The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing: The Perils of Conformity 9781472548399, 9781472512765

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Acknowledgments This volume represents a project that I have struggled with off and on for many years. Some of the material was published previously in a somewhat different form in various scholarly journals. I thank the editors and publishers of the following journals for allowing me to reprint the reworked versions of these pieces in the present volume: Filozofia, Hermeneutische Blätter, Ideas y Valores, International Studies in Philosophy, Man and World, Mosaic, Philosophy and Literature, and Variaciones Borges. Chapter 2 is based on my article “Challenging Prescriptions for Discourse: Seneca’s Use of Paradox and Oxymoron,” that originally appeared in Mosaic, vol. 30, no. 1, 1997, pp.  1–17. Chapter 3 comes from a piece entitled, “Satire as Philosophy: Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium,” from International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 26, no.  2, 1994, pp.  73–90. Chapter 6 is based on the article “Kierkegaard’s Use of Genre in the Struggle with German Philosophy,” which was first published in .  .  .  und Literatur. Pierre Bühler zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by the Institut für Hermeneutik und Religionsphilosophie, Theologische Fakultät, Universität Zürich (Hermeneutische Blätter, nos. 1–2, 2009), pp.  162–86. This work was also published in Slovak as “Kierkegaardove využívanie žánra v zápase s nemeckou filozofiou” (translated by Ivana Komanická) in the journal Filozofia (from the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences), vol. 64, no. 8, 2009, pp. 728–38. Chapter 6 first appeared as “Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in ‘Funes el memorioso,’ ” in Variaciones Borges, vol. 1, no. 2, 1996, pp. 68–85. Chapter 8 was originally published as “Borges and the Refutation of Idealism: A Study of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ ” in the journal Ideas y Valores, no. 101, 1996, pp. 64–99. Sections I–III of Chapter 9 come from the article “Borges on Language and Translation,” which appeared in Philosophy and Literature, vol. 19, no. 2, 1995, pp. 320–9. Sections IV–VII of the same chapter were originally published as “Borges on Immortality,” in Philosophy and Literature, vol. 17, no. 2, 1993, pp. 78–82. Chapter 11 represents substantially reworked material that originally appeared as “The Philosophical Curriculum and Literary Culture: A Response to Rorty,” in Man and World, vol. 27, no. 2, 1994, pp. 195–209. Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 10 have never appeared in print before. I would also like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have been kind enough to read drafts of individual chapters and give me their constructive criticism, suggestions, and general encouragement: Joseph Ballan, Daniel Conway, Finn Gredal Jensen, Louie Matz, Paul Muench, Katalin Nun, Georgios Patios, Peter Šajda, and Brian Soderquist. This work has improved markedly due to their invaluable feedback. Some material from this text was presented orally at talks given at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania, on March 3, 2011, and at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, on March 4, 2011. The discussions on those occasions helped me to see different aspects of the issue of philosophical writing that

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were subsequently incorporated into the text. I am thankful to Tatiana Shchyttsova and J. D. Mininger for their kind invitations in these contexts. A special word of thanks is due to Markus Kleinert, who encouraged me to return to this project and bring it to completion. The text has been stylistically improved due to the careful proofreading and corrections of my brother Loy Stewart. My wife Katalin Nun has kindly helped with the formatting of the electronic version of the text. I am profoundly grateful for all the help that I have received with this project from so many different people over such a long period of time.

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Introduction

The Problem of Philosophical Writing

Philosophy, throughout its history, has been expressed by means of a manifold of divergent literary forms which include almost all of the major literary genres found in the history of Western letters.1 The tradition has been witness to the timehonored dialogue of Plato, Hume, and Berkeley, which embodies the give and take of philosophical debate. There are the philosophical poems of Lucretius and Parmenides, the metrical beauty of which captures the elegance of a philosophical system in a marriage of technical expertise and rigorous argumentation. There are the provocative aphorisms of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein, the private meditations of Descartes and Montaigne, and the letters and correspondences of Seneca and Leibniz. There is the rigor and exactitude of the modern article on formal logic, the scholastics’ quaestiones, and not least of all, Spinoza’s Ethics, which attempt to approach the degree of precision found in mathematics. There are the autobiographical confessions of Augustine and Rousseau as well as the journals of Kierkegaard and Thoreau. There are the essays of Mill and Russell, the commentaries of Aquinas and Averroës, the Enchiridion or handbook of Epictetus, and the philosophical dramas and novels of Camus and Sartre. For most of the tradition, the literary genre of a philosophical work was by no means an issue that was assumed as given in advance; moreover, the richness of the philosophical tradition has at least in part been the result of the great diversity of literary forms which philosophers have used to couch their arguments and articulate their positions. In contrast to this plethora of literary forms, philosophical expression in contem­ porary Anglo-American philosophy reveals a striking homogeneity: the now stock philosophical treatise or paper, common to undergraduates and professional philosophers alike, today occupies an unquestioned position of hegemony in current academic philosophy. A variant of this same genre is the philosophical monograph, which is, in many cases, simply an extended version of what began as a paper or article. Thus, while there is a difference in length, the nature of the writing or genre is virtually identical. This form of writing has come to dominate the field of academic philosophy so much that for anything to be accepted as genuinely philosophical, it must be written in this fashion. At first glance, it seems odd that this lone form of philosophical writing has come to be accepted so exclusively over all others. It should certainly be noted that, in some specific historical times, there has been more homogeneity than in others. However, until fairly recently, there has never been such general acceptance of a single form of philosophical writing. In ancient Greece,

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

philosophers of the same period wrote poems, dialogues, and treatises. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Hume, and Berkeley availed themselves of a wide range of literary genres. Today, however, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, things are quite different, and most of the forms of writing that these philosophers used are no longer accepted. Compared with most any given period in the history of philosophy, our own age appears profoundly uniform. The forms of philosophical writing have changed along with the forms of philo­ sophy. Hence, it will be useful to trace very briefly the course of philosophy in the Anglophone tradition in the last century in order to determine how the current form of philosophical writing has come about. The point of the following, very adumbrated story of the development of the field is to show how a certain kind of philosophical writing grew up side by side with a certain conception of philosophy. Three closely related, yet distinct, causes have produced our current form of philosophical writing: first, the attempt of philosophy to associate itself with the natural sciences, second, the rise of professionalization in philosophy, and, third, the view of language and meaning promulgated by Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

I  The model of the natural sciences The movement of philosophy toward the natural sciences was the result of many complex factors that can only be reconstructed here in a very limited way. The most obvious cause was the ascendancy and consequent dominance of the natural sciences in the academy. With the quick pace of scientific and technological advances at the turn of the twentieth century, in contrast to the commotion and confusion in the scientific world that resulted from the breakdown of classical mechanics in the previous generation, science gained a renewed prestige that it had not enjoyed since Newton. This prestige existed both inside and outside the academy. The West had not yet experienced two world wars, fought with increasingly complex and deadly technology, or endured the Cold War. Technology was still viewed as a means toward a more leisurely life and easier control of the environment rather than as a danger that could result in mass death, the destruction of the environment, and global warming. Philosophers from Pythagoras to Spinoza have long been impressed by the exactitude and conclusiveness of mathematics and physics. But only the strict compartmentalization of the separate disciplines introduced by the twentieth-century ­academy forced philosophy to try to associate itself overtly with these fields. Formerly, “natural philosophy” was a sufficiently broad term to encompass both philosophy and ­physics. With the passage of time, however, the distinctions and divisions between these fields became sharper, and as various fields of research became more ­specialized, philosophy for its own sake became increasingly isolated and marginalized. With the reordering of the academy, the branching off and development of the ­natural sciences, and the addition of the social sciences in the early part of the ­twentieth century, philosophy had its subject matter even more carefully demarcated than in the past.

Introduction

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It was natural then in the context of the reordering of academic disciplines at the beginning of the previous century that the range and subject matter of philosophy came to be reconsidered. Natural philosophy no longer existed, and the sciences that developed from it were making astonishing advances that assured that they would become the very model for truth and certainty. The inception of the social sciences represented another challenge. Disciplines such as psychology and sociology initially seemed to offer utopian possibilities. They appeared to provide a scientific tool with which human beings could effectively and rationally work toward a better social order and ameliorate some of the oldest problems of humanity. Philosophy was thus left in an amorphous middle ground in the new academy between two very strong competitors. What then was to be the place and role of philosophy? How was it to stack up to the sciences? What exactly was it that the philosophers did that the scientists could not do better? Under the pressure of questions such as these, philosophy, unable or unwilling to defend itself as a part of the humanities tradition just like literature or history, needed to associate itself with the sciences in order to justify itself and gain academic respectability. It thus sought to imitate the methods and procedures of the sciences in an effort to legitimate its own academic enterprise. At first, through the work of Dewey, James, and Mead, American philosophy looked for its home among the social sciences, where it enjoyed a prominent position for some years; then, when the expectations for the social sciences became more sober, it turned instead toward the natural sciences through the work of Reichenbach, Carnap, Quine, and others. Anglo-American philosophy moved toward a conception of the field as a rigorous scientific discipline in contrast to literature and history.2 As Rorty put it, the goal was “to get philosophy out of the ‘humanities’ and into the ‘sciences,’ ”3 and by “sciences” here was clearly meant the natural sciences. Philosophy was no longer interested in using the social sciences to reconstruct the social order, but instead there was what Rorty called “an urge to be scientific and rigorous,”4 an ideal which, it was thought, the social sciences had somehow failed to achieve. The results of philosophy’s association with the natural sciences have been extensive. First, there was a shift in the subject matter of philosophy. Specialties associated with the social sciences and humanities such as social theory, philosophy of education, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and history of philosophy were eclipsed and, at some universities, slipped away more or less entirely.5 The branches of philo­ sophy which dealt with “scientific” subject matter rose to positions of prominence: symbolic logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. A new breed of philosopher arose, one trained no longer in the humanities but rather in the natural sciences. Many logicians began their studies in the mathematics department, while many philosophers of mind had extensive training in biology, chemistry, or neuroscience. Symbolic logic established itself prominently as an undergraduate requirement and as a necessary tool of the profession in part because of this tendency to imitate the natural sciences. Philosophers could show their colleagues in the natural sciences that they too had their own esoteric set of symbols, rules for manipulation, and rigorous procedures for determining truth and presenting their research in a way that was

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

objective and universally verifiable. With the widespread application of this new tool, many philosophical journals gradually came to resemble those of the natural sciences, featuring articles written on minute problems and making use of specialized neologistic vocabulary intended exclusively for a small cadre of specialists. The ways in which philosophical writing has changed in this association with the natural sciences during these formative years for Anglo-American philosophy have been profound. This association required a specific mode of writing and has contributed to bringing about the current hegemony of the article or treatise as the favored mode of philosophical expression. Thus, as philosophy began to imitate the natural sciences, there was a change not only in its subject matter and the type of scholar entering the professional ranks but also in the mode of philosophical expression.

II  The rise of the professionalization of philosophy With the professionalization of the field came the need to be able to evaluate the work and qualifications of scholars quickly and efficiently against a common set of recognized standards. The philosophical paper in essay form was immediately recognized as well adopted for this purpose.6 Its brevity and concise narrow focus allow the writer to present his or her position in an economical manner while enabling the reader to evaluate that position and the philosophical acumen of the author in fairly short order. The critical essay must follow a generally recognized set of formal rules which thus serve as a common standard for evaluation. This common standard would be undermined if other genres, such as poetry or fiction, each with their own set of rules, were also regarded as legitimate forms of philosophical expression. Thus, it is no surprise that when one applies for academic positions, one is asked to enclose a writing sample as a part of the formal application, and the expectation is that this will be a paper written in this genre. Likewise, when one is called to give a guest lecture as a part of the on-campus interview process, the idea is clearly that one should present a short paper written according to the accepted professional standards. The rise of professionalization has also led to the rapid proliferation of philosophical journals with ever-increasing degrees of specialization. This also constitutes a common point with the natural sciences. Just as scientists need to make public the results of their experiments in order to make it possible to verify each other’s findings and avoid needless duplication, so also philosophers share the fruit of their latest investigations with other specialists in the same narrow field. This same movement in the increased number of philosophical publications goes hand in hand with the rise of specialist societies, professional meetings, and conferences. The proliferation of philosophical journals also helped to standardize a single model of philosophical expression. For a paper to be accepted for publication by a journal, it had to conform to that journal’s standard of expression. This has influenced graduate training in philosophy, which has also become standardized in the sense that it is primarily geared toward cultivating skills in writing and argumentation that result in papers of a standard length and intended for oral presentation and eventual publication.

Introduction

5

While one of the original goals of the standardization of philosophical writings was to facilitate the evaluation of the work of scholars in the field, one can argue that the usefulness of this has been in some ways counterproductive. The function of establishing a professional standard by which everyone can be evaluated more or less equally is undermined if it becomes too simple for large numbers of candidates to build up a long list of publications due to an overabundance of readily available publication opportunities. The administrators’ response to this new problem has in recent years been the attempt to rank the various journals by means of different criteria. Thus, for the young job candidate, it is no longer a matter simply of publishing as much as possible but rather of publishing as much as possible in the correct, highly ranked journals. The fact that academic publication has reached this situation is telling commentary about the state of current philosophical writing. The result of the mass production of these journals has been to institutionalize and thus standardize the article as the orthodox mode of philosophical expression, while other genres have fallen into desuetude in the field. If one were to use an alternative literary genre today, one would risk giving the appearance of not recognizing the accepted professional standards. Moreover, evaluating works in  alternative genres would be burdensome for the referees or hiring committees since they would not be able to measure it against the accepted disciplinary criteria. In short, the choice of a form of writing other than the accepted treatise would be fatal for anyone seriously entertaining hopes of advancing professionally in the field. The result is the narrowing of the scope of what counts as acceptable philosophical writing, and this has made the field as a whole intolerant of what were once legitimate forms of philosophical expression. While junior level candidates are invariably evaluated in terms of their published articles, candidates for tenure are often under pressure to produce a monograph-length publication at a recognized university press in order to secure their long-term job stability. These monographs are almost invariably reworked dissertations or articles or a combination of the two. But with respect to methodology and linguistic expression, they are simply a longer version of the more widespread philosophical essay. Just as is the case with articles published in professional journals, a specific institutional framework enshrines the monograph as a standard form of philosophical expression since the road to tenure and job security invariably leads through it.

III  Ayer’s and Carnap’s views of meaning A third reason for the ascension of the philosophical paper or article to its current elevated status has to do less with practical or administrative matters and more with actual philosophical considerations. The philosophical justification for the hegemonic position of this genre was provided by logical positivism, which, with its linguistic critique of metaphysics, effectively eliminated alternative modes of literary expression from the discipline, judging them to be illegitimate forms of philosophical writing. The positivists criticized intellectual system building as a pretentious vestige of the by-gone metaphysical age,7 arguing instead in favor of more narrowly circumscribed

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

philosophical inquiries which were well suited for a short treatise. The linguistic criteria promulgated by the positivists established a touchstone against which certain statements and propositions were considered meaningful and others nonsensical. Two works in particular strongly shaped the way philosophy was to be written: A. J.  Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic8 and Rudolf Carnap’s “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.”9 The primary goal of both of these studies was to discredit metaphysics as a legitimate discipline. Given this, these works might appear at first glance to have little to say about philosophical writing per se; however, the tack that their criticism took had far-reaching implications for what was to count as a legitimate form of philosophical expression. Both offered a linguistic critique of metaphysics that was much more than a general criticism of certain presuppositions of this field. It in fact offered a model for philosophical writing that proved highly influential in the decades that followed.10 What began as a criticism of metaphysics turned out to be a full-blown vision not only of the proper office of philosophy but also of the form of expression befitting philosophical enquiry. Both Carnap and Ayer argued that certain kinds of statements which they viewed as “metaphysical” were in fact pseudo-statements devoid of real meaning. This argument was effected by taking “metaphysical” statements from thinkers such as Bradley, Hegel, and Heidegger and showing how they failed to meet certain basic criteria for meaningfulness and intelligibility. For example, one criterion that Ayer and Carnap discuss is the ability on the part of the listener to know what would count as an affirmation or contradiction of the claim in question. Carnap calls this “truth conditions” or the “criterion of application.”11 He uses the example of the imaginary word “teavy.” If we were to ask the speaker what things are teavy and what things are not, and he or she were unable to respond, then there would be no basis for determining whether the word is used correctly or incorrectly. Carnap concludes, “If no criterion of application for the word is stipulated, then nothing is asserted by the sentences in which it occurs, they are but pseudo-statements.”12 Ayer calls this the “criterion of verifiability,” which he explains as follows: The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.13

If this criterion for verifiability is not met, one ends up with “a mere pseudo-statement.”14 This claim about verifiability and truth conditions is at the center of both Ayer’s and Carnap’s position and allows them to criticize metaphysicians via a critique of what was demarcated as “metaphysical language.” In one of the most famous passages in analytic philosophy, Carnap excerpts a snippet from Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and argues that it consists of nothing more than a collection of metaphysical pseudo-statements.15 Carnap especially takes exception to the statement “The Nothing itself nothings,”16 claiming that Heidegger has made “the mistake of employing ‘nothing’ as a noun”17 which, although grammatically

Introduction

7

correct, is nonsensical. Even worse, Heidegger creates a new verb—“to nothing” (nichten). Presumably, this statement would also fail to meet Carnap’s and Ayer’s criterion for verifiability since it is difficult to tell what would count as an affirmation of this statement. Hence, according to Carnap, Heidegger’s statement is meaningless for philosophical purposes. Ayer’s and Carnap’s views rest on a kind of positivism which presumes philoso­ phical or scientific language is trying to mirror a nonlinguistic empirical reality that is freely available to everyone. The all-important criterion of empirical verifiability implies a common ground of experience against which linguistic utterances can be compared and tested. Writing is presumed to be meaningful only insofar as it is able to describe and communicate clearly what is the case about the empirically verifiable world. Thus, Ayer says, “if a work of science contains true and important propositions, its value as a work of science will hardly be diminished by the fact that they are inelegantly expressed.”18 The important thing is that reality be captured with laws or propositions, and the way these are expressed is of little importance provided that the meaning is clear and straightforward. According to this way of thinking, form is no longer considered important, and the immediate transmission of meaning becomes paramount. As Rorty puts it, according to this view, no matter how much writing the analytic tradition does, “it does not think that philosophy should be ‘written,’ any more than science should be. Writing is an unfortunate necessity. . . . In a mature science, the words in which the investigator ‘writes up’ his results should be as few and as transparent as possible.”19 The question of style is regarded as “adventitious and superfluous” to the real questions of philosophy.20 Both Carnap and Ayer are quick to point out that their view does not imply that poetry and fiction writing are meaningless because they produce falsehoods and pseudo-propositions. The literary artist and the scientist or philosopher do not share the same goal: “If the [literary] author writes nonsense, it is because he considers it most suitable for bringing about the effects for which his writing is designed,”21 for example, beauty, entertainment, the expression of an emotion, the heightening of social awareness, etc. The goal of science and philosophy, on the other hand, is to understand the world as it truly is. The metaphysicians, so long as they claim to be presenting the truth, fall short since their pseudo-propositions do not work effectively to this end. Likewise, the poet or fiction writer is simply engaged in an activity fundamentally different from that of the scientific philosopher. The very issue of forms of writing or literary style, according to this view, thus belongs to the realm of literature and art and has no place in the work of a rigorous philosopher. In a short essay on the contemporary practice of philosophy, Paul Feyerabend compares the philosophical writing of Plato to the current form of philosophical discourse: Philosophy  .  .  .  chose to restrict itself to the word. This restriction was soon followed by others. Plato’s attempt to create an art form that could be used to talk about reason and to show its clash with the “world of appearances” was not continued. Technical terminology, standardized arguments replaced his colorful and imprecise language; the treatise replaced the dialogue.  .  .  .  The result in philosophy is a new conformism.22

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

Feyerabend’s thesis about the implicit dogmatism and conformism in current scholarly practice concerns not just the content of philosophy but also its form. For Feyerabend, the current homogeneity in contemporary philosophical writing stands, as has already been noted, in contrast to the richness and variety of the tradition, here represented by Plato’s dialogues. Although the positivists were concerned primarily with meaning and not with genres  of philosophical writing per se, in their view there was a clear correlation between, on the one hand, statements which, on their account, had no cognitive meaning and, on the other, alternative literary styles or genres. Thus, their critique became a credo for the initiates of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, who, with an endless supply of convenient negative examples in the works of Heidegger, Sartre, and others, effectively ostracized alternative literary forms from the mainstream of the field.

IV  The resulting conformism The results of this view of philosophical writing have been very influential for the way in which philosophy is written today. Perhaps the most important result was the division of philosophy into two camps with their own distinctive forms of writing—AngloAmerican analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy.23 There was a time when one could tell to which school philosophers belonged from their writing style alone. Many thinkers on the Continent continued to use technical jargon from Kant and Hegel which Carnap and Ayer branded as meaningless,24 while a new mode of philosophical writing grew up in the Anglo-American philosophical world. The attempts of certain Anglo-American philosophers such as Royce, McTaggart, and Bradley to transplant European philosophical vocabulary into the new tradition were disparaged and had little long-term influence on academia in the English-speaking world. So while this kind of writing was flowering and being superseded in Europe through the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, it was being ridiculed by analytic philosophers in Great Britain and the United States. The model of philosophical expression espoused by Ayer and Carnap grew in strength due to its constant negative comparison with what it perceived as its opposite. The ridicule to which analytic philosophy subjected the mode of expression used by thinkers such as Heidegger created pressure to conform to a very homogeneous style of writing within its own ranks since mainstream analytic philosophers were anxious to avoid suspicion that they had any affinities with the other, less rigorous philosophical camp.25 Now that this conformism in philosophical writing has become institutionalized in the professional community, one danger is that people trained in philosophy today will gradually lose the skill of reading the canonical philosophers of the past. If one takes seriously the model offered by Carnap and Ayer for what counts as meaningful philosophical expression, one will no longer need to teach how to read philosophy (let alone how to write it) since, according to that model, the goal is to express simple and clear statements grounded in empirical experience. Provided that everyone in the field complies with this model, then there is no need to expend a lot of energy to learn how to read difficult and challenging texts since everything that is philosophically

Introduction

9

meaningful would be written clearly. It was not by accident that the high point of analytic philosophy corresponded to the low point of Hegel studies in the Anglophone world. Hegel did not write in a way that was regarded as philosophically acceptable according to the new analytic standard, and so he was simply dismissed. The peril is that philosophers will gradually lose touch with the great figures of the philosophical tradition who wrote difficult and even confusing texts. There is a danger that philosophers trained today will not be adequately equipped with the skills to interpret and understand works of this sort. There is a sense in which philosophy will in time become analphabetic as a discipline.26 The point is that this homogeneity in contemporary philosophical writing in the Anglophone tradition has tended to eliminate certain forms of writing as philo­ sophically illegitimate, thus doing a disservice to philosophy as an enterprise and to its history. Most of the forms of what were formerly considered legitimate modes of philosophical expression have been discredited, for example, poetry, maxims, dialogues, and aphorisms. Anything that does not fit the current model has come to be considered either shoddy or unserious. Hence, the history of philosophy, which abounds in these other forms of writing, fares with only mixed success depending on whether or not the authors in question lend themselves to the currently accepted form of philosophical expression. The goal of the historian of philosophy is now regarded not as understanding the great figures of the past in the context of their own time and place but rather as abstracting from this and translating their works into what is regarded as the lone legitimate form of philosophical expression.27 Once the great arguments of the tradition have thus been reinterpreted, their validity can be evaluated against the presumably ahistorical standards of our own time. The belief is that there is a need to put the great philosophers of the tradition into the current mode of philosophical expression where everyone is on equal footing. This is regarded as the certain test of a philosopher’s mettle which will separate the rigorous and clear-thinking philosophers from the muddled and sophistic ones. This kind of thinking involves some rather obvious question begging insofar as it presupposes that ideas of philosophical merit must be expressible in treatise form with rigorous, preferably formalized arguments. The history of philosophy contains numerous examples of thinkers who questioned the very possibility of any kind of allencompassing language and created philosophies which seem to defy formalization; for instance, it would seem absurd to attempt to formalize the arguments in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. At the heart of Kierkegaard’s view is a claim about how certain elements of the individual’s religious experience cannot be understood in scientific or discursive terms or cannot be subsumed by a philosophical system. Hence, Kierkegaard does not readily lend himself to formalization which is so dominant in Anglo-American philosophy. Yet are we to say that Kierkegaard had nothing meaningful to say about Christianity, the individual’s ethical dilemma, or the Hegelian system? Obviously he did, but he was simply speaking a different language. The goal here is not to denigrate the contemporary method of philosophical expression, which, to be sure, has its virtues, or to justify or exonerate the tradition, which no doubt has its share of unclear thinkers and infelicitous writers, but rather to point out that there are important philosophical doctrines or arguments which

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

do not lend themselves to the kind of philosophical expression that has only fairly recently become accepted. Just as Rorty rightly claims, “there is no single entity called ‘philosophy,’ ”28 so also, I will argue, there is no single correct mode of philosophical expression or argumentation. Rather different philosophical theories and arguments lend themselves to different forms of expression. One occasionally hears complaints that Plato, Hume, or Kant did not write in a manner more akin to the current mode of philosophical writing. In lamenting this fact, one fails to see that an examination of the mode of expression of the philosopher in question can be used as a key to interpreting his thought. Instead of leveling Lucretius, Kant, and Aristotle to a common mean, one might consider taking seriously the mode of expression of each and making that a part of the enquiry, for the mode of writing they use to express their ideas is often inextricably bound up with the content of their philosophy and the arguments that they are trying to articulate.

V  The unity of content and form in philosophical writing It is easy to see that there has been a movement away from the plurality that the philosophical tradition exhibits and toward a clearly discernible homomorphism in the way philosophy is written. Indeed, no philosopher in the Anglophone world today would dream of going to the publisher with a philosophical poem or novel. The question that must be raised is how philosophy as a discipline is served by this uniformity of expression. Can everything that is philosophically meaningful and interesting be spoken in the language of the current philosophical discourse? The examples cited above should suffice to demonstrate that the form of philosophical writing historically has changed as frequently as the content of the theories and arguments that they were intended to express. Given the contingent nature of philosophical expression, it would seem inappropriate and problematic to assume that the current mode of philosophical writing is the correct or the genuinely scientific one and that the task of historians of philosophy is simply to translate the confused and infelicitous writing of the tradition into the currently preferred type of philosophical parlance. By disregarding and denigrating other forms of philosophical expression, one overlooks an important connection between the content of a philosophical theory and the literary form that the philosopher employs to express it. The connection between philosophical content and literary form may seem at first glance to be a ridiculously obvious point that hardly needs to be argued for; however, when one takes a close look at contemporary professional philosophy, this connection does not seem to be obvious at all. If it is so clear, then why do professional philosophers scoff when they hear about a philosophical poem? Why do they think that a philosophical novel is lacking in rigor? In short, why are they so intolerant of other literary forms in philosophy? This intolerance betrays the fact that the connection between content and literary form is not as uncontroversial as it seems. If one truly recognizes the fundamental connection between content and form, then one would simultaneously be obliged to recognize that different literary forms are legitimate means of philosophical expression and entirely appropriate for certain sorts of philosophical

Introduction

11

arguments. Thus, the unity of content and form is worth examining and arguing for in some detail despite its apparent obviousness. It must be readily acknowledged that any discussion of how philosophy is written is necessarily bound up with the broader question of what philosophy ultimately is. This latter question is, however, fraught with ideological investments that make it highly problematic to treat in passing. For this reason, no extended attempt will be made to address this wider question of the nature of philosophy itself, although this issue is touched upon in the final chapter. Instead, the present study will confine itself as much as possible to the issue of philosophical writing. The point here is simply to call into question the traditional arguments noted above for rejecting certain forms of writing as nonphilosophical and to problematize the result of this view. Today many more trends, schools of thought, and traditions are represented in Anglophone philosophy than ever before, but yet despite this apparent plurality, there is nonetheless virtually a complete homogeneity with respect to the way in which philosophy is written and published. Thus, for all of their many differences, the numerous current philosophical approaches seem to be in unanimous agreement about the proper form of philosophical expression. The problem that I wish to address in this work can be stated briefly as follows: although, in its history, philosophy has been expressed by virtually every possible means of literary expression, today in the Anglophone world, it has generally only one legitimate form—the article-length paper or mutatis mutandis the monograph. This homogeneity leads to misunderstandings and intolerance and thereby undermines philosophical plurality. The overarching argument here is that philosophical content and form are often connected in important ways. The individual chapters in this volume are attempts to provide concrete examples of how philosophical arguments and positions have been expressed in literary forms other than the modern treatise. An attempt is made to show how the philosophical content of these positions is most appropriately articulated with these other literary forms and that they in fact express interesting and meaningful philosophical positions; thus, it is argued that one does a disservice to philosophy by dismissing authors using alternative genres as unphilosophical or, if they are still accepted as philosophers, by ignoring the way in which they write simply because their mode of expression is not the same as the one that is currently accepted in the professional philosophical community. The chapters in the body of this study offer treatments of Plato, Seneca, Erasmus, Hume, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Borges, and Sartre. They should not be regarded as an attempt at new research on these figures in the way that this is usually understood in the secondary literature in the corresponding areas of scholarship. These analyses aim instead at a more general, synoptic treatment of the question of philosophical writing by means of these specific examples. Thus, there is of course much more that could be said about each of these figures on this topic and many others. The point is rather to explore the forms of writing used by these figures in their own context and to connect this with the general problem of the homogeneity of current philosophical writing sketched above.

12

1

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

The Platonic dialogues have long been beloved texts that have served as introductions for beginners in philosophy, and one of the reasons for this is certainly their literary form. Generations of young readers have been intrigued by Socrates’ clever destruction of the confident views of his interlocutors. While students are invariably captivated by the spell of Plato, professional philosophers often scoff at what they regard as his naïve way of writing. There is a kind of condescension that regards Plato’s work as a charming, yet ultimately rather silly, attempt at real philosophy. His dialogues contain elements of Greek poetry, drama, and mythology that, it is thought, have no place in a genuine philosophical work. Thus, some regard his dialogues more as works of literature than philosophy. For this reason, much of Plato scholarship takes place in departments of literature and classical studies instead of philosophy. Most philosophers do not reflect much on why Plato chose to write in dialogue form.1 They seem to assume that he, as a good student, simply wished to transcribe his teacher’s important discussions and present them as an accurate record for posterity. The idea is that he was in effect a loyal and devoted pupil taking notes from his teacher, which he later reworked and wrote up in more detail in the same way that, for example, Hegel’s students collected and collated their lecture notes to his courses for publication. According to this view, if Plato had a modern device such as an audio recorder, he would have used it. It is thus naïvely assumed that Plato’s presentation of Socrates is historically veridical and need not be critically examined by means of a comparison with other sources.2 But there were perhaps other good reasons for him to portray his beloved teacher as he did in the form of a dialogue. In this chapter, I wish to place the Platonic dialogues in their historical context in order to gain an understanding of these reasons. First, I will argue that it was of cardinal importance for Plato to distinguish Socrates from the Sophists. This was best done by presenting his philosophical activity in the form of dialogues. Second, I wish to claim that the very nature and content of Socrates’ thought were closely tied to the dialogical form and could not be easily separated from it. It should be pointed out that there is a certain disanalogy with Socrates and the other figures treated in the following chapters of this study; specifically, we only know of Socrates through the works of Plato and other authors, but we do not have any text from Socrates himself. Thus, while it makes sense to talk about the self-conscious use of genre in writers such as Seneca, Erasmus, Kierkegaard, Borges, and Sartre, this is somewhat problematic when one is discussing Socrates. If there is a question of Socrates’ intentional use of the dialogue as a philosophical tool, then this can only

14

The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

be known second-hand through the portrayals of it by others. Indeed, the question has been raised to what degree Plato’s representations of Socrates and his activity are attempts to present a historically accurate picture and to what degree they are idealized or even fictional. These discussions are, however, largely irrelevant for the point I wish to make about the nature of the philosophical dialogue presented by Plato. The argument here does not hang on the historical accuracy of Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in all its details. To be sure, certain historical circumstances about the nature of philosophical writing in ancient Greece are relevant for my claim, but these are so general as to be unproblematic. The genre of the philosophical dialogue arose with the figure of Socrates. Given that many different authors who were his students portrayed Socrates’ philosophical activity in terms of a dialogue, it seems only natural to assume that this was at least one aspect of the kind of philosophical investigation that he was known for and associated with. While, to be sure, we have no independent evidence of Socrates, the historical person, to compare with these writings, the onus of proof is on the skeptic to demonstrate that his philosophy took an entirely different form than that of the dialogue, but for this there is no evidence. In the following, I will thus focus on the Socrates as presented by Plato and explore his reasons for presenting Socrates’ thought and method as he did. I will thereby set aside the question of the true historical figure of Socrates.

I  Plato and presocratic philosophy Before one can properly evaluate the use of the dialogue, it is important to determine what genres of writing were commonly used by other philosophers at this time when philosophy was still in its infancy. What was the status of philosophical expression when Socrates and Plato came onto the scene? Based on surviving fragments and ancient accounts of works now lost, it can be ascertained that there were two main genres of philosophical writing that enjoyed currency in presocratic philosophy: the philosophical treatise and the poem. Anaximander of Miletus is usually claimed to be the first author of a philosophical treatise. His student Anaximenes is also said to have written a prose work, in which he forwarded his famous thesis that everything is the infinite or ἄpeiϱon. Heraclitus authored a book that he placed in the temple of Artemis; from the surviving fragments, it is clear that this was a prose work, written in a style famous for its obscurity. So also Zeno of Elea, the pupil of Parmenides, is said to have written a book in which he set forth his famous paradoxes which were intended to refute the possibility of movement or plurality. Xenophanes of Colophon wrote several poems with philosophical content, of which a number of fragments survive. These fragments are in both hexameters and elegiac meter. Some ancient sources claim he was the teacher of Parmenides, who also wrote his philosophy in the form of a didactic poem in hexameters, a fairly large part of which survives. Parmenides portrays how he came on a chariot to the goddess who revealed the truth to him, thus ascribing the knowledge presented in the work to the divine and not to himself as author. So also two poems in hexameter verse are

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

15

ascribed to Empedocles: On Nature and Purifications. In the first of these, he presents a philosophy of nature, while the second articulates a theory of transmigration of souls, known from Pythagoras. In a sense, Socrates was in a polemical relation with these previous thinkers since he did not believe that philosophy should be written either as a poem or as a treatise. Indeed, he did not think that it should be written at all. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates explicitly argue for the superiority of the oral discussion over the written word.3 Books and treatises can only remind the readers of what they already know, but they do not create new knowledge. Moreover, written works cannot engage the individual in the same way as is done in a genuine dialogue. Books cannot choose their readers and often fall into the hands of the wrong people who simply misunderstand them. Likewise, there is no true back-and-forth interaction with a book since the movement is only in one direction: from the written word to the reader. Socrates compares books with paintings.4 When one wishes to pose a question to someone portrayed in a painting, the painted figure simply remains silent. So also when one wishes to ask a book or written treatise a question, it simply repeats itself forever without ever necessarily addressing the question asked. Socrates thus argues that the skill of dialectical reasoning that is characteristic of philosophy is best exercised by means of a spontaneous oral discussion and not a written text. Given his predecessors mentioned above, it would have been perfectly conceivable that Plato could have portrayed the thought of his teacher in the form of either a poem or a straightforward prose treatise. But due to Socrates’ rejection of these traditional forms of philosophical writing and indeed his objections to writing philosophy at all, Plato was faced with a dilemma. Instead of following in the footsteps of his prede­ cessors, Plato chose an entirely different genre that had no real established philoso­ phical precedent: the dialogue. Since it mirrored the spoken word and presumably the actual interaction of Socrates with his interlocutors, the dialogue allowed Plato to capture the nature and spirit of Socratic philosophical enquiry despite the fact that it was committed to writing. Some of Plato’s considerations on this matter can be seen at the beginning of the Theaetetus. The dialogue opens with a brief discussion between two friends Terpsion and Euclides. Socrates had once recounted to Euclides a dialogue that he had with Theaetetus and some other people, and Euclides subsequently wrote down this discussion. The actual dialogue is merely a reading from this transcription. Euclides shows his work to his friend: This is the book, Terpsion. You see how I wrote the conversation—not in narrative form, as I heard it from Socrates, but as a dialogue between him and the other persons he told me had taken part. . . . I wanted to avoid in the written account the tiresome effect of bits of narrative interrupting the dialogue, such as “and I said” or “and I remarked” wherever Socrates was speaking of himself, and “he assented” or “he did not agree,” where he reported the answer. So I left out everything of that sort, and wrote it as a direct conversation between the actual speakers.5

The idea is clearly that the essence of Socratic thought lies in the dialogical exchange itself. The other elements of the staging are of secondary importance. Through the

16

The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

figure of Euclides, Plato seems to be telling his reader indirectly that he has attempted to present the dialogue in a form that captures the nature of Socratic thought and has thereby refrained from adding any additional theatrical elements. It should of course be noted that there were other Greek writers prior to Plato who made use of dialogues in one form or another, but these tended not to be philosophical authors. For example, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides inserted dialogues into their narratives of historical events, for example, when they report on important political debates that took place in the assembly of an important city-state about a given course of action. Needless to say, dialogue was also a key element in Greek drama of the time, although the role of the chorus and the meter rendered this an artificial form of discourse that no one would ever mistake for a real discussion. One could even argue that there is a form of dialogue is some passages in Homer, for example, when the Greek and Trojan heroes address each other in combat. Works of this kind might have provided Plato with the model for the philosophical dialogue that he went on to develop. There were other students of Socrates who also wrote Socratic dialogues: An­tis­ thenes, Aeschines, Eucleides, Phaedo, and Xenophon.6 Unfortunately, of these, only the works of Xenophon survive in anything more than fragmentary form. These writers were presumably inspired by the same insight as Plato, namely, the realization that Socrates’ thinking was closely wed to the dialogue form. In any case, it would be too strong to say that Plato invented the dialogue as a philosophical genre, but he can certainly be said to have perfected it. It might be objected that Plato in fact follows the lead of his poetic or prosaic predecessors since Socrates occasionally quotes works of poetry and gives long monologues that could just as well be presented as independent treatises. While it is true that Socrates does occasionally cite poetry, the works that he refers to are invariably from well-known Greek poets and not his own original products. Moreover, while Socrates does indeed occasionally give a long speech, this is more the exception than the rule. For example, when he presents a speech at his trial in the Apology, this is obviously due to the dictates of the legal proceedings. Yet even in the course of his speech, he appeals occasionally to his accusers to respond to his questions in a way that introduces dialogical elements into the speech. Thus it is indeed important to point out that while the Platonic dialogues are very rich and contain elements of different genres, there can be no doubt that the dialogical form is the dominant characteristic of Plato’s writings and his portrayal of the thought of Socrates. Apart from Socrates’ negative view of writing and formal treatises, what were Plato’s other reasons for breaking with tradition with regard to the literary genre of philosophy? The first important reason I wish to explore was Plato’s urgent desire to distinguish Socrates from the Sophists.

II  Socrates and the Sophists By all accounts, Socrates was something of an odd character. He spent his time going around Athens and speaking with different kinds of people: craftsmen, poets,

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

17

politicians, etc. At first, he was well received since his interlocutors were flattered by his interest in them and his belief that they knew something important that he did not. They were only too happy to try to enlighten him where they could. However, this positive disposition turned negative when they were exposed to the Socratic elenchus or cross-examination and found themselves caught up in contradictions and misunderstandings. Instead of appearing as knowledgeable and intelligent as they assumed, they came off looking rather silly and confused. This situation was made even more embarrassing due to the fact that there were usually onlookers and young people present, who were zealous to follow the discussion. These people witnessed and presumably took delight in the humiliation of Socrates’ often arrogant discussion partners. In the end, many of the people whom Socrates sought out became irritated with him and broke off the conversation in order to escape from him. Socrates’ behavior was well known to the Athenians generally since many of them had had the pleasure or displeasure of speaking with him personally in this way or were witnesses to his merciless examination of their fellow citizens. Often his interlocutors tell him that they have heard of his reputation for confusing people.7 In the eyes of the Athenians, Socrates’ comportment was difficult to make sense of, and there was, generally speaking, a fair amount of confusion about it. Some people regarded him as meddling in people’s private affairs, corrupting the morals of the youth of the city, or generally making a public nuisance of himself by pestering respectable citizens. This is clear from many of the things that are said about him at his trial as portrayed in the Apology.8 One point of confusion was clearly the association of Socrates with the Sophists, the teachers of rhetoric and other fields who made their living in Athens at the time.9 As is clear from, for example, Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, it was generally believed that Socrates was one of the Sophists. The Sophistic movement included figures such as Protagoras of Abdera, Hippias of Elis, Prodicus of Ceos, Gorgias of Leontini, Thrasymachus, Critias, Antiphon, and Callicles.10 It was known that, like these men, Socrates had students with whom he spent much of his time. Moreover, Socrates did not seem to have any other form of livelihood, and so it was naturally assumed that, like the Sophists, he was receiving payment for the instruction that he was imparting, although this is something that he consistently and vigorously denies. Another point of similarity in the minds of many Athenians concerned Socrates’ stubborn and apparently polemical refutation of his fellow citizens. By reducing every argument or definition to absurdity and contradiction, Socrates seemed to be on a mission to refute every claim to knowing. To all appearances he wanted to undermine any firm belief in traditional values or religion. To many observers this looked like the views of the Sophists, who were associated with skepticism and relativism. Protagoras’ famous claim that “man is the measure of all things” was taken to be a straightforward statement about the relativity of values or truth claims. In other words, there is nothing absolutely true or fixed in the world of nature, and any claim to truth is only relative to the person making it. Thus, the Sophists seemed to wish to refute all human conventions as relative and baseless. As teachers of rhetoric, they taught their pupils how to argue for any given position, regardless of its truth or merit. They thus had the reputation

18

The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

of being interested primarily in success in law or politics and not in truth or justice. Since a part of Socrates’ method was negative, this seemed to be very much the upshot of his thinking. He apparently wanted to demonstrate to his fellow citizens the vanity of their claims to knowledge. However, as is well known to Plato’s readers, Socrates was also keen to refute the relativism and skepticism of the Sophists. Although this is portrayed clearly in Plato’s writings, it seems not to be something that the Athenians were generally familiar with. Socrates appeared to many of them to be simply another relativist. Perhaps this misconception is precisely the reason for why Plato returns to this topic repeatedly. Given this mistaken association of Socrates with the Sophists, Plato was keen to clear up the misunderstanding and to clearly distinguish his master from them. Socrates was no Sophist; he did not demand any instructional fee from his students and indeed even denied that he taught anything. While the Sophists claimed to teach virtue, Socrates argued that this was not something that could be taught. While the Sophists claimed to help their students in practical matters by teaching them the art of effective public speaking, Socrates claimed only to be seeking the truth for its own sake. While Plato could have made these points and distinguished Socrates from the Sophists by means of a formal treatise or a poem, it was more suitable and more effective to do so by means of a dialogue. Indeed, many of the Platonic dialogues portray Socrates explicitly in discussion with well-known Sophists. Thus, dialogues such as the Protagoras, Lesser Hippias, Greater Hippias, Gorgias, and Critias bear the names of specific Sophists (not to mention the dialogue entitled the Sophist). The Sophists of course turn up in other dialogues as well,11 or when they are not physically present, specific well-known Sophistic theses are introduced, which are defended by others.

III  Socrates and the form of teaching of the Sophists Plato is keen to distinguish not only the content of Socrates’ thought from that of the Sophists but also the form. Since the Sophists believe that they have something to teach and indeed are paid to do so, the form of their interaction is that of a teacher vis-à-vis a student. The Sophists thus present their views as straightforward doctrines that their pupils attempt to learn. The Sophists were wont to hold forth on any given topic as a part of their instruction. Plato points out the contrast between the Sophists’ manner of instruction and Socrates’ form of interaction with his interlocutors. This is illustrated well in the dialogue the Protagoras. Socrates goes with his friend Hippocrates to meet the famous Sophist Protagoras, who has just arrived in Athens. Hippocrates zealously wants to be accepted as a student by Protagoras, while Socrates is skeptical about the whole affair. When they arrive, they observe Protagoras surrounded by several young men, both Athenians and foreigners, all anxious to learn from him. As Protagoras walks to and fro in the portico, the young men reverently hasten to follow after him and hear what he is discussing. After a description of the scene and the many individuals present, the reader is told of the pupils: “They appeared to be asking him questions on natural science, particularly astronomy, while he gave each his explanation ex cathedra and held forth on their problems.”12 While this description is compact, it is telling. The

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

19

picture that is conveyed is of a self-certain instructor who can answer any question put to him. Protagoras has an explanation and an argument prepared for any occasion and any topic. These explanations are delivered “ex cathedra.” In other words, they are not worked out together with the help of the students but instead are confidently set forth as established facts. Here before the discussion even gets started, Plato gives the reader a hint of the radical difference between Socrates’ dialogical method and Protagoras’ ex cathedra approach. This difference is made overt in the first interaction between Socrates and the Sophist. Socrates goes to Protagoras and straightforwardly and concisely states their business. He declares that his friend Hippocrates wants to become one of his students and asks if Protagoras would prefer to discuss the matter in private or with the others. Protagoras responds at length by giving an account of the dangers that Sophists are occasionally exposed to and the need for discretion, and so forth, before finally getting back to the original, quite simple question. Sensing that he can gain some glory in the discussion since Hippocrates has come to study with him, Protagoras invites more people to come and listen to the discussion. Socrates then restates his business, again with the utmost brevity: “I can only begin as I did before, by telling you of our purpose in coming. Hippocrates has a feeling that he would like to become one of your followers. He says therefore that he would be glad to be told what effect it will have on him. That is all we have to say.”13 With this, the real philosophical discussion begins. Protagoras launches into a long and articulate speech in which he attempts to explain why he believes that virtue can be taught.14 In the course of his monologue, he appeals to myths, arguments, and any form of persuasion that he thinks will have an effect. His speech is described as a “long and magnificent display of eloquence.”15 Again, the contrast to the Socratic dialogue could not be starker. Instead of the short and concise questions asked by Socrates, Protagoras presents his own positive doctrine, built up in detail, argument after argument. While Socrates gets his interlocutors to focus concisely on a very specific question and issue, Protagoras glides smoothly from one point to the next. Socrates ironically praises Protagoras’ eloquence and contrasts him with the Athenian orators, who, he claims, can make a beautiful speech but are utterly unable to answer questions put to them or to diverge, as it were, from their script in the slightest way. While Socrates says that the orators can “spin out a regular Marathon of speech,” he is confident that Protagoras, “though he is perfectly capable of long and splendid speeches as we have seen, has also the faculty of answering a question briefly, and when he asks one himself, of waiting and listening to the answer.”16 Here Socrates explicitly contrasts their style of speaking. Although he ostensibly seems to be criticizing the orators, in fact his irony is aimed at Protagoras himself. Socrates gets Protagoras to go along with an exchange of short question and answer, but then the latter, feeling worsted in the argument, becomes impatient and reverts to giving a speech, which “the audience vigorously applauded.”17 Socrates attempts to get Protagoras to return to the question-and-answer discussion, by saying, “I’m a forgetful sort of man, Protagoras, and if someone speaks at length, I lose the thread of the argument. If I were a little deaf, you would recognize the necessity of raising your voice if you wanted to talk to me; so now since you find me forgetful, cut down your answers and make them shorter if I am to follow you.”18 Here the clash in forms and

20

The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

methods of philosophy is clearly evident. Protagoras becomes stubborn and wishes to return to his accustomed manner of speaking since he fears falling into Socrates’ traps if he allows himself to be led by the Socratic questioning. Socrates then simply states that he cannot follow long speeches, and so he is obliged to leave since he has other things to do. When the eager young Callias prevents him from doing so and begs him to stay and continue, a discussion arises about the two different kinds of speaking. Socrates admits that Protagoras is better at the long speech, but the Sophist also claims to be a master of short question-and-answer discussions. Why then does he refuse to show this skill now? Alcibiades interjects, Socrates admits frankly that long speeches are beyond him and that Protagoras has the better of him there, but in discussion and the intelligent give-and-take of arguments I doubt if he would give any man best. If Protagoras in his turn admits that Socrates beats him in discussion, Socrates will be satisfied. But if he maintains his claim, let him continue the discussion with question and answer, not meeting every question with a long oration, eluding the arguments and refusing to meet them properly, spinning it out until most of his hearers have forgotten what the question was about.19

Here the different styles of speaking are well described. The Socratic question and answer allows for a focus on a specific issue until a resolution appears; by contrast, the issue often gets lost in a long speech, where new questions are introduced. A compro­ mise is proposed, whereby Socrates is supposed “to slacken the reigns of discourse, so that it may wear  .  .  .  a more dignified and elegant air,” while “Protagoras should refrain from shaking out every reef and running before the wind, launching out on a sea of words till he is out of sight of land.”20 In any case, Protagoras reluctantly agrees to continue the discussion, when Socrates offers to allow him to be the questioner first, and only after Protagoras is satisfied with his answers will he resume his questioning. Plato portrays Socrates’ interaction with the Sophist Gorgias in a similar manner. At the beginning of their discussion, Socrates enjoins Gorgias as follows: “Would you be willing, Gorgias, to continue our present method of conversing by question and answer, postponing to some other occasion lengthy discourses . . . ?”21 Gorgias displays a self-confidence that shades over into arrogance as he claims great expertise not just in long speeches but also in short answers: “There are certain answers, Socrates, that must necessarily be given at length; however, I will attempt to answer as briefly as possible. For that too is one of the claims I make, that nobody could give the same answers more briefly than I.”22 Socrates gladly accepts this response and Gorgias’ willingness to answer him briefly, “That is what I want, Gorgias; give me an exhibition of this brevity of yours, and reserve a lengthy discourse for another time.”23 Gorgias replies, “I will do so, and you will admit you have never heard a speaker more concise.”24 Thus the dialogue commences. When Gorgias answers the first two questions with a simple “yes,” Socrates ironizes over his brevity: “By Hera, Gorgias, I marvel at your answers; they could not be briefer.”25 Apparently oblivious to the irony, Gorgias responds, “Yes, I think I succeed pretty well, Socrates.”26 The point of this is clearly to distinguish Socrates’ form of philosophy from that of Gorgias and indeed the Sophists in general. While Socrates is dialogical, the Sophists

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

21

are not. In order even to enter into a discussion with the Sophists, one must oblige them to modify their usual way of speaking, which they often are reluctant to do. Once the long speeches of the Sophists are broken down into individual smaller parts and examined in a piecemeal manner, their claims prove to be confused and contradictory. Thus, the power of Sophistic persuasion depends on their eloquent speech, but this turns out only to be beautiful-sounding words with nothing substantive behind them. What other reasons might there have been for Plato to use the dialogue form? In addition to showing that Socrates’ form of philosophy was different from that of the Sophists, Plato also wanted to show that its content was different. I wish to suggest that Plato must have felt that the message that he wanted to convey about the philosophy of his master was best presented in the form of a dialogue and that the very nature of Socrates’ thought was necessarily bound up with this form of communication.

IV  Socratic ignorance Socrates repeatedly stated that he did not know anything and therefore that he did not teach anything. His practice was instead to go around Athens and to seek out those individuals who claimed to know something. As he recounts in the Apology,27 he did this in order to disprove the Oracle at Delphi, which had stated that there was no one who was wiser than he. Since he did not regard himself as wise or knowledgeable, he decided to make a test of the oracle, and so he went around the city to people who were known for their wisdom or their knowledge of specific things. His goal was to convince himself of his ignorance vis-à-vis these people. In his discussions, Socrates would usually begin by asking the person to explain something to him or to give him a definition of some concept. The interlocutors would then confidently supply such information as was requested and assume that they had sufficiently demonstrated their wisdom and taught Socrates something. However, Socrates proves to be a difficult student since he continues by asking follow-up questions that require his interlocutor to explain his statement in more detail. Socrates is invariably able to point out certain contradictions or absurdities in the view put forward and thus brings his interlocutors into difficulties. They try again and again to reformulate their claims and definitions, but each time Socrates is able to find a contradiction. By this procedure, Socrates explains that, to his surprise, he learned that the people who purported to have knowledge in fact did not. After having often repeated this experience with many different kinds of people, he reaches the conclusion that the statement of the oracle was correct in the sense that, in contrast to the others, he at least knows that he knows nothing.28 He thus interprets the oracle to mean that true knowledge is only the domain of the gods. Human knowledge is, by contrast, vain and worthless. Socrates is the wisest not because he knows some specific body of knowledge but rather because, in contrast to the others, he realizes that he knows nothing and that his knowledge has no value. The famous Socratic method is portrayed most effectively in the dialogue form. One could not capture the point of Socrates’ ignorance in the same way by means of

22

The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

a philosophical treatise or a poem. At the beginning of the encounter, one usually finds Socrates’ claim to ignorance. This is what has traditionally been regarded as his famous irony, with the idea being that he is merely pretending that he is ignorant and that his dialogue partners have knowledge so that he can lay a trap for them. In any case, his refutation of human wisdom is dependent upon his ability to question others and detect the hidden contradictions in their views. Thus, the dialogue is perfectly suited for this purpose. By simply presenting the dialogue, Plato can allow his readers to follow the logic of the argument for themselves and grasp with their own intuitive sense of reasoning the problems and contradictions that Socrates exposes. For example, at the beginning of the Meno, upon being questioned about the nature of virtue, Socrates states, “I . . . confess to my shame that I have no knowledge about virtue at all. And how can I know a property of something when I don’t even know what it is?”29 It is statements of this kind that are presented in order to begin the discussion. Socrates’ interlocutors feel compelled to enlighten him on specific points that he is curious about but claims to have no knowledge of. In short, if there were no claim to ignorance, the dialogue would never get started since the interlocutors would never feel motivated to present a thesis or a definition for discussion. Thus, Socratic ignorance is closely connected to the dialogue form itself.

