Sep
30
Running into a Professor on the Internet feels Weird: On Sophocles’ Antigone, 334-375, the “Ode to Man”
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Karl Maurer is a professor of mine, so it is with an especial pride I present to you these lines. I ran into him accidentally on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog, and the passage he cited by Nietzsche there is well worth your time. The comment below was left on the blog by me, and is very off-the-cuff and rough. The divinity/rationality comment at the end assumes Sophocles is in agreement with Homer on that issue. I could, quite obviously, be very wrong about that assessment:
Antigone (lines 334-375)
Sophocles (tr. Karl Maurer)
Strange, many things; none stranger than the human.
It crosses foaming sea in winter storm
beneath the sucking
round-roaring swells.
The oldest of the gods, unwithering
and never-resting Earth, man puts to labor
as to and fro year after year the ploughs
pulled by his mules upturn her.
The breeds of the light-headed birds, the tribes
of wild beasts or the ocean’s briny brood he leads
to his nets’ spirals,
far-cunning man.
By cunning he controls the Outdoor Sleepers,
wild beasts that haunt the crags, the shaggy-maned
horse bridled with a yoke strapped to its neck,
the wild ox of the hills.
Language, thought quick as wind, the temperament
for towns he learned, and how to shun the shafts
of frost shot from the sky and darts of rain:
All-solver goes solutionless to nothing,
except to Hades’ house. No flight from that!
Yet from a fatal germ he finds refuges.
Inventive craftsman, unexpected, subtle,
he now embraces evil, now the noble;
honors Earth’s laws and justice sworn to gods,
strong-citied; citiless, picks the ignoble
for love of daring! Such a man may never
be either my hearth-mate or my confidant.
Comment:
1. “It crosses foaming sea in winter storm
beneath the sucking
round-roaring swells.”
Why the image of the sky blowing against the ocean? It’s very strange because the preposition “beneath” seems to confuse the ocean and the sky; despite the “sucking,” the turbulence of the ocean is what man seems to barely notice while cutting through.
2. “The oldest of the gods, unwithering
and never-resting Earth, man puts to labor
as to and fro year after year the ploughs
pulled by his mules upturn her.”
Man seems to accost the Earth as the sky accosted the ocean. When we consider that “crosses foaming sea” may be some sort of allusion to Hesiod’s “Theogeny” and the creation of Aphrodite, one wonders what the real source of turbulence is. We don’t work the Earth because we hate.
3. “The breeds of the light-headed birds, the tribes
of wild beasts or the ocean’s briny brood he leads
to his nets’ spirals,
far-cunning man.”
The real spiral here is a descent – we move from what is higher to what is bestial to what may be primordial. Proteus, the shape-shifting god, transforms into all things because of the primordial character of the ocean.
Why is man’s cunning described in a list that lists easy targets last? The nature of cunning is a base one, since control only is the object. The birds are closest to the divine properly speaking, and they are literally above man. Cunning contrasts with piety, esp. as man uses beasts to tame the oldest god, i.e:
4. “By cunning he controls the Outdoor Sleepers,
wild beasts that haunt the crags, the shaggy-maned
horse bridled with a yoke strapped to its neck,
the wild ox of the hills.”
This list is a narrowing, I assume (I don’t know what Outdoor Sleepers are). The beasts haunting crags are not domesticated at all; horses are somewhat domesticated; the ox is used entirely for the conquest of Earth (the significance of “wild,” I’m conjecturing, is entirely ironic). Again, is this pious? Hesiod and Homer to a degree might say yes, that virtues can stem from the shaping of Earth.
We have an indication that man is alienated from the Earth, that his influence on it is like the turbulent reaction from the ocean to the sky. We yearn for control, whether we have it or not is another story. An ox is domesticated only because a portion of land is controlled in the first place. There’s a lot more out there.
5. “Language, thought quick as wind, the temperament
for towns he learned, and how to shun the shafts
of frost shot from the sky and darts of rain:
All-solver goes solutionless to nothing,
except to Hades’ house. No flight from that!
Yet from a fatal germ he finds refuges.”
“All-solver goes solutionless to nothing” – this is also ironic – man gets solutions only for the problems he can conceive. In a deep way, man has never properly conceived of death (see the Phaedo for the ultimate irony of where this logic goes). Language, thought, mores – these are necessary in order to get solutions, but they stem from something a lot baser, merely getting shelter from the sky.
The “fatal germ” makes me wonder: I think it is the Earth, which we ultimately return to in the darkest sense (we die) but also in our works and days.
