The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy 9781501756368

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THE RHETORICAL SENSE OF PHILOSOPHY

THE RHETORICAL SENSE OF PHILOSOPHY Donald Phillip Verene

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Verene, Donald Phillip, 1937– author. Title: The rhetorical sense of philosophy / Donald Phillip Verene. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020057725 (print) | LCCN 2020057726 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501756344 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501756368 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501756351 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy. | Rhetoric. | Philosophy— History. Classification: LCC B53 .V39 2021 (print) | LCC B53 (ebook) | DDC 101—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057725 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057726

If we follow these principles, our Invention will be keen and prompt, our Arrangement clear and orderly, our Delivery impassive and graceful, our Memory sure and lasting, our Style brilliant and charming. In the art of rhetoric, then, there is no more. Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.56.69

Conte nts

Preface

ix

Note on Citations

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Introduction: The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy

1

Part I. Prolegomena Philosophiae

1. Philosophical Thinking

9

2. Philosophy and the Muses

21

3. Philosophy and Eloquence

33

4. Philosophical Style

45

Part II. Three Rhetorics

5. The Rhetoric of Self-Discourse

61

6. The Rhetoric of Absolute Thought

85

7. The Rhetoric of the Philosophical Frontispiece

109

Epilogue Notes

141

Index

155

137

Preface

Rhetoric and philosophy are old enemies and old friends. The ancient rhetor (rhe¯ to¯r) commanded an art of how to use words to affect an audience regardless of the truth of what was said. The philosopher (philosophos, “lover of wisdom”) sought only to apprehend the truth. To this end the philosopher used words dialectically, placing one idea against another in order to test their truth. The rhetorician and the philosopher shared the need to master words in order to practice their respective arts. Those in public positions relied on rhetoric as an art of persuasion in order to attain and hold political power. Philosophers were seeking only to understand and express what was before them. By the middle of the fifth century in ancient Greece the sophist (sophiste¯ s) appeared, who, in contrast to the earlier philosophers of nature, developed the teaching of subjectivistic, relativistic, and skeptical arguments. Against the sophists, as is well known, stood Socrates, whose words were those employed by the craftsmen and the many (hoi polloi). Through such speech Socrates sought the truth, wherever it might be found, by the question and answer of the elenchos. In Plato’s Republic, the great sophist Thrasymachus says Socrates never answers any of his own questions but leaves it to others to answer them. Thrasymachus, the master of elegant speech, can reply to any question on any subject. But to reply to Socratic speech is another matter. Socrates asks the question to which no answer is easily found. The rejection of rhetoric by philosophy occurs in Plato’s dialogues, especially in the Gorgias, and has persisted despite Aristotle’s treatise Rhetoric, the inclusion of rhetoric as part of the trivium of medieval education, and the Studia humanitatis of the curriculum of Renaissance humanism. Rhetoric is specifically attacked by the founders of modern theory of knowledge, especially Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Rhetoric found no place in two of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century—analytic philosophy and phenomenological philosophy. Those two movements influenced rhetorical studies, but the influence was not reciprocal.

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P R E FA C E

As editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric for a decade (1976 to 1987), I moved my own thinking from a separation of philosophy and rhetoric to an association of them. Those scholars working in rhetoric continued to give attention to developments in philosophy, such as speech-act theory and hermeneutics. Although philosophy influenced conceptions of rhetoric, rhetoric remained largely an instrument whereby, at best, philosophical reasoning could be communicated. Rhetoric was absorbed into “communication studies.” To a great extent the separation of right reasoning from rhetoric remained intact. Logic cannot, by its principles, establish its own beginning points. The archai from which rational thought begins come to us from outside of time. These beginnings are brought into time by the power of the metaphor. Human speech forms the world through the imagination, functioning as a primordial form of ingenuity to perceive similarity in dissimilars. Metaphorical speech takes shape in the myths that are the basis of all human thought and society. In the myths are the narratives out of which all that there is arises. When we look closely at philosophical discourse we find an order of images that provide access to the ideas it promotes. The images are the commonplaces from which the ideas are drawn forth. Topical thinking precedes critical thinking. The method I have followed is that ideas have their own life, once they are put forth. These ideas can be understood for their intrinsic value. They and their authorship can also be approached critically, in terms of their social and cultural context. This approach is not my project here. My intention is to consider the works discussed in themselves. This book invites the reader to notice aspects of these works and connections among them that may have previously been overlooked. In the chapters that follow I wish to suggest the sense in which philosophy and rhetoric can be combined. I wish to consider, through various approaches, how rhetorical speech both brings philosophical speech into existence and allows it to endure and be understood. This view of rhetoric is what I mean by the rhetorical sense of philosophy. Rhetoric is the means by which philosophy can bring ideas, arrived at in thought, into words. Further, rhetoric is the means by which philosophy speaks to itself of its own nature and makes its ideas comprehensible. Above all, the rhetorical sense of philosophy is an attitude of mind, not to separate philosophy from its own use of language. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Henry Johnstone, founder of Philosophy and Rhetoric, who, when we were colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State, introduced me to the importance of rhetoric

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for philosophy—the sense in which arguments require rhetorical principles to make their conclusions accessible. I also wish to acknowledge by indebtedness to Ernesto Grassi, of the University of Munich, for our conversations, over a decade, in Munich, Zurich, and at his villa on the island of Ischia, regarding his conception of “rhetoric as philosophy”—his view that rhetoric is tied to the speech that produces the topical metaphors that form the starting points for rational discourse. Grassi and I also discussed, at length, the sense in which so many works of Renaissance thought, from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to Erasmus, are instances of rhetorical texts that are presentations of philosophy. I thank Molly Black Verene for her editorial skills and for transferring my handwritten drafts into final form. I thank Bethany Wasik of Cornell University Press for her kind support and attention to my manuscript.

Note on Citations

Greek and Latin authors are cited within the text in standard form, using Loeb Classical Library editions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), with some terms and phraseology occasionally adjusted. Most citations of Plato and Aristotle refer to Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997) and Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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Introduction The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy

Histories make men wise; poets witty, the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Francis Bacon, Of Studies

In the first sentence of the Rhetoric Aristotle addresses the question of the relation of philosophy and rhetoric: “Rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic” (1354a1). Dialectic is paired with rhetoric as strophe with antistrophe, as found in the movement of the classical Greek chorus, turning from one side of the orchestra to the other. Strophe¯ is literally “the act of turning.” The antistrophe is the chorus exactly answering to a previous strophe. Rhetoric and dialectic are a pair, corresponding to each other like the parts of a choral ode. In the Topics Aristotle distinguishes dialectical reasoning from demonstrative reasoning. He says: “A syllogism is demonstrative [apodeixis] when it proceeds from premises that are true and primary.” But: “It is dialectical when it reasons from endoxa” and “Endoxa are propositions that seem true to all or to the majority or to the wise” (100a–b). Dialectic is hypothetical reasoning in the sense of assuming as a starting point some commonly held belief or principle. The truth claimed by such argument is dependent on the truth of the opinions elicited. Dialectic is not science. Aristotle says: “Things are true and primary which command belief through themselves and not through anything else; for regarding first principles of science it is unnecessary to ask the further question as to ‘why,’ but each principle should of itself command belief ” (100b).

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INTRODUCTION

Rhetoric is an art (techne¯ ) that persuades by argument. The rhetorician must have a knowledge of dialectic. Aristotle says: “Rhetorical demonstration is an enthymeme, which, generally speaking, is the strongest of rhetorical proofs; and lastly, that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism” (Rh. 1355a). An enthymeme is a syllogism that omits either the major or minor premise or the conclusion, causing the hearer readily to complete the syllogism. Aristotle says: “It is the function of Dialectic as a whole, or of one of its parts, to consider every kind of syllogism in a similar manner, it is clear that he who is most capable of examining the matter and forms of a syllogism will be in the highest degree a master of rhetorical argument” (Rh. 1355a). The rhetorician and the dialectician construct arguments whose conclusions command probability, not certainty. Aristotle says: “Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever” (Rh. 1355b). The particular sciences have their own methods and subject matters of investigation. Philosophy, through the principles of logic, may pursue thoughts concerning any subject whatever. Rhetoric, through its principles of persuasion, may speak on any subject whatever. Philosophy and rhetoric are both universal activities of the mind. The middle term between them is poetic, since poetry can imitate anything whatever. Poetry is drawn on by both philosophy and rhetoric because both employ images. Philosophy has no special subject matter. Its subject is what is and the whole of what is. In Plato’s Gorgias Socrates confronts Gorgias, the famous rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric. Socrates asks Gorgias what rhetoric is. Gorgias replies that its purpose is persuasion, such as is needed in speaking in the law courts (453–55). Socrates makes a distinction between “two types of persuasion, one providing conviction without knowledge, the other providing knowledge” (454e). Oratory has the purpose of producing conviction in a certain belief, but belief is not knowledge. We can have true and false belief, but there is no such thing as true and false knowledge. When we possess knowledge of something we do not also need to be persuaded of it. Like poetic, as treated in the tenth book of the Republic, rhetoric can produce a speech on any subject—as poetic can produce an image of anything. The poet can imitate good and bad actions equally. The rhetor can persuade for both sides of an issue. In the Republic, poets can be allowed in the city only if their poetry is used in accordance with justice. Gorgias makes a similar argument, claiming that anyone who does not use skill in oratory rightly “deserves to be hated and expelled and put to death” (Grg. 457c). Socrates holds that rhetoric or oratory is a knack or aptitude, gained simply from experience. It stands to knowledge as cooking does to medicine. In relation

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to the care of the body, cooking is just a knack for preparing food, but medicine is a kind of knowledge. Oratory is a knack for the use of words in any situation. The unexpressed text in the Platonic quarrel with the poets and the rhetoricians is that, like both of them, the philosopher is only a user of words. The poet uses words to imitate what can be seen by the bodily eye—perceptible objects, the visible (to horaton). The philosopher uses words to imitate what can be seen by the mind’s eye—the ideas (eide¯ ), the intelligible (to noe¯ ton). The rhetor uses words to persuade by appealing to common opinions. The philosopher uses words to subject common opinions to dialectic. The poet and the rhetor seem to provide all that is necessary for the conducting of human affairs. Poetry, as in the works of Homer, is a repository of beliefs needed for human conduct. Rhetoric, such as that taught by Gorgias, is what is needed to apply these beliefs to particular situations. Philosophy questions the beliefs themselves in an effort to know the nature of what is and to act in accordance with such knowledge. Philosophy aims at true speech. Cicero, by means of the dialogue he constructs in De oratore, accuses Socrates of having “separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together” (3.16.60). He says the writings of Plato employing the figure of Socrates are “the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak” (3.16.61). Cicero says that the Stoics are “the only one of all the schools that has pronounced eloquence to be a virtue and a form of wisdom. But clearly there is something in them that is quite out of keeping with the orator whom we are depicting” (3.17.65). The Stoics, unlike Socrates, withdrew from speaking in the public sphere. Isocrates, who was a pupil of both Gorgias and Socrates, identifies the wisdom the philosopher seeks as present in public discourse. In the Phaedrus Socrates speaks highly of Isocrates, saying that he is an accomplished speaker and of a most noble character, and even more, that “something of philosophy is inborn in his mind” (279a–b). In the Antidosis, Isocrates says that since we are unable to achieve a science that will positively tell us what we should do and say, “I hold that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and I hold that man to be a philosopher who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight” (271). The philosopher, taken in this sense, then, is expert in prudence (phrone¯ sis).

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INTRODUCTION

In order to act prudently we must be able to bring a knowledge of various subjects to bear on, and to elicit, the whole of a situation. To do this we must have the ability to express this whole. Isocrates says: “To choose from these elements those which should be employed for each subject, to join them together, to arrange them properly, and also not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the whole speech with striking thoughts and to clothe it in flowing melodious phrase—these things, I hold, require much study and are the task of a vigorous and imaginative mind” (Against the Sophists 16–17). Prudence requires us to put the particular situation into words, to speak from the uniqueness of the situation, and to do so in a striking fashion so that its nature can be grasped. In regard to the proper composition of ideas and effective speech we may add the requirements of Horace’s Ars poetica, that “poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life” (333–34). To instruct, delight, and move are the proper aims for philosophy as well as for poetry. All great works of philosophy offer the reader these three possibilities. Such works present their audience with knowledge, with the pleasure of forming thoughts, and with a new orientation to the nature of things, a new sense of the self and conduct. Great works of philosophy affect the memory. They cause us to recall in some way what we already know. Education is memory, and memory is the source of imagination. Imagination is the basis of thought, in the sense that the power of ingenuity (ingenium) by which the imagination functions allows us to perceive similarity in dissimilars. This power of similarity in dissimilars allows us to achieve a speech of the whole. The adventure of arriving at the whole brings the peace of mind that is wisdom. To philosophize is to think in a way not open to the particular sciences, and to think in such a way is to speak in a way different from these sciences. As philosophy is the thought of the whole, it is also the complete speech, the speech of the whole. In such speech philosophy achieves eloquence. In his essay “On Literary Composition,” Dionysius of Halicarnassus, delineating the characteristics necessary to proper presentation of a subject, says: “What is in fact most important of all, the subject-matter should be arranged in a manner which is natural to it and appropriate” (12). He calls attention to Homer, Demosthenes, and Herodotus as examples of this principle. Included in the principle of what is natural and appropriate is the use of variety of expression. Variety is the cause of pleasure in a composition. It is crucial to Horace’s requirement of delight. A composition employing only an alignment of abstract words has no appeal to the imagination.

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Without imagination the intellect has no beacon of vision. To use words merely to instruct or to convey information is to limit the possibilities that language naturally provides. The composition of the complete speech persuades because it is identical with wisdom. The art of oratory as an art of persuasion presupposes that the rhetor is of good character. The e¯ thos of those who would persuade is fundamental to rhetorically structured speech or writing. Quintilian, in beginning his Institutio oratoria, insists that the ideal orator “cannot exist except in the person of a good man. We therefore demand of him not only exceptional powers of speech, but all the virtues of character as well.” Furthermore, Quintilian says: “I cannot agree that the principles of upright and honorable living should, as some have held, be left to the philosophers” (1.9–12). Quintilian holds that the citizen cannot simply draw on the wisdom of the philosophers but must also draw on the principles of the orators. The citizen must be able both to think well and to speak well. The polis relies on these two powers to be present in its citizens. To possess wisdom without the ability to persuade others of it is to hold wisdom mute. Thus, in the eyes of Cicero and Quintilian, Socrates is both philosopher and orator. By using the words of ordinary speech, the Platonic Socrates in the agora is able to persuade those who can come to know to become friends of the Forms. The character of Socrates is fundamental to the validity of his elenchos. The chapters of the present work may be thought of as follows. The chapter on philosophical thinking is intended to establish the necessity of philosophy. The chapter on the Muses is intended to establish the connection of philosophy and poetry. Poetry and rhetoric are intertwined as components required for the presentation of philosophical ideas, as mentioned above. The chapter on philosophical eloquence demonstrates the sense in which the rejection of rhetoric by the founders of modern philosophy is untenable. The chapter on philosophical style shows the importance of style in works of speculative philosophy. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 bring forth examples of works from the history of philosophy and show how attention to the rhetorical dimension of these works offer us a new grasp of their meaning. Chapter 5 considers the sense in which self-knowledge is at the heart of philosophy by comparing Descartes, Vico, Montaigne, and Socrates. Chapter 6 addresses the way in which Plato, Anselm, Kant, and Hegel bring their readers to a grasp of what it means to claim that thought can think itself. Chapter 7 analyzes how Hobbes, Vico, and Rousseau employ the frontispieces they include in their works as rhetorical devices or emblems to impress on our memory the ideas they contain.

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INTRODUCTION

The art of the frontispiece was prominent in the founding of modern philosophy but has been lost in later philosophy. The reader will notice that in these chapters some things are said more than once and that some sources for these things are brought forth more than once, although in varying contexts. My purpose in so doing is rhetorical, in the sense of the Muses—that their song is not to be sung only once. It is also my purpose that any chapter may be read out of sequence; the ideas it contains can stand on their own. The reader who wishes to move about in the text may do so with ease. The ideas of the great philosophers occur more than once in the history of philosophy. It is this truth that we learn from Ecclesiastes: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been in the ages before us” (1:10). There is, then, a philosophia perennis, and as such philosophy is a theater of memory. Philosophy’s Muse is Mnemosyne herself. We need Mnemosyne and her daughters to keep us from forgetting, for, as Bacon reminds us, the river Lethe runs above as well as below. The philosopher’s task is to keep us from always living in the present. For this labor to be accomplished the philosopher must go to school with both the poets and the orators. We should keep in mind that words are the medium of seers, poets, orators, and philosophers. Philosophy is a form of literature.

Ch a p ter 1

Philosophical Thinking by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour James Joyce, Finnegans Wake 119.4–6

Among the fragments from ancient authors relating to the early dialogues of Aristotle, in the Princeton revised Oxford translation of Aristotle’s Works, this appears: “If you ought to philosophize you ought to philosophize; and if you ought not to philosophize you ought to philosophize: therefore, in any case you ought to philosophize.” A second sentence follows that intends to elaborate the point: “For if philosophy exists, we certainly ought to philosophize, since it exists; and if it does not exist, in that case too we ought to inquire why philosophy does not exist— and by inquiring we philosophize; for inquiry is the cause of philosophy.”1 This statement is one of the many renderings of the most famous passage in Aristotle’s Protrepticus, the original composition of which has been lost in its entirety. The Protrepticus stands in a dialectical relation to the Antidosis of Isocrates, the advocate of rhetoric, and is imitated in the debate over the value of philosophy in Cicero’s Hortensius. Isocrates’ view of philosophy stands opposite to that of Aristotle, who regards contemplation as the goal of the philosophic life. Isocrates, as mentioned above in the introduction, insists that the pursuit of wisdom is the achievement of a life of temperance and just action. Aristotle does not deny the value of philosophy in the pursuit of prudence, but he does not hold this pursuit to be the final end of wisdom. Much of Aristotle’s dialogue or “hortatory essay” (logos protrepticos) has been reconstructed from Iamblichus’s Protrepticus.2 On the passage regarding 9

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whether to philosophize, Quintilian comments: “Sometimes two propositions are put forward in such a way that the choice of either leads to the same conclusion: for example ‘We must philosophize (even though we must not philosophize) [philosophandum (est, etiam si non est philosophandum)]’” (Inst. 5.10.70). A modern citation is that of Jacques Derrida, in the concluding paragraphs of his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” which he attributes simply to “a Greek”: “It was a Greek who said, ‘If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize; if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize (to say it and think it). One always has to philosophize.’”3 Derrida employs this claim about the necessity of philosophy as part of his theme of coupling Judaism and Hellenism, ending his essay with a citation from the Circe chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’?”4 As Anton-Hermann Chroust puts it, the Protrepticus has as its purpose to be “an eloquent eulogy of speculative philosophy and an exhortation to live the ‘philosophic life,’ that is, a life dedicated to speculative philosophy.”5 Chroust believes that the discussion of the interconnection of philosophic wisdom and happiness in Plato’s Euthydemus is the likely source of Aristotle’s main theme of the importance of the philosophic life in the Protrepticus. This discussion in the Euthydemus concludes with Socrates saying: “Since you believe both that it [wisdom, sophia] can be taught and that it is the only existing thing which makes a man happy and fortunate, surely you would agree that it is necessary to love wisdom [philosophein] and you mean to do this yourself.” Clinias, the young boy Socrates is addressing, affirms: “This is just what I mean to do, Socrates, as well as ever I can.” Socrates then says: “When I heard this I was delighted and said, ‘There, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, is my example of what I want a hortatory argument [protrepticon logon] to be, though amateurish, perhaps, and expressed at length and with some difficulty’” (282c–d). In Chroust’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s text, the passage on philosophy runs: “The term ‘to philosophize’ (or, ‘to pursue philosophy’) implies two distinct things: first, whether or not we ought to seek [after philosophic truth] at all; and, second, our dedication to philosophic speculation (philosophon theoria).”6 In his commentary on this statement, Chroust summarizes the tradition of its claim as found in various fragments, most probably starting from the report of it by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the ablest of the commentators on Aristotle’s corpus. But versions have been given by Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, and Boethius. Chroust’s summary of Aristotle’s claim reads:

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“You say that one should (or must) philosophize; then you should (or must) philosophize. You say that one should not (or must not) philosophize, then (in order to prove your contention) you must philosophize. In any event, you must philosophize.”7 Chroust’s summary formulation brings out the ambiguity of whether Aristotle’s claim is that one “should philosophize” in the sense of a choice one can make or that one “must philosophize” in the sense of necessity, not allowing for choice. One has a choice as to what form of life to lead, but mortality is a necessary condition of human life, about which there can be no choice. Following his initial claim concerning the choice or necessity of philosophy, Aristotle proceeds to elaborate on and extol the merits and nature of philosophy more generally, saying, for example, that “the fact that all men feel at ease in philosophy, wishing to dedicate their whole lives to the pursuit of it by leaving behind all other concerns, is in itself weighty evidence that it is a painless pleasure to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to philosophy.”8 There is perhaps nothing in the history of philosophy to equal the Protrepticus as a praise of philosophy, unless it be some of Cicero’s statements. Preceding the passage quoted above, advocating philosopho¯n theo¯ria, Aristotle characterizes phrone¯sis as true wisdom.9 Phrone¯sis becomes the term central to Aristotle’s political philosophy, and the intellectual virtue discussed in his ethics. Prudence or phrone¯sis is necessary to govern human actions and civility, but contemplation (theo¯ria) from which the word theater is derived, is tied to the achievement of the highest human happiness, or eudaimonia, literally “that state of having a good daimon.” Contemplation is simply to look upon or observe for the purpose of understanding, without regard to any subsequent doing or making. Theo¯ria, theo¯rein is what is at issue in Aristotle’s advocation of the human necessity to philosophize. Prudence is necessary for conducting human affairs, but is contemplation a necessity for human beings? This is the question at the heart of the Protrepticus, and at the heart of philosophy itself, for philosophy is the only field that takes the meaning of its own existence as a central problem. When a physicist pauses to ask what physics is the physicist is no longer engaged in pursuit of the knowledge of natural phenomena but is reflecting on the philosophical question of the place of physics in human knowledge. When science turns to reflect upon what science is, scientific investigation itself comes to a standstill. The production of any new philosophy is a redefinition of what philosophy is. It arises from grasping the nature of philosophy in a new way. The existence of philosophy, like human existence, is characterized by the fact that it conceives its existence as a problem.

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In what follows, I wish to take the distinction Aristotle raises—whether to philosophize or not to philosophize—in Quintilian’s rhetorical and dialectical sense: that it is an example of two propositions, formulated in such a way that the choice of either leads to the same conclusion. I think this is the point Aristotle attempts to advance. In taking this approach, I wish to go between the horns of any dilemma that the various versions of Aristotle’s text may contain. To gain perspective on what this double pursuit entails, I wish to consider claims about philosophy made by three figures in the history of philosophy—Bishop Berkeley, G. W. F. Hegel, and F. H. Bradley—all masters of rhetorical expression as well as holders of metaphysical positions.

Berkeley’s Mind In his preface to Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Berkeley says: “We spend our lives in doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at and despise.”10 Other men know—or think they know—that the mind is the brain and that the world is composed of material things that exist independently of our perception of them. These facts about ourselves and the world are indubitable common sense. Berkeley, the first philosopher of the great idealist tradition beyond Plato, doubts the so-called fact that the mind is the brain. Philonous, who represents Berkeley, asks Hylas: “You make certain traces in the brain to be the causes or occasions of our ideas. Pray tell me whether by the ‘brain’ you mean any sensible thing.” Hylas replies: “What else think you I could mean?” Philonous reminds Hylas that sensible things have their existence in the mind: “Sensible things are all immediately perceivable; and those things which are immediately perceivable are ideas, and these exist only in the mind. This much you have, if I mistake not, long since agreed to.” Hylas, the materialist, replies: “I do not deny it.” Philonous then draws the obvious conclusion: “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind.”11 This argument is one of the most simple and clever in the history of philosophy. It is matched only by that of Socrates in the Phaedo when he speaks of his disappointment in realizing that Anaxagoras’s account of causality was inexact. Socrates says: “It was a wonderful hope, my friend, but it was quickly dashed. As I read on [in Anaxagoras’s book] I discovered a man who made no use of his Intelligence [nous; he used his mind but did not realize it was the cause of what he was claiming] and assigned to it no responsibility for the order of the world, but adduced reasons like air and ether and water and many other oddities.” Socrates then applies Anaxagoras’s materialist

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doctrine of causality to his own being, asking, in effect: Do I think these bones and sinews are Socrates? Socrates says: “But to call things like that reasons is too peculiar. If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true, but to say that it is because of them I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best—although my actions are controlled by intelligence—would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression” (98b–99a). The behaviorist doctrines of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity should have been put to rest centuries ago, but such versions of behavior as the basis of a philosophy of mind forever raise their heads. They appeared in Hegel’s day in Lavater’s physiognomy and Gall’s Schädelehre (craniology or phrenology), the reduction of the human self to facial expression or to the diagnosis of bumps on the skull. Hegel, in his section on these “sciences” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, says Gall’s doctrine reduces the mind (Geist) to a bone—to a caput mortum. Lavater’s doctrine misses the fact that the face functions not only as a window to the soul but as a mask that we often employ in order to pass among the affairs of the world. Hegel dismisses phrenology with a pun, saying that the “linking of high and low [mind and body]” is the same as that which “in the living being nature naively expresses in linking the organ of its higher perfection, the organ of procreation, with the organ of pissing [Pissen]. The phrenological science of spirit reduces Wissen to Pissen in contrast to the true or phenomenological science of spirit that knows the difference between these two human capabilities.”12 “Body language,” a popular psychology that emerges from time to time, as a method for judging people’s personalities and attitudes, is a version of Lavater’s “science” and, to an extent, of Gall’s as well. The expert in body language draws conclusions based on the coupling of some broad principles concerning human activity with commonsensical observations and the fortune-teller’s art of stating what is often obvious in such a way that it appears divinatory. In regard to the status of things in the world, Berkeley believed his view that esse (to be) is percipi (to be perceived) reflected good common sense. He thought it in accord with the ordinary view that if something is real it can be perceived. Instead his view was laughed at. The well-known incident of Dr. Johnson’s attempt to refute Berkeley by kicking the stone capsulizes how his metaphysics seems to be contrary to common sense. Dr. Johnson thought that if stones had no material existence, as Berkeley claimed, and that they were “ideas” in mind, his foot ought to meet with no resistance. If Berkeley

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had thought that what we normally think of as material objects were the same as what we normally think of as ideas, Dr. Johnson’s foot would have passed easily through the stone, and refuted Berkeley. In advancing the first version of modern idealism, Berkeley faced the issue that continues to stalk it as a philosophical position.13 No idealist had denied the existence of things independent of my ideas of them. Idealism is not solipsism. Berkeley makes this point clear for all idealism in a passage in Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: “For, though we hold indeed the objects of sense to be nothing else but ideas which cannot exist unperceived; yet we may not hence conclude they have no existence except only while they are perceived by us, since there may be some other spirit that perceives them though we do not.” He continues: “Whenever bodies are said to have no existence without the mind, I would not be understood to mean this or that particular mind, but all minds whatsoever. It does not therefore follow from the foregoing principles that bodies are annihilated and created every moment, or exist not at all during the intervals between our perceptions of them.”14 For Berkeley, when an object is not being perceived by an individual mind it is being perceived by the external mind of God, such that ultimately all things are ideas in the mind of God, who is all mind, omnipotent and omniscient. The idealist, however, need not bring forth Berkeley’s God to avoid the absurdity of solipsism. We might instead assert, with Hegel, that in principle there can be no thing-in-itself, for the Kantian thing-in-itself is itself an idea of the thing held in mind. We may simply accept the paradox, the double truth, that we can think of things as independent and external to our thought of them and at the same time affirm that this is a thought mind has of them. Nous is in all things and is also the way in which we apprehend them. The world itself is nous, and its relation to our power of nous as an individual thinker and perceiver is an internal relation. There is no absolute, external relation, except as a whole that we are always determinately approaching but which we never determine. The world of hard facts, which C. S. Peirce insists we must continually confront, is there—but as we confront these facts they become modified by our confrontation of them, and they are unable fully to maintain their independence of mind in the face of empirical science. In order for common sense to maintain itself against philosophical speculation, it must claim itself as a standard. It must begin to doubt what it thought it evidently knew and to believe what it laughed at and despised. It enters an inverted world in which it cannot abandon common sense and yet cannot verify itself as common sense without leaving common sense. If to be is to be perceived is

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a conception the mind has of objects, then to be and not be perceived is also a conception the mind has of objects.

Hegel’s Phenomenology and Bradley’s Metaphysics In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says: “As regards philosophy in its proper and genuine sense, we find put forward without any hesitation, as entirely sufficient equivalent for the long course of mental discipline [den langen Weg der Bildung]—for that profound and fruitful process through which the human spirit [Geist] attains to knowledge—the direct revelation of the divine and the healthy common sense of mankind [den gesunden Menschenverstand], unconcerned with and undisciplined by any other knowledge or by proper philosophizing. These are held to be a good substitute for real philosophy, much in the way that chicory is lauded as a substitute for coffee.”15 In regard to the absolute, all that is required is a feeling that there is a divine order to things, and in regard to comprehending the nature of human experience all that is required is the Germanic idea of “healthy common sense” or, put in English expression, a “healthy dose of common sense.” Religious faith and common sense make unnecessary both philosophizing and the study of the history of philosophy that is the basis of philosophizing. We are relieved of the burden of acquiring Bildung (education) by realizing that we already are doing philosophy when we are thinking commonsensically, in the way that Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentleman” learns he has been speaking prose all along, for otherwise he would have been speaking poetry. Hegel continues, and considers whether instead of substituting common sense for philosophy we might substitute inspiration (Genialität). We might then engage in “philosophizing by the light of nature [ein natürliches Philosophieren], which thinks itself too good for conceptual thinking [für den Begriff], and, because of the want of it, takes itself to have direct intuitive ideas and poetical thoughts—such philosophizing trades in arbitrary combinations of a merely disorganized imagination [Einbildungskraft] of the marketplace, producing fictitious creations that are neither fish nor flesh, neither poetry nor philosophy.”16 Abandoning commonsense thought goes to the opposite extreme of manufacturing fine-sounding ideas that make up a kind of high nonsense. Hegel says that in all spheres of science, and even in practical endeavors, it is never doubted that a considerable amount of time must be spent learning what is required to engage in them. He says: “As regards philosophy, on the contrary, there seems an assumption prevalent that, though everyone with

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eyes and fingers is not on that account in a position to make shoes if he only has leather and a last. Yet everybody understands how to philosophize straight away, and pass judgment on philosophy, simply because he possesses the criteria for doing so in his natural reason—as if he did not in the same way possess the standard for shoe making too in his own foot.”17 Everyone has an opinion, and thus everyone can philosophize straightaway. In a little manuscript titled “Wer denkt abstract?” (“Who Thinks Abstractly?”), written in April 1807 or shortly thereafter—about the time of the appearance of the first copies of the Phenomenology—Hegel points to the essence of his philosophical position: “Denken? Abstrakt?—Sauve qui peut! Rette sich, wer kenn!”18 Let all who can save themselves do so. Philosophy is not for everyone, and Hegel has no ambition to instruct the world against its will. He speaks of a scene in a recent comedy, in which a Minister goes around during the whole play in an overcoat, then in the last scene suddenly unbuttons it and lets loose his flashing star of wisdom. Hegel says he will ´´ berrock). His flashing unbutton his metaphysical overcoat (metaphysicher U star of wisdom is that philosophy or metaphysics is not the formulation of abstractions, as many people think, but the attempt to think each thing in terms of the whole of experience. Commonsense thinking is based on reducing things to classifications through which they can be tagged as such and such and thus claimed to be known. Hegel inverts the claim common sense makes to be concrete thought and metaphysics to be abstract. Commonsense thinking is abstract thought because it keeps us from seeing things as they really are in their fully determinate nature. Commonsense thinking is for everyone; metaphysical thinking is only for the few who can save themselves from the abstractions of the many. Ten years before Hegel wrote the Phenomenology, in what has come to be known as “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism,” he spoke against what might be considered a parallel to commonsense thinking in philosophical thinking. He said that the philosopher must have as much aesthetic power as the poet, and that “men without aesthetic sense are our literal-minded philosophers [unsere Buchstabenphilosophen].” For these philosophers, like men of common sense, “everything is obscure as soon as it goes beyond the table of contents and the index.” Poetry, Hegel says, is the “instructress of humanity” (Leherin der Menscheit). Hegel, aged twenty-six, advocates here that “we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of ideas, it must be a mythology of reason [Mythologie der Vernunft].”19

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I do not think Hegel ever abandoned this aim. His works, especially the Phenomenology, contain a stylistic dialectic between Bild and Begriff. The alert reader, even the reader of the Science of Logic, will consistently find an image coupled with a concept. Poetry always takes us out of commonsense thought and language. Poetic power is what philosophy requires as its beginning point and constant companion. The mythology of reason is Hegel’s answer to Plato’s quarrel with the poets. If philosophy is a necessity, poetry is, too. F. H. Bradley intends his philosophy to carry forward the objective idealism of Hegelian metaphysics. In the preface to Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, Bradley transcribes several sentences from his notebook. Among them is the following: “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.”20 He introduces this claim by reminding his readers that we tend to hold our own pursuits in too much regard. Thus, “the metaphysician cannot perhaps be too much in earnest with metaphysics, and he cannot, as the phrase runs, take himself too seriously. But the same thing holds good with every other positive function of the universe. And the metaphysician, like other men, is prone to forget this truth.”21 Metaphysics is an art of reasoning that requires an art of speaking. There can be no such thing as a metaphysical proof, in the sense that there can be no counterargument to the argument upon which a particular claim depends. There are no conclusive arguments in philosophical inquiry. All such arguments fall within some stated or implied narrative that makes the arguments meaningful. No great work of philosophy offers an argument to prove its truth. Great philosophers in great works simply begin to make statements and distinctions. Arguments come in along the way as their ideas are expressed. Bradley comes closer than most to use argument to reify his idealism in his Book of Appearance. In the Book of Appearance Bradley considers whether various classic themes, such as substance, relation and quality, space and time, motion and change, causation, the self, and things-in-themselves, can be considered to be the absolute itself. In each case he shows that the attempt to claim such to be the absolute principle of the real ends the reasoning that supports it in an indefinite regress that must be summed. To sum an infinite regress is a self-contradiction. The principle of self-contradiction cannot itself be proved because it is the condition that governs any proof whatsoever. The absolute is thus no one property of the whole but the whole itself. To affirm less is to reduce reality to one of its aspects. Bradley says: “I am so bold as to

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believe that we have a knowledge of the Absolute, certain and real, though I am sure that our comprehension is miserably incomplete.”22 In effect, Bradley restates the issue of the Protrepticus with his question: “Is it possible to abstain from thought about the universe?” He holds that “even the average man is compelled to wonder and reflect.”23 But to do so we must pass beyond common sense as the complete standard of thought. Bradley regards metaphysics as motivated by the same sense of mystery that gives rise to poetry, art, and religion. He says that when these cease to be of interest to us, so will metaphysics: “When, in short, twilight has no charm—then metaphysics will be worthless.”24 Bradley is firm that metaphysics, as an activity of the human self, is not properly concerned to supersede the other functions of the mind. It should set the standard for proper reasoning. He holds the position that is held by many, that to attempt to deny metaphysics is to engage in metaphysical claims. He says: “And the opponent of metaphysics, it appears to me, is driven to a dilemma. He must either condemn all reflection on the essence of things—and, if so, he breaks, or, rather, tries to break, with part of the highest side of human nature—or else he allows us to think, but not to think strictly.”25 To every person capable of reflection, questions of the ultimate nature of things and their reason for being and their causes occur in one form or another, just as ethical questions naturally occur to such persons. But most people put these questions aside as unanswerable, or settle on some provisional view, only later to find it doubtful, and for the questions to recur. In the mental life of the nonphilosopher, yet reflective person, these questions come and go, like ghosts, receding into the background only to reappear unexpectedly. Philosophy, using its rhetorical power, brings these mental shades into the light of reason and approaches them systematically, with the careful use of language in its power to express ideas. Bradley says: “I certainly do not suppose that it would be good for everyone to study metaphysics, and I cannot express any opinion as to the number of persons who should do so.” He adds: “But I think it quite necessary, even on the view that this study can produce no positive results, that it should still be pursued.”26 Metaphysics is written into the human condition, into our selfhood, whether or not we wish it so. Those who become philosophers cannot help themselves, and humanity as a whole cannot help itself, as it has allowed philosophy to persist for twenty-five centuries in Western culture, even though philosophy, during these centuries, has held an uneasy and often difficult and dangerous position in relation to the politics of the polis. By those who take it up, the philosophic spirit is transmitted from generation to generation through the philosophical use of language. Once it was allowed into society

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at the hands of the pre-Socratics, philosophy never left. Like the spectators of the great games at Olympia, the philosophers are there. And, curiously, without the spectators the games are not there.