V  Socratic irony Socrates’ famous irony goes hand in hand with his purported ignorance. A common feature of the Platonic dialogues is Socrates’ humble disposition and his apparent deference to his interlocutors. As has just been discussed in the previous section, at the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates almost invariably states that he does not know about a given issue but is very keen to find out about it. He claims that he has heard that his interlocutor is an expert on the issue and thus begins to ask him questions about it. His demeanor has something very disarming about it, and this was doubtless what made it possible for him to enter into so many discussions with his contemporaries despite his reputation for confusing and perplexing people. Even when Socrates is pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the view of his discussion partner, he remains profoundly polite and deferential, usually generously ascribing any misunderstanding to his own ignorance or slowness of mind rather than to any shortcoming in the argument of his interlocutor. The question of Socrates’ irony is one that has a long tradition in Plato scholarship. Some argue that Socrates in fact really does know about the topic in question, and thus his irony is merely a ruse to bait his dialogue partner to enter into a discussion with him since in this way the partner feels flattered that his expert opinion is being solicited. Others argue that Socrates’ ignorance was in fact real, and therefore he was actually not being ironic when he claimed not to know and subsequently asked for the opinion of the other. The ultimate status of Socrates’ knowledge or ignorance is, for the present purposes, only secondary. The main point is rather that for the famous aspect of Socratic irony to

The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists

23

take place at all, the dialogical form is needed. In other words, if Socrates would have presented a straightforward treatise on the topic in question, then he certainly could not have feigned ignorance or been ironic in this same way. Instead, his irony only makes sense in the context of an interaction with another person who claims to have knowledge about something. For example, when Meno, a Thessalian, asks Socrates whether virtue can be taught, Socrates indirectly flatters him and his fellow countrymen, while denigrating himself. He ascribes this superiority of the Thessalians to the positive influence of the Sophist Gorgias.30 Socrates explains, In particular he got you into the habit of answering any question you might be asked, with the confidence and dignity appropriate to those who know the answers, just as he himself invites questions of every kind from anyone in the Greek world who wishes to ask, and never fails to answer them. But here at Athens, my dear Meno, it is just the reverse. There is a dearth of wisdom, and it looks as if it had migrated from our part of the country to yours.31

By flattering Meno in this way, Socrates encourages him to take up the issue of virtue and to present the famous views of Gorgias on this point. Socrates underscores, “I share the poverty of my fellow countrymen in this respect.”32 Astonished, Meno responds, “No. But is this true about yourself, Socrates, that you don’t even know what virtue is? Is this the report that we are to take home about you?”33 Socrates provokes Meno into giving an account of Gorgias’ views, by claiming that he has never met anyone who knew what virtue is. Here one can see how effective Socrates’ irony is at initiating the discussion. Meno then goes on to confidently give the first definition of virtue, and the actual philosophical discussion gets underway. Thus, Socratic irony is not merely a rhetorical or dramaturgical device, but rather it performs a real function in motivating and initiating the dialogue. He prompts his interlocutor to take pride in his purported knowledge and to present it. Similarly, Socrates, by means of irony, feeds the vanity of the Sophist Protagoras and encourages him to give an account of his claim that he can teach virtue: “With these facts in mind, Protagoras, I do not believe that virtue can be taught. But when I hear you speaking as I do, my skepticism is shaken and I suppose there is truth in what you say, for I regard you as a man of wide experience, deep learning, and original thought. If then you can demonstrate more plainly to us that virtue is something that can be taught, please don’t hoard your wisdom.”34 Here, Socrates exhibits a profound respect for the Sophist and even portrays himself and the others present as simpletons in his presence. Protagoras takes the bait, stating, “I shall not be a miser,” and condescendingly referring to himself as “an old man speaking to his juniors.”35 Thus, the way is cleared for Protagoras to state his views and to begin the exchange. Socrates expresses his astonishment upon hearing that Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father on the charge of manslaughter. He wishes to imply that there is a complex conflict involved in such a case between the duties Euthyphro has toward his father and his family and those he has toward the victim of the purported crime or, for that matter, the state. Referring to Euthyphro’s plan to prosecute his father, Socrates exclaims, “Good heavens, Euthyphro! Surely the crowd is ignorant of the way things

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ought to go. I fancy it is not correct for any ordinary person to do that, but only for a man already far advanced in point of wisdom.”36 To this Euthyphro replies briefly, “Yes, Socrates, by heaven! Far advanced!”37 Confident in his knowledge and acuity of judgment, Euthyphro cannot see any ambiguity or moral complexity in the situation. After Euthyphro gives his preliminary explanation of the situation, Socrates tries again to point out the moral dilemma and ambiguity of the issue: “Euthyphro, you think that you have such an accurate knowledge of things divine, and what is holy and unholy, that, in circumstances such as you describe, you can accuse your father? You are not afraid that you yourself are doing an unholy deed?”38 To this Euthyphro arrogantly replies, “Why, Socrates, if I did not have an accurate knowledge of all that, I should be good for nothing, and Euthyphro would be no different from the general run of men.”39 Then Socrates ironically concludes, “the best thing I can do is to become your pupil.”40 By thus ostensibly taking on the role of Euthyphro’s student, Socrates is then free to proceed with his questions. Moreover, Euthyphro is inflated by Socrates’ apparently uncritical acceptance of his claim to have certain knowledge and to be far superior to everyone else in such matters. Socratic irony thus aims to confirm the interlocutor in his opinion and even his arrogance and condescension. Once this has been established, the interlocutor has no hesitations about setting forth his own positive views, which he expects Socrates to accept uncritically with gratitude and humility. The Platonic dialogues are full of examples of this kind of interaction. Socratic irony thus plays on human vanity and pride in knowing. It functions as a kind of motor for getting the discussion started or continuing it when it is in danger of coming to a stop. It is impossible to imagine irony as serving this same function in the form of a straightforward philosophical treatise. The key is that Socrates does not put forth his own views but evokes the mistaken views of others. One might imagine a prosaic treatise that enumerated a number of fallacious views that were then refuted one after another, but this would in no way have the rhetorical force and power of the Platonic dialogue. Thus, Socratic irony is intimately connected to the dialogue form itself.

VI  Innate knowing and recollection The Sophists had some positive doctrine or practical knowledge that they claimed to impart to their students. This was presumably the justification for the demanding of payment for their services. If they had nothing to teach, then why should they be paid? Thus, they had to claim that there was some specific positive content that they were in possession of and which was of value to the student. Similarly, Socrates’ other interlocutors, such as Euthyphro and Meno, also confidently assert that they know things that most people do not. By contrast, Socrates claimed that he was not teaching anything. However, people had the impression that they had learned something after having spoken with him. In order to explain this, Socrates tries to demonstrate that people in fact already have a kind of innate knowledge from birth and that his task is merely to bring it out. Plato illustrates this in the Meno, where he has Socrates take up the question of whether virtue can be taught. After some back and forth, the interlocutors reach a

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point where they must start again in order to find the proper definition of virtue. But Meno asks how they can seek something if they do not know what it is; even if they found it, they would not necessarily recognize it as the object that they were looking for. Socrates responds to this by sketching his famous doctrine of recollection. Socrates has Meno call one of his young slave boys to him. By leading him from one step to the next, Socrates demonstrates that the slave boy has a basic knowledge of geometry, although he has never made a study of the subject.41 Meno must admit that Socrates was not teaching the boy anything or giving him any information, but rather was merely asking him questions. Socrates draws the conclusion from this that the boy knew this information all along and that all he did was to remind him of it. The boy was thus not learning anything but rather recollecting what he already knew. The knowledge comes paradoxically not from teaching but from questioning.42 The question then arises about how he came to know this. Meno attests that the boy has never had any instruction in geometry, and so he could not have learned it in this life. Socrates therefore infers that he must have had this knowledge prior to being born. From here he develops a theory of immortality. The soul is immortal and has knowledge of empirical things. Thus, when the soul is reborn in a particular person, that knowledge is there innately and must merely be recalled. The teacher is one who helps the individual to recollect. This famous example of the slave boy in the Meno is one that we are used to hearing in order to illustrate this famous Socratic doctrine. However, what people fail to recognize is that the strength of the argument is wholly dependent on the dialogue. What most readers do not remember is that prior to embarking on the exercise with the slave boy, Socrates in fact straightforwardly states his case for the immortality of the souls and for their innate knowledge of things.43 He quotes the poet Pindar as an authority on this matter.44 Here Socrates does not develop the argument by means of a dialogue but simply states it on his own and with reference to Pindar and the other poets. Stated in this way, the claim strikes the reader as bizarre or mystical and far from convincing. It is only when he makes the same case with the questioning of the slave boy that the argument for recollection begins to take on a degree of plausibility. The persuasive power of the argument lies in the fact that he can bring the uneducated slave to state some of the basic principles of geometry. How is this possible? It is from this sense of surprise that Socrates then can draw his more controversial conclusion about the immortality and transmigration of souls. The key thus lies in the dialogue form. Here again it is clear that the dialogue is the most appropriate means of demon­ strating the doctrine of innate ideas and recollection. It is only by portraying Socrates asking a series of questions to the slave boy that it comes out that the boy had know­ ledge that neither he nor anyone else thought that he had.

VII  The maieutic method In the Theaetetus, one finds the famous account of Socrates’ so-called maieutic method, a term taken from the Greek word, maieυtikόϚ, an adjective meaning “of or for midwifery.” There Socrates asks the young Theaetetus for a definition of what

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knowledge is. But the youth, despite his reputation for being a quick and zealous learner, soon becomes frustrated that he cannot provide the answer that Socrates is looking for. Socrates then compares his situation with that of a woman in labor: “You are suffering the pains of travail.”45 Thus, Socrates begins his description of himself as a kind of midwife, the profession that his mother held. He explains that a midwife does not herself give birth but helps other women to do so. He thus draws the analogy: “My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.”46 The key in Socrates’ explanation is that he has no knowledge or wisdom and thus cannot produce anything himself: I am so far like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom, and the common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. The reason is this. Heaven constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth. So of myself I have no sort of wisdom, nor has any discovery ever been born to me as the child of my soul.47

Many young people come to Socrates in the expectation of learning something and indeed go away with the feeling of having done so; however, Socrates has not taught them anything. Instead, he has acted like a midwife to help bring forth the knowledge that they had in themselves all the time. He explains further, Those who frequent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent, but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me. The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven’s work and mine.48

Socrates then suggests that Theaetetus is in the midst of birth pains and proposes to help him out of them. Following up on the midwife analogy, Socrates goes on to explain that his task is not over when he helps his interlocutors to give birth. Instead, he must examine their offspring, that is, the ideas that they present, in order to determine if they are viable. The ideas that appear cannot be accepted without examination but must be inspected closely. This is clearly intended as an explanation of the critical dimension of the Socratic method. This famous analogy of Socrates as a kind of midwife is also dependent on the dialogue form. In other words, if he were just to present a positive doctrine in a straightforward manner, then he would no longer be a midwife of the mind. Rather the art of being a midwife consists in the question-and-answer practice that he engages in with his interlocutor. Only through his questioning can he bring forward the truth that lies hidden in his discussion partner. Thus, the dialogue as a form is absolutely essential to Socrates’ ignorance, his denial that he teaches anything, and his midwife analogy.

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VIII  Aporia Another well-known feature of the Platonic dialogues is the fact that many of them come  to a negative result. This dimension of Plato’s writings has been of particular interest to scholars recently due to modern trends in literary theory. The question ultimately concerns whether Socrates has any positive doctrine or philosophy to convey. If one observes the way in which he questions people, one can easily get the impression that he employs a purely negative method intended merely to refute whatever view he happens to come across. A dialogue such as the Euthyphro presents several different definitions of a given abstract concept that Socrates asks about. Each time his interlocutor attempts to reformulate his answer in order to come up with a definition that Socrates will be satisfied with. As this continues to go on, the first-time reader has the intuition that the discussion is somehow leading somewhere, and at the end, Socrates will himself pronounce the correct definition. To the reader’s surprise, this expectation is disappointed and the dialogue breaks off when Socrates’ conversation partner grows weary of his questioning and can no longer provide any new attempts at a definition. This is the famous ἀporίa, which means “being at a loss” or “in a state of perplexity.” This kind of ending is counterintuitive to the reader, who naturally anticipates some kind of solution as one sees in dramas or other works. This well-known element of Socrates’ philosophical activity is perfectly suited to being portrayed in the form of a dialogue. In the course of the back and forth of the dialogue different definitions get proposed, criticized, and cast aside. This process is what builds up the sense of expectation in the reader. This could not be done with the same effectiveness in a simple philosophical treatise. One could imagine a work by a skeptic that simply enumerates different positions, refutes them one at a time, and then leaves the reader in a state of confusion or perplexity. But this would not have the same rhetorical effect as the dialogue. The Platonic dialogue has the look of two people at work resolving a problem or even a conflict. Each side seeks a satisfactory solution using the tools at his disposal. It is in the interest of both parties to find a solution and to come up with a definition that fits all the requirements. This is quite different from a skeptic who intends from the start to merely destroy any positive doctrine. This is not, at least ostensibly, Socrates’ goal. The dialogue that ends without a conclusion is thus a striking thing for the reader. But it fits perfectly well with Socrates’ claim to ignorance and his disinterested search for truth on its own terms. Given all this, there seem to be many perfectly good reasons for Plato to have couched his portrayal of the thought of his beloved teacher in the form of dialogues. In the historical context, it served his purpose far better than the alternative genres available at the time. With this in mind, it seems clear that much of the meaning of the Platonic dialogues would be lost if one were simply to mine them for the arguments alone. While certainly the arguments are important, to extract them from their dialogical form is to miss many important points that Plato is keen to emphasize about the nature of the thought of Socrates and indeed of philosophical enquiry in general. It should also be noted that it is only our present age which eschews the dialogue as a genuine form of philosophy. Many philosophers after Plato also followed his lead,

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invariably trying to imitate his style. Ancient writers refer to dialogues by Aristotle, although none of them survives. Some of Cicero’s most famous philosophical works are dialogues, such as On the Nature of the Gods, On the Orator, Discussions at Tusculum, and On the Republic. The Greek author Lucian wrote several dialogues with a humorous and satirical twist, for example, Dialogues of the Dead, A Trip to Hades, The Cock, The Sale of Philosophers, and Hermotimus. All of these can be said to contain significant philosophical content. Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy is a dialogue between the philosopher and the personification of philosophy. Augustine also authored a number of dialogues, such as The Teacher, On Free Will, The Happy Life, The Magnitude of the Soul, Soliloquies, and Against the Academicians. Peter Abelard’s Dialogue with a Jew, a Christian and a Philosopher was a profoundly influential work in the Middle Ages. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a series of Colloquia, which featured discussions of several topics from religion and classical philosophy. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one can mention Malebranche’s Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Apart from the desire to imitate Plato, later philosophers and even scientists have availed themselves of the dialogue form for different reasons also largely shaped by the historical context in which they were writing. In times of oppression, the dialogue provided a way to present controversial theories while not making the author responsible for them. One could put the problematic theory in the mouth of one of the interlocutors and thus distance oneself as author from it, especially if it is refuted, albeit badly, by one of the other participants in the dialogue. In this way, the censors would find it difficult to claim that the author was promulgating a dangerous or illegal view. Thus, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems pretended simply to present two opposing views to the judgment of the reader. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno also wrote a number of dialogues traditionally divided into the categories “cosmological,” which include the works The Ash Wednesday Supper, On Cause, Principle and Unity, and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, and “moral,” which follow in the spirit of Lucian and include The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, The Cabal of the Horse Pegasus, and On Heroic Frenzies. Thus, it can be said that philosophers have made use of the dialogue at more or less every period of its history with the exception of today. One might argue that it is not uncommon nowadays for famous philosophers, particularly in the French tradition, to publish interviews, and these have the form of a dialogue. Volumes of interviews of philosophers such as Sartre or Foucault have virtually become canonical in the study of these authors. While it is true that interviews of this kind have the look of a dialogue, they represent a different kind of genre from the Platonic dialogue and indeed from the other later dialogues mentioned here. In the interview, the goal is primarily to gain some supplemental information or perspectives about the work that the author has published and with which the reader is already familiar. One hopes, for example, to gain some insight into the historical or biographical context of one of the philosopher’s great theories or to hear about the genesis of a specific work, how it was conceived, developed, and changed, etc. Thus, the interview is something secondary, an addition or supplement, but it is not regarded as having the same status as the work

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itself. By  contrast, in the history of philosophy, the dialogue was used as a genuine vehicle for philosophical thinking on its own terms. It was what was primary and not an additional commentary to something else. Moreover, in interviews of the kind at issue, the person asking the questions is often a journalist and not a trained philosopher. Given this, it cannot really be said that the person being interviewed is being challenged philosophically in the way that Socrates challenges his interlocutors. The reader hardly expects the philosopher to come up with and develop new theories in the course of an oral interview, which is often intended for a wide audience. This is not the purpose that the interview is intended to serve. Thus, the interview can only serve as a kind of misleading modern analogy to the dialogue. There is nothing in mainstream Anglophone philosophy today that has a genuinely dialogical nature in the Socratic sense. This form of doing philosophy has simply been exorcised from the field despite its long and rich tradition.

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2

Paradox and Oxymoron in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales

On account of their purportedly unphilosophical prose style, a number of philosophers from the tradition such as Hegel and Heidegger have suffered derision at the hands of the analytic school, being accused of casting to the wind the basic rules of logic and clear thinking. For instance, most Anglo-American philosophers wince when Sartre says, “we have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”1 In the spirit of Ayer and Carnap, they are apt to dismiss this claim as philosophically meaningless. To be sure, if one takes the statement at face value, Sartre seems to be attributing contradictory predicates to a single subject: A is both X and not X. However, if one employs the most basic principle of interpretive charity, then surely one cannot believe that Sartre is committing such a sophomoric error. With this curious locution, Sartre must have something else in mind that is not immediately apparent. In other words, he must be using this oxymoron to make a philosophical point that eludes the reader at first glance. The employment of the oxymoron as a literary device is perceived by many to be entirely out of place in the field of philosophy. Perhaps in literature, it can produce a desired effect, but in philosophy, one is concerned with accurately and transparently conveying what is the case, and the contradiction that an oxymoron effects simply hinders one on the way to this end by, at best, obfuscating a point which could be stated more clearly and, at worst, setting out an obvious contradiction. In this chapter, I wish to explore how paradox and oxymoron can be used fruitfully in the service of a philosophical position. I will analyze some examples that Seneca uses in his Epistulae Morales in order to show how he employs these literary devices as effective and appropriate tools by means of which to elucidate and present the Stoic doctrine to the audience of his day. Although the general question of style in Seneca has received some attention in the literature,2 the specific issue of his use of paradox and oxymoron in a philosophical context has been somewhat neglected. The reason for this is that Seneca is known for his straightforward style.3 Indeed, Seneca himself often criticized convoluted rhetoric in philosophical works.4 However, it would be a mistake to take him wholly at his word since, as we shall see, he is not beneath employing convoluting literary devices such as paradox and oxymoron toward a philosophical end.

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I  Seneca and traditional Roman values Before we take up an account of Seneca’s style, it will be useful to articulate a few of the central points of his Stoic doctrine and to situate them in the context of the mores and values of the Roman world of Seneca’s day. This brief sketch will make one sensitive to the problem of presentation which confronted the philosopher.

A  Fame and public recognition One of the principal concepts of ancient Stoicism, from which several important corollaries follow, was that of providence or fortuna.5 The Stoics believed that the universe was governed by a rational plan determined by God. When the Stoics speak of “nature,” they mean this rational plan that provides for the well-being of humanity and the world. Hence, the Stoics are committed to a theodicy since they are continually confronted with the incongruity of this divine rational plan vis-à-vis needless suffering and injustice. This concept of providence in many ways sets the agenda of the philosopher whose goal is then to attain the good life, which for the Stoics means “to live in conformity with nature.”6 The Stoic sage is one who is able to bring his own rationality into accordance with the rational plan of the universe. This central concept of providence allows one to make sense not only of this Stoic ideal of living according to nature but also of a great deal of the rest of Seneca’s moralizing. Seneca, preparing the way for many later moralists, castigates his fellow Romans for cherishing ephemeral values such as the pursuit of fame and glory. According to his view, the problem with dedicating one’s life to the attainment of this goal is that, like health, beauty, and wealth, fame is external and thus subject to fortune.7 Regardless of how many brilliant acts we perform, the attainment of fame is in the final analysis not in our control. Whom the historians laud is dependent upon a myriad of contingent factors, and often by a miscarriage of justice the righteous become anonymous pages in the annals of humanity while the wicked are cast in the light of virtue and piety. The point of the Stoic maxim “live according to nature” is precisely to free oneself from the caprice of fortune by adopting a disposition with which one can bear with equanimity whatever nature or fortune metes out.8 One can never live in harmony with nature if one is immoderately attached to transitory things such as fame. The individual who is dependent upon external things that are determined by fortune is, by the simple principle of transitivity, himself also at the mercy of fortune. Seneca says, “The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids. It is homegrown, wholly selfdeveloped. Once it starts looking outside itself for any part of itself it is on the way to being dominated by fortune.”9 The key to a stable and inviolable life is a disposition that is self-sufficient and does not avail itself of adventitious things to gain its satisfaction. It is with this relationship to external things such as fame that we can best understand Seneca’s critique of the desire for having posthumous glory. Seneca’s criticism of the value of public fame is sharply at odds with Roman tradition and the mores of his day. The Roman hero of the past was always a public figure whose greatest reward was everlasting fame among a thankful Roman people. Virgil’s typically Roman hero Aeneas is constantly driven by his love of glory and the

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promise of his family line continuing in a prosperous manner; this is evinced most clearly in the underworld scene and the prophecies of Anchises at the end of Book VI.10 The most memorable figures in Livy are virtually all heroes of this sort who are driven by the promise of immortality in name. Of Rome’s legendary founder Romulus, Livy writes, “Magnificent in action, he was no less eager for popular recognition and applause.”11 The opening lines of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae constitute a straightforward hortatio to the search for fame: Every man who wishes to rise superior to the lower animals should strive his hardest to avoid living all his days in silent obscurity, like beasts of the field, creatures which go with their faces to the ground and are the slaves of their bellies. . . . since only a short span of life has been vouchsafed us, we must make ourselves remembered as long as may be by those who come after us.12

According to Sallust, the search for fame, being one of the things that separates us from animals, is what is idiosyncratic of humans. Fame is the patriotic Roman’s reward for his selfless sacrifice to the state and the proper discharge of his civil and military duties. The zenith of any Roman leader’s career was being voted a military triumph by the senate after a successful campaign. At such events, conquered peoples and captured materials would be paraded and images of victorious battles portrayed. Statues and effigies kept the memories of fallen heroes alive as examples for future generations. Cicero’s extended discussion in De Officiis gives numerous examples of the importance of lasting fame as a Roman value.13 There he points out the value of and means to obtaining a good reputation for furthering oneself politically and establishing for oneself a leading role in the affairs of the state. The Greek historian Polybius was profoundly impressed by the Romans’ deference to honor and reputation. In his Histories, he describes in the following way the effect of the Roman customs of making effigies and holding eulogistic speeches for dead ancestors: “the most important consequence . . . is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”14 However, honor, far from being the domain only of soldiers, officers, and politicians, is also granted to those in the arts and human sciences as well. At the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poet justifies his life in terms of the posthumous glory which his work is certain to bring him: “That day which has power over nothing but my body may, when it pleases, put an end to my uncertain span of years. Yet with my better Part I shall soar, undying, far above the stars, and my name will be imperishable. . . . I shall live at all eternity, immortalized by fame.”15 Pliny the Younger tells us, “Opinions differ, but my idea of the truly happy man is of one who enjoys the anticipation of a good and lasting reputation, and, confident in the verdict of posterity, lives in the knowledge of the fame that is to come.”16 In another passage, he writes in a similar vein, “Nothing attracts me so much as that love and longing for a lasting name, man’s worthiest aspiration.”17 Thus, the search for fame has a ubiquitous character covering virtually all aspects of Roman life. Seneca is therefore criticizing a very ancient and commonly held value about the desirability of a good public name and of the fame of reputation. His doctrine, which preached a disdain for fame, was entirely at odds with the long-held Roman view.

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B  The cultivation of the body The account of the importance of fortuna also helps one to understand Seneca’s denigration of the body18 and his critique of physical pleasure.19 The body is, like fame, subject to the ravages of time and the vicissitudes of fortune. Although there are certain salutary exercises one might perform or habits one might develop, ultimately health and a strong body do not lie within our sphere of control. The body is the part of human beings that is at the mercy of fortune, and thus Seneca says, “For that body is all that is vulnerable about me: within this dwelling so liable to injury there lives a spirit that is free.”20 He does not forbid or dissuade his addressee, Lucilius, from partaking in physical exercise, but he exhorts him with a frequently used illness metaphor to cultivate his soul first and foremost: “Without wisdom the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in persons in a demented or delirious state. So this is the sort of healthiness you must make your principal concern. You must attend to the other sort as well, but see that it takes second place.”21 Thus, the body must be taken care of for the sake of health but nothing else. Seneca enjoins his novice, “Indulge the body just so far as suffices for good health.”22 For Seneca, since the body is a potential victim of the changes of fortune, it is pointless to try to cultivate it like the soul. He goes so far as to speak of the body as a place in which the soul is held captive.23 The goal then is to minimize the role of the body and to enhance the soul so as to render oneself tranquil in the face of fortune. It is to the soul which one must dedicate one’s most resolved efforts: “Reflect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit.”24 Seneca’s account of the body once again puts him at odds with both contemporary public sentiment and long-standing Roman tradition. Physical strength and beauty were cardinal values for both the Greeks and the Romans as is evinced by some of their most outstanding achievements in the plastic arts. The famous example of the Roman copy of the Discobolus or discus thrower by Myron clearly demonstrates the Romans’ portrayal of an idealized human body that incarnates strength, agility, balance, and elegance all in one. In addition, a condition for many of the priesthoods and religious offices was that the candidates be free of bodily infirmities or defects, the most obvious case being the strict regulations governing the Vestal Virgins.25 In their historical and biographical writings, both Suetonius and the writers of the Augustan History were careful to give detailed accounts of the physiognomy of the emperors and the pretenders to the throne. Rome’s great heroes are virtually always portrayed as vigorous men of great strength, and it is not by accident that the same man often incarnated both civic and military leader. Virgil’s prototypical Roman hero Aeneas is a paradigm case. Dido is captivated by Aeneas not only because of Juno’s spell but also because of his “strong  .  .  .  chest and arms.”26 As he approaches the hunt just prior to the improvident meeting in the cave, Aeneas is expressly described as “handsome past all others.”27 Many martial virtues on which the Romans prided themselves depended on this corporeal ­fitness—running quickly, hurling weapons, wrestling, boxing, etc. Once again, almost all of Livy’s heroes from early Roman history were known for these sorts of virtues, and the later heroes, such as Caesar and Augustus, did not deviate from this

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model. The Romans in Seneca’s time had developed a cult of the body, so to speak, which included elaborate baths, massages, saunas, imported lotions, perfumes, and so forth. Hence, Seneca’s criticism of physical exercise and the body runs entirely against the grain of an old and revered Roman value. The soul plays a crucial role for Seneca since it is associated with the divine28 and with reason.29 Seneca gives Aristotelian reasons30 for the claim that it is the soul that we share with the gods31 and which makes us most like them and distances us from the animals. He argues that the highest faculty of human beings is the rational soul and this is what allows us to live in accordance with nature. In contrast to the body, the soul is not at the mercy of fortune. To the question of what is unique about human beings, Seneca responds, “You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy—that he live in accordance with his own nature.”32 The result of this conception of the relation of the soul to the body and to the external world is that the Stoic sage is one who turns away from the external and into himself. Since only the soul is free from fortune, Seneca issues the injunction to his interlocutor, “Retire into yourself as much as you can.”33 The Stoic is one who withdraws from the distractions and vices of daily life which tempt the unwary and render them dependent on external things.34 Hence, the Stoic is one who concentrates on the cultivation of the soul in order that it may stand fast in the face of fortune. The result of this kind of education is that the individual becomes self-sufficient: “The wise man is content with himself.”35 This is done by disassociating the soul from the many noxious external things and by turning into the secure realm of the self. With his account of the importance of the soul and the inner sphere at the expense of the external public world, Seneca is again promulgating a profoundly unRoman doctrine. The Romans are famous as a people for whom civic and social life were of singular importance. Cicero writes, for instance, in The Dream of Scipio, “the very best deeds are those which serve your country.”36 In the heritage of the Greeks for whom the word “ἰdiώthϚ”37 referred to private individuals who, as if pursuant of Seneca’s advice, kept to themselves and played no role in public affairs, the Romans esteemed public service as the citizen’s highest end and looked upon seclusion or nonparticipation with disdain. In his De Re Publica, Cicero illustrates this point when he claims, “For there is really no other occupation in which human virtue approaches more closely the august function of the gods than that of founding new states or preserving those already in existence.”38 Hence, for Cicero, “virtus” involved holding public office and managing the state wisely. The word “virtus” was traditionally associated with typically masculine actions and deeds performed in the public sphere as is betrayed by its etymological relation to the word “vir” or “man”; however, with Seneca, “virtus” becomes redefined as something having to do with one’s soul and one’s own personal inner life. Seneca’s hero is one who overcomes his own desires and who aligns himself with reason and nature. For Seneca, the battle within is more important than those fought in the political or military sphere. Once again Seneca finds himself diametrically opposed to long-established Roman values.

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C  Inward and outward freedom Freedom is another central concept of Stoicism that is closely related to the other concepts we have been examining. For the Stoic, the principal goal of philosophy and of the wise man is to be free, which means to live in accordance with the rational plan of the universe. One important philosophical problem that ensues from this view is the apparent contradiction between the notion of fate or fortune and freedom. If the universe is governed by providence, then how can we be free?39 How can one make sense of freedom if nature determines everything that one does? Seneca’s answer is that even though the body and one’s external circumstances are subject to the necessity of nature, nevertheless the soul is always free. This view resembles existential freedom in that although one may be physically compelled to do something, the soul is always free to think what it wants. The Stoic view of freedom thus represents a sort of compatibilism that reconciles freedom and necessity. Even under the yoke of the basest tyranny of Nero, the true Stoic can be free. Given that true freedom resides in the soul, the external circumstances of one’s existence are irrelevant. The mundane difference between the two great Stoics, the emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave Epictetus, is dissolved in the realm of thought where Stoic freedom lies.40 This Stoic conception of freedom runs counter to many of the traditional notions held by the ancient Romans. For the Romans, the concept of freedom has a couple of different meanings. First, it meant Roman citizenship and a certain status under the law with the attendant rights and privileges. By contrast, slavery was accompanied by the stigma of not being recognized as a person by the law, which involved potentially being subject to torture or beatings without legal recourse. Hence, the concept of liberty in this sense was a public thing since the exercise of freedom could be readily recognized in the public sphere. Second, for the Romans, the freedom of the citizens of a given state was determined by the nature of their government. Only in a democracy where the citizens themselves determine their own fate can individuals be considered truly free.41 In any sort of autocracy, such as early Rome under the kings or imperial Rome under the emperors, the entire populace was in a sense thought to be enslaved to the will of a single individual. Thus, Brutus, who drove out the last of the kings and helped to establish democratic institutions, is referred to reverently with the epithet “the Liberator” and his act as “the liberation.”42 Tacitus refers to the establishment of the emperors after the civil wars and the fall of the republic as “the nation’s enslavement,”43 and he calls Rome under Tiberius a “slave state.”44 Suetonius writes that upon the occasion of the death of Gaius and the uncertain accession of Claudius to the imperial throne, “the Consuls, with the approval of the Senate and the aid of the city cohorts, had seized the forum and Capitol, and were determined to maintain public liberty.”45 For Suetonius, “to maintain public liberty” amounts to abolishing the emperors altogether and returning to the long lost democracy. For both of these meanings, freedom was overt and universally recognizable. Seneca’s  freedom, on the other hand, was a private disposition which is not easily accessible to others. His conception of freedom is independent of one’s civil status as free or slave and of external conditions such as the form of government under which

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one happens to live. Hence, this definition of freedom contradicted the accepted Roman view of what freedom consisted in.

II  Seneca’s inversion of Roman values and criticism of contemporary philosophy The conclusion that I wish to draw from these bits and pieces of Seneca’s Stoic doctrine is that all of them share the common feature of being at odds with the Roman values of the day. We have seen that Seneca’s criticism of fame and physical strength called into question some of the most widely esteemed Roman virtues. Likewise, his emphasis on the inner sanctuary of the soul and his denigration of civic virtue were wholly at odds with the traditional public-mindedness of the Romans. Finally, Seneca’s definition of freedom as something internal stood in opposition to the Roman notions of freedom. Hence, at each of these points, Seneca contradicts the time-honored values of his fellow countrymen. But a closer look reveals that he is not merely contradicting those values but rather inverting them. In other words, Seneca’s position criticizes exactly what the Roman tradition extols and vice versa. Stoic doctrine is not a simple critique of Roman values, but rather it is a straightforward reversal of them. The Roman tradition says that fame and strength are of utmost importance, while Seneca says that they are without value. For the tradition, fame and strength are external, whereas for Seneca, they are internal. Throughout the history of Rome, public service in any capacity was esteemed as virtuous, while Seneca claims that it is meaningless and that true virtue is internal, in the soul. Freedom is for the Romans an external condition in relation to Roman law, while for Seneca, it is an internal condition related only to the human soul. At every point, Seneca argues for a position which is exactly the opposite of that which was held by his contemporaries. This fact posed a problem of presentation for Seneca since the doctrine that he wanted to espouse could not be couched in the traditional language that his readers were used to hearing, according to which virtue, freedom, etc. had entirely different meanings from those with which he meant to invest them. If one were living in such an inverted world where sweet was sour and virtue was vice, how would one communicate? Imagine that there are two languages the meanings of whose words were exact opposites in every case. Whenever someone in the first language said “black,” his audience in the second language would hear and understand “white.” Thus, meaningful communication would be precluded. For Seneca, the worldview that Stoic philosophy presented was just such an inverted world. It was an inversion of the Roman world that he knew so well. Yet, Seneca knew both languages. He knew the importance and meaning of the traditional Roman values, and he also knew the world and language of Stoic philosophy. The problem that confronted him was how to communicate that Stoic philosophy to his Roman audience given that they represented, as it were, incommensurable language games. To use words such as “virtue” and “freedom” straightforwardly to explain Stoic doctrine would be misleading since these words would have naturally been invested with their usual connotations in the minds of his public. However, to speak only in terms belonging to conservative, traditional

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Romans would fail to do justice to the Stoic doctrine which criticizes precisely the set of values at work there. Seneca was thus presented with the problem of how to express his Stoic philosophy to his Roman contemporaries. For Seneca, the problem of expression could not be resolved by having recourse to some of the typical forms of philosophical writing in his day such as logic and linguistic analysis. He is highly critical of these kinds of academic writing that he perceives as a tendency toward sterile logic chopping which is at variance with the true mission of philosophy.46 Instead of patiently treating genuine philosophical problems and issues, many thinkers allow themselves to get side-tracked by their methodology of logic and linguistic analysis. Seneca contrasts a genuinely philosophical treatment of the concept of friendship with that which is offered by those engaged in purely academic distinctions leading to no greater end than the promulgation of further subtleties: “What I should like those subtle thinkers . . . to teach me is this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used and how many different meanings the word ‘man’ has.”47 These unimaginative thinkers reduce each philosophical issue to a mere linguistic game and thereby purge it of all genuinely philosophical content and importance. Thus, instead of addressing themselves to bonafide philosophical issues, they simply “pull words about and cut up syllables.”48 Seneca takes issue with the sort of philosophical ratiocination and expression which insists interminably on the employment of syllogisms to expose linguistic or logical errors, noting that this sort of insistence on logic becomes an end unto itself, while the true philosophical questions gradually fade into the background: One is led to believe that unless one has constructed syllogisms of the craftiest kind, and reduced fallacies to a compact form in which a false conclusion is derived from a true premise, one will not be in a position to distinguish what one should aim at and what one should avoid. It makes one ashamed—that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.49

It may be useful to have a familiarity with the basic rules of logic, but, Seneca insists, this alone cannot constitute philosophical thought. According to Seneca’s model, philosophy should edify and instruct us about how to lead the bona vita, but it is precisely this practical aspect of the discipline that linguistic analysis diligently avoids. Linguistic games and logic chopping can hardly be regarded as the true means to the end of philosophy. With the following syllogistic example, Seneca makes the contrast clear between his conception of philosophy and that of the “subtle thinkers”: “ ‘Mouse is a syllable, and a mouse nibbles cheese; therefore, a syllable nibbles cheese.’ Suppose for the moment that I can’t detect the fallacy in that. What danger am I placed in by such lack of insight? What serious consequences are there in it for me?”50 These “childish fatuities,”51 as Seneca calls them, provide no insight whatsoever into the good life and invariably leave the true philosopher unsatisfied. Logic and syllogisms are fruitless unless their content can be somehow applied to meaningful questions of how to lead a moral life. Seneca indicates that the use of logic and syllogisms is ineffectual in the service of improving one’s moral character. Citing an example from the Greek philosopher Zeno

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in which drunkenness is criticized by means of a syllogism, Seneca demonstrates how this simply reduces itself to absurdities and offers no moral edification or inducement at all: “No person who is drunk,” he says, “is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man will not get drunk.” Watch how ridiculous [Zeno] is made to look when we counter with a single syllogism on the same pattern. . . . “No person who is asleep is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man does not go to sleep.”52

If our goal is the edification and improvement of the moral character, syllogisms of this sort are entirely without effect. He asks Lucilius rhetorically, “If you want to arrive at the conclusion that the good man ought not to get drunk, why set about it with syllogisms?”53 A much more efficacious means of making a plea for abstemious behavior would be simply to cite a number of negative examples of inebriated individuals and let that testimony dissuade the novices of Stoicism. Logic is not the only object of Seneca’s critique; he likewise criticizes the insistence on linguistic analysis for its own sake: Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers. Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.54

He laments that his contemporary philosophers “teach us how to argue instead of how to live.”55 Seneca thus enjoins Lucilius to avoid this sort of philosophical expression which is inconsistent with true philosophy: “Keep clear, then, my dear Lucilius, as far as you can, of the sort of quibbles and qualifications I’ve been mentioning in philosophers.”56

III  Seneca’s use of paradox and oxymoron From this discussion, it is clear that Seneca regards logic and linguistic analysis, forms of philosophical expression among many of his contemporaries, with nothing but scorn. He needed a means by which he could both distance himself from these “subtle thinkers” and express his Stoic doctrine in a cogent and congenial manner. It would have been absurd to attempt to employ logic and syllogisms to express the counterintuitive claims that he wished to advocate. It would have been misleading precisely because his Stoic philosophy changes and inverts the meanings of certain key words and concepts. Finally, it would have run the risk of reducing his philosophy to a sort of linguistic puzzle which is precisely what he was anxious to avoid. His solution to the problem of presentation and communication was to employ certain literary devices that would point out to his Roman audience that a word or

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phrase was being used in a special way or with a novel meaning which would compel the audience to seek the new meaning and to view it in contrast to its accustomed usage. Two of the devices that Seneca used were paradox and oxymoron, which enabled him to translate his Stoic doctrine to his Roman readers without losing any of that doctrine’s subtleties. The paradox, a traditional Stoic weapon,57 obliges further reflection in its presentation of an apparent self-contradiction or challenge to common sense. The oxymoron similarly plays on the curious use of words or the counterintuitive descriptions of certain events in order to express the Stoic doctrine. These literary devices place the rules of logic in abeyance, so to speak, and allow Seneca to make his often counterintuitive points that were examined above. When Seneca discusses what true peace and quiet is, he first entertains the position of common sense that with sleep come peace and quiet, but then he objects, “interdum quies inquieta est.” (“Rest is sometimes far from restful.”)58 With this oxymoron and the juxtaposition and alliteration of “quies” and “inquieta,” Seneca compels the reader to reconsider the example. Although the body is quiet and restful, the mind or soul may still be profoundly vexed. In this way, although an observer might say that someone sleeping soundly is at rest, in fact the sleeper may be enduring more worries and cares than when he is awake. The oxymoron works by having “quies” and “inquieta” refer to different things. Quies may be a good description of the body, but yet the soul may well be inquieta. Perhaps the most frequent use of the oxymoron by Seneca is in his various accounts of the Stoic notion of freedom. He enjoys playing with the reader’s preestablished conceptions of who is free and who a slave. Seneca lauds the moral integrity of Socrates, who, in the face of the commands of the Thirty Tyrants, would not be compelled to act against his moral conscience.59 He concludes with a general point about the nature of slavery: “Quid interest quot domini sint? servitus una est; hanc qui contempsit in quantalibet turba dominantium liber est.” (“What difference does it make how many masters a man has? Slavery is only one, and yet the person who refuses to let the thought of it affect him is a free man no matter how great the swarm of masters around him.”)60 The oxymoron here consists in the fact that one can, legally speaking, be a slave, surrounded by a crowd of masters, and yet nevertheless still be free. As was seen above, freedom for Seneca consists in a certain mental disposition which is indicated here by the verb “contempsit.” One could say that freedom resides in the soul; hence, if one has the correct mental disposition indicative of a free soul, then one’s legal status or social condition is irrelevant. In another passage concerning freedom, Seneca cites Epicurus as saying, “To win true freedom you must be a slave to philosophy.”61 Seneca’s oxymoron obliges the reader to question the meaning of freedom and slavery since the statement itself cannot be made sense of at face value. Seneca cites long examples of slavery to other things: “I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman,’ a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. I could show you some highly aristocratic young men who are utter slaves to stage artistes.”62 Although the individuals involved, that is, the ex-consul, the millionaire, and the young aristocrats, are all purportedly free, nonetheless they are all slaves to their passions. This sort of slavery Seneca holds in disdain since slavery to the body and the passions, because

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it is self-imposed, is lower than the legal status of slavery. By contrast, to be a slave to philosophy means to commit oneself to a life of overcoming the passions and to mastering them in a retreat to the realm of pure thought. As has been seen, Stoic freedom exists in precisely this sphere. In many of his letters, Seneca criticizes the opulence, avarice, and luxury of the Rome of his day. He often contrasts the simple lives of virtuous Romans of the past such as Scipio Africanus with the vices and luxuries of his contemporaries. In a kind of romantic reminiscence, he contrasts the rustic bathroom in the humble home of Scipio with the lavish bathhouses of Rome’s most morally deprived citizens, and on the basis of this comparison he writes, “Men are dirtier creatures now than they ever were in the days before the coming of spotlessly clean bathrooms.”63 Although the early Romans were not exacting in their personal hygiene, they were nevertheless morally pure, so to speak. For Seneca, although his contemporaries are doubtless physically well cared for with beautiful baths, lotions, and perfumes, nevertheless they are “dirtier creatures” in the moral sense precisely on account of their impoverished value system which placed so much emphasis on the body at the expense of moral character. Seneca sees intemperance as one of the most pernicious of vices. He uses as his example the immoderate consumption of wine, cataloguing the negative results of excessive drinking: dizziness, nausea, disorientation, etc. To describe this, he uses a provocative paradoxical formulation: “So-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.”64 Common sense says that one drinks for pleasure. Yet excess in drinking leads to the “punishments” which Seneca lists, and it is for this reason that temperance ought to be revered and made one of the goals of moral life. Seneca holds in high esteem the value of friendship, solidarity, and community. Cultivating firm friendships is one of the most important things that we as moral individuals can do. Far from taking away from one’s own private life and activity, friendship with others enhances one’s life as an individual. In interaction with others, we gain the recognition and confirmation that each of us needs for his or her own selfconception. Thus, Seneca paradoxically writes, “You should live for the other person if you wish to live for yourself.”65 In order to be fulfilled and happy as an individual, one needs to have trusting and compassionate relations with others. With these examples and many others like them throughout Seneca’s corpus, it is clear why oxymoron and paradox were appropriate and effective literary devices for expressing Stoic philosophy. Given the Stoic inversion of Roman values which he wanted to express, Seneca might have been tempted to create a new philosophical vocabulary as Heidegger later did. This strategy, however, would surely have alienated his audience which doubtless consisted in large measure of uneducated people without the leisure or interest to master new jargon. After all, the Stoic philosophy was a public philosophy which strove after something which everyone desires—the good life. Hence, Seneca is well served by paradox and oxymoron as the literary means to express his Stoic doctrine. The lesson to be learned is that literary devices such as oxymoron and paradox should not be eliminated from philosophical writing since they can serve the function of expressing an important philosophical point. Given the historical context in which

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Seneca lived, it made perfect sense to express his philosophical views with paradoxes and oxymorons. This historical context is precisely what Ayer and Carnap seem to overlook by presupposing that philosophy is a single timeless entity which, having a single universally accepted objective, must be unwaveringly expressed in a single uniform manner. Although out of context Sartre’s claim that human reality is “a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” seems simply silly and illogical, nevertheless a careful study Sartre’s work reveals that he is making a point about the dialectical relationship of what he calls “facticity” and “transcendence” in human life and is couching it in paradoxical terms. Different philosophical theories and arguments lend themselves to different forms of expression accordingly. When one looks at the history of philosophy, one finds that literary devices such as oxymoron have a legitimate role to play in specific contexts. Hence, a disservice is done to philosophy if it is deprived of the use of such devices and they are consigned exclusively to works of fiction or poetry. One would do well to reflect on Seneca’s advice to Lucilius: “Think how many poets say things that philosophers have said—or ought to have said!”66

3

Satire as Philosophy: Erasmus’ Praise of Folly

The satirical writing used by Erasmus of Rotterdam in his classic Praise of Folly provides a good illustration of philosophical writing whose literary form is intimately connected with its argumentative content.1 Since this, Erasmus’ most famous work, is a satire, which is today not generally recognized as a legitimate means of philosophical expression, and since the preponderance of his work is today considered philological in nature, the study of Erasmus, when not neglected altogether, has been consigned almost exclusively to literature departments; as a consequence, although Erasmus clearly concerned himself with central philosophical and theological issues,2 his work is generally not considered philosophically important. There is, however, I wish to argue, an important positive philosophical and theological thesis in Praise of Folly. More significantly, Erasmus’ use of satire as a means of philosophical expression is highly relevant for, and thoroughly connected with, the content of that thesis, which has, in my view, been hitherto misunderstood. Before we turn to Erasmus himself, it will be useful first to look briefly at the philosophical milieu in which he was writing.

I  The scholastic quaestio The writings of the scholastics represent for the modern student something quite foreign and quite difficult. The difficulty lies as much in the subtlety of the ratiocination and the remoteness of the issues as in the generally abstruse, stilted, and idiosyncratic mode of presentation. The scholastics’ quaestio disputata and quaestio quodlibetalis, taken together, represented in large measure the orthodox genre of academic philosophical expression in Erasmus’ time.3 Both evolved from the exercises given to students at the first universities in Europe perhaps as early as the thirteenth century.4 The quaestiones disputatae, or standard disputations, were all related by means of “their subject matter or in virtue of some common text of Holy Scripture.”5 As the name implies, the quaestiones quodlibetales, on the other hand, could be on any issue at all. Although the disputata and the quodlibetalis differed in content, they were identical in form. In Praise of Folly, Erasmus tries to criticize not only the content of the scholastics’ philosophy, but also the genre of philosophical expression in which that philosophy is couched.

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Just as the exercises were governed by strict rules carefully monitored by professors, so also the written form of the quaestio had a definite procedure. At first, the author would propose a thesis that he ultimately wished to defend. Then counterarguments (argumenta contra) would be enumerated against the thesis, and the author would next give preliminary objections to the counterarguments which suggested how they might be undermined. As a result of this, the issue would be resolved, and the thesis reinstated. Finally, the objections against the thesis would be taken up individually and thoroughly refuted. These sorts of exercises and this kind of writing led to a unique kind of philosophy. Scholasticism took delight in distinctions and specialized vocabulary and made it a part of formal philosophical training. As one author put it when discussing the oral disputatio as a school exercise, the students “with the help of ever more finely drawn distinctions” were asked “to show the number of different meanings contained in almost every expression.”6 Besides this obsession with subtle distinctions, logic came to the fore and developed into an important tool to make such distinctions. The advances in logic during the medieval period in the work of scholars such as Abelard hardly need to be rehashed or underscored here. Also, great emphasis was put on methodically constructed philosophical systems, Christian dogmatics, or Biblical interpretations. One need to only examine Aquinas’ Summa Theologica to see how the issues are broken down into very specific questions, which are in turn broken down into very specific articles, which themselves are further subdivided. This sort of regimented and mechanical procedure led to a quite uniform and flat style of writing which encouraged, instead of literary imagination or variety, ever greater acuity in discriminations between ever finer nuances of words and concepts within the same fixed argumentative pattern. This promoted a highly specialized philosophical argot, the mastery of which came to make up a large part of a philosopher’s education. This predilection for linguistic subtleties in turn gave rise to prolix and detailed philosophical analyses which concentrated largely on the elucidation of the technical nomenclature. An abundance of formal logical rules and principles went hand in hand with these uncompromising linguistic distinctions to produce a highly disciplined, exacting, and invariable genre of philosophical expression. This tedious form of philosophical writing was as much the target of Erasmus’ criticism as the abstract content of the scholastics’ doctrines themselves. Erasmus and many of his contemporaries, for example, Descartes, Montaigne, and Hobbes, were disillusioned with the world of scholastic learning that dominated the universities of their day. One tack was simply to reject scholasticism wholesale and start anew as Descartes did in his Meditationes. Another was to respond, as Montaigne did, with a deep skepticism about the status of knowledge, given the scholastics’ failure to ground their claims to knowledge satisfactorily vis-à-vis the obvious advances of the new science. Yet another was to respond with a common sense kind of materialism that was at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum of the scholastics, as Hobbes did. Erasmus’ response was unique and important. He did not simply reject it out of hand or ignore it, but rather he gave an extended and unique criticism of it, which we must now examine in detail.

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II  The theology of Folly Toward the end of Praise of Folly, Erasmus’ own theology comes into focus, and his means of expression becomes highly significant. Erasmus, using Folly as a mouthpiece, articulates an elaborate argument in which he tries to contrast the spirit and teachings of the incipient Christian church with those of the philosophical Christianity espoused by the scholastics. Folly frames Erasmus’ thesis in the following terms: “To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom.”7 Relying heavily on scriptural evidence, Folly tries to provide support for this thesis by making the case that Christianity is, or at least originally was, at bottom an anti-intellectual religion. This interpretation, of course, stands in sharp contrast to the involution and erudition of the scholastics’ version of Christianity, which she so acrimoniously criticizes; specifically, the essence of Christianity, for Folly, involves what she takes to be typically Christian acts and virtues, for example, love, benevolence, charity, etc., which are quite distant from the scholastics’ preoccupation with hermetic theological points. Folly notes how Christ’s teachings were not aimed at the learned or the intellectual elite but instead at the simple and unlettered. She first observes that his reproaches of the Pharisees clearly demonstrate his antipathy for the erudite and his adoration for the unschooled: “There are also some relevant passages in the gospel where Christ attacks Pharisees and scribes and the teachers of the Law while giving his unfailing protection to the ignorant multitude.”8 Folly perspicuously discerns the original Christian inversion of the common understanding of the relation between the ignorant and the wise. Here she reminds the listeners of Christ’s clear intention to address himself to those who were often considered the most foolish, while he admonishes those who were thought at the time to be the most wise. Christ’s doctrine was essentially exoteric and thus stood in contradiction to the elitism of the Pharisees and at odds with the intellectualism of the scholastics. Folly goes on to describe how Christ selected his pedagogical methods in a manner that was appropriate to the audience that he was addressing, avoiding the complexity that his scholastic followers later adopted: “He taught them to shun wisdom, and made his appeal through the example of children, lilies, mustard-seed and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live their lives by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose.”9 Christ did not present his teachings by means of syllogisms or complicated arguments which accorded with the scholastics’ rules of logic and dialectic or by means of bombastic rhetoric full of empty disputations; instead, he taught using stories and parables, which exhibited everyday examples of unadorned simplicity.10 The naïveté expressed in this kind of pedagogy is, for Erasmus, a fundamental characteristic of Christian doctrine which stands in clear contraposition to the barren logic chopping of the schoolmen. Christ’s mode of expression and pedagogical method reflect the content of his teaching. The scholastics, by indulging only in speculative technical issues about Christian doctrine, lose sight of the simplicity and broad appeal of Christ’s own pronouncements.

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Folly, by citing scripture, explicitly indicates how Christian values tend to transpose one’s intuitive notions of wisdom and folly.11 Those who believe themselves to be wise merely betray their own self-deception, while those who are considered foolish, yet, in a Socratic fashion, admit their own ignorance, are by this very fact wise: “If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.”12 Only through a modest and humble avowal of one’s ignorance does one become wise. This seems also to be the point in the Vorrede to Brant’s Das Narrenschiff, one of Folly’s predecessors, which reads, “Denn wer sich selbst als Narr eracht’t, / Der ist zum Weisen bald gemacht.”13 Folly finds additional support for her claim that Christianity is essentially anti-intellectual in nature in Paul’s citation of Isaiah, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, / and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”14 With the use of this scriptural passage and others like it, Folly tries to highlight the often paradoxical inversion of values that early Christianity effected, and thus she gives evidence for her thesis about Christianity having a close kinship with Folly. Erasmus thus exposes a distinct element of foolishness in the inauthentic and often farcical façade of the scholars,15 whereas in the simplicity at the heart of Christianity, there is a certain kind of wisdom from which the ostensibly wise can learn. The point is also well demonstrated by yet another forerunner of Folly from Renaissance German literature—Till Eulenspiegel, the fool who paradoxically outwits the leading citizens of every town that he visits, thus rendering wise the unfortunate victims of his roguishness: “Aber Ihr seht, daß einer wohl durch Narren weise gemacht wird.”16 The debate about the nature of Christian belief is one that begins with the religion’s inception. The scriptures seem to support both sides of the argument. In these passages cited above from 1 Corinthians, a strong emphasis on the essentially passionate or emotional nature of Christian faith is evident. Faith must be emotional and spontaneous and not reasoned and calculated. This emphasis on the passionate side of religious belief has its own modern theological tradition from Pascal to Kierkegaard. However, passages from Romans seem to underline the rational faculty of the mind or nοῦϚ as playing the essential role in Christian faith. Take the following passage for instance, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind.”17 Also in Acts, we constantly see Paul debating with the nonbelievers, an activity which itself seems to give evidence for the claim that Christian faith is a matter of correct belief which can be modified and made veridical through debate and rational discourse. It is this understanding of Christian faith that the scholastics, whether consciously or unconsciously, adopted. The point is not to adjudicate this large theological issue about the nature of Christian faith but rather to orient Erasmus’ own position in that debate. It should be obvious by now that for Erasmus, the nature of Christian faith, if not irrational, has little to do with reason or rationality.18 For Erasmus, Christian belief is revealed in everyday life in one’s feelings of brotherly love and in one’s charitable and beneficent deeds, but this sort of immediate spontaneous feeling or belief is not something which needs support in philosophical argumentation. Faith is something that one feels and is not merely the detached and contemplated acceptance of a conclusion to a syllogism. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard vigorously argues, and Erasmus would doubtless agree, that if Christian

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belief were something that one could work out like a mathematical formula, in the way that the scholastics’ proofs for God’s existence purported decisively to demonstrate their conclusion, then it would not be faith but rather certitude. As the aforementioned passages (and the debate with Luther) indicate,19 the centerpiece of Christian faith, for Erasmus, is the vita Christiana, that is, an ethical life of unpretending simplicity, led according to spontaneous feelings of kindness, munificence, and benevolence. These are the uniquely Christian virtues that Folly wants to accentuate; hence, the scholastics, for Folly, have vitiated and betrayed Christianity by turning it into an academic exercise and a sterile doctrine detached from everyday life and human experience. The scholastics, while claiming to be defenders of the faith, have in fact lost sight of what is most important about Christianity. With Folly as his prolocutor, Erasmus brings off a subtle yet penetrating critique of scholasticism. His mastery of scripture allows him to contrast the scholastics’ misguided vision of Christianity with one which he takes to be closer to the spirit of Christ’s teachings. To be sure, one should be wary of taking at face value Folly’s interpretations of scripture, which admittedly are at times capricious; however, there is clearly a serious point behind the unrelenting satire. The folly of Christianity is just the simplicity and humility of a Christian life. Compared to the prevailing approach to religion in the schools, these candid Christian virtues looked like folly. To the scholastics, the unlearned and simple Christian was a foolish figure since he did not understand the intricacies of the Christian doctrine which he claimed to profess. Yet, for Erasmus, as has been seen, this kind of folly is closer to Christ’s teachings than the dialectic of the scholastics.20 Just as early Christianity inverted the dominant values of Rome in a noble way, so also the scholastics inverted Christian values in an ignoble way; the result is the paradoxical inversion of Christian values in which the fool is wise and the wise man the fool. Erasmus wants to point out this inversion and consequently reject the purported wisdom of his forerunners. As the chorus in The Bacchae of Euripides says: “what the world calls wise I do not want.”21 The scholastics’ inversion of Christ’s teachings in both content and form is significant for why Erasmus chose to write in the way he did.

