Follow the Breath
(Posted on Tuesday, October 22, 2024)
(This poem opens my inquiry into what it means to be a living soul. A Comic Vision of Sacred
Kingship both begins and ends with it.)
Follow the Breath
Breathe,
Oh,
Breathe
To be a living soul…
It
Is
The
Gift beyond compare
Of
An
Unbroken
Line of ancestry.
Again
We
Wake
With breath that lifts the breast,
(Each
A
Perfect
End unto itself)
That
Would
Be
Given again to the source
Of
Breath
And life
And all and everything
I wrote the first stanza of this poem in the beginning of my inquiry. The poem grew to its present
shape over the years. Like a lighthouse and a north star, it warned me about getting off track
and guided me home.
As I reread and edited the work near the end of the process, I noticed that the phrase “all
and everything” kept showing up throughout the text like a refrain in a song. Since it has taken
upon itself this kind of importance, I need to acknowledge that I’ve borrowed the phrase from
Neville Coghill’s translation of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” It appears in the speech where
Theseus delivers his “sentence” to the court on the events that have unfolded (for the reader as
well as his subjects) over the course of the narrative. Since the narrative involves the death of a
young knight, his sentence (the meaning) must include the sentence of death that hangs over all
human life, like the sword of Damocles. Theseus has much to say, but I’ve abbreviated it to
these six lines:
There is no help for it, all take the track,
For all must die and there is none comes back.
Who orders this but Jupiter the King,
The Prince and Cause of all and everything,
Converting all things back into the source
From which they were derived, to which they course?
In the last four lines, Theseus appears to be asking a question: “Who orders this?” But at the
same time, he is answering the question by affirming that “this” is ordered by a sacred king. I
argue in my book that the conversion he describes is like a hinge on which all and everything
turns to reveal what it means to be a living soul.
On Poetry and Philosophy
(Posted on Tuesday, October 22, 2024)
(This essay appears as an Afterword in the second edition of A Comic Vision of Great
Constancy. It replaces “An Essay of Significant Influences” which appeared as the Afterword in
the first edition. That essay now follows “On Poetry and Philosophy” here on my website.)
On Poetry and Philosophy
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 iix-xi). I related the parable
and made that statement in that Preface because they express the overall theme of the book. If
I’m not mistaken, the Old Testament expresses 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 187-190). 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.
This vision of Homer, Aristotle, and Rembrandt himself, whose painting comes to us like the
consciousness of an otherworldly mind, is a golden link 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’m inclined
to conclude that the “bridge” for Rembrandt and for me is a language and the figures of
speech 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” and A 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 certain 20th Century
Continental philosophers—who promises with his speech the means and the power to
determine good and evil. Isn’t it amazing that the authors of this 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” 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
In this stage of my new Preface, I’d like 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 a way forward with his
transcendental idealism. Here’s how Scruton describes the role that a transcendental world
plays in his 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.)
After years of studying the matter, I find that this is a masterful 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 Kant’s transcendental idealism, science studies natural objects (what I refer to as “things-as-they-are” in this book). Scruton calls this 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. 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, 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 the bridge I have
attempted to describe. It has been described many times 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? Maybe not. 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 257-260), 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.)
An Essay on Significant Influences
(Posted on Tuesday, October 22, 2024)
An Essay on Significant Influences
After the text of my argument in the first edition of A Comic Vision of Great Constancy
had concluded, I added “An Essay on Significant Influences.” 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 an another called “On Poetry
and Philosophy.” This new essay briefly describes how my three comic visions can be
read as chapters of one work, an inquiry spanning fifteen years that has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. As I mentioned in the Preface of the second edition, I have moved
those significant influences in the creation of my first book to its new home here on my
website.
I begin with the lectures I attended 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.
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. Evans 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 human beings 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.
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.
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.
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’ 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 in Bruegel’s “The Harvesters” or like a tapestry that warms the walls of a stoney keep.
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 as to the nature of material reality. Some may dismiss this issue as
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 from everything else. His “mind”, as a separate object, is able to imagine a world where mind is in the saddle riding things but 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 this picture 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.
Along with an indebtedness to Tarnas’ 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’ 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,” pages 159-165.) 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 a
looking with the mind and a 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.
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 487-491), 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.” This has influenced the way I organized several chapters on “The
Knight’s Tale,” 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 radically 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’ 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.
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. 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.