Gems and Oddities

To comment, scroll to the bottom of the page.

CONTENTS:

Daniel Boorstin, The Seekers
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 
Harry Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum
Sandra Day O’Connor, The Majesty of the Law
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Plato, Symposium
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings
Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

CASTING MY FILM

 

            My movie will never be made. I am unknown in the industry and the actors have mostly died. My movie is what the industry calls a “remake,” and worse, it’s not even a remake of an earlier successful movie. It’s a smart new version of an old Shakespeare play.

            Now there are a lot of Shakespeare movies. For some reason, the best come from foreign countries. England is far in the lead here. Olivier’s version of the history plays (Henrys and Richards) are first rate. His Hamlet won seven Academy Awards. Kurosawa was magnificent in retelling King Lear and Macbeth. There is also a Russian version of Lear which I like.

            But American efforts have largely been second rate. Yes, there is Orson Wells (Othello and Chimes at Midnight), but I wouldn’t bother to re-watch his Macbeth or Lear. Maybe the best American effort so far was Max Rinehardt’s superb 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Cagney.

            But I am dealing with a different Shakespearean comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies don’t attract Hollywood, unless they’re the teen-oriented, “based upon” variety. And yet Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford did an early knockabout Taming of the Shrew, followed decades later by Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in their own creditable version. But no one has done a classic movie of “Twelfth Night” — and my “Twelfth Night” won’t get made.

            But if made, it would be a huge success. It’s because of the casting. That’s the key. When Irving Thalberg let his 34-year-old wife play a 13-year-old Juliet, to get it made he was obviously pretty much stuck with enlisting a coterie of middle aged actors to play the other “teenagers.” The resulting Romeo and Juliet in 1935 was not supposed to be a comedy, but it’s pretty comical. My “Twelfth Night” will suffer from no such restrictions. I have selected each of my actors at the age at which they were appropriate to play their parts.

            Who could be better as the tragic, repressed Olivia than Greta Garbo? After you think about her Camille, then think of her unfrozen Ninotchka. Did she like men or women? Ask her Queen Christina. Shakespeare’s Viola is a bit harder. She must be a gamin. You say Audrey Hepburn is no longer with us? So what? Neither is Jean Seberg. What about Leslie Caron? Rita Tushingham?

            By the way, my foregoing reference to MGM’s awkward Romeo and Juliet was not intended to disparage John Barrymore. I acknowledge that as Mercutio, the old ham was winded after his first sword slash. But he was born to be Sir Toby Belch (and if unavailable, we could surely call upon his pal, W.C. Fields).

            As for Malvolio, take away the slapstick and you have Oliver Hardy. Every time I see the play I imagine him in yellow garters straining to smile at Garbo. And this naturally brings us to Sir Andrew Aguecheek. No, it’s not Rex Harrison or even Woody Allen. Get me the number of Stan Laurel, Hardy’s old partner. “I was once beloved,” Aguecheek says, scratching his puzzled head. And to complete the Barrymore and Laurel trio, I have cast Betty White as Maria.                                                                    

            So that’s it. Oops, except for the wisecracking, melancholy, melodious fool Feste who also shows a sadistic streak. How do I cast this role? I find the answer in Reinhardt’s aforesaid Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is there in plain sight. No, not Cagney. The call goes to Mickey Rooney, at whatever age you like.  I believe Olivier said he was the most talented man in the business.

• Daniel Boorstin, The Seekers –

To my surprise (since I admired greatly Boorstin’s The Americans), I discovered that this is not a particularly good book. Possibly it is because I have read more about political philosophy than American history and have more decided views of the subject, but I really don’t think that is the problem. The problem is really that this book – though much better than anything I could hope to produce – is more or less what I myself would end up with given the weak organizing principle: seekers.

For The Seekers is just a survey compendium of political (and a few religious) thinkers through the ages. It’s part biography, part recapitulation. Boorstin calls it a “sampling” – because, after all, one could hardly discuss everyone who falls within Boorstin’s ambiguous definition of what is a “seeker.” But not only is the book not original, the secondary source that Boorstin relies on most heavily is Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy – which has the distinction of being a book both far better than the one Boorstin has produced, but also one of the least insightful in the field.[1]

ENDNOTES

1. For example, by my lights, at least, Boorstin has badly misunderstood both John Locke and Machiavelli.




        Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
Presumptuous it is for an amateur to put down reservations about an eminent piece of scholarship by an erudite writer. And yet, as an amateur, my reflections will never be published. Furthermore, my reservations, such as they are, are de minimis in comparison to my genuine respect for a cogent and learned monograph written by a man who was certainly a genius.


          Actually I have little doubt that Sigmund Freud himself shared this evaluation of his intellect. In Civilization and its Discontents he gives modest respect for others in his field, but his chief references are preponderantly to his own earlier work and research. I believe that he would be entirely contented to be referred to as a great scientist as well as a physician.

          But in my reading of this book, science does not really make a very impressive appearance, at least not in any traditional sense. If I can rely on his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s scientific method was the case study of individual patients. His work site was the consultation room, not the laboratory. No, to me, by far the greatest qualities of Civilization are literary and his method is logic[1] and a capacious imagination. Considering the difficulty of the subject matter, his writing is straightforward and mostly devoid of jargon (except that which he had invented).


          By the time he published this book, Freud had gone beyond hypothesis. He had now invented the language of psychoanalyis and here he uses his earlier propositions as having been established and indisputable. His opening paragraphs leave no doubt that if we are to understand the "discontents" of civilization, we must first understand the id and the ego, of which he is the interpreter if not the inventor.

          Although the ego, he says,


"appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else, . . . on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delineation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of façade . . . . [T]owards the outside . . . the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. [But] there is only one state . . . in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. . . [A] man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

          It seems so clear: we all have an ego, which is apparently a separate organ with a primitive mind of its own. It "separates" itself from "unpleasure" and "detaches itself from the external world." Not that the ego can be pinned down the way we can examine, say, a kidney. "The boundaries of the ego are not constant" and love is the wild card.

         Taking a bow in the passive voice, Freud then reminds us that "it was discovered [sic] that a person becomes neurotic"[2] because society imposes "frustration" on him to conform to its cultural ideals[3]. Furthermore, regardless of their primitive nature – and our acceptance of the Darwinian law that in the animal kingdom "the most highly developed species have developed from the lowest" — nevertheless the lower species continue to survive, and in the case of the ego what is primitive is preserved "alongside of what is the transformed version."

        So this is the writer's thumbnail sketch of man's structure. And indeed, since this is only the second book of his that I have read, I surmise that Freud has extensively elaborated the picture in many other places. Moreover, I am necessarily obliged to read his book in English translation, and so it probably imports nothing of significance that I never found in it that English word "soul" denoting the immaterial and eternal part of man. Perhaps Freud feels the ego is the soul.

       In any event, this architecture of the human psyche provides a reliable reference point from which we can now inspect the "discontents" of our civilization. What follows, as I see it, is a modern gloss on Thomas Hobbs, though from the sexual angle.

      And yet it is first worth pausing here. In this book, Freud does not give much analysis to the popular notion that there are multiple civilizations which put out a buffet of discrete choices for the open-minded observer. Nor for that matter is there any wide consideration of competing cultures and how to evaluate them such as Eliot ventured a decade or so later.

      This too seems to have been a deliberate choice. Freud's mission, after all, is to get to the "discontents" without caviling over how they might differ between Victorian England and Pago Pago. As he first describes it, "civilization" is teleological — fixed and monolithic — familiar to all of us, and requiring little elaboration except as it is vulnerable to "discontents." Fundamentally it means "necessity," protecting us against nature and adjusting our mutual relations.

       Elsewhere, however, he comes to regard civilization — which he eventually calls “the unity of mankind” — as less the ultimate goal of mankind than it is a “process, in the service of Eros.”[4] The "decisive step" of this process is the replacement of a single person's power by the power of a community. "All the things with which we seek to protect ourselves" he writes, "are part of that very civilization." And this, says Freud, is "justice," a compromise with freedom, a renunciation of instinct[5] and hence a denial of full satisfaction.

      The reader is now poised to consider a menu of "discontents," the first of which is religion. Religion is never given a more specific definition than being man's "deepest feeling" — an infantile "system of doctrines and promises" most easily explained by looking at "common" men, most of whom will "never be able to rise above" it. Religions are "mass delusions" and "no one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such." But the idea that life must have a purpose is inextricable from religion. This being so, it is more sensible to ask what men think to be the purpose of their lives. And the answer to this is happiness, the pleasure principle.

       Happiness, Freud goes on to tell us, "is a product of the economics of the individual's libido." But — and assuming we understand what this means — to achieve it, that individual will or must adopt a "technique of living." For example, gaining happiness, in a secondary sense, can consist of the "weary resignation" of keeping suffering away by "internal mental processes." Hence because love — sexual love — is our most intense happiness, such happiness is also connected with the subjective enjoyment of beauty. Beauty? But beauty has "no obvious use, nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it."[6]

       The primary emphasis of the fourth chapter is the author's view of love, and particularly the "rift" between "genital love"[7] and "aim-inhibited love or 'affection.'" Civilization aims to "bring people together into large unities," but the family is an idea that is resistant to this. So every young person is eventually obliged to detach himself from family when puberty arrives. This also leads to a wedge between men and women. Civilization confronts a man with ever more difficult tasks which "entails an expedient distribution of his libido," meaning a constant dependence of his association on other men, estranging him from his duties as husband and father. Women, by contrast, are "little capable" of "the ever more difficult" tasks of civilization and therefore are forced into the background of civilization and become hostile towards it. Heterosexual love is also restricted by "insistence on legitimacy and monogamy," a result which has "sensibly diminished" our ability to fulfill our aim in life — happiness. Discontent indeed[8].

      Returning to his observation that "bring[ing] people together into large unities" is a fundamental objective of civilization, Freud shrugs that sexual love is obviously the antithesis of that. A pair of new lovers is indifferent to a wider community. Hence, "love thy neighbor as thyself" is simply contrary to reason. "Nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man."

      Only toward the end of Civilization are we introduced to the super ego, which Freud says is essentially our conscience and is armed most conspicuously with guilt. There it sits, “like a garrison in a conquered city” — that city being the ego. The ego is susceptible to aggressiveness, which is the instinct most retrograde to civilization — but one entirely congenial to the ego. Here the going gets a bit heavy and both the ego and super ego are virtually personified. The idea seems to be that the super ego, supremely energetic, will “torment” the ego with the knowledge that some aggressive acts could result in someone else’s withdrawal of love or respect which would be intolerable to the ego.

        Freud seems to have felt that this “guilt” section was the most important and innovative part of Civilization and I would at least be inclined to call it the most intensely “Freudian.” But to me his arguments about guilt’s origin, its nature, and its value seemed almost fantastical. Yes, guilt and shame are obviously essential to civilization. I suppose they could be called “discontents.” An uncivilized man is one who cannot feel shame. But to ground such important considerations on both supposititious and utterly unproven pre-history and foregone conclusions is not science and its accompanying fictional explication — unusual for Freud — was not even artistic.

       Whether any of Freud’s conclusions carry any weight today I really cannot say. But even if they have been supplanted, I still think he commands enormous respect. Although he was surely not the first to recognize that men have and act upon unconscious motives and fears, he was the first I know of to demand that such things require methodical study and explanation. He took the job seriously and, whatever else might be said, his writings were always serious and have been of incalculable influence for 100 years. For better or worse, the last century would be inconceivable without Freud.

[1] But he makes some suppositions about primitive man that cannot be called logic and can as easily be called fantasy.


[2] I first heard this word in college and since then I don't believe I have ever heard anyone use it out loud. What on Earth does it mean? Later on, when he talks about instinct, the author ventures that it means a struggle between self-preservation and "the demands of the libido" in which the former is victorious, but not without collateral suffering.


[3] We are also offered a bit of psychological history by means of two prominent reasons why there are people hostile to civilization: (i) early Christianity's low regard for earthly life and (ii) the later simplistic reports from the age of discovery that there were primitive peoples whose uncomplicated lives, supplied by nature's bounty, essentially satisfied every need.