We’ve got one more stanza left. How is all this adding up? We started with “ocean” in the first stanza, moved to property/control over beasts, then in this stanza have talked about the sky. Man moves in the first stanza, is at rest in the second, is seeking rest in the third.
The point is, despite the very complicated and beautiful structure, it doesn’t add up. Something is amiss here – the sky governs all in too deep a way, the divine truly is above the human. That’s why the fundamental confusion between sky and ocean to begin with; that’s why Aristophanes considers Sophocles to equal Aeschylus (cf. The Frogs).
6. “Inventive craftsman, unexpected, subtle,
he now embraces evil, now the noble;
honors Earth’s laws and justice sworn to gods,
strong-citied; citiless, picks the ignoble
for love of daring! Such a man may never
be either my hearth-mate or my confidant.”
Politics generally is afflicted by the very strangeness and terror of divinity. Man is untrustworthy because this world is difficult to make sense out of. Is this nihilism? No – the divine can be trusted, must be trusted. It is because of divinity/rationality we were able to make something out of an imperfect beginning. But.
Sep
29
I finished a draft of another section of the dissertation last night. That section asserted that gratefulness needs to be expressed by one citizen to another, always, for ungratefulness makes benefactors feel like they’re lower than dirt. The teaching by Xenophon regarding citizenship stands in stark contrast to “enlightened self-interest,” where our greed produces the specialization and progress which makes us all comfortable in our own property. We don’t need to talk to each other on this latter theory.
The section I’m working on now grapples with fraternity: do we need to be friends? Of course we can’t be friends with all citizens, but the notion of friendship so prevalent among my generation – where “friend” is synonymous with “friend with benefits” and “drinking buddy” in many cases – is this notion acceptable? For Aristotle, the highest sort of friendship aimed at virtue: because we each want to be better, we work with each other and take each other seriously.
It looks like friendship may inform citizenship in a critical way: to know how to make and deal with friends is to know how to deal with people generally, including people who aren’t friends.
The two sections are not alien to one another. The thing I most regret is neglecting those who have done me so much good. What is darkest is my own memory with regards to my true benefactors, and it is darkest partly because saying “thank you” isn’t a virtue for us. More important to us is independence, and the security property affords.
A few who were very special to me only understood people as their own property – love was about possession simply. What is curious is how remembrance is a possession that isn’t a possession; a likeness “is” inasmuch it literally “is not.” To appreciate is an inward movement outward: the self-knowledge gained in taking something seriously leads back to the creator or giver of that something.
Sep
25
Slowly.
Filed Under personal | 2 Comments
If I had one word to describe these recent days, this would be it. Meeting new people, writing the dissertation, working through poems – that’s how life is going, moment by moment, and sometimes it plods.
In some ways, I mind. I want this dissertation to feel like it is writing itself. I want more people to meet me as opposed to me making all the efforts.
But what makes poetry wondrous is how it slows life down: it forces you to focus on a few syllables, keep them in mind, and watch them unfold.
Things are going slowly because of me, and so I’m not complaining.
Sep
23
Puff-Piece Features about Philosophy Do the World No Good: Isn’t Philosophy about asking Tough Questions?
Filed Under academia, education, philosophy | 4 Comments
1. The first issue that this article raises regards the status of public universities:
Auburn is a land-grant university: it became one in 1872 under a federal program geared toward helping the working class obtain practical college educations. That mission continues largely to this day. A public university with an annual tuition of less than $6,000 for Alabama residents, it accepts roughly 70 percent of those who apply. Among its 20,000 undergraduates, business and engineering are the most popular majors. When students choose liberal-arts majors, they tend to be the more practical ones — communications, criminology, psychology, prelaw….
….As he [Jolley, Professor of Philosophy] points out, the opening stanza of Auburn University’s creed — “I believe that this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn” — conveys a certain kind of hostility to the world of ideas in which philosophy and for that matter the rest of the humanities plainly reside. “The creed is a fine document in many ways,” he told me, “but it reinforces a certain picture of what you’re here for, and it can be very hard to break the grip of that with students.” [boldface added by me]
Alright. First question – if a university is devoted to things that are entirely practical, should it exist? “I can count only on what I earn?” That’s openly anti-moral and unpatriotic in the extreme: it’s Jack Nicholson’s character’s credo in The Departed. If actually acted on, it promises to destroy civic life in this country once and for all for the sake of an individual’s paranoia, much less his greed. The entire Auburn creed can be seen as refuted by Plato’s Hipparchus, where the basic requirements needed for commercial transactions – honesty, explicit law-abidingness, wisdom defined in terms of “skills” that can be bought – mark not only the acquirer of wealth but tyrannical rule.