III  Folly’s criticism of scholasticism Erasmus’ criticism consists not only in the obvious critique of the specific scholastic doctrines but also in an indirect attack on those doctrines by means of a critique of scholastic writing. The scholastics’ philosophy deviates from Christianity not just by its aberration from the content of Christ’s teachings, which in scholasticism is metamorphized into abstract conceptual analysis, but also, and not necessarily of lesser importance, by the fact that it is couched in a form of writing that is wholly at odds with Christ’s doctrine and thus thoroughly misrepresents and distorts the essence of his message. The numerous neologisms which permeate scholastic writing are among Folly’s preferred targets of criticism. In the following passage, she derides the scholastic lexicon with its plenitude of intellectual abstractions: “they still boast that they can

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see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matters, quiddities, ecceities, things which are all so insubstantial that I doubt if even Lynceus could perceive them.”22 The obvious philosophical criticism in Folly’s reproach is that the scholastics have reified their own theoretical abstractions; however, the more subtle and important point for our purposes is the critique of these typically scholastic technical termini. Erasmus has Folly monotonously list the sophisticated academic vocabulary of the scholastics in a pejorative way in order to show their obsession with arcane neologistic terms.23 Moreover, Folly shows simultaneously this vocabulary’s remoteness from the straightforward and even simplistic vocabulary of the gospels and its distance from ordinary language and daily experience. Folly also criticizes the excessive use of logic in the writings of the scholastics, seeing it as one of the principal grounds for their tedious and sterile form of expression. She uses a martial metaphor in conjunction once again with a catalogue of terms from scholastic logic in order to make her point: “They are fortified meanwhile with an army of schoolmen’s definitions, conclusions and corollaries, and propositions both explicit and implicit.”24 Folly’s protracted list presumably corresponds to the inordinate number of logical terms and procedures, which dominate the scholastics’ books, but yet Folly also wishes to call into question the role of logic itself. The scholastics, being so inured to logical procedures and methodology, have become fully unreflective about the use to which they put this philosophical tool, taking up any available theological mystery or unsolvable question as appropriate subject matter. It is of no consequence if one is proving an entirely ineffectual hypothesis provided that the conclusion follows from sound premises; moreover, this kind of dry writing of the schoolmen lacks the energy and living spirit of an author who is personally involved in the issues as one should be involved in a Christian way of life. It represents a belief that is no longer vivacious and animating. As Erasmus, in the Colloquia Familiaria, has his character Eusebius say of the scholastics, “what lack of feeling they seem to have for what they write!”25 Folly also criticizes the hairsplitting of the scholastics and their deep fixation on superfluous definitions and distinctions. In the following passage, Folly uses alliteration of the various forms of the word “subtilis” along with a list of the various scholastic camps to issue her critique: “These subtle refinements of subtleties are made still more subtle by the different lines of scholastic argument, so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists and Scotists—and I’ve not mentioned all the sects, only the main ones.”26 The repetition of “subtilis” reflects the ludicrously exaggerated concern for ever finer distinctions that the notorious quaestio demanded. By pointing out the constant appeal to these distinctions by the scholastics, Folly hopes to draw a contrast between the sophistication and erudition of scholastic theology as represented by the various schools and the simplicity of the lives of the apostles and the members of the early church.27 She lists with great energy the following examples: “The apostles baptized wherever they went, yet nowhere did they teach the formal, material, efficient and final cause of baptism. . . . They encourage good works without distinguishing between opus operantis and opus operantum. . . . They detest sin, but on my life I’ll swear they couldn’t offer a scientific definition of what we call sin unless they’d been trained in the Scotist

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spirit.”28 Folly here shows how the scholastics have taken simple Christian acts such as baptism and have trivialized them with stale academic debates. To examine the nature of Christian virtue by means of narrow technical polemics entirely misses the point of what a virtuous life is by reducing it to a perfunctory exercise in argumentation; thus, Folly’s examples illustrate how the scholastics, lost amid definitions and distinctions and engaged in contentious debate, have forgotten the basic and simple virtues of Christian living.

IV  Erasmus’ critical strategy It is not surprising that the content of the scholastics’ philosophy and theology was tied closely to their mode of expression: the conception of Christianity as a complex intellectual doctrine gave rise to the elaborate attempt to systematize every aspect of it, a project which demanded attention, on the one hand, to the minutiae of the strict logical rules and refinements but also, on the other hand, to the macrolevel architectonic congruity among the larger parts of the system. Moreover, the notion that certain Christian mysteries or paradoxes could be resolved by recourse to linguistic distinctions resulted in a technical vocabulary and close attention to definitions of specialized terms. As has also been seen, Erasmus launches a twofold criticism on the theology of the scholastics: Folly rebukes the scholastics with a direct attack on their theology, and at the same time, Erasmus, by the very use of Folly, issues an indirect attack on the way in which that theology is expressed. At the heart of Erasmus’ theology is the ironic notion of Christian folly, which is antithetical to the scholastics’ somber conception of religion. The dilemma for Erasmus was to select a mode of expression appropriate for portraying his controversial account of Christianity. The scholastic form of writing, the quaestio, was the dominant (although to be sure by no means the only) form of philosophical expression of the day. Thus, it represented for Erasmus, as for all other contemporary philosophers and theologians, the more or less selfevident candidate, with respect to genre, for philosophical expression. He could simply have written a quaestio complete with technical jargon and point by point refuted the scholastics, and then tediously, by means of syllogisms and corollaries, constructed the edifice of his own positive theology. But this would have compromised the content of his theology, and it would have begged the question in favor of his opponents. In other words, if Erasmus were to have responded to the scholastics in this way, he would have been assuming that the scholastic quaestio was the correct mode of philosophical expression. He would have been acknowledging that the true nature of Christianity and Christian living could be expressed with logical argumentation. Thus, he would have fallen victim to exactly the same barren and onerous writing style that he so detested, and his own positive theology would have looked absurd if it had been so expressed. Erasmus’ solution to this conundrum was a simple one: he chose to write a satire, specifically, a mock encomium. By changing to a different literary genre, Erasmus could effectively criticize the form of writing that the scholastics had so tediously perfected; moreover, he could express his own

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theology in a manner more amenable to his own purposes. What could be a more fitting way to express the essential foolishness at the heart of Christianity than with satire, with Folly as the spokesperson? What would be a better means of deflating the pretentious scholastic jargon than to put the simple truths of Christianity in the mouth of a simple goddess? Erasmus found his model in the mock encomium (or the paradoxical encomium, as it is sometimes called), the genre employed by one of his favorite authors, the Greek satirist Lucian. Erasmus observed how Lucian, using satire as a tool, was able to criticize the Greek philosophers and intellectualism in general in a way that was both amusing and strangely effective. The idea of a mock encomium was perfectly matched to Erasmus’ purposes since this genre itself was an ironic inversion of another already established genre—the encomium. By lauding something absurd, although employing the standard form of the encomium, the mock encomiast is able to stand the world on its head, so to speak, since when the encomiast praises something absurd, he simultaneously criticizes a number of things that are normally taken to be quite serious. Erasmus saw in the mock encomium and in the ironic inversion which it effects the ideal tool with which to criticize scholasticism, which, for him, represented a sort of inversion of Christianity.29 By choosing an alternative literary genre, Erasmus was also able to criticize the scholastics more effectively since he thus made it impossible for them to respond using their own methodology. Indeed, there would be something gravely inappropriate about somberly criticizing something as humorous as Erasmus’ satire with a scholastic quaestio. The only alternative would be to respond to humor with humor by writing a satire that answered Erasmus’ charges, but to do this would render impossible the usual scholastic account of Christian theology. Indeed, how could one possibly capture the degree of subtlety achieved in the scholastics’ theology with a satire? Moreover, what self-respecting schoolman would stoop so low as to deign to write a satire as a response? Thus, by employing a satire in criticism of the scholastics’ approach to Christianity, Erasmus created a situation in which the scholastics, in order to respond, either had to forsake their tedious approach or else simply look ludicrous.30 In his famous letter to Martin Dorp, Erasmus indicates that the content of the Praise of Folly is the same as that of his earlier work, the Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1501), although the two works differ with respect to literary form. He writes, “My aim in Folly was exactly the same as in my other works. Only the presentation was different. In the Enchiridion I simply outlined the pattern of Christian life. . . . And in Folly I expressed the same ideas as those in the Enchiridion, but in the form of a joke.”31 This passage makes clear that Erasmus intentionally changed literary forms to make his argument more effective. This new literary form allowed him to distinguish more sharply his own theology from the approach to Christianity in the schools than he was able to do in the Enchiridion. In his introductory remarks to the Folly, in which his famous dedication to Thomas More appears, Erasmus makes it clear that his intent in writing the Folly was not simply humor or entertainment, but rather he hints that, indeed, there is a serious point to the work: “The world will pass its own judgment on me, but unless my ‘self-love’ entirely

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deceives me, my Praise of Folly has not been altogether foolish.”32 Along the same lines, he writes, “trifling may lead to something more serious.”33 As has been seen, he claims that the scholastics tend to make Christianity trivial by the way in which they approach and treat its subject matter. In contrast, with yet another ironic inversion, Erasmus shows how Folly, who seems, when taken at face value, to be merely absurd, in fact makes a serious point: “Nothing is so trivial as treating serious subjects in a trivial manner; and similarly, there is nothing more entertaining than treating trivialities in such a way as to make it clear that you are doing anything but trifle with them.”34 Erasmus is therefore leveling a serious criticism against the scholastics and not merely poking fun at them or gratuitously deriding them with silly caricatures and parodies; moreover, he is making earnest points about scripture and religion and not merely engaging in a jeu d’esprit at the expense of Christianity as some had thought.35 Hence, Erasmus, like the German Narrenliteratur,36 uses foolishness toward a serious end, specifically, by showing how the ostensibly serious people, namely, the scholastics, use Christianity toward a foolish end. The claim that Erasmus is saying something serious is hardly novel.37 What is new and important is why he uses satire and not some other means to deliver his serious point. Again in his Preface, Erasmus hints that his jocularity has a serious philosophical intention. There he makes a comparison of his own satirical writing with the tedious exposition of the scholastics which he uses in order to claim that often humor can be more revealing about the truth of the matter than straightforward rational argumentation: “Jokes can be handled in such a way that any reader who is not altogether lacking in discernment can scent something far more rewarding in them than in the crabbed and specious arguments of some people.”38 His claim is that with satire he has at once captured something serious and important about the nature of Christianity that the scholastics were unable to capture; moreover, he has simultaneously leveled an important critique against the scholastics concerning their misconstrual and misuse of Christianity to which they are ill-equipped to respond. With this account, one can see in quite tangible terms the importance of allowing different literary forms to count as legitimate means of philosophical expression since philosophical content can be and often is firmly wedded to the literary form in which it is expressed. Erasmus’ conception of Christianity and the accepted approach to Christian doctrine in the schools of his day dictated that he adopt a new literary genre to express his views. This self-conscious shift of genres foreshadows the approach to philosophical writing found in much of the post-Kantian European tradition. For instance, Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity as something necessarily bound up with the inwardness of the existing individual demanded that he express the Christian message with what he called “double reflection” or more simply “indirect communication.” Likewise, Derrida’s claim that language is nonreferential or nonrepresentational in character and that it is only a self-enclosed system of deferred meanings motivates his own elliptical use of language. Philosophical content may thus take many forms, and often the ensconced or orthodox form of philosophical expression is inappropriate for a given argument.

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Erasmus has shown how satire can be used to convey a serious message about the nature of Christian doctrine and has exposed the poverty of the scholastics’ attempt to portray it wholly discursively. Certain deep truths, indeed philosophical truths, can only be expressed with laughter and not with grave philosophical ratiocination. In short, one needs to be wary of labeling alternative forms of philosophical writing as “silly” or “foolish” since as Folly reminds the reader, “Often the foolish man speaks a word in season.”39

4

The Enlightenment and Religion: Hume’s Dialogues

The Enlightenment is known as a period of open conflict between religion and the emerging sciences, supported by philosophy. Ever since the Renaissance, scientific advancement had called into question one point of religious dogma after another. Leading scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such as Giordano Bruno, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo suffered persecution for their attempts to advance the idea of a heliocentric universe in the face of traditional religious belief. In the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the critical voices became more numerous, and there was a new spirit of skepticism and empiricism that called into question what, during the period, came to be regarded as the superstitious beliefs of Christianity. The Enlightenment encouraged its followers to use their reason and critically evaluate traditional values and beliefs. No longer were things to be taken for granted on the authority of the Church, the King, or tradition. The leading figures of the movement enjoined people to wake up and begin to think for themselves by using their own critical reason. Rousseau never tired of writing about the inner truth in each human being.1 Only by using one’s own critical reason is it possible to liberate oneself from the clutches of prejudice. Kant uses the words “Sapere aude!” as the slogan for his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?”2 There was also a strong empirical dimension to the Enlightenment. The inventions of the microscope and the telescope extended the human senses far beyond their natural limits. The new discoveries that these inventions brought with them seemed to be a vindication of the truth of empiricism. If something could be tested and confirmed by sense experience, then it was true, and if not, it should be rejected. Religious dogma did not lend itself to verification by this method and thus fared badly when subjected to it. The virgin birth, the incarnation, and the ascension were important doctrines for the Church, but it was impossible ever to test them empirically. For these key events in Christianity, the word of the gospels must be relied upon, and no independent verification was possible. No one saw the Holy Spirit entering Mary, and no one could confirm this empirically today. Moreover, it seemed to be entirely contrary to what was known about human conception and reproduction. During the Enlightenment, there were innumerable episodes of writers, philo­ sophers, and scientists running afoul of the authorities for their advocacy of views that questioned the religious or political order. Scholars were routinely fined, persecuted,

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and jailed, and their writings were regularly subject to strict censorship by the authorities. In this atmosphere, the Enlightenment thinkers had to come up with ways to get around the censors and publication regulations. Thus, naturally, many authors published under pseudonyms or anonymously to avoid persecution. Another tack was to employ literary techniques that distanced them from the positions expressed in their writings. David Hume, one of the most celebrated sons of the Enlightenment, presented his most extended treatment of religion in the form of a dialogue. Although he had not used this literary form before in his other works, the sensitive nature of his subject matter compelled him to try his hand at it. The dialogue allowed him to present different positions without clearly revealing his own. The result was the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Despite this precaution, Hume never dared to publish this book in his lifetime, and it only appeared 3 years after his death in 1779.

I  Hume’s trepidation Hume’s biography contains a number of experiences that might be interpreted as relevant for understanding his disposition toward publishing a book that he knew would be controversial and might subject him to persecution. His first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), addresses, among other things, the question of providence and an afterlife. In Book I, Part IV, he applies his critical account of substance to the idea of the soul and concludes that, when examined closely, it, like all other ideas of substance, collapses into a series of perceptions. More provocatively, he tries to argue that traditional theological views about the substantiality of the soul ultimately reduce to a Spinozist pantheism or atheism. If causality is merely a series of constant conjunctions, he argues, we can have no clear idea of God as a causal principle. He sets up the argument as a dilemma, the first part of which is that we are obliged “to assert, that nothing can be the cause of another, but where the mind can perceive the connection in its idea of the objects.”3 If we take this option, then the following result appears: First, we in reality affirm that there is no such thing in the universe as a cause or productive principle, not even the Deity himself; since our idea of that Supreme Being is derived from particular impressions, none of which contain any efficacy, nor seem to have any connection with any other existence. As to what may be said, that the connection betwixt the idea of an infinitely powerful Being and that of any effect, which he wills, is necessary and unavoidable; I answer, that we have no idea of a Being endowed with any power, much less of one endowed with infinite power.4

Hume argues that there is no empirical basis for appealing to God as the source of all effects or actions in the world. After refuting the conception of God as a causal principle and declaring the notion of the substance of the soul to be “absolutely unintelligible,”5 Hume acknowledges that these conclusions will not be welcome to scholars in other fields, but he asserts the right of philosophy to pursue the truth.

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But he goes out of his way to try to assure the theologians that his conclusions are not damaging to their enterprise: There is only one occasion when philosophy will think it necessary and even honourable to justify herself; and that is, when religion may seem to be in the least offended; whose rights are as dear to her as her own, and are indeed the same. If any one, therefore, should imagine that the foregoing arguments are anyways dangerous to religion, I hope the following apology will remove his apprehensions.6

His defense anticipates Kant’s attempt to rescue religion by means of ethics. He claims that whatever we can imagine as true without contradiction is possible. Since we can imagine the idea of the immortality of the soul, without contradiction, it remains a possibility. The metaphysical arguments that Hume has discussed are thus ultimately inconclusive, and “strong and convincing” moral arguments can indeed still be considered.7 He concludes this controversial chapter by writing, “If my philosophy therefore makes no addition to the arguments for religion, I have at least the satisfaction to think it takes nothing from them, but that everything remains precisely as before.”8 This defense did little to allay the misgivings of his religiously disposed readers. Four years later, when he applied for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, he was denied the position, despite his obvious qualifications, due to suspicions of atheism and skepticism.9 This rejection led Hume to seek a career in diplomacy, while he continued his philosophical pursuits on his own. In 1752, when Hume applied for the Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, he was again denied the position due to questions about his orthodoxy. In  1763, Hume was made secretary to Lord Hertford in the British Embassy in Paris. During his 2-year stay in France, he met the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the francophone world: Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire had himself been repeatedly fined and imprisoned for his publications and was obliged for many years to live in exile. In 1769, he published Dieu et les hommes, oeuvre théologique, mais raisonnable, under the pseudonym of a purported English author, “le Docteur Obern.” The work presented itself as a French translation of Doctor Obern’s work by one Jacques Aimon.10 This ruse allowed Voltaire to come into a critical dialogue with the English and Irish free-thinkers: Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), John Toland (1670–1722), and Thomas Woolston (1670–1731). The work was officially condemned in France and publicly burned in 1770. Rousseau also suffered persecution for his writings concerning religion. In 1762, a year before Hume came to Paris, Rousseau published his famous treatise on education, Émile: or, on Education. In this work, there is a section known as “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest” in which Rousseau presents some considerations on not just religious education but religion in general.11 He puts these views in the mouth of an unnamed priest who represents in many ways the Enlightenment spirit. The work contained criticisms of organized religion, revelation, missionary work, and a number of key dogmas. After the book was banned and publicly burned, and arrest warrants were issued for Rousseau in France and the Swiss Confederation, he was compelled to flee to Neuchâtel, Môtiers, and eventually Great Britain, where he stayed with Hume.

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As a result of Hume’s own experiences and those of his acquaintances, it is no wonder he was anxious to avoid any problems with the authorities. He wanted to write something in which he explored current views on religion, but yet he had no desire to be the object of a contentious public debate or to risk being forced to leave Scotland as an exile.12 His initial solution to this was to formulate the work in the form of a dialogue. Hume began writing the Dialogues in the 1750s and continued working on it off and on for the rest of his life.13 When he showed it privately to some friends, he was warned against publishing it, and so he withheld it, presumably hoping that the right time would one day present itself.

II  Hume’s first attempt at dialogue in the Enquiry In  1748, Hume published An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which contains a chapter dedicated to sensitive religious issues, under the title “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State.” After his negative experience with his statements about religion in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume exercises utmost care in presenting the controversial views here by creating a kind of dialogue. He claims to have recently discussed some of these issues with a friend and purports simply to recount their discussion. By ascribing his controversial views to the unnamed friend, he can himself appear to play the role of the one arguing for orthodoxy and traditional religious belief. He begins this section by contrasting the relative tolerance toward philosophy in the ancient world compared with the persecutions it has suffered in modern times. He talks about the “harsh winds of calumny and persecution, which blow upon her.”14 There can be no doubt that he is aware of the difficulties facing scholars and scientists who wished to present their views freely. He has his anonymous friend say, “these persecutions never, in any age, proceeded from calm reason, or from experience of the pernicious consequences of philosophy; but arose entirely from passion and prejudice.”15 Hume then hits upon another ruse to distance himself from the controversial views presented in the ensuing discussion. In his account of the persecutions of philosophers, he refers to Epicurus as a rare example of an ancient philosopher who was persecuted for his beliefs, specifically, for denying the gods and immortality. He then enjoins his imaginary friend to enter with him into some play-acting: his friend is to play the role of Epicurus and present his case to the assembly of Athens, while Hume himself is to play the audience. This ruse creates a fictional situation within a fictional situation, removing by another degree the responsibility for the views presented. Moreover, with the choice of the example of an ancient pagan philosopher, the arguments can be presented as entirely innocuous to Christian faith. It is telling that Hume avails himself of such techniques when he comes to these sensitive issues in a work that is otherwise written in the form of a straightforward philosophical treatise. In short, within the treatise itself, he slightly shifts the genre to create a fictional narrative in order to present the views that are controversial. His fictional friend, pretending to be Epicurus, brings up the argument from design, which is one of the key proofs presented later in the Dialogues: “The religious

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philosophers, not satisfied with the tradition of your forefathers, and doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly acquiesce), indulge a rash curiosity, in trying how far they can establish religion upon the principles of reason; and they thereby excite, instead of satisfying, the doubts, which naturally arise from a diligent and scrutinous enquiry.”16 Here Hume anticipates the goal of the Dialogues, that is, the Enlightenment attempt to assess the merits of religious belief based on reason. The argument from design is attributed to these ancient “religious philosophers” and is critically evaluated by the persona playing Epicurus. The argument claims the order and structure in the universe can only have been the work of a rational creator just as one can infer a builder when one sees a house or a watchmaker when one sees a watch. The imaginary friend claims that for this kind of analogy to work, one must be careful not to infer a cause which extends beyond what is merited in the observed effect: “The knowledge of the cause being derived solely from the effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other; and the one can never refer to anything farther, or be the foundation of any new inference and conclusion.”17 Any extravagant conclusions about the gods based on the observations of order and regularity in the universe are merely “the offspring of your brain.”18 He continues, “You forget, that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or, at least, without any foundation in reason; and that you have no ground to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions.”19 The inference that follows from this falls far short of what the advocates of religion would like to establish. They believe that they are simply reasoning empirically by inferring to causes based on perceived effects. But in fact they are taking great unjustified leaps in their reasoning and assuming many qualities of the divine that are not warranted by the effects that they wish to explain. The friend playing Epicurus goes on to address the charge that he denies divine justice in an afterlife. Again the argument is that this belief cannot be justified in terms of observed experience. He asks, “Whence, do you think, can such philosophers derive their idea of the gods? From their own conceit and imagination surely. For if they derived it from the present phenomenon, it would never point to anything farther, but must be exactly adjusted to them.”20 He concludes, “While we argue from the course of nature, and infer a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle, which is both uncertain and useless.”21 This conclusion sounds suspiciously like the refutations advanced in the Dialogues against the argument from design. The consistency of these arguments suggests they represent Hume’s own view, even though he has taken great pains to distance himself from them here and in the Dialogues. By setting up his analysis as a kind of dialogue between himself and a fictional friend, Hume can pretend to defend the argument from design and leave it to his friend to refute it. This is exactly what happens after the speech of the fictional Epicurus is over. Hume gives a rather straightforward restatement of the argument and is soundly refuted by his interlocutor. But the chapter cannot be allowed to end in this manner. Hume gets in the last word himself, by ostensibly raising a final objection to the reasoning of his friend. This gives the impression that he has won the day by issuing a criticism that his friend cannot respond to. However, a closer look clearly reveals that his objection is far more general and indeed fits far better as an objection

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to the argument from design itself. Indeed, it is an objection that is also raised in the Dialogues.22 The objection concerns the notion that it is possible to infer like causes from like effects (i.e., to infer a watchmaker from the existence of a watch and a rational creator from a regular and structured universe). Hume points out that true inference involves constant conjunction but can never work in one-off cases such as God and the universe: “It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause.”23 Although he presents this as an objection to his friend’s view, it is perfectly clear that the true object of the criticism is the argument from design: “I shall just observe, that, as the antagonists of Epicurus always suppose the universe, an effect quite singular and unparalleled, to be the proof of a deity, a cause no less singular and unparalleled; your reasonings, upon that supposition, seem, at least, to merit our attention.”24 It is quite possible that this mock dialogue in the Enquiry gave Hume the idea for a more extended dialogue on the same subject—the key idea behind the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

III  Hume’s reflections on genre Hume obviously gave some thought to his choice of the dialogue as a genre and indeed has his narrator Pamphilus engage in some reflections on this topic on the very first page. In a sense, the tone is almost apologetic, as if there is a need to explain to the reader why the work does not have a conventional treatise form. Pamphilus begins as follows, addressing his friend Hermippus, to whom he recounts the dialogue that he was witness to: It has been remarked, my Hermippus, that, though the ancient philosophers conveyed most of their instruction in the form of dialogue, this method of composition has been little practised in later ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those who have attempted it. Accurate and regular argument, indeed, such as is now expected of philosophical enquirers, naturally throws a man into the methodical and didactic manner; where he can immediately, without preparation, explain the point at which he aims, and thence proceed, without interruption, to deduce the proofs, on which it is established.25

One can almost hear in this the voice of modern philosophy questioning the use of dialogue. Why present something in dialogue form if one can simply state straightforwardly the arguments that one wishes to advance? Pamphilus continues with further objections to the use of dialogue: To deliver a system in conversation scarcely appears natural; and while the dialogue-writer desires, by departing from the direct style of composition, to give a freer air to his performance, and avoid the appearance of author and reader,

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he is apt to run into a worse inconvenience, and convey the image of pedagogue and pupil. Or if he carries on the dispute in the natural spirit of good company, by throwing in a variety of topics, and preserving a proper balance among the speakers, he often loses so much time in preparations and transitions, that the reader will scarcely think himself compensated, by all the graces of dialogue, for the order, brevity, and precision, which are sacrificed to them.26

In this way, Hume indicates to his reader that he is aware of the shortcomings posed by this genre, but yet he nonetheless wants to claim that it is well suited to his ends with respect to the subject matter he wishes to treat. How then does he justify using it? He has Pamphilus make the claim that the dialogue is appropriate when the matter at issue is well established but yet of great significance. By means of the dialogue such a doctrine can be better appreciated and conveyed in a fresh and entertaining manner. Pamphilus explains, Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious, that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important, that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate the triteness of the subject, where the vivacity of conversation may enforce the precept, and where the variety of lights presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant.27

As is clear in what follows, the doctrine that Pamphilus has in mind is the existence of God. He takes this to be indisputable and repeatedly says so. The belief ’s wide acceptance raises a danger of complacency and so justifies a novel presentation of it in dialogue form. But this is only half of the story. The dialogue, it is argued, is also well suited to treat­ ing very difficult and uncertain issues that are remote from the human understanding. Pamphilus continues, Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it, if it should be treated at all, seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation. Reasonable men may be allowed to differ, where no one can reasonably be positive: Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement: And if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company; and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and society.28

The dialogue is thus well suited to presenting alternative answers to difficult questions. In what follows it becomes apparent that the question Pamphilus has in mind concerns the nature of God. While His existence is beyond all doubt, confusion remains concerning His nature. Pamphilus thus concludes that the genre of dialogue is appropriate in this case since it fulfills both of the stated criteria. The subject matter of natural religion offers both the well-established truth of God’s existence and the much disputed question of His

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nature. The dialogue form will serve to solidify the former in a new and fresh manner, while presenting alternative solutions with respect to the latter. At first glance, this seems to be a straightforward argument generally reflective of the state of discussions about religion in the Enlightenment. Although many leading figures of the period were critical of organized religion and many traditional beliefs, very few were in fact atheists in the sense in which we understand the term today. The most widely held view of the Enlightenment philosophers was that of deism. They wanted to abandon what they considered to be superstitious and anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine in favor of a more abstract notion of a divinity as a creator or first cause of the universe, or to use the standard analogy of the day, a watchmaker. The account given by Pamphilus all sounds fine until one examines it more closely in connection with the actual content of the dialogue. It is stated here at the outset and reiterated unambiguously that there can be no doubt that God exists. Demea says, “No man; no man, at least, of common sense, I am persuaded, ever entertained a serious doubt with regard to a truth so certain and self-evident. The question is not concerning the being but the nature of God.”29 But although all parties to the dialogues seem to be in agreement that the existence or being of God is beyond question, nonetheless, this is precisely what is at issue in the key arguments explored in the piece. The argument from design forwarded by Cleanthes and the first-cause argument championed by Demea concern the existence of God and not his nature. This contradiction between the actual content of the work and Pamphilus’ initial statements about it should make one wary of accepting the latter at face value. The first clue that Hume wishes to hide his true intentions is that although he begins by stating God’s existence is beyond question, he raises that question only a few pages later.

IV  Hume’s portrayal of the interlocutors It is natural that Hume presents characters and arguments in the dialogue that are generally representative of some of the most important positions of the day. Thus, he presents Cleanthes, the mouthpiece for Enlightenment empiricism, who forwards the argument from design. Cleanthes believes that he represents the scientific spirit of the age and that his position is wholly grounded in empirical reason. The position of more traditional religious piety is represented by Demea, who presents the cosmological argument or first-cause argument. This is in a sense a more sophisticated version of the position of religious authority that opposed Enlightenment views. Finally, there is Philo, who is the skeptic and critic. Hume’s portrayal of these characters has been a source of controversy in the secondary literature. The natural question that arises is which of the characters represents his position. At first glance, it might seem rather obvious that Philo is the representative of Hume’s own critical and skeptical reason. But the matter is not so straightforward when one looks more carefully at the way in which he and the others are portrayed. Again addressing Hermippus, Pamphilus gives the following initial description of the interlocutors in the dialogue that he is about to recount: “The remarkable contrast in their characters still farther raised your expectations; while

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you opposed the accurate philosophical turn of Cleanthes to the careless scepticism of Philo, or compared either of their dispositions with the rigid inflexible orthodoxy of Demea.”30 Here Philo is portrayed as light-minded, irresponsible, or cavalier. The implication is clear: his skepticism is not well founded. By contrast, Cleanthes is lauded as the more astute philosopher due to his acute ability to put together and take apart philosophical arguments. This characterization, stated right at the beginning, is reconfirmed at the very end of the work, where Pamphilus gives his own assessment of the outcome of the discussion: “so I confess, that, upon a serious review of the whole, I cannot but think, that Philo’s principles are more probable than Demea’s; but that those of Cleanthes approach still nearer to the truth.”31 In this way, Pamphilus effectively declares Cleanthes the winner of the debate. Thus, the official message of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is that the argument from design is correct and that Cleanthes, as its spokesman, is the correct model for the examination of the issue. But the question remains: does this ostensible conclusion square with the actual content of the discussion itself?

V  Hume’s portrayal of the discussion A closer examination of the actual discussion shows that Hume intends to undermine what Pamphilus presents as the official outcome. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Philo is the winner of the debate. His objections to the argument from design forwarded by Cleanthes are devastating and, moreover, never answered. When one reads through the text and follows the ebb and flow of the discussion, it quickly becomes clear that the intended hero of the work is Philo. He is the only participant of the dialogue who has an acute sense for argumentation, dissecting arguments and reducing to absurdity views that, when first presented, appeared plausible. When one asks students after reading the dialogue, they almost universally say that Philo was the most convincing and persuasive of the interlocutors. I wish to claim that this impression was the one intended by Hume all along. Cleanthes is utterly at a loss as to how to respond since he clearly sees that no further defense of his position is possible. Cleanthes presents his first argument from design in Part II and the second in Part III. Hume then dedicates Parts IV–VI to having Philo refute them. This is done with Cleanthes largely remaining silent. For example, when Philo presents his own naturalistic explanation of the universe as a living and growing entity, Cleanthes is dumbfounded: “This theory, I own, replied Cleanthes, has never before occurred to me, though a pretty natural one; and I cannot readily, upon so short an examination and reflection, deliver any opinion with regard to it.”32 Then at the end of Part VII, Cleanthes in a sense gives up and admits that he has no response to the objections: I must confess, Philo, replied Cleanthes, that of all men living, the task which you have undertaken, of raising doubts and objections, suits you best, and seems, in a manner, natural and unavoidable to you. So great is your fertility of invention, that

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While Cleanthes claims to see where Philo’s error lies, he never does the reader the courtesy of explaining or pointing this out. He merely satisfies himself with the claim, which can hardly be regarded as a counterargument, that common sense speaks against Philo’s position. Certainly, Hume did not expect philosophically inclined readers to be convinced by this. By the end of Part VIII, it is clear that Cleanthes’ arguments are in utter ruin. Indeed, at the beginning of Part IX, there seems to be general agreement about this, and a decision is made to take an entirely different approach since that of Cleanthes’ proved so implausible. It is Demea who takes the initiative: “But if so many difficulties attend the argument a posteriori, said Demea; had we not better adhere to that simple and sublime argument a priori, which, by offering to us infallible demonstration, cuts off at once all doubt and difficulty.”34 This then introduces the next phase of the discussion, where Demea puts forth his first-cause argument. But this is only possible after it has been agreed that Cleanthes’ arguments have been dispensed with. Parts X and XI are dedicated to the problem of evil. Philo presents a series of very serious arguments that seem to be addressed not least to Cleanthes’ conception of the divine and points out the inconsistency of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence with suffering in the world. In Part X, Cleanthes initially tries to make some halfhearted arguments that the claim about human misery is exaggerated and things are not really so bad after all.35 But these objections are quickly refuted by Philo. Then in Part XI, Philo gives a detailed catalogue of the causes of evil and shows that none of them is really necessary for any greater good. From this fact of empirical evil, it is impossible to infer the goodness or benevolence of God.36 Cleanthes is unable to counter this argument. The chapter ends simply with him bickering with Demea, who, feeling offended, leaves. But the highly persuasive arguments of Philo are allowed to stand without any objection. From this exchange, it is clear that Cleanthes has no solution to the problem of evil, and Philo’s position is clearly the most persuasive and immediately intuitive.

VI  Hume’s portrayal of the conclusion The surprising part of the text comes at the end, where Hume intentionally inserts a form of misdirection. From Part I to Part XI, he presents Philo as convincingly and utterly destroying one deist argument after another. Hume realized that if he were to end the work there then it would have been obvious that Philo represented his own view. Desiring to avoid the fate of people like Rousseau and Voltaire, he tacked on Part XII as a kind of diversionary tactic. In it, Philo suddenly steps entirely out of character and agrees with Cleanthes. This is utterly unmotivated and surprising given what had come before, where he showed no mercy for the weaknesses of the arguments of his opponents.37 Despite his previous refutations and the absence of any convincing

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counterargument from his opponents, he abruptly capitulates and embraces an argument that he has been dismantling throughout the entire discussion. Philo says, You, in particular, Cleanthes, with whom I live in unreserved intimacy; you are sensible, that, notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it.38

This statement is completely out of character given that Philo had previously denied any conscious purpose or intention in the universe. Even if Hume wanted to portray Philo as reconsidering and perhaps modifying his previous view, he has no reason to make Philo go immediately to the opposite extreme and say that this purpose and intention in the universe are something that is obvious to everyone. Cleanthes basks in the glow of victory as he rehearses parts of his argument again, this time without fear of meeting with any objections. He claims that certainly a stubborn person could continue to object, but no rational mind can call into question the truth of the argument from design.39 Cleanthes clearly has in mind what he regards as the obtuse form of radical skepticism, which can continue to doubt anything at all even in the face of the most compelling proofs and evidence. He thus concludes that his argument is wholly established and accepted. But the previous course of the argumentation belies this conclusion. His argument has been refuted, and he has offered no new arguments or evidence to revive or reinstate it. It is as if, after having been soundly defeated, he inexplicably declares himself the victor. Oddly, Philo agrees with him in this assessment: wholehearted agreement that skepticism is out of place in a matter which is so obvious. Hume writes, So little, replied Philo, do I esteem this suspense of judgment in the present case to be possible, that I am apt to suspect there enters somewhat of a dispute of words into this controversy, more than is usually imagined. That the works of nature bear a great analogy to the productions of art is evident; and according to all the rules of good reasoning, we ought to infer, if we argue at all concerning them, that their causes have a proportional analogy. But as there are also considerable differences, we have reason to suppose a proportional difference in the causes; and in particular ought to attribute a much higher degree of power and energy to the supreme cause than any we have ever observed in mankind. Here then the existence of a Deity is plainly ascertained by reason.40

This runs counter to Philo’s previous argument that there was only the vaguest of analogies between a house, as made by a human agent, and the universe, as made by God. But now this is assumed to be both intuitive and obvious. From all this, it seems clear that the final chapter is something entirely artificial that Hume has added on to the piece. It has in no way grown organically out of the natural development of the argument. On the contrary, it runs completely against the grain of

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it. Only a very superficial reader can fail to perceive the jarring effect that it produces after having read the text that preceded it. There is further anecdotal evidence that Philo represents the position closest to that of Hume himself. When he was infirm and approaching the end of his life, Hume was visited by his friend the jurist, James Boswell. In his memoirs, Boswell recounts parts of their conversation in which he asked Hume if, now facing death, he believed in any form of an afterlife. Speaking privately to his friend, Hume was at his liberty to state his own views directly, and from his comments it is clear that, if anything, his views on religion were even more radical than those of Philo. Boswell recounts, “He said he never had entertained any belief in Religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke.”41 With regard to ethics, Hume “said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad” and that “when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.”42 Boswell was surprised that Hume insisted on his belief that there was no immortality even in the face of his own imminent demise. As was seen above, Hume had himself said in print in A Treatise of Human Nature that immortality was possible, not demonstrated but yet not refuted, and this was enough to open the door for belief.43 Now, however, when he was able to speak freely, he mocked that possibility. Boswell recounts, “I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that he should ever exist forever.”44 Further, Boswell reports that Hume referred to immortality as a “foolish” and “absurd” notion and that he was “indecently and impolitely positive in incredulity.”45 This is a completely different tone from anything that can be found in his published writings. By comparison, even Philo’s views seem muted. This account leaves little doubt about Hume’s private opinion and makes it abundantly clear that his official stated position in his works is a meticulously prepared statement of a potentially controversial view, formulated in such a way so as not to raise suspicion. The dialogue form gives him the perfect opportunity to camouflage his more radical opinions. One can imagine that, as Hume worked on the text over the years, the chain of events was something like the following. He first hit upon the idea of presenting his views on the subject of natural religion in the form of dialogues in order to criticize some of the most prevalent views of the day without being subject to persecution. But when he was approaching the end of the work, he realized that he had overplayed his hand by portraying Philo’s criticism and skepticism as being profoundly convincing and persuasive. He thus risked making his own position so transparent that people would ascribe Philo’s views to him, dialogue form or not. Rather than go back and modify Philo’s arguments to make them weaker or less persuasive, he decided to add a final chapter, in which he portrays Philo as capitulating and ultimately accepting the arguments of Cleanthes. Adding the final sentence where Pamphilus declares Cleanthes the winner would enable Hume, if necessary, to disassociate himself from any responsibly for Philo’s views. (But Hume was presumably hoping that, while this would be enough to throw off potential critics, the attentive reader would not be fooled by this misdirection and would evaluate the piece based on the relative strengths and

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weaknesses of the arguments, as any truly philosophical reader should do anyway.) Finally, still uncertain whether this would be enough to cover his tracks, he resigned himself to having the work published posthumously. According to contemporary accounts, when Hume became ill and began to grow weaker, he was fully aware that his end was near. One of his final tasks was to rework the Dialogues and prepare them for publication. In his final testament, he bequeathed his manuscripts to his friend Adam Smith and enjoined him to publish the Dialogues posthumously.46 But Hume anticipated that the prospect of taking the responsibility for publishing such a provocative and potentially inflammatory work might prove too much for Smith and added an extra line to his will enjoining his nephew to see to its publication if it had not appeared two-and-a-half years after his death. Ultimately, the work was published later by Hume’s nephew. In any case, it should be abundantly clear that the dialogue form was ideal for Hume’s presentation in the context of his times. It allowed him to criticize the dominant views of the day, while at the same time, hiding his own personal convictions so as to avoid persecution or any other negative consequences that might follow from publically advocating unorthodox views. All of his other philosophical and historical works are straightforward prose treatises. It was only when it came to the topic of religion that he felt that the dialogue was the most suitable form of expression.

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5

Philosophy and Drama: Lessing’s Nathan the Wise

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama Nathan the Wise is known as a classic argument for religious tolerance in the context of the German Enlightenment. While this dramatic work has often been explored from a literary point of view, its complex philosophicalreligious background has rarely been appreciated. This play offers a useful example for the present purposes since it contains some of the same ideas that Lessing had expressed previously in a different literary form. The key to understanding the message of Nathan the Wise is to see the piece in the context of its immediate background, specifically, in terms of Lessing’s defense of the so-called Wolfenbüttel fragments which he edited and published. The fragments unleashed the biggest controversy in German theology since the Reformation, and Lessing was perceived to be undermining the truth of Christianity with their publication. In a series of polemical pamphlets, Lessing attempted to defend himself and the anonymous author of the work. Eventually, he was forbidden from publishing, without prior approval of the censors, any more of the fragments or polemical treatises due to the ill will they were causing. In the midst of this, Lessing decided to change his tactics in the polemic by shifting to a new literary genre. He thus decided to present his views in the form of a dramatic work.

I  Lessing and the publication of the Wolfenbüttel fragments The story of Nathan the Wise begins with Lessing’s publication of the fragments. When living in Hamburg, Lessing met the family of the recently deceased biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Through the scholar’s daughter, Elise Reimarus (1729–1814), Lessing gained access to a long text that Reimarus had been working on for many years. The work, entitled Apologie oder Schutzenschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, was a critical examination of the Bible in the Enlightenment spirit. Lessing immediately recognized the importance of the text and was keen to publish it. Elise Reimarus gave Lessing permission to do so if the opportunity presented itself but on the condition that the identity of her father as the author remain hidden. The material was so potentially inflammatory that she feared that even death would

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not protect him from angry critics. The occasion came when Lessing took a new position as librarian at the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel in  1770, which afforded him the opportunity to publish any new finds at the library that were considered to be of scholarly value—without having to submit them first to the censors of the Principality. This new situation provided Lessing with the idea and the cover that he had been waiting for to publish the text by Reimarus. In 1774, he began to print Reimarus’ text in excerpts in the local scholarly journal, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, which served as the organ for making known new discoveries. He pretended that it was an anonymous text found among the holdings at the library.1 This text subsequently was referred to simply as “the Wolfenbüttel fragments” since neither the real title nor the author was known.2 In his work, Reimarus uses his sharp philological eye to point out contradictions, inconsistencies, and out-of-place details in the Bible, which he criticizes as highly dubious on a number of different points. Lessing was sufficiently cautious to begin by publishing a section from Reimarus’ text, where deism was treated since this was less inflammatory than the sections that seemed to criticize the biblical texts. When he saw his readers could countenance without protest Reimarus’ treatment of this material, he took the next step and began publishing a series of fragments treating, for example, the Old Testament account of the parting of the Red Sea and the New Testament account of the resurrection. In his editorial introduction to the new fragments, Lessing states he felt obliged to continue with the publication of excerpts from the text because some of his readers had been so interested in the first one that they enjoined him to share with them more of the text that he had discovered. Lessing was presumably making this up and thus staging a situation that would make his role appear in an innocent light in case the fragments came to cause offense. He refers specifically to one unnamed reader, “who wrote to reward and encourage” his efforts. Lessing continues, referring to the fictional reader, For he adds that he would regard it as true pedantry if I, as a librarian, were now to put aside completely a set of thirty-year-old papers merely because they were perhaps not yet sufficiently decayed and illegible. He even begs me to provide the public with further extracts in the next issue, including, if possible, the boldest and strongest sections, so as not to lead those of weak faith to suspect that all sorts of unanswerable objections were being kept secret.3

Lessing thus hoped to distance himself from the repercussions of publishing “the boldest and strongest sections” by claiming to have done so only in response to such (presumably fictitious) readers. Needless to say, Reimarus’ criticism of the New Testament was what was regarded as the most provocative. The author claims that his procedure is to test the different gospels for consistency. As a trained philologist, Reimarus was used to comparing different texts in order to determine the most plausible reading. Here he simply expands this principle from textual criticism so that it applies not so much to the individual words or orthography of the text but rather to the meaning that the different variants convey. Since the gospel writers recount largely the same events, we would expect their

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accounts to contain a large degree of consistency. However, this is not what one finds when one examines the matter more closely. Reimarus boldly claims that the message that Jesus actually taught conflicts with the views ascribed to him. He argues Jesus criticized the Pharisees with the intent of reforming Judaism, but it was never his goal to found a new religion.4 Further, when he promised the Kingdom of Heaven, he referred not to a transcendent otherworldly sphere but rather to the worldly liberation of the Jews from the Romans and the reestablishment of the Jewish kingdom. Along similar lines, Reimarus argues, the claim that Jesus was the messiah merely means that he is a revolutionary who will lead the Jews from their current oppression; there was never any claim to being the supernatural Son of God.5 These other views were merely ascribed to him after the fact by his followers when they realized that their mission had failed when Jesus was crucified. Reimarus notes the following, referring to the expectations of the Jews at the time: First of all, it is evident that they are still thinking in terms of a temporal redemption and of an earthly kingdom that they had hoped from Jesus up until that time. Israel or the Jewish people was to be redeemed, but not the human race. . . . Thus it was not a savior of the human race who would expiate the sins of the whole world through his Passion and death, but one who would redeem the people of Israel from temporal servitude . . . .6

This picture of Jesus deviates radically from the savoir of humanity that was preached from the pulpits every Sunday. Reimarus’ interpretation radically undermined the far grander mission of Christ as the divine Son of God. Reimarus interprets the story of Jesus and his movement as a failed rebellion.7 While Jesus initially hoped to be able to foment revolt against the religious authorities, his following quickly faded away as people became fearful of the consequences. In the end, Jesus was thus abandoned to his fate. When his disciples saw him crucified and their undertaking in shambles, they found themselves in a very difficult situation. Since they had sold their property and dropped everything to follow him, they had nowhere left to go and few options remaining. Instead of admitting their defeat and retiring to their lives as fishermen and common people, they manufactured a new story about Jesus’ mission in order to be able to interpret his failure as a great success.8 The idea of Jesus as the supernatural savior of all humanity thus arose from them rather than from Jesus himself. To add more weight to their claims for his divinity, the disciples, according to Reimarus, secretly stole the body of Jesus and claimed that he had miraculously risen from the dead and remained with them for 40 days before ascending to heaven. For Reimarus, the evidence for these claims was cynically fabricated in order to make it easier for the disciples to recruit gullible new converts.9 In support of his radical views, Reimarus points out numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the details of the accounts of these events as presented in the gospels. Obviously, these claims were highly controversial. They seemed to undermine the very foundation of the Christian religion by calling into question key dogmas such as the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, the ascension, and the second coming. According to Reimarus, these key tenets of Christianity were purportedly grounded

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in the Bible, but a closer look reveals that there is no reliable or convincing evidence for them in the biblical texts. He portrays the authors of these texts as men of dubious reputation who would say most anything at all to advance their own interests. To most readers of Lessing’s day, these claims seemed simply outrageous. In the German theological context of the age, the attack on the credibility of the Bible was a particularly sensitive point. A key issue for the Reformers was that the individual believers had the right to read the Bible on their own without the mediation of a priest or the ecclesial authorities. The truth of Christianity was thought to issue no longer from the pope or the Church councils but rather from the biblical text itself. Each individual believer could have access to Christian truth and inspiration by his or her own reading and interpretation of the sacred texts. But if the Bible contained contradictions, inconsistencies, lies, and misrepresentations written by swindlers and unscrupulous opportunists, then the entire Christian faith seemed to be in peril.

II  Lessing’s defense of the Wolfenbüttel fragments Immediately after publishing these texts, Lessing found himself in the middle of a major controversy.10 A number of theologians and pastors were standing in line to criticize him and the anonymous author, whose views they assumed Lessing to share. The most important of these figures were the theologian from Hanover, Johann Daniel Schumann (1714–87),11 the local archdeacon at Wolfenbüttel, Johann Heinrich Ress (1732–1803),12 and Lessing’s most aggressive opponent, the leading pastor in Hamburg, Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–86).13 Lessing responded that he was not in agreement with all the views that were presented in the “fragments.” His line of defense is carefully considered. On the one hand, he tries to support the critical parts of the “fragments,” which do in fact expose real contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible. But, on the other hand, he rejects the idea that these contradictions and inconsistencies in any way pose a problem for the truth of Christianity. For this reason, he states concisely, “I accepted the premise, but I rejected the conclusion.”14 In short, there are indeed contradictions in the biblical writings, but these are not critically damaging for Christian faith. Lessing’s somewhat counterintuitive position separates Christianity from the Bible. He believes that since the Bible clearly has problems, it is necessary to avoid making Christianity depend on its truth. He argues as follows: In short, the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. Consequently, objections to the letter and to the Bible, need not also be objections to the spirit and to religion. For the Bible obviously contains more than what pertains to religion, and it is merely a hypothesis that it must be equally infallible in this additional respect. Religion also existed before there was a Bible. Christianity existed before the evangelists and apostles wrote about it. Some time elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a very considerable time elapsed before the whole canon was established. Thus, however much may depend on these writings, it is impossible for the whole truth of religion to be based on them.15

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His claim is that Christianity is a truth in and of itself, while the Bible is merely a historical record of that truth subject to the imperfections of any other such history. He repeatedly asserts that it is absurd to try to defend the Bible on all points as if everything hung on this. In the article “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,”16 Lessing argues that all historical accounts are flawed since they are written by human beings who each have their own interpretation and perspective on things. Given this, it is little wonder that inconsistencies and contradictions arise. Why should a religious history be presumed more accurate than a secular one? In a different text, he asks, “If, then we treat Livy and Dionysius and Polybius and Tacitus openly and generously enough not to put their every syllable on the rack, why should we not do the same with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?”17 These are things that everyone already knows when dealing with the field of history. But the situation becomes much more sensitive when one is concerned with this historical aspect of Christianity. Whether religious or secular, historical claims give no certainty or guarantee; they can always be overturned by the discovery of new sources and evidence. Lessing’s defense of Christianity involves shifting the focus from the Bible to what he regards as the necessary truths of reason that Christianity contains. He writes, “contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.”18 His argument was in substance if not in syntax that since Christianity was an a priori truth it was not dependent on the Bible for support. This was an odd step that his critics had a difficult time digesting. One is not used to thinking of Christianity as constituting a body of necessary truths; moreover, it is not entirely clear exactly what these truths are in Lessing’s eyes. Instead of spelling this out explicitly, he offers analogies with mathematical truths. No one can doubt the truth of mathematics. Their demonstration can be derived from reason alone and is not dependent on any external facts. The historical dimension of mathematical truths is wholly irrelevant for their truth value. He writes, “Suppose there were a great and useful mathematical truth which the discoverer had arrived at by way of an obviously false conclusion.  .  .  .  Should I therefore deny this truth or decline to make use of it. . . .”19 Regardless of how certain conclusions were reached, if those conclusions are true, it does not matter if the path taken to reach them was faulty. By seeing truths of this kind as the foundation of Christianity, Lessing believes that one can make Christianity immune from any kind of historical criticism. We do not need to rely on “contingent truths of history” or inconsistent stories in the Bible in order to believe in Christianity. Put differently, the implausibility of some of those stories need not threaten or undermine our faith in any way. Lessing believed his critics were doing Christianity a disservice by conditioning belief on the truth of the Bible. He writes, “When will people stop trying to suspend no less than the whole of eternity from a thread of gossamer?”20 One would not bet one’s eternal salvation on some historical claim (even if it is well-documented historically) because it is just that, history, and cannot be conclusively demonstrated. The historical accounts of the details of the life of Jesus, his resurrection, etc., will always be subject to criticism from a historical point of view. Lessing’s point is that the truth or essence of Christianity must be independent of the historical dimension. This allows Lessing

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to conclude that it is still reasonable to believe in Christianity even though there are contradictions in the historical record. People must merely realize that Christianity represents something that is true in itself and not dependent on any particular historical fact of the matter. Lessing is somewhat vague about what specific doctrines or aspects of Christianity are true in itself, but he seems to suggest that this concerns the ethical teaching of Christ. If the ethical truths that are present in Christianity are true in themselves, then why reject them? If the ethical part is present, Lessing argues that one should not be put off by historical inaccuracies or dubious stories about the origin of this. One can find the knowledge of these ethical truths of the Christian religion not by looking to texts, but from “itself,” from the “inner truth, the truth that requires no external confirmation.”21 In this way, he wants to claim that the truth of Christianity is not dependent on any historical claim being true. Lessing believes the truth and value of religion lie in what comes out of it with respect to ethical action in the world, and for this reason, he is not necessarily concerned with the nuances and details of scripture. In his view, a Christianity focused on and justified by ethics is immune from reproaches of inconsistencies such as those described by Reimarus. An example of the sorts of self-evident, necessary truths that Lessing has in mind might be Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbor. The Christian command of love is universal and has, in his eyes, the same status as mathematical truths. While it might have been first “discovered” or originally taught by Jesus, its truth value transcends this historical aspect. This seems to imply that other moral people or teachers of ethics who preach or act on this same command are equally valid with Christ. This in turn would seem to imply that Christianity captures certain aspects of a more general, universal religion, which contains truths of reason. The upshot for Lessing is thus that what is true in itself in Christianity is its ethical dimension and not its doctrinal side. He responded to his critics by arguing that the truth lies in the thing’s intrinsic beauty and functionality and not in its origin: Let us suppose that the Temple of Diana at Ephesus still stood before us in  all its splendor, and that it was discovered from ancient reports that it rested on a base of charcoal; perhaps even the name of the wise man who recommended such a strange foundation was still remembered. A foundation of charcoal! Of brittle and friable charcoal!. . . . Oh what idiots would consider this contradiction, such as it is, an adequate reason for excavating the foundations at twenty places, only to discover a piece of charcoal in whose fire-ravaged texture one could equally well detect olive-wood, oak, or alder! Oh, what arch-idiots would rather quarrel over the inconclusive texture of charcoal than admire the grand proportions of the temple!22

The beautiful Temple of Diana is like the edifice of Christianity as it exists today. Lessing’s plea is for us to admire this edifice for the truth and beauty that it contains in itself and which is self-evident to every beholder. To dispute about the historical details of how this edifice came about would be woefully petty. So also with the truth of religion: its truth lies not in its abstract doctrines but in its ability to improve people morally.

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Lessing remained vulnerable to attack in that his agreement with Reimarus’ historical criticisms seemed to oblige him to give up key Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, the second coming, the redemption of human beings from sin, and a transcendent kingdom of heaven. Although he claims he still wants to retain the necessary self-validating truths of Christianity, it is never made entirely clear what these necessary truths are or what is particularly “Christian” about them. In any case, it seems that Lessing’s attempt to salvage Christianity amounts to a serious reduction of its content. This seems to be the price that must be paid for putting it on a solid foundation and rendering it immune from historical criticisms. In the end, pressure was exerted on the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who ultimately revoked Lessing’s exemption from the censors in a decree issued on August 17, 1778.23 Lessing was compelled to desist from printing any more of the inflammatory fragments and from publishing any statement about questions of religion either in his own name or in that of a pseudonym without prior approval. He was obliged to accept this, but he wished to continue the critical discussion, even though he was in effect barred from publishing more of Reimarus’ manuscript. His lifelong interest in the theater gave him another idea about how he could make use of a different forum to present his ideas. He thus set to work on a dramatic piece that would capture the views that he tried to expound in the controversy surrounding the “fragments.” This work was Nathan the Wise.