The Love of Wisdom There are three kinds of knowledge that contend to make philosophy unnecessary: common sense, poetry, and physics (understood as empirical science generally). Common sense cannot take us to the extraordinary experience upon which philosophical knowledge depends. Philosophy makes common sense walk on its head. Hegel says: “When philosophizing by the light of nature flows along the more even course of sound common sense, it offers at its very best only a rhetoric of trivial truths.”27 Poetry, although gained through the inspiration of the Muses and sustained by their mother, Memory, can only begin the wisdom philosophy seeks, for poetry, tied to images, cannot take us to what can be known only poetically: the forms that are beyond the images. Physics—although the archetype of the knowledge of nature, and requiring the power to theorize— is tied to the empirical. Unless it becomes philosophy it cannot take contemplation beyond the knowledge of the natural and cosmological to the whole, to wisdom, which, as Cicero says, is a knowledge of things divine and human. Philosophy, and the speech it requires, become unavoidable once we realize that our natural propensity to know has as its center to know ourselves as knowers. This realization is a learned ignorance, based on awareness of our mortality as a being, standing, like a middle term of a syllogism, between animals that are mortal but do not reflectively know that they are mortal, and gods, who are immortal and have no need of self-knowledge, being just what they are. Although all that is human exists in this middle position between the purely natural and the purely divine, not all people, I think, are imbued with Aristotle’s principle of the desire to know. In regard to knowing, the ancient distinction holds that there are the few who know, there are the refined—those who can come to know through the teachings of those who know—and then there are those who do not know. In generation after generation, in the great city of the human race, only some people seek to become philosophers, and only some thus seek to master the rhetoric required for philosophical speech, and only some succeed. Most people live apart from its pursuit—from the hoi polloi of the Greek polis to the citizens of the Cartesian world of scientific research, technology, electronics, and gadgets—joined with the ethics of diversity and globalization—that

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today invade our lives. Over and over again only a small number of people take up the pursuit of philosophy, a number that likely remains constant. No one enters philosophy willingly; one day one finds oneself in it and slowly realizes one has somehow been here all along. Once in philosophy it is still as impossible to leave as it was for Socrates. Philosophy leaves the individual no alternatives. As to the question of whether philosophizing is necessary or whether it is not, there is only a single answer, as the Protrepticus suggests.

Ch a p ter 2

Philosophy and the Muses As for the Muses and music and poetry in general, they seem to have derived their name from their eager desire [mo¯sthai] to investigate and do philosophy. Socrates, Cratylus 406a

In the first book of his De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the great Roman philosophical poet Titus Lucretius Carus, Epicurean and materialist, who held that the gods were none but the product of superstition, calls upon the Muses to guide the verses of his work and to make them appealing so his teaching of high matters may be well received (1.921–50; 4.1–25). The Muses are the Greek deities of poetry, literature, music, and dance; later they became associated with astronomy, philosophy, and all intellectual pursuits. Homer, the poet of poets, begins the Iliad, the first work of Western literature, with reference to these deities: “Rage—Goddess [thea], sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” (1.1). With the rage of Achilles and his conflict with Agamemnon told, the Muses appear by name at the end of book 1, singing to the lyre of Apollo at the banquet of Hera, Zeus, and the other gods (1.601–4). The Odyssey, the story of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, begins with the line “Sing to me of the man, Muse [Mousa], the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy” (1.1–2). The nine Muses appear in the last book of the Odyssey, leading the dirge of the mourning and the funeral in the telling of the death of Achilles (24.60–62).

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Who are the Muses? And what connection do they have to philosophy and to philosophizing? The first we hear of the Muses, besides in such passages in Homer, is their description in Hesiod’s Theogony, which commences with the line “Let us begin to sing from the Heliconian Muses, who possess the great and holy mountain of Helicon and dance on their soft feet around the violet-dark fountain and the altar of Cronus’ mighty son [Zeus]” (1–4). As Hesiod tells us, the Muses were born of the union of Mnemosyne (Memory) and Zeus, who copulated for nine nights, and when a year had passed, Mnemosyne bore nine maidens who came forth with “a spirit that knows no sorrow.” Besides their grace and spirit, the Muses possess three main powers. One is that “they know how to sing many false songs similar to true ones, but they know, when they wish, how to proclaim true things” (25–28). Hesiod says they taught him the art of beautiful song, which presumably includes this grasp of the interconnection of the true and the false. The Latin poet Horace, long after Hesiod, affirms that “most of us poets deceive ourselves by the semblance of truth” (A.p. 24–25). This mixture of true and false, as mentioned earlier, is what caused Plato to declare his famous “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” and to request an apology from the poets, which was not forthcoming (Rep. 607b). A second power the Muses have is “to tell of what is, what is to come, and what was before in a harmonizing voice” (36–38). The Muses not only interrelate the true and the false; they order time because their mother is Memory. From them comes the art of the narrative, the key to epic and history. The presentation of time, the condition of our mortality, originally flows from the Muses. The ancient poet and seer are one, taught by the Muses how to comprehend time and thus how to apprehend the human condition. The third power the Muses impart is the rhetorical power of persuasion, the speech necessary for wise government. The ruler must be able to speak well to the populace so as to gain their support. When the ruler speaks well, the populace will seek his favor with reverence, such as they would with a god. Hesiod says: “Such is the holy gift of the Muses to human beings. For it is from the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that men are poets upon the earth and lyre-players, but it is from Zeus that they are kings; and that man is blessed, whomever the Muses love, for the speech flows sweet from his mouth” (93–97). Apollo is the patron of music and particularly of the lyre. The Muses are his retinue. Horace says: “To the lyre the Muse granted tales of the gods and the children of gods” (A.p. 83). The ancient poets most often invoke the Muses collectively, although Hesiod gives a name to each of the nine, whose number corresponds to

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the number of letters in their mother’s name—Mnemosyne. In Late Roman times the Muses were differentiated by their functions: Calliope (Beautiful Voiced) is the Muse of heroic epic; Clio (Glorifying) of history; Euterpe (Well Delighting) of flutes; Terpsichore (Delighting in Dance) of lyric poetry and dance; Erato (Lovely) of lyric poetry or hymns; Melpomene (Singing) of tragedy; Thalia (Blooming) of comedy; Polyhymnia (Many Hymning) of mime; and Urania (Heavenly) of astronomy. Together they represent the arts of humanity. From the Muses comes “museum” (Mouseion), in which can be seen artifacts representing the arts of humanity. There was a museum in Plato’s Academy, another in Aristotle’s Lyceum, and one in Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy Soter, distinct from the great Library. From the Muses we also get “music” (mousike¯ ), tied to ancient poetry from the time of Homer, whose poems were originally recited or sung to the accompaniment of a type of lyre. Mousike¯ brings with it a sense of number, of ratio and proportion as worked out by Pythagoras with his principle of harmonia, the Tetraktys, and the Divine Monochord. In Plato’s doctrine of education in the Republic, music, which means any activity performed under the guidance of the Muses, is the basis of the education of the soul, as gymnastic is of the body. In the Myth of Er at the end of Republic the Daughters of Necessity, the Fates, sing their sounds as one note of a single harmony, “Lachesis of what has been, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what is going to be” (617c). Their music imitates the great spindle of the universe that turns in a circle in a single motion, which governs all that there is. The philosopher seeks the knowledge of the Muses—of what was, is, and is to come—but the philosopher, unlike the poet, seeks this order not simply as a temporal “before and after” but as the Daughters of Necessity would have it, as an unvarying or necessary sequence whereby the whole of things is determined and the causes of all are known. In the Timaeus we are told that “harmony, whose movements are akin to the orbits within our souls, is a gift of the Muses, if our dealings with them are guided by understanding” (47d). In the Theaetetus Socrates says: “We have in our souls a block of wax” the condition of which may vary from one person to another. He says: “We may look upon it, then, as a gift of Memory, the Mother of the Muses” (191c–d). The Muses keep us from forgetting because their arts preserve for us what they portray of the nature and harmony of the human soul. They impress what they portray on our memory. Their name means as much, at least according to Plutarch: “All the Muses are said to be called Mneiai [Memories]” (Quaest. conv. 9.14). Plutarch also says the Muses were called

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such “because they were ‘always together’ [homou ousas] in accord and sisterly affection” (De frat. amore 6). In the Phaedrus Socrates tells the story of the cicadas—that they were human beings before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born, song was created for the first time. Some of the people were so overcome by the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink. From them comes the race of cicadas that, when born, burst into song and live without nourishment until it is time for them to die. After they die they go to the Muses to report who among the mortals have honored the Muses. “To Terpsichore they report those who have honored her by their devotion to the dance and thus make them dearer to her. To Erato, they report those who honored her by dedicating themselves to the affairs of love, and so too with the other Muses, according to the activity that honors each. And to Calliope, the oldest among them, and Urania, the next after her, who preside over the heavens and all discourse, human and divine, and sing with the sweetest voice, they report those who honor their special kind of music by leading the philosophical life” (259d). True philosophy is always musical.

The School of the Poets and the School of the Orators The philosophers must go to school with the poets, for, as Aristotle says in the famous passage in the first book of the Metaphysics, philosophy begins in wonder (thauma). He adds that not only is wonder the origination of the love of wisdom, “even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonder” (982b). The poets are the retellers of myths, the first wisdom of humanity. It is from what the poets say, the first speech of humanity, that the philosophers must begin their discourse of reason that, as Aristotle says, began with their attempts to remove their ignorance caused by aporiai (the conflicts of thought) “about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and stars, and about the genesis of the universe” (982b). Little by little, Aristotle holds, their philosophizing advanced from myth to metaphysics. Metaphysics becomes myth remembered. Metaphysics, like myth, is a speech of all that there is. But unlike myth, metaphysics begins from a distinction between seems and is, from which grows the philosophical distinction between appearance and reality. The philosopher aims at an account of the really real—the to ontos on—and the noetic form of speech that can take us there. Philosophy is a form of literature generated from the Muses’ claim that they can sing true songs when they will. From the true and the false that are intermingled in the myth, philosophy attempts to extract a dialectic of the true and false, the True

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that is the whole—a complete speech of divine and human things and the causes of each—what Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations defines as wisdom (sapientia) (4.26.57). To the poetic image, the philosopher appends the question. The logos, as Socrates shows us, is determined by the formulation of questions and the pursuit of answers. In philosophical speech, the answer to any question is the pursuit of its answer. The philosopher knows that the real always outstrips language. The false songs of the Muses are not deliberate lies. They are paralogisms, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, something the poets have learned from Homer. Aristotle says: “Homer more than any other has taught the others the art of framing lies in the right way.” The poet can freely commit false inference, the fallacia consequentis. Aristotle says: “Just because we know the truth of the consequent, we are in our own minds led on to the erroneous inference of the truth of the antecedent. There is an instance of this in the Bath-story in the Odyssey” (1460a). Odysseus returns to Ithaca in disguise as a Cretan, and convinces Penelope that he is someone who previously met Odysseus, by correctly describing the cloak and brooch that Odysseus wore. Penelope recognizes the truth of this description and on this basis believes the “stranger” is who he says he is. As Aristotle states in On Sophistical Refutations: “The refutation connected with the consequent is due to the idea that consequence is convertible. For whenever, if A is, B necessarily is, men also fancy that, if B is, A necessarily is” (167b). Logic requires as modus ponens that only the antecedent can determine the truth of the consequent: if A implies B, and A is true, only then is B true. Only when the old household servant Eurycleia is ordered by Penelope to wash the feet of the “Cretan” stranger is Odysseus recognized, because of the scar of an old wound. At the beginning of the Phaedrus Socrates, the city-dweller, leaves the city to walk along the river Ilisus with his friend Phaedrus. As they come to a particular spot, Phaedrus remarks that it is near where people say Boreas, the North Wind, carried away Orithuia, the daughter of the Athenian king. Phaedrus asks Socrates if he thinks this account is true. Socrates says that anyone who wishes to explain such stories away must take a great deal of time to investigate it, and to do so would also involve consideration of the truth of all sorts of mythical figures and events, including “the form of the Hippocentaurs, and then of the Chimera; and a whole flood of Gorgons and Pegasuses and other monsters.” He says: “But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is that I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself ” (229e–230a).

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Socrates’ reference is to the inscription gnothi seauton, on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. From this point on, in the history of philosophy, self-knowledge is the problem of the true philosopher. As the philosopher of culture Ernst Cassirer puts it, in the opening sentence of An Essay on Man, “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged. In all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed and immovable center, of all thought.”1 Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan professor of rhetoric, connects the precept of self-knowledge to not only Socrates but earlier, to Solon. Solon was regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece: “Hence Solon was made the author of that celebrated saying ‘Know thyself,’ which, because of the great civil utility it had had for the Athenian people, was inscribed in all the public places of the city. . . . From this reflection there sprang up in Athens all the affairs and laws that shape a democratic republic.”2 As the Muses begin poetry, the Delphic precept begins philosophy as a distinctively human enterprise that is centered in the conception of civil wisdom sought by both Solon and Socrates. Vico explains why the mother of the Muses is Memory. He says: “Memory is the same as imagination [La memoria è la stessa che la fantasia].” Imagination is required for all the arts of humanity. Without imagination, what Vico in Italian calls fantasia, the arts can produce nothing. Memory is held together by imagination as a middle term. As Vico says, “Memory [memoria] takes three aspects: memory [memoria] when it remembers things, imagination [fantasia] when it alters and simulates them, and ingenuity [ingegno] when it encompasses them, and puts them into proper order and effect.”3 Self-knowledge requires this threefold sense of memory. To know ourselves we must be able to recollect ourselves, and to recollect ourselves requires our recollection of humanity, for we are human only through our connection with the rest of humanity. Civil wisdom requires that we realize a wisdom that we can secure only from the Muses—that what is now, has been before, and will come to be again in the future. Our selves, as well as the education of our selves, are based on memory. In On Memory Aristotle says: “When one wishes to recollect, that is what he will do: he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement which he desires to reawaken. This explains why attempts at recollection succeed soonest and best when they start from a beginning” (451b29–32). ´´ ber Mythologie, Volkgeist und Kunst,” discovered In a fragment called “U in a manuscript in the 1970s in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz

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in Berlin, Hegel speaks of “Mnemosyne, or the absolute Muse [die absolute Muse].”4 The “absolute Muse” is also the Muse of the Absolute, for the Absolute, Hegel says in the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, requires knowing to be recollection (Erinnerung). The German word, unlike the English “recollection,” contains the meaning of Innerung or “inwardness.” When we reflect on an object, we know it only from its outside. But when we speculate (specio—“to behold, to see into”), we see from the inside, we apprehend the object from both what it is to itself and as it is as part of us. Its reality and our reality are joined. Recollection is how we know ourselves and the world as part of ourselves, as our idea. But our memory is not ours alone; it is everyone’s memory. We know ourselves only through the arts of humanity, through which we speculate ourselves. The poet Giuseppe Ungaretti says: “Tutto, tutto, tutto è memoria [All, all, all is memory].”5

Twofold Truth From the Muses the philosopher can learn that all truth is double. The ability of the Muses to sing both true and false songs, but true songs when they will, implies that the false is part of the true—and the reverse. Within the True is a dialectic between the true and the false. Human experience is always a doubling up. Nothing is ever purely true or purely false. These opposites require each other to be what they are, and thus they interpenetrate each other. The True is made up of both in the sense that the speech of the True is a speech of the whole. The True, then, is one thing, with a dialectic internal to itself. In the Metaphysics Aristotle says: “Surely to be double and to be 2 are not the same; if they are, one thing will be many” (987a). A double, as James Joyce says, is a “twone,” and to think it requires “two thinks at a time.”6 The whole of experience is one and not many, for any experience beyond experience is simply an extension of what is experience. To say what something is, is to say what it is and to say what it is not; then we have said what it is. We have given the complete speech. Since eloquence is to speak fully on a subject, and wisdom is knowledge of the whole, the complete speech is wisdom speaking. The rhetorical form of such speaking is both dialectical and narrative. Any dialectical relation requires a whole of which it is the division. The speech of the whole itself is a narration. The art of narration is the art of memory. To narrate is to recollect. In the narrative, what has entered memory originally through perception is brought forth with the aid of the imagination and ingenuity. The before and after of the narrated recollection is a cycle. Its beginning is also in a sense its ending. For the narration to be complete it cannot be simply a series of statements.

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Its statements must recapitulate themselves. They must bring the beginning along to connect it to the ending. The narrative is complete when it is a whole. Yet the narrative of the whole is tied to transcendence. The narrative can never as such conclude “and that is all.” To do so is to step outside the narrative. Its relation is not wholly immanent because there is always in principle as well as in fact an outside to the narrative. The narrative falls within memory. Memory is always moving beyond itself, and this moving is its transcendence. Its infinity is constructed out of the self-modification of its own moments. The art of the Muses, which is memory, when taken up philosophically is, echoing Blake, a speech that is always coming back upon itself in order to reach beyond itself. As Joyce says, “Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it.”7 The order that memory is given by the recollective narrative is providential in the sense that what is related is presented as an actual and necessary cycle of events. The time of memory is that of what is, already was, and what will also be again. To narrate is to meditate what is before the mind as having a beginning, middle, and end. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that “every speech must be put together like a living creature, with a body of its own; it must be neither without head nor legs; and it must have a middle and extremities that are fitting both to one another and to the whole work” (264c). Thought directed by memory produces the remaking of the actual in language, and once the actual is so grasped, prudent action is possible. Prudence is to realize that all events in terms of which one must act have a birth, an acme, and an end. The wisdom that is prudence is to recognize that there is a natural course of events and to grasp how to act in accord with this course— to find within it the interrelationship of the true and the false. In this way the philosopher is brought back to the guidance of the Muses. The Muses are the first to order time; they do this by making time a song. The Muses order time, but not neutrally, for they can sing “both true and false songs.” The Muses are thus a guide to eloquence. They do not sing in a monotone but pass between the true and the false, and speak out the whole, which contains both what is positive and what is negative. They are guides to what is probable in speech; thus they are the source of rhetoric as well as of song. Their speech is melodic because it is mixed, in the way good and evil are mixed in the whole of things. As mentioned above, Hesiod says that the Muses can sing true songs when they will. In their songs the true can govern, but how are we to determine this, or imitate it? If we can learn this

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power of the true song we can master many things, including prudence, for prudence is the ability to govern ourselves in terms of a whole action, an action grasped in terms of what was, is, and is to come. Hesiod says: “For it is from the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that men are poets upon the earth and lyre-players, but it is from Zeus that they are kings, and that man is blessed, whomever the Muses love, for the speech flows sweet from his mouth” (Th. 93). The king stands to his populace as Zeus stands to all of humanity. Thus: “All the populace look to him as he decides disputes with straight judgments; and speaking publicly without erring, he quickly ends even a great quarrel by his skill. For this is why kings are wise” (85). Political wisdom and philosophical wisdom require the ability to persuade. Those who are kingly and those who are wise practice the art of oratory, an art that depends upon using words in the right way. To use words in the right way is to bring forth reason in human affairs. The Muses are present wherever there is melodious, harmonious speech. We depend on them once a beginning has been made. We become the agent of the making they inspire, and of their mousike¯. In their primal art of song the Muses set the conditions of human life. Thus life was measured by past, present, and future. Augustine says: “We do not measure poems by pages, for that would be to measure space not time; we measure by the way the voice moves in uttering the poem” (Conf. 11.26).8 We know one thing of time, Augustine says: that it passes. We know this because the mind has three kinds of acts: “The mind expects, attends and remembers: what it expects passes, by way of what it attends to, into what it remembers” (11.28). The first form of language is the song. To speak well is to bring past, present, and future together. Augustine demonstrates the order of time through his example of the psalm: the song, psalmos, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew mizmo¯r. Augustine says: “Suppose I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed to the whole of it; but when I have begun, so much of it as I pluck off and drop away into the past becomes matter for my memory; and the whole energy of the action is divided between my memory, in regard to what I have said, and my expectation in regard to what I am still to say” (11.28). The psalm requires attention as the “place” at which expectation passes into memory. A song is never sung only once; songs achieve their truth by repetition. Repetition trains the mind in attention. To give attention is to fix the moment when expectation passes into memory. This is the activity of attention. It is not a passive state. Truth is never established by a single act

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of argumentation. What is expressed in the argument must bear repeating. It must be told to an audience. The essence of the argument must be narrated. This narration is not something added on to the argument. It is the context that the argument presupposed as its basis from the beginning. The argument simply formulates in a series of steps—what is contained in the narrative that surrounds the argument. An argument once made and never repeated is a thought dead-born. Augustine’s recitation divides between what his mind expects and what it remembers; one passes into the other and makes the song possible. He continues: “But there is a present act of attention, by which what was future passes on its way to becoming past. The further I go in my recitation, the more my expectation is diminished and my memory lengthened, until the whole of my expectation is used up when the action is completed and has passed wholly into my memory” (11.28). The song is the key to the speech that persuades. The speech that persuades must meet the expectation of the audience in the present and allow its subject to be connected to memory, for that which is in the audience’s memory is that of which they are already convinced. The speech that persuades brings the parts of the mind together. It, like myth and music, surmounts time. Augustine concludes: “And what is true of the whole psalm, is true of each part of the whole, and for each syllable: and likewise for any longer action, of which the canticle may be only a part: indeed it is the same for the whole life of man, of which all a man’s actions are parts: and likewise for the whole history of the human race, of which all lives of all men are parts” (11.28). The psalm, the song in each of its parts and in its whole, is the structure of the whole life of a person and of the whole history of the human race. What the Muses teach in the Greco-Roman world is taught in the psalm of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Morality of Prudence Those who love the songs of the Muses and those who love the elenchos of Socrates must find a way to encompass the aporia between them. Facing this difficulty requires a great attention to language, to learn to speak in a way such that thought can double up and gain a coincidence of contraries, a coincidentia oppositorum. We require a way to join the instruction the Muses gave to Hesiod with the instruction Socrates received from the Delphic inscription. The language we require is not open to the new world of electronic communication. The shadows of expression its devices produce haunt us like

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those on the wall of Plato’s cave. Furthermore, they make us inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno. We live among those who are destined always to look downward. Some, the diviners, even have their heads turned backward. None is able to see the stars or the rotations of the heavens. Heads bowed over the little electronic screens—peering at a semblance of the human ability to use language, communicating in fragments containing nothing of lasting meaning and fleeting signs not even formed as thoughts—is a world of no exit, an empire of non-sense. What Plato and Dante could only imagine is now a self-imposed, everyday experience. The friend of the Forms, blinded by the sun, and the poet, the child of the Muses, live as strangers in this world. As such strangers, our only guide to conduct is prudence. Prudence presupposes the wisdom of the Muses because to act prudently we must be able to grasp any event as having a past, present, and future. Thus the Muses are not only a guide to thought; they are a guide to action. Their musical sense of things is needed for moral philosophy. Our ability to act in the world requires our ability to speak about the world. It requires eloquence, that is, oration. Oration or oratio brings together two ways of speaking about the world—narration or narratio, and arranging in order, or ratio. Experience can be spoken of in two ways. It can be related as a story in terms of its beginning, middle, and end, or it can be defined in terms of its components put into logical order. The complete speech of any subject must bring these two ways of speaking into one, as an oration. To bring forth the meaning of anything is to relate the course of its existence, showing its causes both natural and moral and the occasions of fortune. To do so is to present the genesis and development of a thing in terms of the logic of its inner form. Prudence is the key to moral philosophy. Moral philosophy can be conceived in four ways. First, the moral originates in feeling. The world can be felt as benign or malignant. This either-or logic of feeling is the basis of mythical thought. Mythical speech is the speech of opposites. It is protomoral. There can be no true moral sense that is based simply in feeling. When something is apprehended as good or bad, based on feeling—that is felt to be good or bad—the subjective is mistaken for the objective. Because one feels this or that way in relation to something does not mean that how one feels the thing is what it actually is. Although morality begins in a feeling, such feeling is not itself a moral judgment. Second, to attain basic moral perception, consciousness must apprehend what is as a fact. The logic of facts is the logic of common sense. When we enter into the world as an order of facts our feelings about facts remain separate from this order and must be brought into accord with facts. Facts are corrective of feelings. Feelings have no standard. Anything may be felt

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in any way—good or bad. Facts provide a standard. We confront the world and what occurs in it as an objective order. How we feel about the world or events in it is a matter of our subjectivity. To transform our feelings into moral judgments requires the connection of what is felt with what is actual. Ordinary morality is customary morality. It is governed by decorum, by the norms of society. Third, beyond customary morality is reflective morality. This sense of morality occurs when, to a felt moral issue, there is no direction forthcoming from the customary or when what is customary is at odds with itself. Reflection takes us from custom to the law. In law is instruction in civil wisdom. Law becomes the basis for the interpretation of facts. Facts become evidence. The law is the means for engaging in reflective morality. Morality may surpass what is in positive law, but it is of a piece with law itself, with what is right, reasonable, and universal. In the law, prudence merges with justice as jurisprudence. Law is the natural ground for morality and moral philosophy. Law is decorum expressed in formal language.9 Fourth, there is a final sense of morality that goes beyond the reflective morality as based in interpretation of the law. It can be called speculative morality. Its basis is in the Socratic sense of the ethic of the Good. Socrates’ claim that to know the Good is to do the Good is the ultimate principle of morality. This principle must be taken in the sense that if one’s ¯ethos, one’s character, is oriented toward the idea of the Good, it is not possible knowingly to act badly. To act badly is intentionally to make someone the worse for knowing you. To inflict such is to affect adversely the proper state of another’s psyche¯. The second principle of speculative morality is that no harm can come to a good human being. This principle allows one to accept the fact of one’s mortality. The Good is what the law attempts to formulate as civil wisdom. But the Good is more than the law in the sense that the Good cannot be put into language. The moral is ultimately not a set of rules, nor is it the result of arguments pro and con, as practiced in the field of applied ethics. The moral is ultimately good character itself. The source of all morality, then, is moral education, begun with the teaching of the Muses—the power to sing both true and false songs, but from this power to will the true that, in moral terms, is the Good.

Chapter 3

Philosophy and Eloquence For you know well, my dear Crito, that to express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul. Socrates, Phaedo 115e

All of modern philosophy can be accounted for in the line from the first preface of Kant’s first Critique: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit [Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen muss].”1 Looking backward from it is Descartes’s dismissal of rhetoric and the other humanities from the method of right reasoning of his Discours, and looking forward from it are Derrida’s doctrines of criticism in his Grammatologie. Looking to the present we face the phenomenon of “critical thinking,” the new and ever-widening thesis of educational theory, namely, that the general purpose of university instruction is to teach how to think critically. We may ask: Is there a way out of this neo-Kantian world that would reduce the love of wisdom to the problem of knowledge? Whenever philosophy, in its history, reaches an impasse, it is because it has forgotten part of itself. It has attempted to reduce the pursuit of wisdom to the attainment of some form of knowledge that holds all that lies outside it to be error, and once declared as error, this outside is forgotten. If we are to recover from the dominance of critique we must bring back to life what has been left behind. Philosophy advances by the power of memory, not by going forward toward novelty. We can look to Vico, who said: “I hold the opinion that if eloquence does not regain the luster of the Latins and Greeks in our time, when our sciences 33

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have made progress equal to and perhaps even greater than theirs, it will be because the sciences are taught completely stripped of every badge of eloquence.”2 Is it possible for philosophy to recover its sense of eloquence, the connection with eloquence it enjoyed in its origins? Vico, following Cicero, saw Socrates as the most eloquent of philosophers: “The Academy established by Socrates was a place where he, with elegance, copiousness, and ornament, reasoned about all parts of human and divine knowing.”3 Cicero, summing up ancient philosophy, said: “Wisdom is the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57). In the Scienza nuova, Vico, referring to Varro, says: “True wisdom should teach the knowledge of divine things in order to conduct human things to the highest good.”4 Wisdom, then, is a knowledge of the whole, one part of which is human and the other, divine. As Vico says in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, his oration on human education, “The whole is really the flower of wisdom [sapientiae flos esset].”5 To recover the relation between philosophy and eloquence we may turn to Ernesto Grassi’s thesis of “rhetoric as philosophy.”6 The drive to endorse the doctrine of critical thinking has forgotten that ars critica cannot be separated from ars topica. Ars critica, taken in itself, is a self-repeating process that can bring nothing into being. It can do no more than look at what is given and critically reflect on it. It offers no power to reach the origin of what it finds around it as given. Criticism knows nothing of Vico’s maxim that “doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat.”7 In fact, criticism regards the pursuit of the truth of something as directed to the comprehension of its origin as the “genetic fallacy.” Yet, as Grassi’s thesis holds, logic cannot provide an account of its own beginning points. Logic applies its principles, but as to their foundations, it cannot tell us from whence and where.8 Ars topica, taken in its broadest sense, is the subject of rhetoric, for rhetoric teaches us how to speak and from where—the places of memory from which we can draw forth oration. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant states: “Force and elegance of speech (which together constitute rhetoric) belong to fine art; but oratory (ars oratoria), being the art of playing for one’s own purpose upon the weaknesses of men (let this purpose be ever so good in intention or even in fact) merits no respect whatever [ist gar keiner Achtung würdig].”9 Given the prominence of the idea of respect in Kant’s ethics, no stronger a condemnation is possible. Locke, another founding figure of modern philosophy, in An Essay concerning Human Understanding concludes his discussion of the “Abuse of Words” by stating: “If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow

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that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.”10 Locke emphasizes that in all discourses that intend to inform and instruct all elements of oratory are to be avoided. The true philosopher, then, is to strive for a way of speaking that will leave behind all the aspects of language that rhetoric studies. Descartes states, in Discourse on the Method: “Those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton and have never learned rhetoric.”11 Truth can be spoken even in bas Breton. This statement of Descartes is likely the source of the claim that Descartes held that “to know Latin is to know no more than Cicero’s servant,” which is found very early in Cartesian literature, but not in Descartes’s published works.12 Latin is the language most closely associated with rhetoric and oratory and supplies the terminology for law and jurisprudence. It is the source for the term “eloquence” (eloquentia) and its definition. Quintilian says: “The verb eloqui means the production and communication to the audience of all that the speaker has conceived in his mind, and without this power all the preliminary accomplishments of oratory are as useless as a sword that is kept permanently concealed within its sheath” (Inst. 8.pr.15–16). Cicero says: “Eloquence is nothing else but wisdom delivering copious utterance” (De part. 23.79). Vico echoes this view in his question “What is eloquence, in effect, but wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common opinion of mankind?”13 Eloquence is putting the whole into words; it is not simply the formation of elegant and ornate phrases. Eloquence does require copia, in that it joins together many aspects of its subject. Demosthenes was famous for his copiousness, coupled with his mighty enthymeme; having taken his hearers into a great digression, he could call them back with its single stroke.

The Complete Speech The aim of true philosophy is to conceive of and to deliver the complete speech, the account of all that there is. It is to put the world into a microcosm of words with which the mind can course through all that there is, not in fact but in principle. The complete speech is a miniature of all of experience, and therein lies its fascination. The miniature in thought is inherently attractive to the mind’s eye as a physical miniature is pleasing to the bodily eye. The attraction to Plato’s Republic, and why it—along with Hegel’s

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Phenomenology—is one of the greatest works of philosophy, is because it creates a complete “city in speech.” Hegel’s Phenomenology creates a complete “science of the experience of consciousness” in speech. Both of these works are indispensable to the pursuit of philosophical self-knowledge because of their eloquence and the sublime moments the reader encounters within them. A third example may be Vico’s Scienza nuova, which stands to philosophy much as Dante’s Divina commedia stands to poetry. Both leave nothing out, and both are sublime in their extension and in the intension of their moments of insight. The agenda for the modern philosophy of criticism is set by the Port-Royal Logic of Arnauld and Nicole, L’art de penser (1662). Its conception of method puts aside the art of topics in favor of the art of criticism, although it never directly attacks the art of topics. It distinguishes two methods of thinking: analysis and synthesis. Method is generally described as “the art of arranging well a succession of various thoughts, or for discerning the truth when we are ignorant of it, or for proving it to others when we already know it.”14 Two types of method are then distinguished: “one for discovering the truth, which is called analysis, or method of resolution, and that also can be called method of invention; and the other for making it understandable to others when it has been found, which is called synthesis, or method of composition, and can also be called method of doctrine.”15 In effect, what is here asserted is is the following. (1) There is a method for establishing the truth that is nonrhetorical; it is a method of analytical or critical thinking; And (2) there is a method for communicating such truth that is rhetorical; it is a method of synthesizing the truth that has been critically established into a doctrine that is generally understandable. Left out is how we are to find the starting points from which to engage in the critical and proper arrangement of our thoughts and investigations. The principles of the arrangement of our ideas are the subject of deductive logic. The principles of the communication of our ideas are the subject of rhetoric, understood as the art of persuasion. This twofold sense of method is the combination of ars critica and an abridged version of ars oratoria that limits it to speaking about what is already known. Ars topica plays no role in this conception. In Aristotle, there are two ways to regard the syllogism. One is to regard it as an instrument of demonstration, the subject of Aristotle’s Analytics. The other is to regard the syllogism as a means for the generation of ideas, the subject of the Topics. Both are parts of the Organon. In the first of these, the middle term functions solely as the means through which the minor and major terms are connected to produce the conclusion. The middle term is

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present only in the premises, and disappears in the conclusion. In the second sense of the syllogism, the middle term is all-important because it is the commonplace or topos out of which the other two terms of the syllogism are drawn forth (Rh. 1.1–2 and 2.20–23; Pr. 2.27; Top. 1.1). The ars topica is identified with inventio as the first principle of composition. Vico says: “‛Topics’ is the art of finding the ‛medium’ i.e., the middle term: in the conventional language of Scholasticism, ‛medium’ indicates what the Latins call argumentum.”16 The ars critica concerns how an argument already in existence can be tested for validity. The ars topica concerns how an argument can come into existence. Arguments can become the subject of the logician’s principles, or analytics, only when they already exist. The means to bring an argument into existence is the subject of the rhetorician’s principles, or topics. The ars topica presumes that arguments exist for a purpose; they are formulated to accomplish some end, and it seeks the principles by which such formulation occurs. The ars critica can offer us no understanding of the beginning points of arguments; it comes to arguments only once they are there for us. The ars topica requires that the speaker who wishes to assert a connection between two terms must find a third term to act as a middle term, a meaning that is held in common between the speaker’s intention and the audience, that is, a commonplace or topos. This commonplace can often take the form of a maxim or be advanced within an enthymeme. Once in possession of the middle term, the speaker can “draw forth” the connection between the terms of the conclusion, bringing the understanding and agreement of the listeners along so as to accept the conclusion. If the middle term does not express a ground of meaning sufficiently common between speaker and listeners, a further ground must be sought. This process can proceed regressively, even to the point, at least in principle, of the expression of an archetype, implied in what Vico calls the common mental language (la lingua mentale comune) or mental dictionary (dizionario mentale) of humanity.17 The speaker’s original syllogism would then need to come forward from this ultimate commonplace by a sorites, to assert the specific conclusion originally claimed. Lane Cooper, in commenting on this process, states: “The sound rhetorician does draw one thing from another. Thus we come to the preposition ek, which is characteristic of Aristotle’s thought, but often is hard or impossible to translate directly. The speaker is supposed to have resources, from which he draws his arguments and illustrations.”18 We produce middle terms from what Vico calls il senso comune, or our communal sense.19 Ars critica necessarily presupposes ars topica. Why is rhetoric or eloquence the subject of attack by the founders of modern philosophy? Is it rooted in

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the general quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, such that the moderns intend their sciences to be taught stripped of every badge of eloquence? The answer is yes. The conception of modern critical philosophy is to reduce the pursuit of truth to the problem of knowledge and to do so by replacing ingenium with method and meditatio with reflection. Ingenium is the basis of metaphor—a power philosophy shares with poetry and rhetoric. Ingenium, cultivated by the ancients and the Renaissance humanists, is the ability to perceive similarity in dissimilars, the power of invention or finding. It is the power to produce metaphor. As Aristotle says, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius” (Poet. 1459a5–7). Metaphor is the key to ars topica, for it always makes a starting point. It brings into being a connection that has not been thought. It asserts a commonplace.

