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.)