[4] Here is another accessible Freudean metaphor, always useful within his abstract concepts. Eros shares world-domination with “Death”; they are the co-equal instinct of life and the instinct of destruction. Personally .I found this helpful, but Freud himself later wisely warns against “pursu[ing] analogies to an obsessional extreme.”


[5] It implies nothing as to ethics, which plays virtually no part in his analysis. When he does get around to considering ethics, Freud says is “the sorest spot in every civilization.,” and must be seen as “therapy” against the severerst demands of the super-ego ( see infra).


[6] I wonder if his grandson ever read this passage.


[7] "Genital love." The man was a poet.


[8] And here I pass over — though Freud did not — another discontent: that people are "unmistakably bisexual."

• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams —

I think that we should give free rein to our conjectures, provided we keep our heads and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. Since for the first approach to any unknown subject we need the help only of auxiliary ideas, we shall prefer the crudest and most tangible hypothesis to all others.
Freud
Beginning in my 50s, I began to dream a lot, so let me begin this with my own observation, which Freud does not address until late in his book: To me, dreams are “thinking” – only toward the end does Freud tells us that this was also Aristotle’s conclusion – but without the guidance of the will, which seems to be off duty during sleep[1].

But “thinking” is not on furlough at any time, and so when dreams come, it is only the dreamer’s own ability to regulate them which is absent. Dreams are the direct result of what we think about the subjects, simply without reason directing the process. In this sense, they are left-overs. Furthermore, during wake, we obviously can and do think of two or more things simultaneously. I drive to work and think about the traffic while I also worry about my family problems as well as the day the day to come. Throughout the commute, I know these are separate trains of thought. In dreams these separate matters are conflated and what I know is almost reduced to nothing. In my dreams, I am a witness, and often a participant, but never in control of what happens[2].

What I have just said is not at variance with Freud’s ruminations on dreams and “dream thoughts” in this book (except the part about left-overs which he would reject), but I am far more comfortable with it than I am with the “interpretations” which he offers. Indeed, although I haven’t read anything else by Freud, I suspect that the will which I believe to be missing during dreaming is what I think he called the superego (a word I didn’t find in this book but for two late footnotes)[3]. Furthermore, if a dreaming person still “thinks” – albeit without controlling it by his will – the same personality that informs his thinking while awake is probably still at work while asleep.

But personality plays virtually no role in this book (Freud says that we are prone to overestimate conscious character), and as for thinking, Freud says it is “nothing but a substitute for the hallucinatory wish.” This explains a good deal about Freud’s own dreams[4] – not in relation to his sexual theories, but just his inventive mind. Sometimes the man is just irresistible[5] (though also sometimes absurd). When he ventures into interpreting his own dreams, for example, though his favored destination is consonant with his famous theories, the voyage itself is a wonderful symphony of puns, homonyms, rococo allusions, etc.[6] He interprets dreams as we approach poetry and literature – which 100 years later seems to be the area in which his influence is greatest.

But then there is the far more problematic effort at a scientific approach. Much effort is expended in distinguishing “dream content” from “dream sources.” Furthermore, we are told that dreams can be categorized; they are “wish fulfilment,” or “displacement[7],” or “anxiety[8],” or “convenience dreams,” falling more or less neatly into classes which the author has discovered and defined for the enlightenment of his readers. They are manifestations of the unconscious, which is “the true psychic reality.” In place of will, there appear to be rules. There is, in other words, a certain dogmatism in Freud that resembles in its own way the peremptory diktats of two other Central Europeans, Hegel and Marx.

But I don’t write this to denigrate the vibrant insights of a truly innovative thinker. Even a reader who decides that the overall conclusions of this book are silly could not deny its refreshing novelty and inventiveness. (And I personally will always be congenial to one who can repair to Shakespearean references in support of his notions[9].)

The first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams was published more than 100 years ago, and although I read a “completely revised edition” printed in London in 1942 (a year or two after his death), I imagine that in today’s medical climate, the entire matter must seem preposterously outdated. But there is still value in reading someone like Freud who, for all of the legitimate criticisms leveled at him, was still one of the most original influential thinkers of the 20th Century. For one thing, he was obviously an erudite man and not absurd as I had believed of him in my younger years. For another, he is a clear and engaging writer – even in translation – and notwithstanding this overlong book, he can be read with interest for hundreds of pages.

The first section of the book is a sober rehearsal of the views of earlier thinkers about dreams, chiefly the middle European doctors of the mid-19th Century. Indeed, Freud’s treatment of them is so sympathetic that there are times when it is difficult to distinguish where the earlier analysts leave off and he begins. (He makes it clear, however, that he sees Albert Scherner as “the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams.”) But Freud characteristically makes himself clear about his objectives: “the question is not whence particular dreams originate, but rather: what is the exciting cause of ordinary dreams in normal people?” (This was hardly “the question” in the days of Julius Caesar who, by the way, is reported to have dreamt of sleeping with his mother.) The dream itself, says Freud, is “incoherent.”[10]

“[I]t reconciles, without hesitation, the worst contradictions; it admits impossibilities; it disregards the authoritative knowledge of the waking state, and it shows us as ethically and morally obtuse. He who should behave in the waking state as his dreams represent him a behaving would be considered insane. He who in the waking state should speak as he does in his dreams[11], or relate such things as occur in his dreams, would impress us as a feeble-minded or muddle-headed person. It seems to us, then, that . . . we rate psychic activity in dreams very low, and especially when we assert that in dreams the higher intellectual activities are suspended . . . “

Well, as I have said, dreams do seem to be “thinking” without the exercise of will and Freud might have considered that creative minds remain creative during sleep. And yet this volume is dedicated to the interpretation of dreams. Freud is not hostile to the ancient view that dreams have significance. But there are, he says, “no guileless dreams.” The significance, however, emerges from within us, and not from Nabokov’s wonderful idea of the “dream maker,” and hence they show “the mark of the beast ” and could not be prophetic.

In the second act of Julius Caesar, Calpurnia persuades her husband not to venture out that day because during the tumultuous night just past, she had dreamed of Caesar’s statue running blood in which the Roman citizens had bathed their hands. Decius deftly deflects the portent:

This dream is all amiss interpreted.
It was a vision fair and fortunate.
Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,
In which so many smiling Romans bathed,
Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance.

Here is Shakespeare on the folly (and uses) of extracting a literal meaning from a dream. Like the ancients, his concerns were with a dream’s metaphorical meaning, for like Freud he was acutely aware of the use of dreams in literature. Shakespeare took the literal dream and made it ambiguous and symbolic. Freud did the reverse. Regardless of his literary erudition, his entire methodology is to make the incoherence of a dream concrete – by interpretation not only of the dream, but of the dreamer: “When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognized as a wish fulfillment.” (Italics in original.)

This, he says, is demonstrable in the uncomplicated dreams of small children. He gives examples, including his own situation that when he eats salty food before retiring, he dreams of drinking. But as the book went on, I found myself with an unexpected feeling of regret that this erudite man was striving so earnestly at a subject that simply didn’t yield to his efforts. He had devoted so much time and sober thought to the subject, that I had found myself hoping for an explication that was more reasonable – and I confess, less ridiculous – than the guesswork and speculation that seem to inform every conclusion.

As the book progresses, the dream elements which he categorizes so diligently (e.g. the “preconscious” or the “unconscious”) begin to take on the aspect of independent persons. He says that they are fearful or jealous or that they make compromises or have preferences or will force conclusions or make demands and hence that they also make decisions about what is admitted to the dream and what is excluded. Much of this may be no more than the limitations of the written language, but as the pages roll on, there are more and more ipse dixits which seem to be cut from whole cloth.

Some examples:

“When a person of the female sex dreams of falling, this almost always has a sexual significance; she becomes a fallen woman . . . .”

“Wherever a wish-fulfillment is unrecognizable and disguised there must be a present tendency to defend oneself against this wish, and in consequence of this defense the wish is unable to express itself save in a distorted form.”

“A large company . . . signifies a secret. The brother is none other than a representative, drawn into the scenes of childhood by ‘fancying backwards,’ of all the subsequent rivals for women’s favors.”

“[Dreams which turn their thought into their opposites are called ‘inversions,’ which are] “frequently . . . employed in precisely those dreams which are inspired by repressed homosexual impulses.”

“[T]he sensation of inhibited movement [in a dream] represents a conflict of will. . . . . [W]hen a sensation of inhibition in the dream is accompanied by anxiety, . . . there must be a sexual impulse.”

If we are reading a novel, we might accept such pronouncements without question. But The interpretation of Dreams purports to be a work of science, and I am prepared to call this, in Freud’s own words, “a superfluous display of ingenuity.” For the evidence Freud offers in support is by way of analogy and not science (which would surely be impossible)[12]. Hence for Freud, dream “distortions” are like those of political writers who understand that too much candor invites censorship. The parallel is clear, but the evidence is non-existent. “[T]he stimulus of a dream always lies among the experiences of the preceding day,” he says, as if this were scientifically proven, adding that our dreams – acting as free agents, of course – transfer the “psychic intensity” of significant but objectionable events “to the indifferent.”

And the paucity of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud does exactly that: like an ancient soothsayer, he purports to interpret other people’s dreams (and his own[13]) on the basis of the “facts” which he has been able to extract from them.

I ardently wish that Freud, who once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” had shown at least as much wit if not insight in concluding the same about dreams in this endless series of chapters in which the master explains what he says is “obvious” — viz. that every dream can be explained by consulting its countless “symbols” of sexual apparatus, function, desire, envy, etc.[14] But alas the book is earnestly clinical[15] – tedious, even – dilating on a “psychological technique” for interpreting every dream as a “psychological structure.”

Toward the end, Freud falls back on the most deadly professional jargon and permits his lively prose from the beginning to sink into leaden sentences as heavy as bricks, weighted down with “cathexes”[16] and “motility.” The times when I found this book most come alive was when Freud has occasion to make reference to his own life.

“[L]ike so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies in the Punic war not on the Romans, but the Carthaginians. Moreover, when I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-Semitic feeling among my class-mates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized . . . the struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church.”

Similarly, he reveals a bit of biography when he gives anecdotes about the limited professional prospects open to exceptional Jewish boys like himself at the university and how he channeled his disappointment into newer fields[17] .

Freud’s introduction to the third German edition which I read in translation confides that when he originally wrote the book in 1899 it was “intended as an expedient to facilitate the psychological analysis of the neuroses.” Perhaps this is meant to convey that the hundreds of pages which follow are only relevant to patients who are “neurotic,” though he certainly doesn’t say that. (On the other hand, except for himself, all his examples are obviously drawn from people who have consulted with him[18]; and what normal person feels the need to consult a doctor regarding what he dreamed about last night?[19])

At least it can be said that Freud believes in himself (and he ceaselessly advertises his other publications), for he also confides that once he had completed this work, it revealed to him, “as a piece of my self-analysis,” that it had been written as his “reaction to the death of my father, that is, to the most important event, the most poignant loss in a man’s life.”

But it would be an incomplete review of this book to omit its most conspicuous fact – drawn out at too great length in its second half – that there is no complete way to evaluate a dream without seeing it as a sexual symbol. And this is where it seems that, for all of his insights and inspirations, Freud’s efforts ultimately seem beside the point. I think of Captain Cook, surely one of the world’s greatest explorers, who spent what seems a lifetime roaming the uncharted Pacific only to report the fact that there is nothing there. Even if we believe that all of Freud’s interpretations are on the money and that the unconscious is the repository of every man’s thoughts, wishes, and recollections about sex and childish concerns, it does not change the obvious fact that conscious man is not a sexual automaton, that he (like Freud) is inspired, subjective, creative, etc. regardless of the discoveries of the good doctor.

Like Captain Cook, Freud has notified us what is there and that it is essentially nothing.

ENDNOTES

1. For this reason, the absence of will, in my opinion – unlike Freud’s – is that dreaming is of little genuine significance. Eventually, by the way, he does call dreams “unconscious thinking,” but still later he says that although in dreams “the most complicated intellectual operations take place[,] arguments for and against are adduced, jokes and comparisons are made, . . . . it will be found that all these things are dream-material, not the representation of intellectual activity in the dream.” Italics in original. Dreams “disregard” and “lack the ability” to express the if, because, as though, although,” etc. and in this they resemble the “representative” arts like painting and sculpture, and differ from poetry. Hence it is “wrongly stated” that the mind “goes to work in dreams with all its intellectual faculties.”