III  Lessing’s plan for a shift in genre There is clear evidence that Lessing did not intend to give up the fight and that his goal with Nathan the Wise was to continue it.24 Even before the Duke issued the decree forbidding him from further publications without the control of the censor, Lessing could see that things boded poorly for the continuation of his polemic in the form that it had taken up until then. In a letter dated August 11, 1778, that is, a week before the decree, Lessing reveals his idea to his brother Karl and asks him to convey it to their common friend, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn: As yet I do not know what the outcome of my action will be. But I would like to be prepared for any result. .  .  .  last night I had a crazy idea. Many years ago I wrote a sketch of a drama on a subject that has a certain analogy to these present controversies, which I could not have dreamed of back then. If you and Moses [Mendelssohn] think it is a good idea, I would like to have it printed by subscription, and you can print and distribute the enclosed announcement as soon as possible.25

Lessing thus hits upon the idea of reviving an old project and shaping it to fit the new context. He gives a hint of the inspiration for the work by referring to Boccaccio as the source of the story of the ring: I do not want to let the real content of my piece that I want to have announced become known too early; but if you two, you or Moses, would like to know it, turn

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing to Boccaccio’s Decameron, Giornata 1, Novella 3: Melchisedek the Jew. I believe I have invented a very interesting episode for it, so the entire story should be a good read, and with this I certainly want to play a more mischievous prank on the theologians than if I were to publish ten more fragments.26

The last sentence makes clear that Lessing regards Nathan the Wise as a continuation of rather than a departure from his campaign against religious orthodoxy. This seems to indicate that he would have been disposed to go ahead and change genre of his own accord anyway even if there were no pressing external reason to do so, simply because he thought that he could express his views in a more effective way by means of a drama. The key here is his allusion to the “mischievous prank” that he wants to play on the theologians who are so eager to criticize him. The theologians were of course used to writing polemical works and to engaging in arguments of the kind that had been going on. However, they were not accustomed to being attacked in a dramatic work, which made a defense much more difficult for them. The prank that Lessing had in mind was presumably his portrayal of the play’s Christian characters, the religious fanatic Daja or the nefarious Patriarch of Jerusalem, as its villains. By depicting them as bigoted and narrow-minded, in contrast to the sympathetic portrayals of the Jews and the Muslims, Lessing could implicitly associate Goeze and his other critics with them.27 The Patriarch is particularly troublesome because of his single-minded refusal to acknowledge the good deeds of or extend any charity to those who do not share his beliefs. When he hears the rumor of a Jew (Nathan) who has raised a Christian girl as a Jew (Recha), he becomes infuriated and is determined to find the unnamed culprit and have him burned at the stake. He continues to call for the Jew’s death even after the Templar explains that the Jew has shown the girl nothing but kindness and she essentially owes her life to him. This recalls Lessing’s important distinction with respect to the Bible between the letter and the spirit.28 If Christianity is based on love and forgiveness, the Patriarch exemplifies just the opposite. In response to Lessing’s request that his friend, Mendelssohn, be asked his opinion of the idea, Lessing’s brother Karl responds in a letter dated August 25, 1778: Moses thinks that if you produce a piece that ridicules the foolishness of the theologians, they would have you where they want you. “It is a comedy,” they would say; “he has a great gift for mockery and for making people laugh. He is a Voltaire.” But if you stick to the tone that you promised to take in your last reply to Goeze, they could not get away with this evasion.29

Mendelssohn presumably sees the point in the change from polemical treatise to drama that Lessing proposes, but he is concerned that this will mean taking some risks that might undermine the overall goal. But Mendelssohn’s objection is purely a tactical one. There is nothing in principle wrong or inappropriate about using a dramatic work to express philosophical points. It is certainly not inconceivable that Mendelssohn’s objection made Lessing rethink the issue of genre and make some modifications accordingly. An odd feature about Nathan the Wise is that it breaks with the traditional dramatic genres of tragedy and

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comedy. While it has some occasional elements of comedy, it departs from the comic genre in a number of respects. At the end, there is no wedding, and the dervish is the only real comic figure. The dialogue is not intended to be humorous. The full title of the work reads Nathan der Weise. Ein Dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Aufzügen. The subtitle of most plays from the era designates them as tragedies or comedies, but Nathan’s hybrid status as a “Dramatic Poem” suggests Lessing modified what was originally a traditional comedy. Lessing apparently took to heart Mendelssohn’s concern and went back and revised his text to change it from an outright comedy to make it a more sober work with occasional mild comic elements. In this way, he could still carry out his goal of playing a “mischievous prank” on the theologians, without exposing himself to the risk of being dismissed as a simple comic writer with nothing substantial to say on the weighty issues of philosophy and religion. In taking Mendelssohn’s advice, Lessing rejected that of his brother, who urged him to write and out-and-out comedy. To justify his decision not to write a “theological comedy,”30 Lessing explains that his goal was not simply “scornful laughter,”31 but something more serious. He wanted to work to instill the audience with sympathy. He says that he aimed to create a “touching piece”32 that would move people on a deeper level. This pathetic element would clearly be undermined if the comic element were overdone. The serious tone of the piece is indicated by Lessing’s reference to using it to return to his “old pulpit . . . the theater.”33 The work’s moralistic dimension can indeed be seen as analogous to a sermon. The connection between the polemics surrounding the Reimarus fragments and Nathan the Wise was also noted by then contemporary commentators. Friedrich von Schlegel, for example, notes that Nathan the Wise is “a continuation of his Anti-Goeze, a twelfth installment in the series, as it were.”34 Schlegel here makes reference to the series of pamphlets, in 11 installments, that Lessing published under the title Anti-Goeze as a part of his polemic against the abovementioned pastor in Hamburg.35 Schlegel, who has both philosophical and literary interests, was attentive to the issue of genre. Thus, in his eyes, Nathan the Wise was a natural sequel to the polemical treatises that Lessing had used up until that point. Given all of this, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the shift to the dramatic genre was a carefully planned and highly strategic move on Lessing’s part.

IV  Nathan the Wise as a continuation of the debate surrounding the fragments There are a number of places in Nathan the Wise that echo Lessing’s conception of Christianity and defense of the fragments. (1) In one passage, the Sultan Saladin, the ruler of Jerusalem, discusses with his sister Sittah the missed chance to ally their family with the European royal houses by having their brother Melek marry the sister of King Richard the Lionhearted. Sittah laughs at what she regards as the naïveté of her brother, dismissing his ideas as “beautiful dreams.”36 The idea of Christians allowing Muslims to marry into their family strikes her as utterly far-fetched, and she goes on to criticize

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Christians who define morality solely in terms of allegiance to Christ without regard to the actual content of his teaching. She says, the Christians’ pride is to be Christians, not human beings. For even those things that their Founder gave them, those things that season superstition with humanity, they don’t love because they are humane, but because Christ taught them, because Christ did them. . . . His name has to be spread everywhere, has to slander and swallow up the names of all good people. For them it’s all about the name, only the name.37

In Sittah’s opinion, for Christians, what Christ did was right and virtuous, and thus the true goal of Christians is to follow his example and do the things that he did. Thus arose the tradition of the imitatio Christi. But they fail to see that an action is not ipso facto moral and virtuous just because Christ performed it, but rather just the other way around: Christ performed specific acts because they were right and virtuous. He did not have a monopoly on ethical conduct. There were many other great teachers of morality who also led righteous lives. One should give credit to these people as well and not allow Christ to be regarded as the sole example of ethical conduct. Christians miss the point by focusing exclusively on Christ and thus making moral action synonymous with Christian action. But this is, for Sittah, to become simply fixated on the name, that is, the name of Christ and the name of Christianity. One can take the same action and celebrate its righteousness without necessarily having to associate it constantly with Christ. Sittah’s point is illustrated toward the end of the work when Nathan and the friar share information to resolve the mystery of the identity of the real parents of Recha. Nathan explains how he selflessly adopted the infant girl which his friend had entrusted to him before being killed in battle. Since Nathan was a Jew and the girl a Christian, Nathan was running a great personal risk by raising the girl as his own; if the Christian authorities such as the Patriarch had found out, he would have faced severe punishment and possibly death. But Nathan could not in good conscience abandon the infant, the daughter of his dear friend, to live the life of an orphan or perhaps to grow up in an atmosphere without love. Even though the Christians had just massacred his wife and seven sons, Nathan nonetheless gave up all hatred and resentment and took in the Christian girl and raised her as his own daughter, despite the constant danger that threatened if the secret were to be revealed. Since in his despair, Nathan initially vowed a hatred for all Christians but then ended up adopting a Christian girl and loving her as his own child, he was in effect practicing the Christian command to love one’s enemy. Upon hearing Nathan’s story, the friar exclaims, “Nathan! Nathan! You’re a Christian! There never was a better Christian!”38 Although the friar knows full well that Nathan is a Jew, he has no other word to describe the great ethical action that Nathan performed. All acts of love, kindness, and mercy are for him ipso facto Christian acts. Nathan humbly responds to this praise in the spirit of Sittah, saying, “That’s well for us! For what makes me a Christian to you makes you a Jew to me.”39 From Nathan’s perspective, ethical action is synonymous with being a Jew, and so he indirectly praises the friar’s uprightness and honesty by saying that he, although a

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Christian, is acting virtuously like a Jew. This demonstrates Sittah’s point that what is essential is the action itself and not whether or not it is associated with a particular religion or prophet. Sittah’s position is thus a restatement of Lessing’s response to Goeze. As was seen, Lessing argued that the truths of Christianity are self-validating, and for this reason, they do not rely on any historical claims. He compares these self-validating truths of Christianity with the truths of geometry. We believe the latter because they are immediately, obviously true. Their historical background is a matter of indifference. In his polemic, Lessing claimed, if one were to take the truth of Christianity to be grounded in its history, it “would be as strange as if I were to regard a geometric theorem as true not because of its demonstration, but because it appears in Euclid.”40 The propositions in Euclid’s Elements are true, regardless of whether they were written by Euclid or someone else. The truth that Christ taught is universal. He discovered a truth in ethics just as Euclid did in geometry. But these are truths which are valid on their own, even if we had never heard of Christ or Euclid. This is the same point that Sittah makes. Christians reverse the order by believing that a given action is good because Christ did it; instead, it is good in itself, and this is why he did it. Therefore, it is the action that should be the focus of our attention and not Christ as the author of it. Lessing makes this point even more directly in his polemical treatise “Axioms,” in response to Goeze. Axiom IX reads as follows: “The religion is not true because the evangelists and apostles taught it; on the contrary, they taught it because it is true.”41 Thus one is not obliged to believe in the upright and honest character of the evangelists since the truth of Christianity is not dependent on this. That truth stands on its own, even if it were to turn out, as Reimarus asserts, that the evangelists were swindlers. With the matter seen in this way, all people from all religions can acknowledge the truth that Jesus arrived at and use it to improve their moral life. But to insist that one must become a Christian in order to do this is to blind oneself to the content of the action, which is universal. (2) A second point of connection between Nathan the Wise and the foregoing polemical works is the role of history for Christianity. Lessing argues that belief in Christianity must be based on more than claims that the Bible is an unquestionable historical record. He begins by noting that the campaigns of Alexander the Great, although well documented historically, can never be regarded as absolutely certain facts: “We all believe that someone called Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost the whole of Asia. But who, on the strength of this belief, would risk anything of great and lasting importance whose loss would be irreplaceable.”42 It would be absurd to stake one’s salvation on the truth of such historically grounded claims, no matter how certain they might seem to be. Such claims will never live up to the standard of absolute certainty, which is the province of truths of reason. The latter are self-evident truths, such as those found in mathematics. While the “contingent truths of history” will vary in every possible world, the necessary truths of reason will be the same. It is impossible to move from the “contingent truths of history” to the truths of reason without committing a logical fallacy.43 No amount of historical evidence will ever justify a truth of reason. There is always an insurmountable “leap” between the two.44

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In the parable of the ring in Nathan the Wise, the question of the historical veracity is also addressed. After telling the initial story of the ring, Nathan hints at the analogy that it is supposed to represent. The brothers were frustrated at being unable to discern which was the true ring: “They scrutinized, bickered, complained. In vain. The true ring was indistinguishable—almost as indistinguishable as the true religion is to us.”45 Saladin objects that the differences in the three great religions are evident for all to see: “I would have thought that the religions I mentioned were, on the contrary, quite easily distinguished. All the way down to their clothing, all the way down to their food and drink.”46 In response to this objection, Nathan uses Lessing’s argument about the problem of history: “Just not in their foundations. After all, aren’t they all grounded in history? Written or passed down! And history can only be accepted on faith and belief, right?”47 Each of the three religions makes a historical claim about its truth, but since these claims are based on history, they can never be absolutely adjudicated. None of them can be proven correct to the disadvantage of the other two. Nathan continues, Well, whose faith and belief are we least likely to call into question? Isn’t it our own, that of the people to whom we belong? Of the people who from childhood on have given us proof of their love? Who never deceived us, except when deception was better for us? How can I believe my forefathers less than you believe yours, or vice versa? Can I demand that you charge your ancestors with lying, so that you don’t contradict mine? Or vice versa? The same applies to Christians, right?48

It is therefore natural that the followers of the different religions find their own religion the most persuasive, but this is easily explained. It would be naïve to think that anything was really resolved by this matter. The story of the ring thus offers an analogy to Lessing’s thesis about impossibility of historical justification. Despite what the brothers may believe, there is no definitive way to discern which is the real ring, and despite what a follower of a given religion may believe, there is no way to demonstrate its truth historically. (3) A third analogue between the play and the polemical texts can be found at the end of the story of the ring. When the judge finds it impossible to render judgment based on the evidence presented, since after all it is impossible to identify the true ring, he suggests that the brothers consider what makes it so desirable in the first place: “But wait! I hear that the true ring has the miraculous power of making its wearer loved, agreeable to God and human beings. That should decide the matter.”49 He enjoins the three sons to go out and lead good lives, to pass their rings on to their offspring, and to tell them to lead good lives. Then, in the course of time, perhaps it will one day become clear, based on the action of the one family or the other, which one has the true ring: “And should the powers of the stone express themselves in your children’s children’s children, then let them come again before this bench. Then a wiser man than I will sit before them and rule. Go!”50 The situation of Nathan’s judge is the same as that described by Lessing when he portrays the situation of religion in his own day. No one can discern the truth of the one religion over the other. No direct proof is possible. The real truth of the correct religion can only be found in its ability to produce ethical actions in its followers, but this is something that represents a lifetime task for each individual.

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In a response to Ress, Lessing argues against presuming to possess such truths. He portrays the choice as follows: Not the truth which someone possesses or believes he possesses, but the honest effort he has made to get at the truth, constitutes a human being’s worth. For it is not through the possession of truth, but through its pursuit, that his powers are enlarged, and it is in this alone that his ever-growing perfection lies. Possession makes us inactive, lazy, and proud. If God held fast in his right hand the whole of truth and in his left hand only the ever-active quest for truth, albeit with the proviso that I should constantly and eternally err, and said to me: “Choose!,” I would humbly fall upon his left hand and say: “Father, give! For pure truth is for you alone!”51

Lessing’s choice is like that of the judge in the story. He refuses to make himself the judge of the situation but opts rather simply to observe and do the best he can with the evidence as it presents itself. It would be pretentious to state dogmatically the truth of one religion over the other. Thus, the proper stance is that of the judge, who is wise enough to desist from judging. So also Lessing admits up front that he has no pretension of possessing the absolute truth. (4) Finally, a key point in the story of the ring is that, seen from a certain perspective, it does not matter who has the real ring and who has one of the fakes. The point is that what is desired is the ring’s magical power to make its owner beloved by God and other human beings. Thus, if one strives to become beloved by God and human beings for one’s own sake and indeed succeeds in this goal, then there would be no difference between this and the person in possession of the real ring. The two would be identical with respect to their actions. Thus, one can work to reach this desired end even without the ring; in fact, one could attain the same goal without ever having heard of the ring. Conversely, the ring on its own can do nothing since it is emphasized at the outset that the ring “had the mysterious power of making whoever wore it agreeable to God and human beings, as long as the wearer believed in its power.”52 So the ring does not work on its own but must be believed in to have an effect. Thus, a person who found the ring by accident and did not know about its story or its magical powers would not become more beloved by virtue of merely possessing it. This echoes Lessing’s claim that a belief that effects good results remains valuable even if the original basis for believing it later proves to have been incorrect. As was seen above, Lessing argues that useful truths, for example, in mathematics could well be derived falsely, but if they are in fact useful, then it would be absurd to deny them because of this.53 So also with the ring. Even if one had one of the fake copies of the ring and not the true one, this would not matter provided that one believed in its truth and power and acted accordingly. The action would still be good action. There is no advantage in simply having the ring for its own sake. Its valued quality can be found in the ethical action that it produces, but this is something that everyone can attempt to emulate even if they do not possess the ring. By shifting from polemical treatise to drama, Lessing was able to continue defending his position against the theologians but on quite different terms. The change of genre is

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not merely about obtaining some guilty pleasure by casting his opponents in the roles of narrow-minded characters such as the Patriarch of Jerusalem. But rather it allows him to present the followers of other religions in a sympathetic light and to show that there is something universal about all human beings, regardless of their particular confession. The key is to see that this universal message of love is precisely what is found in Christianity, although it is not exclusive to Christianity. It might be objected here that this is primarily a discussion about theology and not philosophy and thus is of little relevance for philosophical writing. But the issues that Lessing treats are profoundly philosophical and indeed were taken up by later philosophers. What is the nature of historical truth? How can historical claims be grounded? What is the difference between historical truths and necessary truths of reason? What is the nature of ethics? What is the relation between religion and ethics? Is there a universal ethics? These are fundamental issues in fields such as the philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and hermeneutics. Thus, Nathan the Wise presents an instructive example of a philosophical argument in the form of a dramatic poem.

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Kierkegaard’s Use of Genre in the Struggle with German Philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard has been difficult to pin down with respect to the nature of his academic project. Claimed with equal zeal by philosophers, theologians, and literary scholars, his authorship seems to defy any clear-cut, unambiguous characterization. A part of this confusion clearly stems from the highly unconventional nature of many of his pseudonymous works. With respect to their genre, they appear to be an unidentifiable hybrid with elements from many distinct literary types. While he has his pseudonymous authors treat philosophical topics and criticize philosophical positions, these works can hardly be considered philosophical tracts in the traditional sense. Similarly, while some of his works, such as Either/Or and Repetition, tell a kind of a story, it is difficult to regard them straightforwardly as novels or some other form of narrative fiction as some commentators have been tempted to do.1 Finally, most all of his pseudonymous works are dominated by discussions of religious topics, but yet, unlike his various edifying discourses, they do not seem to fall into any readily identifiable genre of religious writing. In short, Kierkegaard’s use of genre is quite innovative and confusing. Some of the confusion is the result of a failure to recognize the reasons for his way of writing. As is well known, Kierkegaard was, at least for a period, in a polemical relation to German speculative philosophy. This represented the standard paradigm for philosophical research at the time. It also represented a fixed form of scholarly writing that was more or less standard in both Denmark and the German-speaking states during his age. Kierkegaard was thus confronted with the problem of how to combat what he conceived as this philosophy’s misunderstandings. He realized that he would be undermining himself if he were to write a philosophical treatise along the lines dictated by the German philosophical tradition. Since the content of his arguments was also intimately connected to the form, he needed to find a new kind of literary genre by means of which he could articulate his criticisms. In the course of his pseudonymous authorship, he can be seen as constantly experimenting with new literary forms and rhetorical tools in order to issue his criticisms of German philosophy. It should be noted that as a reaction to the popularity of Hegel’s philosophy in Germany and Prussia, there arose a number of works that were playfully satirical of his thought.2 Otto Friedrich Gruppe (1804–76), one of Hegel’s students in Berlin, penned a comedy entitled, Die Winde oder ganz absolute Konstruktion der neueren Weltgeschichte durch Oberons Horn gedichtet von Absolutulus von Hegelingen,3 which

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takes aim at the technical and idiosyncratic language that Hegel’s philosophy is known for. Gruppe went on the offensive again against obfuscating jargon, this time in the form of a fictional correspondence, Antäus. Ein Briefwechsel über speculative Philosophie in ihrem Conflict mit Wissenschaft und Sprache.4 Another of Hegel’s students, Theodor Mundt (1808–61), published the humorous Kampf eines Hegelianers mit den Grazien in 1833, which portrays Professor Fürsich’s encounter with the Graces.5 Similar works include Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow’s (1811–78) Nero,6 Heinrich Leo’s (1799–1878) Die Hegelingen,7 Karl Rosenkranz’s (1805–79) Das Centrum der Speculation,8 and Friedrich Ludwig Lindner’s (1772–1845) Der von Hegel’scher Philosophie durchdrungene SchusterGeselle oder der absolute Stiefel.9 The existence of these works is clear evidence that there were a number of writers who believed that Hegelianism was best combated with humorous genres of writing and not with the conventional philosophical treatise. It is tempting to think that Kierkegaard’s two main satirical texts about the Hegelians—The Conflict Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellar and Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est—were inspired by these works. But there is no evidence that he read or knew of them, and it is not clear if they enjoyed a wide circulation even in the German-speaking states. However, Kierkegaard and the aforementioned authors at least to some degree followed the same line of thinking in their choice of satirical genres in their treatment of Hegel’s thought. Yet it should be noted that these two early works of Kierkegaard represent perhaps his least innovative use of genre since they follow already established literary forms, the former being a student comedy and the latter a novel. If at this initial phase Kierkegaard was satisfied to fall back on well-known genres, he soon began to experiment with new ones, and it is here that his true originality, with respect to this issue, lies. It should be noted that there is already a large body of secondary literature dedicated to Kierkegaard’s rhetoric or language, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no study to date that gives any detailed analysis of the development of his writing as a contrastive genre to German idealism. It is often repeated in the secondary literature that Kierkegaard tried to undermine or deconstruct German philosophy by ironically making use of various rhetorical or stylistic tools.10 This is usually noted with a brief reference to Kierkegaard’s titles, such as Philosophical Fragments, which underscores the scattered or incomplete character of this work in contrast to systematic thinking. Similarly, scholars often allude to the title, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, to illustrate Kierkegaard’s playful and humorous rejection of German thought. This title states directly that the work is “unscientific” in contrast to the Germans’ insistence on strict scientific or scholarly (wissenschaftliche) studies in philosophy. The unsystematic nature of the work seems further indicated by the fact that it is designated as a “postscript,” although it is several hundred pages longer than the book to which it is supposed to be a postscript, namely the Philosophical Fragments. It is claimed that this is obvious evidence of an irreverent disregard for true systematic thinking. However, usually these kinds of remarks fail to do justice to either Kierkegaard’s position or that of the German philosophers since no account is ever given of what exactly systematic or scientific philosophy amounts to. At best, these are accompanied by a smug caricature of the tedious German mind that insists on order and conformity. But these views are blind to the actual philosophical import of systematic thinking that is at issue.

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The implication is often that Kierkegaard deliberately wrote in a way that is utterly confused, disorganized, self-contradictory, and fragmentary in order to bring home his criticism. According to this view, Kierkegaard is simply a literary anarchist carrying out acts of terrorism against all forms of structure and order. While this may seem to explain the presence of the occasional cryptic passage, it is problematic to take this as a general rule for understanding all of his many works. Moreover, it contradicts his own statements about the development of his authorship in his On My Activity as an Author, in which he clearly indicates that he indeed had a plan and, as it were, a system in his writing. For example, he states that he strategically intended the pseudonymous works to correspond to specific edifying discourses that he wrote at the same time and to treat the same subject matter in a different way.11 This notion of a parallel authorship clearly indicates some kind of general systematic plan and indeed a quite extensive one. In order to understand correctly Kierkegaard’s criticism and his use of alternative literary genres, one must first understand the nature of systematic thought in German idealism that he was objecting to.

I  Writing in German idealism Many readers are familiar with Kierkegaard’s frequent criticisms of what he refers to as “the system,” and most take his pejorative use of this term to refer immediately to Hegel.12 But the identity of his target often remains rather vague. Systematic philosophy was the standard form of philosophical enquiry at the time and was by no means restricted to Hegel’s thought. That philosophy had to be conceived as a system in order to be genuinely scientific and legitimate was a fixed point of dogma, agreed upon by Kant,13 Fichte,14 Schelling,15 and Hegel. This understanding of philosophy grew out of the need to give an exhaustive explanation of the phenomena under investigation. The founder of German idealism, Kant, explains that his goal in the Critique of Pure Reason is to create a transcendental philosophy that deduces the necessary conditions for human perception and understanding. In his polemic against the metaphysical thinking of his predecessors, Kant claims that the study cannot begin uncritically with an investigation of the nature of the objects of metaphysics. Instead, it is first necessary to explore the nature of the human cognitive faculty in order to see how it constitutes objective thinking at all. Kant then sets to work in a highly systematic manner (in the “Transcendental Aesthetic”) by demonstrating what the necessary conditions are for perception or sensible intuition. Once these conditions are established, this then leads him to an account of the necessary conditions for the faculty of the understanding (in the “Analytic of Concepts”). He then is obliged to explain how the faculty of sensible intuition and the faculty of the understanding work together (in the “Analytic of Principles” or “Schematism”). While this is, of course, only a small part of the story that is found in Kant’s rich epistemology, it should be enough to make clear why he believes that a systematic approach to the issue is absolutely imperative. The subject matter itself dictates the order and the structure of the analyses. Kant must start from the most simple human faculty and move to the most complex.

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One can regard Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason almost as a Cartesian project in the sense that, like Descartes, he wishes to criticize his predecessors for unknowingly or uncritically accepting certain prejudices about the nature of the world. He then tries, also like Descartes, to bracket these prejudices or uncritical assumptions and to start from the ground up to see if he can deduce the truth of the matter based on his own principles. In Kant’s case, this means determining systematically the necessary conditions for the individual faculties of the human mind. This requires a systematic approach given the fact that he must begin from nothing. If he were to begin anywhere else, he would risk making himself guilty of precisely that with which he charged his predecessors, namely with assuming certain things uncritically and without demonstration. Given this, Kant must proceed with one cognitive faculty at a time, until he has exhausted all of the faculties of the human mind. Only then will it be possible to determine exactly what the mind can and cannot know. Only in this way can he ascertain the true limits of reason. Given that the human mind represents a system of interlacing faculties, Kant must give an exhaustive account of them in order to determine how the whole works. This can be seen in analogy with many other fields that have the study of organic systems as their object. Thus, in anatomy the understanding of individual organs contributes to an understanding of the workings of the entire organism. Organs and organ systems are related to and necessarily depend on each other and thus must be studied and understood not in isolation but as a part of the larger whole which they comprise. As is said, the whole is greater than the sum total of its parts. So also the astronomer exploring a planetary system must examine not just the individual entities that constitute it, that is, the star, the planets, and their moons, but must also see how these relate to and mutually interact with one another. A full understanding of such a system requires that one knows what effect the distance, the mass, the speed and direction of the movement, and the gravity of the one body have on the others. Regarded along these lines, this conception of systematic thinking seems straightforward and even uncontroversial in the realm of science today. For Kant and the other German idealists, this understanding of system, for obvious reasons, led to a somewhat rigid and disciplined form of writing. To give a systematic account of the individual faculties of the human mind required that one treat them seriatim and that one did not skip around in the analysis. For this reason, the works of German philosophers from this period are often divided into elaborate sections and subsections with numbered paragraphs to make the systematic relations as clear as possible. From the perspective of the modern reader, this can look somewhat tedious or pedantic, but this kind of organizational scheme and its accompanying form of writing are direct results of the philosophical agenda and methodology of German idealism. Hegel continued in the tradition of Kant and, like his predecessor, insisted that philosophy must be executed in a systematic manner if it is to have any value.16 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he states, echoing the claims of his predecessors, “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth.”17 In the same context, he adds, “knowledge is only actual, and can only be expounded,

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as Science or as system.”18 However, Hegel added his own special twist to the notion of systematic thinking based on his understanding of speculative philosophy. According to Hegel’s metaphysics, the categories that constitute both the human mind and the external world are not to be conceived as isolated, individual entities. Instead, they jointly constitute an elaborate network that is necessarily interconnected. In the Science of Logic, he attempts to demonstrate these necessary relations in a step-by-step manner. He wishes to show that there is no hidden thing-in-itself or unknowable, transcendent sphere that is forever separated from the human mind; in order to do so, he attempts to demonstrate that everything that is needed for knowing is entirely immanent and thus available to thinking and cognition. Hegel’s guiding intuition is that individual categories are necessarily related to one another as opposites (Gegensätze). When one takes, for example, the most basic category that the mind can think, namely, pure being, one is tempted to believe that this is an atomic entity that can stand on its own independently of any other thought or object. However, a closer examination shows it is impossible to think the notion of being without the opposite concept of nothing. These concepts mutually imply one another, limiting and conditioning each other reciprocally. Hegel often uses somewhat paradoxical language to describe this relation by saying, for example, that the concept of being is the concept of nothing. By this he means merely that the concept of nothing is already implicitly implied or contained in the concept of being. Concepts of this kind are not separate and independent but rather jointly constitute a single, higher concept, in this case, becoming. This is Hegel’s famous doctrine of mediation. All concepts are mediated by their opposites and thus develop into higher, more complex concepts. Thus, concepts such as up and down, right and left, north and south, all necessarily form a higher collective concept, that is, vertical, horizontal, and longitudinal direction. Hegel’s ambitious goal in the Science of Logic is to trace all of these concepts and their mutual relations in an exhaustive fashion. He does so by systematically identifying the individual stages of thought by which one first begins with an individual category that is initially taken to be an autonomous, individual concept; then this leads to the second stage where the necessary opposite of this concept is discovered and juxtaposed to it; finally, at the third stage, the mind realizes that these two concepts form a single unitary concept at a higher level. Hegel defines speculative philosophy as the dissolution of opposites. For example, in the Science of Logic, one reads, “It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists.”19 The result of this methodology is a movement in the concepts of logic or metaphysics, which is the frequent target of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Hegel at times portrays this categorical development with metaphors that compare the movement of thought with the development and growth of organic life.20 As a plant grows, it passes through different stages from the seed, to the stock, to the flower and the fruit; yet, each of these quite different parts nonetheless necessarily belongs to the single organism of the plant. So also with logic, while individual categories run their course in relation to other categories, they all necessarily constitute a part of a single organic system.

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Another frequent metaphor used to capture the nature of the philosophical system is that of a circle. In the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, he writes, Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle that closes upon itself; but in each of them the philosophical Idea is in a particular determinacy or element. Every single circle also breaks through the restriction of its element as well, precisely because it is inwardly the totality, and it grounds a further sphere. The whole presents itself therefore as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its particular elements constitutes the whole Idea—which equally appears in each single one of them.21

The movement of categories by means of the dialectic of opposites is one that appears in the different spheres and at different levels. Although the content varies from one group of individual categories to the next, the required logic remains the same. There is thus a systematic structure at both the micro- and the macrolevel. The system also constitutes a circle in that the first and the last categorical determinations correspond to one another. Hegel explains this in connection with the difficult issue of the beginning of philosophy: “Within the Science this standpoint, which in this first act appears as immediate, must make itself into the result, and (what is more) into its last result, in which it reaches its beginning again and returns into itself. In this way, philosophy shows itself as a circle that goes back into itself.”22 Since the first and the last categories constitute a unity, the system is immanent and self-enclosed. In principle, one could begin anywhere, and the necessary logic of the categories would lead one through the entire system until one returned to the point where one started. Hegel thus opposes the view that regards individual concepts and categories as absolute, isolated entities. By holding firmly to one side or the other of a dichotomy, this one-sided view fails to recognize that each side of the dichotomy is related to and conditioned by the other in such a way that the two sides constitute a greater whole. Seemingly in critical anticipation of Kierkegaard, Hegel refers to all forms of dualistic thinking as a kind of dogmatic either-or. In the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, for example, he writes: But in the narrower sense dogmatism consists in adhering to one-sided deter­ minations of the understanding whilst excluding their opposites. This is just the strict “either-or,” according to which (for instance) the world is either finite or infinite, but not both. On the contrary, what is genuine and speculative is precisely what does not have any such one-sided determination in it and is therefore not exhausted by it; on the contrary, being a totality, it contains the determinations that dogmatism holds to be fixed and true in a state of separation from one another united within itself.23

Hegel is thus critical of all forms of one-sided thinking that he regards as being caught in a blind dualism. His conception of speculative philosophy is thus that the goal should be to grasp the whole and to understand the individual elements in their necessary relations to the other parts in the whole. Any understanding of an individual element on its own invariably leads to misunderstandings and confusions.

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While Hegel’s notion of the dialectical development of opposites represents his own contribution to systematic and speculative thinking, the result, with respect to philosophical writing, is much the same as with the other German idealists. If the truth consists in these necessary relations, it must be developed in a step-by-step necessary sequence. While Hegel occasionally attempts to illustrate the nature of the categories with examples drawn from everyday life, his general exposition must follow the predetermined systematic form that his methodology dictates. But this is not an unimaginative narrow-mindedness or an obtuse insistence of system for its own sake; instead, it is grounded in a well-considered and carefully argued view of the nature of the philosophical enterprise as such. Philosophy must be written in a systematic way that traces the necessary relations of the concepts. This does not necessarily mean that it should invariably be written in numbered paragraphs in the way that Kierkegaard seems at times to want to mock.24 But it does mean that the form of writing must be stringent and systematic. In any case, from this account, it should be clear why Kant, Hegel, and the German idealists were so insistent on conceiving philosophy as a system and why this resulted in the somewhat tedious form of writing that they are known for. This constitutes the backdrop to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works since he was reacting to this philosophical paradigm both in its original German form and in a derivative form in the works of Danish Hegelians, who sought to imitate it in their own language.

II  Kierkegaard’s objection with respect to content The understanding of systematic philosophy that lies behind the form of writing sketched above has important implications. Hegel’s claim is that religion is one form of knowing along with many others. Since it is also a kind of thinking, religion follows the same rules of thought as everything else. Given this, it can be seen as continuous with the different scholarly fields, and it is subject to the same dialectic of opposites that governs those fields. In a certain sense, Kierkegaard has no objection to the scholarly investigation of certain questions related to religion. The key point for him is, however, that none of these scholarly investigations are relevant for one’s personal relation to Christianity and one’s personal faith. With the distinction between the subjective and the objective approach to Christianity in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript,25 he makes it clear that one’s personal disposition toward Christianity does not depend on “objective” or external facts. The objective approach concerns what can be known about Christianity with regard to, for example, its history. This can certainly be examined with scholarly tools. However, the key issue is the subjective approach, which concerns one’s own personal relation to Christianity and the message it conveys. This, by contrast, can never be the object of scholarly analysis. The question of the faith of the individual has to do with one’s own inwardness, which is incommensurable and nondiscursive. It cannot be taught, learned, or communicated directly. This is why he claims in his early journals, “Philosophy and Christianity can never be united.”26 In contrast to Hegel’s claim that Christianity can be incorporated into

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a philosophical system, the young Kierkegaard stubbornly insists that they must be kept separate since they are fundamentally different in kind. His understanding of Christianity as inner faith is incompatible with Hegel’s attempt to categorize it as a form of communicable knowledge. Hegel’s attempt to understand Christianity as a form of knowing that is subordinate to philosophy, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, misunderstands the inward nature of Christian faith. It is impossible to compare philosophical knowing with Christianity in a way that a meaningful analysis can be given and a hierarchy between them established. The reason for this is that Christian faith exists only inwardly in the heart of each individual believer, and this can never be examined and compared with philosophical knowing. Thus, an important part of Kierkegaard’s undertaking concerns defining and delimiting the sphere of the religious experience. He wishes to carve out a special area for it that is invulnerable to any encroachment from reason or science. Religious faith and the immediate lived experience of the individual are irreducible and autonomous. Kierkegaard’s slogan “either/or” stresses his belief in oppositions within the life of the individual that, unlike Hegel’s purely logical oppositions, cannot be reconciled. A cardinal point of dogma for Hegel is that the truth is one. Since it is one, everything is related, and since everything is related, philosophy must be systematic in order to understand its subject matter correctly. Kierkegaard clearly wishes to contest this view. The truth is not one; instead, there is an objective truth and a subjective truth, and these two represent utterly incommensurable spheres. Kierkegaard’s loudest polemics are aimed against those who, he believes, confuse these two spheres. His claim is that Christianity, when seen from the side of objective truth, must remain forever transcendent and unknowable. As he has his pseudonymous author indicate in the Postscript, no historical, philological, or philosophical research can ever determine the truth or falsity of Christianity or give an individual guidance with respect to the personal decision to believe or not. This is the point of many of his most famous doctrines such as the absolute paradox of the incarnation. According to his view, it is thus pretentious to claim to know this truth. For example, in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Anti-Climacus write the following: “I consider it an outright ethical task, perhaps requiring not a little selfdenial in these very speculative times, when all ‘the others’ are busy comprehending it, to admit that one is neither able nor obliged to comprehend it. Precisely this is no doubt what our age, what Christendom needs: a little Socratic ignorance with respect to Christianity.”27 Modern speculative philosophy with its pretentious claims to know everything stands in stark contrast to the self-knowledge of Socrates, who claims neither to know nor to teach. Socratic ignorance was a form of piety and reverence before the divine. Kierkegaard has his pseudonymous author enjoin his readers to follow the Socratic example, by accepting their finitude and sinfulness: Christianity teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith; therefore it wants to be precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation, keeping watch so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained as it is in the

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paradox and faith, so that God and man do not, even more dreadfully than ever in paganism, do not merge in some way, philosophice, poetice, etc., into one—in the system.28

Any system of philosophy, which claims to have incorporated and understood Christianity, is a form of academic vanity that should be replaced by religious humility. This recalls the Postscript’s praise of Lessing, who said that when confronted with the choice, he would choose the never-ending struggle for the truth instead of the absolute truth itself.29 Hegel’s immanent philosophical system leaves no room for a transcendent God, who is in sole possession of the truth. Given that the objective truth of Christianity can never be known by human beings, what is left is the subjective truth. It is, however, profoundly individual and private. It cannot be communicated to others or meaningfully discussed in positive terms. For this reason, it would be inappropriate for Kierkegaard to present his views about it by means of a systematic philosophical tract. To do so would undermine his own doctrine. He needs a way to sketch his view of subjective truth or the inwardness of religious belief that is wholly incommensurable with philosophy or discursive reasoning in general. This can only be done by attempting to capture specific illustrative scenes, moods, or experiences of individuals, with the hope that the readers will be able to identify with these episodic accounts and then transfer them mutatis mutandis to their own lives. In short, his view of truth as subjective naturally leads him to seek alternative forms of presentation. This raises questions about Kierkegaard’s vocation as a scholar in general. The question of whether or not he was a philosopher has been a hotly and ideologically contested for some time.30 Ultimately, the question comes down to what one understands by “philosophy,” and this is often a matter of personal taste given the heterogeneous character of the field today. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that Kierkegaard has his pseudonymous authors discuss any number of philosophical issues, albeit in his own somewhat idiosyncratic manner. On the other, however, he regards philosophy alone as insufficient. He refuses to be drawn into a philosophical form of discussion since to address the problems he is interested in with purely philosophical arguments would be to betray his own position. One seeks in vain detailed, carefully reasoned arguments to support his often quite radical claims. His primary goal is of a religious nature: to make his reader attentive to the nature of Christianity as something inward and individual. This would, he presumably hopes, enjoin his readers in the privacy of their own minds to review their own relation to Christianity, that is, to bring into focus the subjective approach. His goal can thus be seen as indirectly bringing about a religious reform in individual readers. But Kierkegaard as an author can only do this indirectly since the actual reform itself can only be done by the individual believers themselves. That this is a significant part of his goal as an author seems to be supported by the edifying part of his authorship, which, as has been often noted, contains few if any philosophical discussions in the traditional sense. The goal with the authorship is not a philosophical enterprise per se. But this is of course not to say that it might not overlap here and there with specific philosophical questions such as the limits of reason or human knowing.

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Given the distinction between the subjective and the objective approach and between faith and knowing, Kierkegaard is keen to emphasize that it is inappropriate and misleading to treat certain questions of religion in an objective manner. Given that the objective treatment is exemplified by a certain manner of writing, it is natural for Kierkegaard to include this as a part of his criticism. Thus, the content of his views about the nature of religious faith is intimately connected to his criticism of the form of philosophical writing found in the German thinkers.

III  Kierkegaard’s attempt to distance himself from systematic philosophy Like many readers today, Kierkegaard felt alienated from the kind of writing that he found among the idealists. Their tedious form of presentation seemed to him unsuited for expressing the trials and inward reflections of the religious life as he experienced it. Thus, his protest was not just against the concept of religion that he found in the German idealists but also against their general way of approaching the set of issues that can be designated as relevant for the existential life of the individual or the inwardness of the Christian believer. He was thus challenged to come up with an alternative mode of writing that would simultaneously expose this shortcoming in the work of his predecessors and more satisfactorily describe the key human issues concerning actuality and existence. The most obvious way he responded to this challenge was by having his pseudo­ nymous authors and personae explicitly distance themselves from the dominant German philosophy of the day. In Either/Or, that is, at the very beginning of his pseudo­ nymous authorship, Kierkegaard has Judge William write to the aesthete: “As you know, I have never passed myself off as a philosopher.”31 Only a page later he reiterates this, by stating, “I am a married man and far from being a philosophic brain.”32 These statements usher in a long discussion of the philosophical concept of mediation, which was a highly topical issue at the time. Its placement at the beginning of this discussion suggests that Kierkegaard wishes to apologize for having the Judge dip into what was at the time a trendy philosophical discussion. This is but one indication that Kierkegaard sought to distance Either/Or from traditional philosophical texts. His presentation of the work as an apparently haphazard collection of writings from two different authors is unsystematic in the extreme. In the works of the aesthete, it is difficult to discern any form of order or logic at all. The “Diapsalmata,” with which the work properly begins, seems to be a string of random ideas and insights—the very opposite of a systematic text. The rambling letters by the Judge also have a tone and quality that is entirely distinct from a philosophical discourse. It has often been noted that the Judge seems to represent the voice of common-sense bourgeois life at the time and is not a spokesman for any traditional philosophical doctrine as such. Kierkegaard intentionally avoids portraying him as philosophically savvy. Finally, the story that the pseudonymous editor Victor Eremita tells about the discovery of the manuscripts further stresses the antisystematic nature of the work.

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One finds the same approach in Fear and Trembling. The Preface begins with a lengthy quotation from Descartes and a discussion of epistemology. However, Kierkegaard then disrupts the reader’s expectations of encountering a philosophical text by having his pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio write: “The present author is by no means a philosopher.”33 This disclaimer is repeated in the context of objections to philosophy’s encroachment on the sphere of religion: “Even if someone were able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him. The present author is by no means a philosopher.”34 Since Hegel and the German philosophers try to grasp Christian faith as a concept, they miss the point with regard to the faith of the individual. For Kierkegaard, of course, faith cannot be grasped, analyzed, or presented in this manner. Thus, he is obliged to present this in a form that is unmistakably different from the standard form of philosophizing at the time. Johannes de silentio is not a philosopher in the then contemporary sense that rejects the conception of religion, or specifically Christianity, as an abstract concept. He refers to himself as “a supplementary clerk, who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system.”35 He further anticipates the criticisms of the work by philosophers who will reproach it precisely for not being organized in numbered paragraphs and for not being systematic. Thus, right at the outset of the work, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym declare quite explicitly that his enterprise is not philosophical (in the sense in which this was understood at the time) and that this is reflected in the form of writing that the book displays. As noted, the very title of Philosophical Fragments was intended as an oxymoron since it appeared in an era when “philosophy” was synonymous with “system.” This title would presumably have immediately struck contemporary philosophers as an oddity. How can a work claiming to contain philosophical truth be fragmentary and not systematic? Kierkegaard again has his pseudonymous author—in this case, Johannes Climacus—emphasize that the work does not belong to the German idealist tradition: “What is offered here is only a pamphlet . . . without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor.”36 Since Philosophical Fragments does in fact treat various philosophers and philosophical issues in some detail, Climacus’ disavowal has less to do with the content of the book than with the form in which it is presented. Climacus ironically disparages his own work as a mere “pamphlet” (Piece) in contrast to more traditional systematic expositions: “to write a pamphlet is frivolity—but to promise the system, that is seriousness.”37 He ends the work by again emphasizing the distinction between philosophy and Christian faith: Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that . . . has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought) . . . has ever had this idea.38

He thus explicitly distinguishes his understanding of Christianity from the philoso­ phical endeavor. These passages clearly indicate the necessary relation of content and form that informs Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings.

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Kierkegaard’s satirical work Prefaces is directed against the philosophy and writing of Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Denmark’s most prominent Hegelian philosopher at the time. The humorous story of the origin of the work clearly excludes any association with serious philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Nicolaus Notabene explains that his wife has forbidden him from writing books, but since he still wants to be an author, he has decided to get around the prohibition by writing not entire books but only prefaces. Thus, the work consists of a series of prefaces to books that remain unwritten. With this alone, Nicolaus Notabene distances himself from the standard philosophical writing of the day. Instead of elaborating a system, he writes a preface and stops. In the eyes of the German philosophers, such a work would be laughable. Although it is hardly necessary, Nicolaus Notabene distances himself from philosophy explicitly, when he says, “my epoch has kept me from passing myself off as a philosopher.”39 By this he refers to the ancient skeptical doctrine of the suspension of judgment. Stages on Life’s Way can in many ways be considered the companion piece to Either/Or. It presents itself as an unphilosophical and unscholarly work consisting of a collection of scattered texts from different authors, assembled not by a scholar but by a bookbinder. As was the case with Either/Or, the very genre of this work seems to exclude it from being regarded as a philosophical treatise. In addition, Kierkegaard again has one of his pseudonyms make the usual disclaimer. The “married man,” in his “reflections of marriage,” declares, “I am far from being learned and make no claims to that; it would be embarrassing if I were foolish enough to assume anything like that. I am not a dialectician, not a philosopher.”40 Nonetheless, he still feels that he can defend his position with regard to marriage against learned men. His position is built on practical experience rather than abstract learning. Along the same lines, Frater Taciturnus, the author of “Guilty/Not Guilty,” contrasts his own life of action with the practice of philosophical writing: “And by this kind of talk, or rather, by a life that justifies talking this way, I would think—provided that one person can benefit another at all—I would think that I have benefited my esteemed contemporaries more than by writing a paragraph in the system.”41 In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, arguably Kierkegaard’s most philosophical work, he again has Johannes Climacus contrast his own work with systematic philosophy. At the beginning, he explains the relation of this new work to the Philosophical ­Fragments and provides some insight into the enigmatic motto of the former work: Undisturbed and in accordance with the motto (“Better well hanged than ill wed”), the hanged, indeed, the well-hanged, author has remained hanging. No one—not even in sport or jest—has asked him for whom he did hang. But that was as desired; better well hanged than by a hapless marriage to be brought into systematic in-law relationship with the whole world. Relying on the nature of the pamphlet, I was hoping this would happen, but in view of the bustling ferment of the age, in view of the incessant forebodings of prophecy and vision and speculative thought, I feared to see my wish frustrated by some mistake.42

The “pamphlet” (rather than a formal systematic treatise) as a means of exposition is thus presented as a weapon in the battle against speculative thought. The marriage

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that Climacus feared was that with speculative or systematic philosophy, and thus he wanted at any cost to avoid this association. It is better to be “hanged” in the sense that it is better to suffer negative reviews and the public indignation for the views expressed in the work than to be associated with systematic thought. His hope is that “the nature of the pamphlet” will steer people away from any associations of this kind and will make it clear that the work is cut from an entirely different cloth. Later in the book, in a discussion of the purported presuppositionless beginning of Hegel’s logic with the category of pure being, Climacus again underscores that he is writing a pamphlet and not a work of philosophy: “What has been said here about a beginning in logic . . . is very plain and simple. I am almost embarrassed to say it or embarrassed to have to say it, embarrassed because of my situation—that a poor pamphlet writer, who would rather be worshipping on his knees before the system, should be constrained to say such a thing.”43 In this way, Kierkegaard consistently distinguishes the works of his pseudonyms from those of philosophers. When he mentions the latter, the term almost always has a pejorative ring to it. He refers to “the priests of philosophy,”44 “the speculators,”45 “systematic triflers,”46 “systematic entrepreneurs,”47 “enterprising abstracter[s],”48 and “gobbler[s] of paragraphs.”49 He thus distinguishes his works from those of his contemporaries, and an important part of this distinction has to do with the kind of writing that he is engaged in.

IV  Philosophy and life As has been seen, Kierkegaard’s thought can be grasped not so much as an attempt to create a philosophical theory but as something intimately connected with concrete practice. For this reason, he frequently makes use of the concept of “appropriation.” The goal is not to come up with a formal theory concerning metaphysics or dogmatics but rather to appropriate the Christian message in the life of the individual. The believer must interpret the Christian message and realize or enact it in concrete actions in his or her own life. In his works Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, Prefaces, and Repetition, one finds attempts, as it were, to act out philosophical ideas in terms of life actions, which are described in a narrative form. In De Omnibus, Kierkegaard portrays a naïve student at the University of Copenhagen who attends the lectures of the Hegelian philosophers who follow Descartes by advocating that one doubt everything. Instead of realizing that this is merely an academic exercise, Johannes takes this literally and attempts to apply it in his own life. The narrative is intended to show that applying the philosophical cliché in practice leads to disastrous results. Kierkegaard explains how the story is supposed to run: Johannes does what we are told to do—he actually doubts everything—he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. He perceives that in order to hold on to this extreme

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The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing position of doubting everything, he has engaged all his mental and spiritual powers. If he abandons this extreme position, he may very well arrive at something, but in doing that he would have also abandoned his doubt about everything. Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life has not acquired any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy.50

Universal doubts (and by extension, abstract philosophy in general) may here have their place in the classroom, but are not appropriate guides for real life. This work can thus be taken as a kind of literary refutation of the philosophical position. Reference is made to this in the Postscript, where one reads: “What is lunacy? When an assistant professor, every time his coattail reminds him to say something, says de omnibus dubitandum est and briskly writes away on a system in which there is sufficient internal evidence in every other sentence that the man has never doubted anything—he is not considered lunatic.”51 The pretentious scholar’s theory is contradicted by his own actions. A similar idea is found in Prefaces, where Kierkegaard has his author state that he has been dominated by doubt with respect to the ambitious claims that his philosophical contemporaries were making: I once believed that I had ascertained that things were not entirely right with some of my esteemed contemporaries. In other words, when I, despite every effort, was unable to ascend to the dizzying thought of doubting everything, I decided, in order nevertheless to doubt something, to concentrate my soul on the more human task of doubting whether all the philosophizers understood what they said and what was said. This doubt is overcome not in the system, but in life.52

Kierkegaard’s contemporary Hans Lassen Martensen argued, like Descartes, that philosophy must call everything into doubt in order to start free from prejudice with only the most basic propositions that can be demonstrated by rational proof. Notabene argues that this is merely an empty intellectual exercise since in life it is impossible to doubt everything. He thus hints at an alternative to the philosophical enterprise. While philosophy sets for itself the task of overcoming doubt by means of a body of carefully constructed systematic thought, Notabene believes that this problem and thus this solution can simply be rendered superfluous if one is attentive to the actual lived experience of human life. There is no need to construct a philosophical system in order to escape the problem of skepticism since the problem disappears as soon as one leaves the classroom and engages in the world. Again the focus shifts from the academic context to a practical one that is designated here vaguely with the term “life.” Kierkegaard regards philosophy as creating pseudoproblems while failing to address the real ones. Also in Repetition, the pseudonymous author Constantin Constantius attempts to demonstrate the philosophical concept of repetition by taking a trip to Berlin. Since he has been in Berlin previously, by repeating his trip, he hopes to determine if the philosophical concept of repetition is viable. The work begins as follows: When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward as an opponent. He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but

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merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them. When I was occupied for some time, at least on occasion, with the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated—I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has.53

However, he concludes in the end that in fact a repetition is not possible since so many things have changed vis-à-vis his first visit, and even the things that have not changed he experiences as different since he has changed. What is noteworthy is that Constantius, like Diogenes, has chosen to refute a philosophical argument, not by presenting a series of reasoned counterarguments but through his actions. Given that Kierkegaard explicitly avoided using the accepted philosophical genre and consistently rejected the label of “philosopher” for his literary voices, it is absurd to charge him with being a bad philosopher as was the case in much of the earlier literature. While Kierkegaard research has enjoyed a great boom in recent years, this was not always the case. In the heyday of analytic philosophy, he was frequently dismissed as being irrelevant. One commentator writes, for example, “[Kierkegaard’s] writings are for the most part undistinguished so far as their philosophical content is concerned. Extensive reading is necessary to find a single philosophical thought that can be referred to as such.”54 This misses the point of Kierkegaard’s entire agenda. He was passionately engaged with and made significant contributions to the philosophical issues of the day, but the only way he could be true to his principles was to do it in a rigorously nonphilosophical way.

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Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in “Funes the Memorious”: The Short Story as a Philosophical Argument

Simone de Beauvoir recalls that when she first made the acquaintance of Jean-Paul Sartre, he, then still a young man, proudly and somewhat hubristically declared that when he became older he wanted to be Stendhal and Spinoza.1 Not satisfied with the dream of being merely a great writer or a great philosopher, Sartre hoped to pursue both academic vocations at the same time. For him, this meant not merely writing both philosophical and literary works but also sometimes combining the two. For instance, in order to illustrate a philosophical point, he at times gave literary character sketches such as that of the waiter in Being and Nothingness. Conversely, he incorporated philosophical ideas to good effect into his plays and novels such as his portrayal of existential freedom in The Flies or his account of intersubjective human relations in No Exit. In fact, it was by means of these literary genres that his philosophical theories found perhaps their most eloquent expression. Consequently, it is not uncommon for commentators to go to Sartre’s literary works in search of information to supplement the official philosophical statements of his views. Sartre’s willingness to blur the lines of demarcation that separate the humanities disciplines has, however, not always been seen favorably. Due to the prejudice among philosophers in the Anglo-American world to discount literary works as modes of expression for philosophical investigation, he was frequently the victim of dismissive thinking in this context. However, since in addition to his literary texts, he also wrote purely philosophical works such as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the philosophical side of his dual identity was soundly established, and he was able to assure for himself some measure of philosophical credibility. Yet, it is doubtful whether his name would be mentioned in philosophy departments today if these two works had never been written and his reputation had remained primarily that of a littérateur. The situation of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is, however, quite different. Like Sartre, Borges employed literary forms to illustrate philosophical ideas. But unlike Sartre, Borges never deviated from genres traditionally associated with comparative literature. Although Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published an extended philosophical treatise per se. The result is that his oeuvre has often

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been categorized as purely literary and has thus been largely neglected by trained philosophers. Although his works have occasionally been investigated for their philosophical meaning and significance,2 these few attempts have not been successful in bringing his work into the philosophical canon, and Borges today still remains a largely unrecognized source of insight among professional philosophers. The following analyses constitute a small attempt to correct this neglect of the philosophical side of Borges’ academic identity. It is well known that in his stories, Borges posits fantastic or imaginary worlds, but what is less well known is that these worlds are often based on philosophical theories. Borges’ procedure is to use a particular philosophical doctrine as a point of departure and then to create a world based on it. Then in the course of the cuento, he examines the problems or contradictions that arise in such a world. Thus, he gives in the form of a short story what can be seen as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument against a given philosophical position. The story allows him to bring out the contradictory consequences of a given position and to illustrate them with a character or situation in a way that a philosophical treatise can only do imperfectly with limited examples. A philosophical reading seems to be justified by a number of Borges’ own statements about both his biography and his work. For example, in the Preface to The Gold of the Tigers (1972), he refers to his “philosophical preoccupation” which he says “has been with [him] since [his] childhood.”3 Not only does he frequently mention specific philosophers and philosophical doctrines, but he also exploits such doctrines in the actual content of the stories themselves, in this way making use of philosophical ideas in otherwise literary texts. Thus, while some, indeed perhaps most, readers see his stories merely as examples of a fiction of fantasy, others see them as thought experiments based on philosophical premises. Leibniz discussed at some length the concept of a possible world, based on a distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason. Empirical truths such as “the dog’s hair is black,” are facts of the matter, which just so happen to be the case but which could easily be different under different circumstances. If “different circumstances” are interpreted as different possible worlds, then there is a possible world in which the dog’s hair is brown and one in which it is white and so on. Truths of reason, by contrast, are necessary and thus must hold true in every possible world. Truths of this sort, such as “a triangle is a figure with three sides,” are necessarily true since to deny them would, according to Leibniz, result in a contradiction. Thus, there are infinitely many possible worlds with varying empirical content, but all possible worlds contain the same truths of reason. As readers of Borges know, he was fond of positing different possible worlds. By imagining a world in which a given philosophical doctrine is true, he is able to think the doctrine through to its logical conclusion. As one writer puts it, Borges begins with a “what if ”4 and then tries to tell a story based on the premise contained therein. Philosophers have also often made use of this kind of strategy to refute the positions of their opponents. For example, Hegel’s well-known dialectical methodology in the Phenomenology of Spirit avails itself of the same basic principle. A given theory or what Hegel calls “a Notion” (Begriff ) is posited and then examined for internal consistency. Its

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logical conclusions are drawn out until a contradiction arises. Once the contradiction has been exposed, the Notion must be given up and replaced by a new one. In its most basic form, this strategy of refutation is simply that of the reductio ad absurdum, according to which a given thesis is refuted by demonstrating that contradictory or absurd conclusions follow from it. Borges makes use of this strategy but not with a philosophical argument in the strict sense. Instead, he creates a possible world based on a philosophical doctrine, and in the development of the story itself a reductio of the doctrine is carried out. Thus, Borges is in effect doing philosophy by means of what is usually considered to be an unphilosophical literary genre, namely the short story.