Metaphor and Question There are two senses of metaphor—one is epistemological and the other is metaphysical or ontological. A metaphor, in the sense of using the name of one thing for another, is a condensed analogy. The meanings of two things already known are combined or likened to each other, providing us with a new sense of them. The meaning of one thing is “carried over” into another. A metaphor in the sense that can be expressed as “originating metaphor” or “radical metaphor” brings something into being that was not before. A double is presented as a single thing. We apprehend a “twone” as opposed to the likening of two things, each of which already has separate meaning and being. The elements of an originating or ontological metaphor, once it is uttered, can be separated into an analogy, but it does not initially strike us as such. The ontological metaphor is primordial. Thus in the Homeric “rosyfingered dawn” we encounter a unified entity that, when we gain distance from its immediacy, we can separate into an analogy between the spreading of fingers in a hand and the spreading of rays of light. “Mother Earth” is neither mother nor earth, but is alma mater herself, a double of herself. We can later liken the two terms as two forms of nourishment. “Jupiter Tonans” is a double being that is one. With distance we can sort out Jupiter as a divine being joined to the physical occurrence of thunder. Grassi points out: “The metaphor lies at the root of our knowledge in which rhetoric and philosophy attain their original unity. Therefore we cannot speak of rhetoric and philosophy, but every original philosophy is

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rhetoric and every true and not exterior rhetoric is philosophy.” Metaphor is the accomplishment of rhetorical speech. It gives us access to the world. It is only from this access that philosophy can begin its reasoning. Grassi concludes: “Philosophy itself becomes possible only on the basis of metaphors, on the basis of ingenuity [ingenium] which supplies the foundation of every rational, derivative process.”20 To the trope of metaphor the philosopher appends the device of the question. Socrates is the inventor of the question. The metaphor made into an analogy generates the question of its meaning. The result is the Socratic elenchos that moves between analogies and questions, between “likely story” and logos or argument. Both the metaphor and the question depend upon and originate from ingenium. Method, in contrast, is never ingenious. The discovery of a method itself is a product of ingenium. But once formulated, method simply requires training in application of the method. The strength of the method is proportionate to the degree of insight or intuition required for its application to materials. If the method is truly efficient, little is needed beyond close training and experience in its use. Nothing new can come from method. What is possible is only what the method can do. Whatever newness it may seem to have is due to the lack of foresight regarding its implications or applications. All that lies outside the method is irrelevant. Method is huis clos. We will know what the method will allow us to know. It solves the problem of knowledge. Meditation, or contemplation that is associated by the ancients with theo¯ria and the ethics of the good life, has no place in the dedication to reflection and understanding that dominates modern critical thinking. Theo¯ria—from which the word theater is derived—is the act of looking upon something so as to comprehend it. Such meditation or contemplation is an end in itself, without any further purpose. Meditation is connected to speculation. Speculation is associated with dialectical thinking, which leads to noetic thinking—a type of thinking that leads the mind to a direct and rational seeing of the True. Reflection can never pass beyond the understanding (Verstand), that is, a classifying mentality that achieves only an external joining of subject and predicate. In the “speculative sentence” mind moves from subject to its meaning in the predicate and then back to the subject, now altered in its meaning by its contact with the predicate, and so forth, in a dialectic of internal relations between subject and predicate. In this way, the mind enters further and further into the truth of its object, apprehending it as an idea within its own reality. This dialectic is based on the power of ingenium to perceive connections between opposites, and is a form of ars topica because it is a continual drawing forth of meanings. These meanings or stages of the

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dialectical movement remain as topoi or commonplaces in memory, from which thought can always begin, and begin again. Reflection walks around its object, and, like refracted light, it is a kind of mental optics that comes back from the surface of the object into itself, never able to access the object as a thing-in-itself.21 Dialectical thinking can be interrupted, at any point in its movement, to be formed as an argument. Critical thinking is always argument sui generis, without ground in the larger process of dialectic. Philosophical criticism is always about argument and counterargument, either deductive or inductive. These arguments always presuppose a narrative in which they occur, but the narrative, whether implicit or explicit, appears inessential. As discussed in chapter 5, Descartes’s arguments in the Discourse are set in terms of the narrative or pseudo-narrative of himself as a thinking “I.” And the same is true for his other works, including the Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he intends to redefine the nature of meditation as a noetic activity, as found among the ancients to be a process of argumentation based on logical certainty. Only two modern philosophers instantiate the ideal of “wisdom speaking,” or eloquence, as defined by Cicero and Quintilian: Vico and Hegel. Both pursue wisdom in terms of the whole realized in a complete speech of the whole. Hegel expresses the ideal of wisdom speaking in his famous statement “Das Wahre ist das Ganze”—“The True is the Whole.” If the True is the whole, it must be spoken as a whole. The True is not a form of knowledge; it is all of knowledge, brought together as a complete composition. Hegel’s speech of the whole is not a series of arguments but a series of questions and answers, each one leading to the next. The Phenomenology of Spirit begins in an unstated question: Of what can we be certain? (Descartes’s question). Its answer is that we can be certain of immediate sensation— sinnliche Gewissheit. This answer contains within it its own self-question, that leads consciousness to produce its answer of Wahrnehmung, and so on, each answer providing a new topos from which a question draws forth a new speech, until we reach absolutes Wissen, which declares this dialectic of question and answer to be a science of Erinnerung or “recollection,” a conversation the self has with itself.22 In the Science of Logic, the same process is repeated, beginning with the movement between Sein and Nichts, but this time in terms not of phenomena apprehended but of thoughts thought. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic are two halves of a circle, joined as yin and yang. In fact, Hegel says his “system of science” is a circle of circles (ein Kreis von Kreisen), so that each member of the circular whole returns to its own beginning and is the beginning of the

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next member. Hegel says, at the end of the Science of Logic, that each science in his system of science is joined to the others like links in a chain (Kette): “each of which has a before and after or, more precisely stated, has only the before and in its own conclusion shows its after.”23 The complete speech is always a circle constructed of circles (this sense of the circle is connected to the idea of true infinity in chapter 6). Vico’s complete speech of the Scienza nuova is modeled on forensic oratory. As he was a professor of Latin eloquence, it is a form with which Vico was quite familiar. In a general sense, all philosophy is forensic speech, for it defends and pleads a case to its readers or listeners. The treating of a case in court, by definition, must aim at eloquence in the sense of a complete speech on the matter at issue. Such a treatment of a case will have assurance of success only if it is wisdom speaking. Above all, what is said must, ideally, be both true and plausible. But, as Quintilian advises, “no one should think there is anything reprehensible in my suggestion that a Narrative which is wholly in our favor should be plausible, when it is in fact true. There are many true things that are not very credible, and false things are frequently plausible. We must therefore make just as much effort to make the judge believe the true things we say as to make him believe what we invent. These virtues which I have just mentioned belong of course to other parts of the speech too” (Inst. 4.2.34–39). In all the great speeches that comprise the history of philosophy, whether or not as complete as those of Hegel or Vico, the arguments they contain are secondary to the images that guide them. Most of the great philosophical books simply begin with their authors making assertions and distinctions. They develop an intellectual narrative that, from time to time, resorts to presentations of proofs or arguments. These arguments are imbedded in a kind of literary work that we call philosophy. R. G. Collingwood, in his discussion of philosophy as literature, holds that philosophy is prose containing essential moments of poetry.24 He is correct. Yet the poetry that is present in philosophical prose is rarely noticed. The philosophical imagination is rooted in the general literary imagination.

Attachment to Argument In our age of criticism and reflective analysis, philosophy is taught in terms of arguments. No end of papers are given at philosophical meetings, analyzing, criticizing, and correcting some argument or other extracted from classical or contemporary works of philosophy. Students are taught in class after class to seek out the arguments in philosophical works. There is pathos

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in this process of pinning down arguments in such works. It is Hegel’s “bad infinity”—schlechte Unendlichkeit—because beyond every argument there lies a counterargument, a continual Jenseits. Once an argument is advanced, it is not beyond human wit to discover a counterargument, and so on, without end. Such a series offers us a kind of geistige Tierreich, an intellectual menagerie, with the author of each argument barking its wares, to which we are asked to subscribe. As in Lucian’s Sale of Philosophies, we enter an indefinitely incomplete world of piecemeal thinking. In making this point, however, I do not wish to be a misologist. I heed Socrates’ warning, in his speech in the Phaedo, against being a hater of argument. But argument as an element of philosophy must be put in perspective. It is not in itself all of what philosophical thinking is about. Socrates’ own manner of philosophizing is to establish a dialectic between the elenchos and the likely story, each supplementing the other. The French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff says: “Whether one looks for a characterization of philosophical discourse to Plato to Hegel or to Bréhier, one always meets with reference to the rational, the concept, the argued, the logical, the abstract. Even when a certain coyness leads some authorities to pretend that they do not know what philosophy is, no agnosticism remains about what philosophy is not. Philosophy is not a story, not a pictorial description, not a work of pure literature. Philosophical discourse is inscribed and declares its status as philosophy through a break with myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image.” The surest way to dismiss a philosophy is to declare it to be poetry. Le Doeuff continues: “If, however, one goes looking for this philosophy [that described above] in the texts which are meant to embody it, the least that can be said is that it is not to be found there in a pure state. We shall also find statues that breathe the scent of roses, comedies, tragedies, architects, foundations, dwellings, doors and windows, sand, navigators, various musical instruments, islands, clocks, horses, donkeys and even a lion, representatives of every craft and trade, scenes of sea and storm, forests and trees: in short, a whole pictorial world sufficient to decorate even the dryest ‘History of Philosophy.’”25 Our true entrance into any philosophy is through its metaphors, and it is through its metaphorical images that it is impressed on our memories. We keep philosophy in mind through its key images—through Heraclitus’s river, Plato’s cave, Aristotle’s sea battle, Augustine’s pear tree, Anselm’s fool, Ockham’s razor, Buridan’s ass, Machiavelli’s prince, Bacon’s idols, Descartes’s poële, Spinoza’s bondage, Leibniz’s windowless monads, Pascal’s wager,

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Locke’s candle, Berkeley’s tar water, Hume’s fork, Kant’s fogbanks of illusion, Mill’s canons, Hegel’s master-servant, Marx’s fetish, Smith’s hidden hand, Russell’s logical atom, Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, Husserl’s bracketing, Cassirer’s Linienzug, Heidegger’s Holzweg, Quine’s bound variable—there is no end to the lists that could be constructed for the history of philosophy, or for individual philosophies.26 The history of philosophy, in terms of the image and master images emphasized by major philosophers, is yet to be written. Stephen Pepper’s theory of “root metaphors”—that philosophies can be organized in terms of certain metaphors that inform their origination of worldviews—has never been pursued. The role of the metaphor in comprehending philosophy is inescapable. Even the term Pepper coined is a metaphor.27 Finally, something may be said of the other great trope that informs the eloquence of the speech of the whole. Vico says that irony does not arrive in human thought until thought becomes philosophical. “Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth.”28 A myth is always a true story, a vera narratio. It is a perception put into words, a fable— a metaphor being a fable in brief. Like a perception, it is something true in itself. Fables are not based on judgment, distinguishing between truth and error. Irony, since Socrates, has been a part of philosophical speech. It guides thought to insights that cannot be reached by argument. An irony grasped will establish and record a point more easily and firmly than any argument concerning it. To approach great works of philosophy apart from irony is to miss the insights they contain and to retreat into the monotone of argument and criticism. Irony, like metaphor, depends upon ingenium to connect what is dissimilar. Irony occurs when what is affirmed is the opposite of what is meant. The literal flattens out meaning. Irony causes us to see something from its other side—a trope that embodies Hegel’s labor of the negative (Arbeit des Negativen). When opposites are juxtaposed we see more than when they each are stated separately and compared logically. Further, what is said ironically naturally impresses itself on our memory. Plato’s claim in the Republic that the best state will never exist until philosophers become kings in their countries or kings take up the study of philosophy is likely ironic, and it is unforgettable, once read. In conclusion, one can think of nothing more intellectually boring than critique, critical thinking, and the bad infinity of argument and counterargument. It robs philosophy of a language of the passions of its theater of

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memory, containing its storehouse of topics and the dialectical pursuit of self-knowledge—the conversation the self can have with itself that is the basis of what the ancients called civil wisdom. Once philosophy is stripped of eloquence, it has little to say about the human condition and devotes itself to method, from analytical to hermeneutical, and to the problem of knowledge, not self-knowledge. Tonguetied, philosophical speech becomes the monotone of logical assertion and understanding, a kind of grimness of mind that has nothing daring to say. The confinement of philosophy to the transcendental, with a fear of error that comes with thinking beyond experience, is based on a timidity of soul. We are told to stay at home with the understanding and the logical certainties of method, avoiding the adventures of ideas. Our mind’s eye must be checked, lest it raise its vision upward toward the eide¯ or glimpse the dilettoso monte of the Absolute. We are told to keep a critical eye downward, for the eye is the organ in the body in which the soul concentrates itself. The eye is the instrument of the soul. We are encouraged to keep our sight on the present and the progress of the future, and as much as possible, free of the influence of memory. This is the teaching of the modern problem of knowledge and its constant companion: critical thinking and speaking.

Ch ap ter 4

Philosophical Style Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education

In a digression, Heraclides of Pontus, in his dialogue Peri te¯ s apnon (On the Woman Who Stopped Breathing), attributes the coining of the word “philosopher” to Pythagoras.1 Leon, tyrant of Phlius, impressed with the ingenuity and speech of Pythagoras, asked him what skill or sophia he possessed. In his well-known reply, Pythagoras said that he was not a sophos but a philosophos, perhaps implying, as Diogenes Laertius reports, that only the gods are wise—a clever response, so as not to arouse suspicion that he might possess a divine power, transcending Leon’s political power. When asked further, to say what the nature of such a person was, Pythagoras likened the philosophoi to the spectators at the Great Games, those who attend them with the sole purpose to see what occurs, not to compete or to use the occasion to conduct business transactions. From the time of Pythagoras to the Platonic Socrates in the tenth book of the Republic, the Greek world had not resolved the question of whether the sayings and writings of the philosophoi were a new kind of poetry or embodied a new kind of knowledge. Were the thoughts resulting from this philia to be regarded as an extension of Homer, the poet of poets, whose wisdom was conveyed through the recitations of the rhapsodes? Or were these speculations to take their audience into another sense of things? This is the question Plato decides to answer before engaging his readers in the Myth of Er, which concludes the Republic. 45

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What, then, is the distinction between philosophy and poetry? Is it that philosophical speech simply mixes prose with poetic, employing elements of the lyric, dramatic, and epic? The moral critique of poetry—that it is unable to teach virtue because of its indiscriminate attachment to and portrayal of the emotions—must have an epistemic and metaphysical basis if it is to be more than just a doctrine of political prudence. Plato’s quarrel with the poets depends upon two senses of vision. The poet sees only with the bodily eye. Thus what the poet sees are images. These images are made or imitated in words. Eidos or idea remains, for the poet, what it meant in Homer—“what one sees,” the appearance or shape, normally of the body—a meaning that persisted in pre-Socratic philosophy. In Platonic philosophy, eidos is what is seen by the mind’s eye. The words of the poet make or remake what we can see with the bodily eye. The words of the philosopher make us see the unseen with the mind’s eye. The basis of the quarrel is that both poetry and philosophy are nothing but words. The poet and the philosopher are both imitators. The poetic image imitates what can be seen. The words of the philosopher imitate the unseen. The latter imitate not what appears, but what is. The philosopher shares with the poet the importance of style in the sense of how meaning is put into language. Style is the third principle of composition, well known since Quintilian and Cicero: inventio (the amassing of materials), dispositio (their arrangement), and elocutio (their formulation in language). For the poet, nothing can be wasted. Each and every syllable is given a necessary role; every level of a metaphor is present; every connection of words is precise and simple. The poem, when good, is always something beyond itself. It is never what it seems. Philosophical speech can take the reader only to a point in which the mind’s eye is activated and directed to the unseen in the seen. This process is not mysticism, for of it we can rightly say, with Hegel, that we must be mystics in the end, not in the beginning. Philosophical speech, like poetic speech, goes beyond itself, beyond any literal sense that words can offer. What separates the philosophers from the poets, and from the declarations of the pre-Socratics, is the Socratic discovery of the question. Ernst Cassirer recognizes this in clear terms. He says that, despite the difference between the sophistic and Socratic way of asking questions, “both of them remain united in one thing, which, in a sense, is what is essential to both of them: that they ‘ask’ at all, that they regard not only the being of nature, but that they also—and primarily—regard human reality as something which we need to raise questions about and which it is worth raising questions about.” He concludes: “From now on nothing escapes from the sphere of questioning.”2 The poet does not ask questions. Through the power of metaphor the

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poet portrays, but does not question. The Socratic philosopher advances a metaphorical image in order to ask a question of it, or employs an analogy as a means for further pursuing the answer to a question. Once the question is discovered as the vehicle of thought, all things are open to question, to the sense of thought it entails. Cassirer says: “Philosophy, at least, was henceforth addicted to this criticism and it cannot protect itself from it without forfeiting its own nature.” He concludes: “Doubt is the positive instrument of knowledge and expresses the function of philosophical knowledge.”3 Doubt, the attitude that drives philosophical thought, is not integral to poetry. Poetry is direct affirmation of the value and nature of the object. Philosophy can come to affirmation only by passing through the process of doubt that engenders and is engendered by the formation of the question. Philosophical speech is not in principle able to enclose fully its object. Great philosophers are users of metaphor because, to attain philosophical truth, the full power of language must be employed: the question and the image. As mentioned earlier, it is often thought that philosophy is “about arguments,” and philosophy is most often taught by instructing the student to seek out and examine the arguments in a text. In such an approach to philosophy both the images and the questions are overlooked. Also overlooked, as mentioned earlier, is that no argument stands alone. All arguments presuppose a narrative in which the points to which they are directed make sense. The philosopher caught in the grip of arguments, of “solving puzzles,” cannot ultimately escape the dictum that the True is the whole. To think that the formulation and examination of arguments are the essence of philosophy is to miss the fact that all arguments are responses to questions and that the dialectic of question and answer is what moves philosophical thought along, even if this dialectic is not immediately evident to those engaged in hunting down arguments in the great texts. To attempt to prove something in the modern manner of presenting a deductive-style argument is to take the mind nowhere. One argument simply leads to another. Such back-and-forth is like directing the mind’s eye by lamplight, focusing first here and then there, instead of seeking the full illumination of sunlight that reveals the whole. Thought becomes a kind of intellectual stumbling from point to point, with nothing great or eloquent being said or attempted.

The Sublime The object of philosophical speech—especially speculative speech—is the sublime. The philosopher must go to school not only with the poets but also

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with the rhetoricians. The true philosopher is not an enemy of rhetoric, only an enemy of rhetoric when used sophistically. Cicero recognized that, contrary to tradition, Socrates was in fact a source of eloquence: “What of Critias? And Alcibiades? These though not benefactors of their fellow-citizens were undoubtedly learned and eloquent; and did they not owe their training to the discussions of Socrates?” (De orat. 3.139). Great thought requires great use of language. From great philosophers we learn not only great ideas; we also learn how such ideas can be realized in words. The tongue is the organ of the intellect. All great works of philosophy aim at taking the reader beyond the concepts the works contain. Let us follow Longinus as a guide to how this transposition of the reader may be accomplished. He says: “There are two requisites in every systematic treatise: the author must first define his subject, and secondly, though this is really more important, he must show us how and by what means we may reach the goal ourselves” (1.1). If the author is to speak eloquently, that is, to put the whole of the subject into words, the subject must be defined. More importantly, the author must write in such a way that the reader or listener can make the truth that the treatise contains. In this way the truth enters the reader’s thought and is a proof for the reader of what the author has said. The reader must not simply read or listen to the author’s words; the reader must be moved to remake them in a corresponding speech. Longinus says: “The Sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of language, and that this alone gave to the greatest poets and prose writers their preeminence and clothed them with immortal fame. For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves” (1.3). There is no question of the correctness of this observation. A great work of philosophy is a twice-told tale. It bears reading more than once. Works that may on first reading seem greatly attractive or even fascinating, on subsequent reading offer little, and seem to disappear in the very act of rereading. It is said, and rightly, that the student of philosophy should read Plato every year. A. N. Whitehead expressed this in his wellknown remark that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. As Homer is the poet of poets, Plato is the philosopher of philosophers. The details of thought that a great work contains can emerge slowly in its reading and rereading. But what makes a work great is its ability to induce a sudden insight or epiphany, to take the mind’s eye and direct it to the light of something ultimate. It is the moment when Plato’s Socrates, at the conclusion of the Republic, steps out of the narrative of the Myth of Er and says to Glaucon that we are all in the position of the souls choosing their lives, now

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that we have read the Republic. A great work is a circle. The conclusion of any great work takes the reader back to its beginning. This circle is there in any great work of literature or philosophy. Sublimity is not achieved by the insertion of novel phrases into the text. Great works of philosophy, as well as of literature, are theaters of memory. They cause us to remember what we somehow already know. Novelty cannot, in practice or in principle, effect this grasp of the origin. Jorge Luis Borges, quoting Francis Bacon, says: “Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.”4 Longinus says that the attempt to make novel statements reduces the dignity, the worth, of a text. Thus, “lapses from dignity in literature spring from the same cause, namely that passion for novelty of thought which is the particular craze of the present day” (5). All great thought is the repetition of what we already know but do not know we know until we are shown it in a flash. Longinus holds that if we repeat a passage several times and it does not produce for us greater food for thought but sinks into bathos, then it cannot be truly sublime: “For what is truly great bears repeated consideration; it is difficult, nay impossible, to resist its effect and the memory is stubborn and indelible” (7.3). It is not enough for a single reader to find something sublime. It must also be found to be sublime by others. This common finding is the basis of a work becoming a classic. Works that are lost may be rediscovered, but their rediscovery cannot remain a novel event. It is an article of faith in culture that great works have a natural power to survive as long as there are true scholars and readers. Longinus says: “A grand Style is the natural product of those whose ideas are weighty” (9). In Peri Erme¯ neias, “On Style,” Demetrius says: “Grandeur has three aspects, thought, diction, and composition in the appropriate way” (38). Grandeur is what we identify with true eloquence. In great works of philosophy we expect these three senses of grandeur. Even if a great work is not well written by conventional senses of readability, its greatness is simply there. We encounter forms of thought, modes of expression, and patterns of composition that we find nowhere else. It is this encounter that brings us back to the work again and again, always to find something we did not find before. According to the principles of the art of rhetoric, and as Aristotle holds, amplification is what invests a subject with grandeur. If we follow Longinus we must regard grandeur as separate from sublimity, for “sublimity lies in elevation, amplification rather in amount; and so you often find sublimity in a single idea, whereas amplification always goes with quantity and a certain

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degree of redundance” (12). Amplification is an accompaniment to proof, for it brings the reader into the logos and makes it vivid. Sublimity transports the reader beyond the logos to grasp what cannot be confined to words. We may add, to Longinus’s rhetorical sense of sublimity, Kant’s epistemological presentation of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. In his discussion of the mathematically sublime, Kant distinguishes between the apprehension of an infinite magnitude and its comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). Apprehension can be carried on ad infinitum in an effort to present to the mind an absolute maximum. But, Kant says, “if the apprehension has reached a point beyond which the representations of sensuous intuition in the case of the parts first apprehended begin to disappear from the imagination [Einbildungskraft] as this advances to the apprehension of yet others, as much, then, is lost at one end as is gained at the other, and for comprehension we get a maximum which the imagination cannot exceed.”5 At this point we reach an experience of the sublime. This sublimity is not that of a flash of insight that is unexpected, it is sublimity in the sense of thought reaching a point at which its object is fully in principle comprehensible, but at which its actual comprehension is not truly attainable. The magnitude the series produces defeats the power of the imagination to encompass it. The result is a kind of awe or at least the wonder that an aporia engenders. Kant likens this experience to “the bewilderment, or sort of perplexity, which, as is said, seizes the visitor on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome.” He says: “For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight.”6 The mind is taken beyond itself in its inability to attain a concept by which to form the object before it. St. Peter’s can be continuously apprehended by the senses, but what is sensed cannot be formed into a single image or schema such that what is seen can be conceptually thought as a unity. Yet what is before the mind is a true greatness, a whole.

Imaginative Universals The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry is not resolved by Plato because the poets and their supporters do not come forward with the apologia Plato deems necessary to allow the poets a place in his city in speech. Plato in his own speech oscillates between logos and mythos, but offers no principle in terms of which these opposites may be resolved. It is not enough simply to say that the philosophers must go to school with the poets, because

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this affirmation does not determine how they are to do so. Aristotle puts the issue aside by regarding poetics as a particular subject matter to be philosophically studied. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy, makes the one attempt, before the Renaissance Italian humanists, to face the legacy of the issue that Plato leaves. Boethius’s text is a prosimetrum, remarkable for its interweaving of philosophical prose and ingeniously crafted poetry. Not only for its treatment of the problem of God’s prevision of free human acts, but also for the greatness of its style, it was one of the works of universal appeal throughout the Middle Ages. The Italian humanists reintroduced the ancients by making rhetoric the basis of philosophy. One need only think of Petrarca’s poetry, as well as his writings on moral philosophy, or Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, or the Spanish humanist Ludovicus Vives’s A Fable about Man to gain a sense of the rhetorical and literary mode of philosophizing characteristic of the Renaissance. The starting points of rational deductive thought cannot be supplied by logic, at least by logic understood as ars critica. The Italian humanist tradition realized that metaphor comes before reasoning to give us access to the world. Metaphor is not simply a trope to employ, in the sense of analogy, to explain what is arrived at sui generis by ratiocination. The power of metaphor is the power of the linguistic act to bring something into existence for thought, to give thought an arche¯ , a starting point. All beginnings require the ingenuity of metaphorical speech. It is not until the work of Giambattista Vico that we possess a fully developed doctrine of metaphor that allows us to resolve the Platonic ancient quarrel. Vico, although later than the Renaissance, is rightly called the “Owl of Minerva” of Italian humanism.7 In his doctrine of “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica) in the New Science, Vico resolves the ancient quarrel in one simple stroke. He declares, and proves, that Homer is not a philosopher—that Homer’s wisdom is poetic wisdom; it is presupposed and required by Plato’s philosophical wisdom. The one is the basis of the other. They are not alternatives. One wonders why it took so long for this solution to be seen. The solution, however, requires a new conception of metaphor, one that Vico says is the “master key” to his science, and that cost him nearly the whole of his intellectual life to discover. This solution is bound up with what Vico calls “poetic logic,” the centerpiece of which is the theory of “poetic characters” (caratteri poetici) or imaginative universals (universali fantastici). The conception of metaphor deriving from Aristotle is that “metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from

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species to species, or on grounds of analogy” (Poet. 1457b). Metaphor on the Aristotelian definition is the finding of a similarity in two things, each of which has its own identity—something similar is perceived in what otherwise are dissimilars—as in the verb metapherein, something is transferred or “carried over” from one thing into another. As discussed earlier, all metaphors, on this definition, are conflated or compressed analogies. Indeed, whenever we encounter a metaphor we can intellectually divide it such that one part can be conceived as like its other part in one or more aspects. Thus, for example, the circled moon. The shape of the full moon is like the shape of a circle. The circle as a geometric figure is the genus of which the moon shape is a species. The circle and the moon have completely separate, nonmetaphorical identities. If we consider the Homeric metaphor mentioned earlier, “rosy-fingered dawn,” we can separate its parts into two species; the rays of morning light are merged with the spread-out fingers of a hand, in a likening of one species of thing to another. We may more explicitly express a metaphor by analogy: “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.” By supplying the missing term of “the populace” the Assyrian is attacking, we have an analogy of two pairs of events. Vico, in his discovery of imaginative universals, saw that the “intelligible universals” (universali intelligibili) of Aristotelian class logic presuppose a more fundamental form of universality in order for even this sense of universality to come into existence in thought. Human experience is first expressed through myths or Vichian “poetic wisdom.” Vico says “that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables.”8 It is the first science to be learned because it is through fables that human beings first order the world. A fable is true in the sense a perception is in itself true. At the level of mythic narrative there is no distinction between truth and error, between the literal and the fabulous. The first human beings of the world of nations, like children, feel the world and think through feelings. The first thoughts of humanity, like the first thoughts of philosophy, as Aristotle says in the beginning of his Metaphysics, are the result of wonder (thauma). The first human beings form the world through the power of fantasia to make identities in the ongoing stream of perceptions, in which every facial expression is a new face. Fantasia might best be translated as the “making imagination.” These first human beings make their world through the power of myth to coincide opposites. They are unable to form courage as an abstract quality. Instead they form it as the poetic character Achilles. They are unable to form the idea of prudence, so they form it as Ulysses. Any warrior who possesses courage or prudence is apprehended as Achilles or Ulysses. The warrior is not like Achilles or Ulysses, the warrior literally,

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univocally, is such. In addition, Achilles is Achilles and Ulysses is Ulysses. Put into modern cultural anthropological terms, the members of the Bear Clan do not think themselves as like bears; they know themselves to be bears. And they also know the bears to be bears. The power of metaphor, at this level, is not the power to perceive likeness; it is the power to provide original identity. Mythical perception (fantasia) is proto-metaphysical. In the axioms of the New Science, Vico puts the point as follows: “So that, if we consider the matter well, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity with it should be considered false.” He says, further: “Thence springs this important consideration in poetic theory: the true war chief, for example, is the Godfrey that Torquato Tasso imagines; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war.”9 Vico concludes that the fables have “univocal, not analogical, meanings for various particulars comprised under their poetic genera.”10 It is through the power of metaphor residing in the activity of fantasia that the mind comes to have anything before it at all. As the mind develops its power of abstraction it turns the imaginative universal of Achilles into the intelligible universal of courage and now predicates the virtue of courage univocally of individual warriors who were once each identified uniformly as Achilles. It is not enough that the philosopher intersperse prose with metaphors or images. The philosopher must reinvent language by connecting fantasia with reason. The mythmakers of humanity, or “theological poets,” as Vico calls them, had to make a world through their newly found power of linguistic expression. The philosopher must remake the world through the power of speech to recollect the whole. The myth is a speech of opposites. Metaphysics is a speech of opposites, done not in images but in ideas. Metaphysical or speculative speech is by nature dialectical speech. It is a weaving together of all that there is to speak of in a way that will satisfy the intellect.

The Speculative Sentence In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes the “speculative sentence” (spekulativer Satz). He does this in musical terms. In the speculative sentence the locus of its meaning is first in the subject, but to express its meaning we must pass to the predicate. Once the predicate is grasped we must ask how it is connected back to the subject. The sentence thus has a “floating center.” Hegel likens this movement back and forth to rhythm. This rhythm of the opposition between subject and predicate results in an expression of their unity. As Hegel says, “Their unity is meant to emerge as

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a harmony.”11 We can add to this Brand Blanshard’s point in his little book, On Philosophical Style, that “the rule is to make the emphases of sense and rhythm coincide.”12 The difference between subject and predicate is not overcome by their unity in the sense of a synthesis, or an identity. Their unity is that of a correspondence between subject and predicate. They are entsprechend—matched to each other. As we pass from subject to predicate and back from predicate to subject, their opposition is taken up within the subject. The inner form of the original opposition of the sentence now becomes the inner form of the subject itself that can be brought forth as a new predication of the meaning of the subject. The subject’s original self-identity is dissolved into an internal self-dialectical movement. As a prime example of the speculative sentence, Hegel takes the proposition “God is being” (Gott ist das Sein).13 This is the proposition that Kant dismisses in his criticism of the ontological argument in the first Critique. Kant says: “‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. . . . Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment.”14 Hegel says that “being” is not a predicate in the ordinary sense: because “the Predicate itself has been expressed as a Subject, as the being or essence which exhausts the nature of the Subject, thinking finds the Subject immediately in the Predicate.”15 The well-known Kantian claim that being is not a predicate is only partially correct, because God, as an object of speculative formulation, is both subject and predicate— the one object in which subject and predicate coincide. God is not a substance to which attributes as predicates are simply attached. The inner form of divine being is that of a self-movement that can be comprehended only dialectically. More is said about this in chapter 6. From the standpoint of the understanding (Verstand), being cannot be a predicate but is no more than the assertion of the copula that the subject is, and is connected to, the property or attribute expressed in the predicate. The Kantian thought of the understanding can do no more than classify objects in experience and join them together by means of judgment. Reflection is the means of the understanding. The understanding knows nothing of what Collingwood calls the “overlap of classes,” which is open to dialectical or speculative reason (Vernunft). When a judgment connects two classes as subject to predicate in the ordinary logic of the understanding, two assumptions are made. One is that the overlap of classes will remain within a fixed limit; the second is that for any group of instances there is only one concept. Thus in such logic any two concepts that have a common extension are identical.