2. I also find that my dreams are written in disappearing ink on gossamer. The most vivid of them I will forget in mere seconds, only recalling that they were intense and interesting. (Freud would call this a “resistence.”)

3. But he does mention “dream-distortion,” which he says is a sort of psychic “censorship” which he describes as “vigilant.” Furthermore, he says that dreamers have “command” of symbolism in their dreams from earliest childhood.

4. Including what he refers to “Irma’s dream” – a recurring exemplar – which is actually his own dream. Obviously I didn’t count the many dreams that Freud relates in this book, but a fair number are his own dreams. He confesses reluctance in having published such private matters about himself, but it is also apparent that his ruminations on his own dreams and success in solving their problems like Sherlock Holmes is a source of pride to him. His self-regard sometimes virtually reaches out to touch us: “It cannot be denied that great self-control is needed to interpret one’s dreams and to report them.”

5. He also flatters his reader. “In view of the part played by witticisms, puns, quotations, songs, and proverbs in the intellectual life of educated persons, it would be entirely in accordance with our expectations to find disguises of this sort used with extreme frequency in the representation of dream-thoughts.”

6. A.A. Brill, the translator, did an excellent job of explaining the references without interrupting the flow of the text. But there are also many footnotes referencing Brill’s own work. Are they Freud’s footnotes?

7. Analogized to the illustrations of an abstract political magazine article.

8. Into this category falls a dream that I have actually periodically experienced: the anticipation of a school examination that I am not prepared for. But the pleasure of finding it in this book – which was like the pleasure of recognizing a familiar face in a foreign setting – was immediately effaced by Freud’s next observation that in his experience “this dream invariably refers to sexual experiences and sexual maturity.” He offers no explanation for such a non sequitur.

9. “The dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber,” he says, and then effortlessly adds, “‘It is the nightingale and not the lark,’ [f]or if it is the lark, love’s night is at an end.”

10. Its internal coherence is the result of a “psychic force.”

11. Personally, I dream virtually every night and sometimes quite vividly; and yet, I cannot ever recall “speaking,” and certainly no words of dialogue. Once, in a long while, I recall something which I might call a “caption.”

12. One of the great allures of reading Freud is his literary sophistication. My first introduction to him was hearing of his “Oedipus” complex and his theories of Hamlet’s unnatural love for his mother. This is the book where these ideas – for better or for worse – were elaborated. Here, from the same chapter of the book, is a sentence which begins with one of Freud’s maddening ipse dixits but ends with a wonderful insight: “Just as all neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves, are capable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation.”

13.By referring to his own dreams and how he interprets them, much of Freud’s book has an interesting quality of an odd diary – insignificant recollections of minor events and people in his life.

14. The “final significance,” he says elsewhere, must be given to the dreamer’s utterances, with symbols taking an “auxiliary part.” But it is hard to avoid an irony when he earlier criticizes a colleague who relies on the “efficiency” of symbols which are “immune from criticism” and then, following a page of caveats, ventures that “[a]ll elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, umbrellas, . . . all sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes represent the male member. . . . Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female organ . . . .” His quarrel, it seems, is with what he calls “abstract symbolical lines.” This is the point, also, in which I observe that Freud originally wrote this book when he was about 40 and his patients all seem to have been considerably younger than he. I write this at the age of 62 and insist that other things will intrude on one’s dreams at a later age.

15. Far too much so for my tastes. At one point the good doctor relates matter-of-factly a “medical experience” of his own in which he inadvertently poisoned a patient of his who actually died. He tells the story as one of self-reproach, but he only does so to illustrate a point.
16. The translator, Brill, uses this word “in place of the author’s term Besetzung, to signify a charge or investment of energy.”

17. Perhaps when he reissued The Interpretation of Dreams, he was still unaware of how eminent and influential he was to become. I hope so, because several times in this edition he feels it necessary to quote other scholars praising of his methods by name. (One of them – coincidence, no doubt – is an analysis of a masturbatory dream.)

18. They are what he repeatedly refers to as those subject to “hysteria.”

19. But I am chastised. “The objection that no conclusions can be drawn about the dreams of healthy persons from my own dreams and from those of my neurotic patients may be rejected without comment.”

• Robert Heinlein, Stranger In a Strange Land –

One of the ironies of science fiction set in the future is that it will quickly become more dated than the most contemporary novel. Anything written before the internet and cell phones will sound like ancient history. For such novels to succeed beyond their own contemporary readership, they had better have some transcendent element to permit later readers to suspend their disbelief willingly. I imagine that authors in the genre share that view, but success is probably just as elusive as always. I don’t know. Perhaps you have to be a pessimist to make it work. I think of the “dystopian” novels of Orwell and Huxley[1]. Otherwise, the only example I can think of – and it is a wretched example of a novel – is Atlas Shrugged in which there is the queer element of “objectivism” to keep the ardent reader going. Stranger In a Strange Land lacks even such a bloodless hook as that and if there is anything beyond the insipid repackaged religious ideas suggested by the title, I missed it altogether. What there is is the routine story of a naive traveler in unexpected circumstances. In style the writing is also almost unbelievably anachronistic, by which I mean that the dialogue is straight out of the 1930s, the sort of snappy wiseguy exchanges that were favored in the movies about New York in that period. Heinlein did not anticipate feminism, political correctness, AIDS, etc., etc., and his usage of sexual freedom – which is intended to be insightful and celebratory – comes off as at least superficial if not distasteful to the point of drudgery. If this is good science fiction, then science fiction is really not worth the effort. One cannot willingly suspend disbelief and this is a terrible book.

ENDNOTES 1. And yet any literary work is flawed if its primary objective is to serve as a vehicle for a political message.

Theogony; Works and Days Hesiod (tr. Glenn W. Most) – 

Hesiod was Homer's contemporary, possibly even his predecessor¹. It is also said that his Theogony may actually be the first great work of literature which begins with the writer calling attention to himself. In doing this Hesiod, unlike Moses, betrays no real sense of hesitation or doubt or unworthiness. His opening lines of the Theogony are only a proclamation of his amazing, unexpected good fortune (and genius). An ignoble shepherd, he reveals that he was abruptly bestowed by the muses, Zeus's daughters, with a magnificent bough of laurel and that they breathed a divine voice into him "so that I might glorify what will be and what was before."

What follows is no song of himself, but he does not hesitate to confide that a poet, such as he is, is blessed. A "servant of the Muses," he says that

"he sings of the glorious deeds of people of old and the blessed gods . . ., he forgets his sorrows at once and does not remember his anguish at all. . . . ¶ . . . [T]hat man is blessed whomever the Muses love, for the speech flows sweet from his mouth."

The Theogony — and I should have known this but didn't — is probably the earliest written Greek account of the beginnings of time. There are tedious passages that are the Greek equivalent of the Bible's "begats," but here is also ancient Greece's prolonged and original great account of the struggle between the anthropomorphic Titans and the Olympian gods. "All around, the life-giving earth roared as it burned, and all around the great immense forest crackled; the whole earth boiled, and the streams of Ocean and the barren sea."

But can we really be secure in the knowledge that the gods finally won? After all, Titans cannot die any more than gods die. Their defeat was eternal imprisonment only. The culmination was that the gods and their allies finally forced the Titans

"down under the broad-pathed earth and bound them in distressful bonds after they had gained victory over them with their hands, broad-spirited though they were, as far down beneath the earth as the sky is above the earth. . . . Around this a bronze barricade is extended, and on both sides of it night is poured out three-fold around its neck; and above it grow the roots of the earth and of the barren sea. That is where the Titan gods are hidden under murky gloom by the plans of the cloud-gatherer Zeus in a dank place. At the farthest part of huge earth. They cannot get out, for Poseidon has set bronze gates upon it, and a wall is extended on both sides."

But today Zeus and his fellow immortals are also defeated. Where are they now? Planning a comeback? See Siren Land by Norman Douglas.

And yet for me, notwithstanding all of the sturm und drang of the cataclysmic creation of the world, the mythic struggles, and the Wagnerian mingling of immortal flesh, there is a curious tone of detachment in Hesiod. His depiction of Prometheus's theft of fire, for example, is recounted in a few brief lines, but then, with little more than a shrug, he also reminds us at greater length of Zeus's revenge on mankind for receiving the illegitimate gift:

"[F]rom her [Athena] comes the race of female women: for of her is the deadly race and tribe of women, a great woe for mortals, dwelling with men, no companions of baneful poverty but only of luxury. . . . [H]igh-thundering Zeus set up women as an evil for mortal men, as partners in distressful works. And he bestowed another evil thing in exchange for that good one [fire]: whoever flees marriage and the dire works of women and chooses not to marry arrives at deadly old age deprived of assistance; while he lives he does not lack the means of sustenance, but when he has died, his distant relatives divide up his substance. On the other hand, that man to whom the portion of marriage falls as a share, and who acquires a cherished wife, well-fitted in her thoughts, for him evil is balanced continually with good during his whole life. But he who obtains baneful species lives with incessant woe in his breast, in his spirit and heart, and his evil is incurable."

Notice how this is really not delivered as bad news. It is not instructional and not a warning. It is simply delivered as a fact and we had better just get used to it. And this is as good an introduction as any to Works and Days.

In Works and Days Hesiod is concerned with describing the lot of man on earth now that the gods have won their war against the Titans. Although he includes much in the way of advice, what struck me first — because it came first — is Hesiod's opening theme, that there is a species of strife that is good for mankind. Here is a direct challenge to the observation I have heard for years that of all the cardinal sins, envy is the most puzzling because there is no gratification for it, unlike lust, greed, etc. At most, it is a feeling of dejection at the sight of another's good fortune. But for Hesiod, strife is the result of the gods not having revealed to men the secret to prolonging life. If they had done so, in a day a man could provide a year's worth of produce. Thus strife

"rouses even the helpless man to work. For a man who is not working but who looks at some other man, a rich one who is hastening to plow and plant and set his house in order, he envies him, one neighbor envying his neighbor who is hastening toward wealth: and this Strife is good for mortals."

In a sense, however, this jumps ahead. Hesiod explains that there were four races of mankind before our own was set on earth. First, the golden race of speech-endowed humans who spent their lives entirely apart from toil and distress, but were eventually covered by the earth. A second race — "much worse, of silver" — could not restrain itself from mutual destruction and impiety and was equally covered up by the earth. Then followed the gigantic multi-limbed bronze race ("giants in the earth") devoted to war which eventually sank nameless into Hades. The demigods of the days of Troy then followed, "more just and superior," who were not wiped out but dispersed by Zeus to the limits of the earth.

Ours, however, is the race of iron. Although someday we too are fated to destruction by Zeus, during our term we are also given the extraordinary but unlikely chance of realizing justice.

"Father will not be like-minded with sons . . . nor guest with host, nor comrade with comrade, nor will the brother be dear, as he once was. They will dishonor their aging parents at once . . . . Their hands will be their justice, and one man will destroy the other's city. Nor will there be any grace for the man who keeps his oath, nor for the just man or the good one, but they will give more honor to the doer of evil . . . . And Envy, evil sounding, gloating, loathesome-faced, will accompany all wretched human beings. . . . But those who give straight judgments to foreigners and fellow citizens and do not turn aside from justice at all, their city blooms and the people in it flower."

A moment ago I suggested that Hesiod might have put forth envy as a positive good. As he develops the idea, however, he seems more to urge that selfishness and greed are merely useful flaws for an individual. Not that he makes it a broad economic principle along the lines of Smith or Locke, but he certainly sees the personal utility of striving for gain. Famine, after all, is always around the corner for the lazy man, of whom Hesiod's estranged brother Perses is the exemplar. Laziness is a disgrace.