I  The doctrine of nominalism The cuento, “Funes el memorioso,” was originally published in 1942 and subsequently reprinted in Ficciones.5 This story is about a young Uruguayan who has the ability to perceive and remember everything down to the tiniest detail. He is in possession of a superhuman perceptual apparatus and an infallible memory. The original inspiration for the story apparently came from the experience of insomnia from which Borges occasionally suffered.6 The heightened sense of awareness and consciousness experienced in insomnia is similar to the condition of Funes. This explains Borges’ otherwise obscure description of the story as “a grand metaphor for insomnia.”7 There are striking similarities between the abilities of the fictional character, Funes the memorious, and the philosophical doctrine of nominalism and the fundamental intuitions that guide it. Borges has two objectives. First, by analyzing the perceptual and cognitive capacity of Funes, he implicitly criticizes nominalism. This is not just an academic exercise with a historically obsolete position. Borges is keen to explicate certain facts about human cognition and knowing. Second, the story also argues for the dialectical nature of human cognition which requires both universality and particularity. Borges’ criticism of nominalism here addresses a key issue in both the European philosophical tradition and classic analytic philosophy. Thus, this analysis can be seen as an attempt to locate Borges in this philosophical debate, where he has generally never been recognized as a legitimate participant. Nominalism is, of course, an age-old philosophical doctrine that has made periodic appearances in the history of philosophy. According to this view, the only things that are real are particulars or individual entities. Grounded in common sense, nominalism claims that individual things such as trees or rocks which can be perceived with the senses have an ontological status in the world that abstract concepts such as “justice” or “the good” do not. The mind’s grouping of entities into general categories or concepts is considered wholly arbitrary with no grounding in the individual entities themselves. For the nominalist, abstract ideas exist only in the mind of individual thinkers, whereas individual objects of perception have an independent existence apart from the perceiving subject. General concepts are considered to be mere names or “nomines” with no ontological reality of their own. Nominalism can thus be called “particularism” since it attempts to construct a metaphysics and an epistemology on the basis of particulars alone.

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Nominalism is in a sense related to empiricism which insists that all knowledge ultimately derives from the perception of individual sensible entities. But in contrast to the empiricists and conceptualists, nominalism claims that abstract ideas, whose primary characteristic is universality, are nothing more than abstractions from a number of individual perceptions. Nominalism, like empiricism, argues that the abstract concept “dog” is formed in one’s mind only after one has perceived a number of individual dogs and then has performed the mental act of abstracting from them. Thus, the individual perceptions are primary and the abstract concepts, derivative. However, unlike empiricism, nominalism claims that such abstract concepts have no independent ontological reality apart from the mind. Here we can note that the question concerns not merely language but also perception and the relation between the two. In the story “Funes the Memorious,” Borges uses Locke’s criticism of nominalism as his starting point: “Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name.”8 The passage to which Borges refers comes from Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For the nominalist, abstract concepts do not adequately represent things in the empirical world. Thus, if the goal is to make language veridical, it would be desirable to purge it as far as possible of general concepts such that it could more accurately reflect what is actually given in perception. This would involve having individual words for every individual thing or even every individual perception. Locke gives three reasons for rejecting the notion of such a nominalist language. The first and most obvious reason that Locke gives is that a language that contained only particulars would defy the human capacity of memory. If one had a different word for every individual object, one would simply not be able to remember them all. In so far as new objects are always coming into existence, our dictionaries would be infinite. “First,” Locke writes, “it is impossible that every particular thing should have a distinct peculiar name. . . . it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with: every bird and beast men saw; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding.”9 Borges uses this objection as the very premise of the story. He invites the reader to suppose that sensory perception and memory can be infallible. In order to make the best possible case for nominalism, Borges here creates a fictional character, Funes, who has the ability to perceive and remember individual entities impeccably. By ignoring Locke’s objection, Borges is able better to draw out the consequences of the nominalist picture. Locke’s second reason for rejecting this nominalist language of particulars is that this degree of linguistic particularity would undermine communication. In such a language, says Locke, we would often use words for individual objects with which our interlocutors were not familiar, and for this reason, they would not recognize the word which stood for such objects. When I alone have “the ideas in my mind, the names of them could not be significant or intelligible to another, who was not acquainted with all those very particular things which had fallen under my notice.”10 In other words, we would not be able to understand one another since our vocabulary would overlap only to the extent that our experience overlaps. We would thus each in large measure be in

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possession of a private language based primarily on our perceptions and the objects that we were familiar with. The third counterargument Locke gives is that a language of particulars would in no way serve the ends of science or knowledge since true knowledge is more than just individual perceptions: “Thirdly, but yet, granting this also feasible (which I think is not) yet a distinct name for every particular thing would not be of any great use for the improvement of knowledge: which, though founded in particular things, enlarges itself by general views; to which things reduced into sorts, under general names, are properly subservient.”11 Knowledge is not merely a catalogue of particulars but also general rules of relations and categorization of them. The point of Borges’ story, “Funes the Memorious,” is to demonstrate precisely this. The story works with the hypothesis of an individual who can perceive and remember all particulars he has ever encountered. Borges takes up the criticisms of Locke and tries to show how, despite a virtually infinite capacity for the perception and retention of particulars, such a view of cognition in the final analysis turns out to be self-refuting.

II  Borges’ encounters with Funes The actual story of “Funes the Memorious” concerns Borges’ fleeting acquaintance with Ireneo Funes, a young Uruguayan, who is the illegitimate son of a simple ironing woman. The story represents a kind of brief biography or testimonial on the life of Funes. The events are told by Borges as a first person narrator, which seems to give this ficción a sense of historical veridicality.12 Borges recounts of Funes that he “never saw him more than three times,”13 and of these three occasions the reader is told in detail about the first and the last, which are the most significant. The goal of the present section is to examine each of these encounters. There is very little by way of plot, but rather the essential part of the story is constituted by Borges’ philosophical reflections on Funes and his uncanny faculties of perception and memory. In the opening paragraph, Borges obliquely describes the character of Funes and, while doing so, repeats several times the verb “to remember” (recordar). The first line reads, “I remember [recuerdo] him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it.”14 Without mentioning his name, Borges alludes to Funes here right at the start. He continues his initial description of Funes, repeating the same verb again and again: I remember [recuerdo] him, with his face taciturn and Indian-like and singularly remote, behind the cigarette. I remember [recuerdo] (I think) his angular, leatherbraiding hands. I remember [recuerdo] near those hands a maté gourd bearing the Uruguayan coat of arms; I remember [recuerdo] a yellow screen with a vague lake landscape in the window of his house. I clearly remember [recuerdo] his voice.15

Borges continues, “I remember [recuerdo] his baggy gaucho trousers, his rope-soled shoes, I remember [recuerdo] the cigarette in his hard face, against the now limitless

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storm cloud.”16 The continual use of the verb “recordar” clearly foreshadows the most important element of the character of Funes—his prodigious mnemonic powers; but there is more to it than this. Borges continually uses it to bring together a number of scattered and seemingly chaotic memories that he has of Funes. The point of this repetition is to underscore his own imperfect and defective memory, which represents what is normal for human cognition, in contrast to the memory of Funes. Borges must add parenthetically “I think” in order to qualify his memory and to emphasize its finitude and possible inaccuracy. He can only remember fleeting things and miscellaneous details about the person of Funes, but he admits that he likewise has forgotten many things. By contrast, Funes could remember every word and every detail of each of his meetings with Borges. The initial encounter with Funes took place in 1884 when the young Borges was visiting his cousin Bernardo Haedo in Fray Bentos,17 a small Uruguayan town near the Argentine border. In his description of the first encounter, Borges highlights the weakness and finitude of his own memory and perception many times and in several ways. The first example of Borges’ forgetfulness concerns the date of the original encounter. Borges writes, “My first memory [recuerdo] of Funes is very perspicuous. I can see him on an afternoon in March or February of the year 1884.”18 The exact month in question is one of the many details that Borges has forgotten since he has concentrated his memory on what are for him the essential aspects of the encounter. Normal human memory is selective, whereas that of Funes, which knows no principle of selection or organization, is infinite and retains everything it comes into contact with. Borges and his cousin were riding horseback from “the San Francisco ranch” trying to arrive at their destination before the onset on an imminent storm. The description of the oncoming storm presents the first of many images of darkness which run throughout the story: “After a sultry day, an enormous slate-colored storm had hidden the sky.”19 The “slate-colored” storm clouds had already rendered the day dark, but with the approach of Funes the darkness increases: “We entered an alleyway that sank down between two very high brick sidewalks. It had suddenly got dark; I heard some rapid and almost secret footsteps up above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow and broken path [estrecha y rota vereda] as if it were a narrow and broken wall [estrecha y rota pared].”20 The running figure is the mysterious Funes, whose location elevated above Borges and his cousin suggests some kind of superiority which is as yet undefined. At face value, it seems that the darkness images with which Funes is always associated are a negative reflection on the cognitive capacities of Borges when compared to those Funes, but this is only a part of the story since it also suggests an ignorance on the part of Funes that is likewise as yet unexplained. Also noteworthy is the repetition of the words “narrow and broken” (estrecha y rota). An incline rises up beside Borges and his cousin like a wall, which means that they are on the same level as it. They share the same normal human powers of cognition and perception which are continually contrasted with those of Funes. The incline, which runs parallel to them, is portrayed as “narrow and broken” (estrecha y rota pared), a description that corresponds to the limited and fragmentary human capacity to perceive and remember. By contrast, Funes is located above the “narrow and broken” incline and runs along on top of it as an indication of his complete and nonfragmentary powers of perception and memory.

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The foreshadowing continues in Borges’ description of the brief verbal exchange between his cousin and Funes that took place during this first encounter: “Bernardo cried to him unexpectedly: ‘What time is it, Ireneo?’ Without consulting the sky, without stopping, he replied: ‘It’s four minutes to eight, young Bernardo Juan Francisco.’”21 Borges underscores once again the frailty of his own perception: “I am so unperceptive that the dialogue I have just related would not have attracted my attention had it not been stressed by my cousin.”22 Even though he had been a witness to the exchange, Borges hardly perceived it. This is the normal state of the human mind which must filter out and limit much of what the sense organs actually perceive. Borges learns from his cousin that Funes is a local curiosity due to his strange asocial habits and his uncanny ability of remembering everyone’s name and knowing exactly what time it is without the benefit of looking at a clock or the location of the sun. These capacities prefigure what happens to Funes later; it is as if he always had a certain latent proclivity which was waiting to be activated. This concludes the description of the first encounter. Borges then recounts two fleeting glimpses of Funes which collectively constitute the next encounter. Three years later, in 1887, he returns to Fray Bentos and learns that  the  idiosyncratic Funes has been paralyzed as a result of a fall from a horse. Once again the verb “recordar” is employed: “I was told he had been thrown by a half-tamed horse on the San Francisco ranch and was left hopelessly paralyzed. I remember [recuerdo] the sensation of uneasy magic the news produced in me.”23 The glimpses that Borges catches of Funes in his paralyzed condition seem, in keeping with the local gossip, to be sad ones: “Twice I saw him behind the iron grating of the window, which harshly emphasized his condition as a perpetual-prisoner: once, motionless, with his eyes closed; another time, again motionless, absorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant sprig of santonica.”24 Here nothing is mentioned yet of his remarkable abilities, but Funes is portrayed as a prisoner. Borges somewhat cryptically lets his brief description of these encounters stand without further elaboration or commentary. As Borges indicates himself, it is the final encounter that represents the crux of the story. The occasion for the meeting is Borges’ errand to the home of Funes to pick up two Latin books that he had loaned the paralyzed man. Upon learning that Borges had in his possession a Latin dictionary as well as a few Latin texts, Funes writes a polite and formal request to borrow them on the seemingly naïve pretext of learning Latin with their help. Borges describes his incredulity: “I did not know whether to attribute to insolence, ignorance or stupidity the idea that the arduous Latin tongue should require no other instrument than a dictionary; to disillusion him fully, I sent him the Gradus ad Parnassum of Quicherat and the work [sc. Naturalis historia] of Pliny.”25 Unexpectedly notified per telegram that his father is ill, Borges realizes that he must return to Argentina at once. In the evening, before embarking on the ship, which is due to sail the next morning, Borges goes to the home of Funes to collect his books. Once again the imperfection of his memory is underscored by the fact that he had forgotten about the books, although only a week had passed: “When I packed my valise, I noticed the Gradus and the first volume of the Naturalis historia were missing.”26 When Borges arrives at the home of Funes, the images of darkness are repeated in the description of Funes’ living quarters. Borges recounts, Funes’ mother “told me Ireneo was in the back room and I should not be surprised to find him in the dark,

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because he knew how to pass the idle hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the tile patio. . . . the darkness seemed complete to me.”27 The obscurity surrounding Funes is perceived by Borges, but not by Funes himself, for whom even darkness is rich with diverse sense impressions. Borges says the darkness “seemed complete to me,” thereby underlining the subjective nature of his impression. It is only when Borges comes into contact with Funes that he perceives the obscurity. When he is alone, he is not aware of his limited capacities because the fallibility of perception often escapes the notice of common sense. The image seems to suggest that Borges’ sensory faculties are in darkness in comparison with those of Funes. But, as will be seen, the darkness images also have an ironic meaning which reflects negatively on Funes. Likewise, the fallibility of Borges’ memory is emphasized: “I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable.”28 He cannot recall all of the dialogue on that night but must recount it fragmentarily. His general statement here underscores the fact that all human perception and memory are fragmentary and that information is always lost in both memory and perception. The secret of Funes’ condition is that after the fall from the horse “his perception and his memory were infallible.”29 Thus, although his body was paralyzed by the fall, these two mental faculties were rendered infinitely more acute. Borges recounts the story that he heard in the dark thus: “He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue-grey horse threw him, he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addlebrained, absent-minded.”30 Although Funes is describing the seemingly terrible event that left him paralyzed in the bloom of youth, he nevertheless cannot recount the story without remembering the seemingly insignificant details that it was a rainy afternoon and that the horse was blue-gray in color. Borges relates as follows the essential point of the accident, which constitutes the basic premise of the whole story: “For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything; when he fell, he became unconscious. When he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories.”31 His perception and memory reached unknown levels of acuity: “the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical pain.”32 The accident with the horse is the device that Borges uses to create a fictional instantiation of a philosophical theory, namely nominalism or particularism.

III  Funes as the incarnation of nominalism Funes the memorious is consistently portrayed in terms reminiscent of nominalism. The fundamental characteristic of knowledge according to nominalism is, of course, particularity since it is concrete particular images or representations which are given in perception and memory. This is precisely what characterizes the cognition of Funes: We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory

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with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.33

He perceives and remembers every detail of every given sensory perception. Borges underscores the aspect of particularity several times since it is precisely this which proves to be problematic. Borges tells of Funes’ attempt to construct a language similar to Locke’s nominalist language of particulars: “Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous.”34 A language consisting only of particulars is too general for Funes since his perception is so acute that even what we normally consider to be individual entities seem to him to be different over time and from different perspectives. Borges writes, “Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.”35 Thus, for Funes, to give a specific name to an individual leaf would still be a generalization since the leaf itself appears to him as various. Every image or perception is individual; there are always slight variations which our sensory apparatus generally ignores but which are nevertheless present. Funes, by contrast, is able to perceive vividly the slightest deviations in the different perceptual images of a leaf. Borges uses the perceptions of a single dog to illustrate the level of particularity at which Funes’ cognition functions: “it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).”36 Funes’ perception is so acute that the individual perceptions of something appear so different as to be independent ontological entities which would require separate individual words in a nominalist language. Borges continues, “His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.”37 Even the slightest variations of the surface of his skin were major alterations for Funes. Yet a further level of particularity involves the fact that each individual image for Funes is associated with an individual feeling of his own bodily state: “These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc.”38 Thus, when Funes recalled, for example, the image of a dog he had seen the previous day, he would simultaneously remember the feeling of hunger or the pain of a headache that he experienced at precisely the same moment of the original perception. Even if he were to perceive two images that were so similar as to verge on identity, they would still be for him quite distinct due to his own internal perceptions which he associated with them. Given these descriptions of Funes and his ability to distinguish seemingly infinite levels of particularity, there can be little doubt that he is intended to embody the nominalist doctrine.

IV  The reductio ad absurdum of nominalism In order to offer a criticism of nominalism by means of a reductio ad absurdum argument, Borges creates a character whose world is precisely what the nominalist asserts it is. The finite perspective of Borges, the narrator, represents the truth of

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human cognition of which empirical knowledge of particulars is only a part. Borges can perceive individual entities, albeit not as sharply as Funes, but he is also in posses­ sion of universal concepts. The point of the character of Funes the memorious is to show that a fully consistent nominalism, by eliminating general concepts, renders thought impossible. Borges reduces nominalism to absurdity by indicating the infinite levels of particularity that are involved in sense perception. Nominalism, strictly speaking, insists on the ontological priority of individual things. The question that Borges poses with the character of Funes is why particularity must stop at the level of individual entities. There is a certain arbitrariness at work here since, as the character of Funes demonstrates, the ontological reality of individual entities would be called into question if one were acutely aware of the differences in the manifold perceptions of an individual object. Thus, a single dog becomes a manifold of dogs when perceived at different times or from different perspectives. There is no end to the levels of particularity to which acute perception can penetrate. Each level dissolves into a new one ad infinitum. The result would be the disappearance of individual entities altogether into the infinity of perceptual particulars. Nominalism thus ultimately ends up with a chaotic manifold of infinite particularity. Despite the powerful perception and memory of Funes, the infinite acuity of these  faculties hinders him from genuine thinking: “I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”39 Funes, the embodiment of radical nominalism, has only the capacity to perceive, that is, the faculty governed by particularity, but he lacks the ability to conceive of universal terms. Borges adds, “He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. . . . it [was] difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form.”40 Both universality and particularity are required for human cognition. Individual perceptions are meaningless unless they can be categorized and ordered. The images of darkness that accompany Funes are not merely a negative reflection on normal human cognition but also represent Funes’ genuine ignorance of general terms. One example of Funes’ inability to think abstractly is mathematics. The abstract notion of number escapes him in that he thinks that a system of numbering is merely a series of individual signs. Thus, given that any sign can be replaced by any other, he devises his own system. Borges explains, He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. . . . His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, the railroad; other numbers were

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Luis Melián, Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark.41

Because he can only perceive discrete individual entities, Funes is unable to grasp the conceptual nature of numbers which is bound up in their quantitative relation to one another. Borges recounts his criticism of Funes’ system: “I tried to explain to him that his rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers. I told him that saying 365 meant saying three hundreds, six tens, five ones, an analysis which is not found in the ‘numbers’ the Negro Timoteo or meat blanket. Funes did not understand me or refused to understand me.”42 Borges returns to the example of language and recounts that with his infallible memory, Funes could easily learn foreign languages with the aid of a dictionary alone: “With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin.”43 Certainly, it would be a great advantage when learning a foreign language if one never forgot a single word, form, ending, or prefix once learned, but yet language acquisition is more than rote memory; it is also the ability to order individual instances under abstract grammatical rules and apply those rules. One might, for example, know by heart the endings for the dative case in a given language, but one would never be able to apply them in individual instances if one did not know when the dative case is employed, that is, if one did not know the abstract rules which govern the dative case. Moreover, it is difficult to see how Funes would be able to understand or correctly use certain abstract terms. For example, the word “dog” and the word “wolf ” would be difficult for him to distinguish since his perceptions of the empirical entities which correspond to these terms are so varied and indeed confused and mixed together. Words at higher levels of abstraction such as “quality,” “the state,” or “justice” would be incomprehensible to him. The vividness of his perceptions renders the world of Funes a manifold chaos which leaves him no rest. This explains his need for darkness, which alone allows him some repose from the intense perceptions to which he is continuously subject. Here, once again Borges’ own experience of insomnia must be recalled. In the story, the narrator Borges recounts, It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. . . . Towards the east, along a stretch not yet divided into blocks, there were new houses, unknown to Funes. He imagined them to be black, compact, made of homogeneous darkness; in that direction he would turn his face in order to sleep.44

Part of the human mental capacity is the ability to select and attend to certain information while at the same time blocking out and ignoring other information that is less essential or relevant at a given point in time. Funes’ mind is always bombarded with a manifold of individual perceptions, and he is unable to sort out the important ones.

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The last thing that Borges recounts is the death of Funes: “Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs.”45 The date is 2 years after Borges’ final meeting with him and some 3–4 years after his fall from the horse. Borges intentionally gives Funes’ date of birth as 1868, which would make him 21 at his death. The premature death suggests the impossibility of life with a perceptual apparatus like that of Funes.46 This seems to be confirmed by what Borges himself says of the story: “its treats a young peasant from Uruguay who has an extraordinary memory and dies because he is not able to forget anything.”47 Moreover, the manner of his death, “congestion of the lungs,” suggests the result of an overabundance of some substance that the body cannot adequately dispose of or regulate.48 In the case of Funes, it was an overload of sensible particulars which his mind could not order or organize. The fact of Funes’ early death thus suggests the implausibility of the nominalist model. The Western tradition of epistemology and metaphysics has been concerned with the issue of universality and particularity since its inception. Seen historically, there has been a tendency to gravitate toward one end of the issue or the other. Nominalism itself, with its denial of the ontological validity of universal terms and its emphasis on particularity, is a good example of this. Conversely, realism, which emphasizes the universal aspect of cognition and thus abstracts from experience, represents the antipode to nominalism. The story of Funes the memorious is more than just a refutation of nominalism, for while refuting this position, it also makes a crucial point about the dialectical nature of human cognition. The character of Funes, on the one hand, demonstrates the chaos of manifold perceptions in the absence of abstract universal categories and, on the other hand, ironically shows the loss of detail or particularity that is necessary for all thinking. In order to think universal terms, one must necessarily sacrifice precision in perception since one must overlook and ignore certain perceptual differences in order to think abstractly. Achieving knowledge ironically requires a kind of ignorance or forgetfulness of perceptual particularity. Borges says, “our life is . . . an education in forgetting.”49 The coherence and lucidity of Borges the narrator are attributable to the very fact of his forgetfulness. He is able to tell the story since he has the ability to pick out certain relevant facts and arrange them in an orderly way, by so doing forgetting countless other irrelevant details which Funes would remember. The story thus refutes both extremes of the epistemological and ontological spectrum. It demonstrates that true knowledge is dialectical in nature, requiring both some information about sensible particulars as well as universal concepts. As Kant says, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”50 A nondialectical approach, which emphasizes particularity at the expense of universality or vice versa, results, as Borges’ literary reductio has demonstrated, in contradictions and absurdity. Funes is, for Borges, a symbol of the infinity of sensible particulars. On the one hand, infinity can be awe-inspiring. Borges writes, “The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) are senseless, but they betray a certain stammering grandeur.”51 Funes himself thus “seemed to me as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids.”52 His knowledge of particulars makes him something mystical, like an ancient oracle: “His voice was speaking in

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Latin; his voice (which came from the darkness) was articulating with morose delight a speech or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my fear took them to be indecipherable, interminable.”53 His words are like the mystical prophecies. His room, like the cave of the Sybil, was an “earthen patio” which was dark and “smelled vaguely of dampness.”54 Funes’ voice comes to Borges mystically from the obscurity: “out of the darkness, Funes’ voice went on talking to me.”55 It is as if Funes with his superhuman powers were, like the Sybil, possessed by a god or rather by the goddess Mnemosyne. Like many demigods, Funes is the offspring of a simple mortal mother and an unknown, perhaps divine, father. Although infinity can display a kind of “grandeur” and be awe-inspiring, it can also be terrifying. Here one finds the work’s ironic message. Like immortality in “The Immortal,” infinite memory and perception, which at first appear to be a divine gift, in fact turn out to be a curse. Borges’ constant astonishment at the abilities of Funes is undercut and transformed into something horrifying: “I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.”56 Funes, despite his infinite knowledge of particulars, is constantly associated with the darkness of ignorance. His superhuman abilities imprison rather than liberate him.57 His state of paralysis and consumption underscores the futility and untenability of the nominalist line of thought. For Borges, Funes is, like the library of Babel, a symbol not just for any infinity but for what Hegel calls “the bad infinity.”

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Borges’ Refutation of Idealism: A Study of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

The strategy of the reductio ad absurdum is nowhere clearer than in Borges’ story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which was originally published in 1940 and then reprinted in Ficciones.1 In this work, Borges posits a world based on the philosophical doctrine of idealism, which he uses as a vehicle by means of which to explore this doctrine and to expose its logical conclusions as absurdities.2 The story thus represents a literary reductio ad absurdum of idealism. I wish to show that Borges’ portrayal of the world based on idealism is self-contradictory and is thus not a possible world in Leibniz’s sense. Many historians of philosophy are familiar with Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason or with G.  E. Moore’s influential article of the same name, but few are aware of Borges’ refutation of idealism as a philosophical position in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Although “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” has received a great deal of attention in the secondary literature, the criticism of idealism found here has escaped the notice of many of the commentators and has yet to be explored in detail.3 What is particularly surprising is that many commentators read the story not as a criticism but as an advocation of idealism.4 In other words, they see Borges as arguing for the kind of epistemological nihilism or skepticism that arises at the end of the story. What I hope, among other things, to demonstrate, is that the reductio that Borges effects on idealism here leads to an utter chaos and confusion of truth and falsity, appearance and reality, and that the confusion reaches such a degree of self-contradiction that it would be absurd for Borges or anyone else to want to advocate it.

I  Forms of idealism Before we examine the story itself, it will be useful to say a few words about idealism in general and the kind of idealism that is at issue in Borges’ text. The doctrine of idealism is generally taken to be the claim that what is essentially real and true is mind or a product of thought and not some independent external reality. Mind, on this view, is conceived as something which cannot be reduced to a material entity or to a physical process. Idealism is thus often contrasted with the realism of common sense which affirms the existence of matter independent of the human mind. The nature of this

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mental reality is interpreted in various ways which in turn give rise to the various forms of idealism. For Plato, there is an ontological realm of ideas which are essentially real in contrast to the mutable objects of the world of sense. The ideas such as “the True” or “the Beautiful” neither come into existence nor perish but rather are eternal. Therefore, they are more true and more real than the objects we perceive with the five senses. According to this theory, the ideas have an ontological reality; in other words, there exist fixed ideas of “the Good” and “the Just” which stand in contrast to various empirical instantiations of them. Humans are thought to have access to this realm via thought. For the German idealists, objects are conceived to be essentially ideal with respect not to their content but rather to their form. All objects are governed by necessary forms of thought which are present in every representation. For Kant, these forms are the categories of the understanding such as substance and accident, cause and effect, etc. Without these formal elements in our experience, there would be no coherent objects. Thus, while the content of our experience comes from without from some external, unknown entity referred to as the “thing-in-itself,” we would not be able to form it into a coherent object without the a priori formal structures supplied by the mind. Thus, objects are to this degree ideal. It is not, however, these well-known versions of idealism that are at issue in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The hint that is necessary to unravel the real target of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can be found in Borges’ interest in the British empiricists. Borges was well versed in both classical British philosophy and modern analytic thought. He was fascinated by the robust brand of idealism of Berkeley,5 and this is, I would like to argue, his true target here in this story. This position, which Berkeley himself refers to as “immaterialism,” is based on the argument that what we are aware of in perception is not particular objects themselves but rather sensations, ideas, or impressions. Our common sense infers from this that these impressions come from some external source, which is independent of the perceiving subject. For Berkeley, this is a mere prejudice, and what we refer to as objects are no more than organized, stable aggregates of sensation. We have in principle no way of knowing any independent matter or object behind our sensations since we can never look behind them. Perception is our only means of access to objects, and in perception we have only sensations or ideas but not matter. Thus, the very idea of an object or matter apart from our sensations is incoherent. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges tries to create a world based on Berkeley’s blueprint. In the world of Tlön, there are no material entities but only ideal ones. By means of the story, Borges tries to demonstrate the incoherence of a subjectivistic idealism. Traditionally, idealism has tried to make its case on the strength of the order and stability of the world of thought in contrast to the unstable, mutable world of perceptions, which, it argues, cannot possibly provide the grounding for true knowledge. Epistemologists with idealistic proclivities have often used objects of thought such as geometrical figures or mathematical principles as models for truth. Unlike the mutable and inexact truths of sense, these truths of thought are eternally valid and seem to enjoy a degree of universality and exactitude that empirical entities can never attain. Borges’ story attempts to demonstrate that a consistent idealism would lead to this same instability and mutability not in the realm of sense but rather in the realm of ideas and would in end effect destroy the very notion of truth.

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II  The developmental stages of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” employs many of Borges’ familiar literary techniques. It is told in the first person presumably by Borges himself, although his name is never mentioned. Real people and places are interspersed with imaginary ones, a device which blurs the distinction between imagination and what we normally consider to be reality. This is in many ways the theme of the piece as a whole. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” reads something like a detective story and, as some commentators have noted, is organized like one.6 In the first part, the mystery is presented, then in the second, it is deepened, and finally, in the third section, that is, the postscript, it is resolved. But the structure is much more complex than this. It is in fact composed essentially of two sets of symmetrical triads. The mystery begins when Borges comes upon an enigmatic article on an unknown country named “Uqbar.” The article appears in an unauthorized copy of the tenth reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica under the title the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. The four-page article on Uqbar is appended to the end of volume XLVI of the work. What is so perplexing is not the article itself but rather the fact that other standard reference works make no mention of it. The curiosity of Borges, the narrator, grows as he in vain combs through countless atlases, geographical works, and travel reports in an attempt to find some reference to the mysterious land. After some searching, he does manage to come upon the names of four works which mention or treat some aspect of the country. In the article itself mention is made of Tlön: “it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön.”7 This reference to Tlön forms the link to the second stage. The mystery deepens when Borges finds an entire volume of an encyclopedia of the imaginary planet Tlön entitled, A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. This constitutes the second stage of the mystery. The movement toward the ever more fantastic is a gradual one, and each new stage is prepared by a previous one. Borges underscores the difference in degree between the two stages when he writes, “Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history.”8 Just as this stage was prefigured by the previous one and the word “Tlön” was mentioned in the article on Uqbar, now the volume of the encyclopedia of the planet Tlön hints at the third stage with the mysterious words, “Orbis Tertius.” Borges describes the lone volume as follows: “On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered one of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius.”9 At this point in the story, this inscription is cryptic and mysterious, but it serves the purpose of forming the link to the third stage. In the postscript to the story, Borges tells of a secret society founded in the seventeenth century, whose purpose was “to invent a country.”10 This society continued through the ages, passing on its labor to new initiates. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the plan of the society became more ambitious, and the group dedicated itself to creating an imaginary planet. This monumental labor was completed in 1914 when the society distributed to its members the final volume of the encyclopedia of Tlön.

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This already prodigious effort then contained the seeds of an even greater task. Borges explains, “the edition was a secret one; its forty volumes (the vastest undertaking ever carried out by man) would be the basis for another more detailed edition, written not in English but in one of the languages of Tlön. This revision of an illusory world, was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius.”11 Once again there is a leap in magnitude that distinguishes the two stages. Each stage increases the grandeur of the enterprise. First, a fictional country is described in a short encyclopedia article, then a fictional planet in an entire encyclopedia, and then a fictional planet in a more elaborate encyclopedia in the fictional language of the fictional planet. With the discovery of the secret society and the plan for Orbis Tertius, the mystery is solved, and the initial three stages come to a close. Although the original mystery is solved, a new story begins and with it a new series of stages. This new series charts the gradual introduction and infiltration of the imaginary world of Tlön into reality and how it in time becomes indistinguishable from our purportedly real world. The first stage is represented by a mysterious compass which is described as follows: “Its blue needle longed for magnetic north; its metal case was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlön.”12 Borges does not dwell on this example, and the most remarkable fact about it seems to be its mysterious letters. It is an empirical entity of normal size and shape which occupies space and time and has nothing particular or special about its physical presence. Borges designates this as “the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.”13 We now move to the second stage at which another actual, empirical object from the imaginary world of Tlön enters into our world. The object is a small cone of tremendous weight: In vain a boy tried to pick up this cone. A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground. I held it in my hand for a few minutes; I remember its weight was intolerable and that after it was removed, the feeling of oppressiveness remained. I also remember the exact circle it pressed into my palm. . . . These small, very heavy cones (made from a metal which is not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön.14

Now the degree of materiality has increased. At the previous stage, the nonmaterial, ideal object was an ordinary compass with nothing remarkable about it except for the mysterious letters, but now it is an object with extraordinary empirical properties that has been created from the world of thought. Borges goes out of his way to underline the object’s seemingly material aspect. Although it is purportedly merely an object of thought, the cone nonetheless can physically affect material objects. Its disproportionate weight relative to its size emphasizes that it does not belong to the “real” world. This stage is explicitly designated “the second intrusion”15 of thought into reality. The third stage is represented by the complete capitulation of reality to the imagination. Artifacts and objects from Tlön proliferate as do works about the mysterious world that go far beyond the original encyclopedia. The narrator writes with a tone of regret, “Almost immediately reality yielded on more than one account.”16 The world of thought takes over the world of matter. At this third stage, it is no longer

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an issue of isolated individual cases of imaginary objects with or without remarkable qualities but rather of a countless plurality of objects of thought which enter the world. Thus, once again there is an increase in degree or magnitude, and here at the final stage, objects of thought become so numerous and so intermingled with material objects that one can no longer distinguish between them. Borges gives the reader a number of hints that the story is constructed with these kinds of symmetries or triads. Many commentators see this simply as a part of Borges’ technique as a storyteller by means of which he is able to build up suspense by degrees. But there is more to this than simply Borges’ literary technique since this structure or form of the text is connected with the story’s content. The reader is brought into the world of Tlön unsuspectingly by perceiving certain patterns and then interpreting them as a certain structure. The reader thus posits an ideal structure on the “real” text. In a sense, all interpretation is an imposition of a structure of thought or a thought determination on a text since it is only by means of these interpretive structures that the text has any meaning. By “discovering” or “imposing” structures on Borges’ story, as he clearly wants us to do, we enter into the idealistic world of Tlön where things are what we think them to be. Already by conceiving of the text as following a triadic structure, we depart from the “real” world of common sense realism.

III  The idealism of Tlön There is ample evidence that this story is primarily about the philosophical doctrine of idealism. In his discussion of the lone volume of the encyclopedia that was originally discovered, Borges goes into some detail to describe the world of Tlön. He begins by announcing, “The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language—religion, letters, metaphysics—all presuppose idealism.”17 But the matter is more complicated. Tlön is imaginary at two different levels: it is the imaginary region of the stories in the literature of the inhabitants of Uqbar, who in turn are the creation of the imagination of the members of the secret society. Moreover, in their imagination, the imaginary people of Uqbar have created a world whose inhabitants are idealists, that is, who believe that thought and imagination are what constitute reality. The objects of Tlön thus constitute yet another layer of idealism. Another good reason to think that we are primarily concerned with idealism here is that the name of George Berkeley comes up twice in the course of the story. Borges alludes to Berkeley’s idealism immediately before outlining the idealistic world-view of Tlön: “Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.”18 Later we are told that Berkeley was a member of the secret society dedicated to creating the country of Uqbar.19 This is fitting since it is Berkeley’s brand of idealism which is at issue in the story. Berkeley’s motto, esse est percipi, could well be the slogan for the objects of Tlön. Philosophical positions are often defined in contrast to views to which they are opposed. Borges notes, “among the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the scandalous reception accorded to materialism.”20 The materialism of common sense, which says

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that objects have a continued existence over time independent of the human mind, is the target of criticism of centuries of philosophical thought on Tlön. The views of common-sense realism are regarded at best as paradoxes and at worst as simply nonsense. Once again it seems uncontroversial that the philosophical doctrine of idealism is the central issue here. Borges’ main image in the story is the mirror, which is referred to again and again. As some commentators have noted, it is a symbol for idealism.21 A mirror reproduces from a “real” entity something in a sense real, yet nonmaterial, namely a reflection. The story begins with the following lines: “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house.  .  .  .  From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered . . . that mirrors have something monstrous about them.”22 What is monstrous about mirrors is their ability to reduplicate reality in an insubstantial, nonmaterial sphere. The mystery of Uqbar is set into motion by Borges’ friend, Bioy Casares, who “recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.”23 It is the search for the source of this information that leads Borges and his friend to set about to try to learn about Uqbar. When Casares finds the passage in the encyclopedia, the image of the mirror appears in the same context as the doctrine of idealism. The passage from the encyclopedia reads: “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.”24 The opening sentence of part two of the story also contains reference to a mirror: “Some limited and wanting memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogué, among the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors.”25 Ashe is described as someone who “suffered from unreality”26 and who was a “ghost”27 while still living, as if he had no material being but only existed in the reflections of mirrors or in the memories of others. The image of the mirror represents Borges’ negative assessment of the doctrine of idealism. At the beginning of the story, the mirror is referred to as “monstrous” and “abominable,”28 which are fitting descriptions of the idealism which takes over at the end.  The point of Borges’ postscript is to explain how the irreal ideal world, which was the product of the human imagination, in fact, encroaches on human reality and  becomes something real and indistinguishable from normal material objects. The world of nonmaterial entities is portrayed negatively, as if it were a usurper or a growing cancer attacking the material world. These characterizations underscore the fact that Borges rejects the doctrine of idealism and intends to refute it with this story. The mirror is Borges’ image for this since, by producing or introducing new nonmaterial things into the world, it confuses our sense of what is real and what is illusory. It unsettles the conceptions of truth and reality of which our common sense assures us. The mirror thus leads us to confusion and disorientation and finally to horror in the face of chaos. Borges describes “a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear”29 which he felt when holding the mysterious cone, the object of thought from Tlön which had made an ingress into the material world. Once again, the consequences of Berkeley’s idealism are characterized in negative terms.

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IV  Space and time Philosophically speaking, the argument in this story is that a subjectivistic version of idealism leads to absurd conclusions. Borges paints the picture of Tlön, a world based on this brand of idealism, and leaves it to his readers to examine it for consistency. The incoherence of this world is illustrated by countless examples which demonstrate that a rigorous idealism of this sort renders impossible not only science but all notions of objective thought and experience. The refutation of Berkeleyian idealism found here can be understood as a literary version of Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism and his criticism of what he calls “dogmatic idealism.” In arguing for his idealism of form, Kant tries to demonstrate that certain elements must necessarily be present in our experience if we are to have objective experience at all. In his story, Borges imagines what human experience would look like in the absence of these necessary structures. The result, in accordance with Kant’s arguments, is incoherent and indeterminate experience. Kant discusses two distinct kinds of cognitive faculties which he calls “sensibility” and “understanding.” He designates space and time as the “forms of sensible intuition.” According to his version of idealism, in order for a thing to appear to us as a determinate object, it must appear in space and time. These are the forms of the faculty of intuition and thus are supplied by the subject and are not properties of the external world. Without them, it would be impossible for us to perceive determinate objects since something out of space and time is not a possible object of experience for us. One finds analyses of Kant’s forms of sensible intuition in Borges’ account of Tlön. We begin with the conception of time in Tlön. With his reductio, Borges shows that a consistent subjectivistic form of idealism would destroy the very notion of time and with it objective experience. Berkeley argues that the notion of time is simply an empty abstraction from the series or succession of ideas that the thinking subject experiences. As he puts it, “Time therefore [is] nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds.”30 There is no universal notion of time that is common to all minds. It is merely the succession of ideas of which each of us is immediately aware. Borges’ story demonstrates the necessity for some agreement or universality of time. In Tlön, there is no agreed upon past common to all perceivers, and thus no notion of historical truth or fact beyond what is thought. As a result, the past “is no less plastic and docile than the future.”31 Borges points out with great subtlety this temporal instability. In his description of an archaeological experiment in Tlön, during which subjects were supposed to uncover imaginary objects of thought called “hrönir,” he writes, “The first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week’s work with pick and shovel did not manage to unearth anything in the way of a hrön except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment.”32 While the casual reader will notice nothing particular or remarkable about this passage, the attentive one will stumble on the word “posterior.” The rusty wheel dated not from a period in the past but from one in the future. It was a relic of an age which had not yet come about. Borges’ point is that this profoundly counterintuitive conception of time is the logical result of this kind of idealism. Another example is the dating of the postscript. The entire story,

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including the postscript, was originally published in 1940, but the postscript bears the date 1947. In other words, the postscript was published 7 years before it was written. A third example concerns the discovery of the compass, the first hrön or imaginary object of thought from Tlön to be discovered in the real world. The date of this discovery is given at 1942,33 2 years after Borges had written and published the story in which he describes its discovery. Similarly, the discovery of the complete set of 40 volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, of which only volume XI was theretofore known, is dated at 1944,34 that is, 4 years after the story was published. Here Borges once again blends together fiction and reality and draws the reader directly into the chaotic idealistic world since in order to notice the incoherence, the reader (in  1940) must use as a reference point his or her own temporal orientation in order to compare it with the dates listed in the story. Once the readers do this, they too find themselves caught up in the world of Tlön. These examples have presented a puzzle to the secondary literature on the story, but they can, in my view, be made sense of when they are understood as a part of Borges’ reductio here. Our conceptions of the past, present, and future are made possible at least in part by the fact that given temporal events stand in fixed relations to one another, for example, that the French Revolution took place before the rise to power of Napoleon or that World War II took place after World War I. But if temporal events with which we are familiar could change their location on the temporal continuum and if new events could be created ex nihilo and inserted at random into the temporal continuum, then our whole conception of time would be destroyed. As has been noted, Kant argued that space and time are necessarily present in every representation since the representation of any object whatsoever is unthinkable apart from them. But when Kant argues that time must be present in  all our representations, he means a single time. If our experience continually shifted between several different temporal continua, experience and objectivity itself would be impossible. The story also presents a disruption of space. The geometry of Tlön is subjective in the sense that the geometry of a given space will differ from person to person: “This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him.”35 In Tlön, space is not something independent in the world but rather a thought or a production of the mind. Moreover, it is not a single thing but instead is conceived differently by various individual subjects with no agreement among the various conceptions. Each individual has his or her own spatial framework, and even these private spatial frameworks vary from moment to moment. That the notion that space is altered by the movement of the individual is another doctrine of Berkeley, who argues specifically that there is no absolute space in itself apart from the movement of the body. He explains, When I excite a motion in some part of my body, if it be free or without resistance, I say there is space: but if I find a resistance, then I say there is body: and in proportion as the resistance to motion is lesser or greater, I say the space is more or less pure. So that when I speak of pure or empty space, it is not to be supposed, that the word space stands for an idea distinct from, or conceivable without body and motion.36

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Space is thus nothing more than the sensation of lack of resistance that one has when moving one’s body. Berkeley concludes, “When therefore, supposing all the world to be annihilated besides my own body, I say there still remains pure space: thereby nothing else is meant, but only that I conceive it possible for the limbs of my body to be moved on all sides without the least resistance.”37 This then implies that space is subjective and changes with the varying degrees of resistance to the movement of the body. This is precisely the conception of space on Tlön that Borges presents, and now we must examine it for internal consistency. For Kant, for space to be present in every representation, a single stable, spatial framework must be presupposed. If space changes with every instance and is modi­ fied by the movement of the individual, then experience itself becomes impossible since objects in space would not stand fast. At one instant, object X would be to the right of object Y, at the next, to the left of it, and at the next, behind it. If experience is to be possible, space, like time, must be a universal, necessary element in human experience and cannot be subjective and mutable. In short, there must be a single space.

V  The categories In addition to the forms of sensible intuition, Kant also gives an account of what he calls the “categories of the understanding.” According to his view, the categories are necessary for all judgments about objects in the faculty of understanding. The categories are to the faculty of the understanding what the forms—space and time— are to the faculty of sensible intuition. Kant names 12 categories which he divides into four groups: I. Quantity: unity, plurality, totality. II. Quality: reality, negation, limitation. III. Relation: inherence and subsistence (i.e., substance and accident), causality and dependence (i.e., cause and effect), community (i.e., reciprocity of agent and patient). IV. Modality: possibility—impossibility, existence—nonexistence, necessity—contingency.38 According to Kant, it is these categories which supply the necessity which we find in our experience. Like the forms, these do not come from the perceptions but rather are supplied by the perceiving subject. Thus, like space and time, the categories such as causality, substance-accident, and so forth are not qualities of things-in-themselves or facts about the world independent of thought; instead, they belong to the human faculty of understanding. Kant argues that without these categories, we would be unable to experience or conceptualize objects at all and indeed would have no objective experience. Borges’ story demonstrates this same point with the imaginary world of Tlön. The first category that is explored is that of substance. Perhaps the most obvious thing that Borges’ reductio demonstrates is the incoherence of a world in which there are no enduring objects. The inhabitants of Tlön do not believe in the continued existence of objects over time but instead regard them simply as isolated individual mental acts in accordance with Berkeley’s motto, esse est percipi. Their view seems to be a robust form of Berkeleyian idealism, according to which, things cease to exist when they cease to be thought by human beings. Borges illustrates this by the paradox

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of the nine copper coins which, he explains, is the parallel on Tlön to the paradoxes of Zeno on earth: On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. . . . It is absurd . . . to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed—at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men—at every moment of those three periods.39

Although we would naturally assume the continued existence of the coins in the interim in which they were lost, for the radical idealists of Tlön, this is a paradox. Their natural assumption is that the coins cease to exist when we cease to think about or perceive them. Given that objects and thought are synonymous, the inhabitants of Tlön can in a sense structure reality as they please. Their idealistic thinking shapes what they perceive. Nonmaterial objects can be conjured into existence by a wish or an expectation: “Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations.”40 People find what they expect to find, and there is no independent evidence external to thought to hinder them or to contradict their beliefs. There is in short no check or control on one’s beliefs about the external world. The world is simply what is created by thought. For Kant, substance is, of course, one of the necessary categories of the understanding. In order for objectivity to be coherent, there must be some substance which stands fast behind the changing appearances. The result, as portrayed here in the story, is absolute chaos. A doorway “survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared after his death. At times some birds, a horse have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.”41 In a world in which objects come into and out of existence in this way, thinking itself would be impossible. Since each mental act is particular, then every time we perceived or conceived of a particular object, we would be concerned with a different object. But if every perception is a different object, then objectivity would collapse into a plurality of individual mental acts.42 We would end up with a nominalism or particularism of thought. In order for our experience to be coherent, we must presuppose continuous objects which remain the same throughout our various representations and conceptions of them. As Kant says in “The First Analogy,” there must be a substratum that stands fast in the face of the various perceptual changes.43 Without this, objective representation would be impossible. Borges also addresses the category of quantity. Given that on Tlön, each individual mental act is thought to be an isolated atomic unit, there is no necessary agreement regarding, for example, truths of mathematics: “The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity should obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory.”44 When two different

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individuals working the same problem come up with the same solution or even when one individual works the same problem twice with the same solution, it is considered simply a coincidence or luck. We are told, “they maintain that the operation of counting modifies quantities and converts them from indefinite to definite sums.”45 Since they too are only mental acts, mathematical quantities are subjective and mutable like everything else. This is similar to Berkeley’s doctrine, according to which the notion of number is nothing when it is abstracted from the concrete things being counted. Berkeley says that numbers are merely signs: “those things which pass for abstract truths and theorems concerning numbers are, in reality, conversant about no object distinct from particular numerable things, except only names and characters; which originally come to be considered on no other account but their being signs, or capable to represent aptly whatever particular things men had need to compute.”46 Number or quantity has no necessary or universal status but is merely an aspect of various contingent experiences in which specific objects are enumerated. Quantity, like substance, is, for Kant, a necessary category which is required for determinate representations of objects. If quantity is merely a contingent part of experience, then it will vary with the different empirical representations. If two sometimes meant four and sometimes seven, then the notion of quantity would be indeterminate. We would not be able to determine an entity as a single unit, and our experience would only occasionally and by a rare chance concur with that of others. Thus, if mathematics and our notion of quantity are rendered subjective or arbitrary, then the result is that our experience of objectivity is also destroyed. With this account, it is clear that the result that is reached cannot possibly be a position that Borges himself wants to hold. Surely, he would not want to claim that mathematics is wholly arbitrary or subjective or that the act of counting changes given quantities. The point here is, instead, that if mathematical truths have no necessity and if they can vary from person to person, then human experience would be incoherent. Yet another Kantian category that is put into abeyance in Tlön is that of cause and effect. The empirical sciences rest on the presupposition that empirical objects interact with one another and thus stand in cause-and-effect relationships. In Tlön, however, each mental idea or impression is isolated, with the result being that objects do not interact with one another. Borges explains, “This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state.”47 Thus, what we would explain by means of obvious cause-and-effect relations, the inhabitants of Tlön would regard as simple coincidences or successive actions with no relation to one another. In Tlön, “The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.”48 This view strongly resembles Berkeley’s criticism of causality. Berkeley argues that the world is ultimately only an aggregate of sensations or ideas, and ideas are essentially inactive: “A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything.”49 Thus, as in Tlön, there can be no causal interaction between objects.

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According to Kant’s analysis in “The Second Analogy,” we must presuppose cause and effect as a necessary condition for the possibility of coherent experience at all.50 When cause and effect are jettisoned in Tlön, it is not merely empirical science that is eliminated but the very possibility of experience and objective thought. If there were merely successive experiences of phenomena without any necessary rule of succession such as cause and effect, then the phenomena themselves would be indeterminate. Nothing remains but a plurality of unrelated, uncaused phenomena. The reductio is complete at the end of the story where the result is utter chaos. The upshot here is that while Berkeleyian idealism appears at first glance to give a stable and orderly picture of the universe which contrasts sharply with the mutable world of sense, nevertheless when it is drawn out to its logical conclusions, it appears even more chaotic and unreliable than the empirical world. The secondary literature has often struggled to explain why Borges characterizes Tlön both as an absolute order and as an absolute chaos.51 The solution is to be found in the reductio that the story carries out. Tlön is at first glance an absolute order of ideas, that, when drawn out to its logical conclusion, collapses into absolute chaos. The problem with this radical view of idealism is not simply that it is profoundly counterintuitive but rather that it is in itself incoherent. Not only would all science be impossible since every interpretation and theory would be as good as any other in the absence of any general external constraints, but even more importantly, human experience itself would become so chaotic as to be indeterminate. If there were no universal rules for thought and understanding, human thinking and experience would themselves be impossible. Without the necessity of the Kantian categories and forms of sensible intuition, we could form no determinate conception of objectivity. We would each be operating in our own incoherent world.

VI  History in Tlön As has been noted, some commentators have seen in Borges’ account here an advocation of skepticism or epistemological relativism. This, however, is not what is demonstrated by the examples discussed above, which show that objective thinking in general is at issue and not the validity of specific truth claims. This is also made clear in Borges’ account of historical knowing in Tlön. The conclusions here go far beyond a simple relativism or, in this case, a simple historicism. Borges further illustrates the problems resulting from pure subjectivistic idealism in the account of the archaeological expedition on Tlön. At first, the excavation of ancient tombs is carried out by inmates from a state prison who are promised their freedom for a meaningful discovery. In addition to this incentive, “the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find.”52 These photos allow them to create in their minds images of what they would “discover.” But the very fact that they had such images or representations in their mind meant that the objects, qua representations, already existed. After some efforts, the result of the experiment was repeated by schools whose students were able to “find” objects which their imaginations had in fact created: “In three of them [sc. of the four groups] the failure was almost complete; in the fourth . .  . the students

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unearthed—or produced—a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the mouldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher.”53 It is noteworthy that the artifact, which is the creation of the human imagination, bears an indecipherable inscription. The human mind has created something incoherent, which it itself cannot understand. It has produced chaos. If everything is merely the product of human cognition, then there are no external criteria by which to adjudicate truth, and the result of this with respect to historical knowledge is that there is no stability in history since history is merely what we conceive it to be. But even this thesis is rendered more radical by a subjectivistic idealism since, according to such a view, there would be no way of discriminating between a given view of history and the individual’s imagined history. In other words, the individual could imagine any kind of history he or she wanted, and this view would be just as valid and just as true a history as any other account. According to a thoroughgoing, subjectivistic idealism, it would be impossible to differentiate since there could be no appeal to external evidence independent of the subject. Archaeologists and historians would thus be able to find precisely what they expect to find just like the inmates or students in the experiment on Tlön. Borges writes, “Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodological fabrication of hrönir . . . has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past.”54 Each individual has his or her own conception of the past, and there is no universality that runs through these varying conceptions. Any given view could be supported by evidence and archaeological artifacts of thought. He concludes, “already the teaching of [Tlön’s] harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty— not even that it is false.”55 History becomes synonymous with imagination, and there are no fixed or agreed upon criteria to adjudicate historical issues. This is the logical conclusion of the story. As was noted above, some commentators have claimed that Borges’ thesis here is that all accounts of history are ultimately impositions of the human mind and thus that there are no absolute historical facts. But if that were his thesis, he would stop far beyond where he actually does. The examples demonstrate not just that there are no historical facts but that we can create our own as if at random. Moreover, the evaluation of differing views of history is not open for discussion or criticism since they are all equally valid. Not only are there no facts determined by an external world, but there are also no criteria for adjudicating between various truth claims about the world. Given that every historical conception in Tlön is a “fictitious past” and exists as the product of a human mind, it is ipso facto true. But in the absence of all criteria, the very notion of truth and falsity must be abandoned. As Borges says in the passage cited above, our past is “a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.”56 For something to be false it must be refutable, but in Tlön, no view of history can ever be refuted since it is an object of thought and thus true. Therefore, Borges’ claim here, if indeed this is his position, is much

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more radical than that of a simple historical relativism or skepticism; it rejects the very notion of truth itself which these positions presuppose. This is, however, not his view. The contradictory conclusions here are best seen as a part of a refutation of idealism by means of a reductio and not the advocation of any particular positive position on Borges’ part. A variant of this interpretation of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is that Borges is offering a criticism of the human need for metaphysical comfort which is manifested by our positing of artificial structures, in the form of theories, on an inherently chaotic world. According to one commentator, “The ending of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is designed to alter the puzzle. It is no longer a question of what the world would be like if the philosophical idealists were right. It is a question now of how far people will go to create for themselves a comforting picture of existence.”57 According to this interpretation, Borges wants to demonstrate with the story the ultimate artificiality, arbitrariness, and ipso facto falsity of our contemporary views in science, philosophy, history, and literature. These views are simply the product of the human mind with no correspondence to any independent reality or phenomena. According to this view, Tlön is our world.58 Again the story itself actually demonstrates a much more radical view since, according to the premises of subjectivistic idealism, there is no cause and effect, no substance, no universal space and time, and finally no objectivity. These conclusions once again go far beyond a simple criticism of the desire for metaphysical comfort or overenthusiastic claims for the ability of reason or sense to grasp the truth. This interpretation unknowingly attributes to Borges a contradictory and absurd view, which needless to say, does him no service. These contradictory conclusions are best seen as the result of a reductio ad absurdum argument that is intended to refute idealism as a philosophical position and not as a transparent reflection of Borges’ own considered position. Given the foregoing analysis, it is clear that the real target of criticism is the idealism of Berkeley. While this form of idealistic thinking is reduced to absurdity, a different kind of idealism along Kantian lines is made plausible. Indeed, Borges makes use of Kant’s arguments against subjective idealism. As Kant points out, there are necessary structures in our experience which must be present if we are to have objective thought at all. One can argue whether these structures are necessary laws of the universe independent of the human mind or the impositions of thought on an external reality, but either way they must be present if coherent experience is to be possible. Kant distinguishes between sensible properties such as the particular color or taste of a thing which vary from person to person and the universal elements which are necessary for experience. The former are subjectively ideal in that they are determined by the perceptual apparatus of each individual as well as the various conditions of perception such as the light in which the object is perceived, the temperature of the perceiver’s body, etc. These elements have no universality but rather vary from person to person and time to time. The latter, that is, the forms of sensible intuition and the categories of the understanding, are universal and constitute the very condition for experience. The subjectively idealist world of Tlön eliminates the latter, leaving only the former. The world of Tlön is a world in which everything is, like taste and color, subjective and dependent on the individual perceiver.