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The traditional logical overlap of classes allows for only a partial overlap of classes; it does not allow for any instance to be fully a member of more than one class. In order to make such a distinction we must presuppose that any instance is always more than itself. All things have multiple identities that are separated out abstractly in the doctrine of class membership of the ordinary logic of the thought of the understanding. Collingwood says: “The first rule of philosophical method, then, will be to beware of false disjunctions and to assume that the specific classes of a philosophical concept are always liable to overlap, so that two or more specifically different concepts may be exemplified in the same instances.”16 Only a dialectical logic governed by speculative reason is capable of structuring the sense of the overlap of classes. The static classification of things by the reflective acts of the understanding in fact presupposes the actual overlap of classes. Dialectical logic of speculative reason shows that the identity of the members of any class are subject to the self-development of the class. It is a logic of metamorphosis. Speculative or dialectical thinking depends not on reflection but on recollection. The speculative sentence is a memory structure. As thought passes from the subject to predicate, the subject must be remembered in the predicate and then, when passing back from predicate to subject, the remembered subject-developed predicate must be remembered in the newly apprehended or re-apprehended subject. As consciousness passes back upon itself through the circle of the speculative sentence, consciousness turns itself into a theater of memory. In so doing, the world as object is remade in speculative speech. The reader who can follow this speech makes a proof in the reader’s own thought of that which is claimed. Further, however, in so doing the reader sees the limits of language and moves beyond these limits toward the sublimity of the divine vision of the truth of the whole. How can the speculative sentence be expressed in a text? Hegel says: “When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then is a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but can only be known; the Owl of Minerva takes its flight just at the falling of the dusk.”17 Philosophy does not make the forms of life; it can only make a knowledge of them. This knowledge is recollection or anamne¯ sis. To speculate is to recollect. The German word for anamne¯ sis is Erinnerung. On the last page of the Phenomenology, Hegel suddenly uses Erinnerung four times, to explain to the reader the basis of his work. The key to “absolute knowing” (absolutes Wissen) is Erinnerung. The German term, unlike the English “recollection,” incorporates the idea of “inner.” In the stages of Hegel’s “science of the experience of consciousness” substance has become Subject. The inner form of consciousness has

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been revealed by consciousness recollecting the past forms of itself. Consciousness in its philosophical form has come to know—come both to recognize and to put into order—the inner forms of itself (das Innere). Hegel’s work is a colossus of systematic memory. To possess absolute knowing is to possess absolute recollection, a total act of self-knowledge, a total recall. In the second instance of recollection in Hegel’s final page, Er-Innerung is hyphenated. Ernst Bloch, in a lecture on language and culture, remarks: “In Hegel’s Phenomenology one notices quite frequently how a sudden linguistic insight is inextricably bound up with true philosophical invention. This occurs when Hegel separates the word re-collection (Er-Innerung) and thereby takes recollection (as the condition of history) into the most interior, the most subjectivistic opposition to ‘alienation’ (Entäusserung) (as the condition of nature).”18 The hyphenation of Er-Innerung is a profound example of the spekulativer Satz in that it introduces into the key word of absolute knowing itself the circular or dialectical movement that characterizes that internal motion of subject and predicate of the speculative sentence. It is through the image that we can both access and recollect the concept. As we look through the Phenomenology we encounter Hegel’s dismissal of earlier formulations of the Absolute as “the night in which all cows are black,” the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus—the eating of bread and the drinking of wine of the stage of “sense-certainty”—in which, along with the animals, we realize sensuous particulars cannot be thought but only digested. We come, further, to the inverted world (verkehrte Welt) in which consciousness goes into a swoon, not able to think the difference between the North and South poles. There is the famous metaphor of the master-servant (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) and the unhappy or misfortunate consciousness (unglückliches Bewusstein), as well as the false doctrine of spirit embodied in craniology (Schädellehre), the skull Hegel says he would like to beat in. There is the “law of the heart” and the “knight of virtue,” followed by the “spiritual zoo” (das geistige Tierreich) of the constant pursuit of the matter-in-hand, the task to be done, and the “beautiful soul” (die schöne Seele), as well as “the absolute freedom and terror” (die absolute Freiheit und des Schrecken). Finally we are at “absolute knowing” (das absolute Wissen), where we are reminded that what we have passed through is a series of images of Geist. It is through these images that we have been able to think through the selfdeveloping order of concepts (Begriffe). The images now become topoi from which we can recollect the conceptual order so that we may reenter the text and experience it as a twice-told tale. In so doing we may add the trope of irony to the trope of metaphor. Underlying the images of Geist is the “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft), such that the actual is rational. Rationality

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brings with it irony. The gallery of images is also a gallery of ironies. Each stage of the science of the experience of consciousness begins with the serious belief that the two sides of consciousness, the in-itself and the for-itself, are finally being unified, only to see them separate again, and the original hope of synthesis to dissolve into an illusion. The irony of the speculative sentence is that we cannot stabilize its meaning. No one without a sense of humor can read Hegel’s text. Bertolt Brecht says Hegel “had the stuff of the greatest humorists among philosophers, Socrates is the only other one who had a similar method. . . . It was clear to him that right next to the greatest order dwells the greatest disorder. . . . What order affirms, disorder, its inseparable partner, opposes at once, in one breath where possible. They can neither live without one another nor with one another. . . . I have never met a person without a sense of humor who has understood Hegel’s dialectic.”19 Speculative philosophy knows that all truths are partial errors and all errors are partial truths. This realization is reached only through a sense of irony. We realize the error in taking ourselves seriously. Attributed to Oscar Wilde is the claim that all bad poetry is sincere. We may say of philosophy, all bad philosophy (that is, literal-minded philosophy) is sincere. Looking at Plato, Vico, and Hegel, we see how speculative philosophy is written and can be written. They defy us to reduce philosophy to arguments pro and con—the instruments of literal-mindedness. These great figures instead direct us to the possibilities of the complete speech. The complete speech is also an instigation of the great rhetorical principle of eloquence, of saying all that can be said on a subject.

Ch ap ter 5

The Rhetoric of Self-Discourse We ought not to say, “I think,” because “I” is a subject; we should say, “It is thought,” much as we say, “It is raining.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Immortality” (1978)

William James, in the Principles of Psychology, examines the sense in which we can be said to have a self. We have direct feeling of being in a body and we also have direct feeling of an inner or subjective being. James says the self “is something with which we also have direct sensible acquaintance, and which is as fully present at any moment of consciousness in which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such moments.”1 The self is not an abstraction or a construct of any kind. It is what is constantly present in our existence. James says: “Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real and verifiable ‘personal identity’ which we feel.”2 A key to the self is memory, for memory is required to hold together the stream of feelings as a continuum. This identity can be thought as an “I.” But “the identity found by the I in its me is only a loosely construed thing, an identity ‘on the whole,’ just like that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts.”3 Should I lose the feeling of the I, I would become simply a stream of thought with no particular identity. James says: “The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as ‘I’ can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew; and 2) emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ‘me,’ and appropriate

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to these the rest.”4 In order to be a thinking being I must have a personal identity. It is this sense of identity that supports thought and that allows thought to think about itself. The ancient precept of self-knowledge, approached in psychological terms, depends upon this internal experience that allows us also to have experience as external to ourselves. Once we have the experience of the distinction between I and world, the I can return to itself as an identity separate from any objects it identifies as not itself. The psychological fact of this inner sense is the ground of the possibility of self-discourse. The self finds itself as both within and without its activity. The human self can represent itself in language and also the world in language. The thinking self takes itself out of the immediacy of its feeling of the world and can make itself an object for itself, but it is an object different in kind from any other object. Its inner form is memory activated as the imagination. Before one can become a self that is a thinking thing it must imagine itself, bring itself forth as personal identity from its memory. The metaphysical claim of an I that underlies or is thought requires the psychological principle of personal identity to make this claim intelligible.

The Rhetoric of Descartes The sentence most recognized by the public from all the history of philosophy is “I think, therefore I am.” Second to it, perhaps, is the Socratic claim “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates is the founder of the ancient philosophy of the self. Descartes is the founder of the modern philosophy of the self. At Leiden in June 1637, when Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. Plus la Dioptrique, les Météores et la Géométrie qui sont des essais de cette Méthode appeared, anonymously, Scholastic philosophy finally came to an end.5 The way, however, had been paved by Copernicus, Bruno, Bacon, and Galileo. Mathematics replaces disputation. The reader, on opening Descartes’ work, is confronted by an autobiographical introduction, followed by three substantial scientific essays, including diagrams and mathematical calculations. The introduction, or discourse on the method proper, is written in the first person, inviting the reader to think along with Descartes, to join him in his room in the German winter, in a village near Ulm, enjoying the warmth of the poële on which he is seated.6 The reader, when beginning the fourth part of the text, is asked to engage in hypothetical doubt, including the reader’s own self-knowledge, in a quest for certainty. The reader is led to discover, with Descartes, the first principle

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Descartes was seeking, namely, “Je pense, donc je suis”—“I think, therefore I am.” The reader, nearly halfway through the introductory discourse, can with relief sit back and enjoy this discovery of the certainty of the self. If it is an argument, it is an enthymeme of either the first or second order, depending upon how the premises are to be arranged. Descartes has come forth, like Demosthenes, with his invincible enthymeme. Descartes says that in his Discourse he wishes to “represent my life as a picture [tableau].” He says further that he presents this writing “as a history [histoire] or if you better prefer, as a fable [fable].”7 In the same breath Descartes says he has given up reading the histories and fables of the ancients, as he has spent enough time on such activity. Reading such things is dangerous, as they may cause those who do so “to fall into the extravagances of the Paladins of our romances [romans] and conceive of plans that go beyond their powers.”8 We risk becoming like Don Quixote de la Mancha, traveling about as a stranger in our own country, victimized by our own imaginations. We must also avoid rhetoric. Descartes confesses that he esteemed eloquence and had a love of poetry, but he decided that these were simply gifts of the mind, not fruits of study. He says he found that those who reason most strongly and can order their thoughts so as to render them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive.9 The reader is invited to understand the Discourse in terms that Descartes dismisses as appropriate to understand the truth—history and fable. Descartes’ topos of the “I” pulls the reader into his text from beginning to end. The Discourse is a masterpiece of rhetoric. From the endorsement of “good sense” (bon sens) in the first sentence to his “public declaration” in the last words of the Discourse that he will devote the rest of his life to acquiring a better knowledge of medicine in order to solve the problem of longevity, Descartes has made the reader his companion. Nothing more is needed than to keep a clear head, learn the four steps of the method of right reasoning, and apply ourselves to the various areas of the sciences. Certain of our own existence, we are ready to go to work. Descartes’ method of right reasoning, as it appears in the second part of the Discourse, is the first formulation of what has become known as the “scientific method.” In general terms, it says to begin with what is already established as true (science always builds on its previous results), divide the issue under investigation into its smallest parts, proceed through these in a step-by-step fashion, and, when the solution is reached, review what has been found and adjust, if needed, for a margin of error. The method establishes a single, universal standard for all that can rightly be called knowledge. Rightly applied, nothing more is needed.

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In Gulliver’s Travels, in the “Voyage to Laputa,” Gulliver was permitted to see the grand Academy of Lagado and observe its professors at work. He says: “The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with Forty Pupils about him.” He is shown a large device “for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations.” It was designed to replace the usual methods of obtaining knowledge in the arts and sciences: “By his Contrivance the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The pupils are arranged around a twenty-foot-square contrivance in the middle of a room. They operate this great engine of knowledge by turning a series of iron handles, or cranks. The professor explained “that he had emptyed the whole Vocabulary into his Frame, and made the strictist Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.”10 The young students were employed at this activity for six hours a day. Swift includes a diagram of this engine. It is the first representation of a computer to appear in literature. In A Tale of a Tub Swift speaks of how the concentration on method has allowed the moderns to surpass the ancients: “The whole Course of Things, being thus entirely changed between Us and the Antients; and the Moderns wisely sensible of it, we of this Age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent Method, to become Scholars and Wits, without the Fatigue of Reading or of Thinking.” All that is needed to become wise is to examine the conclusions the works prove: “Thus are the Sciences found like Hercules’s Oxen by tracing them Backwards.” The moderns, as Descartes would say, need only read the book of nature itself. Swift says: “Now the Method of growing Wise, Learned, and Sublime, having become so regular an Affair, and so established in all its Forms,” writers continually get in each other’s way. Swift concludes: “Besides, it is reckoned, that there is not at this present, a sufficient Quantity of new Matter left in Nature, to furnish and adorn any one particular Subject to the Extent of a Volume. This I am told by a very skillful Computer, who hath given a full Demonstration of it from Rules of Arithmetick.”11 Among the ancients we do not find a single standard of truth. There is no single method to determine right reasoning. As mentioned above, in the first sentence of the Discourse Descartes declares: “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world.” Everyone thinks they possess a sufficient amount of it. Descartes says: “In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is

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naturally equal in all men.”12 Anyone can apply the method. What is missing is culture. Descartes never discusses law or jurisprudence, upon which all human society depends. It would not be possible to pursue a court case using Descartes’ method, yet the law depends upon citizens to possess good sense and to exercise reason. Scientific method is unable to determine moeurs, or custom. Thus Descartes, in the third part of the Discourse, puts forth a provisional moral code of four maxims that typify living an orderly life. In the “Author’s Letter” that prefaces the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes proposes a tree of philosophy, of which the highest branch is to be a moral system.13 But such was never realized in the Cartesian corpus. If we wish to find Descartes’ ethics we can only seek out his Stoicism, described in his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth.14 In founding modern science Descartes also enacts the separation of science and values that typifies modern consciousness. Descartes’ sequel to the Discourse appeared at Paris in 1641, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua dei Existentia et Animae Immortalitas Demonstratur. Descartes’ purpose in these Meditations on First Philosophy was to provide a metaphysics for what he proposed in the Discourse, and to do so in Latin, the universal academic language. In his dedicatory letter to the Faculty of Theology at Paris, Descartes overturns the medieval doctrine that philosophy is the servant of theology, namely, that philosophy’s purpose is to support by reason what theology expresses from holy writ. Descartes says: “It is of course quite true that we must believe in the existence of God because it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture, and conversely, that we must believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God.”15 By assessing the best arguments on the existence of God, Descartes says: “What I have done is to take merely the principal and most important arguments and develop them in such a way that I would now venture to put them forward as very certain and evident demonstrations.”16 In so doing Descartes has claimed that all Scholastism has produced is a petitio principii, an argument in a circle that presumes what it purports to prove. He now will make theology dependent upon philosophy, for philosophy will accomplish by reason alone what theology thought could ultimately be had only by faith supported by the explanation of scripture. It is no wonder that Descartes never received the endorsement of the Faculty of Theology that he sought. Descartes begins the Meditations with his method of hypothetical doubt, giving reasons why he could at any given time doubt his external senses, his internal sense of the state of his body, and even the results of the sciences

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that investigate corporeal nature. But whether he is awake or asleep, he concludes, he could not doubt the simple truths of mathematics, such as addition of numbers. He finally comes to the ultimate ground of doubt, with the assertion “I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”17 Descartes imagines an inverted world, governed by a malin genie. As a result of this extreme ground of doubt, a doubt conceived by reason itself, he advances the certainty that I am, I exist (Ego sum, ego existo) and that this proposition is true anytime it is conceived in his mind. Unlike the formulation of the Discourse, that of the Meditations is not an enthymeme. It is the assertion of a proposition. Descartes then proceeds to characterize this proposition as the indubitable answer to a question: “But what then am I? A thing that thinks [Res cogitans]. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”18 The answer to a question is not a proof. Descartes simply gives a genus-species definition of thinking. Descartes seems to have been unaware that his proof of his existence has a precedent in Augustine’s si fallor sum. In a letter written at Leiden in November 1640, replying to Andreas Colvius, a Dutch Protestant minister and friend of Isaac Beeckman, the Dutch physician with whom Descartes discussed much of the ideas that became part of the Discourse, Descartes wrote: “I am obliged to you for calling my attention to the passage of St. Augustine to which my Je pense, donc je suis has some relation. I have been to read it today in the town library, and I find he does truly use it to prove the certainty of our existence.” Descartes’ reference is to the City of God (11.26; cf. De trinitate 10.10 and De libero arbitrio 2.3.7). Descartes concludes: “And such a thing is of itself so simple and natural to infer—that one is from the fact that one is doubting—that it could have fallen from the pen of anyone; but I am quite pleased to have been in agreement with St. Augustine.”19 In the Confessions, Augustine, in considering the truth of God’s existence, quotes Exodus 3:14: “I Am that I Am,” and concludes that he would “sooner doubt that I did not live, than that the Truth is not [faciliusque dubitarem vivere me, quam non esse veritatem]” (7.10). Although Augustine speaks of doubting his own reality, God, not the I, is the principle of his first philosophy. Descartes proceeds from the proof of his own existence to the existence of God via a version of the cosmological argument, completed by the ontological argument for God’s existence. Finally, having put aside the possibility of an anti-God that is a deceiver, Descartes asserts that the world exists because

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God would not deceive him into thinking the world did not exist when he has the distinct idea that it does. Descartes began the Meditations believing that he exists, that God exists, and that the world exists. At the end of the sixth meditation he is certain that these beliefs are true. What he thought was probably true is now certainly true. What Descartes’ first philosophy has not provided us is a knowledge per causas. The reader, closing the last page of the short Meditations, about to enter the tedious sets of Objections and Replies, has been given no account of how these certain existences originate, or of their natures. It is a metaphysics that takes us back to the “physics” of the sciences that follow the method of the Discourse. We are now even more prepared to go to work; all doubts have been relieved. How has Descartes begun modern philosophy? He has taken a lead from Montaigne’s late Renaissance creation of the essay as the way of doing philosophy, in particular Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience.” Montaigne says: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics [Je m’estudie plus qu’autre subject. C’est ma metaphisique, c’est ma phisique].” But Descartes is unable to follow Montaigne into the inner realm of the self. He does not take in Montaigne’s further claim: “Philosophical inquiries and meditations serve only as food for our curiosity. The philosophers with much reason refer us to the rules of Nature: but these have no concern with such sublime knowledge.” The access to ourself requires the logic of the histoire and the fable, which Descartes says can guide the reading of his Discourse but are precluded from the method of right reasoning that it advocates. Montaigne says: “The more simply we trust to Nature, the more wisely we trust to her. . . . In the experience I have of myself I find enough to make me wise, if I were a good scholar.”20 Descartes cannot go into himself as Montaigne does. His thinking I is just a device. We do not learn how Descartes comes to the views he describes. That he attains them on a single winter day in Germany is a ruse. He had actually worked them out through exchanges with Beeckman, over time. The I is not truly a subject except as a logical subject. Without saying so, Descartes has reached back to the Delphic-Socratic precept of “Know thyself ” and brought it forward in a new form, one that fits modern science. It captures the popular imagination because sublimated in it is the first thought of humanity, tied to the temple devoted to Apollo, whose retinue are the Muses, the daughters of Memory. The memory within the “I am” is Memory herself, Mnemosyne. When Descartes, at the beginning of the second meditation, says he is seeking the Archimedean point, we are taken back to a sense of origin, to that one place from which all is possible. Descartes may be thinking of the

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proverbial Archimedean lever, long enough to lift the world, or the Archimedean instrument mentioned by Simplicius: “If I have somewhere to stand, I will move the whole earth with my charistion.”21 It was most likely a triplepulley device. Descartes’ triple device that could move all that there is was the I, God, and the world, enacted in only a few pages. Descartes wrote to Christian Huygens, on December 4, 1637, that he was composing Summary of Medicine, partly from books and partly from his own theories, which he hoped to use to prolong his own life. Descartes wrote: “I used to think that death might rob me of thirty or forty years at most, it could not now surprise me unless it threatened my hope of living for more than a hundred years.”22 If the very method of truth itself has been discovered, why could the body’s propensity toward death not also be mastered? Descartes, to his surprise, died at age fifty-four, in Sweden at the court of Queen Christina, of pneumonia, which he contracted because he was not used to the cold of the Swedish winter. The French abbé Picot, who once lived with Descartes in Holland for three months, wrote “that he would have sworn that it would have been impossible for Descartes to die at the age of fifty-four, as he did; and that, without an external and violent cause as that which deranged his ‘machine’ in Sweden, he would have lived five hundred years.”23 Descartes was thoroughly modern in his belief in medicine as a means to diminish the fear of death. The problem of our mortality can be given over to the command of medicine, directed by right reasoning.

The New Art of Autobiography By the early 1700s, Cartesianism had come to dominate the intellectual life of Naples, much as analytic philosophy came to dominate the world of philosophical thought in American universities in the second half of the twentieth century. Vico reports that Aristotle as interpreted by the Schoolmen had become a “laughing stock” (divenuta una favola). Plato was regarded as important only as a source from which to quote an occasional poetic passage. The great humanists of the sixteenth century who excelled in poetry, history, and eloquence were of no interest. The medieval interpreters of civil law had fallen from their high repute. No orations were to be heard that drew on Greek wisdom in the treatment of manners or Roman grandeur in stirring the emotions. Even medicine, which had produced so many great doctors according to the principles of Galen, had, because of the frequent revolutions in physics, lost the ability of diagnosis and fallen into skepticism about the nature of diseases.

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Vico, who had schooled himself in the great canon of philosophy and literature, was a stranger in his own land (come forestiero nella sua patria). All that Descartes had told his readers to put aside in favor of his doctrine of right reasoning had come to pass, even in Naples. As Vico pursued his form of erudition, he lived not only as an outsider but as a foreigner (straniero) in his own country, and quite unknown (sconosciuto).24 Vico, a citizen of the Republic of Letters, was surrounded by those who had given up on letters for a new world of method, a new physics and metaphysics. The great French historian of eighteenth-century thought, Paul Hazard, wrote: “If Italy had listened to Giambattista Vico, and if, as at the time of the Renaissance, she had served as guide to Europe, would not our intellectual destiny have been different? Our eighteenth-century ancestors would not have believed that all that was clear was true; but on the contrary that ‘clarity is the vice of human reason rather than its virtue,’ because a clear idea is a finished idea. They would not have believed that reason was our first faculty, but on the contrary that imagination was.” Hazard adds: “There was not an object that Vico touched without transforming it into gold.”25 In 1710 Vico began his own system of philosophy with a criticism of Descartes’ first principle of the cogito, which he replaced with his own first principle of verum esse ipsum factum (the true is itself the made).26 Vico finds this principle present in mathematics because mathematical truths are made by deduction. Euclidean geometry is a prime example, a process of thought that Vico supports even for the education of the young. It is also proper to aritimetric, as it depends upon the sum of elements as gathered together. Vico also claims that the Latins use verum and factum interchangeably, thus preserving an ancient wisdom. Descartes’ hypothetical doubt, based ultimately on his imagining an allpowerful deceiver, Vico finds foreshadowed in Cicero’s Academica (2.15.47). The idea of a demon deceiver is by no means original with Descartes. Vico says: “But, of course, on no basis can someone not be conscious that he is thinking, and from this consciousness of thinking, he gathers with certainty that he is. Thus, René unveils this as a first truth: I think, therefore, I am [Cogito: Ergo Sum].”27 Vico further finds a precursor of Descartes’ claim in Plautus’s comedy Amphitryon (441–47). There Vico finds a different and less dignified version of Descartes’ first truth. In Plautus’s play, while Amphitryon, the commander in chief of the Theban army, is at war, he is cuckolded by Jupiter, who assumes Amphitryon’s form. The guise is so perfect that Alcmena, Amphitryon’s wife, who is wholly innocent, presumes Jupiter to be her husband. In this comedy of errors Mercury assumes a guise as Amphitryon’s slave, Sosia.

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Sosia, now returned with his master from the war, discovers his double, and begins to doubt his own existence when Mercury, in his guise as Sosia, tells Sosia he is mistaken about his own identity, and that in fact he, Mercury, is Sosia. Sosia then looks in a mirror and begins to develop his “Cartesian proof.” He concludes: “But, when I think, indeed I am certain of this, that I am and have always been [Sed quom cogito, equidem certo sum ac semper fui].” Vico comments that what Sosia “contends is that certitude that he is thinking is mere consciousness [conscientia], not science [scientia], and commonplace knowledge available to even a person without any learning, like Sosia, not some rare and exquisite truth which requires the meditation of a great philosopher to invent.”28 For Vico, the key word in Sosia’s reaction to his own image is certo, that he is certain of his being. Vico’s claim is that Descartes’ first truth is a certainty (certum) but not a true (verum). It is not sufficient for a first principle to be certain; such a principle must be true. From certainty only certainty comes. Certainty does not provide a knowledge per causas. I have not found the connection with Plautus’s comedy treated in the Cartesian critical literature. Vico’s second confrontation with Descartes is in his autobiography. Vico’s autobiography appeared in 1728, in the first issue of a journal edited and published in Venice, Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici. It was solicited by its editors on the basis of Count Gian Artico Porcìa’s “Proposal to the Scholars of Italy to Write Their Own Lives.”29 Max Fisch, in the preface to the English translation of the autobiography, says: “Aside from the light it sheds on his other works, and the interest it has in common with every other intellectual autobiography, Vico’s has the unique interest of being the first application of the genetic method by an original thinker to his own writings.”30 The reader may think immediately of Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s work certainly is a precursor. Vico even calls Augustine his “particular protector” in signing one of his additions to the Scienza nuova.31 Augustine provides the narrative of his spiritual development, but he does not apply the “genetic method” to his writings. The term “autobiography,” at the time of Vico’s text, did not exist in Italian or any other language. Thus Vico’s work is titled “The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself.” Carlo Lodoli, one of the Venetian scholars involved in the founding and editing of the Raccolta, coined the term periautografia from Greek, using peri- (around, what surrounds or encloses) rather than bios as the term to connect autos and graphe¯. Peri is a life term, often used as a prefix to anatomical terms to characterize what surrounds a designated organ. Lodoli’s term is remarkably ahead of its time and is in many ways a better term than “autobiography” for the presentation of one’s

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intellectual life, because it conceives the subject as something that exists in a surrounding that affects what it is. The impetus for the Venetian project was a letter written on March 27, 1714, from Leibniz to Louis Bourget, who was then in Venice. In it Leibniz comments on the fact that Descartes only pretended in the Discourse to present such an account of the manner of his discoveries. Leibniz says: “Descartes would have had us believe that he had read scarcely anything. That was a bit too much. Yet it is good to study the discoveries of others in a way that discloses to us the source of the inventions and renders them in a sort our own. And I wish that authors would give us the history of their discoveries and the steps by which they have arrived at them.”32 Leibniz says when authors fail to do so we are left with the task of trying to divine these steps ourselves. Vico, as if in response to Leibniz’s letter, declares in the first part of his autobiography: “We shall not here feign what René Descartes craftily feigned as to the method of his studies simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human erudition. Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of Vico’s studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of his particular development as a man of letters may be known.”33 In the continuation of his autobiography that he wrote in 1731, Vico says: “As may be seen, he wrote it as a philosopher, mediating the causes, natural, and moral, and the occasions of fortune.” Vico says that his account of his life shows how all his life moved toward his production of the Scienza nuova. This account “was to demonstrate that his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise.”34 As providence governs the ages of human history, as shown in the Scienza nuova, so it also governed the personal order and progress of his thought. In deliberate opposition to Descartes’ Discourse, Vico wrote the account of his life—never using the first person, referring to himself in the third person and often simply as “Vico.” This placed Vico in the position of a historian of himself, the author of his own biography. Rhetorically, instead of the Cartesian topos of the “I,” the historical figure “Vico” is the topos, on the basis of which his account is brought forth. The reader quickly comes to believe that this is the actual history of Vico. In fact, from the first page Vico creates a fable of himself.35 The first sentence of his text is “Signor Giambattista Vico, he was born in Naples in the year 1670 of upright parents, who left behind them a very good reputation [Il signor Giambattista Vico egli è nato in Napoli l’anno 1670 da onesti parenti, i quali lasciarono assai buona fama di sé].” Vico was in fact born June 23, 1668. Everyone on his street in Naples knew when he was born, and it was so

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recorded at his baptism the following day in the parish book of the nearby church of S. Gennaro all’Olmo; the entry in it survives today.36 By making his birth year 1670 Vico has put his end in his beginning, the age of seventy being the proper number of years for a human life both in biblical terms and for life expectancy as understood in Greek medicine. Vico outlived his birth date; he died in 1744, at age seventy-five. On the first page of his text Vico falls from a ladder (likely in his father’s bookshop) headfirst (col capo in giù) at age seven, the combination of the first two numbers of his claimed year of birth. As he arrives at the bottom of the page, surviving a broken cranium, by the grace of God, his temperament is transformed from that of a child to that classically attributed to a philosopher: “He grew up from then on, with a melancholy and acrid nature which necessarily belongs to ingenious and profound men, who through ingenuity flash like lightning in acuity, through reflection take no pleasure in witticism and falsity.” Providence itself has ordained Vico’s starting point. He will be an original mind that will stand against the fashions of his age. Vico, the author of the history of Vico, is born in 1668, but Vico, the subject of the fable, is born in 1670 in the text. He is the historical figure—il Vico. No one writes an autobiography unless it is to right the wrongs suffered by no fault of their own. The body of Vico’s text, both in its original form of 1725, 1728, and in its continuation of 1731, is a series of adversities to be overcome. It is a tale of corsi and ricorsi. “For a righteous man falls seven times and rises again; but the wicked are overthrown by calamity” (Proverbs 24:16). The reader follows to the end this providential pattern of rises and falls. In his final passages Vico sums up his status of constant adversity, taking some of the blame for it himself. He says: “Vico was choleric to a fault,” but “among the caitiff semi-learned or pseudo-learned, the more shameless called him a fool, or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas.” Yet he “blessed all these adversities as so many occasions for withdrawing to his desk, as to his high impregnable citadel.” These periods of withdrawal led him to the discovery of the Scienza nuova. When he had written these words, he says, “he held himself more fortunate that Socrates, on whom Phaedrus has these fine lines: ‘I would not shun his death to win his fame; I’d yield to odium, if absolved when dust.’”37 Vico thus declares himself to be the heroic mind, the new Socrates in the new polis, Neapolis. Vico’s university position throughout his life was a professor of Latin eloquence, or rhetoric. He says that in his teaching (he taught from his own Institutiones oratoriae) he always attempted to follow the great rhetorical ideal, endorsed by Cicero and the Italian humanists, of la sapienza che parla,

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to be “wisdom speaking,” never to separate wisdom from eloquence. He attempted to convey the true as the whole and to imitate, so far as possible, the ancient thinkers, each of which, Vico claims, was a complete university. Vico says, rather sadly, that he lectured every day “as if famous men of letters had come from abroad to attend his classes and to hear him.”38 None ever did. He was in fact addressing young students preparing for the law, which required a basic knowledge of rhetoric coupled with jurisprudence. Vico, at his desk or in his classroom, neither a Stoic nor an Epicurean, is a neo-Socratic. We leave Vico, who delivered his last public address in 1737 before the opening of the fourth annual gathering of the Academy of Oziosi. He says he has drawn on Father Augustine to conceive this prayer: “Hear, humbly I pray you, hear, not fabulous Minerva, but Eternal Wisdom, generated from the divine head of the true Jove, the omnipotent Your Father.” He opens this Academy “that it might be for the perfection of these well-born intelligences, because wisdom, which is mind and language, is the perfecter of human beings in their properly being human.”39 It is Vico’s farewell address, and we shall remember him there, at the podium—the solitary figure, now taking his place in history.

