To give a sample of my work on the web, I am publishing here in my blog examples of poetry and prose which employ a poetic language. Part One concludes my first book, Part Two helps to conclude my reading of Scruton’s chapter on “Believing in God” in my third book, and Part Three concludes my third book. Since I completely rewrote the second half of my second book on self-government after writing Sacred Kingship, the poem in Part Four called “The Fuse,” with which I concluded that work, also concludes the three books as a whole. That’s why it comes last in this sequence.

Part One

A Comic Vision of Great Constancy ends with “A Coda.”

The great hunt that Theseus and Hippolyta enjoy prior to their marriage puts in mind the great hunt for a comic vision that has been the preoccupation of human beings from ancient times. In these essays I have traced that vision to its conclusion, the way a hunter traces a deer (or a dear heart) to its conclusion. From ancient times, poets have found something of great constancy in this quest, and people still seek this something out in works that have stood the test of time. I have borrowed the words “something of great constancy” from Hippolyta’s debate with Theseus concerning the dreams of the four young lovers. Because their argument is about the reality not just of fairies but of the comic vision that’s the purpose for writing a work that may lighten the heart of another, Hippolyta’s response to his skepticism is worth recalling here:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable.

Hippolyta speaks for much more than the story told over by the four lovers. The comic visions of our literature have transfigured minds and have witnessed more than fancy’s images for thousands of years as they are told over and over from generation to generation. The constancy can be found in the comic vision itself and in the way people continually seek out the the sense and sensibility of great comic poets who have gone before them. In these texts they find the friendship of those who love and look in this way. 

In the epilogue, Robin’s plea (to the audience) to give him our hands echoes the final words of Chaucer’s Theseus. Emily, the longtime object of Palamon’s passion, signals that she agrees to wed Palamon by giving Theseus her hand, and Theseus turns then to Palamon to say:

I think there needs but little sermoning
To gain your own assent to such a thing.
Come near and take your lady by the hand.

The joining of hands at the end of “The Knight’s Tale” and at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sums up the essence of a comic vision. Like hands that touch, everything we have seen or heard in the play transmits the spirit of comedy and lights a path forward for those who would survive and prosper. Like hands that hold, it’s a spirit that’s “catching,” for it expresses that which has been passed, like the light of one candle lighting another, through the generations. Anyone who enters the theater of Shakespeare’s play or Chaucer’s poem is invited to become a link in this chain.

But this is just another image, out of many, to which poetry must resort. Like fairyland, this image and all the other images in its train trip away at break of day as we do when we get out of bed in the morning and go to work in the world. Notwithstanding, a vision of these images may yet do the business of comedy. Even though it comes and goes like the images of a dream, the vision I have set down here has a remarkable durability and constancy. It’s like a round and orient pearl set overnight in a small flower or on a slender blade of grass that dissolves in the heat of the day. With unearned luck I find it there for a time, a pearl of great price, mine own and not mine own.

Part Two

Part Four

The second edition of A Comic Vision of Self-Government ends with this poem.

The Fuse

Here at my desk at night
A lamp illuminates
My book of poetry.

I see the cord, but I 
Can’t see the force that heats
The incandescent wire.

Likewise, I wonder what
It is that powers my sight.
Pray, what ignites this life
So I can read it now?
Can it be that truly
I’m the son of sunlight, 
Son of light that shines
As far as light can go 
Into an infinite darkness?

What does it mean to be
This ongoing, astounding burst 
Of all and everything?

September 2025

Part One: On Striving to Grasp the World as a Whole

The Preface to the 2014 edition of A Comic Vision of Great Constancy employs my Parable of the Lost Quarter to argue that “A rational record of things-as-they-are…cannot lose sight of this darkness, the vast expanse of what we don’t know” (see pages xi-xii). The parable originally was a comic strip. On a dark night, a boy encounters another boy who is looking in a pool of light for something on the sidewalk. When asked, the one tells the newcomer that he’s looking for a quarter he dropped. They look together for a while unsuccessfully so the second boy asks the first boy where exactly he dropped it. “Oh, I dropped it over there,” he explains, pointing towards the darkness, “but the light is better here.” I related the parable and made that statement in the Preface because they express the overall theme of the book. If I’m not mistaken, the Old Testament expresses something like same idea as the sentiment often referred to as “a fear of the Lord.” This sentiment derives from the disappointment, confusion, or pain we experience when we make mistakes. When we confront the fact that we don’t know everything, we might well long for the Lord’s point of view, which we read about in Biblical stories. Maybe then we could avoid the disappointments.

I wrote A Comic Vision of Great Constancy several years before discovering the writings of Roger Scruton. Since then I’ve read many of his books, and he inspired me to write A Comic Vision of Sacred Kingship. Once that book was finished, I wondered how my first book, which interprets two famous literary works, would read after an immersion in this later project, which interprets the writings of Scruton and two other philosophers. So I reread A Comic Vision of Great Constancy and found right away in the Preface the sentence I’ve quoted above. I see now that an immersion in Scruton’s writing allows me to translate that sentence (about not losing sight of the darkness) into concepts and propositions from philosophy. We learn there that an inquiry into the relationship between what we can and can’t know is an exercise in metaphysics, and Scruton relies on Kant’s metaphysics for his own. In Kant, Scruton finds the crucial distinction between the phenomenal world, the world of appearances, and the noumenal world, the world grasped as a whole. Since we are part of the phenomenal world that’s bound by space and time, Kant argues, we cannot know things-as-they-are, the noumenal world. What we can know is firmly located in the world of appearances. But that’s not the end of the story, for Kant also argued, “… that reason is tempted to reach beyond these boundaries, striving to grasp the world as a whole and from a transcendental perspective” (see The Soul of the World, page 25, for this quote). In a different book written twenty years earlier, Scruton informs us that “The effort of transcendence is, Kant argues, inevitable.” For, Scruton adds: “there is no way in which we can avoid the temptation towards this vain journey into the transcendental. Our very possession of a point of view on the world creates the ‘idea’ of a world seen from no point of view. Thus we strive always ‘to find for the conditioned knowledge of the understanding, the unconditioned, whereby its unity might be brought to completion.’”(See Kant: A Very Short Introduction, pages 60-61. The quotes within the quote are from Kant.)