This leads to an earnest and pragmatic passage on how a man in those days should manage his farming. It is delivered as advice to Perses, whom Hesiod clearly sees as a wastrel, — but I take it very seriously as prudent advice to all. After all, it begins with the topic of how to ward off famine: get a house, a woman, and an ox; work every day; pay attention to the seasons; own more than one plough and as many oxen as you can afford; a hired hand of at least 40 years old is ideal. Land left fallow may save you someday.

TRhese observations are interlarded with numerous aphorisms:

". . . . If you put down even a little upon a little and do this often, then this too will quickly become a lot. . . . "

". . . . Take your fill when the storage jar is just opened or nearly empty; be thrifty in the middle; thrift in the lees is worthless."

". . . . Let the payment agreed for a man who is your friend be reliable; and smile upon your brother — but add a witness too: for both trust and distrust have destroyed men."

And once he has left off agriculture — and also the dubious proposition of earning a living on the sea —Hesiod closes with wider advice to his brother, e.g. how to make and treat friends, the wisdom of remaining taciturn, and what days of the month are propitious. Some of these ring true, others —"do not urinate standing up facing the sun" — not so much.

1 In my translation, at least, Hesiod too speaks of the "rosy-fingered dawn" and the "wine-dark sea." He also refers to the Trojan War.

 

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law --

This is a compendium of edited lectures. It is less a book than a "document." In other words, it does not have a logical beginning, middle, and end so much as it has topics, all of them treated with erudition and sometimes with humor, but not with much sense of one evolving naturally into the next. (Holmes would probably argue with this conclusion, since much of what he was doing was giving a sketch of the evolution of the common law; nevertheless, the book is not truly a history and it can be opened at virtually any point without much loss.)

The quotable Holmes is front and center in the book's opening pages, two of his most famous epigrams appearing in virtually the same paragraph. My favorite is the observation that even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. At the end of the day, however, this book is not for the layman. It is a textbook for young lawyers and -- since the old forms of action which are the chief grist of the book are now almost entirely forgotten -- not likely to be much understood even by them.

In one way the book is a precursor of the Restatement of the Law, a very successful set of volumes published in this century by the American Law Institute.

• Harry Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom –

It was more than 40 years ago that Harry Jaffa published Crisis of the House Divided. That remarkable book was Jaffa’s interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and also included much critical analysis of Lincoln’s earlier speeches.

I read Crisis in my senior year at Cornell, preparatory to writing a thesis on Lincoln (now lost thank God) which I submitted with some success to my adviser at that time, Walter Berns. To me, only just in my 20s, it was wonderful how Jaffa discovered in the young Lincoln a mature thinker, notably more sober and clever than he was witty and homespun.

And like a foolish teenager at a Saturday matinee, I took seriously Jaffa’s promise in his introduction to The Crisis that soon he would bring out his second volume, a companion to the first, which would be called A New Birth of Freedom. It would be a consideration of the Gettysburg Address, and thus reveal the “axis” of Lincoln’s political philosophy. A good deal of life will fill up 40 years, and so after a year or two in disappointed anticipation, only about once a decade would I with curiosity look to see if the promise had ever been kept. Jaffa was still around, I knew, since I would periodically see articles by him, each inevitably identifying him as a fixture at the Claremont Colleges. But it was not until I was about to leave my 50s that I learned that he had actually done it, published the second book – and under the same title that he had promised 40 years earlier.

That book, copyrighted in 2000, at least took me less time to read than it did for the author to produce, but I do not apologize for my slow trip through it. It is dense with ideas and anyone game for a first reading will acknowledge the eventual need for a second. “[I]n our time,” he says,

“truth has been disarmed by the opinion that reason is impotent to know what is just or unjust, right or wrong, true or false. If there is no truth, or if the truth is beyond the power of the human mind to know, then free argument and debate as means of arriving at the truth are meaningless.”

For Jaffa, this fact of recent academics is the chief challenge to understanding the significance of the Gettysburg Address about which he says his book is a “Great Commentary.”

Jaffa is a Straussian. Now whether a Straussian technique (also taken in The Crisis) is particularly insightful on this subject, Jaffa himself simply makes the following remark in his current introduction: “Strauss taught that one must make every attempt to understand a writer as he understood himself” and he says that he has used that approach to consider Lincoln’s debate with the legacy of Calhoun – meaning states rights and secession – in this second of his books on his chosen topic[1].)

As Jaffa sees it,

“Lincoln’s acceptance of the idiom of natural rights and natural law – above all his acceptance of the idea of nature not merely as a record of cause and effect but as a source of moral principles – has become alien to us. Hence it was necessary to challenge the conventional wisdom of the present day to gain a hearing for Lincoln.”

In articulating that challenge, Jaffa takes himself and his readers well beyond a narrative of the Civil War years. Indeed, this book is not at all a narrative; it is a work of Constitutional scholarship.

The first third draws us back and back into the history of philosophy’s (and religion’s) reflections on freedom. It is a bracing survey, in some sense much too short to cover in 150 pages, and in part so erudite that the reader must periodically remind himself that eventually we will confront Lincoln on these grounds. The effect, successfully achieved, places Lincoln not simply in the noble tradition of American government and history, but of Western philosophy.

But Lincoln himself is a surprisingly elusive personality in this book, although his powerful arguments are available on every page. Instead, the featured players are actually Stephen Douglas, Roger Taney, Calhoun, and Jefferson – particularly Jefferson. As Berns made certain I understood as an undergraduate, Lincoln’s “four score and seven years” referred back, not to the adoption of the Constitution, but to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the concept of human rights to be found there – including the conclusion that civil society is a “compact” among men who already have natural rights.

Jaffa is equally alive to this point. His first chapter revisits Jefferson’s thoughts on the fundamental rights of man, not only as expressed in the Declaration, but also in his earlier writings, in his later attack on the Alien and Sedition Laws, and in his first inaugural address[2]. The lessons which Lincoln drew from these sources are essential to understanding the meaning of his thinking and his politics. For as Jaffa puts it, while taking a respectful but devastating swipe at Carl Becker, the serious question is “whether Lincoln’s belief in the truth of the Declaration can be accepted, not merely as emotionally evocative and persuasive, but as philosophically sound.” Jaffa knows that it was sound and this book is a detailed and persuasive brief in support of that conclusion.

Hence the second chapter, rather than bring us back to the American Civil War, takes us instead to the seemingly endless English civil wars of Shakespeare (another of Jaffa’s preeminent fields) to consider the divine right of kings, whence (since we are considering divinity) we must consult St. Paul and the Old Testament. Then moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Jaffa devotes half a chapter to James Buchanan’s final message to Congress in 1860. This should be a lesson to any lawyer (and Buchanan had been a very successful lawyer) against arguing without analysis, a charge that could never be made against Lincoln, who was a great lawyer. Buchanan’s loyal support of the Union during the war to the contrary, this brief segment of the book richly illustrates the phrase “moral bankruptcy,” which Jaffa unhesitatingly uses to describe Buchanan’s confused analysis of the country’s crisis.

Confusion, in fact, was (and remains) near the center of much Civil War thinking. As an example, Jaffa is anxious to ensure that his readers know that it is an error to see the struggle, as Calhoun did, as one between state rights and national supremacy.

“The conflict was between two different conceptions of state rights and two different conceptions of what constituted that nation. The state governments formed in the period following July 4, 1776, were all formed upon the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence, as the bills of rights prefaced to most of the state constitutions proclaimed. The state rights that allegedly justified the ordinances of secession of 1860-61, and which served as the foundation of the Confederacy, had severed the connection with natural rights that had informed the generation of the Revolution. This great change in the conception of state rights had been mainly the work of John C. Calhoun. . . . .”

Calhoun had died a year or so before Lincoln became president, but his ruminations and public statements, starting with the nullification struggle of the 1820s, had always furnished the manque legal justification for secession. Calhoun believed ardently that there are no individual rights “apart from the positive law of any given community” – a Rousseauian starting point almost too ironic to contemplate in view of the busy bee legislation of the modern liberal community to whom Calhoun’s name (though not his thinking) is anathema[3]. Almost as much as for Lincoln, therefore, the Declaration of Independence played for Calhoun the critical role in his political thought. But for him it was an entirely negative role, for as he saw it the country had begun “to experience the danger of admitting so great an error [the assertion of universal equality] to have a place in the declaration of our independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits.” And so in this perverted way the Declaration was as important to Calhoun as it was to Lincoln.

Calhoun, therefore, left Lincoln with a dual mission. To press his ultimate point that slavery was wrong and that the nation could not continue half slave and half free, he continually had to meet and refute Calhoun’s work, which he did with superior history and rigorous logic, as Jaffa shows.

In following this path, however, Jaffa flirts with tedium more than once. I earlier compared this book to a brief in support of Lincoln’s views (although Lincoln obviously wrote his own brief more persuasively than anyone, including Jaffa). As a good scholar would be, Jaffa is at pains to put out every possible criticism of his subject and then to deal with them fairly. The scholarship is impressive, the repetition cumbersome. Furthermore, I suspect that many readers will be disappointed that Lincoln himself is so remote in this book that the Gettysburg Address itself – the quintessential expression of Jefferson’s philosophy (and the speech about which Jaffa says this book is a “commentary”) – is never even quoted in full.

But Jaffa does give an astonishingly comprehensive analysis of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, paragraph by paragraph. Although the closing words of that speech, often attributed to Seward, are what appropriately linger in the memory, the mission of that specific moment when the breakup of the Union was underway and war was about to erupt, was as significant as the moment which gave birth to the Declaration of Independence itself. The latter moment required an exposition every bit as much as it needed that concluding eloquence. Jaffa’s evaluation of it is a remarkable piece of analysis.

A final point worth noting is the recurring note of sadness and frustration. For all of the depth of Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s thought, Jaffa knows and laments that “Calhoun’s heirs have dominated the academy and by a shallow and permissive historicism and relativism have subjected ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God to scorn and contempt.” I do not say that the tone is wrong or the conclusion incorrect. And yet I do suspect that the sense of frustration is partially the result of Jaffa never actually having finished this book, 40 years of toil to the contrary notwithstanding.

He doesn’t admit to that, of course. But as it closes, A New Birth leaves the reader hanging. For example, even having delivered some last words of encouragement to the discouraged, Jaffa feels compelled to offer an Appendix which looks very much like a digression which he was unable to work into the main text. It is useful and well-considered, but just as it says, it is an appendix.

As a criticism, however, this is small stuff. The big message is that it really was worth the wait and that this book is not for a casual reader. It is a work of rigorous and rewarding scholarship.

ENDNOTES

1. To my distant recollection, Professor Berns (another Straussian) remarked that Jaffa’s approach in The Crisis was possibly strained.

2. Jefferson, founder of the Democratic party, is nevertheless unpopular with contemporary academics as a hypocrite. Among other reasons this is because he apparently had a mistress who was also his slave, and chiefly because liberals therefore cannot believe he had meant what he said in the Declaration about all men being created equal. But Jefferson was taken at his word by Lincoln.

3. Holmes’s cynically eloquent dictum that “there is no brooding omnipresence in the sky,” which energized many 20th Century jurisprudential liberals, is essentially Calhounian.

4. He repeatedly compares Lincoln to both Socrates and Euclid.

• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity – 

Let us distinguish faith from doctrine. Faith, which is religion’s poetry, is a condition like pigment or talent or personality. Many men have it and all can observe it whether they themselves have it or not. Friends of mine would be delighted with this way of putting it. They already call faith an illness, a disease, a fever. There is no point in arguing that point of view -- although I would prefer calling faith a flame.

But to come to doctrine, widespread faith is an observable fact, so men will naturally examine it. Although we generally assign the examination of facts to science, the process of examining faith is also the mission of doctrine, which -- though not itself science -- resembles it[1]. The scientific method supposedly postulates doubt about what is assumed to be a fact and tests it with rigor. Ideally, the closest science comes to accepting the reliability of any fact is a “theory.” But doctrine works from the other direction: truth is already revealed and doctrine’s mission is to harmonize it with other truths. In its way, that is burning ground. To visit doctrine, as C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, is to tread into “highly controversial regions.”