The Essay and Self-Knowledge The origin of the essay is the letter, especially the letter as intended for a public. In the New Testament, the letters of Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude are the earliest documents of the New Testament and the most common literary form found in it. Collections of letters from antiquity of philosophical interest include those by Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Pliny, and Seneca. There is also the correspondence of Fronto with Marcus Aurelius, largely concerned with the study of rhetoric. The first of the great letter-writers of the Renaissance is Petrarca, followed by Erasmus, who regarded letterwriting as a special genre, and Justus Lipsius, who set out the distinctive qualities of letter-writing, including the value of a simple style called sermo humilis. An example of the Renaissance letter that rises to the level of an essay is that of the rhetorician Leonardo Bruni to the famous scholar of the Renaissance Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro on the nature and value of the study of literature.40 The Enlightenment is not only the great age of conversation, it is also the great era of letter-writing, significant portions of which made their way into print. The study of modern philosophy is greatly enriched by the body of correspondence of such figures as Descartes and Hegel.41 Through it we learn much of the author’s intent in advancing

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the essential ideas of his philosophy. The author appears from behind the thought. Among ancient authors, we would not truly understand Plato’s conception of philosophy without his Seventh Letter. Without Cicero’s letters to Atticus and his letter to Laelius on friendship we would not understand Cicero. “Essay” as a transitive verb has the sense of “to try out, to put to a test,” deriving from Latin exigere, “to drive out, to complete, finish,” also, subjectively, “to consider, reflect upon.” As a kind of writing it is an analytic, interpretive literary composition, advanced from a personal point of view, in contrast to a “treatise,” which is concerned with providing in a systematic manner a methodological discussion of the facts and principles involved in a subject. To appreciate the contrast between these two literary forms one has only to think of the difference between Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, in which he conceives the four divisions of the science of man as “logic, morals, criticism, and politics,” and Montaigne’s three books of Essais, in which he approaches human nature by means of a selfportrait, informing the reader that his purpose is to record for his relatives and friends “some features of my habits and temperament.”42 The essay, like letters, is a document in which the reader encounters the presence of the self of the writer. Montaigne, with the title of Essais (1580, 1588), is the first to use the term “essay.” Montaigne and Bacon are the founders of the philosophical essay. Montaigne saw the essay as a form of self-discovery, while Bacon regarded his Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) as a form of “practical and moral advice.”43 If we look back toward the ancients it is Plutarch who stands out as a precursor, with his fourteen books of Moralia. But the essay in its modern sense depends upon the Renaissance awareness of the self as the subject of thought. The centrality of the self starts with Petrarca’s “On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others,” which is addressed almost as a letter “to the grammarian Donato,” and in which Petrarca writes in the first person.44 The self is the subject of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s famous “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” which begins by quoting Hermes Trismegistus: “A great miracle, Asclepius is man.” In contrast to the beginning point of medieval thought, in God, Pico begins with man. He says: “We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world.”45 Pico’s oration is intended as the prelude to his proposed disputation of 900 theses, thus recasting the medieval sense of disputation, making the self its beginning point. Pico’s purpose in the disputation, although it was never held, was to validate the dignity or ultimate worth of human nature, of the

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reality of the human self, and the importance of self-knowledge as derived from the Delphic precept. In order for the self to become the center of philosophy, the disputation, as the form of philosophical thought and education, with all its pretentious rhetoric, must be put aside. This is accomplished by Rabelais in the second book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which the Englishman, Thaumaste (in Greek, “wonderful,” thauma) is put to a non-plus by Pantagruel’s pupil, Panurge (perhaps a play on Greek pantomimos, “actor,” “mimic,” as well as on panourgos, “ready to do anything,” “a crafty fellow”), in a disputation before a large audience in Paris. It is decided that the argument will take place wholly “by using signs, without any words, for thus you and I will truly understand one another.” Thaumaste intended to dispute Pantagruel himself, but Panurge convinces him to retire for a good night’s sleep rather than prepare by studying through the night for the event, which is to begin at seven o’clock in the morning. Panurge assures Pantagruel he has taken on such scholars before: “I’ve knocked them on their asses.” Panurge prepares by spending the night drinking and gambling with the house servants. The argument is conducted mostly in complete silence, each making meaningless hand signals that are interpreted as profound exchanges. After their exchange has proceeded through several phases: “Panurge pulled out his long codpiece with its waving tassel, stretching it a good foot and a half or more, holding it in the air with his left hand and with his right, taking the ripe orange [he had inserted], he threw it in the air seven times, the eighth time catching it in his right fist and then holding it quietly, calmly in the air.” In response, “Thaumaste began to puff out his cheeks like a bagpipe musician, blowing as hard as if he were inflating a pig’s bladder.” Finally, Thaumaste in desperation begins to speak. Then he “pulled out a dagger, holding it with the point facing down. At which Panurge grabbed his great codpiece and shook it against his breeches as hard as he could. Then he joined his hands like a cock’s comb and put them on top of his head, sticking out his tongue as far as he could and rolling his eyes like a dying goat.” From here the argument moves toward a conclusion. Panurge has in effect made the sign of the fool, appearing to imitate a rooster and then a goat. Thaumaste “put his left thumb to the end of his nose and closed the rest of his hand.” Panurge responds by making a face that resembles the downturned expression of the sad-face emblem that is often found opposite the upturned, happy face (the faces of tragedy and comedy) adorning the stage in a theater. Thaumaste has lost. He addresses the audience: “Gentlemen, now I can truly speak the biblical words: Et ecce plus quam Solomon hic, And here is one who is greater than Solomon.” He says Panurge has not only

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answered all the questions for which he had come to seek answers but “has even told me more than I’d asked.”46 In a few pages Rabelais has put to rest the idea that argumentation pro and con is a way to philosophize. For every gesture there is a counter-gesture, resulting in the preposterous claim that the audience has witnessed the wisdom of Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon, traditionally, is to be found in Ecclesiastes, in which there is not one argument and which begins with the notice that “all is vanity” (1:2). The vanity of the intellect is to think that an argument can be devised to settle the great issues of the real, the knowable, and the good. What is needed is for the self to look within itself and discover to what extent it can draw forth its own nature in language. The ability to use language speculatively and practically is distinctive to the human being, a being that also can employ reason to examine its place in the world, in what is. Rabelaisian satire, like all satire, causes us to look into ourselves. In addition, the semiotics of Thaumaste and Panurge causes us to look into what philosophy is, into how to emerge from the dull-wittedness of its purely academic form. An example of a letter that rises to the level of an essay, or at least the essence of an essay, is Machiavelli’s famous letter of 1513 to Francesco Vettori, his benefactor in Rome. In it he describes his day in exile (from the position he held in the Florentine government, through his relationship with Gonfalonier Piero Soderini), working on his farm in Tuscany, eating his main meal, then visiting the nearby inn and conversing with local tradesmen. He says: “On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions.” Machiavelli says he spends four hours doing this, during which he forgets the misfortune of his situation and is even not frightened of death. He says he gives himself over completely to this great conversation of the ages. In so doing he was making notes to write his Discourses on Livy and The Prince, the most famous work in modern politics. He says: “Because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me.”47 Machiavelli arrives at these ideas not by disputation or argument but by placing himself and his actual experience in politics in relation to the great

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conversation of the past that comprises the Republic of Letters. His procedure is based on the rhetoric of the ars topica. The ideas he finds in the past are places from which he can draw forth his own views and from them as the next step in the understanding of the logic of politics. From the particular he arrives at the universal. This is the method of humanistic thinking and the method of the essay. The most important idea in the world of ideas is the idea of ideas. We owe the existence of the idea to Plato, and when we place ourselves in relation to it, we can think. To think is more than to communicate information. To be merely well informed is to have nothing to say. To think is to move ideas in relation to each other and thus to illuminate what comes before the mind in experience. The purpose of the essay, and of the letter that rises to the level of the essay, is to involve the reader in the reality of the ideas it contains. The author of the essay does not intend the reader simply to repeat what is said but to take up the process of essaying itself. The rhetoric of the essay is to draw the reader into its manner of thinking. The essay is a particular kind of thought that, when taken to its fullest extent, is a kind of philosophizing. No better example of this philosophizing can be found than that of Montaigne’s essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die.” Socrates makes this claim in his digression in the Phaedo (67e). Montaigne begins his essay with not Socrates but Cicero. He says: “Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death. This is because study and contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it busy outside the body; which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death.”48 This is what the claim means, Montaigne says. “Or else it is because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.” But, Montaigne says, “in truth either reason is a mockery.” The goal of life, Montaigne claims, is not death but pleasure achieved through the exercise of virtue. He says: “Now among the principal benefits of virtue is disdain for death.”49 Virtue gives peace of mind, and death is a natural process over which we have no control. Ordinary people simply try not to think of death. But the attempt to forget the possibility of death is no solution. Instead we will be happy only if we accept death, which comes at any time, as a fact of existence. Montaigne says: “It is uncertain where death awaits us: let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.”50 Montaigne further calls attention to

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the Egyptian custom of the larva convivialis, the articulated skeleton brought forth during dinners: “As the Egyptians after their feasts had a large image of death shown to the guests by a man who called out to them: ‘Drink and be merry, for when you are dead you will be like this’; so I have formed the habit of having death continuously present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth.”51 Montaigne is like a Buddhist practicing nonattachment, and like a Taoist following the natural way. In “Of experience” Montaigne sums up his position in essaying himself as an instance of humanity. In his final lines he says: “It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.” The essay allows us to reach the inner form of what we are. He continues: “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity. Now old age needs to be treated a little more tenderly.”52 Montaigne advocates a perspective much lost in our age of pragmatism understood as directed to social problem-solving and protest. It is the perspective of Ciceronian decorum, of propriety. The psychology of nonattachment comes with age because with age comes the natural acceptance of death. In 1935 Marvin Lowenthal, a humanist scholar, published a unique work titled The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne. Making his own translation, Lowenthal pieced together, in a continuous narrative—principally from the Essays—the life of Montaigne in his own words. In the nearly 300 pages, Montaigne tells the reader who he is, offering the reader the inner form of the inner form of the Essays. At the end of this “autobiography” Lowenthal presents an epilogue on Montaigne’s death, beginning with a letter from Pierre de Brach to Justus Lipsius, of February 4, 1593: “Monsieur de Montaigne is dead. This is a blow that will pierce your heart as it has mine—and how deeply it pains me to be the herald of such tidings! But why should you not share the bitterness of his death, you who shared in the sweetness of his life?” De Brach has understood Montaigne’s sense of opposites and his sense of tolerance for the course of nature. He says, further: “Once when we were together in Paris some years ago, the doctors despaired of his life; and I saw him repulse the fear of death, even as it stared him in the face, with a disdainful gesture, and what brave and beautiful words!”53 If Pierre de Brach is accurate, Montaigne faced the human condition just as he wrote. The true philosopher is his philosophy. More than that the philosopher cannot provide.

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Socrates’ Apologia There is an old principle in the practice of courtroom law that an attorney should not ask a question of a witness to which the attorney does not know the answer. It is the principle that Socrates employs in questioning those he meets in the agora and elsewhere. Socrates knows one thing in advance: that the person he is questioning does not know the answer because he, Socrates, does not know the answer. When Socrates questions Euthyphro regarding hosion, he knows in advance that Euthyphro does not know what it is, because Socrates also does not know. Socrates does not know the answer because he does not know what it means to be a human being, an anthropos, for to know this would be to possess a knowledge of things both human and divine. In the Apology Socrates says he may really possess human wisdom, but he does not possess divine wisdom (20d–e). To possess human wisdom implies a knowledge of the difference between human and divine wisdom, but not a knowledge of the divine as such. Without a knowledge of the divine we cannot know fully what it is to be human. Knowledge of what it is to be divine would require an apotheosis such as that of Empedocles, as related by Diogenes Laertius (8.67–68). Diogenes also says: “Aristotle in his Sophist calls Empedocles the inventor of rhetoric as Zeno of dialectic” (8.57). Socrates knows that he does not possess wisdom because, as Cicero later reports, and as was mentioned in chapter 3, wisdom is understood by the Greeks as “the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57); he says wisdom has been defined this way “by the philosophers of old” (De off. 2.2.5). In the Apology Socrates says that his friend from youth, Chaerephon, went to Delphi and asked the Pythian if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that no one was wiser. The Pythian was correct that no one was wiser than Socrates, but that does not entail that Socrates was in possession of wisdom. No one is in fact in possession of wisdom. The Pythian always speaks in amphiboly (amphibolos). The popular view, that Socrates says that he knows that he knows nothing, is incorrect. Socrates does not claim to possess wisdom. Socrates’ philosophy is not written down because it cannot be put into language. It is never possible adequately to define the meaning of an eidos because the eide¯ are not dialectical in nature. The mind is dialectical, but mind is not an eidos. Dialectic is a means to approach the eide¯, but the eide¯ in themselves simply are, the Good being the supremely real. Socrates’ purpose, in his use of the elenchos, his questioning of the orators, poets, and politicians, is to bring them to the realization that they do

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not possess the Good. In this way he is the gadfly that stings the body politic. Socrates is dangerous because he would turn anyone with whom he speaks into a philosophos, a lover of wisdom. Anyone whom he positively affects would then give up their belief in politics as an ultimate activity of human beings. Since the gods are the protectors of the polis, Socrates can be accused of irreligion. The young are already corrupted because they have a natural belief in politics. To believe in politics is to wish to acquire a position in life, to have a career that provides one a place in the order of the polis. The turning point in Socrates’ speech in the Apology is his exchange with Meletus, whose name, ironically, sounds like melein—“to care about.” Meletus admits that Socrates believes in and teaches the young about “spiritual things.” Socrates says: “If I believe in spiritual things I must quite inevitably believe in spirits [daemones]” (27c). Daemones is a less specific term than “gods,” designating some supernatural powers but not recognized by the Greeks as gods in the normal sense. Then Socrates asks: “Do we not believe spirits to be either gods or the children of gods?” (27d). Meletus agrees with Socrates’ rhetorical question. Socrates then concludes: “There is no way in which you could persuade anyone of even small intelligence that it is possible for one and the same man to believe in spiritual but not also in divine things, and then again for that same man to believe neither in spirit nor in gods nor in heroes” (27e). Socrates observes the state religion of Athens; he has no problem in participating in its rites and obligations. The issue of his trial is whether he also believes in a higher reality than the pantheon of gods ruled by Zeus. Socrates never directly affirms his belief in gods. He repeatedly asserts this belief as an inference from his belief in spirits. We should recall that in the Euthyphro Socrates states that he is charged with being “a maker of gods,” that he creates “new gods while not believing in the old gods” (3b). The eide¯ are not characterized by Plato as daemones. The eide¯ are the centerpiece of Platonic metaphysics, but at no point does Plato present a proof of their existence. They first appear as a hypothesis in the Phaedo (130a–134e), in the dialogue ending in Socrates’ death. The eide¯ were hypostatized versions of definitions of ethical qualities in the Euthyphro (5d, 6d). In these passages, however, eidos has a meaning close to “appearance,” carrying something of the original Homeric sense of “what one sees” or “the shape of something.” Beyond a doubt the eide¯ in Platonic philosophy are a supersensible reality and the condition of all philosophical discourse. For Plato the eide¯ exist separately (Tim. 52a–c). The eide¯ in the Socratic dialogues are not developed as a theory, as they are in the later philosophy of Plato. But Socrates, in his speech

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of the Apology, appears to believe in some standard that can be seen only with the mind’s eye. The eide¯ are Socrates’ “new gods.” Socrates is brought to trial because he advocates philosophy over religion. He is pursuing a wisdom that is beyond what can be known by expertise in religious matters, as his exchange with Euthyphro, an expert in such, demonstrates. Socrates is not a critic of the polis. He has no quarrel with the laws of Athens, even after he is convicted, as his speech on the laws as his parents shows, in the Crito. Socrates says in the Apology that he thought himself to be under the direction of the god as the result of the response of the Pythian “to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others,” and that to have abandoned this post out of fear of death or anything else is unthinkable. “That would have been a dreadful thing, and then I might truly have justly been brought here for not believing that there are gods, disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking I was wise when I was not.” To fear death is the most important example of false wisdom: “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils” (28e–29b). Socratic ignorance is not an abstract problem of episte¯me¯. It is rooted in the fact of human mortality. Without divine knowledge Socrates cannot know the meaning of death. “Self-knowledge” ( gnothi seauton) requires “nothing overmuch” (me¯den agan). The principle of moderation must follow from the fact that no one can know the meaning of human mortality. Without such knowledge, human wisdom is to make no one the worse for knowing one, and if this can be accomplished we can only trust that no harm can come to a good human being. Socrates’ psyche¯ is at peace. Isaiah Berlin, commenting on types of thinking, calls attention to a line of the Greek poet Archilochus that says: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Diehl, frag. 103).54 A. N. Whitehead makes a parallel distinction regarding reason: “The Greeks have bequeathed to us two figures, whose real or mythical lives conform to these two notions— Plato and Ulysses. The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other with the foxes. . . . Reason as seeking complete understanding and Reason as seeking an immediate method of action.”55 Socrates, along with Plato, is a hedgehog. Socrates knows that we cannot be wise unless we are divine. Pythagoras, in his reply to the tyrant Leon, said that only the gods are wise, and that he is only a lover of wisdom, a philosophos.56 Socrates knows the one big thing, that we cannot know death and therefore cannot be wise.

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If Socrates knows this one big thing, why does he spend his days in the agora talking with anyone he can? What is the purpose of the elenchos? The elenchos is the exercise of reason, not to solve problems of any immediate concern, but to allow thought to think itself. The True cannot be cultivated by sitting alone, which is the picture of the modern researcher, at work in the study or laboratory, seeking knowledge that can be applied to solve problems. The True, Good, and Beautiful require friendship. What is human is social. The pursuit of the pursuit of truth is its own end because only by pursuing the question are we distinctively human. Human beings are the only animals that take their existence as a problem. They do this against the realization that they are mortal. Philosophy, then, in the sense of question and answer, is what can keep our lack of wisdom before us. It is not, at least as practiced by Socrates, a desperate activity; it is irenic, a process of adventure the aim of which is a peace of the psyche¯. What better way can one’s time be occupied? By using up the psyche¯ in politics—the activity of the fox? The historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot says: “In the person of Socrates, we have encountered a personality which, by its mere presence, obliges those who approach it to question themselves. This is what Alcibiades allows us to understand at the end of the Symposium. It is in Alcibiades’ speech in praise of Socrates that the representation of the Individual appears, perhaps for the first time in history.”57 As Alcibiades proclaims, Socrates, unlike other figures, cannot be classified as a type. The Greeks thought in terms of types of persons, not in terms of individuals. In the Apology Socrates says he faces two kinds of accusers: those who have recently brought the charges against him and those who have for a long time been against him and disapproved of his activity. These old enemies were influenced by the portrayal of Socrates by Aristophanes in The Clouds. Socrates mentions Aristophanes by name: “You have seen this yourself in the comedy of Aristophanes, a Socrates swinging about there, saying he was walking on air and talking a lot of nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all” (Ap. 19c; Clouds 225ff.). Aristophanes also portrays Socrates as involved in Sophistic pedantry concerning what gender to use in speaking of a fowl. The discussion concerns the term alektruo¯n (Clouds 660–65; see also 845–50). It is a silly conversation. In the death scene of the Phaedo, when Socrates has drunk the hemlock, he uncovers his head, pulling back the blanket that is over him, and says his last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget” (118). The comment usually made on this is that, since

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Asclepius is the god of healing, Socrates is saying, ironically, that death is the cure for life. But something more is involved in the irony. Not only is a cock the least expensive sacrifice that can be made to thank Asclepius, but Socrates also uses a play on the same word that Aristophanes satirizes in The Clouds—alektruo¯n. The cock or rooster is the sign of the fool. Socrates has answered his accusers and has passed into memory.

Complete Education Lessing said it is as impossible to steal a verse of Shakespeare as it is to steal the club of Hercules. Every great philosophy is a unique and complete education. It is not possible to duplicate it or to pass it off as one’s own. Hegel says: “Philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes.”58 Every philosophy is the self of its author writ large; in it we see what selfknowledge is. To require philosophy to be otherwise is to ask it to leap over Rhodes and it is to forget that we are also the children of our own time. The absolute is never reached in absolute terms. Any philosophy, when accepted for what it is, provides a complete education, but one in which some of its elements belong only to it and may be left aside as part of the past. Otherwise we impose upon it what it ought to be, not what it is. It ought to be what it is. Those elements in it that are archaic can only remain so. There is no ethics of the past, for, as Aristotle says, there is no choice to be had in what is past. Queen Elizabeth I said, rightly, “The past cannot be cured.” The past always comes again in the present, but it comes as an artifact, to be accepted as such in the present. Thus philosophy can ever renew itself from the past without simply repeating the past. If each philosophy is a complete education of the self, the history of philosophy is a complete education of this education. In it nothing can be alien to the philosopher who takes up its study. This study can be approached only dialectically. It cannot properly be undertaken ideologically, that is, by endorsing some standard and measuring what must be rejected and what can be accepted. The True is realized through the interacting of one thing advanced against another. In this sense all education in philosophy is dialectical— the self in discourse with itself. In saying that every philosophy is written in its own time and often reflecting, in places, views that are bound to its time, I do not mean to situate the interpretation of a philosophy wholly within its era. As mentioned earlier,

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the great philosophies of the history of philosophy comprise a philosophia perennis. Within the philosophies of the various periods is always philosophy itself. It is the love of wisdom that persists to produce philosophies from one age to another. We study these philosophies to enter the inner form of philosophy itself. Only if this is our aim can we add to the grasp of the pursuit of truth that is the philosophia perennis. Philosophy, thus, lives both within history and beyond history. For we study philosophy not to be in time but to be beyond time, to attain to the “what is,” the absolute that is beyond the confines of any history or contemporary ideology.

Chapter 6

The Rhetoric of Absolute Thought Guided by this reasoning, he put intelligence [nous] in soul, and soul into body and so he constructed the universe. Plato, Timaeus 30b

In the Metaphysics Aristotle says: “Thought thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same” (1072b). Aristotle also says: “The science of the philosopher treats of being qua being universally and not of some part of it” (1060b). In metaphysics thought thinks itself, and in so doing it treats of being itself. The principles in such thinking are necessarily first principles. Thus Aristotle says: “Wisdom [sophia] is a science of first principles” (1059a). It is sophia that the philosopher loves. The speech of first principles will allow us access to being as the universal object of thought, and being is reached by thought thinking itself. What, then, is the rhetoric of such speech? There is no process of persuasion to be undergone. Word and object will be one. Such speech is the speech of absolute thought. Metaphysical speech must take thought to the transcendent. Yet the transcendent cannot be wholly transcendent. If it is, there is no way to know it as something that is. If what is ultimate is wholly immanent it is not anything in itself. The being of what is ultimate must both be itself and be capable of being known. Thought must be able to put into language what is transcendent-immanent. Such speech is always paradoxical speech. The aim of the metaphysician is to get the audience to accept the paradox, the sense in 85

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which that which truly is, is both itself and not itself. Of this aporia, Aristotle says: “But this is paradoxical, for such a principle and substance seems to exist and is sought by nearly all the best thinkers as something that exists; for how is there to be order unless there is something eternal and independent and permanent?” (1060a). The idea of an unmoved mover is a paradox, but such must be real. Aristotle says: “Since that which is moved and moves is intermediate, there is a mover which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way: they move without being moved” (1072a). The most Aristotle can give us is an analogy. The unmoved mover moves all that is not itself by some causal power of attraction. We are unable to say what this causal power is, only that it is. It must be the subject of wonder (thauma). As mentioned earlier, Aristotle says at the beginning of Metaphysics: “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (982b). Further, Aristotle says: “God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others” (983a). Divine science does not require wonder, but it is not available to human beings. God is the ultimate thought, but this thought requires the articulation of God’s connection to the world. Leibniz, with the metaphysics of monads, may be considered to take a step forward in presenting this divine science. The monads, being “windowless,” give substance an inner form. They are self-caused, all causality being immanent to their being. As a physics the monadology promises coherence; as a metaphysics it must account for God as the creator of the world. God creates each substance so that everything that happens to it comes forth from its own nature, apart from any influence from outside, yet in complete harmony with every other substance. The aporia, the unanswered question, is, How does God act to affect these monads if not by a causality external to and transcendent of their selfcontained worlds? Leibniz leaves us with only the hypothesis that by divine will there is a “pre-established harmony” that accounts for coherence in the cosmos. Leibniz ultimately describes this preestablished harmony in terms of the Augustinian “City of God.” Leibniz says: “As regards minds [esprits] or rational souls, though I find that what I have just been saying is true of all living beings and animals (namely that animals and souls come into being when the world begins and no more come to an end than the world does).”1 He says further: “Whence it is easy to conclude that the totality [assemblage] of all spirits [esprits] must compose the City of God. . . . This City of God, this truly

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universal monarchy, is a moral world in the natural world, and is the most exalted and most divine among the works of God.”2 Thus the monadology is not merely a cosmology; it is at the same time a morality. This morality, Leibniz says, “enables spirits [or minds—esprits] to enter into a kind of fellowship with God.”3 Leibniz’s Monadology is the middle between Aristotelian substance metaphysics and Whiteheadian process metaphysics. Whitehead’s “actual entities” are intended to repudiate the notion of “vacuous actuality” that haunts the doctrine of substance. Whitehead says: “The term ‘vacuous actuality’ here means the notion of a res vera devoid of subjective immediacy.”4 Actual entities, which are all that there is, have a primordial nature and a consequent nature. Whitehead says: “Analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts.”5 In Whitehead’s process philosophy, God’s primordial nature is the locus of Leibniz’s preestablished harmony among the monads. God’s feelings are the result of divine subjectivity at the basis of God’s nonvacuous actuality. Like all actual entities, God has an inner life. All actual entities are dependent upon each other. But each in some way is dependent upon the actuality of God in a way they are not dependent on each other. God “is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire.”6 From God’s perspective, the divine subjective aim, “the world is felt in a unison of immediacy.”7 Whitehead’s interpretation of divine being is not intended as a proof of God’s existence or nature: “There is nothing here in the nature of proof.”8 Whitehead leaves us with the final image: “God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”9 The paradox of absolute thought as we move from substance metaphysics to process metaphysics is transformed, but it is not resolved. The impasse reached by metaphysical reasoning is relieved by the power of the image. Thus Whitehead says that God “is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”10 As the poet of the world, God is the alter ego of every actual entity. Metaphysics becomes the oration of being, the Socratic likely story of the order of the world. Only the image can finally confront paradox. The beautiful speech, dialectically ordered, gives us access to the world. It lets us see the “is” that underlies the appearance and put it into words. In this way metaphysics as the locus of ultimate thought becomes rhetorical activity.

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I have to this point followed R. G. Collingwood’s advice, in beginning his An Essay on Metaphysics, that “in writing about metaphysics it is only decent, and it is certainly wise, to begin with Aristotle.”11 I proceed to four extended examples of the speech of absolute thought, taken from the philosophies of Plato, Anselm, Kant, and Hegel.

The Lost Lecture on the Good (agathon) To understand Plato we may make a distinction between the written and the unwritten doctrines. The written doctrines are those well known to every student of philosophy—the Dialogues. The unwritten doctrines are those that Plato put forth in his lectures within the walls of the Academy. John Findlay, who makes this distinction between the two senses of Plato’s thought, says: “A study of Plato which confines itself to the letter of the Dialogues, such as has been attempted by most scholarly interpreters in the past two centuries, has ended by stripping Plato of his philosophical dignity and interest, has set him before us as a brilliant, but basically frivolous playerabout with half-formed, inconsistent notions and methods, and has failed to explain the persistent, historical sense of him as a deeply engaged thinker, to whom we owe one of the most coherently elaborated, most immensely illuminating ways of regarding the world.”12 The Dialogues were addressed to those outside the Academy but who were refined enough to comprehend them. The unwritten doctrines, Findlay holds, are those that concern a purely numerical account of the eide¯ that Aristotle encountered when he attended the Academy and that can be extracted from the accounts of Platonism found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Plato’s teaching in the Academy, Findlay says, “remained unwritten, not because it was thought to be too high or too deep to be communicated to the many, but because it never became more than a programme, and that inspired all Plato’s efforts, but that he was never able to implement fully. What he was unable to communicate to others was also what he was unable to say clearly to himself, the predicament of many great thinkers.”13 This program, as Findlay sees it, was the pursuit of many-dimensional numbers and ratios, tied to one or two ultimate principles that could explain the essence of everything. Although Findlay believes the clues to this program can be found in Aristotle’s discussions and criticisms of it, Aristotle, in fact, never understood it. I agree that Plato’s unwritten doctrine was not advanced as a secret teaching, to be kept from those in the public who could perhaps understand it. There is no evidence that those admitted to the Academy took an oath not

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to speak of such ideas outside its walls. The requirement of admission, by tradition, was a knowledge of mathematics. But those in the Academy were the known few who could participate in Plato’s thought, those who, as philosophical thinkers themselves, could understand Plato’s efforts. There is no question but that there were those in Athens who were suspicious of the Academy. It is a tension between the philosopher and the city that goes back at least as far as the questioning of Pythagoras by Leon, the tyrant of Phlius, as mentioned in chapter 4, and even to the mocking of Thales, as related by Diogenes Laertius (8.8). This tension, I believe, is what leads to and explains Plato’s purpose in delivering the so-called lost lecture on the Good. The locus classicus for considering the idea of the Good, as found in the sixth book of the Republic, is in the passages leading to the famous presentation of the Divided Line. In considering the Platonic doctrine of the eide¯, I also very much agree with Findlay “that it is incredibly wrong to treat Platonism as a form of dualism, as involving the postulation of a second world of detached meanings over against the solid world of particular things.”14 The sensible and the intelligible, when rightly grasped, are to be grasped together, as one. When understood, the many are the one, even though the one cannot be spoken of or named, as the many can be. In the Republic, Socrates approaches the problem of the nature of the good through the nature of the cardinal virtues, especially justice. The question is raised as to whether the virtues are not the most important things: “Is there anything even more important than justice and the other virtues we discussed?” (504d). The answer is “that the form of the good is the most important thing to learn about and that it’s by their relation to it that just things and the others become useful and beneficial. . . . If we don’t know it, even the fullest possible knowledge of other things is of no benefit to us, any more than if we acquire any possession without the good of it” (505a). The knowledge of the good, then, is the ultimate form of knowledge. It is a knowledge that we necessarily presuppose regarding anything that we deem beneficial and “good.” Socrates says: “Every soul pursues the good and does whatever it does for its sake” (505e). Socrates says that he wishes to “abandon the quest for what the good itself is for the time being, for even to arrive at my own view about it is too big a topic for the discussion we are now started on” (506d–e). He offers an analogy, with the sun as functioning in the world the way sight functions in perception. He says: “Let’s say, then, that this is what I called the offspring of the good, which the good begot as its analogue. What the good is itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things” (508b–c).

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The eide¯ are visible to the intellect, the mind’s eye, because of the good, and the good has the power to make itself an object for the intellect. Socrates says: “So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge” (508d–e). Finally, Socrates says that the good is not being in the sense that we can know something to come to be and pass away. Thus, “you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power” (509b). The good, like the one, is beyond being (hyperousia). In the Parmenides Plato says: “The one [hen] in no way partakes of being . . . the one in no way is . . . neither is it in such a way as to be one, because it would then, by being and partaking of being, be. . . . No name belongs to it, nor is there an account or any knowledge or perception or opinion of it” (141e–142a). If the one had being in the sense that it would be a thing among things, it would be a name. If the good had a status different from the one, it would be a name for the opposite of what is not good. The good, like the one, is not a name; it is not something nameable. All philosophies that pursue the wisdom of the whole, that have not mistaken politics for philosophy or simply passed from one puzzle to another, reach a point of the ultimate thought of the ultimate. At this point philosophy becomes speechless, for the ultimate, the absolute, cannot be put into language. Plato establishes this sense of philosophy in his famous statement in the Seventh Letter: “There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences” (341c). Plato says that if such matters could be put into words it would be done best by him. He says: “If I thought they could be put into written words adequate for the multitude, what nobler work could I do in my life than to compose something of such great benefit to mankind and bring to light the nature of things for all to see?” He concludes: “But I do not think that the ‘examination,’ as it is called, of these questions would be of any benefit to men, except to a few, i.e., to those who could with a little guidance discover the truth by themselves” (341d–e). The speech of the philosopher who has reached the point where thought has transcended language is to take those few who can know beyond language, beyond the distinction of the Divided Line. Despite what Plato professes in the Seventh Letter, Aristoxenus, the pupil of Aristotle, reports that Aristotle used to tell a story of a lecture by Plato “on the Good.” This was a public lecture, delivered outside the Academy, open to

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all who wished to come. The audience came expecting to learn something about the goods that are associated with happiness, such as wealth, health, and physical strength—such, in fact, as Aristotle enumerates in the Nicomachean Ethics. Instead Plato presented his thought in mathematical demonstrations, in numbers, geometrical figures, and astronomy. He concluded with the statement that “Good is One.”15 The equation of Good with One, presented in mathematical terms, goes beyond how Plato writes of the Good, especially in the Republic. He seems to have connected it to his statements in the Parmenides, as discussed above. But his use of mathematics as the form of this question is not in the Dialogues. Plato’s mathematical presentation was unexpected by the many who came, and was incomprehensible to them. Most of the audience simply walked away during the lecture, and all that were left were Plato’s followers. Whitehead, in the essay “Mathematics and the Good,” regards the failure of Plato’s lecture to lie not simply in losing his audience at the time but in the fact that the association of mathematics and the good has remained an undeveloped topic. Whitehead says: “Undoubtedly his lecture was a failure; for he did not succeed in making evident to future generations his intuition of mathematics as elucidating the notion of the Good.”16 Plato cannot really be held responsible for future generations failing to take up this issue, but Whitehead is correct concerning this neglect. The good is largely thought of in terms of an ethical ultimate. Whitehead suggests that the good can be connected to the sense of mathematical pattern in the world. It is likely that Plato was at least in part advocating such a pattern. Findlay’s discussion of the good gives insight into how Plato was thinking of it. He says: “The idea of the Good is responsible, not only for the perspicuous givenness of the Eide, but even of their Being an Eide.”17 All that there is, including the eide¯, is derivable from a principle of absolute unity. Findlay says: “What it is to be a pattern of Numbers and Proportions, and what it is to be an Eidos is plainly a universal higher than the Eide, which, by its presence, enjoy eidetic status. This Principle of Unity or Goodness in a sense lies beyond the unhiddenness of truth or the clarity of the penetrating mind or the definite structures which specify it.”18 Findlay points out that in the Platonic conception of education the study of arithmetic and geometry is to be understood “as presenting perfect instances of eternal Eide which will lead the soul to the vision of the Idea of Good.”19 It seems likely that Plato’s use of mathematics in his lecture was intended to advocate just such education, to show how mathematics is a kind of vision of the intelligible accomplished by the mind such that what an eidos is could be grasped. Once so grasped, the possibility of grasping the idea of the good

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as necessarily entailed by the eide¯ could be realized. Once realized, however, Plato already knew that its truth could not in principle be put into speech. The good could not be known in any sense familiar to us. There is no science of the good. The question remains, Why did Plato come forth from the Academy to speak of these ideas to the Athenians? Konrad Gaiser, in his extraordinary essay on Plato’s lost lecture, found the exact answer. It lies in the suspicion the Athenians had of philosophy and of the Academy in particular, a suspicion the many, the hoi polloi, always have had of philosophy. Plato intended to fail. He knew that what he had to say would be incomprehensible to all but the few. As he said in the Seventh Letter, “For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself ” (341c–d). Gaiser says he believes Plato gave a valid statement of his doctrine, but in a highly technical manner: “If the people of Athens took his ideas for incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, they would at least cease to regard him as a threat and to persecute followers of such an abstruse creed.”20 Further, “Plato may have feared that his own school, which in so many respects resembled that of the Pythagoreans, might meet a similar end to theirs, caused likewise by angering the public with the elitist secrecy of their proceedings.”21 Plato did not, and could not, care if a large number of people might lose interest in his philosophy; the preservation of it was of greater importance. In presenting the lecture as he did, Plato was employing the logic of the mask. He stated his views correctly and honestly, but in such a way that those of the city found what he said harmless and useless. It is a philosophical trick that keeps philosophy alive. Why is the lecture lost? Perhaps it is lost just in the sense that many works from antiquity are lost. Or, more likely, Plato intended it to be lost, consistent with his views of how absolute thought is transmitted.

The Ontological Argument Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1033–1109), is the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God, of which, Charles Hartshorne, its most prominent modern interpreter, says: “There is no more famous philosophical argument.”22 Anyone who seriously undertakes the study of philosophy encounters this argument early on, and must take a stand

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on its interpretation and validity. What is missed by its commentators is the rhetorical sense in which Anselm presents his argument. He first informs the reader of how he seeks to present his work. He says he does not regard what he has written as a book in the ordinary sense, with himself as an author. But after some consultation and thought, he decided “to prefix my name to these writings. And that this might be done more fitly, I named the first, Monologium, that is, A Soliloquy; but the second, Proslogium, that is, A Discourse.”23 Anselm conceives his “discourse” as an allocution, that is, as an authoritative or hortatory address, intended for publication. He begins the Proslogium with an exhortation of the mind to the contemplation of God, and he ends this exhortation (the first chapter) with the claim “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand.”24 Anselm’s theology is Augustinian: he believes in order to reason, instead of reasoning in order to believe. His purpose is to determine whether there might be a single argument that would verify the belief he holds in the existence of God: “I began to ask myself whether there might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself alone.”25 Anselm is completely correct in this aim, for in logic, if more than one argument is advanced for a single conclusion, either the further argument is redundant or the original argument is defective. Adding arguments together to prove a point means either the point is unprovable or its possible proof is not fully known. Anselm’s claim is that in one and only one case the conception of something necessarily entails its existence. He says: “Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.”26 What the critics have missed is Anselm’s claim that it is in one and only one case that the thought of something necessarily entails its existence—the case of the thought of a being of which nothing greater exists. Why philosophical minds of the first order have been unable to focus on this claim of the argument is baffling. Hartshorne has called out the critics on this error. He says: “Anselm’s intuition was that God exists in a superior manner, the ordinary way of existing being a defect. ‘Thou dost exist so truly that Thou canst not be conceived not to exist,’ and ‘this is greater than a being which can be conceived not to exist.’ Show me where the critics

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(Hume, Kant, e.g.) deal with this idea!”27 Anselm is in no sense asserting the general proposition that the thought of something entails its existence. He is claiming exactly the opposite: the being of anything understood in any sense except the greatest is distinct from the understanding of it. It is not my purpose here to answer the criticisms of Anselm’s argument that have accumulated. Hartshorne has done so, at book-length. I mention only one that is most associated with Kant—that existence is not a predicate. This claim has been dismissed in principle by Hegel in his conception of the speculative sentence, discussed earlier. As Hartshorne points out, in relation to Anselm’s proof, “The Argument does not depend upon whether or no (mere) ‘existing’ is a predicate. How much longer will ink—and students’ time in a thousand colleges—be worse than wasted upon the supposition that it does? . . . This King is really naked. The king is not Anselm’s argument, or not that only; it is Kant’s chief criticism of it.”28 The essence of the argument can be stated in terms of two premises and a conclusion: I can conceive in my understanding of a being greater than which none other exists. This being must exist in reality, independent of my conception of it, or it would not be the greatest such being. Therefore, God exists both in my understanding and in reality. Anselm’s intention in the argument is to demonstrate that any attempt to deny the existence of God is a contradiction. His opponent is the fool who has said in his heart that there is no God (Psalms 14:1). The fool has said this in his heart, but, as the argument demonstrates, the fool cannot do so in his understanding. In rhetorical as well as logical terms, whether one is a believer or a nonbeliever in the existence of God, what is meant by God is a being greater than which none exists. Thus the atheist cannot avoid the selfcontradiction Anselm’s argument entails. Anselm’s critic, Gaunilon, in taking the position of the fool, raises the objection as to whether it is possible to conceive a being greater than which none other exists. He says: “But of God, or a being greater than all others, I could not conceive at all, except merely according to the word. And an object can hardly or never be conceived according to the word alone.”29 Gaunilon’s claim is that there is no necessity that anyone must have such a conception in the Understanding. God may simply be a word, not a concept. Anselm, then, is just talking but not thinking. If God is not a thought, but only a word without

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intelligible content, there is nothing for Gaunilon with which to argue. Argument is always conceptual, as distinguished from mindless chatter. Gaunilon raises the example of conceiving of a perfect island. If we conceive of such a perfect entity, does that entail that it exists? The conception of a perfect entity does not place us in the position of a self-contradiction, if we also deny its existence. Anselm, in answering this example of Gaunilon, reminds him that “the non-existence, then, of that than which a greater cannot be conceived is inconceivable.”30 Only if the perfection of the island was conceived as more perfect than any conceivable perfection would it be a selfcontradiction to deny it. What Anselm’s argument for the existence of God demonstrates is that the conception of a being greater than which none other exists necessarily entails the conception of its existence. The circle of thought is never left. In the instance of every other thought of an object, it is distinct from the thought of its existence as well as from the actual existence of the object. Anselm’s argument shows what it means in metaphysics to have thought think itself. God’s existence is pure thought. Missed by the critics is that thought exists. Anselm’s argument proves that thought itself exists and it can verify its own existence by thinking the absolute form of itself. The rational is the real. In his monologium Anselm is concerned with discussing how the various attributes of God are connected to God’s existence. That with which Anselm begins and ends is the good. The primary concern of human beings is to determine what is good. Thus, Anselm says: “It is natural that this man should, at some time, turn his mind’s eye to the examination of that cause by which these things are good, which he does not desire, except as he judges them to be good.”31 Anselm’s argument is Neoplatonic in that good is described as a form that exists as such, not through anything else, and provides the absolute standard by means of which something is said to be good in comparison with another. Anselm says, of those things that are good: “if they are truly good, and good through that same being through which all goods exist, whatever that being is. But who can doubt this very being, through which all goods exist, to be a great good? This must be, then, a good through itself, since every other good is through it.”32 God is the cause of all that exists and whatever exists as a good is the result of God’s goodness. In his conclusion to the monologium Anselm says: “For, as it is established that through the supreme Good and its supremely wise omnipotence all things were created and live.”33

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Anselm’s argument for God’s existence establishes the possibility of metaphysics. If metaphysics consists in its essence of thought thinking thought, Anselm’s argument verifies that thought cannot without contradiction deny its own existence. Anselm presents his argument wholly in terms of Scholastic reasoning, which is why he is often regarded as the father of Scholasticism. His ontological argument is taken further by Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia. Cusanus adds, to Anselm’s conception of a being greater than which cannot be conceived, the mathematical image of a maximum, infinite line. Cusanus says: “The most devoted Anselm compared the maximum Truth to infinite rectitude. (Let me, following him, have recourse to the figure of rectitude, which I picture as a straight line.)”34 Ernst Cassirer says that Cusanus can be characterized as “the first modern thinker.” He can be so regarded because he approaches the question of God in terms of “the possibility of the knowledge of God,” which is a departure from the traditional approach of speculative theology.35 Anselm might be considered proto-modern in that he presents half of his doctrine in a soliloquy. Cusanus formulates the question of God’s existence in terms of how God can be known. To ask this question presupposes the establishment of God’s existence. Cusanus says: “I maintain, therefore, that if there were an infinite line, it would be a straight line, a triangle, a circle, and a sphere. And likewise if there were an infinite sphere, it would be a circle, a triangle, and a line. And the same thing must be said about an infinite triangle and an infinite circle.”36 Cusanus’s mathematical diagrams show that when any of these figures are expanded to approach their absolute limits they are like a curved line that, when infinitely extended into an ever-larger and shallower curve, approaches a straight line. “Hence, the minimum coincides with the maximum.”37 A being greater than which cannot be conceived is an absolute maximum, the infinite straight line itself. Our learned ignorance is the result. Our conception of God has within it an incompleteness in principle, making our conception of God’s being a unique thought. Cusanus initiates modern philosophy through a doctrine of ignorance of God’s being, rising from the dogmatism of medieval theology. Socrates initiates ancient philosophy proper through a doctrine of ignorance of human being, rising from the cosmologies of the pre-Socratics. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, says: “The proof passes over from the concept of God to the being of God. The ancients, i.e., Greek philosophy, did not have this transition; even within the Christian era it was not accomplished for a long time, because it involves the most profound descent of Spirit [Geist] into itself.”38

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Once spirit has so descended into itself and emerged to speak about it, the golden bough it is carrying is the ontological argument. Once this bough is handed off, to be transformed in the mathematical symbolism of Cusanus, it is possible to reintroduce a doctrine of ignorance into philosophy and into absolute thought. Thus philosophy has a new beginning. And like all new beginnings in philosophy, it is undertaken by remembering the origin.