A Comic Vision of Great Constancy is all about “striving to grasp the world as a whole.” I already knew this but didn’t know that Kant was invested in the same pursuit. My reading of Theseus’s speech at the end of “The Knight’s Tale” is an explicit account of this “striving” in A Comic Vision of Great Constancy (see pages 118-143). As for my reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first section of Chapter Eight, which is called “The View from Olympus,” introduces a view of the whole as a major theme in the play (see pages 189-191). In addition to addressing it directly as in the opening section of Chapter Eight, I note that Shakespeare on occasion gives Puck and Oberon the-view-from-Olympus when they stand aside and watch other characters perform. But, of course, Shakespeare is perfectly aware that the audience always has a god-like-view-of-everything. In this way, Shakespeare gives us a taste of what it is like to know everything we are “like to know” (see Peter Quince’s speech, page 412) about what’s happening on stage, and this device invites us to wonder whether a god-like-view-of-everything somehow somewhere exists. Shakespeare employs dramatic irony like this, I believe, because the wonder and the power of this perspective gives birth to something like the “idea” (Kant’s word here. See the quote above.) of grasping the whole, and the “idea” simultaneously gives birth to an intention. We are tempted to grasp the idea by knowing that to which it refers, even though it’s not of this world. We are tempted to grasp the whole even though we are immersed in the immense darkness of an (apparently) limitless universe.

Part Two: A Bridge Between Literary and Philosophical Approaches

I have argued in my second book, A Comic Vision of Self-Government: Essays about Political Ideas Shaped and Illuminated by Wisdom Literature, that literary works like “The Knight’s Tale”, the Odyssey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Wisdom books of the Bible like Proverbs, Job, and the Book of Jonah may have inspired and guided writers like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke as they sought to express their insights into economics and politics. Consider, for example, the role Smith’s Impartial Spectator plays in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. My book on Scruton continues to study this relationship between poetry and philosophy. Now that I have a more confident grasp of Kant’s and Scruton’s concepts, I imagine that Kant himself may have been tempted by Biblical and literary works to propose his transcendental philosophy, and Kant in turn encouraged Scruton to move in that direction. To sum up the point of this paragraph, my second book imagined that there’s a bridge between literary and philosophical approaches in this business of grasping the whole that connects the two. This bridge became even more of a reality once I discovered the writings of Roger Scruton and attempted a reading of The Soul of the World. Within these writings, I discovered that Scruton couldn’t have written or even thought what he did without the unfathomable resources of poetry.

When I reread A Comic Vision of Great Constancy, I was reminded that Rembrandt makes the relationship between poetry and philosophy the subject of his painting called “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”, which illustrates Chapter Seven (see page 146). Just as I wonder in this essay about the relationship between Shakespeare’s poetry and the philosophical reasoning of Kant, Hegel and Scruton, Rembrandt wonders in a visual language about the relationship between Homer’s poetry and Aristotle’s philosophical reasoning. For example, he has Aristotle reaching across time and space to put his hand on Homer’s head; that’s a visual bridge between the two. In the first section of Chapter Seven, called “Autonomy: Then and Now,” I do a brief reading of the painting. I imagine that Rembrandt is depicting “a chain of vision,” an image suggested by the gold chain that Aristotle wears across his body. The respective visions of Homer, of Aristotle, and of Rembrandt himself, whose painting comes to us like the consciousness of an otherworldly mind, are golden links in a chain of golden links, and we who view the painting are called on to be another link in an endless chain of vision. Rembrandt’s painting which connects Homer with Aristotle and the two of them with himself serves the same function as my essays about the relationship between Chaucer/Shakespeare, the philosophers, and myself.

I can see the similarity in what Rembrandt and I have attempted, but the similarity doesn’t tell me anything about the bridge itself, which is suggested by Aristotle’s outstretched arm and his hand that reverently touches the balding pate of Homer as if he were alive. Since an arm can’t bridge the gap between Homer, Aristotle, Rembrandt and ourselves, I have to conclude that the “bridge” for Rembrandt and for me is a language and the figures ofspeech of which a language is capable, just as the word “bridge” is part of a language and a figure of speech in my use of it. For that matter, there are musical signs in a musical language (like the “sign” of a major chord as opposed to a minor chord), architectural signs in an architectural language (like the use of columns in Greek temples and arches in Roman public buildings), and there are signs in dance and other wordless arts. A painted bridge, like all those that Monet did, is a sign in a painterly language, a hieroglyph. We see a bridge, either in a picture or in life, and already it has a meaning which derives from all our experiences of bridges. Homer’s language provided him with the word “arete” which can be translated as “excellence.” Thanks to that word and that language, “arete” was a vital part of the world Homer inhabited, just as, I’m sure, a bridge was. Arete is also the name of a great queen who plays a pivotal role in Odysseus’s quest for home. She’s the one who offers him hospitality after he washes up on her island, and her acceptance of him prompts the kingdom to transport him (as quick as thought) home to Ithaca on one of the kingdom’s magic ships. Her people rely on her because her judgment consistently proves to be excellent, and this episode involving Odysseus is further proof. Aristotle wrote a book called the Nicomachean Ethics in which he translates this excellence, as conveyed by the character of Arete in my example, into thoughts concerning moral virtue, the good, and beauty as an embodiment of the good. The Ethics argues that true happiness or excellence comes with personal fulfillment, and we achieve this state as we strive to cultivate virtue as a habit, just as Arete did in her life. Clearly both Homer and Aristotle would give their readers something of great value, something golden. Rembrandt, I argue in the book, paints a picture which offers the same gift, but it’s wrapped in the silent language of a painting.