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Seen philosophically, the argument that Borges puts forth with the story is that this kind of subjective idealism is ultimately self-refuting since it destroys coherent experience by abandoning universality and necessity. Seen psychologically, the story conveys the sentiment that this kind of radically subjectivistic experience, in which nothing stands fast, in which there is no overlap or agreement with the experience of others, and in which objects are generated infinitely by thought, is, as the descriptions of the mirror suggest, ultimately something terrifying and abhorrent.

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Language, Conceptual Schemes, and Immortality: Borges’ Use of the Short Story as a Philosophical reductio ad absurdum in The Aleph

After Ficciones, Borges’ other important early collection of short stories is The Aleph from 1949. Here he continues to make use of the same reductio ad absurdum technique that he pioneered in his previous collection. Moreover, his stories continue to be full of philosophical content, which has not been fully appreciated by philosophers in the secondary literature. This collection thus provides further examples of an alternative mode of philosophical writing. “Averroes’ Search” treats key epistemological topics such as the commensurability of conceptual schemes, and “The Immortal” can be read as a meditation on traditional religious doctrines of immortality.

I  Language and cultural translation in “Averroes’ Search” We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’ philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.”1 He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer. . . .”2 Borges poses the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’ particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and cross-cultural knowledge and comprehension. The point of Borges’ story about the fate of Averroes is, first, to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and, second, to bring to light the comprehensive

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nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been entirely neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges.3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the epistemological and hermeneutical theories from later philosophers, such as Gadamer, Davidson, and Quine. There is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place, or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are of little importance. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. “Dog” in English corresponds straightforwardly to “Hund” in German or “perro” in Spanish. A gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather is explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of the people who speak it. That we who live in the world after Babel speak English or French is due solely to chance, and we could just as easily speak Hindi or Mongolian. There is likewise a naïve epistemological view according to which cultural differences are, like language, immediately comprehensible and entirely translatable. One might argue that this is a methodological assumption upon which disciplines such as cultural anthropology rest. According to one sanguine characterization, “There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information.”4 The idea is that we can, by mere observation, make sense of specific actions and practices in any given foreign culture. The underlying premise is that there are hidden structural commonalities between our culture and the culture we are studying, which allow us to identify and render intelligible given practices in foreign cultures by analogy to certain practices in our own. Foreign cultures are thus thought to be transparent to the anthropologist trained in the proper empirical methodologies. Anthropologists must merely observe the object domain and then seek the corresponding practice in their own culture. Just as there is, on the naïve view of language, a one-to-one correspondence between words and languages, so also here there is thought to be something like a one-to-one correspondence between cultures and the institutions and practices they contain. Borges’ story is intended as a refutation of the common sense theories of both language and culture sketched here.

II  Averroes’ translation problem The age of Averroes was one in which truth was not considered, as it is today, to be something elusive which had to be painstakingly sought, but instead, was thought to

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be already at hand. Attempts to discover new truths independently were condemned as the “illiterate and vain . . . desire for innovation.”5 Everything worth knowing could be found in Aristotle, the man referred to by Dante simply as “The Philosopher.” Borges writes, “This Greek, the fountainhead of all philosophy, had been bestowed upon men to teach them all that could be known; to interpret his works as the ulema interpret the Koran was Averroes’ arduous purpose.”6 The intellectual mission of Averroes was to write a grand commentary on the Aristotelian corpus, which he patiently executed day after day. His scholarly gifts allowed him no small measure of success in this ambitious project, and, indeed, he filled many volumes until he came upon two words that stopped him abruptly. At the beginning of the Poetics, Aristotle employs the words “tragedy” and “comedy” which are incomprehensible to the Arab doctor. These words cannot be avoided or ignored since they run throughout the text and seem to form an integral part of it. Thus, the problem of the correct translation and elucidation of these two unknown terms vexes and exercises him. This constitutes the principal issue of the story: Averroes’ futile search. Foreshadowing, Borges describes Averroes’ frustration: “He told himself (not with excessive faith) that what we seek is often nearby.”7 Using this insight, Averroes goes over to the shelves to consult a book by another Arab author to see if perchance it contains the secret to the mysterious words. But the key to the secret lies not in the erudite tomes of his proud library but rather in the naïve games of the children playing in the street below his study: He looked through the lattice-work balcony; below, in the narrow earthen patio, some half-naked children were playing. One, standing on another’s shoulders, was obviously playing the part of a muezzin; with his eyes tightly closed, he chanted “There is no god but the God.” The one who held him motionlessly played the part of the minaret; another, abject in the dust and on his knees, the part of the faithful worshippers.8

The children, pretending to be who they are not, collectively tell a story by acting out particular events and thus exemplify what the Greeks know as “drama.” But Averroes is condemned to dismiss their actions as a fatuous children’s game and continue his desperate and fruitless search in his library.9 The truth that he sought was indeed nearby, but he was unable to recognize it since it was hidden in the fabric of daily life. Averroes passes the evening at a friend’s house where they are entertained by the exotic tales of the traveler Abulcasim, who has just returned from distant lands. The distance evoked here is not merely spatial but above all cultural and conceptual, which Borges notes by portraying Averroes’ momentary pause in contemplation of the “fear of the crassly infinite.”10 The traveler tells of a strange and incomprehensible spectacle that he witnessed in the distant city of Sin Kalan: One afternoon, the Moslem merchants of Sin Kalan took me to a house of painted wood where many people lived. It is impossible to describe the house, which was rather a single room, with rows of cabinets or balconies on top of each other. In these cavities there were people who were eating and drinking, and some on the floor, and some on a terrace. The persons on this terrace were playing the drum

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and the lute, save for some fifteen or twenty (with crimson-colored masks) who were praying, singing and conversing. They suffered prison, but no one could see the jail; they traveled on horseback, but no one could see the horse; they fought, but the swords were of reed; they died and then stood up again.11

The listeners find the account bewildering and can only conclude that the men of Sin Kalan were mad. Abulcasim, however, assures them that this was not the case: “These were no madmen  .  .  .  .  They were representing a story, a merchant told me.”12 This explanation likewise meets with dumb bewilderment: “No one understood, no one seemed to want to understand.”13 Abulcasim becomes exasperated as he tries to make clear something that he himself does not truly comprehend. The discussion ends once the host, upon learning that the men of Sin Kalan speak while representing the story, conclusively declares, “In that case twenty persons are unnecessary. One single speaker can tell anything no matter how complicated it might be.”14 When this statement meets with the approbation of all, the discussion moves on to other topics. Once again, Averroes is confronted with but cannot recognize the answer to the translation riddle that is vexing him. This time, instead of it being presented to him by a chance occurrence such as the children’s game below his window, the answer is in a sense explained to him, albeit ineptly, by Abulcasim in the description of the drama that the latter was witness to. But Averroes cannot know that the words “tragedy” and “comedy” were bound up with the bizarre spectacle witnessed and recounted by Abulcasim. Finally, when Averroes returns to his library after the evening of stories and speculations both theological and literary, he believes that he has solved the riddle that had so perplexed him: “Something had revealed to him the meaning of the two obscure words. With firm and careful calligraphy he added these lines to the manuscript: ‘Aristu (Aristotle) gives the name of tragedy to panegyrics and that of comedy to satires and anathemas.’ ”15 Thus ends the story with the mistaken definition of the Greek terms recalled later by Renan. This misinterpretation constitutes the crux of the story, and thus a correct understanding of it is essential for a correct interpretation of the cuento as a whole.

III  Language and cultural incommensurability The secondary literature on this story seems entirely to have missed the thesis about the relation of culture and language contained in it. One commentator, for instance, sees the philosophical point at issue here as being the rather banal claim that particular descriptions and empirical events necessarily fall short of Platonic forms. “The conception of tragedy and comedy to which Averroes finally attains,” he writes, “is . . . only one articulation of the form, and failing, therefore, to correspond to it absolutely.”16 According to this reading, no definition can adequately capture the universality of ideas. This account, however, misunderstands the nature of the error contained in Averroes’ definition and, with it, the point of the story as a whole. The definition of Averroes errs in its attempt to understand the words in question in terms of the cultural categories provided by the Arab world, and it is because of this rather than its finite empirical character that it is condemned to failure. Borges writes, “no one

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in the whole world of Islam could conjecture what they meant.”17 It is not by chance that after his mistaken definition Averroes adds, “Admirable tragedies and comedies abound in the pages of the Koran and in the mohalacas of the sanctuary.”18 The Arab culture and language shape his way of conceiving the world and render it impossible for him to grasp the true meaning of the mysterious words. The point is not that a correct definition of tragedy and comedy are in principle impossible but rather that the possibility of the very understanding of the concepts of tragedy and comedy is culturally conditioned. When taken at face value, this story seems to make a simple point about universals and particulars. It points out the necessity of universal concepts in the human mind for the proper employment of language and reference. The mind must have the ability to categorize sensible particulars under universal concepts. When I see a hairy quadruped, it is necessary that I have the concept of “dog” in my mind in order to refer to the object of my experience correctly. When Averroes understands tragedy simply as “panegyrics” and comedy as “satires and anathemas,” he is mistakenly employing the terms since the reference is incorrect. Human language simplifies the phenomenological reality by reducing the manifold of experience to universal concepts. We read, “the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words.”19 The perceptual experience of the moon as perceived over Bengal and over Yemen is perhaps quite different, yet we refer to these different experiences with the same word and the same concept. Abulcasim, on the contrary, is obliged to recount in detail the events that he witnessed since he has no universal concept of “drama” to describe it in a word. Instead of saying that he witnessed a comedy or a tragedy, he must describe the setting and the actions and is thus reduced to the level of particularity. We can imagine the difficulty of his task if we try to describe a dog which we saw to someone who does not know what a dog is. We would have to be satisfied with an awkward description of individual characteristics and inexact comparisons with other animals: it has four legs, it is larger than a cat but smaller than a cow, etc. Borges’ story is concerned with more than just the play of universals and particulars. It also tries to portray, via the pathos of Averroes, the necessary connection between language and culture. The Arab world, because it did not know drama as an art form, did not possess the linguistic and conceptual apparatus requisite for genuinely understanding and subsequently translating the terms “tragedy” and “comedy,” which are so familiar to the Western mind. Although the concept of drama is explained to Averroes, it remains incomprehensible. Even when Abulcasim sees a drama with his own eyes, he fails to comprehend it fully because he lacks a certain fundamental conceptual category. In the story, the Arab world with its culture and language represents what philosophers used to call a “notion,” a “world-view,” a “paradigm,” an “episteme,” or a “conceptual scheme.” The network of beliefs and the language connected with it held Averroes in a fixed cultural and historical space that he was unable to transcend. It caused him to perceive certain things and overlook others. Borges indicates that Averroes was in some sense ultimately limited to the cognitive structures and conceptual categories that the Arab world of his day had at its disposal. When Averroes has no culturally provided concept at his disposal, he simply cannot understand. He is able to form an interpretation of foreign concepts in accordance with his own conceptual scheme. But this interpretation is false vis-à-vis the true one of the Greek

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world. Here the Greek concept is true only by virtue of the fact that the phenomenon in question is one that forms a part of Greek culture and has its origin there. Conversely, Greco-Roman culture has in its turn simplified and distorted concepts from the Arab world. As Borges notes in the very first sentence of the story, the very name Averroes is the conveniently simplified Latin version of an extremely complex Arabic name full of patronymics which were utterly incomprehensible to the Latin mind: “Abulgualid Muhammad ibn-Ahmad ibn-Muhammad ibn-Rushd (a century this name would take to become Averroes, first becoming Benraist and Avenryz and even Aben-Rassad and Filius Rosadis).”20 The two cultural frameworks thus carve up the world in different and in part incommensurable ways. Borges, with the aid of historical imagination, is careful to underline a number of significant cultural differences which separate the modern reader from Averroes and the culture in which he lived and worked. He casually notes that Averroes writes “from right to left,”21 thus underscoring the difference in the written forms of the Arabic and Latin languages. The cultural distance between Averroes and the object of his study is highlighted by the observation that he “was working with the translation of a translation.”22 He has direct access neither to Aristotle’s own text nor to the Greek language and thus is compelled to approach his subject matter by means of inexact and distorting mediating agencies. In his epilogue, Borges concludes his account by speculating on his own ultimate inability to understand and reconstruct the cultural context of Averroes: “I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd that I, wanting to imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, Lane and Asín Palacios.”23 With this reflexive turn back to himself and our own age, Borges indicates that just as Averroes was limited by his time and its conceptual scheme, so also we are limited by ours. Averroes’ life-long goal was to understand and interpret the works of Aristotle. He could only be successful to the extent to which Arabic culture overlapped with the Greek. The irony that Borges points out is that the greatest imbecile among the Greeks could immediately grasp what for the polymath Averroes was incomprehensible. Borges writes, In the foregoing story, I tried to narrate the process of a defeat. I thought of that archbishop of Canterbury who took it upon himself to prove there is God; then of the alchemists who sought the philosopher’s stone; then, of the vain trisectors of the angle and squarers of the circle. Later I reflected that it would be more poetic to tell the case of a man who sets himself a goal which is not forbidden to others, but is to him. I remembered Averroes who, closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy.24

Even the illiterate Athenian would immediately and intuitively grasp the meanings of the words “tragedy” and “comedy” since they constitute the background knowledge of his culture, whereas for the erudite Arab physician surrounded by learned tomes, they remain in obscurity since, despite his erudition, he is ultimately limited to the epistemological categories of his culture. It is precisely this point which gives the story its pathos.

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Borges’ account demonstrates the fallacy of the view that sees languages as complex systems constructed with one-to-one correspondences between individual members. In the case of Averroes, no correspondence was possible since there was no institution in his culture and hence no word in his language that could have served as an analogue to the event of drama on the Greek stage and to the words “tragedy” and “comedy” in the Greek language. A language contains only the tools with which its culture has equipped it and is not something transcendent which floats over and above culture and human practices. Likewise, the story refutes the assumption that one can in principle understand the totality of practices of other cultures by simple observation and comparison by analogy. Borges demonstrates with this historical example that there will be certain practices which will always defy our comprehension and from which we, for all of our scientific achievements, will be forever barred. This is, needless to say, a far-reaching epistemological thesis which many contemporary philosophers and social scientists have wrestled with. “Averroes’ Search” is the story of a futile effort to break out of the constraints of historical time and cultural distance and isolation. The concept of solitude is captured not merely by the 100-year lifetime of a small town erased forever by tempests and nameless jungles, but also by the cultural and spatial distances which efface entire peoples, languages, and cultures from the increasingly homogeneous collective human memory. Objective calendar time and absolute space in the natural world constitute distances that can be overcome by the scholarship and imagination of the historian and by the technology of the engineer and the natural scientist; however, cultural distances are much greater than these natural ones, and Borges’ story shows us that they can on occasion constitute spaces which no degree of imagination, technology, or erudition can ever help us traverse.

IV  Borges’ conception of immortality in “The Immortal” The various conceptions of immortality found in most every culture evince both the basic human fear of death and the equally basic hope for a more congenial future beyond mundane existence. The Greek and Christian views of immortality, which have been so influential in Western philosophy and theology, represent two quite different, yet generally quite positive, visions of eternal life. If for the Greeks, immortality in Hades was not, as Achilles’ lament indicates,25 a thing to be eagerly anticipated, nevertheless, the Olympian gods with their immense power and influence represented a positive picture of perennial existence. The Christian promise of an everlasting life in heaven in the state of perfect bliss has long been held up by theologians as representing the apex of human happiness and fulfillment. The short story “The Immortal”26 by Borges hints at something fundamentally wrong  about the very concept of immortality. Most philosophical criticisms of this concept concentrate on attacking the notion of a separable soul which survives the death of the human body, thus approaching the question of immortality essentially as a mind–body problem. Borges’ story, by contrast, focuses on the concept of immortality itself and on what one might call its internal consistency. Reflecting on “The Immortal,” Borges says that the story shows us “the effect that immortality would have on men,”

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and he explains that the story offers “a sketch of an ethic for immortals.”27 “The Immortal” can be seen as a thought experiment: Borges proposes that we imagine that we are immortal,28 and then calls on us to examine our conception of that imagined existence to see if it can be thought consistently. The outcome demonstrates that traditional views of immortality are contradictory and that the consistent conception represents something quite different from our preconceptions and—far from desirable. Although the most obvious target of criticism in Borges’ story is the Greek conception of immortality, on closer inspection he is also concerned to criticize the Christian view. This reading has been neglected by many commentators.29 I wish to follow up on the philosophical consequences of Borges’ critique in order to show by means of comparison the internal incoherence or incongruity in the Christian conception of immortality. By means of this analysis, I will argue that Borges’ story not only helps us to understand the problematic nature of this influential conception of immortality but also gives us a new insight into the nature of human finitude.

V  The visio beatifica and traditional views of immortality I do not purport to be able to give a comprehensive overview of the Christian conception of immortality since in a discussion of this sort that would perforce mean oversimplifying a rather massive, contradictory, and heterogeneous subject matter. The vagueness and ambiguity of scriptures themselves along with the plurality of interpretations produced through the ages have engendered many, often conflicting conceptions of immortality within the Christian tradition itself. In lieu of an exhaustive account, I wish to focus on a specific part of the Christian doctrine of immortality, ignoring the concomitant problems such as the immutability of bodies in heaven or the elimination of desires and passions, with which so many Christian authors have so assiduously concerned themselves; specifically, I wish to concentrate on the Medieval conception of the visio beatifica (beatific vision) which stands at the center of the Christian dogma of immortality. To elucidate this theory, I wish to make use of the accounts of Augustine and Aquinas. Their views, of course, have been influential and authoritative in the formation of Church doctrine and, more importantly for our purposes, give a clear account of the key concept we wish to examine. The argument that Augustine and Aquinas give is that the immortality of the blessed souls in the supernal state consists essentially in participating in the visio beatifica. To behold this vision is to take part in eternal life. Aquinas writes, “Moreover, this vision is a certain kind of life; indeed this act of the intellect is a certain kind of life. Therefore, through this vision the created intellect becomes a participant in eternal life.”30 Let us now see how Aquinas arrives at this notion. In an argument largely appropriated from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,31 he contends that human beings, who naturally desire to know,32 are never perfectly satisfied provided that there remains something unexplained. In their terrestrial condition, always seeking and desiring, human beings are in a tragic situation since they can never unravel the ultimate causes and thus attain perfect beatitude. Since human beings are happy only when they know the causes and essence of things, they are supremely happy when they know the first cause of all things and the ultimate essence—God. Aquinas concludes thus: “Therefore, it follows that

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God alone is truth by means of his essence and that only by the contemplation of him is man rendered perfectly blissful.”33 The vision is beatific since it satisfies the highest human faculty—the intellect. It is only in heaven that human beings behold God, and at that moment they obtain to divine knowledge and with it perfect happiness. In beholding God, who is the first cause of all things, one sees and understands the workings of all things since, with the comprehension of the first cause, all the other causes become apparent as well. Aquinas thus argues that when we behold the workings of the entire universe in the visio beatifica, in fact, we are merely beholding God himself or more exactly the omnipresent divina substantia. Augustine describes the vision thus: “Similarly, in the future life, wherever we turn the spiritual eyes . . . we shall discern . . . the incorporeal God directing the whole universe.”34 By beholding God, we simultaneously behold the entire cosmos which God directs. By observing how God governs the universe, our intellect gains ultimate satisfaction, and there remains nothing more to be known. But God does not exist in time as do finite things. This means that our vision of the divine is not a temporal one but rather an eternal one. Likewise, since, as we have seen, the universe is nothing other than the divine substance which is God, we behold the entire workings of the universe simultaneously just as we behold God in one eternal moment: “Therefore all the things which the intellect sees in the divine substance, it sees at the same time.”35 Thus, insofar as one participates in this vision, one is immortal since the visio beatifica is extratemporal. It is through the atemporal nature of the visio beatifica that eternal life is established. The Christian form of immortality thus amounts to a complete consciousness of God and the celestial workings which ultimately satiates the individual’s intellectual curiosity. On this view, immortality is ipso facto also the active participation in the divine and in the unity of the heavenly community. Augustine explains the activity in heaven thus: “He [sc. God] will be the goal of all our longings; he who is seen forever; he who is loved without satiety; he who is praised without wearying. This indeed will be the duty, the pleasure, the common activity of all, just as the eternal life itself is common to all.”36 Although Augustine’s list contains other endeavors which could be considered activities as such, that is, an outward show or expression of love or praise of God, the primary activity in heaven is the beholding of God in the visio beatifica. The blessed will behold God and the universe for all eternity. Otherwise, Augustine characterizes this state as one of perfect rest: “But now restored by him and perfected by his greater grace we shall be still and at leisure for eternity, seeing that he is God. . . . This we shall then know perfectly, when we are perfectly at rest and in stillness see that he is God.”37 There will no longer be anything to see or to desire, for we will know everything there is to know in beholding God and the workings of the universe. We can rest contented in this state of perfect leisure for all eternity.

VI  Borges’ alternative version of immortality The point of Borges’ story is to demonstrate the internal contradictions in this Christian picture of immortality and to provide us with a view which, if not attractive, is at least internally consistent. On Borges’ vision of immortality, the reader is presented

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with a picture of neither gods nor saints but rather a repellant barbarian tribe called “troglodytes,”38 who lie in the sand consuming lizards. The Roman military tribune Marcus Flaminius Rufus, both narrator and protagonist of the story, determines to set out in search of the River of Immortality and the City of the Immortals. After several trying adventures, he arrives tired and ailing at the labyrinthine City of the Immortals and displays great repugnance toward the troglodytes, the abject and quiescent creatures who are the inhabitants there. At first sight, the troglodytes seem entirely to lack the benefits of reason and culture. They have no speech and possess no visible means of communication. Moreover, although they do not seem to sleep, the troglodytes are listless creatures who neither farm, nor hunt, nor provide themselves with shelter. They appear almost comatose, entirely oblivious to their surroundings, neither helping the feverish tribune nor heeding him when he speaks. As the tribune surprisingly discovers on one rainy morning, this miserable assemblage of troglodytes, which he so condescendingly regards, is the remnant of the Olympian gods, and their pathetic condition is the logical and inevitable result of their immortality. The infinity of time, he learns, has stultified them and rendered them reticent and base creatures. The astonishment of this discovery simultaneously moves both the reader and the tribune who had imagined immortality to be quite different, and herein lies the irony of the work.39 Through the passage of the centuries, the lives of the immortals had degenerated into an apathetic condition in which they did nothing. The infinity of time involved in the life of immortality has deprived the lives of the gods of meaning, and thus they had fallen into their wretched condition. Borges’ tribune observes, death “makes men precious and pathetic . . . . every act they execute may be their last . . . . Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.”40 By contrast, for the immortals, “every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree.”41 Borges’ point is the fundamental existentialist claim that it is only in the finitude of human existence that actions and life have their meaning. Only because we know that our life spans are limited are we concerned and motivated to accomplish our projects. All motivations, both noble and base, lose their value when a finite existence is expanded to an infinite one. In an eternity, our lives would become tedious and banal. Individuality and personal identity are lost in an infinity of time since in an eternity we would have the opportunity to play the roles of all human beings and to accomplish all things. Since one can do all things, one could not define one’s life by the continuity of the specific deeds done or the projects accomplished. Thus, the main characters of Borges’ story, the antiquary Cartaphilus and the Roman tribune Marcus Flaminius Rufus, are not two different individuals but rather one person who spans the ages.42 The value that our lives have is necessarily bound up with our own human limitations and finitude. The difficulties of our lives which we curse and the labors under which we toil are what give our lives meaning. For the immortals, there is no challenge or difficulty which cannot be accomplished in an eternity. The construction of the city of labyrinths was the ultimate desperate project undertaken by the immortals before they drifted off into the gray eternity of indifference: “This establishment was the last

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symbol to which the Immortals condescended; it marks a stage at which, judging that all undertakings are in vain, they determined to live in thought, in pure speculation.”43 The gods modeled the labyrinthine city after their own absurd and meaningless lives. Its architectural irregularities and asymmetries represent a world of chaos lacking all semblance of meaning or order.44 While lost in the labyrinth prior to discovering the truth of the troglodytes, the tribune concludes, “The gods who built it were mad.”45 Although at the time he could not know, the tribune’s ironic words captured the truth of the immortals’ dilemma since their lives, busied only with Sisyphean projects and having become wholly indifferent to the usual tasks of life, represent a kind of madness. For Borges, such immortality is subhuman: “To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.”46 Animals, lacking the faculty of reflection and thus not knowing of their inevitable deaths, live, like the troglodytes, everyday like every other day. Their lives cannot be said to be meaningful in the way human lives are. Only humans have history, culture, and language, all of which would gradually disappear, were we to live forever. Borges constantly uses the pejorative simile of a dog to describe the troglodytes.47 The tribune disdainfully names  one of them “Argos” after Odysseus’ faithful old hound in the Odyssey. This deprecatory appellation, which seems to us so unbecoming of immortals, gives evidence that Borges is criticizing the notion of immortality itself. The tribune says that the troglodytes, that is, the gods, “did not inspire fear but rather repulsion.”48 The juxtaposition of the words “fear” and “repulsion” is the key here. One would expect to feel terror before the gods, but instead the sensation is one of disgust. The repulsion that we feel toward the troglodytes indicates that there is something repellent about our notion of immortality if it were carried to its logical conclusion. This kind of life strikes us as an insult to the integrity of human existence. The same pejorative animal simile is used by Kant, who describes what would happen to human beings if the difficulties of human life were removed. He argues that the role of nature is to provide a hindrance to human intentions and actions. In this way, nature serves the function of developing our human faculties and abilities by providing us with opposition. In the absence of these natural impediments, human life would become an idyllic, blissful pastoral life (Schäferleben). Lacking the hindrances presented by nature, “men docile as the sheep they tend would hardly invest their existence with any worth greater than that of cattle; and as to the purpose behind man’s creation, his rational nature, there would remain a void.”49 Kant’s point is the same as that of Borges. The logical result of a life that is immortal and does not need to provide for itself or fear impending death is the loss of meaning and value in life. This then leads naturally to the bovine existence of the troglodytes who have no obstacles and thus no meaningful activity. For Kant, nature itself plays the crucial role by providing human beings with tasks to overcome, thus instilling human life with meaning. Similarly, Hegel’s analysis of the biblical story of the Fall of Man indicates the hollowness or the unsatisfactoriness of the condition of humans in paradise. He argues that the unity and bliss of natural existence in paradise are not a true sort of

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human life: “the schism in which we find everything human involved can certainly not be the last word; but, on the other hand, it is not correct to regard the immediate, natural unity as the right state either. Spirit is not something merely immediate; on the contrary, it essentially contains the moment of mediation within itself.”50 Human existence, for Hegel, involves more than simply the satisfaction of natural desires. To dwell in a paradise without death and without the need to provide for oneself divests human beings of their greatest faculties which make them human in the first place. The human mind, for Hegel, necessarily involves reasoning and reflecting, for it is with these tools that humanity can create a more meaningful unity than merely the natural unity represented by the Garden of Eden. Traditional representations of the immortal life commonly run up against this problem. While Dante never seems to run out of innovative punishments to occupy the inhabitants of Hell, he is hard pressed to find some meaningful activity for the blessed souls in heaven to engage in. The Greek gods of Homer and the tragic poets are far more engaged in the activities of the mortal, human world than in their own sphere. Indeed, their lives seem to depend on the human sphere for their meaning. If they did not have their human favorites to guide and protect or if they could not otherwise interfere in human action, it is not clear what they would be doing at all. The conclusion of “The Immortal” confirms the criticism of the very notion of immortality. The immortals reason that if there is a river whose waters grant immortality, there must also be a river that renders one mortal again. The immortals embark on a quest for the river of death which will liberate them from the onus of immortality and again invest their lives with meaning by rendering them finite. We see here an ironical mirror image of the story of the Fall in which mankind was exiled from the happy immortal state to one of pain and death. When at last the former tribune drinks from the waters that efface immortality and for the first time in almost 2000 years becomes finite and vulnerable, he receives a wound and feels the first tinge of pain after so many centuries. Borges uses the peculiar adjective “precious” (preciosa) to describe the formation of the drop of blood from the wound.51 This word is used throughout the story to indicate the meaning bound up with a finite life. Something that can be infinitely repeated cannot ipso facto be precious. Only in a life threatened by death are individual events meaningful. Despite all that he has seen and done through so many years, the protagonist, the former tribune, is happy only by regaining death and finitude. It is no accident that “The Immortal” is sprinkled with references to the Odyssey. The image of Odysseus gazing into the sea and longing to return to his family and homeland in Book V moves us not just because we see a man whose fortunes are waning but because his dilemma represents something about the human condition. Although on a bountiful island with a beautiful and amorous goddess Calypso, he is nonetheless wholly distraught. He is unwilling to accept the goddess’ seemingly magnanimous offer to make him immortal on the condition that he become her husband because he realizes that such a life would amount to no more than ferine bliss without challenges or difficulties and thus without glory and honor. The Odyssey abounds in stories of this kind such as the lotus-eaters or the hapless victims of the sirens who lead lives of heedless, bestial happiness and bliss, yet seem debased and less

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than human. A human life consists in the overcoming of obstacles and dilemmas, and this is what Odysseus chooses, although he is quite cognizant of the fact that it will cost him great hardships.

VII  Borges’ reductio ad absurdum of the Christian doctrine of immortality Although, when taken at face value, Borges’ story seems to be a criticism solely of the Greeks’ conception of immortality, since after all, it is the Olympian gods that the tribune finds in such a base state, nevertheless Borges intends for this criticism also to be valid for the Christian view.52 Most directly, he writes, “Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.”53 Besides this direct reference to Christianity that indicates that Borges means to use it as a foil in his attempt to capture the contradiction in the very concept of immortality, there are other subtler bits of evidence that seem to single out specifically the Christian doctrine of the visio beatifica.54 For instance, Borges gives the following description of the immortals after the erection of the city of labyrinths: “They determined to live in thought, in pure speculation.”55 The eternal life of pure speculation is, as was noted, precisely the description of the visio beatifica given by Augustine and Aquinas, in which one contemplates God and the workings of the universe for all eternity. The immortals are described as being so lost in the realm of thought and speculation that they reach the point at which they gradually lose touch with the physical world.56 This accords with Aquinas’ analysis that in the visio beatifica the souls behold only divina substantia. The blessed perceive the universe only in terms of divine substance and thus do not see the physical world or mundane substance per se. The blessed state of the immortals is also alluded to in the tribune’s observation: “the Immortals were capable of perfect quietude.”57 This then echoes the perfecta beatitudo of Aquinas as well as Augustine’s claim that the souls will be perfectly at leisure. The tribune, having become immortal, explains the highest enjoyment: “There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.”58 Here one sees the claim of Augustine and Aquinas that pure speculation in the visio beatifica is the greatest bliss that humans can experience. Borges’ picture of the troglodytes indicates certain tensions or internal contradic­ tions in the Christian view of immortality presented above. The problem is how to reconcile the seemingly optimistic and desirable account of immortality that Christianity offers with the fact, which Borges so poignantly illustrates, that such a life of immortality would be meaningless and indeed undesirable. Not accidently the visio beatifica seems to reduce humans to a troglodyte condition insofar as it precludes meaningful activity per se by removing obstacles and by introducing an infinite time frame. This condition seems to be the necessary result of such an immortal condition. The sort of difficulties and challenges that render our mundane existence meaningful

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would be obviated since heavenly life is, as has been seen, one characterized by rest and leisure. Since in the visio beatifica, the souls will no longer have anything to seek or desire, the very essence of human existence will have been removed. The absence of difficulties that make us human is what makes heaven appear at first glance attractive. One might be tempted to argue that Borges’ critique of immortality and the visio beatifica evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of this Christian doctrine. As was seen, Aquinas argues that those who dwell in eternity experiencing the visio beatifica are atemporal, but yet Borges’ account of the immortals places them in time; indeed, the tribune comes upon them at a precise historical moment. This objection, however, misses the subtlety of Borges’ story. The tribune, who has not yet drunk from the waters that give immortality, perceives the immortals as existing in a temporal order. He sees them temporally because he sees himself and the world temporally. From the perspective of the immortals, however, there is no history and no time. This too is simply the consequence of their immortal condition. When one of their fellows falls into a precipice and though unharmed—for he is immortal—burns with thirst, it takes 70 years before the other immortals throw him a rope. Likewise, the tribune, turned immortal, writes of his leave-taking from his fellow immortal Homer, formerly the troglodyte Argos, “I think we did not even say goodbye.”59 The point of these examples is precisely that the immortals see the world sub specie aeternitatis just as in the visio beatifica. Boethius correctly observes, “Eternity is the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life. The meaning of this can be made clearer by comparison with temporal things. For whatever lives in time lives in the present, proceeding from past to future, and nothing is so constituted in time that it can embrace the whole span of its life at once.”60 Atemporality thus is not something present simply in the visio beatifica, but rather it is a necessary condition for this kind of immortality. The concept of immortality that Borges finds contradictory is that of eternal and continuous consciousness (in contrast to a concept of immortality such reincarnation or the immortality of a species in which individual consciousness is lost). This point is crucial for the Christian notion of the visio beatifica since, regardless of how time is conceived metaphysically, a continuity of individual consciousness must be maintained for the visio to be a reward. Thus, insofar as the visio beatifica depends on an immortality of individual consciousness, Borges’ criticism is still valid. If one follows up on the implications of Borges’ story, one arrives at a profound critique not just of the Greek but also of the Christian version of immortality that has been so influential in the Western tradition. The life of the troglodytes exposes the internal tensions and incoherencies that are latent at the very heart of both of these views. The problem that “The Immortal” presents is how to reconcile the optimistic account of immortality that Christianity offers with the fact, which Borges so poignantly illustrates, that such a life of immortality would be meaningless, bovine, and undesirable. It is not by accident that the visio beatifica reduces the life of immortality to a troglodyte condition insofar as it precludes meaningful activity by removing obstacles and introducing an infinite time frame. The absence of difficulties and challenges make heaven seem attractive, but it is these very difficulties and challenges that render our

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existence meaningful. Implicitly contrasting and problematizing the traditional images of immortality such as blessed saints living blissfully in heaven beholding God and the universe, Borges presents his readers with base and indifferent troglodytes eating lizards and tracing inchoate figures in the sands of unknown deserts. By portraying this condition with an image from a story, Borges delivers a compelling philosophical argument that would be less effective if it were presented in the form of a straightforward tract or treatise on immortality.

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Sartre and Existential Theater: Bariona and The Flies

There is sometimes a tendency in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to view philosophical problems as eternal and sacred entities. According to this conception of philosophia perennis, the discipline is a timeless intellectual forum where theories from every age are juxtaposed to one another in an eternal debate. It is in this spirit that many theme-oriented anthologies are written and many introductory survey courses taught. This approach has obvious shortcomings and is particularly problematic when one is concerned with a figure such as Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work was so intricately interwoven with the times in which he lived. In the celebrated Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel discusses the necessary relationship between a philosophy and its age. “Whatever happens,” he writes, “every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age.”1 Philosophical ideas, theories, and movements are, of course, closely linked to the age in which they were born, and, indeed, the lives of individual thinkers are frequently tied to world-historical events which surround and engulf them. In this chapter, I will explore Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dramatic work, The Flies and also its lesser-known forerunner Bariona. The theory of freedom that he develops in his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, is given a dramatic presentation in both of these works. I wish to show that there were good reasons for Sartre to make use of drama as a genre given the historical situation at the time. A brief account must first be given of the political and historical context in which Sartre wrote these theater pieces. One might object that an account of the historical circumstances and the biography of Sartre might conceivably be important for an understanding of his ever-changing political orientation, but these matters have no place in a discussion of his philosophy or specifically his theory of freedom. However, upon closer examination, we find that the truism from Hegel cited above takes on particular meaning with respect to a number of the epistemological and metaphysical issues treated in the tradition of French phenomenology. Sartre’s theory of freedom provides a good case in point. To be sure, the debate about free will and determinism has exercised the Western philosophical tradition virtually since its inception, and if any issue has the right to be hailed as one of the timeless philosophical problems, this would certainly be a strong

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candidate. However, the question here concerns not only the abstract philosophical problems at issue, but also factors such as how the terms of the problem are framed, what philosophical methodology is applied to it, and what conclusions might result from such an inquiry. It is a mistake to see any issue as an atomic philosophical problem set  alongside other similar monadic units since it is often discovered that what at first appeared to be a single issue is in fact several different problems and that the timeless and sublime dialogue of the ages is merely a mundane example of people talking past one another. Thus, the issues of human freedom or intersubjectivity that come up in Sartre are not simply abstract or isolated philosophical problems. Sartre’s interest in the question of human freedom and the manner in which he understood and treated it betrays something about the time period and historical circumstances in which his works were written. Similarly, his approach to psychology, his refutation of the theory of the unconscious, his account of the transparency of consciousness and the forms of bad faith are all deeply conditioned by the historical context in which he was writing. When years later Simone de Beauvoir asked Sartre why he wrote Being and Nothingness, he unhesitatingly responded with an account of the historical context: “It was during the war; I conceived of the work during the drôle de guerre2 and in the prisoner-of-war camp; and I wrote it during this period: either one did not write anything at all or one wrote the essential things.”3 It is clear from this response that if one wants to understand the work of Sartre, then one must first familiarize oneself, at least in a general way, with the historical context in which he was working.

I  The historical background The historical context that informs the conception of human freedom expounded in The Flies and Being and Nothingness is, of course, World War II, the German Occupation and Sartre’s experience in a prisoner-of-war camp. In  1933, Sartre was in Berlin with a research grant,4 zealously studying the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.5 He saw with horror the growing Nazi presence in Germany after having spent the summer in fascist Italy with Simone de Beauvoir.6 Prior to the outbreak of World War II, it was the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 and the international struggle against fascism which, as de Beauvoir recounts,7 marked an initial political awakening for Sartre and a number of French intellectuals of his generation. Like many of his contemporaries, Sartre criticized the policy of nonintervention pursued by France and the West, which seemed to condemn the Spanish Republicans to certain defeat in view of the fact that Franco was abundantly receiving arms and manpower from fascist Germany and Italy. Although they were deeply concerned about what was happening in Spain,8 French intellectuals were able to view the struggle as spectators at a distance,9 and their engagement was thus of a theoretical rather than a personal nature. All of this changed with World War II, during the course of which these same intellectuals were called up into military service and suffered deportation, prisoner-of-war camps, the Occupation, and often much worse. World War II transformed their world and their political perspectives with it: they were first-person participants in this event and

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no longer merely passive spectators. What was once political criticism of this or that governmental policy was transformed into personal engagement. In Merleau-Ponty’s essay “The War Has Taken Place,”10 dating from the year of the liberation 1945, he describes the two entirely different worldviews that French intellectuals held at first before and then after the war. He characterizes the ante bellum period as one of happiness, simplicity, and naïveté: the French inhabited a “peaceful garden” as it were.11 He writes, “We knew that concentration camps existed, that Jews were being persecuted, but these certainties belonged to the world of thought. We were not yet living face to face with cruelty and death: we had not as yet been given the choice of submitting to them or confronting them.”12 Simone de Beauvoir describes the shift in perspective as follows: “Up until the war, I had followed my inclinations: I learned about the world, and I constructed happiness for myself. Morality was mingled with this practice; it was a golden age. . . . Beginning in 1939, all this changed; the world became a chaos, I ceased trying to construct anything.”13 The first-hand experience of the war and the German Occupation destroyed their simple outlook forever. Sartre, like his fellow countrymen, woke up, made difficult choices and political affiliations, thus becoming engaged in a way that he had never been before.14 At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Sartre was obliged to leave his teaching post when he was called up into military service. He served for some peaceful months as a meteorology expert in southeast France until the German offensive on the Western front. During the first several months of his military existence in  1939, he did not take the matter seriously. His notebooks published as Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre provide an interesting picture of this period. He engaged in a form of escapism, writing prolifically. The first two tomes of Roads to Freedom, for instance, were written largely during this period as were several lengthy notebooks.15 Merleau-Ponty says of this period after the French mobilization: “Our being in uniform did not essentially change our way of thinking during the winter of 1939–40. We still had the leisure to think of others as separate lives, of the war as a personal adventure. . . . Even when we worked with a will at the job of war, we did not feel involved, and all our standards were still those of peacetime.”16 The irenic illusion of these French intellectuals was abruptly destroyed in May 1940 when the Germans launched their offensive against France. After the French defeat and the dramatic events at Dunkerque, Sartre and his unit were obliged to retreat very quickly and, abandoned by their officers, were soon taken prisoner in June of that year. Understandably, this shock changed his perspective radically. In a letter, Sartre explains this awakening: “I was playing at war in the fashion of Kafka; it was amusing until May 15; then it began to become disturbing now that the others were waging a real war.”17 Sartre was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Trier, where he studied Heidegger’s Being and Time with Catholic priests. His military service and captivity seem hardly to have affected his prolific literary activities. For Christmas of 1940, he wrote, directed, and even acted in a little-known work which was in many ways the forerunner of The Flies.18 Purportedly a simple Christmas play, Bariona was, in fact, a hidden call to Sartre’s fellow prisoners to courage, solidarity, and resistance. Many years later, Sartre recalls, “I wrote Bariona which was indeed bad, but there was an idea of theater

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there.  .  .  .  The Germans did not understand the allusion to engagement. They saw there only a Christmas play. But the French prisoners understood everything. My piece interested them.”19 The play portrays the story of Bariona, a Jew living during the time of the Roman occupation of Judea. The parallels to the situation of the French prisoners are so obvious as not to require explanation, at least not for the French audience: The important thing for me in that experience was that I was going to speak as a prisoner to other prisoners and bring up our common problems. The play was full of allusions to the situation we were in, and each one of us understood them perfectly well. In our minds, the Roman envoy to Jerusalem was the German. Our captors saw him as the Englishman in his colonies!20

The plot was brilliantly conceived since it could thus be interpreted in two different ways. Sartre indicates that if the Germans understood the play, they would surely have stopped it.21 This play demonstrated to him the importance and potential effectiveness of a theater of resistance. He wrote later, “As I addressed my comrades above the footlights, speaking to them of their condition as prisoners, when I suddenly saw them so remarkably silent and attentive, I understood what the theater should be: a great collective and religious phenomenon.”22 He was particularly fascinated by the special relation that the work created vis-à-vis the audience, which, by virtue of its situation, could not remain aloof from the piece as in a normal theater. Instead, they were themselves in a sense caught up personally in the action of the drama. Sartre was released after some 8 months of captivity and returned to Paris, now under German Occupation, in spring of 1941. Upon his return, he immediately became active in organizing a group of intellectuals for the resistance. This group called “Socialisme et Liberté” included close friends, former classmates from the École Normale Supérieure, such as Merleau-Ponty, and former students. However, the group quickly lost its impetus and eventually dissolved for want of effectiveness. As Sartre himself put it, “Born of enthusiasm, our little group caught a fever and died a year later, of not knowing what to do.”23 Despite this apparent failure, Sartre was by no means discouraged and continued to seek ways to make himself useful to the resistance. Later, he was to become a member of a group of writers associated with the French Communist Party in the resistance, which was called the “Comité national des écrivans.”24 The historical events could hardly have failed to have an effect on French intellectuals of the day. The awakening and change in orientation caused by the war marked the major turnabout in Sartre’s development. Sartre wrote later, “the war truly divided my life in two.”25 By the end of the war, the beginning looked infinitely distant. He later comments, “But who, in 1945, remembered the ’30s? They were quietly preparing for retirement, the Occupation had killed them, and only their bones remained.”26 One of Sartre’s biographers concurs, writing, The Sartre of 1945 was no longer the Sartre of 1939. It was the great change, the great metamorphosis of his life. Upon entering the tunnel, he was a philosophy teacher at the lycée, with two books to his credit, an isolated being, an individualist,

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little if at all concerned with the affairs of the world, entirely apolitical. Upon coming out, he was a writer who multiplied his talents in diverse genres, politically active and wanting to be so.27

World War II thus served to politicize Sartre and virtually the entire generation of French intellectuals. Never again would he be politically apathetic. In the decades after the war, his voice would constitute an important force in the political debate in France and abroad. Sartre conceived of and wrote Being and Nothingness as a prisoner of war, and it was published in 1943 during the Occupation. Not by accident, the main theme of the book is human freedom.28 Just as the war had changed the face of the world, so also Being and Nothingness decisively changed the philosophical scene in France and determined its course for several years to come. At the same time, almost as a kind of companion piece, came Sartre’s dramatic work, The Flies.

II  The production of The Flies The Flies was written in 194129 and published as a book in April 1943.30 Sartre initially had difficulties finding financial backing for the drama, which was understandable given that France was under German Occupation at the time. Simone de Beauvoir recounts that it was Merleau-Ponty who interceded and successfully secured a sponsor for the project.31 The Flies was first performed in June of 1943 at the Théâtre SarahBernhardt (under the German Occupation renamed, Théâtre de la Cité) and after a brief hiatus saw performances in October of the same year. It was not a great success with the general public. One biographer writes of empty seats, canceled performances and reserved critics.32 Despite this, The Flies represents Sartre’s first major work of drama. The piece takes as its theme the Greek myth, treated in the Orestia by Aeschylus, of the homecoming of Orestes and his vengeance on his mother Clytemnestra. Behind this classical theme, however, is hidden an unambiguous message of resistance which at the time made the work based on an ancient theme so very contemporary.33 As with Bariona, the overt classical theme enables Sartre to avoid the attention of the German censors. In the play, Sartre offers a simple analogy to the French situation. Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistheus, who tyrannically rule over Argos after the murder of Agamemnon, represent the Germans occupying France. The citizens of Argos, representing the French, are confronted with the absolute choice of rebellion or submission. Orestes is the existential hero who embraces his freedom and rebels against the oppression. Although she is clearly prejudiced in the matter, Simone de Beauvoir recounts what a profound effect the piece had on her the first time she saw it performed. She writes, “How I was moved when the curtain rose! It was impossible to mistake the meaning of the piece; falling from the mouth of Orestes, the word ‘Freedom’ exploded with a crash of lightning.”34 De Beauvoir’s reaction is indicative of the risks Sartre was taking, given the menacing situation with the censors and the German Occupation.

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Critics were generally lukewarm. One wrote, “The work left me dissatisfied.”35 Another refers to the author’s “predilection for the abject.”36 However, the play was reviewed sympathetically by Sartre’s friend and colleague, Merleau-Ponty,37 who rebuked the hostile critics for failing to grasp the play’s real message. Unlike many contemporary critics, he dares to underscore the theme of freedom and indeed to make it the central point of his interpretation, although he prudently refrains from drawing direct parallels to the German Occupation.

III  Key philosophical themes in The Flies The Flies is a work, which despite its literary genre, philosophers are obliged to take seriously since it was written at exactly the same time as Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece Being and Nothingness, which was published only 2 months after the dramatic work. It is not by chance that this drama treats many of the same themes as the philosophical treatise. Human freedom is the central topic of both works, and the character of Orestes personifies the detailed theory of existential freedom presented in Being and Nothingness. However, there is substantial overlap in other themes as well.

A  Bad faith During the Occupation, many of Sartre’s fellow Frenchmen felt themselves helpless in the face of the occupying German forces. The fact that they were living in a defeated and occupied country seemed to relieve them of their duty to be moral agents and many permitted themselves to countenance things they would normally have found horrifying due to the belief that they were no longer free. Sartre, however, argues that people are still free even in such dire circumstances. Bariona was intended to encourage his fellow prisoners of war to assert their freedom even in captivity. Sartre is unwilling to allow human beings to deny their moral responsibilities regardless of the circumstances. In The Flies, the citizens of Argos represent case studies in self-deception or what Sartre called “bad faith” in Being and Nothingness. They attempt to flee from their freedom and fear it more than tyranny itself. Like the French, the citizens of Argos were afflicted by a tyrannical rule. Instead of recognizing their freedom and taking up the call to resist, they pretend that they can do nothing. In Act I, the story of the murder of Agamemnon is recounted. Although everyone in Argos sensed what was afoot after Agamemnon returned home, none of them dared to say anything or to warn him that he was in danger: “They still kept silent when they saw their King entering the city gates. And when Clytemnestra stretched forth her graceful arms, fragrant and white as lilies, they still said nothing. Yet at that moment a word, a single word, might have sufficed. But no one said it.”38 Sartre is sensitive to the psychology of group situations, where individuals are intimidated and thus do not dare to take action. In short, they are anxious about acting alone and about a burden of responsibility accruing solely to them. The fact that the situation is a public one with many people present seems to relieve the individual of personal responsibility.

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The notion that the responsibility is shared by so many people seems to diminish the responsibility of each individual. None of the people of Argos feels responsible for what has happened to them. Everyone seems to have an excuse for not acting. Zeus interviews a typical old woman about her role in the events surrounding the murder from so many years past. He points out that Agamemnon’s cries could be heard echoing through the streets, and he then asks, “What did you do about it?” She continues, “My good man was in the fields, at work. What could I do, a woman alone? I bolted my door.”39 In bad faith, she denies that she was able to do anything to prevent the murder. Instead, she in effect pretended that nothing was happening. This is presumably the typical form of thinking shared by all the other witnesses to the crime. Some even found a certain sense of adventure in it: “So the people here held their tongues; they looked forward to seeing . . . a violent death.”40 All of these excuses seek to eschew personal responsibility in one way or another. For Sartre, this was also regrettably the case with a great number of Frenchmen who refused to see the Occupation as a situation in which different possibilities for action existed. The question of collaboration became particularly problematic. Orestes himself initially demonstrates bad faith. Although he will later experience a kind of existential conversion by which he comes to realize and embrace his freedom, here he is still like the rest of the people, unreflective and unaware that he is free. When his worried tutor asks him if he is not planning the murder of his father, he reasons, “These folk are no concern of mine. I have not seen one of their children come into the world, nor been present at their daughters’ weddings; I don’t share their remorse, I don’t even know a single one of them by name.”41 The argument is that since he is not a citizen of Argos and does not know the people involved, he therefore has no moral obligations toward them. According to Sartre, however, the individual is responsible for the entire world and not just for his or her small part of it. One cannot select specific individuals to whom one has ethical obligations and ignore the rest. The demands of ethics and responsibility are universal and thus extend to everyone, even those one does not know or has never met. Clytemnestra reproaches her rebellious daughter Electra for being judgmental. She employs a useful image by way of illustration: You are young, Electra. It is easy for young people, who have not yet had a chance of sinning, to condemn. But wait, my girl; one day you, too, will be trailing after yourself an inexpiable crime. At every step you will think that you are leaving it behind, but it will remain as heavy as before. Whenever you look back you will see it there, just at arm’s length, glowing darkly like a black crystal. And you will have forgotten what it really is, and murmur to yourself: “It wasn’t I, it could not have been I, who did that.” Yet though you disown it time and time again, always it will be there, a dead weight holding you back.42

This illustrates Sartre’s belief in the impossibility of the escape to transcendence. A crime once committed can never go away. It will remain forever a fixed part of the individual’s facticity. Although one can try to appeal to the future and posit oneself in transcendence, the fact of the crime in the past never disappears, regardless of how

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many virtuous acts are performed to atone for it. One can never be free until one embraces all of one’s acts and even one’s crimes. Only by taking responsibility for these can one rid oneself of the burden of them. The motif of the flies from which the work takes its name is a curse sent by the gods to punish not the murders themselves but rather the cowardly townspeople who passively sat by and allowed the atrocity to take place. They symbolize the constant guilt and lack of moral character of the people of Argos who are portrayed as the living dead.

B  The realization of human freedom The key event in the piece comes in Act II when Orestes experiences a revelation, whereby he realizes his freedom. After being uncertain of whether to leave Argos or to take revenge, he suddenly stops and assumes a different aspect and voice. He triumphantly declares to Electra, “from now on I’ll take no one’s orders, neither man’s nor god’s.”43 He continues by describing his new perspective, “What a change has come on everything, and, oh, how far away you seem! Until now I felt something warm and living round me, like a friendly presence. That something has just died. What emptiness! What endless emptiness, as far as the eye can reach!”44 What has died in him is clearly the illusory belief in metaphysical comfort, that is, the childhood feeling of being at home in the universe with fixed values and truths. Now all of these handed-down verities have disappeared, and all that is left is “nothingness.” Orestes realizes that he must now be the author of his own values. The customary values that he immediately accepted in his youth are hollow and meaningless. They represent nothingness that can only be filled by the work of his own will. Only after this revelation does Orestes decide to avenge his father by murdering the wicked Aegistheus and Clytemnestra. Zeus comes to Aegistheus in order to warn him of Orestes’ intentions. In their discussion, it comes out that both the ruler of the heavens and the usurping king of Argos enforce their rule by deceiving their subjects into believing that they can do nothing to change their situation. Zeus states, “You have [a secret]. The same as mine. The bane of gods and kings. The bitterness of knowing men are free. Yes, Aegistheus, they are free. But your subjects do not know it, and you do.”45 Orestes, however, has broken the spell and has attained a higher form of consciousness by realizing the fact of his freedom. This makes him dangerous and unpredictable. By continuing to deny their freedom, the people of Argos render themselves docile and easy to control. When Zeus continues to press him to arrest Orestes and Electra, Aegistheus asks if they are really so dangerous. Zeus responds simply, “Orestes knows that he is free.”46 Then Aegistheus realizes that there is nothing that can be done: “He knows he’s free? Then, to lay hands on him, to put him in irons, is not enough. A free man in a city acts like a plague-spot. He will infect my whole kingdom and bring my work to nothing.”47 Once one person has reached the consciousness of freedom and demonstrated it, others will surely follow. Here Sartre uses the image of a disease that infects the people, a common metaphor in existentialist literature. In the context of the Occupation, this can be read as a call for people to encourage one another to embrace their freedom and responsibility and to pass along this message to others.

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Zeus then indicates that not even he is able to do anything about human beings when they realize that they are free: “It’s a matter between man and man, and it is for other men, and for them only, to let him go his gait, or to throttle him.”48 Orestes himself confirms this: “What do I care for Zeus? Justice is a matter between men, and I need no god to teach me.”49 Here Sartre’s atheism emerges. While he makes use of Zeus for dramatic purposes in the play, he is careful to underscore that for the question of human freedom, the existence of God is irrelevant. Whether or not God exists does not change the fact of human freedom and cannot influence the fundamental human condition that it dictates. Likewise, there are no divinely given values that exist for all time. Values are created by individual human beings in the context of their specific actions. This is also a consequence of the fact of human freedom.

C  The bane of human freedom But freedom, liberating though it may seem, is not an unqualified blessing. With it comes alienation and the strict demand of responsibility. In this sense, it is as if freedom were a sentence for some crime committed. As Sartre says elsewhere, “man is condemned to be free.”50 In The Flies, this is portrayed by the fate of Orestes. While there is a certain sympathy between Orestes and his sister Electra before his conversion and his rebellion, after it she loses all love for him and, under the duress of the furies, deserts him. Orestes says to her, “A nameless horror has descended on you, keeping us apart.”51 This is the alienation from the unreflecting mass of people that is portrayed in figures such as the underground man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Mersault in Camus’ The Stranger. Once one has contracted the disease of reflection, nothing looks the same again, including one’s fellow human beings. Moreover, once one has realized one’s freedom, one is forever separated from the common herd which constantly denies its freedom. The conflict between Orestes and Electra concerns the question of responsibility. Orestes defiantly embraces his actions. He says, “I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse.”52 He openly states what he has done: “You see me, men of Argos, you understand that my crime is wholly mine; I claim it as my own, for all to know; it is my glory, my life’s work, and you can neither punish me nor pity me.”53 He transparently realizes his freedom, and he knows that he must take full responsibility for his actions. Electra, however, attempts to deny her role in the murders. Although she admits to having thought about and even fantasized about murdering Aegistheus and Clythemnestra, she is now horrified by having actually done so. Even though she helped Orestes to commit it, by sneaking him into the palace and helping him to avoid the royal guards, she still attempts to minimize her role. Orestes appeals to her as follows: “Listen Electra! It’s now you who are bringing guilt upon yourself. For who except you can know what you really wanted? Will you let another decide that for you? Why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself? And why disown the firebrand that you were, that glorious young goddess, vivid with hatred, that I loved so much?”54 In his eyes, she is blameworthy not because she has been complicit in a crime but because she fails to recognize and accept her responsibility, and thus flees her freedom. Sartre is alert to the way in which people try, as it were, to rewrite the past when there is something in it that is uncomfortable for them.