The Island of the Pure Understanding Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft is a masterpiece of making philosophical distinctions. The reader enters an enormous cave of experience, in which thought is thinking through all the various senses of its activity. This enormous cave of experience holds them all, for, as Kant says in the first sentence of his work, “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.”39 He also says: “Experience is therefore our first instruction, that in the interconnected lives of all future generations there will never be any lack of new knowledge that can be thus ingathered.”40 Kant is a thinker of the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung). The great cave of experience is a treasure house of all that there truly is that is accessible to the Understanding (Verstand). Those who commit to systematic thought based on scientific investigation will never want for work. Their efforts will be greeted by progress. The reader is first shown the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. “Analytic judgments (affirmative) are those in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought through identity; those in which this connection is thought without identity should be entitled synthetic.” Furthermore: “Judgments of experience, as such, are one and all synthetic.”41 After this distinction, accompanied by the subdistinctions of a priori and a posteriori, the reader, through the space and time that order sensibility, is shown the Table of Categories that correspond to the twelve types of cognitive judgment. And in regard to these pure concepts of the understanding, the reader encounters their deduction. Deduction here refers not to logical deduction but to legal deduction, the demand of quid juris—by what right such concepts can be allowed to circulate. The reader is issued a warning that there are also in experience usurpatory concepts (usurpierte Begriffe) that circulate without proper justification: “But there are also usurpatory concepts, such as fortune [Glück], fate [Schicksal], which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question: quid juris.”42 Kant says these two concepts and their like have no legal title to justify their existence that is obtainable from either experience or reason. Although Kant does not

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put it in these terms, fortune and fate, as elements of the human condition, being the frequent subjects of poetry, should, like the poets in the Republic, be banished. There is no place in the realm of the understanding for such intruders into the perfect world of its concepts. Next the reader encounters the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding. The question that has been growing in the reader’s mind is, How are these concepts connected to what is perceived in experience by the senses—what Kant calls “intuition” (Anschauung)? The reader then learns that this connection is accomplished by the faculty of “imagination” (Einbildungskraft), the product or form of which is the schema. The doctrine of the schematism is the grand example of the procedure Kant employs, in other places, to join two terms of a distinction by the introduction of a third or middle term. The schema is not as such an image, but it is at once sensible and conceptual. The question the reader now has is, What is this extraordinary and crucial element that makes knowledge possible? Kant says: “This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul [ist eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele], whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.”43 The reader may be astounded. All of the Critique’s doctrine of the understanding, its epistemology, depends upon an art, concealed in the human soul, with no expectation that the nature of which will ever likely emerge. It rivals the other unknowable upon which the Critique rests—the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich). As Kant says in the Preface to the Second Edition, the reader must bear in mind that our thought must be limited to objects of experience and “that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.”44 Knowledge takes place through an element that is unknown, based on an object the true nature of which is also unknown, concealed from sense as well as thought. These things-in-themselves are noumena of which there can never be an intuition, a perception. Thus, “it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience.”45 These noumena are the causes of the phenomena that comprise experience, yet the category of cause does not apply to these noumena. Umberto Eco, in Kant and the Platypus, says: “As far as Kant is concerned, nature is before our eyes, and his native realism prevents him from thinking that the objects of nature are not there, functioning in a certain way, given

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that they develop by themselves.” A tree, for example, grows as an individual entity by its own internal organic law. “But what this law is cannot be known from the tree, given that the phenomenal teaches us nothing about the noumenal. Nor do the a priori forms of the pure intellect teach us anything, because the entities of nature obey a plethora of particular laws.” How do we know with specificity what things truly are? “These objects of nature are (apart from those highly general laws that allow us to think of the phenomena of physics) dogs, horses, stones—and platypuses.” We must simply imagine something as possible according to the concept. “And so we try to construct the concept of a tree (we assume it) as if the trees were as we can think them.”46 We do not learn, from Kant’s transcendental method, how we know a dog is a dog, a cat a cat, or a platypus a platypus. The reader, having been guided by Kant through this great cave of experience, is now shown that within it is an island where all is pure and perfect. Before exploring this island like a Robinson Crusoe, the reader, looking ahead, sees the realm of transcendent ideas and the dialectic of pure reason, and of its object, “of which we have no concept.”47 There, thinking without the aid of the concept, we encounter “the paralogisms of pure reason,” followed by “the antinomies of pure reason,” and finally, the “impossibility of the proofs of the existence of God.” These cause the reader to resist the temptations the speculative use of reason holds forth and to accept a regime of self-discipline, for “if in the speculative employment of pure reason there are no dogmas, to serve as its special subject-matter, all dogmatic methods, whether borrowed from the mathematician or specially invented, are as such inappropriate.”48 What is absolute for thought is the understanding; pure reason can only carry us off into the ether of thought, where no true concepts exist. Metaphysics must be a metaphysics of experience. Any thoughts of ideas beyond experience, a Jenseits, like those usurpatory concepts of fortune and fate, have no right to exist, or to be allowed on the island. Kant’s description of this island is the only poetic passage in all of the Critique. It is an absolute thought in that it takes the reader to the limits of the understanding and hence of true philosophical thinking. The island provides the reader with an image of how to live and think wholly within experience. It replaces the sense of the great cave of the text, in which the reader has been wandering. Kant says: “We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.” Now that this assessment is complete, we can see that “this domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land

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of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.”49 Kant, having been born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and lived all his life in East Prussia, close to the Baltic Sea, is—with his references to icebergs and fogbanks—not thinking of a tropical island. This land of truth is not blessed with especially good weather. Kant’s seafarers are Descartes’ paladins, who fall into extravagances and “conceive of plans beyond their powers to complete.”50 They make such plans by reading fables and histories. In the land of truth, the right reasoning of the understanding precludes such reading as a guide to thought. It is a short step from such ideas to the pursuit of speculative philosophy, which will take us into the illusions of metaphysical reasoning. If thought can keep itself within the limits of the phenomenal object and not reach out to try to grasp the noumenal thing-in-itself that is its cause, we can remain within the land of truth, heeding well Kant’s warning. But once we find ourselves within this island we may ask if Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy of criticism can provide us with answers to the questions that structure the human condition. What can this philosophy of the pure understanding tell us about self-knowledge, the instruction humanity has received from the Delphic inscription—gnothi seauton? How are we to face our own mortality? What is the origin of the world in which we find ourselves? And what is the connection between the human and the divine? These are the questions that the myths that lie at the basis of human culture answered before they were even raised as such by human consciousness. Once philosophy arises from mythico-religious thought, through the metaphysics of the first philosophers, they become articulated, and are then the subjects of the Platonic-Socratic Dialogues. Their answers, however, involve the usurpatory concepts of fortune and fate that govern the Socratic “likely stories.” Concerning the self, Kant offers the “transcendental unity of apperception”: “The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts.”51 This self is the “‘I think’ (a representation which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which in all consciousness is one and the same).”52 This is the truth-seeking self of the pure understanding that confines itself to the formation of the concept of the object accessible within experience. It does

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not seem concerned with its own mortality. If this self of apperception were to become concerned with itself as a thing-in-itself, with the nature of its own reality, it would fall prey to the paralogisms of pure reason that Kant presents in the transcendental dialectic. In the Phaedo Socrates says: “Those who rightly philosophize are practicing to die [hoi ortho¯s philosophountes apothne¯skein meleto¯si]” (67e3–4). This claim is repeated further on in the dialogue, where Socrates is describing the soul. He characterizes philosophy, when pursued in the right way, as “practice of death” (melete¯ thanatou, 81a1–2). Shortly before he drinks the hemlock, Socrates relates a likely story concerning the nature of the earth as a whole and its surroundings, including the river Styx and the region where the dead arrive. When he has put forth this account, Socrates says: “No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale” (114d–e). Socrates says we cannot know what will occur after death, but we can assume that no harm can come to a good human being. Part of this goodness is to have spoken well. Good speech is proper to the knowledge of the good. The ultimate basis of Plato’s quarrel with the poets rests on the fact that poetic speech is not sufficient to prepare us for death—because such speech is tied to the body. Only philosophic speech is fully in accord with the soul and with the Form of the Good. For this reason Plato concludes his criticism of poetry in the tenth book of the Republic with affirmation of the immortality of the soul, having Socrates say: “And you may be sure that no one will ever prove that the souls of the dying are made more unjust by death” (610c). Are these thoughts equally attributable to the transcendental unity of apperception, as it goes about the work of the understanding, or do they pass beyond the bounds of experience? To know what it is to be a human being is to know what it is to be mortal. In the Timaeus Plato offers the reader a rhetorical display of how to speak of the origin and nature of things. Timaeus says he will give an account of the whole universe or world order, the cosmos. “This, then, is how it has come to be: it is a work of craft, modeled after that which is changeless and is grasped by a rational account, that is, by wisdom. Since these things are so, it follows by unquestionable necessity that this world is an image of something” (29a–b). He says that he who formed the universe was good and wanted to produce a piece of work that would be as excellent as its nature

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would allow. “This, then, in keeping with our likely account, is how we must say divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing, endowed with soul and intelligence” (30c). After relating all the details of this likely story, in which everything in the world comes into being, he says our world teems with things, mortal and immortal. “A visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled. Our universe, indeed the only one of its kind, has come to be” (92c). It is a story not to be matched in the history of cosmology, and it is a product, so to speak, of the exercise of pure reason. If we turn then to the four antinomies of which Kant speaks, will the story of the Timaeus fall from our minds as illusion and non-sense? It is a speech of “things of which as they are in themselves we have yet not the least knowledge.”53 It is not enough to regard such a likely story as a regulative idea, as if whatever truth it holds lies elsewhere. What is said in the story allows us to situate ourselves within the universe. It lets us know who we are. In the Seventh Letter, as discussed above, Plato says that none of his teaching is written down, nor can it be. His teaching regarding the absolute good can only be reached outside language, and thus outside experience, as that which can be had by the joining of sense perception with concepts. Only by thought thinking itself can what is absolute be reached. The ontological argument, unknown as such to Plato, does not provide a knowledge of God’s existence. It only shows that to think of God necessitates the thought that God exists. When we add to it the symbolism of the infinite straight line of Cusanus, we are exactly at the place of Plato’s Seventh Letter. Thought is taken to its limit, and that is beyond what can be said in language. It is beyond the concept. The true philosopher puts into language what can only be apprehended beyond language. Kant folds the arguments for God’s existence into each other. He says: “The physico-theological proof of the existence of an original supreme being rests upon the cosmological proof, and the cosmological upon the ontological.”54 Kant is ingenious in his observation that the physico-theological and the cosmological arguments require the ontological for their completion. They stand as ways to come to the idea of God, but require the ontological argument to claim God’s existence as independent from the thought of God. However, Kant’s failure to realize that existence is a predicate leaves his criticism of the ontological argument ineffective. He claims that “a determining predicate is a predicate which is added to the concept of the subject and enlarges it. Consequently, it must not be already contained in the concept.”55

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Kant has engaged a petitio principii, for his criticism assumes that a logical predicate in this one and only one case cannot be a determining predicate. Kant holds that metaphysics as an activity of pure reason is a propensity of mind that cannot simply be eliminated by critique. But he does not realize that the import of the ontological argument is to give the human mind confidence that the real is the rational. For, if this is not the case, all is absurd, even the thought of the understanding, because the understanding presupposes that things-in-themselves comprise a rational order, which can be transferred in their appearances to the understanding, and which it can bring forth in its production of “sense in the sensible” (Sinn im Sinnlichkeit). Metaphysics is inescapable, not simply as a regulative activity of mind, but as constitutive. It is not possible to be human without metaphysics, for it is the ultimate manifestation of thought, and thought is that which is distinctive of human being.

The Logic of the True Infinity Kant’s philosophy of criticism is a still life, nature morte. In its Land of Truth everything is in place, and everything has a place. In Hegel’s “science of the experience of consciousness” the True is a Bacchanalian revel at which no one is sober, and once each reveler has collapsed into the other—the absolute reached—it is a scene of transparent, unbroken calm.56 It is remarkable that Kant could conceive the Critique of Pure Reason, fettered as he was to the halls of the University of Königsberg. On visiting it in 1739, Crown Prince Frederick said it was more suited “to the training of bears than to becoming a theatre of the sciences.”57 In 1801, Hegel began lecturing, first as Privatdozent at the University of Jena, later as Professor at Heidelberg, and finally at Berlin, all centers of learning of the first order. Kant wrote a formalized Latinate German; Hegel intended to “teach philosophy to speak German.”58 He does so through many ironies, images, and puns, such as his play on Pissen and Wissen in his criticism of phrenology (Schädellehre) in the Phänomenologie des Geistes, mentioned in chapter 1.59 Kant is Prussian. Hegel is Swabian. And as Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, “Hegel is a Swabian and shocking people is his passion, as it is the passion of all Swabians.”60 The two terms most strongly associated with Hegel’s philosophy are the Absolute (das Absolute) and dialectic (die Dialektik). The word absolut is an adjective or adverb that derives from the Latin absolutus. It appears first as a noun in Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, used to refer to God. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant says: “The word ‘absolute’ is one of the few words

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which in their original meaning were adapted to a concept that no other word in the same language exactly suits.”61 German philosophers after Kant employ the term to refer to ultimate and unconditioned reality.62 Dialectic, for Hegel, is the doubling-up of consciousness on itself. It is a twoness that is inherent within consciousness. Hegel says: “The very fact that consciousness knows of an object at all already involves this distinction: to consciousness something is the in-itself, while another moment is the knowledge, or the Being of the object for consciousness. This differentiation is at hand, and the assessment rests upon it [Auf dieser Unterscheidung, welche vorhanden ist, beruht die Prüfung].”63 In contrast to this moment within consciousness is Kant’s triadic form (Triplizität) of the schematism, which is a “lifeless” embodiment of the concept (Begriff).64 This movement between the in-itself (an-sich) and for-itself (für-sich) is the heart of the concept. It makes the concept concrete rather than abstract. In the first book to present Hegel’s system in English, James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, the Begriff or “concrete concept” is declared the essence of Hegel’s thought. Stirling says: “The secret of Hegel may be indicated at shortest thus: As Aristotle—with considerable assistance from Plato, made explicit the abstract Universal that was implicit in Socrates, so Hegel— with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling—made explicit the concrete Universal that was implicit in Kant.”65 The Begriff or “concrete universal” is the means by which consciousness reaches the inner form of the object such that the object’s actuality is not vacuous for consciousness. It requires the “speculative sentence” (spekulativer Satz), as discussed earlier, in which thought passes from the subject to the predicate, and from the predicate back to the subject, the subject now being increased by its absorption of the predicate.66 This is the speech of reason, in which substance becomes subject and the True is the whole. The speech of the understanding reflects the object in thought as something external to thought. The understanding, with its classifying mentality, offers only a table of contents of experience but “the content itself it does not offer whatsoever [den Inhalt selbst aber liefert er nicht].”67 The understanding makes experience stand still. The Absolute, dialectic, and concept all come together in Hegel’s “true infinity” (das wahrhafte Unendliche). In the Wissenschaft der Logik Hegel introduces infinity, with the claim that “the infinite in its simple concept can first of all be regarded as a new definition of the Absolute.” In this sense, Hegel adds, the infinite is set forth as both “being and becoming” (als Sein und Werden).68 Thus the internal order of the concept of the infinite is dialectical, as is the Absolute itself. In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel says that the

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“fundamental concept of philosophy” depends upon the concept of “true infinity” (“der Grundbegriff der Philosophie das wahrhafte Unendliche, hängt davon ab”).69 The task of philosophy is to take thought to its absolute limit. Kant is able to take thought only to the limits of the understanding. When thought then becomes reason it can realize itself only as a dialectic in which are placed its ideas. Such ideas “ought not to be assumed as existing in themselves, but only as having the reality of a schema—the schema of the regulative principle of the systematic unity of all knowledge of nature. They should be regarded only as analoga of real things, not as in themselves real things.”70 When we properly occupy the island of pure understanding, we realize that “the ideas of pure reason can never be dialectical in themselves; any deceptive illusion to which they give occasion must be due solely to their misemployment. . . . The ideas of pure reason do not, indeed, admit of the kind of deduction that is possible in the case of the categories.”71 Kant knows that the residents of the island will be prone to temptation because human reason always, by its nature, wishes to realize itself. But its dialectic will lead only to illusions and disappointment. What Kant missed in his conception of dialectic is the principle Hegel finds in the German conception of das Aufheben. Hegel comes to this because of his wish to make philosophy speak German. As a verb, aufheben, or as a noun, das Aufheben, has no counterpart in English. It is sometimes translated as “sublation” or “supersession.” Both of these renderings intellectualize its meaning, as it is an ordinary German verb, close to the English “to take up,” but going beyond it. Hegel states its meaning clearly: “Aufheben puts forth its double meaning, which we have seen in the negative: it is a negating and a preserving at once [Das Aufheben stellt seine wahrhafte gedoppelte Bedeutung dar, welche wir an dem Negativen gesehen haben: es is ein Negieren und ein Aufbewahren zugleich].”72 The negation of a negation is a positive, which preserves the original in a new form. The German verb captures the sense in experience in which something is passed beyond, but in so doing the new object is a further determination of what is passed beyond. This movement is simply what it means to have experience. It is a constant, everyday occurrence. We experience something. We turn from it to something else. What we turn to carries with it, to some extent, that from which we have turned. English simply does not have a verb that specifically designates this well-known process. It was Hegel’s genius to see that das Aufheben is the dialectic, the logic, of daily life and of the life of Geist or spirit itself. It is a process closed to the still-standing understanding, but open to both consciousness and thought pursued as reason.

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The opposite of true infinity is bad infinity. Hegel says: “It is essential to distinguish the true concept of infinity from bad infinity [von der schlechten Unendlickeit], the infinite of reason from the infinite of the understanding.”73 Bad infinity is bad because it is a false concept of infinity. It is based on contrasting the infinite with the finite. Such an infinite is not truly infinite because it is limited by its opposition with the finite. The finite is a condition of its existence. The infinite can only be what it is as an opposite of the finite. True infinity must be the completely unconditioned. In this sense the true infinite is synonymous with the absolute. How, then, are we to conceive this sense of the unconditioned and the dialectical structure that characterizes its internal form? Josiah Royce, in the “Supplementary Essay: The One, the Many, and the Infinite,” of The World and the Individual, First Series, gives an example to portray the self-determined or self-represented infinite that he correlates with the mathematics of Dedekind and Cantor. Royce asks the reader to consider the idea of a perfect map of England. This map of England would include the map that is mapping England, and this map would itself be required to include itself and so forth, a series of maps, not possible to enact in practice, but in principle comprising an infinite of which each instance is determinate and finite. Royce says: “As the England of our illustration could be self-mapped, if at all, then by countless series of various maps, not found in the same part of England and not in the least inconsistent with one another; and as the number-series,—that abstract image of the bare form of every self-representative system of the type here in question,—can be self-represented in endlessly various ways.” Thus each map can re-represent itself. Royce concludes: “So, too, the self-representation of the Absolute permitted by our view is confined to the one necessary case.”74 The self-representing, true infinite is not a single series because such a series can function as the basis for any number of additional, offshoot, infinite series. Another way to put this internal structure of the concept, as well as true infinity, is in terms of a functional order of a series of variables. The principle of the order of the series is of a different logical type than the variables of the series. Yet the meaning of this principle is dependent on its presence in the series, and the variables are such only in terms of each of their places in the series so ordered. The principle of a series can also become a variable in a series of greater generality, and the variables it orders become a subset. Thus the functional concept can expand infinitely in every sense, but with each and any of its moments being completely determinate.

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Although Hegel is writing before the formulation of the function-concept, he regards the mathematical infinite, to the extent it is part of the mathematics of his day, as the basis of the philosophical infinite. He says: “From a philosophical point of view the mathematical infinite is important because underlying it, in fact, is the concept of the true infinite.”75 In his explanation of the “absolute idea” with which the Science of Logic concludes, Hegel says: “It has been repeatedly shown that the infinite progression as such [the bad infinity] belongs to a reflection void of concept; the absolute method [dialectic], which has the concept for its soul and content, cannot lead into it.”76 The true infinity shows that the absolute is not a goal or end point to be reached teleologically by consciousness or reason, for the absolute is present in each determinate moment of experience. This fact about the absolute is what so many of Hegel’s commentators have failed to grasp. Hegel says: “By virtue of the nature of the method just indicated, the science presents itself as a circle that winds around itself, where the mediation winds the end back to the beginning which is the simple ground; the circle is thus a circle of circles.” Hegel’s science is a science of eternal return: “for each single member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member.”77 Hegel’s thought of the absolute is thought’s continual representation of itself to itself.

Ascent to the Absolute Whitehead concludes Modes of Thought with the claim that “philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.”78 If philosophy is akin to poetry, it is also akin to rhetoric. Poetry and rhetoric are both concerned with how words are used. It is the proper use of words that allows thought to grasp what is beyond the literal. In poetry there is a natural impetus toward philosophy. The great poets pass from the immediacy of the lyric or other short forms to what approaches philosophy. The Homeric Hymns give way to the Iliad and Odyssey, which seem to belong to a world of their own. Dante’s poems to Beatrice of the Vita nuova precede the Divina commedia. Shakespeare’s famous sonnets are an addition to the world of his plays. Goethe’s Gedichte stand beside the themes of his masterpiece of Faust. Joyce’s Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach do not approach the colossus of the imagination that is

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Finnegans Wake. These are works of literature raised to the ether of philosophy. They are books of wisdom that take up the True as the whole. Hegel’s circle of circles, his Kreis von Kreisen of his system is a complete speech. It takes its place among the great complete speeches of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle forward. We may add to these, thinking of rhetoric, the corpus of Cicero. The totality of the thought of any great thinker is a narrative that can be read and reread. Whether they are stated in meter or mathematic pattern, we are taken by great works on an ascent to the absolute. They are each a circle, not only because their thought is a whole but also because the beginning points of their narratives presuppose what they intend to present. A poem, even a lyric poem, like a philosophy—even the root metaphor on which it is constructed—folds back upon itself. At its end we are at its beginning again, like the first half of the sentence that ends and begins Finnegans Wake: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the.”79 A tetralogy always closes time. It is the square within the circle. A main subject of the Platonic Academy was mathematics. We should not then be surprised that the words of philosophy, taken to the edge of the absolute, are allied to mathematic pattern: from Plato’s lecture on the Good to Cusanus’s straight line to Hegel’s true infinity.

Ch a p ter 7

The Rhetoric of the Philosophical Frontispiece Reading works of literature forces on us an exercise of fidelity and respect, albeit within a certain freedom of interpretation. There is a dangerous critical heresy, typical of our time, according to which we can do anything we like with a work of literature, reading into it whatever our most uncontrolled impulses dictate to us. This is not true. Umberto Eco, On Literature

“Frontispiece,” as it entered English from Latin, carried the meaning “the countenance or facade of a building,” especially denoting a decorated entrance, perhaps involving a pediment over a door or a sculptured or engraved panel. Analogously, it was applied to the entrance to a book, first used to designate the title page. As printing spread throughout Europe, many books of modern thought appeared with engravings facing the title page, emblematically introducing the reader to the book. The emblem of the frontispiece is the first grasp the reader has of the work, and it may also be the last. Books, once read to the end, often bring the reader back to the beginning. The author’s thought forms a circle, and the frontispiece is an aid to recall its elements. Francis Bacon says: “Emblem reduces intellectual conceptions to sensible images; for an object of sense always strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of the intellect.”1 An emblem is a means for what Bacon regards as the “Art of Retaining or Keeping Knowledge.”2 The frontispieces of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Giambattista Vico’s La scienza nuova (1730), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours (1750) are emblems in Bacon’s sense. They are each commissioned by their author and are intended to serve as a rhetorical device to bring together as a whole, on a single page, the elements that comprise the meaning of the work. What is portrayed in the frontispiece is expanded for the reader in the 109

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reasonings of the text. The author, by joining the rhetorical power of the frontispiece with the dialectical power of the text, affects both the reader’s imagination and reason. The critical literature on each of these authors’ works is enormous, but one finds in it almost no attention to the presence of their frontispieces or to their importance for the contemplation and comprehension of their themes. I wish to pursue the question, What may be learned if we interpret the whole of these three works in terms of the frontispieces the authors have placed in them? My aim in this chapter is to discover the authors’ intent in putting forth the ideas the texts contain. In seeking this intent I endorse the principle that all books are about other books. In the case of Leviathan, the urtext is the book of Job; in that of the Scienza nuova, it is the Tabula of Cebes; and in that of the Discours it is Plutarch’s essay in the Moralia “How to Profit by One’s Enemies.” These writings are the basis of the respective frontispieces. and together they are the keys to enter into the essence of each work.

Hobbes: The Body Politique The frontispiece to Leviathan was done by the prominent French printmaker and engraver Abraham Bosse (1604–1676), commissioned and assisted by Hobbes. At the top margin, just above the head of the figure that symbolizes the state or body politic, is the line from the Latin Vulgate that concludes the description of Leviathan in the forty-first chapter of the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible: “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei [There is no power on Earth that is comparable to it].” The King James Bible, completed in 1611, forty years prior to Hobbes’s work, presents the line as “Upon earth there is not his like.” This is the English version, available in Hobbes’s time. The Latin third-person demonstrative (ei), functioning both as masculine (to him) and neuter (to it), lets Hobbes merge Leviathan as “it” (a nonhuman) and as “him” (a human) into the “artificial man,” an entity that is like a man, but is not such. Hobbes expects the reader immediately to complete the line with “who is made without fear.”3 In his book title Hobbes is the first to use “Leviathan” in a prominent intellectual sense in English, outside the literature of biblical criticism. His use of it as his title is extraordinary; perhaps he intends it even as a play on a colloquial, figurative use that the word had, referring to a man of vast and formidable power or enormous wealth.4 Because it is unusual, the title, particularly when connected to the image of the frontispiece, becomes immediately memorable. It is likely that Hobbes hoped the reader would notice that the book was “Printed for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in

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St. Pauls Church-yard, 1651.”5 Leviathan is from Hebrew liwya¯tha¯n, a sea monster, a crocodile, a dragon. Its power can be likened to the civil commonwealth joined to the ecclesiastical commonwealth—the Green Dragon in the churchyard. This is an irony that Hobbes would not have missed, if indeed it was not deliberate. John Dewey, in the essay “The Motivation of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” sees the fundamental value of Hobbes’s political philosophy as the conception of a new relation of political and religious authority. Hobbes attempted to secularize morals and politics such that politics ceased to be a branch of theology. Dewey says: “It is, I think, of fundamental importance in the theme that Hobbes’s great work was in freeing, once for all, morals and politics from subservience to divinity and making them a branch of natural science.” He concludes: “So I offer no apology for setting forth the evidence that Hobbes himself believed in the scientific status of his politics.”6 Hobbes accomplishes his new science of the civil world by joining together the civil and the ecclesiastical commonwealths. By making authority twofold, the divine right of kings is supervened. What so much commentary on Hobbes’s political philosophy misses is this double sense of power. Such commentary proceeds as though the artificial man embodies only the civil commonwealth. Dewey says: “It may be worth noting that considerably over one-half of the Leviathan is explicitly devoted to the bearing of religious and scriptural matters upon politics as they touch upon the relation of church and the civil power.”7 Nothing makes this duality of state and church more evident than the five sets of corresponding images in the lower half of the frontispiece. From left to right, the castle is opposite the church; the crown opposite the bishop’s mitre; the cannon that operates through the artificial fire of gunpowder opposite lightning that emits from the thundercloud; the arms, battle flags, and drum of civil conflict opposite the pikes inscribed with the syllogism and with epistemological and metaphysical distinctions rooted in Scholastic debate; and the full battle scene of war is opposite the courtroom scene of canon law. In the upper half of the frontispiece this dualism is repeated, with the figure of the artificial man holding a sword in one hand and a crosier in the other, parallel to the two sets of images. On the head of the figure is a crown. The figure itself is composed of a multitude of individual subjects, looking upward. The figure stands over a representation of town and countryside. The figure, with curling, shoulder-length hair, thin mustache, and well-trimmed goatee, appears strikingly similar to the countenance of Hobbes himself, when compared with the engraving of him presented in

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the English edition of De Cive and in other editions, as well as his engraved portrait in the 1667 Dutch translation of Leviathan.8 Hobbes is the maker of the artificial man, for such does not actually exist. Thus Hobbes gives him instructions at the close of his introduction: “He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind.” Hobbes says this ability is as hard to learn as any language or science: “Yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the same in himself.” Hobbes concludes: “For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”9 Hobbes’s Leviathan, like Plato’s Republic, is a city in speech. In the Laws Plato says the absolutely ideal society (such as that of the Republic) is a state for the “gods or a number of the children of gods.” Plato says: “Men need look no further for their ideal: they should keep this state in view and try to find the one that most nearly resembles it” (739d–e). The state in the Republic is presented by the Platonic Socrates as the individual writ large (368d–e). Hobbes’s artificial man is also the state writ large, but unlike that of the Platonic Socrates, the purpose is to see not justice but the power of governance written in larger letters. As the subtitle of Leviathan states, the work concerns the “Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth.” Hobbes’s state requires a reconception of the relation of the individual to the state. The state as the artificial man has absolute power over the individual. In the state of nature any individual stronger than another will assert power over the other. Those who are so dominated have no recourse. By obedience to the artificial man the individual hopes to receive protection in the form of law as internal to the state, as well as defense from invasion from other states. Hobbes knows one thing: that man naturally makes war and also naturally needs peace. He says: “The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them.”10 In “The Piety of Hobbes,” a companion essay to Dewey’s, Herbert W. Schneider says: “The chief point, however, of this study of Hobbes as a person is to describe his piety and ‘true religion.’ He was clearly an orthodox Christian and, far from being an atheist, was devout.”11 Part 3 of Leviathan is devoted to biblical interpretation directed to the conception of a Christian commonwealth. Hobbes says: “The Church, if it be one person, is the same thing with a Common-wealth of Christians; called a Common-wealth, because it consisteth of men united in one person, their Soveraign; and a Church because it consisteth in Christian men, united in one Christian Soveraign.”