And so, explaining the title he has given to these essays, Lewis says at the very start that he will not discuss doctrinal differences. He wishes to be understood as defining the original meaning of Christianity, designating what any Christian believes or strives for, as opposed to the theological details which elaborate his beliefs. He longs for a “Christian society” and is happy enough if his audience asks for no more. His objective is to illustrate what might be called first principles: a consensus prerequisite to later questions.

With this in mind, I turn to the first of Lewis’s analogies (of which he is a master). Faith he describes as a “hall out of which doors open into several rooms.”

“But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires, and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. . . . . [Y]ou must regard it as waiting, not as camping. . . . . [A]nd, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.”[2]

This was a bit startling to me. By using this serene, somewhat Platonic image, Lewis does not at all start with revealed truth. He starts with “natural law” for which he makes a strong observational argument. He is trying, he says, to learn about the source of this moral law from his “own steam.” But relying on his “own steam” is what a philosopher does.

And this provokes a reflection. Somewhere within this set of reviews, I have already mentioned the very first college examination I took. (The professor took pains to ensure that it was the first essay exam for that year’s freshman class). It was in a world history course. The exam question: “Christianity Without Plato Is Inconceivable. Discuss.” I was 18 years old. I only remember two parts of the nonsense I wrote; first that Christianity without Christ was inconceivable, and second that Plato contributed “verve.” I think I got a C.

The fact that Plato by his own steam deduced a theory of “forms” and that Lewis is led to “a Somebody or Something,” does not seem like too much of a difference to me. Indeed, Lewis is at pains to point out to non-believers that so far the trip has not taken him to the Bible or the churches. And although his natural law analysis now leaves him content to speak of “God,” it gets him no closer to comfort. The Moral Law is not at all the same thing as “goodness,” he says; it is without exceptions and is indifferent to the difficulties it presents for humans. It will not let you off, “just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off.” (Plato again.) And humans all being fallible, this is a terrifying fact: the fact that Christianity claims to answer[3].

Now it would be foolish to suggest that Mere Christianity is anything other than what it is: a heart-felt polemic of sorts. But Lewis’s opening passages are still steeped in an ancient tradition. As I remember the “classical” (pre-Christian) virtues from my undergraduate days, they were in more or less in ascending order: courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice. This must have come from Plato (though it certainly has an Aristotelean sound). It was St. Paul who later set down the Christian virtues as faith, hope, and charity (love). And again relying on my faulty memory, I believe St. Thomas elaborated – or added -- the “cardinal” Christian virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude[4] -- a Christian re-writing of what went before.

Lewis explicitly dwells on those “cardinal” virtues. An example:

“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. . . . You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials ‘for the sake of humanity,’ and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”[5]

This is not to say that Lewis neglects the explicitly Christian virtues. He deals with each separately. I began this review speaking about faith, the first of them, and so let me remark that although in this context Lewis begins by calling faith a “virtue,” in the next breath he calls those virtues a “habit” as well. Here he departs briefly from the main theme of his polemic. He delivers a short lecture to the converted. Moods change, he says, and so for a Christian it is requisite that he have daily prayers, religious reading, and church attendance, for no belief automatically remains alive in the mind without being fed. Among other things, such refreshment reveals truth about oneself, particularly about how hard it is to be good.

“The main thing that we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain – any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debt so that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His side – that has to be wiped out.”

Throughout Mere Christianity, Lewis visits and revisits the concept of goodness, apparent goodness, good men, good fortune, wasted opportunity, and free will. He does this more or less without reference to whether the men he is looking at call themselves Christians. And he never gives up on the “bad man.” “A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.” By contrast,

“the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.”

At a certain point the book leaves off referring to virtue and Lewis comes to describe his effort as “an account of Christian Morals.” He offers a chapter on chastity followed by one on “Christian Marriage.” I can imagine any number of popular commentators today having much fun at the very idea of writing on such topics. But even here Lewis’s message, while earnest, is like the rest of Mere Christianity: essentially explanatory and not particularly pious or prudish or condemnatory -- and always enlivened by periodic similes and analogies. Christ, he says for example, called a man and his wife “one flesh” because spiritually they are a single organism -- like saying that a lock and its key are one mechanism[6]. Anyway, the section on Christian marriage is more of a critique of its opposite, divorce.

Earlier I noted Lewis’s remark that the Moral Law is impassive and offers no comfort. But there is ample comfort in virtually every one of Lewis’s observations about God’s love. “On the whole,” he says, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for him.” This is because human feelings are not constant and our feelings toward God are most important insofar as they are “an affair of the will. . . . . The great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference . . .”

When Lewis finally does get to doctrine – or “theology” as he prefers to call it – he begins by explaining the distaste that many people feel about such things. When you have seen the Atlantic Ocean from a beach, how can a colored map aid your understanding? In answer he posits two things. In the first place, he says, the map

“is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. . . . [I]t has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have had from the beach; . . . [but] the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary.”

I recall that a girlfriend once shrugged off religion because she felt that it was a more intense experience for her to “walk in the woods.” But that, as Lewis says, is “all thrills and no work.” It leads to the anodyne popular idea that “Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and . . . if we took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order.” But good advice has always been available -- and rarely taken. Christianity, by contrast, claims to tell us the truth about something behind the world, and if true, “what it tells us would be bound to be difficult – at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.” It is inadequate to end with saying that Christ was a simply good man who died 2000 years ago. Christ is

“a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as he was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has.”

This is how Lewis looks at the conundrum of free will vs. the omniscient, omnipotent God. What God has done, he says, is that He has created in mankind creatures whose only purpose is freely to accept Him “and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created.” God will not force that, because if he did, it would no longer be free will. To me, it sounds a bit like a word game, but it has its logic – and its appeal.

To picture the Trinity, Lewis again uses his gift for analogy , though to what success will depend on the reader. He begins with another Plato-like picture – the Trinity, he says, is like a cube which is one body but it contains six squares. Then he says that our conventional notions of linear time keep us from envisioning what is more accurate – i.e. that father and son in context of the Trinity are not first one and then later the second, but both always. It is also, he says, not strange that the Holy Spirit seems vaguer that the other two.

“In Christian life you are not usually looking at Him: He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something ‘out there,’ in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side . . . then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you.”

I have mentioned Plato several times, although he is rarely mentioned overtly – and dismissed as ineffectual – in Mere Christianity. Rather early Lewis dismisses him as being “in direct contradiction to Christianity.” And yet in the very last pages Lewis, with no attribution at all, gives this “imperfect illustration”:

“Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them . . . . Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that . . . they would all look alike?”

Is Christianity without Plato inconceivable? Is Lewis without Plato inconceivable?

Endnotes

1. When I speak here of doctrine, I am talking about things like the transubstan-tiation/consubstantiation debate, not those features of Christianity such as the resurrection which are accepted by all of its denominations. And even Lewis at the end recognizes that theology means “the science of God.” He calls it “experimental knowledge.”

2. Of course most us are already born in one of the rooms.

3. Platonism and Christianity both make their own approaches to perfection, of course, but I had to smile that Lewis also finds it to be a point in Christianity’s favor that it is also odd. “It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”

4. Lewis says a good alternate contemporary word for fortitude is “guts.” “You will notice, of course,” he says, “that you cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play.”

5. There is an echo here of Shylock’s exchange with Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

6. An erudite man, Lewis would have read the funny/serious Aristophanes passage in the Symposium.

• Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum --

Overall, this book is an exploration of what went into the thinking of the framers of the Constitution and how they articulated, argued, and applied their meditations during the Constitutional Convention.

McDonald begins with a description of the political thinking and attitudes of all Englishmen in the mid-18th Century. Among other things, his description reminded me that Lord Mansfield had been widely despised at that time for having introduced several controversial procedural features into jury trials -- e.g. judgments n.o.v. Mansfield was mistrusted, McDonald explains, because the jury at that time was seen as the people's representative and a brake on unbridled executive power. The situation, was unexpectedly turned on its head in America following the Revolution, therefore, because then the government was the people and a runaway jury could be seen as anti-democratic. (I imagine the "jury nullification" proponents of the late 20th Century have an answer to this, but I am unfamiliar with what it must be.)

In the last two chapters of the book, McDonald takes his time in depicting the evolution of the Constitutional framework as it occurred during the convention. Even when controversial, he is insightful:

"[T]he delegates -- at least in dealing with the question whether the legislature should be national, federal, or a mixture -- did not derive their positions from systems of political theory. Rather, they used political theorists to justify positions that they had taken for nontheoretical reasons. . . . [T]he Framers were [also] politically multilingual: they could speak in the language of Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Locke, the classical republicans, Hume, and many others, whichever seemed rhetorically appropriate to the particular argument at hand."

An interesting sidelight is the author's conclusion that Madison's reputation as "father" of the Constitution is overstated. McDonald does a bit of arithmetic to show that of Madison's 70 or so concrete recommendations, only about half made their way into the final version of the document. On the other hand, the "father" of the Constitution is known by that nickname as much for his copious notes and his contributions to The Federalist as he is for any theoretical framework for the government; the Constitution, after all, has always been seen as a series of compromises. (And Madison is rightly redeemed as a master legislator by Joseph J. Ellis in Founding Brothers.)

• Sandra Day O’Connor, The Majesty of the Law; Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice –

Conflict. Fiction isn’t the only sort of writing that needs it to make interesting reading. A tension about how something happened, or where things are heading, or what secrets or insights an author has to reveal will quite easily encourage the attention of a reader of non-fiction. Alternatively, strong and vivid prose itself can capture the imagination even when the subject matter is well known. Think of Churchill’s various histories.

But books that lack such elemental qualities are called textbooks, or abstracts, or eventually “remainders.” This book, for instance, suffers almost irretrievably from the absence of any magnetic element – except the prominence of the author – to provoke the curiosity of a reader. And how can that possibly be?

Recently retired from the United States Supreme Court after more than 20 of the most contentious and partisan years in recent times, Justice O’Connor pretends that her ethical obligations of confidentiality have confined her so much that she may only write a compilation of unexceptional historical facts bearing on the history of American law. No one but a college freshman could expect to be nourished by this tapioca.

Even when O’Connor ventures ever so delicately into recounting ancient controversial issues – none more recent than decades ago – she cannot seem to avoid platitudes and a conclusion that now that this or that disagreeable contention is over, everything is again all right or will be, and there is nothing to be concerned about. I can accept that she is satisfied with the outcome of cases that were (and sometimes still are) intensely controversial, but O’Connor routinely neglects even to set out the competing legal issues that were at the core of the controversies.

Consider, for example, her glancing reference to Roe v. Wade – a case which for the past 30 years has been referred to daily in the newspapers but which merits only two mentions in O’Connor’s index. This is her judgment: “No one, it seems, considers [the decision] to have settled the [abortion] issue for all time. Such intense debate by citizens is as it should be.” That’s it. In O’Connor’s world, we are fortunate to have come to peace with the issues underlying Brown v. Board of Education; we are fortunate that we are not at peace with Roe. With no further comment, her book just moves on to other familiar topics, all dealt with in the same Panglossian fashion.

Similarly, O’Connor’s evaluation of the Bill of Rights sounds more like Pollyanna than Plato. She commends what she calls Madison’s “bold declarations” and “strong language,” but then in the same paragraph decides that the Bill of Rights is as elusive as “a novel by Faulkner or a painting by Monet; it does not change but your understanding and perception of it may.” Simultaneous admiration for both Madison and Faulkner is probably not uncommon, but I would wager that this is the first time they have ever been compared. Indeed, the fatuity even permits her to elide the far more controversial notion that the Bill of Rights is essentially subjective.

But what is O’Connor’s comment supposed to tell us about the rule of law, anyway? In fact, although she writes about it periodically, what she appears to mean by the Rule of Law (which she always capitalizes) is little more than the rule of the Supreme Court insofar as it may alter over the years as modified by events and a changing membership.

Permit me to offer a contrast.

“It is the Rule of Law, in the sense of the rule of formal law, the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, which safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government. . . . [¶ . . . It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality – all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.”

This quotation is from Friedrich Hayek, though I could have found any number of comparable assertions by others.