I write in the second sentence of the original Preface to A Comic Vision of Great Constancy that I approach my recreations of “The Knight’s Tale” andA Midsummer Night’s Dream “with a great longing to understand the world and myself and so read them as they live in me.” This sentence frames my enterprise as a quest for understanding or meaning, and this goal tempts me to venture forth and interpret these works as best I can. Is the quest (the journey) to find meaning in vain (see Scruton’s quote in Part One above)? Scruton argues in The Soul of the World that only one who has gone on that journey and succeeded is in a position to judge. For those of us considering or attempting it, we may indeed be encouraged (or tempted) to do so by the beauty of their report. Each of the authors I write about in my books, I believe, is a case in point.

One more consideration or observation on this subject of a bridge across time and from person to person. Because, to the best of my knowledge, we venture forth on the quest for meaning in the vehicle of a language, the venture must be meaningful. Language by its nature is meaningful. It was invented by human beings to be meaningful. No wonder we love it! Language is love. Those who write treatises on the meaninglessness and lovelessness of life are, at their best, not-a-little mad like Don Quixote tilting at windmills; at their worst, they are like the poisonous snake in the garden—the intellectual ancestor of a certain 20th Century Continental philosopher—who promises with his speech the means and the power to determine good and evil. Isn’t it amazing that the authors of the story in Genesis already knew that the power of the snake’s speech would also determine the death of everything including the knowing self. The shooter high above the crowd in Las Vegas acted out for us the end to which the sentence “Hell is other people” (as asserted in Sartre’s No Exit) will inevitably tend. In the last century, the tyrant of a great nation somehow found reasons (which he put in a book, for he thought he was an intellectual and a prophet) to murder millions. In the end he helped himself (along with all the others) with a bullet to the brain.

Part Three: Different Folks, Different Things-As-They-Are

At this point, I need to discuss my use of the expression “things-as-they-are” in the text from 2014, which I have left largely intact. I wanted to contrast things-as-they-are with things-in-a-kind-of-dream-world. For example, I recall in the book the old vaudeville routine where a pedestrian is reading a newspaper while walking down a sidewalk. Because his attention is completely absorbed by the story in the paper, he doesn’t see the banana peel lying in his path. He is effectively dreaming even though he’s awake. He is about to wake up, however, when he slips on the banana peel and takes a painful fall. He has ignored things-as-they-are to his peril. The contrast I draw between things-as-they-are and things-in-a-dreamworld is different from the contrast Kant makes between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world. Kant employs these concepts to make his argument in The Critique of Pure Reason. He proposed his critique in order to solve a problem for science that was posed by Hume. Science explains what causes the motion of things. Hume argued, however, that a cause is not some thing that can be observed. We can observe individual events, but we can never observe necessary connections. Hume’s skepticism on this point threatened the whole enterprise of science. Kant believed, though, that science was a reliable method for knowing the world, and so he proposed his transcendental theory to solve Hume’s problem. Our perceptions of the world, Kant argued, are already structured by a-priori concepts of space, time, and causality. We can’t perceive anything without them. Since causality is reliably baked in, science can proceed with confidence that causality is real.

How is this a transcendental theory? To Kant’s mind, the theory is reasonable. His critiques study, however, the limits of reason. Causality is a case in point. Even though causality can’t be empirically observed, Kant “clearly perceived” (the standard that Descartes established) a way forward with his transcendental idealism. Here’s how Scruton describes the role that a transcendental world plays in Kant’s theory:

According to Kant, the world is independent of us, but also “conforms to” our faculties. The world is the way it is because that is the way it seems—even though being is more than seeming. The way it seems is the way we order it, and the way we must order it if we are to have objective knowledge. We also have the idea of a “transcendental” world—a world unconstrained by the requirement that we should know it. But it is only an idea, which can be translated into no knowledge of a transcendental reality. (Modern Philosophy, pages 24-25. The words in quotes are Kant’s words.)

A summary of Kant’s theory in plain English.

Having saved science, Kant then wrote The Critique of Practical Reason to save ethics and religion. To do that, he had to rescue human freedom from the foundational premise underlying science, that every event must have a physical cause. Just as Kant founded his first critique on transcendental concepts of space, time, and causality, he founded his second critique on the transcendental concepts of the moral law, the transcendental “I” of personal identity, and the transcendental concept of human freedom. Kant concluded that it was reasonable to sustain the concept of a moral law and the existence of an “I” that observes the moral law, but these depend on the all-important concept of freedom. At this point, I think it best once again for Scruton to make the argument:

We know that we are free, Kant argues, because we are bound by the moral law. We are self-commanded by reason to do what we ought and to avoid what we ought not. Such commands would not make sense, if we could not freely decide to obey them; for that which we do by nature cannot also be a duty. There is no place for freedom in the world of nature, whose ruling principle is the law of causality. It seems, therefore, that I am both part of nature—since I am an animal, subject to the passions, and prompted to act from all kinds of non-rational motives—and apart from it, since I am the originator of my actions, which stem from reason, and express my free obedience to a transcendental law. How do I reconcile those two ideas? Kant’s view is that they cannot be reconciled, but only transcended. They offer complete descriptions of the world from rival viewpoints: the viewpoints of understanding and practical reasoning. (Modern Philosophy, pages 234-235.)

The paradoxical form of the first sentence is typical of Scruton’s transcendental prose in places throughout his work. In those places, he writes with otherworldly precision what cannot otherwise be said.

I can now return to where I began, namely with my use of the phrase “things-as-they-are” and Kant’s use of it. In my first book, I contrasted things-as-they-are with a dream world, as when a person is lost in thought or actually dreaming. In Scruton’s philosophy, things-as-they-are (the world studied by science) is contrasted not with a dream world but with a transcendental world. Scruton calls the scientific viewpoint the “understanding” in the quote above. For Kant and Scruton, the humanities study things-as-they-are in the noumenal world—like the self, and the great question the self puts to itself when it asks “What shall I do?” This is the viewpoint that Kant refers to as practical reasoning. Other philosophers, like Edmund Husserl and Scruton himself refer to the world revealed by that viewpoint as the Lebenswelt or the human world. From a scientific point of view, human beings inhabit a world made up of atomic and subatomic particles and energies. From the point of view of the humanities, human subjects inhabit a world composed of lovers, families, communities, friends, workplaces, moral values, beauty, and so on. Which point of view is the “real” one? Only the transcendental world, Scruton implies, can answer the question.