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An ecclesiastical commonwealth is exactly parallel to a civil commonwealth. Hobbes says: “But if the Church be not one person, then it hath no authority at all.”12 The two commonwealths come together in the body politic, which appears in the frontispiece as the artificial man. The sword and the crosier are joined in the crown. The body politic is man-made, that is, the artificial Leviathan that is to be feared, but that has no fear. The meaning of Leviathan rests on its relation to the book of Job. It is why Hobbes gives his book the title it has and why he heads the frontispiece with reference to it. The theme of the book of Job is the obedient individual’s relation to the immortal power of God. Hobbes’s intention in Leviathan is to rewrite the book of Job for the gentile nations, for the modern individual subject. The ancient Hebrews could speak directly to God. The Lord appears to Job in a whirlwind and says: “I will question you, and you shall declare to me.”13 They engage in dialogue. God reminds Job of the vastness of divine power that is joined with the vastness of divine wisdom. Ultimately the Lord faces Job with the power of nature itself, in the form of Leviathan, and over which only God has domain. Job then knows that man is not the measure of all things and that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.14 The Leviathan for the gentiles is not nature. The rise of modern science has altered the relation of man to himself and to man’s ability to command power over the natural world. But the moderns, unlike the ancients, face in the commonwealth “that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence.”15 Hobbes’s concern above all is the individual subject, who is, as such, powerless against the multitude that is the state. His purpose for the whole book is ultimately to convey advice on how to live within the state that is not the individual writ large but the multitude formed as the body politic. It matters not whether its government is a democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy.16 The political subject is a modern Job. It is important for Hobbes to speak normatively about the state and how the affairs of ruling and right should be accomplished. Even if his work is initially a city in speech, it is intended to be a science that can be applied. We might say that Hobbes moves between man as he should be and man as he actually is, between Plato and Tacitus. Hobbes knows that equality is an ideal. In the state of nature there is no equality. The stronger dominate at will; life for the weaker certainly is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”17 But once the state of nature is surmounted, the covenant accomplished, the problem emerges that Hobbes states in part 2: “This question, Why Evill men often Prosper, and Good men suffer Adversity.”18 He says this is the problem that governs the book of Job and he

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reiterates this question in his biblical interpretation in part 3.19 One form of government may provide better conditions for its subjects than another, but, regardless, this condition of inequity persists universally in human affairs. There is no known political solution for it, just as there is no resolution of Job’s afflictions through the arguments of his friends who arrive to offer advice. No action by any state will fully eliminate it. This is the human condition itself. Hobbes knew this to be a permanent feature of life in the body politic as well as in the state of nature.20 The frontispiece stands as a constant reminder that the sovereign is the body politic of which the civil is only part. As Hobbes says in his introduction: “The Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul” of the whole which is “this Body Politique.”21 The artificial man balances the sword in one hand with the crosier in the other. Hobbes’s unstated advice is that, as subject to the body politic, the individual must have the patience of Job. This patience is the only way the individual can confront the fact that the wicked often prosper. In the first chapter of the book of Job the Lord asks Satan where he has come from. Satan answers: “From going to and fro on the earth and from walking up and down on it.” God allows Satan to test the piety of Job, saying to Satan: “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”22 The individual can expect the state to protect his life, or as Hobbes claims, the individual has a right, if possible, to seek another sovereign. Even if, as Hobbes says in the Art of Rhetoric, “they that fear not are: such as expect not evil; or not now; or not this; or not from these. And therefore men fear little in prosperity.”23 Even if the state provides prosperity, it cannot guarantee the individual will not fall prey to the power of the kingdom of darkness, which Hobbes says—at the beginning of part 4 of Leviathan—is real. “Besides these Soveraign Powers, Divine, and Humane, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another Power, namely, that of the Rulers of the Darknesse of this world, the Kingdom of Satan, and the Principality of Beelzebub over Daemons.”24 Against the presence of this kingdom, the individual can only seek the protection of the ecclesiastical commonwealth, the church. The gentiles have no direct access to the Lord as did the ancient Hebrews. Without the ecclesiastical commonwealth the individual is left helpless to confront the power of darkness. Man is not the measure of all things and cannot simply survive with only the protection of the artificial man of the civil commonwealth. Any prosperity gained can disappear as quickly as does Job’s, by means of “a Confederacy of Deceivers, that to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour by dark, and erroneous Doctrines, to extinguish in them

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the Light, both of Nature and of the Gospell; and so to dis-prepare them for the Kingdome of God to come.”25 All this Hobbes knows, and it is why his book has four parts. Hobbes’s work, when understood, allows us to accept the human condition by means of a stoic piety. This is the lesson Hobbes’s book teaches. It must be read as a whole, guided by the image of the whole of the frontispiece. In addition to its purpose for the survival of the individual, it contains a science of government. But the advice it contains for individual prudence is its practice, and its ultimate value. Hobbes’s aim should not to be overlooked, as it has been in all the critical literature known to me.26 Leviathan shows us that politics is not ethics. When politics is assigned the duty to resolve questions of proper conduct among individuals the private sphere of individual life disappears. Political principles concern the use of power. Ethical principles concern decorum. How one individual is to act in relation to another cannot be learned by the study of politics. Central to ethics is the idea of friendship. Friendship has no place in politics. Leviathan governs by unstated fear, the fear that the individual rightly has of political power. The kingdom of darkness comes in disguises. To believe that somehow the individual can look to the state, to the body politic, to discover how to live is both foolish and dangerous. It removes the power of judgment and dignity from the individual. The individual abides by the laws of the state in order to achieve a means of conduct that is determined not politically but by the cardinal virtues of courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice. To convert the idea of justice as a rational standard that is more than both the individual and the state, into social justice, is to equate justice with the desires of whatever body politic holds power or aspires to hold power. The world of the individual disappears into the mass of the body politic. Such justice is simply a new Leviathan. The independence of the individual is then foregone. Correct reason is dissolved into the passions of the new body politic. The individual must once again rely on the patience of Job. In “A Review and Conclusion” to Leviathan Hobbes expresses a warning: “There is nothing I distrust more than my Elocution.”27 But he says, despite how he may have made his case: “All Truth of Doctrine dependeth either upon Reason or upon Scripture.”28 He says there is nothing in his whole discourse so far as he can perceive that is “contrary either to the Word of God, or to good Manners, or to the disturbance of the Publique Tranquillity.”29 Hobbes’s conclusion calls to mind the prefatory declaration of Hugo Grotius’s De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625): “If I have said any thing contrary either to

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Piety, or to good Manners, or to Holy Scripture, or to the Consent of the Christian Church, or to any Kind of Truth, let it be as if unsaid.”30

Vico: The Donna Metafisica In 1730 Vico published Cinque libri di Giambattista Vico de’ principj d’una scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Five Books of Giambattista Vico of the Principles of a New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations). This second edition was a substantial revision of the 1725 edition, known as the Scienza nuova prima. The 1730 edition, when taken together with a third edition Vico was revising in 1744, the year of his death, is called the Scienza nuova seconda.31 While the 1730 edition was in press, Vico decided to commission an emblematic engraving or Dipintura to appear opposite the title page, and to write a commentary on the significance of the items or hieroglyphs depicted to serve as an introduction to the “Idea of the Work.” The picture was done by the sculptor, architect, and painter Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1681–1750), and the engraving was made by the prominent engraver Antonio Baldi (1692–ca. 1773).32 Vico begins his explanation by referring the reader to the Tabula of Cebes: “What Cebes the Theban made of Morals, we give here to view a Tablet of Civil things; which will serve the Reader to conceive the Idea of this Work before reading it, and to bring it back most easily to memory with the aid of the imagination after having read it.”33 This is the only reference Vico makes in the Scienza nuova to Cebes or to the Tablet attributed to him. The sixteenth-century humanists, as well as scholars through the end of the eighteenth century, believed the Tablet to be the work of Cebes, the Pythagorean and student of Philolaus, who, along with Simmias, appears in Plato’s Phaedo, discussing the immortality of the soul with Socrates, on the day of Socrates’ death. One source for this view is that Diogenes Laertius lists a Tablet as one of three dialogues authored by Cebes of Thebes (2.16.125). The Tablet, however, was most likely the production of a first-century A.D. author, writing in Koine Greek, making it a Hellenistic work. It may be that Cebes the Theban was thought to be the originator of the work, not because he composed it but because its basic content was thought to have derived from him. Indeed, the narrator of the dialogue begins by saying that the creator of the Tablet was a Pythagorean.34 The Tablet was translated in the sixteenth century into Latin as well as most European languages.35 The Tablet is encountered by a group of visitors to the temple of Cronus, but they are unable to discern its meaning. They have the good fortune to

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meet an old man who had learned from its creator the fable that explains the picture. He offers to relate it to the visitors, who are immediately eager to hear it. Then he warns them that the explanation carries with it an element of danger. “If you pay attention and understand what is said, you will be wise and happy.” But “if, on the other hand, you do not, you will become foolish, unhappy, sullen, and stupid, and you will fare badly in life.”36 The danger is analogous to the fate of those who confront the riddle of the Sphinx. Those who failed to understand the riddle were destroyed. The visitors, like any and all readers of the Tablet, decide to assume the risk in the hope that their careful attention will serve them well. The picture on the Tablet is one of a mass of people proceeding upward in circular enclosures and through various gates. It is a fable of the difference between true and false education (paideia). Those who finally reach true education acquire all the virtues and wisdom that generate happiness. Those who are distracted by immediate gratifications embrace lives of deceit and meaningless luxury that end in misfortune. On hearing the story, those who are able to learn the via virtutis that Cebes and the ancients learned from Socrates avoid the danger. Did Vico, in his citation of the Tablet of Cebes, intend that his table of civil things should be understood to carry a similar danger? Indeed, he did, at least as he explains the image of the Dipintura in the 1730 edition. Once Vico has explained the meanings of the hieroglyphs and principles of his new science in completely positive terms, he turns by way of conclusion to invert the meaning of each to its opposite.37 He says the reader will then look in horror on what is depicted. The female figure of metaphysic, which reflects the divine light of providence and surmounts the globe above the world of nature, will now be covered in shadows and will teach the doctrine of the blind chance (cieco caso) of Epicurus or the deaf necessity (sorda necessità) of the Stoics, which is represented in modern thought by John Locke and Benedict Spinoza. All the other hieroglyphs become grotesque versions of themselves, as blind chance and deaf necessity become grotesque replacements for the metaphysics of providence (provvidenza). Vico’s meaning is clear: if our highest efforts of thought are pushed aside by the metaphysic of Epicureanism or Stoicism, we will have no possibility to attain civic wisdom, to learn the via civitatis that the ancients learned from Socrates. In his explanation of the Dipintura in both the 1730 and the 1744 editions of the Scienza nuova Vico systematically assigns a meaning to each of the hieroglyphs, indicating how they are involved in the principles of his science of the common nature of the nations. The last hieroglyph upon which he

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comments is the caduceus of Mercury. But he makes no comment on the winged cap that, in the Dipintura of 1730, rests against the pediment of the statue of Homer, and in the 1744 drawing is placed in the foreground, near the pediment. In his discussion of “poetic politics” as a branch of “poetic wisdom,” Vico identifies Mercury with Thoth of the Egyptians. Thoth is the lawgiver, who presides over commerce among nations.38 Mercury is the bringer of order into what is disordered. Vico, as author of the Scienza nuova, is Mercury. The winged cap in the Dipintura is Vico’s cap, and it is the cap of the reader who properly meditates the truth of this science. Its wings are analogous to those on the temples of the Donna Metafisica, who reflects the divine light onto the statue of Homer. When Vico turns from his description of the last hieroglyph, or Mercury, he asserts that “this new science is thus a metaphysics meditating by the light of divine providence the common nature of the nations.”39 Vico says the crack at the base of the statue of Homer signifies the discovery that the true Homer is the Greek people themselves.40 Vico’s winged cap, placed against or near the statue of the true Homer, symbolizes Vico’s discovery that the origin of human society is evident from the fact that the first gentile peoples spoke in “poetic characters.” Vico says: “This discovery is the master key of this Science.”41 The discovery of the speech of poetic characters or “imaginative universals” (universali fantastici) made possible the discovery of the “true Homer.” Vico is the bringer of order into history, with his discovery of “ideal eternal history” (storia ideal eterna). He accomplishes this order by having philosophy undertake to examine philology. The deeds, languages, and laws of peoples at war and in peace are subjected to universal principles of explanation, such that the Roman law of ius gentium (law that is natural and common to all peoples) becomes a law of Vico’s three ages, which each nation in the world of nations undergoes in its own development—an age of gods, of heroes, and of humans. It is this sense of ideal eternal history that Vico places against the conceptions of the basis of society of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists and through which Vico formulates a science of history to complement the science of nature of Bacon and Galileo. The title of Vico’s work is intended to recall, for the reader, Galileo’s Dialoghi delle nuove scienze and Bacon’s Novum Organum. The natural-law theorists, Grotius, Pufendorf, Selden, and Hobbes, are unable to formulate an adequate science of politics because they fail to understand that such a science presupposes a science of history and that a science of history must be based on a doctrine of providence. As Max Fisch points out, “In the Latin version of the Leviathan (1668) [the version

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Vico would have read], the definitive statement of his political theory, he [Hobbes] is ready to say curtly that ‘history is divided into natural and civil, neither of which pertains to our subject.’”42 Since Hobbes has no philosophy of history he cannot speak with certainty concerning the origin of human society. Hobbes presents his state of nature, of the possibility of “a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man” as a hypothesis extrapolated from the fact that people lock their doors and chests to protect themselves and their property from others.43 Hobbes says: “It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world.” He goes on to say that such a state might exist among savage peoples, such as those in America. “But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another,” Hobbes says war is always present as a fact and as a threat between “Kings and Persons of Soveraigne authority.”44 Hobbes and natural-law theory generally have nothing to tell us concerning how human society arises in time and develops from a point of origin. Hobbes has no genetic account. For Vico, every gentile nation has a birth (nazione, from nascita, “birth”), and lives a life. This life is a natural course of rise and fall, as Vico makes clear in one of his most important axioms in the Scienza nuova (1744): “Men first feel necessity, then seek utility, next turn to comfort, even further delight themselves with pleasure, hence dissolve into luxury, and finally go mad and squander their substance.”45 This axiom, which turns the three ages of Vico’s ideal eternal history into three pairs of substages, is not progressive, but it is providential. Each nation undergoes a corso and then a ricorso in which it attempts to establish an eternal, natural republic, such as Plato projects in the Republic, as ordained by providence. But each nation fails, finding itself in an age of barbarism, which “with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.”46 It is a state comparable to Dante’s lowest region of the Inferno. Each nation in both its corso and its ricorso fails to achieve the divine wisdom and establish the principles of an eternal republic. As Hobbes places the individual in relation to the power of the body politic, Vico places the individual in relation to the providential order of history. Any event, like history itself, has a birth, rise, and fall. This pattern is the key to prudence. The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini says, in his Ricordi: “All that which has been in the past and is at present will be again in the future. But both the names and the appearances of things change, so that he who does not have a good eye will not recognize them. Nor will he know

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how to grasp a norm of conduct or make a judgment by means of observation.”47 The good eye (buono occhio) is the ability to see the commonalities in human events over time, to see the common nature of the nations as well as the common nature of particular human affairs. Vico replaces the study of great figures in history as the models of prudence with the study of the providential order of history itself as the model. All in human experience functions by corso e ricorso. The Dipintura allows the reader to see the hieroglyphs that embody the commonalities of all nations. They become the keys to memory. In the discussion of the true Homer, Vico describes memory in terms analogous to those of the first sentence of the Scienza nuova. He says: “Memory has three different aspects: it is memory [memoria] in that it remembers things; imagination [fantasia] in that it alters and simulates them; ingenuity [ingegno] in that it puts them in order and arrangement.”48 Vico says that for these reasons Memory was called the Mother of the Muses. Vico’s science is a theater of memory in which the three worlds that the Dipintura presents are brought together and maintained together. “All the hieroglyphs visible on the ground denote the world of nations to which men applied themselves before anything else. The globe in the middle represents the world of nature which the physicists later observed. The hieroglyphs above signify the world of minds and God which the metaphysicians finally contemplated.”49 The proof of Vico’s science depends upon the Muses to show what providence has wrought in history—the jurisprudence of the great city of the human race. Vico says: “Indeed, we make bold to affirm that he who meditates [meditare] this Science narrates [narrare] to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be’ [‘dovette, deve, dovrà’].”50 The reader who has given careful attention and is able to accomplish this act of memory, turning the Muses’ power to sing of what was, is, and is to come, into a necessary order of events, “will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties.”51 Even more, “O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.”52 The divine pleasure that Vico promises the proper reader of the Scienza nuova corresponds to that of the auditor who grasps the meaning of true education in the virtues of the Tablet of Cebes. Why did Vico choose the Tablet, and not another work, as his key for the reader? The answer lies in the fact that Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), spent the

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last fifteen months of his life in Naples—from November 1711 to February 1713. He came to Naples in hopes of the climate being beneficial to his failing health. His project was his incomplete Second Characters, which was to be a sequel to his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.53 Shaftesbury’s plan was to put art to ethical use through a method of combining allegorical engravings with a commentary so as to produce a “noble virtuoso scheme” of moral philosophy. He completed such a treatment of the “Judgment of Hercules,” based on its presence in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and intended to do so in regard to the Tabula of Cebes. Left at his death was the text of a translation from Greek of the Tablet, not in his own hand but likely what he dictated.54 Seventeen years later, in search of a way to introduce the second edition of his Scienza nuova, Vico adopted Shaftesbury’s noble scheme. Vico must have intended the Donna Metafisica, the centerpiece of the Dipintura, to cause the reader to recall the most famous female figure in the history of philosophy—Philosophia, or Lady Philosophy—who appears to Boethius in his prison cell at the beginning of the Consolatio.55 Philosophia immediately banishes the Muses of poetry, who have been present in Boethius’s cell, because they play upon the passions rather than reason. She says: “Leave him to my Muses” (1.1.40). But in the Cratylus, Vico’s favorite dialogue, Plato says the Muses “seem to have derived their name from their eager desire [mo¯sthai] to investigate and do philosophy” (406a). This sense of the Muses might be close to what Philosophia would accept. Vico calls Boethius “Latino Platone” and “il Platon cristiano.”56 As Philosophia introduces herself to Boethius, she tells him that his plight in prison is not the first time wisdom has been attacked, referring to the condemnation of Socrates by the Athenians. She says: “And after Socrates the crowd of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest strove as far as they could to seize his legacy, carrying me off protesting and struggling, as if I were part of the booty, tearing my dress, which I wove with my own hands, and then went off with their torn-off shreds, thinking they possessed all of me” (Cons. 1.3.21–28). Vico says that in the Dipintura the convex jewel on the breast of Metaphysic, illuminated by the ray of the eye of divine providence, “denotes the clean and pure heart which metaphysic must have, not dirty or befouled with pride of spirit or vileness of bodily pleasures, by the first of which Zeno was led to put fate, and by the second Epicurus to put chance, in the place of divine providence.”57 The dress worn by Metafisica in the Dipintura is irregular, seeming to symbolize the torn dress described by Philosophia. Metafisica is Mnemosyne, the Mother of the Muses, whose art the reader

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must use to prove the truth of the new science and experience the divine pleasure of the true paideia. In his first published book, the expanded text of his seventh university inaugural oration, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time, 1709), Vico informed the reader of his greatest fear: “In my life I have always had the greatest apprehension of being alone in wisdom; this kind of solitude exposes one to the danger of becoming either a god or a fool.”58 To be alone in wisdom is the fear that all original thinkers share. Later, his Scienza nuova would be the subject of ridicule.59 As an original thinker, Vico could not expect to be understood. His ideas were so far beyond his time, his contemporaries could find no means by which to transpose them into their own terms.

Rousseau: Prometheus and the Satyr As the title page announces, Rousseau’s Discours is in answer to the question “Si le rétablissement des Sciences & des Arts a contribué à épurer les moeurs? [Has the reestablishment of the Sciences & Arts contributed to the purifying of morals?]” posed by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. Facing the title page is Rousseau’s frontispiece, depicting three figures: Prometheus, a nude young man, and a satyr—a god, a human being, and a half human-half beast. Along the bottom edge of the engraving is “Satyre, ne je connois pas [Satyr, you do not know it],” followed by an indication to see page 31.60 Taking up this instruction, the reader finds a footnote to the beginning of the second part of the Discours, explaining the fable the figures depict.61 The frontispiece was the design of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (1713–1789), professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1748. Several years after the publication of the Discours in 1757, Rousseau, reflecting on the frontispiece in a letter, judged it to be “très mal” (very bad).62 I interpret his criticism as both aesthetic and conceptual. Considered as a picture, the figures of the frontispiece are not very interesting. As an emblem embodying an idea in an image the frontispiece is not complex. It oversimplifies Rousseau’s theme. We see Prometheus giving the gift of fire to man unclothed, and the figure of the Satyr, hoping also to receive it—but where is the connection to the Egyptian god Thoth, or to the fate of Prometheus riveted to the Caucasus that Rousseau indicates in his footnote explaining the frontispiece? There is nothing in the picture to suggest these elements.63 In 1752, in his reply to the Réfutation of Claude-Nicolas Lecat, in which Lecat equates Rousseau himself with the Satyr, saying that it represents

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Rousseau’s attachment to natural man, Rousseau took a much more positive attitude toward the frontispiece. Rousseau assigns definite meanings to each of the figures in the frontispiece, to correct Lecat’s distortion. Rousseau implies that the meaning of the frontispiece is obvious, so much so that he must treat readers such as Lecat as children. Rousseau says the torch of Prometheus is the sciences intended to animate the great geniuses (les grands génies) who are attached to them. The Satyr, who sees fire for the first time and wishes to embrace it, represents ordinary men (les hommes vulgaires), who are seduced by the dazzling light of letters so that they indiscreetly give themselves over to the pseudo-study of them. The source of the cry to the Satyr, to avert danger, is the Citizen of Geneva, the term Rousseau uses to identify himself as the author of the Discours, on its title page. Rousseau concludes: “Cette allégorie esˆt jusˆte, belle, j’ose la croire sublime [The allegory is just, beautiful, I hazard to believe it sublime].”64 Rousseau places himself in the frontispiece through the warning, which is a reference to Plutarch’s essay in the Moralia “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” an essay that interested Rousseau throughout his life. Plutarch says: “The Satyr, at his first sight of fire, wished to kiss and embrace it, but Prometheus said, ‘You, goat, will mourn your vanished beard’ for fire burns him who touches it, yet it furnishes light and heat, and is an instrument of every craft for those who have learned to use it” (86.2). The line Plutarch quotes is from Aeschylus’s Prometheus the Fire-Bearer.65 This was the satyr drama affixed to Aeschylus’s treatment of the Prometheus myth. In the satyr play Prometheus brings fire to the Satyrs, who hoped their possession of it would make them more attractive to the Nymphs. In exchange for the gift of the fire, Prometheus received from the Satyrs a jar of evils, which he deposited with his brother, Epimetheus, “warning him never to accept anything from Zeus, but Epimetheus ignored the warning and accepted Pandora.”66 The locus classicus of the Prometheus myth is that told by Plato in the Protagoras (320d–322d). There was a time when the gods existed but mortal beings did not. At the proper moment in the genesis of things, the gods molded the various forms of these beings inside the earth. They did this by blending earth and fire and various compounds. When the gods were ready to bring these beings into the world they put Prometheus and Epimetheus in charge of assigning to each type its particular powers and abilities. Epimetheus begged Prometheus to grant him the privilege of distributing their powers and abilities to the various species, and the agreement was made that, once the distribution was complete, Prometheus would inspect it. Thus allowed, Epimetheus supplied some with strength; those that were weaker he made quick. To some he assigned wings, and to others the means

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to burrow underground. For protection against the weather he gave some thick pelts and hides. He shod some with hooves and gave others claws. He also provided them with various forms of nourishment. Each species was equipped with what was needed for survival. When Epimetheus (whose name means “he who learns only from the event, the heedless”) was finished, Prometheus (whose name means “he who knows in advance, who provides”) saw that all the available powers and abilities had been used up on the nonreasoning animals. The human race had been left entirely unequipped—naked, unshod, and unarmed—and it was already the day that all the animals, including the humans, were to be released from inside the earth into the light. In order to provide the humans with some means of survival, Prometheus stole fire for them from Hephaestus, the divine smith and master of the forge on Lemmos; from Athena he stole wisdom in the practical arts, which was necessary for humans’ use of fire. But he did not provide political wisdom, necessary for living together in societies, for that was kept by Zeus. Humans were the only animals to command the divine power of fire and its use as a means of their existence. Also, they alone among the animals worshipped the gods. Because human beings did not possess the art of politics, Zeus feared they might scatter and be destroyed, unable to form cities. He sent Hermes to distribute equally to all humans the virtue of justice, joined with the proper sense of shame. In Plato’s account, Zeus looks kindly on Prometheus’s act. But in another version, given by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, Zeus is greatly displeased by Prometheus’s theft of this possession of the gods (2.10). Cicero quotes a description from Aeschylus of how Zeus chained Prometheus to the Caucasus and caused an eagle ( Jove’s bird) to come every third day to gnaw his liver, which then grows back, a torture that continues for agelong centuries. It is said that Zeus finally repeals the punishment.67 Whether Zeus acts kindly toward Prometheus’s theft for humanity or is furiously offended, the fact remains that human animals, unlike any of the others, possess the divine power of fire. In the footnote on the frontispiece, cited above, Rousseau compares Prometheus to the Egyptian god Thoth, saying that the Egyptians did not treat Thoth any more favorably than the Greeks did Prometheus. In the Phaedrus Socrates says that Thoth was thought by the Egyptians to be the discoverer of “number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and above all else, writing” (274c–d). Rousseau, in saying that Thoth was treated as badly as was Prometheus, has in mind Socrates’ claim that Thamus or Ammon (identified by the Greeks with Zeus and the

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Egyptians with the sun god, Ra), as the king of the Egyptian gods, declared that the discovery of writing “will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own” (274c–275a). The arts and sciences, in their rise in the oldest civilizations—that of the Egyptians being even older than that of the Greeks—were regarded in both a positive and a negative way. The theme of Plutarch’s “How to Profit by One’s Enemies” is how to turn the negative into the positive. He regards this art as the key to statecraft.68 Plutarch takes his theme from Xenophon’s claim in the Oeconomicus that friends are a kind of wealth but that “enemies too are wealth to anyone who can derive profit from them” (1.15). Plutarch begins by describing a state of nature in which primitives learned not just to protect themselves from wild beasts but to make use of these natural enemies for food and hides. The farmer is able to domesticate animals and generally profit from nature, which otherwise would provide only a hostile environment. It is in this context that Plutarch reminds us through reference to the Satyr that fire can burn and destroy but also furnish light and heat. The wisdom to turn natural processes to the profit of human beings is necessary for their survival. This sense of conversion of negative factors to positive ones can be carried over into social relations, and is the basis of political wisdom. It is the political wisdom that did not originally accompany Prometheus’s gift. Plutarch concludes his essay with the advice that both the failures and the successes of our enemies should not go without being employed to some purpose. We should study “how by guarding against the former we may be better than they, and by imitating the latter no worse” (92F). This advice is what guides Rousseau in the Discours. The idea governing modernity is “progress.” In its name human beings have moved from a natural state of simplicity to a corrupt one of luxury. And “luxury rarely develops without the sciences and arts, and they never develop without it. . . . Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of business and money.”69 In citing the question of the Academy of Dijon in the Confessions, Rousseau alters the phrase “Si le rétablissement des Sciences & des Arts a contribué à épurer les moeurs” to “Si le progrès [progress] des sciences et des arts a contribué à corrompre ou [corrupting or] à épurer les moeurs.”70 The question is whether progress corrupts or purifies morals. The enemies of humankind are those who have pursued the sciences and arts solely as instruments of material improvement of social life and in so

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doing have sought luxury to the exclusion of taste and virtue. In the final sentences of the Discours Rousseau reveals how we may profit by the understanding he has given of these enemies of the human. It should cause us to look to ourselves: “O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls. . . . Are not your principles engraved in all our hearts, and is it not enough in order to learn your laws to commune with oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the passions? That is true philosophy, let us know how to be satisfied with it.”71 Our enemies in their dedication to progress have shown us what false philosophy is, thus we can realize what is “la véritable Philosophie.” Ernst Cassirer says, in his compact treatise Das Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Indeed, the first Discours appears as a rhetorical masterpiece unsurpassed in the whole of Rousseau’s writings. . . . No matter how we feel about it and about the single steps of Rousseau’s argumentation, the truthfulness of Rousseau’s inner sentiment impresses itself upon us in every sentence of the Discours.” Cassirer says that “Rousseau’s ethics [Ethik] resolves itself into this one fundamental idea and feeling [that of the sentences quoted above].”72 Rousseau takes us back to the Socratic question of self-knowledge. It has been left behind, as has the Platonic question that follows from it— how an ideal state based on it can be made actual. In the Phaedrus Socrates tells Phaedrus he has no time to devote to evaluating various knowledge claims. Socrates says: “I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself ” (229e–230a). The warning to the Satyr of the frontispiece is extended to the reader by the epigraph from Horace’s Ars poetica (5.25) that Rousseau employs to introduce the text of the Discours: “Decipimur specie recti” (We are deceived by the semblance of right). Rousseau presents as a general maxim the observation Horace makes of poetry. Poets play on our feelings and cause us to set reason aside through the attraction of their images. The reader who is a citizen, or wishes to be a citizen, as Rousseau says in his last lines, must look to the truthfulness of “conscience in the silence of the passions.” Conscience will direct our reason toward virtue if we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by the appearance of luxury—the result of progress. In the first lines of the Discours Rousseau compares himself to Socrates, saying that its author is “an honorable man who knows nothing and yet does not think any less of himself.”73 Those pursuing luxury put themselves ahead of the gods instead of living in terms of the gods: “Finally, they chased the gods out in order to live in the temples themselves, or at least the temples of the gods were no longer distinguishable from the houses of citizens.”74

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Possessing fire, the means to accomplish all things through the sciences and arts, human beings have no need of the divine. They also have no need of Socrates. As Rousseau says, “Among us, it is true, Socrates would not have drunk hemlock; but he would have drunk from an even more bitter cup: insulting ridicule and scorn a hundred times worse than death.”75 This attitude toward Socratic wisdom causes us to see what has been left behind in modern philosophy. These modern philosophers, Rousseau says, are like “a troop of charlatans, each crying from his own spot on the public square: Come to me, I alone do not deceive.”76 Mentioning only their doctrines, Rousseau has in mind the philosophies of Berkeley, Spinoza, Mandeville, and Hobbes. Rousseau objects in particular to Hobbes’s view of human beings as like wolves who can devour each other with a clear conscience. He also likely intends the reader to recall Lucian’s famous Sale of Philosophies, in which are “put up for sale philosophies of every type and all manner of creeds” (1), now done in modern dress. The profession of the citizen is the pursuit of self-knowledge. Good citizens make the good state. The figure in the frontispiece on which Rousseau makes no explicit comment in his explanatory footnote cited above is the statue-like figure of the human being, the idealized young man. It is not Rousseau, for he identified himself as the Citizen of Geneva, the speaker who warns the Satyr. The human figure is Rousseau’s reader, who understands the true philosophy of conscience. Rousseau’s aim is not to do away with the Promethean gift that makes possible the sciences and arts but to join the sciences and arts to a philosophy of the soul, a philosophy of self-knowledge. In advocating this philosophy Rousseau has one fear, a fear confirmed by the Réfutation that was so quickly issued by Lecat—that he will not be understood. It is the fear that his Discours will be understood as simply critique, thus engendering an endless series of argumentation, instead of a new philosophy that is simply the revival of the true philosophy that offers a true education. Rousseau’s apprehension is captured in his quotation from Ovid’s Tristia: “Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis [Here I am the barbarian, because no one understands me].” It is placed on the title page, just below Rousseau’s identity as the Citizen of Geneva. Ovid, the citizen of Rome, poet and speaker of Latin, ordered into exile at Tomis on the Black Sea, found himself as if a barbarian, in a world of full-blooded barbarians dressed in skins, with long hair and beards, who went about armed. Ovid reports: “I must make myself understood by gestures. . . . The Getae laugh stupidly at Latin words, and in my presence they often talk maliciously about me” (5.10.35–39). Ovid says that they even think he may be poking fun at them by speaking Latin, and this reaction can put him in danger.

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Rousseau realizes that when one finds oneself in such a position there is very little one can do. One cannot be what one is not. One can only hope to overcome the exile by, if necessary, remaining in obscurity along with common men (hommes vulgaires).77 This is also the term that Rousseau uses, in his reply to Lecat, to identify the role of the Satyr in the frontispiece. The Satyr is said to be easily seduced by the gift of Prometheus. Rousseau knows that his philosophy of self-knowledge and conscience will not be accepted or even understood by the savants and the modern philosophers he cites. He is left with the possibility that some of the hommes vulgaires, abandoning their indiscreet studies to turn within themselves, will turn to what they really are—those âmes simples—in whom Rousseau must largely place the reception of his work. His enemies can serve only as subjects of study. His enemies are his allies, in this sense. Rousseau’s audience contains the many and the few. The few are those who know and are in obscurity or partial obscurity as ordinary citizens who, like Rousseau, are the descendants of Socratic thinking. The many are those who do not know and whose spokesman is Lecat. But between the many and the few are those who can come to know when they encounter those who know. These are the readers who are symbolized in the center of the frontispiece, and on whom Rousseau must rely.

The Art of Reading and the Art of Memory The practice of beginning a work with an engraved frontispiece facing the title page that captures the theme of the work in a master image had its origin in the Renaissance emblem tradition and lasted into the eighteenth century.78 The great philosophical works of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those of Kant and Hegel, do not continue this tradition. Their readers are left to form an image from the text itself. Kant provides such an image in the blessed island of the pure understanding, the land of truth (das Land der Wahrheit), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, with the deceptive appearance of further shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer, which was discussed in chapter 6.79 In Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes the reader encounters its image of a gallery of pictures (eine Galerie von Bildern), which refers to the succession of stages of Geist that comprise the science of the experience of consciousness, discussed in chapter 4. This gallery is coupled with Hegel’s final image, taken from the lines of Schiller’s poem Die Freundschaft (Friendship), with which Hegel ends his work, directing the reader’s attention to how the stages of Geist stream forth into divine infinitude.80

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Vico describes the art of reading (as he devised it for his own education as an autodidact).81 He advocates dialectically pairing works of the ancients with those of the moderns. Vico read the writers of the Tuscan tongue, paired with the Latins: Boccaccio with Cicero, Dante with Virgil, and Petrarca with Horace. The ability to think dialectically is the most difficult to acquire—to regard the object both as what it is and as what it is not. The ancients are not the moderns, or the reverse, but both together are a harmony. Thought may move freely from one to the other and seek a balance between them, to grasp the truth that is in each. They then form a self-differentiated whole. The great mistake is to dismiss one in favor of the other. Then the whole is lost, which is really the proper object of thought. The goal of thought is the internal harmony that lies within the whole. Once the reader pairs ancient works with those of the moderns, a natural dialectic of thought is established that can direct the reader’s own production of thought. Education is memory. It forms an encyclo-paideia, in which thought is a circle, always coming back upon itself. In memory what is learned never stands sui generis. The mind governed by memory is a treasure house of topics. Its topics are commonplaces from which the mind can draw forth what is needed to illuminate what it countenances. The mind becomes erudite by storing up what is read as topics. In the matter of writing, Vico says, we can do no better than to follow Horace: “Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons [Of good writing the source and font is wisdom].”82 Wisdom, or correct reasoning, what in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says is necessary for virtue (orthos logos, 2.2), can be learned only from works that illustrate it and actions that embody it. Reading is the basis of both logic and ethics. Thought so formed is in turn the basis of good writing. It is true education. As a device for reading, the frontispiece not only directs the reader to the work as a whole but impresses this whole on memory so the reader can easily recall the work. A concentration on the composition of the frontispiece will also suggest to the reader the internal relations and transitions of the theme of the work. The language of the forms that the frontispiece presents are further realized by the author’s own language in the text. The image of the frontispiece stands as a guide to the author’s intentions. To read is not simply to follow the ins and outs of a text, as if no one wrote it. To read is continually to interpret what the author intends to say. Only in this way do we enter a text. Frontispieces are not as such works of art. They may be artistic, but their purpose is not aesthetic. Nor is a frontispiece intended simply as decoration to make the work more attractive. It has nothing in common with the graphics

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employed on modern book covers, which are the products of their publishers. Rightly understood, the frontispiece is sublime, or intended to be sublime. Sublimity is “synthesis”—the arrangement of words such that they form a whole. This whole is given to the reader in a single moment when the reader grasps the author’s meaning. Longinus says: “A well-timed flash of sublimity scatters everything before it like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke” (1.4). A synthesis of this kind is like a “melody in words: these words must be a part of man’s nature, that reach not only the ears but the soul” (39.3). No frontispiece accomplishes such a synthesis for a work, but it is an aid to it because it places all of the work in a single image. It pulls meanings together like an invincible enthymeme. This is because the frontispiece is sublime; it is not a mere convention. It pulls the astute reader into the essence of the work. The reader is provided with a glimpse into the work’s inner form (endon eidos), which, as Plotinus claims, is to grasp something as “without parts but appearing in many parts” (1.6.3). No frontispiece can take the reader fully into a work’s inner form—the point at which the beauty of the author’s thought resides. Only the complete work can do that. The frontispiece, meditated upon in connection with the work, places the work in the reader’s imagination, and hence in memory. And so the work becomes part of the reader’s education.