The point is, O’Connor is incapable of framing a definition in such concrete terms. She clearly fears specificity and when a point of view is called for she can offer little more than generalities – and, far too often, the quoted thoughts of others who have said it better. I do not mean to say that relying on the thoughts or sayings of others is forbidden to a thinker, although the best normally use them epigrammatically to refute or expand upon.

But in this book, at least, O’Connor will not take a stand if it is likely to be controversial. For her, quotations are more like filigree, embellishing the points that she would make if she could make them as well as her mentor. Hence, instead of actually drawing upon Montesquieu, Holmes, Emerson, et al., she merely leans upon them, over and over again, to state a point which she is evidently incapable of making as well as they once did. (This is also the chief use of cliches, which O’Connor employs energetically when there is no anodyne quotation readily at hand.)

Most of her chapters do not even deal with intellectual struggle. She retails twice-told tales about this or that personality, material that a practicing lawyer or judge would already know. Many of the chapters sound like re-packaged lectures once delivered to a local bar association. But for an interesting digression on England’s Privy Council, the only section unfamiliar to me was the praise for Chief Justice Taft for his efforts in getting the Supreme Court its own building and fashioning an institution with such collegiality that it could publish a high percentage of unanimous opinions even with a membership containing cantankerous personalities like Holmes and Brandeis.

O’Connor includes a few sweet tales about Lewis Powell and Thurgood Marshall and a stout defense of whatever it was Warren Burger did during his tenure on the Court. She also comes perilously close to betraying an opinion in her gloss of the contradictions in the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

But this is brief. Instead, she doggedly moves on to other chapters only loosely related to those that went before. I suppose I will be faulted for criticizing her section on American feminism when I remark that it is not only somewhat out of place (although no section of this book fits very well with any other) but also perfunctory and self-evident in concluding that fairness is better than its opposite. Most of this segment is a lament that women’s rights were not recognized from the beginning of the republic, illustrated by a number of thumbnail anecdotes from victims and advocates.

And rather than discuss the legal problems that can arise from special pleading for identifiable groups – something that might be expected in a book which claims to be about the law – O’Connor instead slips into the modern “empirical” mode, assuring the reader that “national surveys reveal,” “according to a recent United Nations study,” “recent sociological literature strongly suggests,” and “experts agree.” She is perfectly content to cite New York Times articles as her primary analytical source.

The Majesty of the Law: I believe I sense the hand of the publisher in the title of this insignificant book. What else to call it and hope for sales? All it is is a farrago of anecdotes, personal reminiscences, and familiar stories, stitched together with one or two historical references and the earnest assurance that all is in good hands. It is padded with copious white space between the lines, illustrations and photographs, and numerous quotations of the “as Emerson said” variety.

The subtitle should probably have been "Pieties of a Supreme Court Justice." This is not a book; it’s a pamphlet with many chapters.

• Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. Rolfe Humphries) –

The description of turbulent Western civilization as the offspring of the ancient tension between Athens and Jerusalem can’t be right without also considering the subversive impact of the artists uncommitted to either. In fact, artists came first. Homer preceded Plato by half a millennium, and Plato – who made the war between them virtually personal – to my knowledge never mentioned the mandatory doctrines of modern monotheism. He was explicit on the role of myth in all of this; how myths are created, preserved, amended, passed on, etc. More important, he knew their value and dangers.

But while an understanding of myth is central to The Republic, my attention here is drawn to the general ubiquity of Greek myth and heros in our phraseology, our literature, even our psychology, while the concrete sources are so few. But for the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the handful of surviving plays from the 5th Century B.C., it is the Metamorphoses, composed by the Roman Ovid, which is the best coherent source of the ancient Greek myths. Without Rome, indeed, I suppose that we would know much less than we do of the literature of Greece.

Ovid hardly compares with Homer or Sophocles, but he has given us the stories with such intelligence and animation as to permit greater poets (I mean Shakespeare and maybe Boccacio) to use him not merely as a source but as inspiration. Actually, I doubt I would have come to Ovid at all were it not for the knowledge that Shakespeare drew so heavily on him. But knowing that, I remember Hamlet in the graveyard and take delight in reading this from Book 12:

“So now Achilles, The terror of Troy, the ornament and bulwark Of the Greek name, the great invincible captain, Was burned. . . . Now he is only dust, and of Achilles, Of all that might, nothing, or almost nothing, Remains, a pitiful handful, scarce sufficient To stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

Ovid is rarely as meditative as Shakespeare or as processional as Vergil. His style, at least as translated here, sounds almost informal. He frequently uses parentheticals and interior thoughts of his narrators, downplays similes, and it is not often that he laments the fate of his characters. But those fates are vivid and grievous. The work, after all, is called Metamorphases. It is not Genesis by any means, but it does repeatedly tell us how this or that bird, animal, or tree was created from a mortal who was loved or condemned by a god. (The painful transformation of so many characters into trees is surely where Shakespeare got the idea of Ariel’s imprisonment.)

These stories are often loosely strung together, with little sense of chronology, though it must be said that Metamorphoses begins emphatically with the creation when “all other animals look downward; [but] man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.”Indeed it ends with Roman myths, although I must say that nothing in the closing books is so fanciful (barbaric?) as what was derived from Greece.

And yet when I say Greece, in retrospect it seems to me that we are told of Thrace and Thebes and Crete but not Athens. I also noticed a predominancy of lust, not love, and even more interestingly, the women seem to burn as much or more than the men. I was happy to come across Pyramus and Thisbe (all tears, no Bottom), Pygmalion, Daedalus, and the Trojan War. Perhaps this latter segment is where Shakespeare conceived old Nestor (he is 300 years old!) as garrulous and it may even be where he got the idea – in the competing speeches of Ajax and Ulysses – of Anthony’s funeral oration. And, notwithstanding my note about Ovid’s generally lack of pensiveness, at the end, by calling upon Pythagoras, he does appear to reflect and synthesize. Nothing, he says, can remain the same forever. “Every place submits to Fortune’s wheel.” We find fossils far from the sea and old anchors on mountain-tops. “The earth has something animal about it.” (This reflection is the predicate to the tale of the phoenix.)

“We are not bodies only, But winged spirits, with the power to enter Animal forms, house in the bodies of cattle. Therefore, we should respect those dwelling-places Which may have given shelter to the spirit . . .”

Yes, reincarnation, and Pythagoras we are told was a vegetarian.

Plato, Symposium –

I have no standing to “review” Plato or to interpret or comment on him, but I am making notes of this particular dialogue not only because so much of what we think we know about Socrates seems to come out of it, but also because the dialogue itself has such a layered presentation that its literary value alone seems to me to be remarkable. I rely strictly on the Jowett translation published by Gateway (paperback) which begins with the following italicized introductory sentence: “The dialogue is repeated to his Companion by Apollodorus, who has heard it from Aristodemus.”

So we start with a warning of double hearsay, meaning that we know at the outset that what we are about to read is what Apollodorus is telling his companion[1]. But what he tells him is what he had previously told Glaucon two days earlier when Glaucon had asked him for the details of a drinking party (symposium) which he had heard about. The party, it seems, had been held at the home of the young playwright, Agathon. But Apollodorus says that he had assured Glaucon first, that he himself had not attended the party and second, that the party had not been recent. And yet the dinner enjoyed some notoriety, because the “companion” has already heard of it. As he says, “A man who had heard the story from Phoenix son of Philip recounted it to me.” And even this doesn’t end it. Apollodorus confesses that the party had actually occurred when he and his companion were just boys and that Phoenix originally had the story of Aristodemus, a little shoeless fellow who had personally been at the symposium. It was Aristodemus, we learn, who had originally told the story to Apollodorus as well as to Phoenix.

And so, moving down all of these corridors of memory, we have come back to a single source. To keep myself straight, I hereby relate the foregoing chronologically:

Several years ago, when Apollodorus was just a boy, Agathon, a new disciple of Socrates, gave a drinking party to celebrate his having won a drama prize[2]. Among those who attended the party, in addition to Socrates and Alcibiades, was Aristodemus, young and of little account. Indeed, he evidently crashed the party at the bidding of Socrates. The party over, Aristodemus eventually repeated his recollection of its details on different occasions to both Phoenix and Apollodorus. Not knowing the common source of the story (i.e. Aristodemus), Socrates’s companion, who has already heard it from Phoenix, has now asked Apollodorus, a recent disciple of Socrates, to give his version. Apollodorus, though a sour sort, agrees to do so, and adds that he has himself confirmed the details at some prior time with Socrates himself.

I see no reason to doubt that this symposium actually occurred, but this is an enormously complex way to begin a story. Plato was not a historian or news reporter and it was not his obligation to be so punctilious. He did this for his own reasons, and I cannot believe that the reason was to achieve obscurity; if anything, he certainly alerts us to read carefully.

In any event Apollodorus relates that before Socrates and Aristodemus had even arrived at Agathon’s home, Socrates had fallen into one of his cataleptic trances and only arrived after he had recovered, midway through the meal. Aristodemus had come on before him and obviously had already begun making his observations. The drinking then begins, although all present have agreed in advance that it will be in moderation. A guest then proposes that they speak of love (those Greeks!) and that they do so in a specified order. He turns for the first presentation to Phaedrus, who had originally come up with the topic.

Phaedrus begins in prosaic and concrete terms about Eros, somewhat in the nature of an after dinner toast[3]. Stepping a bit higher, he also makes a sensible point that having a lover can make one nobler and more averse to shameful things because it would be painful to be detected by one’s beloved in less than noble pursuits and love’s highest office is in such inspiration. But his example (Achilles and Patroclus) is defective because such loves are unequal.

Pausanius – Agathon’s friend? – then criticizes Phaedrus for praising love indiscriminately and in failing to recognize that there are two loves, whose character he tries to distinguish: one is common, of the body in the bloom of youth and not of the soul, and the other stable and exalted, without wantonness. In places like Athens, the latter has a privilege. The lover

“may pray and entreat and supplicate and swear and lie on a mat at the door, and endure a slavery worse than that of any slave. . . . [C]ustom has decided that [such practices] are highly commendable and that there is no loss of character in them.”

Pausanius puts much stress on custom and the peculiar love known as pederasty, concluding (uncomfortably for me) that if the love of boys is coupled with the virtue of doing service to them by improving them it is not dishonorable. And then he stops abruptly.

Next to speak was to have been Aristophanes. But being troubled by a hiccough, he is supplanted by Eryximachus, a physician. (This change of place is one of those Platonic details that always seem to have a significance which eludes me[4].) Eryximachus, however, makes his analogy of love not to medicine but to music, specifically harmony and rhythm. According to him, they originally appeared together, mirroring the love which had not yet become the double love described by both Phaedrus and Pausanius. It is only in the uses of “actual life” – education about these original things – that the difficulty begins, requiring the participation of an artist whose business is “divination,” the healing of the two loves, which is done “in company with” temperance and justice. Having finished, Eryximachus then turns to the comic playwright, Aristophanes, now cured of his hiccough.

Beginning in a humorous vein, Aristophanes turns to one of the famous images of antiquity, primeval men, round, with four hands, four feet, two faces, and two privy parts[5]. These people having attacked the gods, Zeus determined to cut them in two. Each thereupon was condemned to spend his life longing for the other half of his former self,

“so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two . . . . Each of us when separated, having one side only, . . . is always looking for his other half. ”

And when this meeting is made, the two halves will be lost in amazement, which is the ideal love, most rare. (Most common, of course, is the unequal love which had been described by Phaedrus, on the first rung of the evening’s ladder.) His story, Aristophanes cautions, is not told for the purposes of ridicule. He warns Eryxamachus away from making such efforts and instead puts the evening’s next segment in the hands of Agathon and Socrates, whom he describes as “masters in the art of love.”

At once, Socrates begins to assert control by initiating a conversation with Agathon that would seem to be off the point: his reluctance to do something disgraceful in the presence of a wise man which might otherwise be performed without disgrace in the presence of many. Ironically, Phaedrus -- whose initial argument had been similar to this point – breaks in and discourages any such dialogue in favor of Agathon’s uninterrupted encomium on love which then commences.