And who or what can take credit for the answer? According to Kant, the “I” in the question “What shall I do?” can only be a perspective; it is “pure subject,” not an entity. A subject, he argued, cannot be an object. He also argued (in The Critique of Practical Reason), however, that we come to know the “I” (even if it is pure subject) and learn to answer the question “What shall I do?” through experiences where we employ practical reason to do the right thing in this world of objects and other people. Here the rubber (of the transcendental moral order and the transcendental “I”) hits the road (of natural objects and other people) in everyday decisions. These choices define us as subjects or persons. They do more than that; they create a sense of personhood in ourselves and in our sense of others. To borrow an image Scruton uses in The Soul of the World, Kant’s theory and our applications of practical reason exist on the horizon between natural and transcendental worlds, and the idea of personhood exists there as well.

In The Soul of the World Scruton relies on Kant’s concept of human freedom to argue that we can experience the sacred in this life. The sacred is present as we exercise our freedom to obey the moral law. That said, an excellent book by Mark Dooley explains how Scruton critiques Kant’s perspective. Once we acknowledge the freedom that’s the cornerstone of Kant’s ethical theory, Scruton relies (Dooley writes) on Aristotle and Hegel for his approach to ethics. In Scruton’s critique, Kant put too much emphasis on a moment of decision, a do or die sort of moment where the exercise of reason saves us. Aristotle, on the other hand, takes a long term perspective. We make both good and bad decisions over many years, and we learn from them what makes us happy and what doesn’t. We’re not obeying an abstract code; we learn through repeated experiences about the moral order that informs the way things are. Thanks to this informing principle, over time we acquire the habits of virtue which give us a moral disposition. For example, courage isn’t a quality we are born with, something that can be learned from a book, or something that comes to us all at once out of the blue. It’s a disposition which may take many years to cultivate. We have to learn, Aristotle writes, what to fear. For example, we can learn over time to fear abandoning our place in a battle line when the enemy strikes. Instead of a mystic quality, courage is now a reasonable goal for someone who is determined to learn “what to fear.”

Dooley also points out Hegel’s influence in shaping Scruton’s ethical perspective. I think it best to let Dooley speak for himself:

Scruton is here reinforcing the familiar Hegelian intuition that ‘communities are not formed through the fusion or agreement of rational individuals: it is rational individuals who are formed through communities.’ From the outset of his existence, the individual is surrounded by obligations, and it is ‘an essential part of rationality to recognize these obligations which are not self-imposed.’ And so, the abstract rationality of the Kantian ego is rejected in favor of that which is socially formed. It is, says Scruton, ‘only in the condition of mutuality, when he recognizes himself as a social being bound by a moral law which constrains him to recognize the selfhood of others, that the individual acquires (or realizes) his autonomy.’ The rational agent evolves therefore, from those institutional structures which burden him with ‘a debt of love and gratitude.’ (Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach, pages 59-60. The passages in quotes are from Scruton’s writings.)

Part Four: The Illusion That Brings Us to our Final Resting Place

Now that I’ve outlined a little of what I have learned from Scruton about Kant and Hegel and what I have learned from Dooley about Scruton, I can return to the main reason I wanted to write this new Afterword. The thoughts I have related here led to a discovery as I reread what I had written many years ago in this book on Chaucer and Shakespeare. For those readers unfamiliar with Kant’s concept of practical reasoning and Hegel’s “intuitions” about how communities and moral individuals are formed, I believe “The Knight’s Tale” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream vividly dramatize these matters as the characters act and react in lively relationships. Just as Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote their works without the help of modern philosophers, I wrote the essays in this first book without knowing much about the way Hegel’s dialectic (of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) could be applied not only to developments within a society over time but to interpersonal relationships. Because of my background in literature, I was quite familiar with Joseph Cambell’s book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces; it describes a narrative pattern common to many cultures where a hero leaves the safety of what he knows at home, explores the unknown in a foreign land, and returns to his people with wisdom gained from his experience to preserve his people’s health and safety. I learned about Hegel’s treatment of this theme, which predates Cambell’s by a century and a half, from reading Scruton’s books. Scruton agrees with Hegel that interpersonal relationships have layers of development, like the layers of an ancient city in an archeological dig. We begin innocently like Adam and Eve in the garden, but then we fall into self consciousness and alienation thanks to the objectifying gaze of the Other. Hegel held that the alienation is finally resolved in a synthesis (God willing, I’m tempted to add), as in his famous Master-Slave parable. These stages of development may seem to be separate episodes in a narrative, but Scruton argues they are one thing. They are layers of one thing, the “I” or the self which is always here and now. Through experiences which involve practical reasoning and the pressure of social obligations, we find ourselves to be both pure subject and an object of judgment. The process that brings us to this place of rest is another bridge I would describe with this bridge of language. It has been described as well in scripture and in our literature.

The narratives of Chaucer and Shakespeare give this process (or bridge from one state of being to another, if I employ a metaphor) a vivid, entertaining shape. In my reading of their narratives, poetry and philosophy are innocently and happily married. The war between Theseus and Hippolyta in both “The Knight’s Tale” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets the template for the process. People exercise practical reasoning when they converse, argue, and fight. The relationship may begin in a kind of play where one tests the other’s quickness and intelligence with a thrust, and the other may parry it and make a counter thrust. The contest, though, can escalate into a war. We see this in the various bouts between Palamon and Arcite in “The Knight’s Tale” and in the quarrels between all the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After a while, the character of the relationship may change. Chaucer and Shakespeare suggest how that might happen. Instead of trying to defeat the other, there may arise an appreciation for the other’s grace, courage, stamina, and power. (This, it would seem, is the case with Theseus and Hippolyta in both stories about them.) Or, the aggression may arrive at a stalemate when there’s no winner in sight and both combatants are exhausted. (This is the case with the four lovers from Athens in Shakespeare’s play.) One then may begin to reason about the conflict itself. Each thrust of the other forces the one to ask, in effect, “What shall I do?” This question (in Scruton’s description of Kant’s theory) is the essence of practical reasoning in relationship, for as social beings we are accountable for what we do. Practical reasoning, Kant believed, provides the ultimate answer. He argued that a reasonable person would eventually come to the reasonable conclusion that he would do the way he would like to be done by” (as Scruton puts it in Modern Philosophy, page 285). Previously, the one saw the defeat of the other as a means for enjoying the fruits of victory, but practical reasoning now teaches him to look at himself from the other’s point of view. He now sees that the other sees his defeat as a means for enjoying the fruits of victory. Just as he would rather be treated as an end, not a means, practical reasoning teaches him to treat the other as an end, not a means. Each may now recognize the other as an end unto itself. In both “The Knight’s Tale” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all the combatants (including Bottom, the most solipsistic character) eventually arrive at this place (which might as well be a preview of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends). Do they think it through with terms like this at hand to assist? Unlikely! But maybe just coming to this kind of recognition, a recognition of kind, is enough and a form of reason.