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Zeus attempts to argue with Orestes about his newly realized freedom. In a rich metaphysical passage, he explains the workings of the universe, noting that a free man has no place in it: Orestes, I created you, and I created all things. Now see! See those planets wheeling on their appointed ways, never swerving, never clashing. It was I who ordained their courses, according to the law of justice. Hear the music of the spheres, that vast, mineral hymn of praise, sounding and resounding to the limits of the firmament. It is my work that living things increase and multiply, each according to his kind. I have ordained that man shall always beget man, and dog give birth to dog. It is my work that the tides with their innumerable tongues creep up to lap the sand and draw back to the appointed hour. I make the plants grow, and my breath fans round the earth the yellow clouds of pollen. You are not in your own home, intruder; you are a foreign body in the world, like a splinter in flesh, or a poacher in his lordship’s forest.55

Here we have a wonderful portrayal of existential alienation from the world. Once Orestes has realized his freedom and the hollowness of all human values, he is no longer at home in the universe. This is the burden of authentic freedom. It is as if the world has been made for the unreflective and the naïve, who are not conscious of it. Orestes explains how he experienced his conversion. He tells Zeus, “You were my excuse for being alive, for you had put me in the world to fulfill your purpose, and the world was an old panderer prating to me about your goodness, day in, day out. And then you forsook me.”56 From his youth, Orestes lived with the accepted customs and habits of his people. He believed in them until he realized their falsity. It was as if the gods had abandoned him. He continues, recounting how he felt at one with nature and in harmony with the world. But then came the realization of freedom: “Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me off my feet. Nature sprang back, my youth went with the wind, and I knew myself alone, utterly alone in the midst of this well-meaning little universe of yours. I was like a man who’s lost his shadow. And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders.”57 This is an echo of Sartre’s famous claim, “We are left alone, without excuse.”58 Once one has realized one’s freedom, it is impossible to continue to appeal to the truth of absolute values as before. Instead, one is on one’s own with only one’s private justifications. Zeus underscores that Orestes has chosen to follow a perilous path. The townspeople of Argos press at the door of the temple ready to kill him as soon as he leaves. Zeus rebukes Orestes, “Your vaunted freedom isolates you from the fold; it means exile.”59 Orestes is thus alienated from his fellow countrymen. Electra abandons her brother: “I won’t hear any more from you. All you have to offer me is misery and squalor.”60 She leaves him, hoping for salvation through repentance, but she is devoured by the furies. Orestes laments, “I am alone, alone.”61 Due to the effects of his freedom, he is also alienated from his own family. Thus, the realization of freedom means the birth of despair. Orestes is anxious to proclaim his newfound freedom to the people of Argos so that they too can awaken to it: “The folk of Argos are my folk. I must open their eyes.”62 To which Zeus responds,

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“Poor people! Your gift to them will be a sad one, of loneliness and shame. You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid on them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul, and futile, a barren boon.”63 The conflict is thus between the bliss of the ignorance that lives in the illusion of fixed values and truths and the despair of the knowledge that there are no such values and truths. Zeus’ argument is that freedom is too great a burden for people to bear. Thus, his attempts to deceive them are in fact in their own best interest since otherwise they would constantly be in despair. But Orestes remains firm and embraces the despair that comes with the realization of freedom. He argues, “Why, since it is their lot, should I deny them the despair I have in me?”64 Zeus then answers with another question, “What will they make of it?”65 To this, Orestes responds, “What they choose. They’re free; and human life begins on the far side of despair.”66 Living under the illusion of ignorance is not a genuinely human life. Although it is difficult, one must instead embrace one’s freedom, regardless of the costs.

D  The existential hero From this harsh conception of freedom in extreme circumstances comes a conception of heroism that has been one of the leitmotifs of existentialist literature. In the prison camp, one could choose to live one’s condition as a prisoner in a docile and servile fashion, but this would be to allow oneself to be reduced to an object, a prisoner-thing, and would deny one’s freedom in the matter. For Sartre, heroic people are those who do not allow themselves to be made into objects but rather constantly affirm their freedom regardless of the circumstances. The most extreme of these circumstances during the war and the Occupation was perhaps that of torture which became an urgent issue for the Resistance.67 In an interview years later, Sartre recalls the importance of this experience for his theory of freedom: What the drama of the war gave me, as it did everyone who participated in it, was the experience of heroism. Not my own, of course—all I did was a few errands. But the militant in the Resistance who was caught and tortured became a myth for us. Such militants existed, of course, but they represented a sort of personal myth as well. Would we be able to hold out against torture too? The problem then was solely that of physical endurance—it was not the ruses of history or the paths of alienation. A man is tortured: what will he do? He either speaks or refuses to speak. This is what I mean by the experience of heroism. . . .68

Here Sartre grants that this took on a kind of mythical character among his contemporaries. It was thus natural that this came to be a fixed motif in existentialist literature. Sartre’s understanding of torture as a model case for his theory of freedom is perhaps best illustrated in the preface he wrote for Henri Alleg’s book The Question.69 There, he analyzes Alleg’s personal experience of persecution and torture by the French military forces during the Algerian War. Sartre concludes that Alleg’s ability to resist the torture is a proof that we are free and cannot be reduced to an object or to the body. Alleg asserted his freedom which transcended the body and refused to reveal

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information about his comrades in arms. This is one of Sartre’s clearest examples of existential heroism. Once one realizes that one is free, then the extreme situations no longer appear so threatening: the guards in the prisoner-of-war camp, the secret police, the torturers have no hold on one. Orestes, Sartre’s great existential hero embraces his alienation from other human beings and accepts the despair that comes with it. Zeus mocks him, “If you can brag of freedom, why not praise the freedom of a prisoner languishing in fetters, or a slave nailed to the cross?”70 Somewhat surprisingly, Orestes simply affirms this, “Certainly. Why not?”71 Here one can see a subtle reference to the question of resisting torture at the hands of the occupying forces. As Zeus says, “Once freedom lights its beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.”72 Orestes is thus in a sense a Prometheus figure, who rebels against the gods and their world order. In Bariona, the title character, likewise asserts the power that accompanies the awareness of freedom: Even if the Eternal had shown me his face in the clouds I would still have refused to listen to him, because I’m free, and not even God himself has any power over a free man. He can grind me to dust or set me on fire like a torch, he can make me writhe in pain like a snake in a fire, but against that pillar of bronze, that inflexible column—a free man—he is powerless.73

For Sartre, one who is free transcends the world and its miseries. The free individual’s courage when faced with torture is testimony to the fact of his freedom.74 This was clearly an important part of the hidden message of both works during the war.

E  Freedom and resistance In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir explains the relation between Sartre’s life in the camp and his theory of freedom. She writes of Sartre and his fellow prisoners, “Opposite the Germans, opposite the collaborators, and the apathetic people whom they confronted daily, the antifascists in the Stalag formed a sort of fraternity, albeit a very reduced one, whose members were tied by an implicit oath: not to bend, to refuse every concession. Separated from the others, each had sworn to himself to maintain this command in its rigidity.”75 This form of refusal and resistance represented an affirmation of human freedom. Although incarcerated by the enemy, the French prisoners refused to be reduced to objects. By mentally resisting, they demonstrated that despite their outward condition as prisoners, they were nevertheless free. In an interview years later Sartre says, recalling the argument from Being and Nothingness, “I was a prisoner, and I was not free when I was a prisoner; however, I lived my manner of being a prisoner with a certain freedom.”76 The realization that he made was that the individual even in a situation of captivity was still capable of choosing how he or she would act in the situation. Thus, even though the undesired situation is imposed from the outside by factors beyond one’s control, the individual is still free since there are still any number of different possible actions and attitudes within that situation.

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One of the central points of Sartre’s Bariona is that there are many different ways to be exploited and oppressed, but in the final analysis, it is up to each individual to decide how he or she will react and experience the situation. It is King Balthazar, the role played by Sartre himself,77 who says, You are not your suffering. Whatever you do and however you look at it, you surpass it infinitely; because it means exactly what you want it to. Whether you dwell on it as a mother lies down on the frozen body of her child to warm it up again, or whether on the contrary you turn away from it indifferently, it is you who give it its meaning and make it what it is. For in itself it’s nothing but matter for human action . . . you are responsible for yourself and your suffering. . . . You are beyond your own suffering, because you shape it according to your own will.78

Humans can transcend the world and their own suffering by means of their ability to choose how to respond to facts and situations. It is the nature of human beings to transcend the world in this way. Alone of all creatures, humans have the capacity to assign value to the various givens of the world and ipso facto are not destined to suffer and experience them as simple givens. Thus, being a soldier and a prisoner taught Sartre that there were different ways of acting in these situations and that freedom is always preserved. Simone de Beauvoir writes that she found Sartre a changed man upon his return from the prisoner-of-war camp and was somewhat disconcerted by the uncompromising rigidity of his new found moral attitude. He reproached her for buying tea on the black market and for signing a reprehensible attestation at the school where she worked affirming that she was not Jewish.79 She says, “Sartre had always imperiously affirmed his ideas . . . but he never expressed them under the form of universal maxims; the abstract notion of duty repulsed him.”80 She recounts how she gradually came to understand how his new moral orientation had originated from his experience as a prisoner. In the camp, he was constantly under supervision, and the slightest act or gesture took on moral meaning; from this came the moral stringency that was observed and described by de Beauvoir. The situation under the German Occupation was no different. Sartre writes, “Since the Nazi poison was slipped into our thinking, every just thought was a victory; since an omnipotent police force tried to keep us silent, each word became precious as a declaration of principle; since we were trapped, each of our gestures had the weight of an act of engagement.”81 He writes elsewhere, “We weren’t able to take a single step, or eat or even breathe without making ourselves accomplices to the occupying forces.”82 Merleau-Ponty recalls, “we had to avoid any public gesture which might have ‘played into the hands’ of the occupying forces.”83 Sartre’s concept of freedom brought with it the burden of responsibility for even the slightest of actions. One was obliged to reflect upon everything one wanted to do and to consider whether or not a contemplated act might be perceived ambiguously. In the context of the Occupation, right and wrong were easy to discern, and the issues that were involved—loyalty or betrayal, solidarity, or self-interest—were highly charged since they often entailed life or death consequences. Simone de Beauvoir writes, “under the Occupation one knew unambiguously how to act.”84 By this she

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seems to mean that there was no moral ambiguity in the minds of most people that the German Occupation was not to be recognized and was to be resisted whenever possible. Sartre puts it in the strictest of terms: “Hitler deports people. This is a state of affairs which we cannot accommodate ourselves to. If we accept the Vichy regime, we are no longer human: no compromise is possible with the collaborators.”85 To go along docilely with such a situation and to countenance such atrocities would be tantamount to rejecting morality per se. If we were to do so, we would no longer have the right to consider ourselves human beings or morals agents; rather, we would resemble the dead just as the people of Argos in The Flies. The Occupation and the Vichy government presented for Sartre in a sense the same situation as the prisoner-of-war camp. The context presented an absolute decision between two alternatives which admitted no middle ground, and for the vast majority, the correct choice was easy to discern. The experience of the war also led to a concrete notion of rebellion for several existentialist writers. Sartre had always been an unforgiving critic of the bourgeois social order as his novel Nausea evinces; however, it took the experience of the war to turn this sentiment of social criticism into the genuine political engagement that he would practice for the rest of his life. He would say later, Those five years of war and captivity and coexistence with the conquerors were capital for me. The fact of living beside a German who had defeated us and who, moreover, is a common soldier who does not know us, who does not speak French, is an experience which I had first as a prisoner and then as a free person in a captive country. I began better to understand what it was to resist authorities.86

Just as Sartre refused to live as a captive and chose to resist the German forces both in the prisoner-of-war camp and during the Occupation, so also after the war he became an outspoken critic of any number of policies of the French government and the West. Sartre made use of the dramatic genre in order to express some of the key concepts that he had explicated in a more technical manner in his scholarly works. In his work, different genres mutually complement and supplement one another. Not just content to limit himself to scholarly essays, he also effectively presented his ideas through stage plays, novels, an autobiography, etc. Had he been so inclined, Sartre could presumably have written a political tract denouncing the German Occupation of France and had it published and circulated clandestinely as was the common practice with resistance journals. However, his call for solidarity and resistance was perhaps more effective by being presented in Bariona and The Flies. With these works, he could involve his audience in the ideas in a way that was not possible with a straightforward political treatise. Because the French audience could see the hidden message of these works and know that the Germans could not, a sense of solidarity and community naturally arose among those who were in on the secret. In this way, Sartre managed to touch a chord in each individual and help them to see their relation to the others who found themselves in the same situation. By portraying situations such as the return to Agamemnon to Argos, where murder awaited him, Sartre provided a general example that invited his

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audience to find parallels in their own experiences of the German Occupation, where they had stood by and watched people being arrested, persecuted, or deported. Most everyone at the time could presumably remember something in their own life that was in some way similar to the dramatic situations that Sartre was presenting under the apparently innocuous guise of a remake of an ancient drama. In this way, he was able to get across his partially hidden message in a very personal manner. Thus, by means of drama, his message was most effectively stated in the given historical circumstances.

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Philosophy, Literature and Rorty: Concluding Reflections

The examples cited in the preceding chapters are intended to illustrate the manifold ways in which philosophy can be effectively expressed in a number of different literary forms. Often the form or genre is selected for specific reasons in order to make the philosophical arguments more persuasive and to present them in a more suitable manner. The fact that there is a unity of the form in philosophical writing and the content of the philosophical argument is often overlooked. Given this unity of content and form, what should one make of the striking homogeneity in current philosophical expression? Plurality and diversity are celebrated in other spheres, yet in professional philosophy just the opposite seems to be the case. One response to this issue is provided by Rorty, who is not alarmed by the current conformity of philosophical writing and methodology. Since much of the history of philosophy is written in forms different from those recognized today, it is a natural development, in his view, that they will simply be consigned to other academic departments, such as literature or intellectual history. This has, indeed, to some extent already happened over the past several years. Rorty traces this movement and takes a laissez-faire attitude toward it. Rorty’s essay, “Professional Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,”1 describes the different sorts of academicians that currently inhabit the American university and charts the movement of the major figures of European philosophy—Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, et  alii—out of the philosophy department and into the departments of comparative literature and history. This migration is, according to Rorty, no cause for alarm since according to his view nothing is really lost in this displacement; moreover, one need not worry, he assures us, that the absence of these thinkers from the professional discipline of philosophy will hinder its intellectual project, whatever it may be. This view is somewhat problematic as I wish to show in what follows.

I  Rorty’s account of the professional philosopher and the highbrow Rorty sketches a brief intellectual history of the changes that have occurred in American philosophy during the course of the twentieth century. He distinguishes

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three different periods in this development: (1) the period prior to the World War I, (2) the “Deweyan period” between the wars, and (3) the “professionalizing period” from the end of World War II until today. Philosophy during the first period is characterized by Rorty via Santayana, as the “genteel tradition,”2 a term intended to capture the lingering belief in metaphysics and the search for metaphysical hope and comfort. The second period, dominated by John Dewey, was critical of abstract metaphysical systems and saw philosophy as playing a more practical role in the social and cultural life of the nation. Philosophy was to marshal the social sciences in its attempt to apply scientific rationality and methodology to reconstruct the social order. During the professionalizing period, however, philosophers abandoned this mission and turned away from the social sciences. Rorty writes, “philosophers attempted halfheartedly to define their activity in relation to mathematics and the natural sciences. In fact, however, this period has been marked by a withdrawal from the rest of the academy and from culture—an insistence on philosophy’s autonomy.”3 Philosophers in this period began to abstract themselves from their cultural and public role and set out examining ever more specialized problems that were of interest only to their professional colleagues and not to the wider intellectual community, let alone to the general public at large. Thus, a new sort of intellectual, whom Rorty refers to as the “professional philosopher,” came to dominate the philosophy departments of the leading research institutions. Rorty’s model for the professional philosopher seems to be rather straightforwardly the analytic philosopher, whom he characterizes in terms of (1) a specific set of interests and (2) a specific methodology or set of skills. (1) According to Rorty, the professional philosophers have given up on Dewey’s dream of a public philosophy that plays a meaningful part in civic life; instead, they are more concerned with abstract issues related to the natural sciences, mathematics, and the study of language. The professional philosopher shares the belief that only recently have the proper philosophical problems been adequately delineated and a methodology developed with which they can be rigorously and scientifically treated. As a result, the professional philosopher tends to be ahistorical and to take a dismissive stance toward the history of philosophy. (2) The professional philosophers also pride themselves on their training in formal logic and on what they perceive as analytical and critical skills superior to those found in other humanities disciplines. Their scholarly publications, written largely in the language of logic, strive to imitate the model of the natural sciences. This constellation of skills, methodology, and interests has had the effect of isolating them from other disciplines and from public discourse at large. With the rise of analytic philosophy came a profound homogenization of the field with regard to methodology, perceived goals and purpose, and form of writing. Rorty goes on to characterize a second sort of academic whom he juxtaposes to the professional philosopher. This type of intellectual, whom he calls alternately the “highbrow” or the “cultural critic,” seems to correspond roughly to the professor of comparative literature or intellectual history. The highbrows, says Rorty, are the result of an “agonized conscience of the young”4 and have their roots more firmly in literature, specifically in nineteenth-century Romanticism, than in the natural sciences. The highbrow, moreover, is skeptical about and suspicious of the success of the natural

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sciences, regarding scientific theory merely as another sort of discourse about the world, a discourse which is more esoteric and potentially pernicious than most. As a result, this sort of intellectual is critical of the professional philosopher’s unreflective attempt to model philosophy on the natural sciences, decrying the purported truth of the natural sciences as merely another form of metaphysical comfort. Instead of being animated by a serious or rigorous interest in science or mathematics like the professional philosopher, the highbrow is much more concerned with, above all, literary theory and, at least in some instances, with the main figures of the literary world. He or she dabbles in the history of philosophy and takes an interest in philosophers of the post-Kantian European tradition such as Heidegger and Nietzsche who offer long narratives about the history of Western culture, narratives which the highbrows put on a par with the results of the natural sciences but which the professional philosophers view with disdain as unscientific and arrogant. There has always been, according to Rorty, a tension between these two academic types, and they continue to fight a battle of words along ideological lines today. The professional philosophers, not finding the same deference toward logic and rigorous argumentation in the works of the highbrows as in the writings from their own intellectual camp, criticize the highbrows for sloppiness, lack of scholarly seriousness and argumentative rigor. The highbrow, on the other hand, finds the professional philosopher guilty of irrelevance, logic chopping, and naïveté. Professional philosophers are caricatured by the highbrows as engaged in futile academic debates about problems of their own making while they assume an uncritical and obsequious posture toward the natural sciences. These conflicts come to a head not merely in academic books and professional journals but also, and more destructively, in concrete daily events at the university, for example, hiring, grant allocations, and general budgetary issues. The conflict is thus one that, for Rorty, tends to permeate many aspects of intellectual life in the humanities disciplines. One point of contention is European philosophy—which falls into the intellectual no man’s land between the two academic camps. For ideological reasons, the professional philosopher often does not regard the standard canon of texts of the European tradition as appropriate subject matter for the modern philosophy department. Rorty accounts for this sentiment in terms of the professional philosophers’ critique of metaphysics, which, in his view, resulted in an allergic reaction to the history of philosophy. He claims that the professional philosophers “reacted either by ignoring the great dead philosophers or by reinterpreting them so that they would be seen as addressing properly professional philosophical issues. The result of such reinterpretation was to obscure the presentness of the past and to separate the philosophy professors from their students and from transcendentalist culture.”5 Thus, professional philosophers introduced a new ahistorical canon that no longer included Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, but instead consisted of a new set of classics—Russell, Moore, Strawson, and Quine. Hence, when professional philosophers tended to move away from the traditional curriculum, the texts of European philosophy and history of philosophy became the property of other disciplines. The departments of literature, history, and politics, peopled by highbrows, were only too happy to incorporate the major figures of the European philosophical tradition into their own courses and canons.

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Although the conflict has its origins at the highest ideological level, its effects are most problematic in mundane decisions about pedagogy and the curriculum. Rorty writes, “I have heard analytic philosophers get furious at comparative literature departments for trespassing on philosophical turf by teaching Nietzsche and Derrida and doubly furious at the suggestion that they might teach it themselves.”6 Although the professional philosophers were content to forsake the European tradition, nevertheless when these practical matters come up at least some of them are defensive and suspicious of other disciplines due to differing opinions about methodology and argumentation. These debates about the curriculum thus become a lightning rod for more far-reaching ideological disputes. Rorty tries to effect reconciliation between these two competing camps by putting up what he sees as a defense for the highbrows and for literary culture.7 He thinks that the conflict is between two incommensurable paradigms whose respective practitioners talk past one another instead of genuinely trying to come to terms with the fundamental tenets of the opposing camp; yet, the discourse or reigning paradigm of both factions is of equal importance and relevance. In his defense of the literary critics’ form of understanding, he writes, “Dewey had still attempted to tell a great sweeping story about philosophy from Plato to himself, but philosophers in the professionalizing period distrusted such stories as ‘unscientific’ and ‘unscholarly.’ So they were, but they also form a genre of writing which is quite indispensable.”8 If the highbrows’ agenda, method, and mode of expression differ from those of the professional philosophers, they nonetheless have their own merits. At bottom here is what many regard as Rorty’s relativism—his willingness to give up the notion of truth in any weighty sense and his  advocacy of the maximal amount of interpretive plurality possible. From the standpoint of this relativism, the ideological concerns outlined above seem parochial since both views are in a sense correct and legitimate. Thus, concerning the debate between the highbrow and the professional philosopher, he writes, “I want to claim that this is not a conflict which we need view with any great concern nor try to resolve.”9 Rorty believes, in part correctly, that these rhetorical disputes at the ideological level are relatively benign and can be safely ignored; however, along with this reconciliatory stance comes a tone of complacency which overlooks the real problems they create with respect to the curriculum and philosophical didactics.10 Due to his relativism, Rorty is not concerned about analytic philosophy’s carrying on about its business and forsaking the European tradition: “It may be that American philosophy will continue to be more concerned with developing a disciplinary matrix than with its antecedents or its cultural role. No harm will be done by this, and possibly much good.”11 Rorty’s suggestion that much good could result from the predominance of professional philosophers is based, in part, on his belief in the value of the methods developed by analytic philosophy.12 He sees the analytic method as a valuable skill that is transferable to other spheres of activity. He writes, “Indeed, where style is the kind of argumentative skill I have described, it is enough to make it socially valuable. A nation can count itself lucky to have several thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecialized intellectuals who are exceptionally good at putting together arguments and pulling them apart. Such a group is a precious social resource.”13 One of philosophy’s contributions to the academic world or the general public at large is, he

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thinks, to be found in this method or acuity in argumentation. In any case, this claim about the usefulness and value of the analytic method is at least part of what underlies his complacency and his approval of the academic status quo. Rorty, in the passage cited above, also indicates that “no harm will be done” by the hegemony of the analytic or professional philosopher in the philosophy department. This is so, he believes, because the heroes of transcendentalist culture such as Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are not, in fact, casualties of this development as one might think since they will still be read and taught although not by the professional philosophers. He writes, “The dialectical dramas which began with Plato will continue. They will be enacted, if not by people paid to teach Plato, then by others. These may not be called ‘philosophers’ but something else, possibly ‘critics.’ ”14 According to this view, the subject matter that used to belong to philosophy has simply been innocuously passed on to other fields such as literature or intellectual history. Certain elements of the academic landscape have changed places, but nothing has been lost in the move. In the end students will still be able to read the classics of the philosophical tradition and receive instruction on them, and that, for Rorty, is the important thing.15 The cultural critic and the professional philosopher are thus able to live and let live since they do not share any real common ground which could be a potential source of conflict or competition. Rorty believes that he is making a plea for tolerance and diversity.16 The result is, however, that what counts as philosophy and appropriate philosophical writing becomes profoundly homogeneous.

II  An alternative view of the Anglophone academy Rorty’s analysis overlooks a third kind of academic situated midway between the professional philosophers and the critics, namely the historian of philosophy or the specialist in Continental philosophy. By this I mean very generally someone with philosophical training who does philosophical work on the major figures of the European tradition and is able to place them in their historical context. Rorty does not carve out any particular niche for European philosophy in his scheme and seems at times, by means of his vague term “transcendentalist culture,” to equate the European philosopher with the professor of comparative literature. This overlooks some important differences between the literary critic and the European philosopher. First, deconstruction, the current trend in literary theory that dominates many graduate programs and research agendas in comparative literature is, at least in its practice, profoundly ahistorical, and, in this respect, differs markedly from the tradition of European philosophy from which it sprung. Deconstruction itself is a product of the historical tradition—Derrida, for example, being part of a line that runs from Schleiermacher to Dilthey to Gadamer. Further, this is not to imply that at its most theoretical levels, deconstruction is ahistorical since obviously its most celebrated theorists are aware of their philosophical forerunners and generally have a thorough grounding in the history of philosophy. The claim here is a much more modest, indeed, fairly uncontroversial one, namely, that the practice of deconstruction has nothing to do with historical contextualization.

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A theoretical grounding of this approach may be found in Derrida’s concept of différance. Derrida’s notion of the indefinite deferring of meaning is intended to undermine all attempts to arrive at a final interpretation of a text. An interpretation that attempts to understand a work in the context of its particular time period or in accordance with the author’s intentions enjoys no interpretative privilege. All interpretations are simply leveled off, each possessing some sort of transitory meaning but none better than the other. With this theory of interpretation, it is hardly surprising that departments of comparative literature have in large measure become ahistorical. Reconstructing a work in the context of its own period requires time and effort which a deconstructive approach offers no incentive to expend. Thus, it is no longer unusual to find students of comparative literature who are unfamiliar with the traditional lines of interpretation of what used to be regarded as the standard works of the canon. The deconstructive critic stands in sharp contrast to the historian of philosophy or specialist for European philosophy who is by nature always historically oriented. Most of the major figures of the European tradition—Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger— have a story to tell about the history of philosophy and their place in it, and one cannot study them or effectively evaluate their works without an understanding of this. By dismissing history, the deconstructive approach turns a blind eye to a very important interpretative dimension. Second, many historians of philosophy in the Anglophone world share a good deal with their analytic colleagues with respect to presentation and methodology despite the disparity in interests and subject matter, and in this regard as well they differ from their counterparts in literary theory. Many Continental philosophers in Great Britain or the USA, trained in the analytic tradition, have successfully applied the tools of analytic philosophy to an assessment of the figures and movements of the European tradition, at times to such a degree that the end result is closer to analytic philosophy than European philosophy.17 (To make this point clear, one need only mention the body of Anglo-American Kant scholarship,18 which differs markedly from the German Kant scholarship and, indeed, constitutes a separate and independent research tradition.) Others have produced informed works on European philosophy at a greater distance from analytic origins while yet still employing analytic tools and forms of presentation.19 Thus, it seems that concept of the historian of philosophy in the Anglophone academy is a more elastic one than is generally recognized. The split between European philosophy and analytic philosophy is often overstated, with too much being made of the purported difference in methodology or level of argumentative rigor. Clearly, analytic philosophy is not the sole domicile of rigorous argumentation in the human sciences (an illusion of which one will be quickly disabused by the most casual survey of the journals of classical philology). Hence, in so far as most Continental philosophers in the Anglophone world have to some extent been influenced by the analytic method, they are to this degree to be distinguished from the highbrows who show nothing but disdain for such a method. These arguments, I hope, are enough to demonstrate that there are important distinctions to be made between historians of philosophy and highbrows, both of whom Rorty unhappily places under the umbrella of “transcendentalist culture.” I forego a detailed analysis of the distinction between the historian of philosophy

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and the analytic philosopher since I take it to be relatively unproblematic at least for Rorty. There are both important similarities and differences to be noted among all three academic profiles. The argument here has simply been that, although historians of philosophy and literary critics hold some important things in common, there are relevant differences between them that Rorty seems to overlook, and thus one must make room in the schema for the historian of philosophy as a third academic type. By lumping together the historian of philosophy and the highbrow, Rorty fails to perceive the danger to the curriculum and to responsible philosophical pedagogy that would come about when the standard texts of European philosophy are abandoned to other humanities fields.

III  The danger to the curriculum Contrary to Rorty’s claim, the ahistorical tendency in modern professional philosophy, as in contemporary comparative literature departments, has some serious and far-reaching results. The question is of course about not just the proper form of philosophical writing but also the proper form of philosophical reading. By insisting on a single form of writing, professional philosophy implicitly imposes a certain notion about how to read philosophy. This is where the problem comes in. If philosophers are only taught to read and interpret a certain, narrowly defined kind of text, they will be unable to recognize the philosophical importance or value in texts that are written in a different manner. Let us examine the case of one hero of transcendentalist culture whose corpus, one might argue, is gradually making the move from the philosophy department into the literature department. The work of Martin Heidegger is a paradigm case for what Rorty designates as “transcendentalist philosophy” or “cultural criticism.” It is couched in an esoteric, unscientific style that places it clearly on the side of literature and distances it from analytic philosophy. It concerns themes such as death, anxiety, and despair, all of which appeal to the “agonized conscience in the young” and all of which repel the professional philosopher. It seems to contain nothing of the argumentative rigor found in the analytic classics and which is a prerequisite for philosophical writing among the professional philosophers.20 In short, it seems, on the face of it, to lend itself quite well to the literary highbrows. But if one looks more closely, one realizes that Heidegger is, in fact, engaged in a philosophical project thoroughly rooted in the Western philosophical tradition. As a part of his own constructive project, Heidegger offers a critique of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes, just to name a few, and, thus, in order to understand him, one must first understand the tradition and not just the quasi-literary way in which he uses the language. The sort of ahistorical training that is presently offered by most comparative litera­ ture programs is clearly insufficient to provide students with the historical back­ ground requisite for profitably reading a philosopher such as Heidegger. The tendency is, in the absence of this historical training, simply to concentrate on internalizing Heidegger’s own language so that one can make use of it when convenient. However, the ability to dissemble one’s lack of comprehension and to feign a knowledge by the

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well-timed employment of a few catchphrases or bits of jargon is a far cry from genuine understanding of an author or a text. One could argue that the minority party in the literature camp—the group that still reads the important works from the literary tradition and, for the sake of convenience, can be called littérateurs—might be in a better position to understand the texts of European philosophy than their colleagues in literary theory. However, one must still harbor grave reservations about even this group’s ability to come to terms with the complexity of a thinker such as Heidegger. Although they may read some traditional philosophical texts, the classics that they are expected to master form a different, albeit at times overlapping, canon. Instead of learning Aristotle and Descartes, they learn Shakespeare and Goethe. And even when the texts do fortuitously overlap, the littérateurs concern themselves with a set of problems different from those treated by philosophers. Thus, for example, they tend to focus on Heidegger’s images or linguistic style rather than his ontology or phenomenology per se. One might receive the impression from the foregoing chapters that the point of this study is to make the argument for reading philosophy as literature. But this is not the case. To read philosophical texts as literature is to miss the specifically philosophical meaning that they contain. The point is rather that philosophy is many things, and therefore it requires many different interpretative methods and skills, some of which might be borrowed from literature (or history or other fields). But this is not to say that while reading a text in this way, one forgets one’s philosophical skills. Thus it might be useful to study certain philosophical texts with literary tools, but this is not to imply that the goal is to read them as literature or to reduce them to purely literary texts. Literary training, when seen from a philosophical point of view (although certainly not from any absolute perspective), is superficial in that it does not prepare one to evaluate the kinds of arguments, which, despite what Rorty says, are to be found in the writings of the great European philosophers. In order to understand a text such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, one must first have not only a solid familiarity with the history of philosophy but also the ability to interpret and reconstruct arguments, a skill, which differs markedly from the ability to interpret symbols and metaphors. The transcendentalist colleagues in comparative literature, where Heidegger’s migration seems to be destined, cannot be expected to employ this sort of logical analysis since they learn to employ a different set of interpretive skills. The skills that they are called upon to master involve interpretation not of arguments but of literary devices. Again, this is not meant as a critique of transcendentalist culture in general or of comparative literature in particular since for all their philosophical weaknesses, the highbrows make up for with literary strengths that the professional philosophers almost universally lack. The point is rather that if the instructors from the literature department do not have philosophical training, then they will presumably miss the philosophical import of the texts that they have inherited from the philosophy department. They will not be attentive to the philosophical aspects of the works since they will simply be looking for other things. While they may indeed be reading philosophical texts, what comes out of that reading will not necessarily be anything particularly philosophical. The problem that comes about for the students and the damage that this migration of history of philosophy has done to the curriculum is easy to discern and can be seen

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in terms of a simple question about the appropriate deference held for specialization. By leaving Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the rest in the hands of the literature department, one is effectively requiring these difficult authors be taught by people who lack the specialized training necessary to understand their agendas. Consigning the philosophical tradition to the literature department thus creates something of a double standard with respect to the specialized training necessary to understand and teach the subject matter. Philosophy departments are populated with research specialists whose prime pedagogical responsibility is to teach courses in their respective areas of specialization. This tendency toward specialization is generally regarded, with some qualifications, as a positive development for philosophy as a professionalized discipline. How then can this be squared with Rorty’s expectation that the literature department will be able to take over teaching the tradition when the training that one receives in literature only in the vaguest sense resembles that received in philosophy and has not visibly changed to meet the demands of the new subject matter? Clearly, this offends the instincts of the modern specialist, according to which one must have a certain level of expertise in an area before deigning to offer a course in it. Thus, there seems to be an odd contradiction at work in Rorty’s assumption: he believes that specialization is necessary for modern analytic philosophy but not for the works of the philosophical tradition. Given the training received in comparative literature departments vis-à-vis that in philosophy, even a minimal level of competence with the difficult texts of European philosophy is too much to expect from most literary critics or even from old school littérateurs. Perhaps a brief example will help to elucidate the criticism. An instructor in the comparative literature department, in the course of the routine duties in a Western civilization program, was given the task of teaching Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Instead of analyzing Hume’s arguments by putting together premises with conclusions, she did what her literary training had prepared her to do, analyzing Hume’s metaphors and symbols. It may well be that Hume’s Dialogues contain a rich network of imagery that was hitherto unknown and neglected by philosophers. But nonetheless such a purely literary approach overlooks the philosophical meaning which was clearly intended, and this, although perhaps a matter of indifference to the literature department, represents a substantial loss to the philosophy department. Another scenario of the literary critic in the philosophy classroom would be a deconstructionist approach to Hume, which would be likewise unhelpful and uninformative to most students. Such an interpretation might tell us a great deal about deconstructionist theory and methodology but little or nothing about Hume. For established schools of interpretation such as deconstruction, Marxism, Freudianism, etc., the text quickly becomes in a sense irrelevant and in the end is used merely as an occasion for learning more about the interpretative method that is being employed. Each approach has its merits, but none is likely to shed light on the purely philosophical aspects of what were expressly intended to be philosophical works. Hence, in this case as well, the philosophical meaning of Hume’s text would be lost. Thus, it seems that, with literary training being what it is, the possibilities of effective philosophical pedagogy coming from a literary critic are quite remote.

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When authors such as Nietzsche and Heidegger are abandoned by the philosophy department and become adopted by comparative literature, then a great deal is lost, not least of all the philosophical meaning of those authors. As Rorty says, traditional authors will still be read, and students will still have the chance to learn about them, but it is hardly a matter of indifference, as Rorty thinks, how these authors are read. The real question is will they be understood in a philosophically meaningful way? If they are read inappropriately or taught by instructors lacking the requisite philosophical training, then it is not clear what really remains of them in the final analysis. Although, as Rorty says, there is no point to the useless rhetoric between the two sorts of intellectuals about who the real philosophers are and about what really counts for philosophical inquiry, nevertheless one needs to make sure that the sort of intellectual who has the ability to understand these historically based philosophical texts in a philosophical way does not disappear from the faculty in philosophy.

IV  The current homogeneity and the perils of conformity The danger in modern academic philosophy in the Anglophone world is that the homogeneity with respect to the form of philosophical writing unknowingly promotes an intellectual intolerance by denying a forum to those philosophical positions that demand a form of expression at odds with the standard one. If the goal is to create an intellectual atmosphere that stimulates creativity and originality instead of one in which a sterile and limiting conformity with regard to style and genre is not only accepted but even mandatory, then one must not merely grudgingly accept or impassively suffer variation in philosophical expression but rather actively encourage it. The suggestion here is not that professional philosophers all turn to writing poetry as the later Heidegger did or that academic journals for symbolic logic should start accepting short stories instead of articles with formalized arguments. There is nothing wrong with the current mode of academic expression per se. But rather the problem lies in the fact that this current mode counts as the only acceptable genre of philosophical writing. The claim is that when one reads the philosophers of the tradition, one should resist the automatic urge to attempt to formalize their arguments or to reformulate them into the language or form of analytic philosophy. Instead, the question should be raised about what importance the literary genre or style might have for the arguments in question. The relation between the content of the argument and its form needs to be taken seriously. This opens the door to accepting ostensibly literary works as a potential source of philosophical discussion and argumentation. Surely, the solution to the problem of conformity in philosophical reading and ­writing  is not, as Rorty says, simply abandoning the history of philosophy to other ­disciplines. Philosophy is not literature, but literature can contain philosophy. Persuasion can take many forms, and persuasive arguments can be expressed in many ways. Given this, is philosophy served by dictating a highly conformist conception of writing to its practitioners? Does this not in the end undermine the philosophical project as such? In Anglophone philosophical circles today one often hears self-laudatory phrases

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about  how the discipline has become more heterogeneous than ever, about how new research programs and trends are readily encouraged and accepted. A closer look, however, reveals that these are simply empty words. In fact, despite all the countless philosophical societies, conferences, and journals, philosophy—with respect to its form of expression—has never been more conformist in its history than it is today. The argument here is not that there are some specific literary genres that best express specific philosophical points, for example, that novels are the best expression for certain themes in moral philosophy.21 There is no claim here to the necessity of expressing a specific philosophical position with a specific literary genre. The point has rather been to demonstrate the more general claim that certain philosophical positions, given their cultural or historical context, are better suited to specific forms of expression than others and that by obliging them to conform to a single uniform manner of expression one ultimately undermines their effectiveness. This simple lesson should serve as a clear warning about the dangers of imposing a rigid standard and insisting on an unvarying homogeneity with respect to philosophical writing. Philosophical enquiry has always flourished in an atmosphere of open-mindedness, tolerance, diversity, and plurality. Given this, the current unbending dogmatism about the proper form of philosophical expression in the Anglophone world is both highly perplexing and deeply disturbing.

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Notes Introduction 1 Compare the following list with that of Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/ of Literature,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited by John Rajchman and Cornel West, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 67. See also Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 27–8. Julián Marías, Philosophy as Dramatic Theory, translated by James Parsons, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971, pp. 5–6. For more recent accounts of the notion of genre in philosophy, see Jonathan Allen Lavery and Louis Groarke (eds), Literary Form, Philosophical Content: Historical Studies of Philosophical Genres, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Michael A. Peters (ed.), Academic Writing, Philosophy and Genre, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 2 See Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 3 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today” in his Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. 219. 4 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture” in his Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 63. 5 For a good account of the neglect of the history of philosophy, see the following: Richard H. Popkin, The High Road of Pyrrhonism, San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980, pp. 3–10. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “History of Philosophy and History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1, 1964, pp. 1–15. 6 See Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited by John Rajchman and Cornel West, pp. 65–6. 7 See Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, pp. 121–2. 8 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, New York: Dover Publications, 1952 (originally published in 1936). 9 Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932, pp. 219–41. (English translation: “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” translated by Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer, New York: The Free Press, 1959, pp. 60–81.) 10 For an interesting alternative account of how philosophy took this “purely conceptual” approach to writing, see Paul Feyerabend, “Let’s Make More Movies” in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, edited by Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell, New York: MacGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975, p. 205. Feyerabend’s claim is much broader than mine. His main target is a kind of thinking that encourages dogmatism in philosophy and the sciences, the result of which is a certain kind of writing. 11 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” translated by Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer, pp. 64–5.

172 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Notes Ibid., p. 64. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 35. Ibid., p. 35. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 69. Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 1965, p. 34: “Das Nichts selbst nichtet.” (This text was delivered as a lecture on July 24, 1928 at the University of Freiburg and was originally published in the same year.) Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 69. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 45. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” from Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 94. Brand Blanshard cleverly problematizes the imperative that philosophers should attempt to write as clearly as possible in his On Philosophical Style, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954, pp. 27ff. Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited by John Rajchman and Cornel West, p. 64. See also Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, p. 11. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 45. Paul Feyerabend, “Let’s Make More Movies,” in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, edited by Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell, pp. 206–7. For an interesting discussion of this split see Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today” from Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 223–7. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 67. For a good account of this and other kinds of conformism in modern philosophy, see Paul Feyerabend, “Let’s Make More Movies,” in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, edited by Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell, p. 207. Richard Popkin makes a similar point about the importance of interpretative and linguistic skills in the study of the great philosophers of the past. Richard H. Popkin, The High Road of Pyrrhonism, pp. 5–7. See Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited by John Rajchman and Cornel West, pp. 66–7. Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, p. 13. Julián Marías, Philosophy as Dramatic Theory, pp. 2–4. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today” from Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 226.

Chapter 1 1 Only fairly recently has the dialogical form of Plato’s work begun to be recognized as something of philosophical significance. See Charles H. Khan, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. For an account of the dramatic elements in Plato, see Henry G. Wolz, “Philosophy as Drama: An Approach to Plato’s Dialogues,” International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2, 1963, pp. 236–70. See also his “Philosophy

Notes

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

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as Drama: An Approach to Plato’s Symposium,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 30, no. 3, 1970, pp. 323–53. See Charles H. Khan, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, pp. 3ff. Kahn points out that the question is rarely raised of whether the dialogues might be some kind of artistic construct that merely pretends to be historically accurate. Phaedrus, 274c-279c. See Thomas Alexander Szlezák, “Gespräche unter Ungleichen. Zur Struktur und Zielsetzung der platonischen Dialoge,” in Literarische Formen der Philosophie, edited by Gottfried Gabriel and Christiane Schildknecht, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990, pp. 40–61. Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Platon und die Schriftlichkeit der Philosophie, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Charles H. Khan, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, pp. 371–92. Phaedrus, 275d-e. Plato, Theaetetus, 143b-c. English translation quoted from the Theaetetus, translated by F. M. Cornford in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 848. See Charles H. Khan’s “Sokratikoi logoi: the Literary and Intellectual Background of Plato’s Work,” Chapter 1 in his Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, pp. 1–35. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 52. See, for example, Meno, 79e-80a. In addition to the Apology, see also the Euthyphro, 2c-3a. Aristotle, who inherits Plato’s disdain for the Sophists describes them as follows: “the art of the Sophist is the semblance of wisdom without the reality, and the Sophist is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom.” On Sophistical Refutations, 165a 22. English translation quoted from The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited and translated by Richard McKeon, New York: Random House, 1941, p. 209. Socrates mentions at his trial some of the Sophists by name in order to distinguish himself from their practice of teaching the young for a fee. See Apology, 19e. For example, Meno 91c and ff.; 95b and ff. Plato, Protagoras, 315c. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Protagoras, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 308–52. Plato, Protagoras, 318a. Ibid., 320c-328d. Ibid., 328d. Ibid., 329b. Ibid., 334c. Ibid., 334c-d. Ibid., 336b-d. Ibid., 338a. Plato, Gorgias, 449b. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Gorgias, translated by W. D. Woodhead in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 229–307. Plato, Gorgias, 449b-c. Ibid., 449c. Ibid. Ibid., 449d. Ibid.

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27 Plato, Apology, 21a. 28 Ibid., 23a-b. 29 Plato, Meno, 71b. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Meno, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 353–84. 30 Plato, Meno, 70a-b. 31 Ibid., 70b-71a. 32 Ibid., 71b. 33 Ibid., 71b-c. 34 Plato, Protagoras, 320b-c. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Protagoras, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 308–52. 35 Plato, Protagoras, 320c. 36 Plato, Euthyphro, 4a-b. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Euthyphro, translated by Lane Cooper in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 169–85. 37 Plato, Euthyphro, 4b. 38 Ibid., 4e. 39 Ibid., 4e-5a. 40 Ibid., 5a. 41 Plato, Meno, 82b-86c. 42 Ibid., 85d. 43 Ibid., 81a-e. 44 Pindar, fragment 133. 45 Plato, Theaetetus, 148e. All English translations of this dialogue come from the Theaetetus, translated by F. M. Cornford in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, pp. 845–919. 46 Plato, Theaetetus, 150b. 47 Ibid., 150c-d. 48 Ibid., 150d.

Chapter 2 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 58; L’Être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard, 1943, p. 93. 2 See Eugène Albertini, La composition dans les ouvrages philosophiques de Sénèque, Paris: Anciennes Maisons Thorin et Fontemoing de Boccard, 1923. Robert Coleman, “The Artful Moralist: A Study of Seneca’s Epistolary Style,” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 24, 1974, pp. 276–89. H. Mac L. Currie, “Der Stil des jüngeren Seneca: Einige Beobachtungen,” in Seneca als Philosoph, edited by Gregor Maurach, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987, pp. 203–27. 3 See H. Mac L. Currie, “Der Stil des jüngeren Seneca: Einige Beobachtungen,” pp. 203–27. 4 E.g. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48, 88, 108. All of the Latin quotations are from the Oxford Classical Text, L. Annaei Senecae ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, edited by L. D. Reynolds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. All translations of Seneca’s letters come from Letters from a Stoic, translated by Robin Campbell. Penguin, 1969.

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5 See Seneca’s account in De Providentia. 6 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 5.4; Letters, p. 37. 7 For this same reason Seneca also criticizes extravagance, ostentation, opulence, avarice and luxury: Epistulae Morales, 5, 7, 9, 16, 55, 63, 77, 90. 8 See Epistulae Morales, 15, 18, 60, 63, 91, 104, 107. 9 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 9.15; Letters, p. 51. 10 Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, New York: Bantam, 1971, pp. 157–62. 11 Livy, The Early History of Rome, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960, p. 45. 12 Sallust, The Jugurthine War/The Conspiracy of Catiline, translated by S. A. Handford, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, p. 175. 13 See, for example, Cicero, On the Good Life, translated by Michael Grant, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, pp. 139–43. Unfortunately we can only speculate about what was written on this topic in his lost work De Gloria. 14 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, p. 347. 15 Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, p. 357; Book XV.870–9. 16 Pliny, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, translated by Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, p. 235; IX.3. 17 Ibid., p. 145; V.8. 18 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 15. 19 Ibid., 86. 20 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 65.21-22; Letters, p. 123. 21 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 15.1-2; Letters, p. 60. Elsewhere, he writes, “So keep the body within bounds as much as you can and make room for the spirit” (Epistulae Morales, 15.2-3; Letters, p. 60). 22 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 8.5; Letters, p. 45. 23 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 65; Letters, p. 122. See Plato, Phaedo, 822ff. There a similar claim is made about body as prisonhouse. Seneca uses the same image in “Consolation of Helvia”: “The body, the prison and fetter of the soul.” Cited from The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, translated by Moses Hadas, Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958, p. 124. 24 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 8.5-6; Letters, p. 46. 25 See M. Gwyn Morgan, “Priests and Physical Fitness. A Note on Roman Religion,” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 24, 1974, pp. 137–41. 26 Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, p. 81; Book IV.11. 27 Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, p. 86; Book IV.141. 28 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 41. 29 Ibid., 41, 78. 30 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, 13.37; 1177b25 ff. 31 See “Consolation of Helvia,” § 6: “Man’s mind was not compacted of earthly and ponderous matter, but descended from the lofty heavenly spirit.” Cited from The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 114. See also § 11, p. 124, Ibid. 32 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 41.8; Letters, pp. 88f. 33 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 7.8; Letters, p. 43. See the parallel passage in “On the Tranquility of the Soul,” § 17, in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 104. 34 In “On the Shortness of Life,” Seneca gives the same argument against taking public office, encouraging a withdrawal into the private life. See § 2, § 3, § 4, § 5, § 17, § 20.

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35 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 9.13; Letters, p. 51. 36 Cicero, On the Good Life, translated by Michael Grant, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 354. 37 Of which, the English words “idiot” and “idiocy” are obvious cognates. 38 Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus, translated by Clinton Walker Keyes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928, p. 29; Book I.12. 39 See E. H. Sandbach’s discussion in his The Stoics, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975, pp. 101–8. 40 See Hegel’s reference to the Stoic indifference of being “on the throne or in chains.” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 121; Hegel, Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols. 1–26, edited by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1927–40, vol. 2, p. 160. 41 Livy, The Early History of Rome, pp. 105ff. 42 Ibid., p. 101. 43 Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by Michael Grant, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, p. 37. 44 Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, p. 77. 45 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957, p. 191. 46 In his letters 88 and 90, Seneca distinguishes philosophy as a discipline from the other liberal studies. See Alfred Stückelberger, Senecas 88. Brief über Wert und Unwert der freien Kunst, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1965. 47 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.4; Letters, p. 97. 48 Ibid., p. 97. 49 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.5; Letters, p. 97. 50 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.6; Letters, p. 97. See “On the Shortness of Life,” § 13, in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 65. 51 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.7; Letters, pp. 97f. 52 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 83.9-10; Letters, p. 142. See “On the Shortness of Life,” § 10, in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, pp. 58–9. 53 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 83.18; Letters, p. 143. 54 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 88.42; Letters, p. 160. See “On the Shortness of Life,” § 13, in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 63. See Alfred Stückelberger, Senecas 88. Brief über Wert und Unwert der freien Kunst, especially “Der Kampf gegen die Vielwisserei,” pp. 71–6. 55 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 108.23; Letters, p. 207. 56 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.12; Letters, p. 99. 57 The Stoics had always used logical paradoxes as a tool to express their philosophy. The most famous of these is perhaps the liar’s paradox. See Cicero’s collection and defense of several of these paradoxes in his Paradoxa Stoicorum. 58 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 56.8; Letters, p. 111. 59 See “On Tranquillity of the Mind,” § 5, in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 86. 60 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 28.8; Letters, p. 77. 61 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 8.7; Letters, p. 46. 62 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 47.17; Letters, p. 95. 63 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 86.12-13; Letters, p. 148. 64 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 83.27; Letters, p. 144. 65 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 48.2-3; Letters, p. 96. 66 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 8.8; Letters, p. 46.

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Chapter 3 1 All references to Erasmus’ works are to Desiderii Erasmi Opera Omnia, vols. 1–10, edited by Jean Leclerc, Leiden: Petrus Vander, 1703–06; unchanged reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962 (hereafter Opera Omnia). The English translations are taken from Praise of Folly, translated by Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. 2 See Erasmus’ debate with Luther on the freedom of the will, De Libero Arbitrio διατριβή sive Collatio (Opera Omnia, vol. 9, pp. 1215–48). Erasmus-Luther, Discourse on Free Will, translated and edited by Ernst F. Winter, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961. 3 See Thomas Rentsch, “Die Kultur der quaestio. Zur literarischen Formgeschichte der Philosophie im Mittelalter,” in Literarische Formen der Philosophie, edited by Gottfried Gabriel and Christiane Schildknecht, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990, pp. 73–91. 4 From the Introduction of Scotus’ God and Creatures, translated by Felix Alluntis and Allan B. Wolter, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. XXIV. 5 Ibid., p. XVX. 6 Anders Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning, translated by David Jones, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981, p. 148. 7 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 201; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 499. 8 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 197; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 497. 9 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 199; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 498. 10 See Praise of Folly, p. 201; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, pp. 499f.: “Secondly, you can see how the first great founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter enemies of learning.” 11 For a good account of this transposition, see M. A. Screech, Erasmus: Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly, London: Penguin, 1980, pp. 18–26. 12 Folly is citing 1 Corinthians 3:18. For Folly’s scriptural quotations, I use the Revised Standard Version translation. 13 Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, Vorrede, 41–2, cited from Das Narrenschiff, edited by Hans-Joachim Mähl, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964, p. 8. For an interesting comparison of this work with the Praise of Folly, see Georg Baschnagel, “Narrenschiff ” und “Lob der Torheit”. Zusammenhänge und Beziehungen, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1979. 14 1 Corinthians 1:19. 15 Compare Shakespeare’s character Viola in Twelfth Night, who notes: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit. /. . . . / . . . This is a practice / As full of labor as a wise man’s art; / For folly that he wisely shows, is fit; / But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit.” Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene I, lines 58–66. Cited from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Alfred Harbage, London: Penguin, 1969, p. 321. 16 Helmut Wiemken (ed.), Die Volksbücher von Till Ulenspiegel, Hans Clawert und den Schildbürgern, Bremen: Carl Schünemann Verlag, 1962, p. 26. 17 Romans 7:25. 18 See Zoja Pavlovskis’ discussion, The Praise of Folly: Structure and Irony, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983, pp. 198ff. 19 In his debate with Luther on the freedom of the will, Erasmus criticizes Luther’s doctrine of predestination and defends his own account of how works done freely

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Notes play a crucial role in salvation. De Libero Arbitrio διατριβή sive Collatio (Opera Omnia, vol. 9, pp. 1215–48). See Herbert B. Rothschild, “Blind and Purblind: A Reading of the Praise of Folly,” Neophilologus, vol. 54, 1970, pp. 230ff. Cited from Richmond Lattimore’s translation of The Bacchae in Euripides V, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959, line 1005. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 152; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, pp. 462f. Compare Praise of Folly, p. 155; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 465: “There are any amount of ‘quibbles’ even more refined than these, about concepts, formalities, quiddities, ecceities, which no one could possibly perceive unless like Lynceus he could see through the blackest darkness things which don’t exist.” See Miller’s account of Erasmus’ use of lists and catalogues. Clarence Miller, “The Logic and Rhetoric of Proverbs in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly,” in Essays on the Works of Erasmus, edited by Richard L. DeMolen, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 86. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 153; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 464. Compare Praise of Folly, p. 171; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 477: “Then they let fly at the ignorant crowd their syllogisms, major and minor, conclusions, corollaries, idiotic hypotheses and further scholastic rubbish.” Erasmus, Ten Colloquies, translated by Craig Thompson, Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957, p. 155; Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 682. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 156; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, pp. 465f.: “Jam has subtilissimas subtilitates subtiliores etiam reddunt tot Scholasticorum viæ, ut citius e labyrinthis temet explices, quam ex involucris Realium, Nominalium, Thomistarum, Albertistarum, Occanistarum, Scotistarum, & nondum omneis dixi, sed præcipuas dumtaxat.” See Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 156; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 466: “Such is the erudition and complexity they all display that I fancy the apostles themselves would need the help of another holy spirit if they were obliged to join issue on these topics with our new breed of theologian.” Erasmus, Praise of Folly, pp. 157–9; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, pp. 466f. Compare Douglas: “He [sc. Erasmus] does not merely set himself to write satire, come what may: he writes satirically when satire is the right weapon.” A. E. Douglas, “Erasmus as a Satirist,” in Erasmus, edited by T. A. Dorey, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 32. See Miller’s discussion: “Narrow-minded monks and theologians could (and did) dissect his ‘serious’ works and refute them piecemeal, however unfairly. But such a method (though they tried it) could not really work against Folly’s laughter at their wrongheaded subtlety and preposterous arrogance. Their irritation and frustration probably arose from an awareness, however dim, that to take Folly seriously was to seem foolish indeed and to deploy their heavy artillery against her was to show the whole world that they were sour cranks, incapable of understanding or enjoying a good joke. No one, however foolish, likes to be shown up as a fool in such a way that his denial, however energetic, only confirms his folly.” Clarence H. Miller, “Introduction” in Moriae Encomium id est Stultitiae Laus, edited by Clarence H. Miller, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, Amsterdam, Oxford: North Holland Publishing Company, 1979, ordo 4, tome 3, pp. 24–5. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 215; Opera Omnia, vol. 9, pp. 2f.