Although Agathon begins by describing the sensuality of anthropomorphized Love, more interesting to me is the way he attempts to prove loves’ virtues, as though Love were the ideal Athenian youth:

“[H]is greatest glory is that he can neither do nor suffer wrong . . . ; force comes not near him, neither when he acts does he act by force. For all men in all things serve him of their own free will, and where there is voluntary agreement, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city say, is justice. And not only is he just but exceedingly temperate, for Temperance is the acknowledged ruler of the pleasures and desires, and no pleasure ever masters Love; he is their master and they are his servants; and if he conquers them he must be temperate indeed. As to courage, even the God of War is no match for him; he is the captive and Love is the lord, for love, the love of Aphrodite, masters him as the tale runs; and the master is stronger than the servant. And if he conquers the bravest of all others, he must be himself the bravest.”

Agathon’s case for love’s wisdom, the final virtue, is equally artificial: Love turns the most prosaic man into a poet, he observes, and “he whom Loves touches not walks in darkness.” And on he goes, speaking of medicine, archery, metallurgy, etc. He concludes his speech by admitting that it was “half-playful,” but with some seriousness.

Again Socrates speaks up, praising Agathon’s speech as worthy of Gorgias, the rhetorician, but noting, however, that he now realizes that personally he must have mistaken the purpose of the evening’s exercise, “for the original proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only that you should appear to praise him.” He thus asks to be excused from his turn, being unable to praise in that way.

Socrates now completely takes over the conversation, departing from the formalized ritual they have just performed, proposing instead to speak “the truth about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my mind at the time.” Here the dialogue truly begins and the going gets rough. Socrates swiftly gets Agathon to agree that “he who desires nothing is in want of nothing” – recalling to me the reverse situation, the yearning of the myth recited by Aristophanes. Instead, Socrates relates his own myth, told to him by Diotima, a wise woman whom he describes as his instructress in love and who once spoke to Socrates, as he now does to Agathon, in questions. (In this segment, Socrates uses Diotima – who for all I know is fictitious[6] – as Plato uses Socrates, by which I mean that there is never absolute certainty about whose conclusions are being expressed.)

Diotima has convinced Socrates that love is a mean between fair and foul, hence a “great spirit” (daimon) but thus no god. Love is the child of Poverty and Plenty, she says, and he interprets between gods and men. “The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of the arts and handicrafts, is mechanical.” (So much for Loves’s wisdom as described by Agathon.) The confusion between love and the beloved, Diotima has told Socrates, is what makes people say love is beautiful; but the principle of love is something else. Socrates then relates in some detail how Diotima illustrated this principle.

Reconfiguring Agathon’s disquisition on wisdom, Diotima had spoken to Socrates of wisdom in the form of a syllogism: (1) wisdom is beautiful; (2) Love is of the beautiful; (3) therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom. Hence Love, being a lover of wisdom, is in a mean between the wise (the gods) and the ignorant. And then hard upon this follows another syllogism, even more difficult for me to understand. As all men desire the good, when they achieve it they have achieved happiness. But the reason that only some men are said to love, Diotima goes on, is mostly a problem of nomenclature, for love has several names. An analogy can be seen in poetry, which is “creation or passage of non-being into being,” meaning art. But just as not all artists are called poets, not all lovers are known as lovers. But all men desire procreation, body and soul. This is the immortal principle in the mortal creature; and beauty is its goddess.

Diotima then dilates at length on immortality, including its “senseless” impulsion toward immortal fame, for men are more creative in their souls than in their bodies, she says, because the soul is the womb of wisdom and virtue. And so Diotima takes us back to wisdom, the greatest order of which “is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice.” This also apparently leaves aside the love between man and woman, for now Diotima speaks of this wisdom in the context of an older man seeking a younger one to educate in such matters: “and they are married by a far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children.” Moreover, the love of a beautiful body will lead to the love of the form of the beautiful in general.

“[T]he beauty of them all [institutions and laws] is of one family, and . . . personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, . . . . but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single knowledge, which is of beauty everywhere.”[7]

Above all other lives which he can live, therefore, man should lead the life of contemplation of absolute beauty.

Socrates stops. He is applauded by the others for his presentation. The dialogue feels as though it had ended – and in a way it has, because it will go no deeper. But Plato is not finished. Suddenly the applause is abruptly interrupted by the raucous and unexpected entrance of Alcibiades, high-spirited, drunk, and shouting for Agathon. (Contrast the arrival of the unassuming Aristodemus at the beginning of the party.) Seated, the newcomer turns and discovers Socrates, who flinches. Alcibiades, of course, was a notoriously oversized rogue and gaudy liar, a grown-up golden boy blessed with talent, universally mistrusted but so self-confident as to have been given at various times leadership on both sides of the Peloponessian War. (I have trouble imagining this whole scene without thinking of Petruccio’s hilarious belated appearance at his wedding.)

Alcibiades, it seems, was once Socrates’s lover (in a manner of speaking) and Socrates feels compelled to ask Agathon, his newer protégé, for a host’s protection from Alcibiades’s jealousy. But Alcibiades just charges on and appoints himself “master of the feast” until he decides everyone is sufficiently drunk. (It will never happen to Socrates, who is a notoriously unaffected drinker, as everyone, including Alcibiades, knows.) Eryximachus then puts the new arrival on to the evening’s business, readily embraced by Alcibiades who thereupon commences to speak in praise of – not love, but Socrates. And, as Socrates had previously warned that his remarks would be at random and not organized, Alcibiades now makes a similar caveat, excusing himself because of his drinking.

What follows is actually heart-felt. Along with the home truths (Socrates is as ugly as a satyr), Alcibiades says that the philosopher’s reputation as an intoxicating speaker is greater than that of Pericles and his discourses themselves have come close to causing Alcibiades to abandon his civic duty altogether so that he might simply sit at the master’s feet. He becomes bathetic and confessional:

“And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature . . . . For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. [There is a lesson here.] . . . Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die: so that I am at my wit’s end.”

Again the mood changes and Alcibiades describes the original seduction. But how strange it was. When they were first alone, he says, the old poop did nothing but talk as usual. The next time, same thing. A third time: ‘Come up to my apartment for dinner; oh I’m so sleepy.’ Yet nothing but talk. Later Alcibiades and Socrates were in the wars together and Alcibiades reports that which the world now knows: the great man needed virtually no sleep, never complained of the starvation he was obliged to endure, and could stand barefoot in the snow without complaint. He once stood a day and a night in a cataleptic trance. He was courageous and calm in battle.

And so Alcibiades, the public demagogue who knows who he is, gives witness to what Socrates is (and I must believe that this too is Plato speaking):

“[M]ost of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is perfectly astonishing. . . . His words are like the images of Silenus which open [something like a Russian doll, I imagine]; they are ridiculous when you first hear them; . . . for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers . . . ; but he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have meaning in them, . . . and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honorable man.”

This is useful advice to anyone who has just read Socrates’s presentation. But Plato is also taking us out of the depths of the evening. The first step was the Alcibiades interlude. And now, just as Alcibiades and Agathon begin sparring about how they should sit in relation to Socrates, there is a new interruption of additional revelers and much drinking ensues. Aristodemus, our original reporter, falls asleep. He awakes at dawn finding only Socrates, Agathon, and Aristophanes still talking, with Socrates, sober, naturally holding the floor. Aristodemus believes that their topic is now the writing of comedy and tragedy, which Socrates sees as similar enterprises. But the listeners finally drop off to sleep, one by one, and Socrates departs, followed by Aristodemus.

ENDNOTES

1. The “companion” is never identified. Is it Plato himself? All we know of him is that Apollodorus calls both him and Glaucon “rich men and traders.” I believe that Glaucon was Plato’s older brother.

2. At the time of the dialogue, Apollodorus still appears to be a young man.

3. In my reading of the Symposium, the distinction between Eros and his mother, Aphrodite, male and female, is obscure. I suspect it is deliberate, but I may not have read closely enough.

4. Bloom says it is because it puts Aristophanes in the center. I won’t argue that, but I suspect the hiccough was added to make Aristophanes look a bit ridiculous, a tit-for-tat vis-a-vis "The Clouds."

5. Actually, I am guessing somewhat here. I don’t personally recall reading the conceit elsewhere, including in Aristophanes, though I haven’t spent much time with him. It is possible that the entire idea is a Platonic conception, attributed by him to Aristophanes for his own reasons.

6. Actually, I suspect that most – and maybe all – of the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogs were real people. But since this may be the only woman given any extended opportunity of expression by Plato, maybe the situation is otherwise.

7. And here I recall the very first examination I took in college, in which the professor craftily asked us to discuss the preposterous proposition: “Christianity without Plato is inconceivable.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (Victor Gourevitch, trans.) —

“Upon the ruins of the medieval idea of government which Machiavelli and his followers undermined, Rousseau erected a kind of quasi-religious political contrivance, supplied with its own myths from his idyllic imagination, inspired by the notion that pity has primacy among human emotions.”
Russell Kirk, summarizing Irving Babbitt.
“Rousseau’s primary concern is with the fundamental difference, recognized by the philosophic tradition but obliterated by the predominant trend of the nineteenth century, between ‘nature’ and ‘convention.’”
Leo Strauss in his comment on Karl Lowith.
At least in translation, Rousseau’s style has always left me suspicious, or perhaps a better word is uneasy. In college I never felt that I had understood him, not so much because he seemed contradictory, but because he seemed always to have additional meanings that he had reserved for those who were better readers than I[1]. Now I’ve made the effort again 35 years later and have come away with the same feeling[2], albeit augmented with a suspicion that I have heard the devil quoting Scripture.

Take his most famous conceit, man in a state of nature (which Rousseau concedes to be merely a hypothesis[3]). What the world takes as improvements (science), Rousseau says are corruptions piled on corruptions, owing in large part to human reason which continues to degenerate the species by harming human morals far more than conferring any concomitant benefit. The new idea here is that man is essentially born good, and Hobbes is thus turned upside down. Natural man has only needs (“food, a female, and rest”), the desire to meet which becomes passion. It is the activity of passion which leads to reason: “We seek to know only because we desire to enjoy.” The contributions of the arts and sciences are for our convenience, exactly like most vices.

“Did Paganism, given to all the aberrations of human reason, leave to posterity anything comparable to the shameful memorials which Printing has readied for it in the reign of the Gospel? The impious writings of such men as Leucippus and Diagoras perished with them. The art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind had not yet been invented. But thanks to Typography and to the use we make of it, the dangerous reveries of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever.” First Discourse.

Note that this is not an overt attack on the accuracy of Hobbes and Spinoza; it goes beyond that to the logical conclusion that they are dangerous. And Rousseau might well think Hobbes dangerous; for Hobbes -- also a state of nature man -- envisions the civil state as a leviathan necessarily formed to protect man from his natural state where life is nasty, brutish, and short[4], while Rousseau acknowledges (but laments) that everywhere modern man is in chains.

“As an untamed Steed bristles its mane, stamps the ground with its hoof, and struggles impetuously at the very sight of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers whip and spur, so barbarous man will not bend his head to the yoke which civilized man bears without a murmur, and he prefers the most tempestuous freedom to a tranquil subjection. Man’s natural dispositions for or against servitude therefore have to be judged not by the degradation of enslaved Peoples but by the prodigious feats of all free Peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former do nothing but incessantly boast of the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable servitude peace: but when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, rest, wealth, power, and life itself for the sake of preserving this one good which those who have lost it hold in such contempt; when I see Animals born free and abhorring captivity smash their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of completely naked Savages scorn European voluptuousness and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death in order to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for Slaves to reason about freedom.” Second Discourse[5].

But note that even this passage concerns those whom Rousseau calls “barbarians,” and in his analysis, Rousseau ultimately claims to go back even further, to a state prior to reason, one which he says is governed by two principles of the soul, our well-being and self-preservation and our “natural repugnance to seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being[6] like ourselves, perish or suffer.” Thus Irving Babbitt was provoked to say of Rousseau that “his influence so far transcends that of the mere man of letters as to put him almost on a level with the founders of religions.”