This account draws a picture of practical reasoning and a synthesis of competing interests, but a picture is not a living, breathing person alive in the world and interacting with others. Nevertheless, the idea of it points us in the direction where we might find ourselves finally at home in the world. That’s the goal Kant and Hegel had in mind, and Scruton points us in the same direction. Perhaps the idea will prompt an intention. Maybe Chaucer and Shakespeare have a role in bringing us to this place, just as Puck has the job of bringing the four Athenian lovers to their final resting place at the end of their midsummer night. Oberon tells Puck to bring Helena there “by some illusion” (see pages 261-262), and this is what he does for all the lovers. And this is what Shakespeare has done for his audience by means of his play. It’s his gift of a pearl beyond price. (For my vision of this pearl, see the “Coda” at the end of the book, pages 455-456.)

Introduction

In the first edition of A Comic Vision of Great Constancy, I added “An Essay on Significant Influences” as an Afterword at the end. In keeping with the relative informality and the personal nature of my approach, this was my way of giving credit to the writing of others without interrupting the text with extensive footnoting. In my second edition of that book, I replaced that essay with another called “On Poetry and Philosophy.” This new essay describes how my three comic visions can be read as chapters of one work, an inquiry spanning fifteen years. As I mentioned in the Preface of the second edition, I have moved the essay on significant influences here to its new home on my website.

Part One: Trinity College and the University of Oregon

I read Shakespeare’s Comedies by Bernard Evans as an undergraduate at Trinity College, and more than any other book of literary criticism it has shaped the way I read Shakespeare’s plays. Evans documents Shakespeare’s use of dramatic irony, a device that contrasts the ignorance of a character with the intelligence of an audience that’s allowed to see and understand the larger context. He showed me this about Shakespeare, but his critical frame can be used to interpret other great comic writers in Western literature, starting with Homer. Shakespeare may have learned this device from any number of authors, especially the Roman comedies he read in school as a student, but he certainly admired Chaucer’s mastery of it in The Canterbury Tales. I argue in Great Constancy that Chaucer and Shakespeare used dramatic irony to express the fact that the intelligence of a human being is intrinsically limited. This insight establishes a baseline or a “bottom”, the way a ship has a bottom, for the creating and the mending of a social order.

At Trinity College some of our English professors were strongly influenced by the work of Northrup Frye. In particular, I learned from Dr. Paul Smith in a course on Yeats about Frye’s synoptic view of literature and the importance of archetypes. I readily acknowledge that I continue to read literature through this critical lens. It’s old fashioned, but the world of archetypes has room for modern critical points of view. For example, the determinism that’s all the rage in contemporary critical circles is just another form of fate or fortune. Zeus has been replaced by concepts like the means of production or social conditioning.

As a graduate student at the University of Oregon. I took a class on the Pearl Poet given by Dr. James Boren, and it was here that I learned about the concepts of cupiditas and caritas in Medieval literature. Dr. Boren’s lectures were models of clarity, and these concepts continue to influence the way I read literature. More than that, they have proved their worth when I’m forced, usually by some kind of screw-up, to interpret my own life. Wisdom literature has been teaching people about the concepts of cupiditas and caritas for thousands of years. These stories foster an awareness that love usually looks, not with the eyes, but with the mind. We learn from them that, like Cupid, those looking with the mind are flying blind.

The Professor who taught my 18th Century Literature class (I can’t remember his name) also gave me an invaluable strategy, not only for the teaching of literature but also for ordering the great abiding quest for meaning on which all human beings embark. For every work we studied—“The Rape of the Lock,” “A Modest Proposal,” Tom Jones, etc.—we were required to write an essay no longer than a single page that captured “the informing principle” of the work. I still think this is a master stroke of teaching. Without having to study Plato’s Idea (of the forms) versus Aristotle’s critique of it, this exercise adopts the Aristotelean approach in a simple pragmatic exercise. I suppose I favor it because, now that I have studied them, I too favor the Aristotelean approach. What informs this life with meaning? This is the question a comic vision addresses.

Part Two: A Curriculum for the AP English Literature Course

Back in the 80’s Freeman Dyson wrote a book about nuclear disarmament called Weapons and Hope at a time when the two superpowers were still governed by a policy of mutual assured destruction. His last chapter, “Tragedy Is Not Our Business,” includes a description of Odysseus as a comic hero. I read this book when I was first putting together my AP course for seniors in 1984, and this chapter, especially the title, expressed what I hoped to teach my students. Dyson is a world-famous scientist still active at Princeton at this writing [2014], but he is unusual in that he has maintained strong ties with the literary roots of our culture. For me he also represents the hope that the folkways and the insights of an older culture and the methods of modern science can be brought more into balance in the world view we pass on to our children.

