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.