Meantime, and without puzzling any esoteric meaning, I was touched by this passage which Rousseau volunteers about his father:

“I never recall without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous Citizen to whom I owe my life, and who often throughout my childhood impressed on me the respect due you. I see him still, living off the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul with the most sublime Truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius before him amidst the tools of his trade. I see at his side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender teachings of the best of Fathers.”[7] Second Discourse.

And yet again I wonder what is really implied when I think of Rousseau’s beastly behavior to his own children.

Finally, because Rousseau writes with such ferocious confidence in his insights, I was surprised to feel that it never amounted to arrogance. He seem almost serenely patient with those who have not thought as comprehensively as he about the subjects he considers. And while I would not say that these works are lightened by recurring wit, I don’t mind concluding with a passage which did make me laugh:

“What would we say about a painter so lacking in sense and taste as to . . . limit the pleasure painting gives us to the physical aspects of his art? What would we say about a musician who, filled with similar prejudices, believed that harmony alone is the source of the great effects of music? We would send the former off to paint the woodwork, and condemn the other to compose French operas.” Essay on the Origin of Languages.

ENDNOTES

1. “[I]t takes a combination of great talents and great Virtues to put Science to good use; which is something one can barely hope for in a few privileged souls, but ought not to expect from an entire people.” Response to Answer to First Discourse.
2. Maybe this could be good. Strauss says that “[t]he beginning of understanding is a sense of the bewildering or strange character of the subject to be understood.”

3. But Leo Strauss says that this was no more than a convenient artifice on his part. Natural Right and History.

4. Leo Strauss says that Hobbes constructs human society “by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints . . . .”

5. According to Leo Strauss, the Second Discourse is modeled on a poem by the Epicurean Lucretius.

6. Among the many oddities of Rousseau which I cannot figure is his inconsistent (but obviously deliberate) use of capital letters.

7. The next sentence, alas, returns to the tantalizing ambiguity that always troubles me with Rousseau.

Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances --

For some reason the British seem to like this kind of book, an eminent man's ruminations on his eminent and not so eminent sidekicks. I have read similar efforts by Chesterton, Graves, Waugh, even Churchill. I am sure there are others. There is nothing particularly outstanding about this volume, but it is well written and some of the anecdotes are genuinely memorable. I loved the story about the lovable and eccentric Reverend Spooner who, upon spilling salt on the tablecloth while he was a dinner guest, meticulously took the bottle of claret and sprinkled it on the salt to clean it up. It would be almost impossible to read all such English reminiscence books without finding at least one, and usually several, overlapping portraits of mutual acquaintances. Perhaps Toynbee's subjects are all part of a sub-society which I am not familiar with, but overall this is one more version of the intelligentsia picking over its mate's shoulders, looking for nits. On this point, Toynbee is careful to have selected subjects who have all died. In his introduction he betrays an itch to have done others still living which he has foregone. (He obviously had Churchill in mind, and I don't think it would have been laudatory.) One bright anecdote sticks in my mind. At the 1919 Paris peace conference, Prince Faisal's speech (in Arabic) was actually an irrelevant chapter out of the Koran; by prearrangement, when Col. Lawrence delivered the "translation," he simply read his own statement. Speaking of the Paris conference, it appears to be one of three events in Toynbee's life that he refers to periodically in the book, the other two being his life at Oxford and his writing of a history of the Armenian genocide.

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test –

Because Wolfe begins this account of his mid-1960's reconnaissance of Ken Kesey and his disciples in the first person, I think it must have begun life as a magazine article that got out of control. Indeed, “control” (or its surrender) is at the center of everything that is described here, as I will describe momentarily.

As a character and even as a commentator, Wolfe soon enough disappears from the text (although he pops up from time to time) and instead the reader is given an impressionistic but detailed third party account of a couple of years in Kesey’s orbit. When I say “impressionistic,” I really mean it, because while there is little evidence that Wolfe was much of an eyewitness, the whole tale is described with such idiosyncratic vividness that it is obvious that more than just his interviews with the survivors was involved. In part, this can be explained because Kesey and his so-called “merry pranksters” were committed to “the movie,” by which I mean that they shot miles of film during their heavily sedated peregrinations and it is easy to picture Wolfe delightedly watching every tedious frame for weeks and weeks while he wrote his book[1].

But that only goes so far, because Wolfe doesn’t hesitate to describe in the most subjective way the “bad trips” and insecurities endured by various pranksters, particularly one Sandy Lehman-Haupt, who in Wolfe’s hands resembles a moth in Kesey’s flame. Not that Kesey comes off as inherently flamboyant – at least not if you ignore the day-glo paint that he and his pranksters employ not so subtly as make-up, weapons, perfume, housepaint, etc. In fact, Wolfe actually handles Kesey himself with kid gloves, if not with the deference that the pranksters themselves treated him.

Tom Wolfe is always has a point of view, of course; he is never without that. But among his enormous talents is that, in addition to being the most vivid scene writer, he is also an adroit editor. In other words, his point of view is latent in his selection of what he tells us, not in his comments about it (of which there are few if any.) It is true, we are made to witness Kesey degenerate and there is no reason to doubt why Wolfe thinks it happened. But it is only shown (and shown in Kesey’s own day-glo), but not overtly remarked upon by the author.

As presented by Wolfe, Kesey was ultimately a failure, but emphatically not for any reasons that make the rest of us prone to failure. Wolfe is persistently at pains always to show who Kesey is: a talented, unpretentious (yes!), quiet and magnetic man on the artist’s quest for a new way of looking at the world. This quest is not blameworthy, although it is almost always irresponsible. But genuine artists are not responsible. And so in his book, Wolfe has made the choice, putting Kesey’s irresponsibility front and center and de-emphasizing his mission. Indeed, the mission looks pretty ridiculous from this vantage point. In my view, this is not as cold-hearted as it may seem. It is how the world will always treat the failed vision: the failure is showy and gossipy and the vision irrelevant and eccentric.

The case in point is this. Kesey sacrifices not only himself and his family, but every one of his disciples for his manque vision, drenched in -- inspired by, at one with – drugs, specifically LSD. And yet none of the victims appears to recognize the sacrifice. They are all on a lark. And without Kesey (e.g. while he is hors de combat in Mexico) their own “acid tests” on unsuspecting innocents take irresponsibility into criminality.

This is a part of, but not the entire part of, the “control” theme of the book and of Kesey’s life as Wolfe depicts it. One is either “on the bus” or off it. If you are on the bus, you are seeing and living the Kesey “now-ness” as Kesey expects you to see it and live it. But if you are on the bus, you are also like one of those teeny-boppers at the Beatles concert or like a sinner in the hands of Elmer Gantry. Your life is not yours. Because if you are on the bus you are also a “head,” an acid-head, with the surrender of physical control that that implies. The LSD and marijuana do not control Kesey, however, although they cripple him. Kesey perpetually preaches the goal of “going beyond” while expanding his “now-ness.” (Words cannot describe . . . .)

Thus, as far as I can tell, Wolfe uses the expression presque vu more times per chapter than any other writer in history. With his patented sound effects and attention to minutiae, Wolfe gets as close as an outsider can to depicting this life of thrall. Even the Hell’s Angels hilariously roar across the stage once or twice at Kesay’s direction. In short, the whole package is a realistic, impressionistic, funny, non-didactic inspection of an ephemeral cult in the hands of a failed but serious artist.

ENDNOTES

1. Since I wrote this review as I was reading the book, I was unaware that following his epilogue, Wolfe offers an author’s note in which he had given a thumbnail description of his technique, including much of what I had intuited.

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word –

Toward the end of second semester in the freshman year of my college life, the professor projected on the screen a little number called “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” “One can easily appreciate,” he said, “the staccato of horns, sirens, footsteps and life by simply looking at the surface of this painting.” I wrote this down in my notes and never forgot it. I was actually quite excited at the moment. My first thought was, “Aha!” Suddenly I had a clue about how to look at modern art which I had never previously had an inkling about how to do. (Up to then Art Appreciation had been all about Giotto, Vermeer, Titian, and that group; learning how to look at them seemed child’s play compared to the entanglements that were now on the screen.) But my second thought, hard upon the first, was, “What is that about? Do you have to have a title before the art can be appreciated?” Obviously Wolfe’s critique is more subtle, more academic, and much funnier than anything the little freshman could ever achieve. In terms of popular criticism, in fact, his concise essay is a tour de force for reasons that make an essay great, even if the analysis cannot be profound. That’s because Wolfe starts and finishes at the same point – though on a spiral, not a circle. The catalyst for his book, he says, was a random remark by Hilton Kramer in the New York Times to the effect that art which lacks a “persuasive theory . . . lack[s] something critical.” But as Wolfe tells it, the departure point for art in the last century was an abjuration of things that might give rise to theory -- of storytelling and the third dimension. It self-consciously evolved to a state where the artists were proclaiming that their art had no significance beyond what was physically before the viewer. And so Wolfe gives a mini-history of the period from Cubists, to Social Realism, to Modernists, to Pop Art, Op Art, etc., etc. Things became flatter. Emotion and brush strokes disappeared (or were banished).

“In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat . . . . Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs. Enough? Hardly, said the Minimalists . . . .”

And yet now (1975), Wolfe says with some glee, artists have talked themselves into a corner in which the only two things that matter are genius and the process of creation. The caption -- which includes the description of the process -- supersedes the picture. Or, as Wolfe puts in at the outset, we are at a point where “frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” Everything else has disappeared “up the fundamental aperture.” As can be seen even from this thumbnail sketch, Wolfe is just too funny not to quote liberally. And there’s a point to his wit, because it is really calculated ridicule of the most refined sort. I don’t think I’m wrong by attributing this in part to Wolfe’s politics, because, to a man, the objects of his ridicule are leftists and unlike him they have no sense of humor. They are angry. They are devoted to the modern stereotype of the bohemian artist:

“the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever . . . .”

Elsewhere he describes “the antibourgeois sing-along of Bohemia, standard since the 1840's, as natural as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of any rational content . . . .” And although there is no inherent war between wit and profoundness, I have said that this essay is not profound. First, Wolfe’s targets are not just the defenseless artists (whom he sees as little more than a herd or two of cattle), but the art patrons and the art critics – particularly Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

“The vision that Rosenberg inspired . . . was of Action Painter . . . a Promethean artist gorged with emotion and overloaded with paint, hurling himself and his brushes at the canvas as if in hand-to-hand combat with Fate. There! . . . there! . . . there in those furious swipes of the brush on canvas, in those splatters of unchained id, one could see the artists’s emotion itself . . . .”

Criticizing critics is a joyous game in Wolfe’s hands, but it never takes him beyond his own superior swordplay. He is simply having too much fun with his victims to get down to the “What is art?” level, which the others, after all, were aiming at. Second, to return to the politics, is it a bit difficult to swallow the elitist Wolfe in the role of resentful spokesman for the “public” which is “not invited” to the art community’s decisions about what will become art. (I recall he also played this part of Citizen Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House)[1]. A related third reason is that Wolfe’s scorn falls in more or less equal measures on the behavior of both the masters of what he calls the “Boho dance” (Picasso was the ne plus ultra) and those who are such committed non-conformist lefties that they refuse to dance. (Truth be told, I sense more than a little envy toward the dance masters, chiefly because of their achieved celebrity – after all , this is Tom Wolfe we’re talking about.) He ends with a blithe observation, commonplace enough for a conservative, but cheerful enough to make the liberals writhe:

“[T]he scientists of the mid-twentieth century proceeded by building upon the discoveries of their predecessors and thereby lit up the sky . . . while the artists proceeded by averting their eyes from whatever their predecessors, from da Vinci on, had discovered, shrinking from it, terrified, or disintegrating it with the universal solvent of the Word.”

But again, this doesn’t quite get to the point, though I acknowledge the Irving Babbitt-like point of concentricity. What it misses is what this essay was bound to miss as reflected by Wolfe’s “devoid of rational content” remark I have just quoted. Somehow I am certain that someone -- Rousseau, possibly, or Nabokov -- could articulate it. Art is less “rationality,” I believe, than eros and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Wolfe’s philosophy.

ENDNOTES

1. Part of this pose is that of Wolfe, Man of Economics. “How are you going to sell anything if you sneer at the customer?”