Thanks to Dr. Smith’s interest in Northrop Frye, I borrowed Frye’s “synoptic view” of literature as a way of structuring the course. Frye pictured the four modes of literature—romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy—as a circle with the reader in the middle. This way the mode could be described as the reader’s view on the principal character.  In a romance, we maintain a high level of respect for the hero above us. In a tragedy, on the right side of the circle, the hero begins above us but ends below us. In an ironic presentation, we look down on the character the entire time. In a comedy, we see the comic hero at first as a fool or a loser, but by the end he has risen, thanks to the grace of comedy, to a position above us. I began the AP course with an extensive unit on irony. Chaucer and Twain were our masters. I highly recommend this ordering of things, for I discovered that learning to grasp irony in a work is a critical step in reading comprehension, or comprehension of anything for that matter, as the reader has to supply the meaning. At the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer has us look at Odysseus from Athena’s and Zeus’s point of view. We look down at him as a captive, powerless man. The Odyssey is a comedy, though, for Odysseus rises from there to a god-like prominence. Homer doesn’t have tell us the meaning of his story. The shaping of an ironic contrast does that for us.

Part Three: In Retirement, Time To Study History

After I retired from teaching in 2002, I embarked on a self-directed reading program to prepare myself for the book I wanted to write. I read all the plays by Shakespeare that I had never studied, and my wife and I have now seen productions of the entire canon. I studied the 2006 edition of A History of the Modern World by Palmer, Colten, and Kramer to refresh what I learned from the first edition as an undergraduate, and I read many other books on history, art, architecture, and culture. After attending a lecture by the historian Daniel Boorstin, I read a number of his books beginning with his trilogy, The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers. I found much I liked in his writing. For example, he keeps the structure and the language simple and straightforward. It’s a worthy goal and one to which I aspire as well. Also, he approaches his subject as a storyteller the way I have done throughout my career in teaching. His history turns out to be a vast, interconnected series of biographies loosely grouped into heroes of the natural sciences, heroes of the imagination, and heroes in the search for meaning. At some point I realized that Boorstin’s method of presentation was closely linked to his overall argument. He was opposing historicism, the view popular in modern thought that history is an objective supernatural power like Providence that can dictate the way things and people are in the world. Boorstin, on the other hand, humanizes history by telling the linked stories of human beings who have added their discoveries and creations and insights to this surpassingly complex wonder of a world. At the beginning of The Discoverers he writes “A Personal Note to the Reader” which touches on this sense that the world will always be a place of wonder for human beings rather than a object acted on by historical forces. He writes:

My hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West—the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present—had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us. The obstacles to discovery—the illusions of knowledge—are also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their time can we begin to sense the courage, the rashness, the heroic and imaginative thrusts of the great discoverers. They had to battle against the current “facts” and dogmas of the learned.

This is another way of describing the comic vision that’s been the subject of my book. It’s a way of looking that appreciates the greatness of what we don’t know, and it’s a way of looking that overcomes obstacles created by what we think we know.

Part Four: In Retirement, Time To Study Philosophy

On a trip to California I bought The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas in a Pasadena bookstore and studied it carefully over a number of years. Bernard Evans’s book on Shakespeare describes how dramatic irony functions as a setting which conveys the poet’s theme—that Everyman’s knowledge is limited. In much the same way, Tarnas’s book provides a step by step survey of Western philosophy that helped me to place the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare within a coherent frame or narrative of philosophical ideas. It reveals the limits of those ideas as different thinkers wrestle with how we know the world. Tarnas concludes his narrative, however, with that development in modern philosophy which proclaims that there are no “grand narratives.” Clearly, Tarnas’s survey of the Western Mind refutes that claim. In my Preface of Great Constancy and throughout the rest of the book, I also refute that claim with my own view that, while the scientific method has deconstructed grand narratives with material facts, people all over the world still have experiences, like those in sacred writings and works of art, which humanize brute material facts with pictures of people living peacefully together in fields and towns, as they do in Bruegel’s “The Harvesters” or as in a tapestry that warms the walls of a stoney keep.

The project of deconstruction has picked up its pace and has seeped further and further into the social fabric. Like the pattern in manic depressive behavior, Descartes’ drive for certainty may be closely related to the depressing nihilism of postmodernism. It’s a great irony and a paradox that the modern project to establish certainty has ended up in massive uncertainty even as to the nature of material reality. Some may dismiss my depiction of contemporary life as the depiction of an intellectual tempest in a teapot, but there’s an anxious, hysterical quality about postmodern thought that spills over into our culture and into our daily lives. It’s not helpful or healthy to be in the grip of a deterministic, fatalistic view, and so my Comic Vision offers a critique of this view and its effects by celebrating the wisdom of comedy. 

From Wisdom’s point of view, Modern Man (the creation of Science) has painted himself into a corner by seeing himself and his world as the culmination of a logical and irresistible progression. We think that, as members of a modern culture, we are dealing with problems never faced before. As human beings lose their exalted status in the scheme of things (the status they enjoyed in the old grand narratives) and are immersed, along with everything else, into the chemistry and the physics of the natural world, the basic relationship reverses to where “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind” instead of the other way around. What a relief it can be, then, to discover authors at a distance of 600 and 400 years who describe the same cul de sac and who point the way forward out of the mind-forged prison of fatalism and historicism. 

The wisdom tradition, of course, is much older than the works of Chaucer. From ancient times it has been the business of comedy to show that the mind, as opposed to fate or historical forces, is at the heart of human survival and prosperity. This will always be the case, but what I refer to as “mind” may not be what a philosopher like Descartes had in mind.  Descartes thought mind was a separate substance apart from everything else. His “mind”, as a separate object, is able to imagine a world where mind is in the saddle riding things. Unfortunately, though, it can also then imagine a world where things are in the saddle riding mind. If his picture of the mind is false, I wonder about the effect his picture of mind has had on our culture. I can wonder about it, but that gets me nowhere. Instead, I would inquire what’s possible when mind is one with all and everything, like a comic hero at the end of a comedy.