Figure 1.

Frontispiece of Bacon, Instauratio Magna (1620)

Figure 2.

Frontispiece of Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Figure 3. Title page of Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Figure 4. Frontispiece of Vico, La scienza nuova 1730 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Figure 5.

Frontispiece of Rousseau, Discours (1750)

Figure 6. Title page of Rousseau, Discours (1750)

Epilogue

The rhetorical sense of philosophy suggests that we regard any philosophical work as an oration directed to the reader. Of the three kinds of oratory—epideictic, deliberative, and forensic— philosophical speech most resembles forensic. Epideictic is a speech of praise or blame, often connected to ceremony. Deliberative is a speech typical of legislative bodies and of politics. Forensic speech is that of the law courts. It is that by which a case is made, a cause pursued. The author of a philosophical work intends to convince the reader of the truth of what is said. In philosophical education, students are most often taught to seek out the arguments in a work. But all arguments presuppose a narrative in which the arguments stand. If a philosophical work is approached in rhetorical terms, the reader should look for the images or metaphors upon which the thought depends. In reading Descartes, for example, attention must be given to the metaphor of light, and to the “light of nature,” and to the metaphor of an “Archimedean point.” Along with the images, the reader must bring forth the questions that are imbedded in the text. In some cases these questions are stated directly, as, for example, Kant’s question “How is metaphysics possible?” Connected to this question is the image of the “transcendental turn.” Image and question go hand in hand, as in Socrates’ speech, when he moves from the elenchos to the “likely story.” The image often sets the stage 137

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for the question and the argument. To view philosophical works in this manner is to consider their narratives as containing an internal dialectic that the reader must grasp in order to comprehend them. The thought of the author of the work is caught up in this dialectic, and the author intends to transmit it to the reader. The reader will understand the work when the reader can remake its dialectic, grasp its inner form. The author’s oration is then effective. In this way the reader discovers the meaning of the work and, perhaps, its truth. Quintilian, in his work on the orator’s education, says that the orator has three aims—to instruct, to delight, and to move (Inst. 3.5). Quintilian transposes to oratory the same aims that Horace says are those of poets (A.p. 333). If we regard philosophy as a kind of oratory, we may say that philosophy has these aims. They are the aims of the complete speech. Thought is put into words to instruct, to inform the reader of the nature of a topic—the ultimate topic of philosophy being the nature of things. Such instruction, if done with skill, has the potential to delight, in the sense that contemplation is in itself a delight to the mind and spirit. Although philosophy is the pursuit of truth for its own sake, not for the acquisition of honor or wealth, the pursuit has the power to move. To grasp to an extent the nature of things is the necessary condition of prudence. Theoretical wisdom is the basis of practical wisdom. We can act well only when we can think well. The composition of a written oration and of a work of philosophy both depend on the same principles—invention (inventio), disposition (dispositio), and elocution (elocutio). Invention involves securing the materials that will comprise the content of the work. It requires the art of topics, whereby the lines of argument appropriate to the subject are found. The art of topics requires the discovery of the middle terms from which to draw forth syllogisms. The art of criticism comes into play, in choosing among the topics from which to expound the subject. Disposition is the overall plan of development or arrangement of the issues. In general terms, it provides form for the content amassed by invention. Elocution is the expression in the work of what has been collected and ordered in thought. It involves the great tropes of metaphor and irony and the various figures of thought and speech. These principles of composition imply an art of reading any written work. The reader may move through the work three times. The first time is to grasp the composition as a whole, to apprehend its nature and subject. The second time is to note the transitions and sequence of thought, to think through the work, as did its author. The third time is to collect the fine turns of thought and expression, to note how the ideas of the work are formulated in language. Each work has its own manner of speech. Without the

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fulfillment of these rhetorical principles, no work of philosophy can come together as a whole. They show the interdependence of the rhetorical and the philosophical. The rhetorical sense of philosophy depends on the recognition that philosophy, like poetry, is a linguistic art. Poetry originates in the image and is maintained through the image. The world is first formed by the power of speech to present to the mind what is immediately before the mind. The result is a mixture of objects and images in an ongoing movement. The world is expressed as it is felt. Feeling is a first way of thinking that develops through the language of the image. As the mixture of word and object separates, speech acquires the power to represent the world, not simply to present it. Sensation becomes perception. Words correspond to objects, and the knower gains mental distance from the known. The image is not lost. It becomes an image of something. Language as the medium of representation classifies the objects to which words refer in terms of genus and species. The world becomes an order of things that is embodied in the grammatical structure of language. The power of speech to represent the world allows the mind to pass to a level of reflection in which the mind takes its own activity as an object. Meaning is not tied to the representation of the world. The power of speech to reflect allows the mind to bring forth a distinction between culture and nature. There is the self-developing world of the knower and the natural world of the known. The power of reflection makes possible theoretical language. Thought as theory introduces alternative ways to conceive the object. Theoretical thought achieved through reflection makes possible speculation. The power of speech to direct the mind to see beyond what is evident is the foundation of philosophy. Speculation allows the mind to move from the image, the object, and the thought of theory to the idea. Philosophy not only reflects theoretically on the nature of things, as does science; philosophy also takes thought beyond language. Philosophy aims at the speech of the whole that will embody the True as the whole. The thought of the whole is always beyond what can be put into words. Thought and the vision of the whole exceed language. This vision moves philosophy forward. Every philosophy has its own use of language, its own rhetoric. Once the reader of philosophical works realizes that philosophy is a linguistic art, philosophy and rhetoric are joined, as Aristotle says—as strophe and antistrophe.

Notes

1. Philosophical Thinking

1. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:2416–17. 2. Anton-Hermann Chroust, Aristotle: Protepticus, A Reconstruction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964). See also Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), chap. 4. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 152; James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage, 1986), 411. 4. Derrida, “Violence,” 153. 5. Chroust, Aristotle, xvii. 6. Chroust, Aristotle, 3. 7. Chroust, Aristotle, 48–49. 8. Chroust, Aristotle, 24. 9. Chroust, Aristotle, 2–3. 10. George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, ed. Colin M. Turbayne (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 5. 11. Berkeley, Dialogues, 52. 12. On Hegel’s criticism of phrenology, see Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), chap. 7. 13. A. C. Ewing, The Idealist Tradition from Berkeley to Blanshard (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). 14. George Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York: Random House, 1939), 538–39. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 125–26; Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 63. 16. Hegel, Phenomenology, 126; Phänomenologie, 63–64. 17. Hegel, Phenomenology, 125; Phänomenologie, 63. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, “Wer denkt abstract?,” in vol. 2 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 575. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, “Das älteste Systemprogram des deutschen Idealismus,” in vol. 1 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 234–36. 20. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), x.

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21. Bradley, Appearance, ix–x. 22. Bradley, Appearance, 3. 23. Bradley, Appearance, 3. 24. Bradley, Appearance, 3. 25. Bradley, Appearance, 3–4. 26. Bradley, Appearance, 4. 27. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), par. 69. 2. Philosophy and the Muses

1. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 1. 2. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), par. 416. 3. Vico, New Science, par. 819 (my trans.). 4. Eva Ziesche, “Unbekannte Manuskripte aus der Jenaer und Nürnberger Zeit im Berliner Hegel-Nachlass,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 29 (1975): 430–44. For a partial translation of Hegel’s fragment, see Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 36–37. 5. Giuseppe Ungaretti, in a lecture on Vico in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1937. See Ungaretti, Vite d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 345. 6. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 3.12 and 583.7. On Joyce and philosophy, see Donald Phillip Verene, James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 7. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage, 1986), 20. 8. English text for the quotations here and following is from Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). 9. Donald Phillip Verene, “Vichian Moral Philosophy: Prudence as Jurisprudence,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 83 (2008): 1107–30. 3. Philosophy and Eloquence

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1958), 7. 2. Giambattista Vico, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 87. 3. Vico, “Academies,” 86. 4. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), par. 364. 5. Vico, Study Methods, 77. 6. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, trans. John Michael Krois and Azizeh Azodi (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). 7. Vico, New Science, par. 314.

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8. Grassi, Rhetoric, chap. 2. 9. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 185. 10. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), 2:146. 11. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:114. 12. Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 3rd ed. (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1868), 2:537 and n, does not find this statement in Descartes, but says it is similar to reports by Sorbière, Relations, lettres, et discours de M. de Sorbière sur diverses matières curieuses (Paris, 1660) and Adrein Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1691). 13. Vico, Study Methods, 78. 14. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser: Contenant outre les règles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles, propres à former le jugement, ed. P. Clair and F. Girbal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 299 (my trans.). 15. Arnaud and Nicole, La logique, 299–300 (my trans.). 16. Vico, Study Methods, 15. 17. Vico, New Science, pars. 145, 162, 355, and 542. 18. Lane Cooper, ed. and trans., The Rhetoric of Aristotle (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1960), xxiii. 19. Vico, New Science, par. 142. 20. Grassi, Rhetoric, 34. 21. For the connection between the philosophical doctrine of reflection and the science of optics, see Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 22. Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), chap. 9. 23. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971), 2:504 (my trans.). 24. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 214. 25. Michèle Le Doeuff, Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 1. 26. Donald Phillip Verene, Speculative Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), chap. 3. 27. Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), chap. 5. 28. Vico, New Science, par. 408. 4. Philosophical Style

1. H. B. Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 23–25; Cicero, Tusc. 5.3.7; and Diogenes Laertius 8.8. 2. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 135.

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3. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, 135. 4. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 183. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 99. 6. Kant, Judgement, 100. 7. Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975), 320–21. 8. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), par. 51. 9. Vico, New Science, par. 205. 10. Vico, New Science, par. 220. 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), par. 61. 12. Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 57. 13. Hegel, Phenomenology, par. 62. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1958), 504. 15. Hegel, Phenomenology, par. 62. 16. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 49–50. 17. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 7 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 28 (my trans.). 18. Ernst Bloch, “Zerstörte Sprache—zerstörte Kultur,” in Deutsche Literatur in Exil 1933–1945: Texte und Dokumente, ed. Michael Winkler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979), 353–54 (my trans.). 19. Bertolt Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1961), 108–11. For a translation of Brecht’s comments, see Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 119–20. 5. The Rhetoric of Self-Discourse

1. William James, The Principles of Psychology [the long course] (1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 1:299. 2. James, Principles, 1:336. 3. James, Principles, 1:372–73. 4. James, Principles, 1:400. 5. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1:109. 6. Descartes is literally seated “dans un poële.” He is not simply in a “stoveheated room.” For an explanation of a poële, see Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 22–23. 7. René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode & Essais, vol. 6 of Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 4 (my trans.).

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8. Descartes, Discours, 7 (my trans.). 9. Descartes, Discours, 7 (my trans.). 10. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), 155–57. 11. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in Writings, 337–38. 12. Descartes, Discourse, in Philosophical Writings, 1:111. 13. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, 1:186. 14. Descartes, Correspondence, in Philosophical Writings, 3:256–73. 15. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, 2:3. 16. Descartes, Meditations, 2:4. 17. Descartes, Meditations, 2:15. 18. Descartes, Meditations, 2:19. 19. Descartes, Correspondance, vol. 3 of Oeuvres, 247–48 (my trans.). 20. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 821–22; Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958), 3:321. 21. Greek Mathematics, trans. Ivor Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2:21. 22. Descartes to Huygens, December 3, 1637, quoted in Jack Rochford Vrooman, René Descartes: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1970), 142. 23. Quoted in G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978), 95; Descartes, vol. 11 of Oeuvres, 671. 24. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 132 and 134; Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo, in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 1:23 and 26. 25. Paul Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIe siècle de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Librairie Arthine Fayard, 1963), 43–44 (my trans.). 26. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Drawn Out from the Origins of the Latin Language [Latin and English opposed texts], trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 17. 27. Vico, Ancient Wisdom, 31. 28. Vico, Ancient Wisdom, 33. 29. For full details, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the “Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself ” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), chap. 2. 30. Max Harold Fisch, “Preface,” in Vico, Autobiography, v. 31. Giambattista Vico, L’autobiografia, il carteggio e le poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, 2nd rev. ed., vol. 5 of Opere di G. B. Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 327. 32. Quoted in the introduction to Vico, Autobiography, 5. 33. Vico, Autobiography, 113. 34. Vico, Autobiography, 182. 35. For a full account of Vico’s fable, see Verene, New Art, chap. 5. 36. See the reproduction of the entry in Verene, New Art, 178. 37. Phaedrus 3.9; Vico, Autobiography, 199–200.

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38. Vico, Autobiography, 199. 39. Giambattista Vico, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1990), 90. 40. Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 91–125. 41. Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 42. Montaigne, Essays, 2. 43. Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1625), in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 44. Francesco Petrarca, “On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 47. 45. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 223–25. 46. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1990), 190–98. 47. Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 2:929. 48. Montaigne, “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” in Essays, 56. 49. Montaigne, “To philosophize,” 57. 50. Montaigne, “To philosophize,” 60. 51. Montaigne, “To philosophize,” 62. 52. Montaigne, “Of experience,” in Essays, 857. 53. Marvin Lowenthal, The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne (1935; New York: Vintage, 1956), 290–91. 54. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 1. 55. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1958), 10–11. 56. See H. B. Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), chap. 2. 57. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29–30. 58. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–22. 6. The Rhetoric of Absolute Thought

1. Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert Latta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898), 265. 2. Leibniz, Monadology, 267. 3. Leibniz, Monadology, 266. 4. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 43. 5. Whitehead, Process, 524. 6. Whitehead, Process, 522.

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7. Whitehead, Process, 524. 8. Whitehead, Process, 521. 9. Whitehead, Process, 532. 10. Whitehead, Process, 526. 11. R. G. Collingwoood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 3. 12. John Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), x. 13. Findlay, Plato, xi. 14. Findlay, Plato, xi. 15. Quoted by Konrad Gaiser, “Plato’s Enigmatic Lecture ‘On the Good,’” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Thomas Alexander Szlezák (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 2004), 266. 16. Alfred North Whitehead, “Mathematics and the Good,” in Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 97. 17. Findlay, Plato, 184. 18. Findlay, Plato, 185. 19. Findlay, Plato, 193. 20. Gaiser, “Plato’s Enigmatic Lecture,” 286. 21. Gaiser, “Lecture,” 287. 22. Charles Hartshorne, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S. W. Deane (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962), 1. 23. Anselm, Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, 2–3. 24. Anselm, Writings, 7. 25. Anselm, Writings, 1. 26. Anselm, Writings, 8. 27. Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962), 58. 28. Hartshorne, Logic, 58–59. 29. Anselm, Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, 148–49. 30. Anselm, Writings, 159. 31. Anselm, Writings, 38. 32. Anselm, Writings, 40. 33. Anselm, Writings, 143–44. 34. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and an Appraisal of “De Docta Ignorantia,” 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990), 63. Hopkins points out that the source is Anselm’s De veritate and that Anselm’s term is summa veritas rather than infinita veritas (189n73). 35. Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (1927; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 10. 36. Nicholas of Cusa, Learned Ignorance, 63. 37. Nicholas of Cusa, Learned Ignorance, 63. 38. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1:433. 39. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1958), 41. 40. Kant, Critique, 41.

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41. Kant, Critique, 48–49. 42. Kant, Critique, 120. 43. Kant, Critique, 183. 44. Kant, Critique, 27. 45. Kant, Critique, 270. 46. Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), 91. 47. Kant, Critique, 327. 48. Kant, Critique, 592. 49. Kant, Critique, 257. 50. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, in vol. 6 of Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 7 (my trans.). 51. Kant, Critique, 136. 52. Kant, Critique, 153. 53. Kant, Critique, 484. 54. Kant, Critique, 524. 55. Kant, Critique, 504. 56. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 39. 57. Willibald Klinke, Kant for Everyman, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Collier, 1962), 17. 58. Letter to Voss, in Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 107. 59. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 254. 60. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die verkehrte Welt,” Hegel-Studien 3 (1966): 137 (my trans.). 61. Kant, Critique, 317. 62. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 27. 63. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), par. 85; Phänomenologie, 72. See also Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), chap. 2. 64. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 41. 65. James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter, new ed. (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1898), xxii. 66. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 51. 67. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 44. 68. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971), 1:125 (my trans.). 69. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830, vol. 8 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 203 (sec. 95). 70. Kant, Critique, 552. 71. Kant, Critique, 549. 72. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 90 (my trans.). 73. Hegel, Logik, 1:125; G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109.

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74. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being (1899; New York: Dover, 1959), 546. 75. Hegel, Science of Logic, 204. 76. Hegel, Science of Logic, 749. 77. Hegel, Science of Logic, 751. 78. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938; New York: Capricorn, 1958), 237–38. 79. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 628.15–16. 7. The Rhetoric of the Philosophical Frontispiece

1. Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie, and Douglas Denon Heath (New York: Garrett Press, 1968), 4:437. Bacon employs an emblematic frontispiece in the Instauratio Magna (1620), depicting two ships apparently passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, between two freestanding pillars, perhaps intended to symbolize in modern fashion the mythological Pillars of Hercules. The ships are pointed toward the New World, as Bacon’s Novum Organum points to the new world of knowledge it introduces. This interpretation is reflected in the quotation at the bottom of the scene, taken from Daniel 12:4: “Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia [Many shall be running back and forth, and knowledge shall increase].” The ships may also symbolize the passing back and forth between the knowledge of the ancients and the moderns. 2. Bacon, De Augmentis, in Works, 4:435. 3. King James Bible, Job 41:33. Hobbes’s quotation from the Vulgate cites this as 41:24. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan, 3rd ed.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 772, renders Job 41:33 as “On earth it has no equal, a creature without fear.” 4. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), s.v. leviathan. 5. The Molesworth edition of Hobbes’s Works employs a variant edition of Leviathan. See William Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 3 (London: John Bohn, 1839). Regarding the editions of Leviathan, see C. B. Macpherson’s comments in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 67–70. Citations hereafter refer to the Macpherson edition. 6. John Dewey, “The Motivation of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Thomas Hobbes in His Time, ed. Ralph Ross, Herbert W. Schneider, and Theodore Waldman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 21. 7. Dewey, “Political Philosophy,” 13. 8. For reproductions of these, see J. G. van der Band, ed., Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1982), 136–38. 9. Hobbes, Leviathan, 83. 10. Hobbes, Leviathan, 188. 11. Herbert W. Schneider, “The Piety of Hobbes,” in Van der Band, Thomas Hobbes, 96. 12. Hobbes, Leviathan, 426–27. 13. New Oxford Bible, Job 38:3. 14. New Oxford Bible, Proverbs 9:10.

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15. Hobbes, Leviathan, 227. 16. These are the forms of government Hobbes identifies in The Art of Rhetoric, in Works, 6:435. 17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 186. 18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 398. 19. Hobbes, Leviathan, 420. 20. Archibald MacLeish, J. B.: A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); MacLeish’s version of the story of Job reminds us that Job is also modern man. 21. Hobbes, Leviathan, 81 and 82. 22. New Oxford Bible, Job 2:6. 23. Hobbes, Art of Rhetoric, 457. 24. Hobbes, Leviathan, 627. 25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 627–68. 26. Lars Östman, “The Frontispiece of Leviathan—Hobbes’ Bible Use,” Akademeia 2 (2012): 1–16, confirms my judgment that the title, frontispiece, and basis in the book of Job have commanded little attention in Hobbes scholarship (1). Östman ends his analysis with an odd statement. Having cited the creation by God of heavenly beings in Job 38:6–7, he concludes: “As God could be said to have sent his dearest angel to the world, so too has Hobbes created an angel, Leviathan, to take care of the world he has created and which can take no other form than the state” (10). Since God brings forth Leviathan to Job as a creature that has no fear but whose power instills the greatest fear conceivable, it seems odd to term Leviathan an angel. 27. Hobbes, Leviathan, 726. 28. Hobbes, Leviathan, 726. 29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 727–28. 30. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:132 (trans. slightly modified). 31. Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova 1730, ed. Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna (Naples: Guida, 2004), 55–58. Cf. Princìpi di scienza nuova (1744), in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), pars. 41–42. 32. For an account of the events leading up to Vico’s decision to commission the Dipintura, see Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), chap. 4. The Dipintura was redrawn to fit the larger format of the 1744 edition, published by the Stamperia Muziana, instead of by Felice Mosca, the publisher of Vico’s other works, including the 1730 edition. The two versions of the Dipintura differ in terms of the placement of the winged cap at the base of the statue of Homer and the clarity of the inscription “D. M.” (Dis Manibus—“Into the god’s hands,” or as Vico renders it, “To the good souls of the interred,” signifying burial as one of the principles of humanity). See the anastatic reprinting of the 1744 edition, Principj de’ Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, ed. Marco Veneziani (Florence: Olschki, 1994); and The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 2. For an analysis of the construction of the design of the Dipintura, see Mario Papini, Il geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella “Scienza nuova” di G. B. Vico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984). Papini demonstrates how the Dipintura is formed through a combination of the four geometric shapes: triangle, square, circle, and sphere.

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33. My translation. Vico, Scienza nuova 1730: “Quale Cebete Tebano fece delle Morali, tale noi qui diamo a vedere una Tavola delle cose Civili; la quale serva al Leggitore per concepir l’Idea di quest’Opera avant di leggerla, e per ridurla più facilmente a memoria con tal’ ajuto della fantasia dopo averla letta” (27). 34. See the introduction to The Tabula of Cebes [Greek and English opposed texts] by John T. Fitzgerald and L. Michael White (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 7; and the text of the Tabula, 63. 35. These are reprinted in Sandra Sider, Cebes’ Tablet: Facsimiles of the Greek Text, and of Selected Latin, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and Polish Translations (New York: The Renaissance Society of America, 1979). 36. Tabula, 65. 37. For a translation of these passages in the Scienza nuova 1730, see Verene, Vico’s New Science, 46–48. 38. See Vico, Scienza nuova 1730, 47 and 229–30; Scienza nuova (1744), pars. 30 and 604–6. 39. Vico, Scienza nuova 1730, 47; par. 31 (my trans.). 40. Vico, Scienza nuova 1730, 30; par. 6. 41. Vico, Scienza nuova 1730, 50; par. 34. Vico states this point differently in the two editions. The line above is adapted from the text of 1744. 42. Max Harold Fisch, introduction to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 28. 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, 186. 44. Hobbes, Leviathan, 187. 45. My translation. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744): “Gli uomini prima sentono il necessario, dipoi badano all’utile, appresso avvertiscono il comodo, più innanzi si dilettano del piacere, quindi si dissolvono nel lusso, e finalmente impazzano in istrappazzar le sostanze” (par. 241 [axiom 6]). 46. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), par. 1106. 47. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 131 (my trans.). 48. My translation. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744): “Ch’è memoria, mentre rimembra le cose; fantasia, mentre l’altera e contrafà; ingegno, mentre le contorna e pone in acconcezza ed assettamento” (par. 819). 49. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), par. 42 (trans. Bergin and Fisch). 50. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), par. 349 (trans. Bergin and Fisch). 51. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), par. 345 (trans. Bergin and Fisch). 52. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), par. 349 (trans. Bergin and Fisch). 53. See the discussion of Vico’s connection to Shaftesbury in Verene, Vico’s New Science, 35–38. Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova, vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978) agrees with the view that Vico’s source is Shaftesbury’s Second Characters, but adds that Vico may also have intended his Dipintura to be in contrast to the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan (21). 54. Anthony Ashley Cooper of Shaftesbury, Second Characters; or, the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 64–87. 55. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 1.3.21–27. It is generally held that Vaccaro employed a composite of the figures of metaphysic and mathematic in the Iconology (1593) of Cesare Ripa, a widely used manual for artists and engravers when depicting

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allegorical or mythical scenes. For a discussion of this aspect of the Dipintura, see Verene, Vico’s New Science, 40–41. 56. Giambattista Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, ed. Giuliano Crifò (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989), 246; letter to Nicola Gaetani di Laurenzano, March 1732, in Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi correspondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 167. 57. Scienza nuova (1744), par. 5 (trans. Bergin and Fisch). 58. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 80. The original text of Vico’s statement of his greatest fear reads: “Nam id in omni vita unum maxime formidavi ne ego solus saperem, quae res plenissima discriminis semper mihi visa est, ne aut deus fierem, aut stultus” (De nostri, in Opere, 214). 59. See the discussion of the reception of the First New Science (1725) in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 85–135. 60. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, ed. George R. Havens, crit. ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1946), 89–90. 61. Rousseau, Discours, 127 [31]. See also The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964), 47–48. 62. Rousseau, Discours, 227; quoted by Havens. 63. Jeff J. S. Black, Rousseau’s Critique of Science: A Commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009) points out that the frontispiece does not depict the traditional story of Prometheus. See Black’s interpretation of the various aspects of the frontispiece (146–50). The fact that Black comments on the meaning of the frontispiece is an exception in the critical literature. 64. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:102. 65. Aeschylus, Fragments, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 219. 66. Aeschylus, Fragments, 212; quoted by Sommerstein. 67. On the Prometheus myth in its many forms, see Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–38. 68. Plutarch states that his views in “How to Profit by One’s Enemies” is a condensation of his “Precepts of Statecraft”; Moralia 86D and 789–825. 69. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 50–51. 70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions de J. J. Rousseau, in Oeuvres, 1:351 (bk. 8). 71. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 64. 72. Ernst Cassirer, Das Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Gesammelte Werke Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Birgit Recki, vol. 18, ed. Ralf Becker (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), 14. English translation: The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 48. 73. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 34. Vico also compares himself to Socrates (Autobiography, 200). For Vico’s view of himself as the “new Socrates” in the “new polis” (Neapolis), see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the “Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself ” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 31–33. Rousseau likely knew of Vico’s work while he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743–44 (Verene, New Art, 60–61); see also Rousseau, “Dépêches de Venise,” in Oeuvres, ccxlvi–ccliv and 1045–1234.

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74. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 54. 75. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 46. 76. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 60. 77. Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, 64. 78. For examples of the emblem tradition between 1531 and 1647, see Charles Moseley, A Century of Emblems: An Introductory Anthology (Hants, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1989). 79. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), 287. 80. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 563–64. 81. Vico, Autobiography, 120. 82. Giambattista Vico, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Study Methods, 89; Vico, Opere, 407–8; Horace, Ars poetica 309.

Index

Achilles, 21, 52–53 Aeschylus, 123–24 Agamemnon. 21 Alcibiades, 48, 82 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 10 Anaxagoras, 12 Anselm, Saint, 5, 42, 88 ontological argument, 92–97 Apollo, 21–22, 26, 29, 67 Archilochus, 81 Aristophanes, 82–83 Aristotle, 23, 42, 68, 79, 83, 90, 108, 129 author of Protrepticus, 9–12 conception of metaphysics, 24–27, 51–52, 85–86, 88 on metaphor, 38, 51 theory of rhetoric, 1–2, 36, 49, 139 Aristoxenus, 90 Arnauld, Antoine, 36 Asclepius, 74, 83 Athena, 124 Atropos, 23 Atticus, 74 Augustine, Saint, 42 and Descartes, 66 on time, 29–30 and Vico, 70–73 Bacchus, 56 Bacon, Francis, 42, 62 on emblems, 109 founder of the essay, 74 and memory, 6, 49 and Vico, 118 Baldi, Antonio, 116 Beatrice, 107 Beeckman, Isaac, 66 Berkeley, George, 43, 127 Three Dialogues, 12–13 Berlin, Isaiah, 81 Blake, William, 28

Blanshard, Brand, 54 Bloch, Ernst, 56 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 129 Boethius, 10 as “Latino Platone,” 121 and Renaissance, 51 Borges, Jorge Luis, 49 Bosse, Abraham, 110 Bourget, Louis, 71 Brach, Pierre de, 78 Bradley, F. H., 12 metaphysics, 17–18 Brecht, Bertolt, 57 Bréhier, Emil, 42 Bruni, Leonardo, 73 Bruno, Giordano, 62 Buridan, John, 42 Calliope, 23–24 Cantor, Georg, 106 Cassirer, Ernst, 26, 43, 46–47, 96, 126 Cebes, 116–17 Ceres, 56 Chaerephon, 79 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 68 Chroust, Anton–Hermann, 9–11 Cicero, 69, 124, 129 letters, 73–74 on philosophy, 9, 11, 19, 25, 79 on rhetoric, 3, 5, 34, 40, 46, 48, 72, 108 Clemet of Alexandria, 10 Clinias, 10 Clio, 23 Clotho, 23 Clovius, Andreas, 66 Collingwood, R. G., 41, 55, 88 Cooper, Lane, 37 Copernicus, 62 Critias, 48 Crito, 82

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156

INDEX

Cronus, 22, 116 Crusoe, Robinson, 99 Dante, 31, 36, 107, 119, 129 Dedekind, Richard, 106 Demetrius, 49 Demosthenes, 4, 35, 63 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 33 Descartes, René, 5, 42, 100, 137 letters, 73 and rhetoric, 33, 35, 62–68 thinking “I,” 40, 63 Dewey, John, 111–12 Diogenes Laertius, 45, 79, 89, 116 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4 Dionysodorus, 10 Eco, Umberto, 98–99 Elizabeth I, 83 Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, 65 Empedocles, 79 Epicurus, 73, 117, 121–22 Epimetheus, 123–24 Erasmus, Desiderius, 73 Erato, 23–24 Eurycleia, 25 Euterpe, 23 Euthydemus, 10 Euthyphro, 79, 81 Fichte, Johann, Gottlieb, 104 Findlay, John, 88–89, 91 Fisch, Max Harold, 70 Frederick, Crown Prince, 103 Fronto, 73 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 103 Gaiser, Konrad, 92 Galen, 68 Galileo, 62, 118 Gall, Franz Joseph, 13 Gaunilon, 94–95 Glaucon, 48 Godfrey, 53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 107 Gorgias, 2–3 Grassi, Ernesto, 34, 38–39 Grotius, Hugo, 115, 118 Guicciardini, Francesco, 119–20 Hadot, Pierre, 82 Hartshorne, Charles, 92–94 Hazard, Paul, 69 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 12–13, 46, 73, 94 on absolute, 88, 103–7

concept of philosophy, 83 on memory, 27, 128 Phenomenology of Spirit, 13, 15–17, 19, 35–36, 40–41, 53–56 Heidegger, Martin, 43 Hephaestus, 124 Hera, 21 Heraclides of Pontus, 45 Heraclitus, 42 Hercules, 64, 83, 121 Hermes, 124 Hermes Trismegistus, 74 Herodotus, 4 Hesiod, 22, 29–30 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 109, 127 Leviathan and Book of Job, 110–15 and Vico, 118–19 Homer, 48 as guide to conduct, 4, 51 meaning of eidos, 46 and Muses, 21–23 and Vico, 118, 120 Horace, 4, 22, 126, 129, 138 Hume, David, 43, 74 Husserl, Edmund, 43 Huygens, Christian, 68 Hylas, 12 Iamblichus, 9 Isocrates, 3, 9 James, 73 James, William, 61–62 Job, 110, 113–14 John, 73 Johnson, Samuel, 13–14 Jove. See Zeus Joyce, James, 10, 27–28, 107–8 Jude, 73 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 43, 88, 128, 137 concept of criticism, 33 ontological argument, 54, 94 pure understanding, 97–103 on rhetoric, 34 on sublime, 50 Lachesis, 23 Lactantius, 10 Laelius, 74 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 13 Lecat, Claude-Nicolas, 122–23, 127–28 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 42 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 42, 71, 86–87

INDEX Leon, tyrant of Phlius, 45, 81, 89 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 83 Leviathan, 110, 113 Lipsius, Justus, 73, 78 Locke, John, 34–35, 43, 117 Lodoli, Carlo, 70 Longinus, 48–50, 130 Lowenthal, Marvin, 78 Lucian, 42, 127 Lucretius, 21 Machiavelli, Nicolò, 42, 76–77 Malatesta, Lady Battista, of Montefeltro, 73 Mandeville, Bernard, 127 Marcus Aurelius, 73 Marx, Karl, 43 Meletus, 80 Melpomene, 23 Memory. See Mnemosyne Mercury, 118 Mill, John Stewart, 43 Minerva, 73 Mnemosyne, 6, 19, 22–23, 27, 67, 120–21 Molière, 15 Montaigne, Michel, 5, 67, 74, 77–78 Muses, 5–6, 19, 21–32, 67, 120–21. See also individual names Nicholas of Cusa, 96–97, 103 Nicole, Pierre, 36 Ockham, William of, 42 Odysseus, 21, 25, 52, 81 Orithuia, 25 Ovid, 127 Pandora, 123 Pascal, Blaise, 42 Paul, 73 Peirce, C. S., 14 Peleus, 21 Penelope, 25 Pepper, Stephen, 43 Peter, 73 Petrarca, Francesco, 51, 73–74, 129 Phaedrus, 25, 28, 126 Philolaus, 116 Philonous, 12 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 51, 74 Picot, Abbé, 68 Pierre, Jean-Baptiste-Marie, 122 Plato, 5, 12, 31, 35, 42–43, 48, 57, 68, 81, 104, 108, 116 conception of the State, 112, 119

157

on eidê, 80 and Gorgias, 2 lecture on the Good, 88–92 and Muses, 23 Prometheus myth, 123 quarrel with poets, 17, 45–46, 50–51, 101–2 Seventh Letter, 73–74 Plautus, 69–70 Pliny, 73 Plotinus, 130 Plutarch, 23, 74, 110, 123, 125 Polyhymnia, 23 Porcìa, Count Gian Artico, 70 Prometheus, 122–25 Ptolemy Sorter, 23 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 118 Pythagoras, 23, 45, 81, 89, 92 Pythian, 79, 81 Quine, Willard van Orman, 43 Quintilian, 5, 10, 12, 35, 40–41, 46, 138 Quixote de la Mancha, Don, 63 Rabelais, François, 75–76 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5 frontispiece to Discours, 109, 122–28 Royce, Josiah, 106 Russell, Bertrand, 43 Ryle, Gilbert, 13 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 104 Schiller, Friedrich, 128 Schneider, Herbert W., 112 Selden, John, 118 Seneca, 73 Seven Sages of Greece, 26 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, 120–21 Shakespeare, William, 83, 107 Simmias, 116 Simplicius, 68 Skinner, B. F., 13 Smith, Adam, 73 Socrates, 57, 96, 104, 117, 123, 126–27, 137 Apologia, 79–83 concept of mind, 12–13 and death, 80–81, 101 on the good, 89–90 and Muses, 23–24, 30 and poets, 45–47 and rhetoric, 2–3, 5, 28, 34, 39, 42–43, 48 and Vico, 72 on wisdom, 10, 20

158

INDEX

Soderini, Piero, 76 Solomon, 49, 76 Solon, 26 Sphinx, 117 Spinoza, Benedict de, 42, 117, 127 Stirling, James Hutchison, 104 Stoics, 3, 117, 121 Swift, Jonathan, 64 Tasso, Torquato, 53 Terpsichore, 23–24 Thalia, 23 Ulysses. See Odysseus Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 27 Urania, 23–24

Vico, Giambattista, 5, 34, 36 art of topics, 37 autobiography, 68–73 frontispiece, 116–22 and Hegel, 40–41, 57 imaginative universals, 51–53 and irony, 43 method of reading, 129 and self-knowledge, 26 and Socrates, 34, 72 Virgil, 129 Vives, Ludovicus, 51 Whitehead, A. N., 48, 81, 87, 91, 107 Wilde, Oscar, 57 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 43 Xenophon, 121, 125

Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio, 116 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 34 Vettori, Francesco, 76

Zeno, 79, 121 Zeus, 21–22, 29, 73, 80, 123–24