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Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 59; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 403. Ibid. Ibid. Compare Dorp’s criticism: Epistola Apologetica ad Martinum Dorpium Theologum pro Moria, (Opera Omnia, vol. 9, pp. 1–16). Also see Opus Epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vols. I–XII, edited by P. S. Allen, Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–58, inter alia, VI.305, VII.351, VII.12ff. E.g., Brant’s Das Narrenschiff, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus Teutsch and the Volksbücher, Till Eulenspiegel and the Lalebuch. See Miller’s “Introduction” in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ordo 4, tome 3, p. 25. See also Preserved Smith, “The Praise of Folly,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Praise of Folly, edited by Kathleen Williams, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pretence-Hall, 1969, p. 17. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 59; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 403. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 208; Opera Omnia, vol. 4, p. 504: “pοllάki tοi kaὶ mwϱὸϚ ἀnὴϱ katakaίϱiοn eἶpen.”

Chapter 4 1 For example in Emile, he has the Savoyard priest explain his method of rejecting book learning as follows: “Still following the same method, I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy. I find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface.” Rousseau, Emile or On Education, translated by Barbara Foxley, NuVision Publications, 2007, p. 262. Émile, ou de l’éducation, vols. 1–4, Amsterdam: Jean Néaulme, 1762, vol. 3, p. 90. 2 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, translated by Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1983, p. 41; “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,” in Werkausgabe, vols. 1–12, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, vol. 11, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik 1, p. 53. 3 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vols. 1–2, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1939, vol. 1, pp. 235f. 4 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 236. 5 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 237. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 238. 8 Ibid. 9 See David O’Connor, Hume on Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 4. 10 Dieu et les hommes, oeuvre théologique, mais raisonnable, par le Docteur Obern, traduit par Jaques Aimon, Berlin: Christian de Vos, 1769. 11 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 236–91. Émile, ou de l’éducation, vol. 3, pp. 19–188. 12 In a letter, Hume in fact states directly the reason why he did not want to publish the Dialogues even though his friends thought it was the best thing he had ever written: “I have hitherto forborne to publish it, because I was of late desirous to live quietly

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Notes and keep remote from all Clamour.” He acknowledges that Philo “advances several Topics, which will give Umbrage, and will be deemed very bold and free, as well as much out of the Common Road.” See “Appendix C. Evidence Bearing on the Times of Composition and Revision of the Dialogues, and on Hume’s Arrangements for Their Posthumous Publication” in Norman Kemp Smith’s edition of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947, p. 90. See ibid., pp. 87–96. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Eric Steinberg, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977, Section XI, p. 91. Ibid., Section XI, p. 92. Ibid., Section XI, p. 93. Ibid., Section XI, p. 94. Ibid., Section XI, p. 95. Ibid. Ibid., Section XI, p. 97. Ibid., Section XI, p. 98. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin, Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 51: “When two species of objects have always been observed to be conjoined together, I can infer, by custom, the existence of one wherever I see the existence of the other: And this I call an argument from experience. But how this argument can have place, where the objects, as in the present case, are single, individual, without parallel, or specific resemblance, may be difficult to explain.” See also p. 49: “Unless the cases be exactly similar, they repose no perfect confidence in applying their past observation to any particular phenomenon. Every alteration of circumstances occasions a doubt concerning the event; and it requires new experiments to prove certainly, that the new circumstances are of no moment or importance.” Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XI, pp. 101f. Ibid., Section XI, p. 102. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin, p. 29. For Hume’s Dialogues, see J. C. A. Gaskin, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, London: Macmillan, 1978. Stanley Tweyman, Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin, p. 29. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. (Punctuation slightly modified.) Ibid., p. 30. Ibid. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., pp. 101f. Ibid., pp. 112f. Diderot attempted a similar misdirection strategy, albeit without success, in Philosophical Thoughts (1746), where he argues for deism throughout the work but at the end suddenly professes his belief in Catholicism. See Philosophical Thoughts in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Writings, translated by Margaret Jourdain, Chicago and London: Open Court, 1916, pp. 27–67, see Section LVIII, p. 64.

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38 Ibid., p. 116. 39 Ibid., p. 118: “A false, absurd system, human nature, from the force of prejudice, is capable of adhering to with obstinacy and perseverance: But no system at all, in opposition to a theory, supported by strong and obvious reason, by natural propensity, and by early education, I think it absolutely impossible to maintain or defend.” 40 Ibid., pp. 118f. 41 See “Appendix A. An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.” in Norman Kemp Smith’s edition of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 76. 42 Ibid., p. 76. 43 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, p. 238. 44 “Appendix A. An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.” pp. 76f. 45 Ibid., p. 78. 46 See “Appendix C. Evidence Bearing on the Times of Composition and Revision of the Dialogues, and on Hume’s Arrangements for Their Posthumous Publication” in Norman Kemp Smith’s edition of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pp. 88f. See also “Introduction” in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin, p. xviii.

Chapter 5 1 The “fragments” were originally published as follows: (1) “Von Duldung der Deisten: Fragment eines Ungenannten,” in Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, vol. 3, edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Braunschweig: Im Verlage der Buchhandlung des Fürstl. Waysenhauses, 1774, pp. 195–226. (2) “Ein Mehreres aus den Papieren des Ungenannten, die Offenbarung betreffend,” in Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, vol. 4, edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Braunschweig: Im Verlage der Buchhandlung des Fürstl. Waysenhauses, 1777, pp. 261–88. (3) “Zweytes Fragment. Unmöglichkeit einer Offenbarung, die alle Menschen auf eine gegründetet Art glauben könnten,” in ibid., pp. 288–365. (4) “Drittes Fragment. Durchgang der Israeliten durchs rothe Meer,” in ibid., pp. 366–83. (5) “Viertes Fragment. Daß die Bücher A. T. nicht geschreiben worden, eine Religion zu offenbaren,” in ibid., pp. 384–436. (6) “fünftes Fragment. Ueber die Auferstehungsgeschichte,” in ibid., pp. 437–94. (7) Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger. Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten, edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. For modern reprints, see Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, vols. 1–2, edited by Gerhard Alexander, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1972. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, edited by Herbert G. Göpfert et al., vols. 1–8, Munich: Carl Hanser, 1970–79, vol. 7, Theologiekritische Schriften, pp. 313–604. Partial English translation: Reimarus, Fragments, edited by Charles H. Talbert, translated by Ralph S. Fraser, London: Fortress Press, 1971. 2 See William Baird, History of New Testament Research, vol. 1, From Deism to Tübingen, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 165–77. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 113–16. 3 Lessing, “Editorial Commentary on the ‘Fragments’ of Reimarus,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge

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Notes University Press, 2005, p. 61; “Gegensätze des Herausgebers,” in Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, vol. 4, edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Braunschweig: Im Verlage der Buchhandlung des Fürstl. Waysenhauses, 1777, p. 263. Reimarus, Fragments, § 7, p. 71; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] I, § 7, pp. 18f. Reimarus, Fragments, § 9, p. 74; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] I, § 9, pp. 23f. Reimarus, Fragments, § 30, pp. 127f.; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] I, § 30, p. 115. Reimarus, Fragments, § 7, p. 147; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] II, § 7, pp. 147f. Reimarus, Fragments, § 31, p. 129; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] I, § 31, pp. 117f. Reimarus, Fragments, § 33, p. 134; Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, [Part] I, § 33, pp. 126f. For the controversy in general, see Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought, Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1966, pp. 80–120. Toshimasa Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 41–71. Karl Barth, “Lessing” in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Brian Cozens and John Bowden, London: SCM Press, 2001, pp. 220–51. William Baird, History of New Testament Research, vol. 1, From Deism to Tübingen, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 165–77. Johann Daniel Schumann, Ueber die Evidenz der Beweise für die Wahrheit der Christlichen Religion, Hannover: Im Verlag der Schmidtschen Buchhandlung, 1778. Johann Heinrich Ress, Die Auferstehungs-Geschichte Jesu Christi gegen einige im vierten Beytrage zu Geschichte und Litteratur aus den Schätzen der herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel gemachte neuere Einwendungen vertheidigt, Braunschweig: Im Verlage der Fürstl. Waysenhaus-Buchhandlung, 1777. Johann Melchior Goeze, Etwas Vorläufiges gegen des Herrn Hofrats Lessings mittelbare und unmittelbare feindselige Angriffe auf unsre allerheiligste Religion, und auf den einigen Lehrgrund derselben, die heilige Schrift, Hamburg: D.A. Harmsen, 1778. Lessing, “A Rejoinder,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 99; Eine Duplik, Braunschweig: In der Buchhandlung des Fürstl. Waisenhauses, 1778, p. 13. Lessing, “Editorial Commentary on the ‘Fragments’ of Reimarus,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 63; “Gegensätze des Herausgebers,” in Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, vol. 4, p. 495. See also “Axioms,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 127; Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778, pp. 21f. With the title of this piece Lessing refers to 1 Corinthians 2:3-5, where Paul says, “And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” Here the point is that it is “the Spirit” and “the power” that in antiquity had the persuasive power for people (i.e., through miracles, fulfilled prophecies, etc.), but today this power has been lost since miracles no longer

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happen. See Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 84; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, Braunschweig: n.p. 1777, pp. 5f. Lessing, “A Rejoinder,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 100; Eine Duplik, p. 17. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 85; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, p. 9. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 88; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, pp. 15f. Lessing, “A Rejoinder,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 105; Eine Duplik, p. 28. Lessing, “Axioms,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 140; Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, p. 58. Lessing, “A Rejoinder,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 103f.; Eine Duplik, pp. 24f. See Letter to Lessing from Duke Karl of Brunswick, August 17, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, edited by Karl Lachmann, 3rd edn by Franz Muncker, vols. 1–23, Stuttgart and Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung 1886–1924, vol. 21, pp. 223–4 (letter 762). This connection has been noted in the following Toshimasa Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, p. 42, pp. 72–88. The present analysis is indebted to that of Yasukata. See Lessing’s Letter to Karl Lessing, August 11, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 18, p. 285 (letter 611). Ibid., pp. 285f. (letter 611). See also Lessing’s Letter to Elise Reimarus, September 6, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 18, p. 287 (letter 613). It has been quite plausibly claimed that Goeze was the model for the figure of the Patriarch. See Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, p. 75. Lessing, “Editorial Commentary on the ‘Fragments’ of Reimarus,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 63; “Gegensätze des Herausgebers,” p. 495: “In short, the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. Consequently, objections to the letter, and to the Bible, need not also be objections to the spirit and to religion.” See Letter to Lessing from Karl Lessing, August 25, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 21, p. 226 (letter 765). Ibid. See Lessing’s Letter to Karl Lessing, October 20, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 18, p. 289 (letter 615). Ibid. See Lessing’s Letter to Elise Reimarus, September 6, 1778, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 18, p. 287 (letter 613). Friedrich von Schlegel, “Ueber Lessing,” in Lyceum der schönen Künste, vol. 1, Part 2, Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1797, p. 127. Lessing, Anti-Goeze, D. i. Nothgedrungener Beyträge zu den freywilligen Beyträgen des Hrn Past. Goeze Erster, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Zweyter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Dritter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Vierter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Fünfter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Sechster, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Siebenter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778.

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Notes Anti-Goeze. Achter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Neunter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Zehnter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Anti-Goeze. Eilfter, Braunschweig: n.p. 1778. Lessing, Nathan the Wise with Related Documents, translated and edited by Ronald Schlecter, Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004, p. 46; Nathan der Weise. Ein Dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Aufzügen, [Berlin]: n.p. 1779, p. 67. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 46; Nathan der Weise, p. 67. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 98; Nathan der Weise, pp. 217f. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 98; Nathan der Weise, p. 218. Lessing, “Axioms,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 140; Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, p. 58. Lessing, “Axioms,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 138; Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, p. 53. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 86; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, p. 10. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 85; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, p. 9. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 87; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, p. 13. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 72; Nathan der Weise, p. 145. Ibid., p. 146. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 73; Nathan der Weise, p. 146. Ibid., pp. 146f. Ibid., p. 148. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 74; Nathan der Weise, pp. 149f. Lessing, “A Rejoinder,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 98; Eine Duplik, p. 11. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, p. 71; Nathan der Weise, p. 143. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 88; Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, pp. 15f.

Chapter 6 1 See, for example, Aage Henriksen, Søren Kierkegaards Romaner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1954. F. J. Billeskov Jansen, Studier i Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1951. 2 See Otto Pöggeler, Hegel in Berlin, Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1981, pp. 264–71. Three of these works have been reprinted in Heiner Höfener (ed.), Hegel-Spiele, Frankfurt am Main: Rogner & Bernard, 1977. 3 [Otto Gruppe], Die Winde oder ganz absolute Konstruktion der neueren Weltgeschichte durch Oberons Horn gedichtet von Absolutulus von Hegelingen, Leipzig: W. Nauck, 1831. (Reprinted in Heiner Höfener (ed.), Hegel-Spiele, [pp. 71–200].) 4 O. F. Gruppe, Antäus. Ein Briefwechsel über speculative Philosophie in ihrem Conflict mit Wissenschaft und Sprache, Berlin: W. Nauck, 1831. 5 Theodor Mundt, Kampf eines Hegelianers mit den Grazien. Eine kritische Humoreske, in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, no. 61, March 1, 1832, pp. 257–9; no. 62, March 2, 1832, pp. 261–3; no. 63, March 3, 1832, pp. 265–7; no. 64, March 4,

Notes

6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19

185

1832, pp. 269–71. (Reprinted as Kampf eines Hegelianers mit den Grazien. Eine philosophische Humoreske, in his Kritische Wälder. Blätter zur Beurtheilung der Literatur, Kunst und Wissenschaft unserer Zeit, Leipzig: Wolkrecht, 1833, pp. 33–58.) Karl Gutzkow, Nero, Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1835. Heinrich Leo, Die Hegelingen. Actenstücke und Belege zu der s.g. Denunciation der ewigen Wahrheit, Halle: Eduard Anton, 1838. Karl Rosenkranz, Das Centrum der Speculation, Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1840. (Reprinted in Heiner Höfener (ed.), Hegel-Spiele, [pp. 223–334].) See Rudolf Unger, “Karl Rosenkranz als Aristophanide. Interpretation einer literarischen Episode aus den Schulkämpfen des Späthegelianismus,” in his Gesammelte Studien, vols. 1–3, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966, vol. 3, Zur Dichtungs- und Geistesgeschichte der Goethezeit, pp. 268–97. Friedrich Ludwig Lindner, Der von Hegel’scher Philosophie durchdrungene SchusterGeselle oder der absolute Stiefel, Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagshandlung, 1844. (Reprinted in Heiner Höfener (ed.), Hegel-Spiele, [pp. 7–51].) In English as The Absolute Boot: or, The Journeyman Cobbler Steeped in Hegel’s Philosophy, translated by Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Syracuse: Gegensatz Press, 2008. See Roger Poole’s well-known Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993, for example, pp. 49–60. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 29–37; Samlede Værker, 1st edn, vols. 1–14, edited by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901–06, vol. 13, pp. 521–8. See, for example, Jens Himmelstrup’s “Terminologisk Register” in Kierkegaard’s Samlede Værker, 2nd edn, edited by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, vols. 1–15, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1920–36, vol. 15, pp. 711ff. See, for instance, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929, p. 14, Axx. Ibid., p. 653, A832/B860. Ibid., Bxxxvii-xxxviii. Ibid., p. 33, A840/B869. Fichte, “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge,” in The Science of Knowledge, translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 22. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by Peter Heath, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978, p. 1, p. 15. See, for example, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by T. F. Gerats, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, § 14, pp. 38f.; Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols. 1–26, edited by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1927–40, vol. 8, p. 60. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 11; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 24. See Encyclopaedia Logic, § 16, pp. 39–41; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, pp. 61–3. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 3; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 14. Phenomenology of Spirit, 13; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 27. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 3; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 14. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 13; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 27. Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1989, p. 56; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, p. 54.

186

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20 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 2; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 12: “The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.” Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, New York: Willey Book Co., 1944, p. 18; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11, p. 45: “And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that history.” 21 Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, § 15, p. 39; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, p. 61. 22 Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, § 17, p. 41; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, pp. 63f. 23 Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, § 32, Addition, p. 70; Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, p. 106. With this example Hegel is of course making reference to the “First Antimony” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 399–402, A426/B454-A433/B461. 24 See, for example, Fear and Trembling, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 8; Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, K1-K28, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Alastair McKinnon, Copenhagen: Gad Publishers, 1997–2013 (hereafter SKS), vol. 4, pp. 103f. Stages on Life’s Way, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 291; SKS, vol. 6, p. 271. In fact, only two of Hegel’s works were written with numbered paragraphs in this way: the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Philosophy of Right. The reason for this was that these works were conceived as textbooks that he used in his lectures, and for didactical reasons, it was useful to organize the material in this way so that he could simply refer the students to the individual paragraph numbers when he was assigning the readings and as he was working through the material. 25 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vols. 1–2, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, vol. 1, p. 17; SKS, vol. 7, p. 26. 26 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, et al., Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007–, vol. 1, p. 25; SKS 17, 30, AA:13. 27 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 99; SKS, vol. 11, p. 211. 28 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 99; SKS, vol. 11, p. 211. 29 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 106; SKS, vol. 7, p. 103. 30 For some interesting reflections on this issue, see Alastair Hannay, “Why Should Anyone Call Kierkegaard a Philosopher?” in Kierkegaard Revisited, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 1), pp. 238–53. Alastair Hannay, “Kierkegaard and What We Mean by ‘Philosophy,’” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–22. See also William Barrett, Irrational Man, Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1962, p. 151. 31 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 2, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 170; SKS, vol. 3, p. 166. 32 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 2, p. 171; SKS, vol. 3, p. 167.

Notes 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

187

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 7; SKS, vol. 4, p. 103. Ibid. Ibid. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 5; SKS, vol. 4, p. 215. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 109; SKS, vol. 4, p. 305. Ibid. Kierkegaard, Prefaces, translated by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 49; SKS, vol. 4, p. 510. Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, p. 92; SKS, vol. 6, p. 90. Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, p. 291; SKS, vol. 6, p. 271. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 5; SKS, vol. 7, p. 9. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 116; SKS, vol. 7, pp. 112f. Kierkegaard, Prefaces, p. 50; SKS, vol. 4, p. 510. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 120; SKS, vol. 7, p. 116. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 123; SKS, vol. 7, p. 118. Ibid. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 8; SKS, vol. 4, p. 103. Ibid. Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, Supplement, pp. 234–5; Pap. IV B 16. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 195; SKS, vol. 7, p. 179. Kierkegaard, Prefaces, p. 49; SKS, vol. 4, p. 510. Kierkegaard, Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 131; SKS vol. 4, p. 9. Marvin Farber, Phenomenology and Existence: Toward a Philosophy within Nature, New York, Evanston and London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967, p. 27.

Chapter 7 1 Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, p. 182, p. 228. 2 E.g. Ion T. Agheana, The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges, New York: Peter Lange, 1988. Serge Champeau, Borges et le métaphysique, Paris: J. Vrin, 1990. Didier T. Jaén, Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction, Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America, 1969. Juan Nuño, La filosofía de Borges, Mexico City: FCE, 1986. Juan Arana, El Centro del Laberinto: Los motivos filosóficos en el obra de Borges, Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S. A., 1994. Gregorio Kaminsky (ed.), Borges y la filosofía, Buenos Aires: Instituto de Filosofía, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1994. 3 The Gold of the Tigers, translated by Alastair Reid, in The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, New York: Penguin, 1977, p. 98. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas, vols. 1–3, Barcelona: Emecé Editores, 1989, vol. 2, p. 459. 4 Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992, p. 162. 5 The story, “Funes el memorioso,” originally appeared in La Nación, Buenos Aires, June 7, 1942. 6 See Donald L. Shaw, Borges: Ficciones, London: Grant and Cutler, 1976, p. 45.

188

Notes

7 Borges, Obras Completas, vols. 1–3, Barcelona: Emercé Editores S.A., 1989, vol. 1, p. 483: “una larga metáfora del insomnio.” See Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Reinhardt and Winston, 1968; New York: Avon Books, 1970, pp. 45–7. 8 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New York: Penguin, 1981, p. 93; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 489. 9 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vols. 1–2, collated and annotated by Alexander Campbell Fraser, New York: Dover Publications, 1959, vol. 2, p. 14. 10 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2, p. 15. 11 Ibid. 12 See Donald L. Shaw, Borges: Ficciones, p. 46. 13 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 87; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 485. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 88; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 485f. 17 The biographical aspect of the story is, of course, anachronistic given that Borges was only born in 1899. 18 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 87; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 485. 19 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 88; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 485. 20 Ibid. 21 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 88; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 486. 22 Ibid. 23 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 89; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 486. 24 Ibid. 25 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 90; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 487. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 91; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 488. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 33 Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 91f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 488. 34 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 93; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 489. 35 Ibid. 36 Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 93f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 37 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 38 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 92; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 488. 39 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 40 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 93; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 41 Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 92f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 489. 42 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 93; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 489. 43 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 44 Ibid. 45 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 95; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. 46 See Carter Wheelock, The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969,

Notes

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

189

p. 122: “The Aleph is finally impossible, and the nominalist must ultimately perish of ‘pulmonary congestion.’ ” Quoted from Jamie Alazraki, La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1974, p. 35: “se trata de un joven campesino del Uruguay que tiene una memoria extraordinaria y muere porque no puede olvidar nada.” Donald L. Shaw, Borges: Ficciones, p. 48. Borges, Discusión, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964, p. 70: “nuestro vivir es . . . una educación de olvido.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929, A51/B75. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 93; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 489f. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 90; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 487. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 91; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 487. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 92; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 489. Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 94f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 490. See Jaime Alazraki, Versiones, inversiones y reversiones. El espejo como model estructural del relato en los cuentos de Borges, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1977, p. 120: “Como la inmortalidad, una memoria infalible y total no es una liberación, sino una condena.”

Chapter 8 1 The story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” originally appeared in Sur, no. 68, 1940, pp. 36–46. 2 See Naomi Lindstrom, Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990, p. 27: “Although ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ takes philosophical ideas and alternate worlds as a point of departure, the interest lies in imagining the consequences a philosophical notion might entail if applied to everyday life, and in speculating on the human cognitive and emotional response to these consequences.” 3 One exception is Didier T. Jaén, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the Esoteric Tradition,” in his Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction, Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America, 1969, pp. 184–5: “Borges’ story implies a criticism of all idealistic philosophies as . . . tending to promote false or fictitious order.” 4 See Donald L. Shaw, Borges: Ficciones, London: Grant and Cutler, 1976, p. 13: “By confronting our instinctively materialist account of the world with an equally congenital idealist one, which seems to be just as coherent or more so, Borges suggests the conclusion that the way we see things is determined not by the things themselves but by our mental categories.” 5 For an account of Berkeley in Borges, see Darío González, “Alguien, algo, nadie: La imagen de Berkeley en la obra de Borges,” Paradoxa, Literatura/Filosofía, no. 7, 1993, pp. 31–7. See also Didier T. Jaén, Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction, pp. 45–59. Luis Eduardo Hoyos Jaramillo, “Refutación de Borges,” Ideas y Valores, nos. 96–7, 1995, pp. 23–47. 6 Didier T. Jaén, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the Esoteric Tradition,” in his Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction, p. 185. Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992, p. 161.

190

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7 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New York: Penguin, 1981, p. 29; Obras Completas, vols. 1–3, Barcelona: Emercé Editores S. A., 1989, vol. 1, p. 432. 8 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 31; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 434. 9 Ibid. 10 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 39; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 440. 11 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 40; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 441. 12 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 41; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 441. 13 Ibid. 14 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 41; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 442. 15 Ibid. 16 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 42; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 442. 17 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 32; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 435. 18 Ibid. 19 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 39; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 440. 20 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 35; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 437. 21 Jaime Alazraki, Versiones, inversiones y reversiones. El espejo como model estructural del relato en los cuentos de Borges, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1977, p. 81. Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, pp. 31f. 22 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 27; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 431. 23 Ibid. 24 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 28; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 432. 25 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 30; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 433. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 27; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 431. 29 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 41; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 442. 30 Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, Manchester and New York: George Routledge and Sons Limited, 1893, § 98. 31 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 38; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 440. 32 Ibid., p. 439. 33 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 40; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 441. 34 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 42; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 442. 35 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 37; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 438. 36 Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, § 116. 37 Ibid. 38 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929, p. 113, A80/B106. 39 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 35; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 437. 40 Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 37f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 439. 41 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 39; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 440. 42 See Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, p. 162: “. . . the world of Tlön can and must by one of pure chaos: the random flickering on and off of mental events in the consciousness of separate individuals. Each of these events is unrelated to anything outside the head of the individual concerned and is restricted to the awareness of the individual who conceives it.” 43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 212–17, A182/B224-A189/B232. 44 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 37; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 438f. 45 Ibid., p. 438.

Notes 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

191

Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, § 122. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 34; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 436. Ibid. Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, § 25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 218–33, A189/B232-A211/B256. Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, p. 162. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 38; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 439. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 439f. Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 42f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 443. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 43; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 443. Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy, pp. 163f. Jaime Alazraki, “Tlön y Asterión: metáforas epistemológicas,” in Jorge Luis Borges: el escritor y la crítica, edited by Jaime Alazraki, Madrid: Taurus, 1976, pp. 183–200.

Chapter 9 1 “Averroes’ Search” appears in the following English translation: Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New York: Penguin, 1981. 2 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 180; Obras Completas, vols. 1–3, Barcelona: Emercé Editores S. A., 1989, vol. 1, p. 582. 3 None of the following commentators mentions the issue of the connection between language and culture in reference to this story: Ana Maria Barrenecha, La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Borges, Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1967, pp. 173–4. Jaime Alazraki, Versiones, Inversiones, Reversiones. El Espejo como modelo estructural del relato en los cuentos de Borges, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1977, pp. 59–61. Luis Antezana Juárez, Algebra y Fuego. Lectura de Borges, Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1978, pp. 70–89. 4 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, translated by Philip Mairet, London: Methuen, 1948, p. 47; L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel, 1961, p. 70. 5 Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 186f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 587. 6 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 181; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 582. 7 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 181; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 583. 8 Ibid. 9 See Carter Wheelock, The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969, p. 158: “The boys playing muezzin. . .do not have any overt connection, of course with Averroes’ search.” 10 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 184; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 585. 11 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 184; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 585. Translation slightly modified. 12 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 184; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 585. 13 Ibid. 14 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 185; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 586. 15 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 187; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 587. 16 Carter Wheelock, The Mythmaker, p. 156.

192 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39

Notes Borges, Labyrinths, p. 181; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 583. My italics. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 187; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 587. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 183; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 584. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 180; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 582. Ibid. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 181; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 582f. Borges, Labyrinths, pp. 187f.; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 588. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 187; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 587f. One author incomprehensibly takes this as a statement about causality, that is, in order to understand tragedy and comedy, it is necessary (in a causal sense) to understand what a theater is. See Jaime Alazraki, La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges, Madrid: Biblioteca Románica Hispánica, 1968, p. 98. Homer, Odyssey, Book XI.487ff. “The Immortal” originally appeared in The Aleph (1949) and appears in English in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 629 (my translation). See Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and his Fiction, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981, p. 230. See L. A. Murillo, The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce and Jorge L. Borges, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 215. Ronald Christ sees in this work an affirmation of the power of literature over death and finitude. See his The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion, New York: New York University Press, 1969, p. 211. One exception to this neglect is Jorge Ayora, “Gnosticism and Time in ‘El Inmortal,’  ” Hispania, vol. 56, no. 3, 1973, pp. 593–6. Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vols. 1–32, edited by E. Fretté and P. Mare, Paris: L. Vivés, 1871–80, vol. 12, Summa Contra Gentiles, Liber III, Caput LXI, p. 328. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10:6–8; 1175a ff. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1:1; 980a Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 2, Summa Theologica, Pars Secunda, Quaestio III, Articulus VII, p. 99. Augustine, City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, pp. 1086–7; De civitate dei, Libri XI-XXII, edited by B. Dombart, A. Kalb, Turnhout: Brepols, 1955 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, vol. 48), Pars XIV, Liber XXII, Caput XXIX, p. 861. Aquinas, Opera Omnia, Summa Contra Gentiles, Liber III, Caput LX, p. 328. Augustine, Liber XXII, Caput XXX, p. 863. Augustine, City of God, pp. 1086–7; Augustine, Liber XXII, Caput XXX, p. 865. See also: “This we shall then know perfectly, when we are perfectly at rest and in stillness see that he is God.” Liber XXII, Caput XXX, p. 865. Borges’ source for this tribe is historical. The troglodytes or trogodytae were a primitive people of Ethiopia. They are mentioned by, among others, Herodotus. See Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954, p. 332; Book 4.183: “The Garamantes hunt the Ethiopian hole-men, or troglodytes, in four-horse chariots, for these troglodytes are exceedingly swift of foot—more so than any people of whom we have any information. They eat snakes and lizards and other reptiles and speak a language like no other, but squeak like bats.” See Jacques Réda, “Commentaire de ‘L’Immortal’ de J.-L. Borges,” Cahiers du Sud, vol. 49, 1962–63, p. 439.

Notes

193

40 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 146; Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 541f. 41 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 146; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 542. 42 See Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and his Fiction, p. 230; Jaime Alazraki, La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges, Madrid: Biblioteca Románica Hispánica, 1968, p. 71. Borges’ inspiration for this character seems to come in part from the medieval legend of the wandering Jew, sometimes called Ahasverus. There are different versions of this legend, according to which Ahasverus was said to have insulted or even struck Christ while he has bearing the cross and as punishment was made to live until Christ’s return. 43 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 144; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 540. 44 See L. A. Murillo, The Cyclical Night, p. 226. 45 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 140; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 537. 46 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 144; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 540. 47 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 139, p. 141; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 536, p. 538. 48 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 139; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 536. 49 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, translated by Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1983, p. 32; “Idee zu einer Allgemeinen Geschichte in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” in Werkausgabe, vols. 1–12, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, vol. 11, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik 1, p. 38. 50 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by T. F. Gerats, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, § 24, Addition 3, p. 62; Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläumsausgabe in 20 Bänden, edited by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1928–41, vol. 8, p. 94. 51 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 147; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 542. 52 Compare Schaefer, who believes that Borges also offers a criticism of eastern religion here. Adelheid Schaefer, Phantastische Elemente und ästhetische Konzepte im Erzählwerk von J. L. Borges, Frankfurt am Main: Humanitas Verlag, 1973. 53 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 144; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 540. 54 It seems to me that the commentators on “The Immortal” have fully missed this point. Compare Cédola, who fully misses the reference to pura especulación: “Sin embargo, los Inmortales rescatan un placer para sí: la pura especulación. Los personajes del relato rechazan finalamente la inmortalidad, lo cual significa, sin duda, rehusar al pensamiento sola—parece decir Borges—cortado de la creatividad y de la acción, es infrehumana.” Estela Cédola, Borges o la coincidencía de los opuestos, Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1987, p.144. 55 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 144; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 540. 56 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 144; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 540: “Absorbed in thought, they hardly perceived the physical world.” 57 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 145; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 541. 58 Ibid. 59 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 146; Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 542. 60 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by Richard Green, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, p. 115. Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii Philosophiae Consolatio, edited by L. Bieler, Turnhout: Brepols, 1984 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, vol. 94), V.VI.8, p. 101.

194

Notes

Chapter 10 1 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, p. 11. Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols. 1–26, edited by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1927–40, vol. 7, p. 35. 2 Sartre uses this virtually untranslatable term to refer to the period after the mobilization but before the actual fighting. It was meant to characterize the levity with which he took the situation. See Sartre’s posthumous Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, p. 128. 3 Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, p. 226. See also pp. 246ff. 4 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, Paris: Gallimard, 1960, p. 168. 5 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, pp. 226–7, pp. 246ff. Compare Sartre’s account of his encounters with the works of Husserl and Heidegger in Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, pp. 224ff. 6 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, pp. 177ff.; pp. 206ff. 7 See ibid., pp. 315ff. 8 One of Sartre’s close friends, Fernando Gerassi, was personally involved in the Spanish Civil War. See Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 539. 9 Sartre says, “We were very happy that the popular front had succeeded. We were tied in sentiment to these groups, but we didn’t do anything for them. We were rather spectators.” Quoted from Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 539. Simone de Beauvoir says of a political rally in Paris in 1935: “Such was our attitude at that time; the events could stir up in us strong feelings of anger, fear and joy, but we did not participate in them. We remained spectators.” Quoted from Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, p. 249. 10 Sartre comments on this piece at length in his “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” Les Temps Modernes, 17e année, 1961, numéro 184–5 (numéro spécial: Maurice MerleauPonty), pp. 309ff. In English as “Merleau-Ponty,” in Situations, translated by Benita Eisler, Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1965, pp. 227–326. 11 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 139; Sens et NonSens, Paris: Nagel, 1948, p. 246. See Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p. 215, where Sartre writes that between the wars “in France at least one was able to know . . . ‘the sweetness of life.’ ”  12 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 139; Sens et Non-Sens, p. 246. 13 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, pp. 625–6. See also also p. 410: “It is not possible to assign a day, a week or even a month to the conversion which took place in me. But it is certain that the spring of 1939 marks a break in my life. I renounced my individualism and my anti-humanism. I learned solidarity.” 14 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, p. 415. 15 Sartre, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, op. cit. 16 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 141; Sens et Non-Sens, p. 249. 17 Letter to Jean Paulhan, June 9, 1940; cited from Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905– 1980, Paris: Gallimard, 1985, p. 271. 18 Sartre, Bariona, in English in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, translated by Richard McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pp. 72–136. 19 Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 264.

Notes

195

20 Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, chronologie, bibliographie commentée, Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 62/368. Cited by entry number and not by page number so as to facilitate reference to both the French and English editions. (In English as The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Bibliographical Life, translated by Richard McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 412.) 21 Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 264. 22 Sartre, Un Théâtre de situations, Paris: Gallimard, 1973, pp. 61–2. 23 Sartre, Situations, pp. 158–9; “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” pp. 306–7. 24 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 341. 25 Sartre, Situations, X, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 179; Cited from Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 247. Simone de Beauvoir discusses this metamorphosis in La Force des choses, I, Paris: Gallimard, 1963, pp. 15ff.: “The war had effected a decisive conversion in him.” 26 Sartre, Situations, p. 170; “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” p. 318. 27 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 247. 28 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 505. 29 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 326. 30 See Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, chronologie, bibliographie commentée, 43/35. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Bibliographical Life, p. 84. 31 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, pp. 616ff. 32 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 326. 33 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, pp. 264f. 34 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, p. 617. Here she in fact paraphrases from the play itself, where Orestes says to Electra, “Freedom has crashed down on me like a thunderbolt.” Sartre, Les mouches in Huis clos suivi de Les mouches, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, p. 208. The Flies in No Exit and Three Other Plays, translated by L. Abel, New York: Vintage, 1955, p. 108. 35 Quoted from Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 326. 36 Ibid., p. 327. 37 Merleau-Ponty, “Les mouches par Jean-Paul Sartre,” Confluences, 3e année, no. 25, September–October, 1943, pp. 514–16. In English as “On Sartre’s The Flies,” translated by Michael B. Smith, in Texts and Dialogues: Merleau-Ponty, edited by Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry Jr., Humanities Press, New York, 1992, pp. 115–17. 38 Sartre, The Flies, pp. 54f.; Les mouches, pp. 109f. 39 Sartre, The Flies, p. 56; Les mouches, p. 114. 40 Sartre, The Flies, p. 54; Les mouches, p. 111. 41 Sartre, The Flies, p. 63; Les mouches, p. 123. 42 Sartre, The Flies, p. 72; Les mouches, p. 139. 43 Sartre, The Flies, p. 92; Les mouches, p. 178. 44 Ibid. 45 Sartre, The Flies, p. 102; Les mouches, p. 198. 46 Sartre, The Flies, p. 104; Les mouches, p. 200. 47 Sartre, The Flies, p. 104; Les mouches, p. 201. 48 Sartre, The Flies, pp. 104f.; Les mouches, p. 201. 49 Sartre, The Flies, p. 105; Les mouches, p. 201. 50 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, translated by Philip Mairet, London: Methuen, 1948, p. 34. L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel, 1961, p. 37. 51 Sartre, The Flies, p. 114; Les mouches, p. 221.

196 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75 76

77 78

79 80 81

Notes Sartre, The Flies, p. 115; Les mouches, p. 222. Sartre, The Flies, p. 126; Les mouches, p. 244. Sartre, The Flies, p. 118; Les mouches, p. 228. Sartre, The Flies, pp. 119f.; Les mouches, pp. 230f. Sartre, The Flies, p. 121; Les mouches, pp. 233f. Sartre, The Flies, pp. 121f.; Les mouches, p. 234. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 34; L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 37. Sartre, The Flies, p. 122; Les mouches, p. 234. Sartre, The Flies, p. 124; Les mouches, p. 239. Sartre, The Flies, p. 124; Les mouches, p. 240. Sartre, The Flies, p. 123; Les mouches, p. 236. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Sartre on Freedom,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1981, pp. 399–400. Sartre, “Sartre par Sartre,” Situations, IX, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, pp. 100–1. See Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, chronologie, bibliographie commentée, 58/302. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Bibliographical Life, pp. 345f. Reprinted in Situations, V, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 72–88. This text appeared in 1958 and seems to attest to the fact that Sartre never abandoned the key tenets of his doctrine of freedom. Sartre, The Flies, p. 116; Les mouches, p. 225. Ibid. Sartre, The Flies, p. 104; Les mouches, p. 201. Sartre, Bariona, in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, p. 104; Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 599. In a prefatory note to the plays The Flies and No Exit, from 1947, Sartre writes, “No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the time or place, man is free to choose himself a traitor or a hero, a coward or a conqueror.” Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, 47/116. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Bibliographical Life, p. 161. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, p. 550. Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 508. See Sartre, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p. 144: “But we must realize that facticity plays no role here. Certainly it’s the facticity which brings it about that I am thrown into war. But what this war will be for me, the face that it will unveil for me, what I myself will be in the war and for the war, all of this I will be freely, and I am responsible for it.” Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, pp. 129–30. Sartre, Bariona, in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 625. In English as The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, pp. 129–30. See Sartre, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p. 70: “We are free-in-order-to-suffer and free-in-order-not-to-suffer. We are responsible for the form and intensity of our sufferings.” Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, p. 549. Ibid., pp. 549–50. Sartre, “La République du silence,” in Situations, III, Lendemains de guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 1949, pp. 11–12.

Notes 82 83 84 85 86

197

Sartre, “Paris sous l’occupation,” in Situations, III, pp. 35–6. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 151; Sens et Non-Sens, p. 267. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, I, pp. 271–2. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre. 1905–1980, p. 299. Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 504.

Chapter 11 1 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” in his Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 60–71. All references to this article are from Consequences of Pragmatism. (This work was first published in The Georgia Review, vol. 30, 1976, pp. 757–69 and was later reprinted under the title “Genteel Syntheses, Professional Analyses, and Transcendentalist Culture” in the proceedings of the Bicentennial Symposium—Two Centuries of Philosophy in America, edited by Peter Caws, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, pp. 228–39.) 2 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” p. 60. 3 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 4 Ibid., p. 66. 5 Ibid., p. 69. 6 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” in his Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 225. 7 See Michael Fischer, “Redefining Philosophy as Literature: Richard Rorty’s ‘Defence’ of Literary Culture,” in Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 233–43. Fischer argues, correctly I think, that Rorty’s “defense” of literary culture, when analyzed more closely, in fact does little credit to literary theory. 8 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” p. 65. 9 Ibid., p. 65. 10 As one writer puts it, Rorty is a conservative who “favors the political status quo in the human sciences.” Edward Davenport, “The New Politics of Knowledge: Rorty’s Pragmatism and the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 17, 1987, p. 382. 11 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” p. 69. 12 See Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” p. 217: “The analytic style is, I think, a good style.” 13 Ibid., pp. 220–1. 14 Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” p. 69. 15 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” p. 225. 16 Ibid., p. 219: “We should let a hundred flowers bloom, admire them while they last, and leave botanizing to the intellectual historians of the next century.” 17 For a discussion of this issue see Margaret Wilson, “History of Philosophy in Philosophy Today; and the Case of the Sensible Qualities,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 101, no. 1, 1992, pp. 191–243. 18 E.g. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, London: Methuen, 1966; Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic, London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974; Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.

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Notes

19 E.g. Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975; David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History and Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, New York: Macmillan and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967. Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 20 See Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” p. 224: “Analytic philosophers, because they identify philosophical ability with argumentative skill and notice that there isn’t anything they would consider an argument in a carload of Heidegger or Foucault, suggest that these must be people who tried to be philosophers and failed, incompetent philosophers.” 21 See Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. See also the response by Cora Diamond, “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels,” Philosophical Investigations, vol. 16, issue 2, 1993, pp. 128–53. See also R. W. Beardsmore, “Literary Examples and Philosophical Confusion,” in Philosophy and Literature, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 59–73.

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Index of Persons Abelard, Peter (1079–1142), French theologian and logician  28, 44 Aeneas  32, 34 Aeschines  16 Aeschylus  147 Alexander the Great  77 Alleg, Henri (b. 1921), French-Algerian journalist  153 Anaximander of Miletus  14 Anaximenes  14 Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Scholastic philosopher  132 Antiphon  17 Antisthenes  16 Aquinas, Thomas (ca. 1225–74), Scholastic philosopher and theologian  1, 44, 134–5, 139–40, 165 Aristophanes  17 Aristotle  10, 28, 35, 127, 129, 132, 134, 161, 165–6 Nicomachean Ethics  134 Poetics  129 Asín Palacios, Miguel (1871–1944), Spanish scholar of Islamic studies  132 Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Church Father  1, 28, 134–5, 139 Augustus (31 BC-19 AD), Roman Emperor  34 Averroes (Arabic, Ibn Rushd) (1126–98), Islamic religious philosopher  1, 127–32 passim. Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89), British philosopher  6–8, 31, 42 Language, Truth and Logic  6–8 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86), French philosopher and author  97, 144, 147, 154–5 Berkeley, George (1685–1753), Irish philosopher  1–2, 28, 112, 115–19, 121, 124

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75), Italian author  73–4 Boethius (ca. 480-ca. 524), Roman Christian philosopher  28, 140 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount (1678–1751), English politician and philosopher  55 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), Argentinian author  11, 13, 97–109, 111–25, 127–41 The Aleph  127–41 Ficciones  99, 111, 127 The Gold of the Tigers  98 Boswell, James (1740–95), Scottish lawyer  64 Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924), British philosopher  6, 8 Brant, Sebastian (1457–1521), German jurist and author  46 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), Italian astronomer and philosopher  28, 53 Caesar, Julius (100–44 BC), Roman general and author  34 Callicles  17 Camus, Albert (1913–60), French author and philosopher  1, 151 The Stranger  151 Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), German-born American philosopher  3, 6–8, 31, 42 “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” 6 Christ  45, 47, 69, 71–3, 76–7 Cicero  28, 33, 35 De Officiis  33 De Re Publica  35 The Dream of Scipio  35 Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729), English philosopher  64

210

Index of Persons

Claudius  36 Collins, Anthony (1676–1729), English philosopher  55 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543), Polish astronomer and polymath  53 Critias  17 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Italian poet  129, 138 Davidson, Donald Herbert (1917–2003), American philosopher  128 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), French philosopher  8, 51, 162–4 Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher  1, 44, 84, 91, 93–4, 161, 165–6 Dewey, John (1859–1952), American philosopher  3, 160, 162 Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), German philosopher  163 Diogenes  94–5 Dionysius of Halicarnassus  71 Dorp, Martin  50 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), Russian author  151 Notes from Underground  151 Empedocles  15 Epictetus  1, 36 Enchiridion  1 Epicurus  40, 56–8 Erasmus, Desiderius (1465–1536), Dutch humanist  11, 13, 28, 43–52 Colloquia Familiaria  48 Enchiridion Militis Christiani  50 Praise of Folly  43–52 Euclides  16, 77 Euripides  47 Euthyphro  23–4 Feyerabend, Paul (1924–94), Austrian-born American philosopher  7–8 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), German philosopher  83 Foucault, Michel (1926–84), French philosopher  28

Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002), German philosopher  128, 163 Galileo Galilei (1584–1642), Italian physicist and mathematician  28, 53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat  166 Goeze, Johann Melchior (1717–86), German Lutheran pastor  70, 74, 77 Gorgias of Leontini  17, 20, 23 Gruppe, Otto Friedrich (1804–76), German philosopher, philologist and poet  81 Gutzkow, Karl Ferdinand (1811–78), German author  82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), German philosopher  6, 8–9, 13, 31, 81–2, 84–7, 89, 91, 98, 109, 137–8, 143, 159, 163–4 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences  86 Phenomenology of Spirit  84, 98 Philosophy of Right  143 Science of Logic  85 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791–1860), Danish poet, playwright, critic and philosopher  92 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher  6–8, 31, 41, 145, 159, 161, 163–8 passim Being and Time  166 What is Metaphysics?  6 Heraclitus  14 Herodotus  16 Hippias of Elis  17 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945)  156 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), English philosopher  44 Homer  16, 138, 140 Odyssey  137–8 Hume, David (1711–76), Scottish philosopher  1, 10–11, 28, 53–65, 115, 167 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion  53–65, 167

Index of Persons An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding  56, 58 A Treatise of Human Nature  54, 56, 64 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), German philosopher  144 Ibn Rushd, see “Averroës.” Isaiah  46 James, Henry (1843–1916), American-born British author and philosopher  3 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), Czech-Austrian novelist  145 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher  8, 10, 53, 55, 83, 87, 108, 111–12, 117–24 passim, 137, 161, 164 Critique of Pure Reason  83–4, 111 “What is Enlightenment?”  53 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55)  1, 9, 11, 13, 46, 51, 81–95, 159, 167 Concluding Unscientific Postscript  9, 46, 82, 87–9, 92, 94 The Conflict between the Old and the New Soap-Cellar  82 Either/Or  81, 90, 92 Fear and Trembling  91 Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est  82, 93 journals and notebooks  87 On My Activity as an Author  83 Philosophical Fragments  82, 91–2 Prefaces  92, 94 Repetition  81, 93–4 The Sickness unto Death  88 Stages on Life’s Way  92 Lane, Edward William (1801–76), British orientalist  132 Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician  1–2, 98, 111 Leo, Heinrich (1799–1878), Prussian historian  82

211

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer and philosopher  11, 67–80, 89 Anti-Goeze  75 “Axioms,”  77 Nathan the Wise  67–80 “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,”  71 Lindner, Friedrich Ludwig (1772–1845), German journalist  82 Livy  33–4, 71 Locke, John (1632–1704), English philosopher  64, 100, 105 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding  100 Lucian  28, 50 Lucretius  1, 10 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), German theologian  47 Malebranche, Nicolas (1683–1715), French philosopher  2, 28 Marcus Aurelius  36 Martensen, Hans Lassen (1808–84), Danish theologian  94 McTaggart, John M. E. (1866–1925), English philosopher  8 Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931), American philosopher  3 Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–86), German philosopher  73–5 Meno  23–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61), French philosopher  8, 145–8, 155 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), English philosopher  1 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92), French essayist and philosopher  1, 44 Moore, George Edward (1873–1958), English philosopher  111, 161 More, Thomas (1478–1535), English lawyer and philosopher  50 Mundt, Theodor (1808–61), German critic and novelist  82 Myron  34 Nero  36 Newton, Isaac (1643–1727), English physicist and mathematician  2

212

Index of Persons

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), German philologist and philosopher  1, 161–4, 167–8 Odysseus  137–8 Ovid  33 Parmenides  1, 14 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), French mathematician, physicist and philosopher  46 Paul  46 Phaedo  16 Pindar  25 Plato  1, 7–8, 10–11, 13–29, 112, 161–3, 165 Apology  16–17, 21 Critias  18 Euthyphro  27 Gorgias  18 Greater Hippias  18 Lesser Hippias  18 Meno  22–5 Phaedrus  15 Protagoras  18 Sophist  18 Theaetetus  15, 25 Pliny the Younger  33, 103 Polybius  33, 71 Prodicus of Ceos  17 Protagoras of Abdera  17, 19–20, 23 Pythagoras  2, 15 Quicherat, Louis-Marie (1799–1884), French philologist  103 Quine, Willard Van Orman (1908–2000), American analytic philosopher  3, 128, 161 Reichenbach, Hans (1981–53), German philosopher of science  3 Reimarus, Elise (1729–1814)  67 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1694–1768), German biblical scholar  67–9, 73, 77 Wolfenbüttel Fragments  67, 70–3, 75 Renan, Joseph Ernest (1823–92), French scholar of the Middle East  127, 130, 132

Ress, Johann Heinrich (1732–1803), German Protestant theologian  70, 79 Rorty, Richard (1931–2007), American philosopher  3, 7, 10, 159–69 Rosenkranz, Karl (1805–79), German philosopher and theologian  82 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher  1, 53, 55, 62 Dieu et les hommes, oeuvre théologique, mais raisonnable  55 Émile: or, on Education  55 Royce, Josiah (1855–1916), American philosopher  8 Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), British philosopher  1, 161 Sallust  33 Santayana, George (1863–1952), American philosopher  160 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), French philosopher and author  1, 8, 11, 13, 28, 31, 42, 97, 143–57 Bariona  143–57 Being and Nothingness  97, 143–5, 147–8, 154 Critique of Dialectical Reason  97 The Flies  97, 143–57 Nausea  156 No Exit  97 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854), German philosopher  83 Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829), German Romantic writer  75 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834), German theologian  163 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher  1 Schumann, Johann Daniel (1714–87), German theologian  70 Scipio Africanus  41 Seneca  1, 11, 13, 31–42 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English dramatist  166 Smith, Adam (1723–90), Scottish philosopher  65 Socrates  13–29, 40, 46, 88

Index of Persons Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77), Dutch philosopher  1–2, 97 Ethics  1 Stendhal (Henri Beyle) (1783–1842)  97 Strawson, Peter Frederick, Sir (1919–2006), English philosopher  161 Suetonius  34, 36 Tacitus  36, 71 Theaetetus  25–6 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), American author and philosopher  1 Thrasymachus  17 Thucydides  16 Tiberius  36 Till Eulenspiegel  46

213

Toland, John (1670–1722), Irish philosopher  55 Virgil  32, 34 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778), French author  55–6, 74 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher  1 Woolston, Thomas (1670–1731), English thinker  55 Xenophanes of Colophon  14 Xenophon  16 Zeno of Elea  14, 38, 120

214

Index of Subjects afterlife, see immortality Algerian War  153 alienation  151–4 Anglo-American philosophy, see philosophy, analytic anthropology  128 anxiety  165 aphorism  1, 9 appropriation  93 atheism  54–5, 151 bad faith  144, 148–50 bad infinity  109 belief, see faith Bible/Scripture  43, 46–7, 51, 67–8, 70–1, 74, 77, 134 categories  85–7, 93, 99, 108, 112, 119–22, 124, 131–2 cause and effect  121–2, 124 Christendom  88 Christianity  9, 44–53 passim, 56, 67, 69–78 passim, 80, 87–91, 93, 133–5, 139–40 Cold War  1 comedy  75, 129–33; see also tragedy communication, indirect  51 conceptual scheme  127, 131 conformism, conformity, see homogeneity content and form  10–11, 18, 21, 43–4, 47, 90–1, 112, 115, 159 death  133, 136–8, 165 deconstruction  163, 167 deism  60, 68 despair  152–4, 165 dialectic of opposites  86–7 dialogue  1, 2, 7, 9, 13–29, 53–65 différance  164 double reflection  51 doubt  93–4

drama  1, 13, 16, 27, 67–80, 129–33, 143–57; see also comedy; tragedy duty  155 edifying discourse  81, 83 either/or  86, 88 Eleatics  94 empiricism  53, 60, 100 Enlightenment  43, 47, 53–65, 70–1, 78, 87–91 episteme  131 ethics  72, 76–8, 80 existential hero  153–4 existentialism  143–57 faith  46–7, 56, 68, 70–1, 78, 87–91 Fall, the  137–8 fame  32–4, 37 fiction  7, 42 form  10 fortuna, see providence freedom  36–7, 40–1, 97, 143–4, 147–55 passim Freudianism  167 German idealism  82–4, 87, 90–1, 112; see also philosophy, speculative historical truth  80 history  71, 77–8, 87, 122–5, 140, 164 of philosophy  3 homogeneity/conformity/ uniformity  1, 7–8, 10–11, 159–60, 163, 168–9 idealism  111–25 imitatio Christi  76 immortality  25, 55–6, 64, 109, 127, 133–41 passim interview  28–9 irony  19–24 passim

216

Index of Subjects

Judaism  69 knowledge, innate  24 language  2, 6–7, 9, 37, 51, 82, 85, 100–1, 105, 107, 114, 127–8, 130–3, 137, 160, 168 leap, the  77 letters  1 life  94 logic  1, 3, 31, 38–40, 44–5, 48–9, 85–6, 93, 160–1, 166, 168 logical positivism  5 love  72, 74, 76, 80 maieutic method  25–6; see also Socratic method marriage  92 Marxism  167 materialism  115 maxims  9 meaning  137–8, 150 mediation  85, 90 memory  97–109, 120, 133 metaphysics  5–6. midwifery, see maieutic method mock encomium  49–50 mythology  13, 19 natural sciences  2–4, 18 nominalism  97–109 nothingness  150 novel  1, 10 oxymoron  31–42, 91 pantheism  54 paradigm  131 paradox  14, 31–42, 46, 49, 120 absolute  88 perception  54, 83, 97–109, 112, 119–21, 124, 128 Pharisees  45, 69 phenomenology  143–4, 166 philosophical journals  4–5 philosophy, analytic  1–9 passim, 31, 97, 143, 160–8 passim. Continental  8, 161–8

of education  3 of history  3 of language  3 of mind  3 of religion  3 of science  3 speculative  5, 9, 44, 49, 58, 63, 81–94 passim, 160 (see also German idealism) the beginning of  86 poetry  1–2, 7, 9–10, 13–16, 18, 22, 42 positivism  6–7 possible world  98, 111 presuppositionless beginning  93 professionalization  2, 4 proofs of God’s existence  47 providence  32, 34, 36, 54 pseudonym  54, 81 psychology  144 quantity  120 realism  108 recollection  25 reductio ad absurdum  98–9, 105, 108, 111, 117–19, 122, 124, 127, 139–41 relativism  17–18, 162 religion  53–65 responsibility  151, 155 Roman law  37 Romanticism  160 satire  43–52 scholasticism  43–51 passim short story  97–109, 111–25, 127–41 skepticism  17–18, 23, 44, 53, 55, 61, 63–4, 94, 111, 122, 124 social sciences  2, 160 social theory  3 Socratic method  21, 26 Sophists, the  13 space and time  117–19, 124 Spanish Civil War  144 Stoicism  31–2, 35–40 subjective truth  89 substance  119, 121

Index of Subjects suffering  155 Supreme Being  54 syllogism  38–9, 45–6, 49 symbolic logic  3 systematic philosophy, see philosophy, speculative Temple of Diana at Ephesus  72 theater  75, 143–57 time  136, 140; see also space and time

217

tragedy  74, 127, 129–33; see also comedy treatise  2, 4, 7, 14–15, 18, 22–4, 27, 56, 58 universal/particular  48, 97–109, 112, 119, 123–5, 131 virtue  18–19, 22–5, 34–5, 37, 45, 47, 49 visio beatifica  134–5, 139–40 World War II  144–7, 156