Part Five: Reading Tarnas Deepens the Readings of Shakespeare and Chaucer

Along with an indebtedness to Tarnas’s overall narrative, specific chapters in his book have deepened for me the significance of the way I have read Shakespeare throughout my teaching career. For example, my chapter on “Devouring Time as Played by Snug the Joiner” derives from a study of his sonnets that I have been working on since I began teaching the advanced placement course in the nineteen-eighties. I knew then that Shakespeare was consistently playing with, and generally trying to dislodge or explode, the concept of time as a thing. I didn’t know, since I hadn’t studied it, Hume’s views about causality. I learned from Tarnas that Hume’s skepticism about causality came from finding the Achilles heel of empiricists who would ground all human knowledge in sense experience. Tarnas writes, “If every valid idea has a basis in a corresponding [sense] impression, then to what impression can the mind point for its idea of causality? None, Hume answered. If the mind analyzes its experience without preconception, it must recognize that in fact all its supposed knowledge is based on a continuous chaotic volley of discrete sensations, and that on these sensations the mind imposes an order of its own.” Having questioned the reality of causation, it was a short step for Hume to question the nature of the self as well, for for a sense of self is a creation of time and memory.

Since I read this passage about Hume, I have wondered whether his skepticism could have been suggested or confirmed by reading Shakespeare’s sonnet “Devouring Time” and other works. For example, the chaotic volley of discrete sensations in Tarnas’s account sounds like Lear’s night on the heath. Without a sense of time in the darkness of the heath, a sense of self slips away as well. Lear is a tragedy, but his night has the much the same function as a midsummer night in fairyland. They serve as a comic wake-up call for the characters initiated into them. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare makes the case that the suffering caused by time (the four days and nights, for example, that separate Theseus from that which he desires and which define him in relation to Hippolyta) is a necessary prologue to a comic vision in which the days dissolve seamlessly into night and the nights dream away the time.

Despite a skepticism about concepts that human beings employ to locate themselves on a time/space grid, neither Hume nor Shakespeare was a nihilist or anarchist. Hume argued that human beings ordered the world with an opinion. He saw that this opinion was necessary, but as a philosopher he couldn’t substantiate it. For the most part, he thought a people’s inherited culture reflected that opinion and could be counted on to serve as a basis for a social order. Then again, he lived in England which had long and deep traditions in law and liberty.

Tarnas’s chapter called “The Quest of Thomas Aquinas” confirmed for me the way I had been reading Theseus’ great speech at the end of “The Knight’s Tale,” even though I wasn’t aware at the time of Aquinas’s influence on Chaucer. The chapter includes a description of his philosophy that is particularly relevant for understanding what Theseus means by “experience” when he refers to it in his speech. Tarnas argues that Aquinas blended the teachings of Plato and Aristotle for his theory of the way human beings perceive and know the world. Aquinas, he writes, moves away from Plato and toward Aristotle when he argues that sensible things do not exist merely as “shadowy replications of the Platonic Ideas.” Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that the Platonic forms “were genuinely embedded in matter, united with matter to produce a composite whole.” Aristotle, however, tends to view nature as existing apart from God, and this is where Aquinas parts company with him. He argues instead that meaningful perception would “connect the created world with God.” I quote the next passage at length because Tarnas here explains in philosophical terms what Theseus is telling his people in plainer language:

To accomplish this [connecting the created world with God], Aquinas reintroduced the Platonic notion of “participation” in this new context. Created things have true substantial reality because they participate in Existence, which is from God, the infinite self-subsistent ground of all being. For God’s essence was precisely his existence, his infinite act of being which underlay the finite existence of all created things, each with its own particular essence. The essence of each thing, its specific kind of being, is the measure of its participation in the real existence communicated to it by God. What a thing is and the fact that it is at all are two distinct aspects of any created being.

These passages helped me to interpret Chaucer’s text so I wrote in my book “The fact that we can ‘sense’ the world at all ties us to the whole, the sentience and ‘sentence’ of the world, from which we derive. Order and meaning take shape in perception itself.” (See the section called “Perception: A View Into the Garden.”) When Tarnas writes that “What a thing is and the fact that it is at all are two distinct aspects of any created being”, he is phrasing in different words Helena’s formulation that there’s looking with the mind and looking with the eyes. The one calculates what a thing is; the other appreciates that the thing, and the one perceiving it, is at all. The larger view, the one that looks with the eyes, describes what I refer to as a comic vision.

Part Six: The Creation of a Comic Vision

I’ll close these acknowledgments of Tarnas’ work, however, with a disclaimer. While I found Tarnas’ narrative persuasive and compelling and the commentaries I have just reviewed were particularly helpful, this is not to say that I agree with his answer to the philosophical problems posed by post-modernism. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, looks to the stars and astrological charts for guidance, whereas I follow the lead of Chaucer and Shakespeare who believed in comedy as a form of self-government. Teaching Western literature in a public school classroom has become problematic due to sensitivities about religious issues being discussed there. This doesn’t mean that I ignored religious texts in my own reading. I have studied the literature of the Old Testament and the New Testament to see for myself what Chaucer and Shakespeare learned from these texts. As my own text indicates (see “The Source of a Noble Respect,” pages 404-407 in Great Constancy), I regard The Book of Job as an indispensable wisdom text. My study of Buddhism also has had a decisive influence on my reading of “The Knight’s Tale.” It has influenced the way I organized several chapters specifically the material concerning the birth and development of ego in “Everyman’s Story” and the six psychological states that the two knight’s experience during the course of “Ego’s Sold-Out World Tour.” These six states have an uncanny resemblance to the Six Realms as Buddhism describes them. This system has been worked on for thousands of years, and the insights of these teachers are still revered and cherished for the way they help people to survive and prosper. If Chaucer arrived at similar insights into the human mind, this speaks in favor of a comic vision that is constant in human beings despite their different languages, history, and culture.

I have obliquely referred to the title of Toni Packer’s first book, The Work of This Moment, in a section of the Introduction called “The Work.” Toni began her teaching life as the dharma successor of Phillip Kapleau at the Rochester Zen Center but eventually left that position to establish her own center for meditation. Her teaching is deeply rooted in the Japanese Zen that was her teacher’s discipline, but once on her own she developed a much more informal style. Toni was an important influence during the time I was teaching and developing the readings I have set down in book form. In conversations with Toni I first glimpsed the strong similarities between the central theme of her teaching and the comic insight of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Borrowing Helena’s terms to explicate Toni’s terms, the work of this moment is to look with the eyes.

I have already suggested that The Passion of the Western Mind serves as a critique of ideas and of the writers who have them. Like the use of dramatic irony in the Odyssey, I sensed from reading the story of the western mind that the knowledge of Everyman, even a brilliant philosopher, is limited. Tarnas’ survey presents a series of what he calls “world views.” He begins with the Greek or Classical world view, shows how that evolved into a Christian or Medieval world view, and ends with the modern world view which came into being during the course of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution. His title makes it clear that we, Western readers, have a passion for ideas that shape the way we look at the world. The way we look at the world endows us with the power to create a world, just as we have the power to create a life in our passion for another. From the beginning, comedy has been about this creative power so for me this links Tarnas’s structural device for telling the story of Western philosophy with the story I tell about comedy, which has its origins in fertility rites. Similarly, Tibetan Buddhism is more than just a set of ideas. It’s a world, a cosmos that’s structured around male and female polarities, and so it’s a way of looking at the world that creates a world.

Part Seven: Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, Morgan’s Inventing the People, and Hume’s  Vision of Opinion as the Basis for Government

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare has the character of Bottom proclaim to the universe (for his fellow workmen have all run away) “I have had a most rare vision.” He had that vision after Puck supplied him with a completely new head. This vision makes all the difference in the world for him and his companions, for their play is “preferred” and wins the hearts and minds of all who witness it. This description of Bottom’s vision sets the stage for my retelling of A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell. It’s about economics, politics, and culture, but as the title tells us it’s about two conflicting visions of human nature. Sowell calls them the constrained and the unconstrained view. The first argues that human beings are intrinsically limited as to what they can know of themselves and the world. Because their knowledge about individuals and groups is hopelessly inadequate for the task, individuals cannot be counted on to manage a complex social order. The constrained view, therefore, relies instead on well established institutions and social processes like a market economy and the rule of law. The unconstrained view, on the other hand, believes that gifted and highly trained experts can successfully manage complex economies and societies. If left to their own devices, they will create the best of all possible worlds. When we observe the way our country is so deeply divided into those who share the constrained view and those who share the unconstrained view, we have to agree with Sowell that a vision creates a self-contained, self-sustaining world. Those who don’t share that vision inhabit a different world, and so we have a war of the worlds between them.

A Comic Vision argues that this conflict of visions is not just an accident of history that began in the 18th Century with writers like Adam Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet, spokespeople for the constrained and the unconstrained point of view. We can say that Louis XIV had a constrained view of his role as king  (“L’etat c’est moi”) because he simply followed the example of thousands who thought about kingship in that way. If Smith, Hayek, and Sowell are familiar with a constrained view, it’s because comic writers have left a vivid record of it starting with Homer, the father of all Western literature. Shakespeare, I have argued, significantly reinforced the constrained view which he could read about (in his own language) in the tales of Chaucer. When Helena tells us that love looks, not with the eyes, but with the mind, she captures what a great comic writer four hundred years ago had to say about the conflict of visions that Sowell has found at the heart of our economic and political life. The constrained view looks with the eyes at things-as-they-are. The unconstrained view looks with the mind at things that must be changed in line with the way the mind would order things. This conflict is not just an economic or political problem. We find it at the heart of the human condition; we find it in the human heart, in the way we love. The two views would appear to be forever hopelessly in conflict, but comedy puts us on a path to resolving them. This is the point of A Comic Vision and a reason for writing it.

From the beginning A Comic Vision argues that the insights of comedy provide a foundation for self-government. It’s easy to observe, along with Theseus in “The Knight’s Tale,” that there is nothing so foolish as a man in love. It is very difficult, on the other hand, to observe it when that man is oneself. Nevertheless, this is the essential act of self-government. Because the themes of comedy and government are so closely related in my reading of these stories, I studied the history of our own government as an experiment in self-government magnified in time and space. Edmund Morgan has thoroughly researched the early years of the American colonial experiments in government, and he begins his important book on the subject, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, with a quote from David Hume:

Nothing is more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicite submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

When we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ‘Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and popular.

Morgan agrees with Hume but he alters the statement slightly to read that government is based, not on opinion, but on “a fiction.” It also could be called a “world view.” Some may argue that force is not always on the side of “the many,” but the breakup of the Soviet block, one of the most brutal totalitarian schemes in history, and other mass uprisings against police states tend to reinforce Hume’s observation. After beginning with Hume’s quote, Morgan then painstakingly documents how the experiments in government during the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century illustrate Hume’s idea, and he argues as well that the idea found its fullest expression in the American colonies, the American revolution, and the establishment of constitutional government. It is interesting to note that Ben Franklin met with Hume personally when he visited Scotland in 1758.

Hume’s insight into the nature of government and Morgan’s research into the establishment of self-government in England and America make a compelling case for the role a fiction like “The Knight’s Tale” or A Midsummer Night’s Dream may actually play in our national life. It suggests that, at a very basic level, a government is not a concrete fact, like a king on his throne or a soldier with a gun; it’s an opinion. It’s the way a man sees the world and the way he sees himself in the world. Government is now free to be something other than a trick of fate or a fact of history. This view of government frees up a space for a play of ideas like that in a play or in a truly representational government. 

It’s a space that even hard-headed, skeptical Theseus finally sees for himself in his last words at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

This palpable gross play hath well beguil’d
The heavy gait of night. Sweet friends, to bed.
A fortnight hold we this solemnity
In nightly revels and new jollity.

Peter Quince’s fiction has charmed the heavy hand of Theseus’s authority. Why, in the end, does the play govern what we all, players and audience alike, have experienced? It’s because it “holds” securely, the way a fort, night and day, physically holds a community secure and holds the goods secure that we value in community—namely a solemn commitment in marriage and the pleasures those committed take in shared interests. Edmund’s Morgan’s presentation of this argument helped me to see the relationship between my work as a student of literature and the authority I sought (and needed in order to effectively teach) at the head of a classroom. Government, he says, is based on a fiction, and what better fiction can we imagine than that we live in a comic world. As in any kind of sorcery, though, there’s a great danger in the idea that government is based in a fiction. It could easily lead (and has) to the anarchy of Everyman as his own priest and king. And so I argue in the marketplace of ideas for something of great constancy in human history, a comic vision that holds a social order together.