Btw, I should say this: I do like Auburn, it has an awesome swimming program and if they can keep tuition that low, heck, I would have gone there. But some traditions really are this thoughtless and need to be shown the door fast. There is no way American life can continue if this is taken literally: either the contradictions in the creed will show the entire enterprise to be futile, and thus education to be worthless, or the parts that destroy morality will prove themselves supreme as they are held on an equal level with the parts that are simply empty moral rhetoric.
As we have discussed numerous times, education is anything but practical. Real education approaches the useless even as it articulates a good – you don’t “use” the highest good, after all.
2. Of course, what’s funny about practical endeavors is just how short-term they are. You want a lasting good? You need people willing to work for it full-time, accept no pay, and search out other talent actively and unselfishly:
Jolley’s early efforts to change the culture of the philosophy department at Auburn met with quite a bit of resistance from the university’s administration. Among other things, they rejected his requests for money for more upper-level philosophy classes. Determined to build up Auburn’s philosophy major, Jolley simply taught the courses himself, free of charge.
Many of Jolley’s colleagues were similarly skeptical of what he was trying to do. Several of them urged him to “tone it down,” he recalls, when they noticed the intimidating syllabus for his first class, the history of ancient philosophy, taped to the door of his office. They advised Jolley against wasting his time trying to start a philosophy club at Auburn — the club now has about 30 members — and called his approach to teaching “aristocratic.” In particular, they objected to the fact that he was grading students not on how well they learned philosophical terminology and definitions but on their ability to think philosophically.
Jolley gradually built allies within the department while at the same time looking to bring in like-minded professors. He didn’t expect Auburn to be able to land top candidates, but he was convinced that a lot of talented young philosophers were slipping through the cracks, often because they had the misfortune of specializing in an especially popular area, or because they had been stigmatized for taking too long to finish their degrees. (Jolley’s latest hire, Arata Hamawaki, spent 18 years finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard.) Auburn’s philosophy department is now dominated by graduates of some of the nation’s top philosophy programs.
The result you can already guess:
…it came as something of a surprise when, in the late ’90s, Auburn’s college of liberal arts undertook an internal ranking of its dozen academic departments and philosophy came out on top. The administration figured that there must have been a problem with the criteria it used, and a new formula was drawn up. Once again, philosophy came in first. This time, the administration decided to give up on the rankings altogether.
Why are practical endeavors trumped by theoretical ones this soundly? Part of me has always suspected Socrates’ seeming knowledge of everything is some sort of joke – since he has knowledge of ignorance, and all men are ignorant in some way, he knows all men’s natures and thus can comment on whatever they do rightfully. When I’m done the dissertation, I should have a more definite answer for you, but I suspect that Heidegger gets at the truth more directly when asserting that there are arts that a philosopher requires. A good example of this is seen if we move one degree away from the philosopher, to the epic poet: Homer knowing everything is a major theme of several Socratic dialogues. We know someone like Milton had his hands on multiple languages, mastery of diverse verse forms common to English and those languages, a working knowledge of the science of his day, was active politically and had read and understood Machiavelli. All of that and more was required to make Paradise Lost, parts of which I think he dictated because he was literally blind then.
Practical endeavors have a definite end. Theoretic ones probably demand more than any one person is capable of.
3. I’m making this article to be better than it is. What set me off was this crap:
By any measure, Jolley has accomplished a great deal. But in the service of what, exactly? During my stay at Auburn — and in our e-mail exchanges afterward — Jolley and I returned again and again to that very question. Why does philosophy matter?
Jolley could never seem to come up with a clear, settled explanation, and since clarity is a philosophical virtue, on one level this obviously bothered him. Yet his failure to give a simple answer was, in a way, the best answer he could have given. Philosophy is so much a part of how Jolley thinks, talks and writes that his attempts at an answer were themselves invariably philosophical, which is to say, aimed as much at exploring the assumptions behind the question as at answering it. “One reason it can seem so hard to see how philosophy relates to life is that we have often already decided that philosophy is thinking, not living,” he once wrote me. Explaining why philosophy matters, in other words, requires doing philosophy — the very thing the questioner wants explained.
I felt dumber after reading that, esp. when this was said above:
[Jolley:] “I am convinced that philosophy is not just about theory,” he told me. “It’s about a life well lived and thoughts truly thought.”
Sep
22
Entry 600: Love Letters
Filed Under personal, politics | 2 Comments
1. There’s a strange feeling I get when looking over old love letters.
The strangeness is precisely the lack of feeling. I’m not regretful or saddened when reading them, despite the prayers then mumbled to myself, the agonizing over every word, the attempt to influence a heart with some scribblings.
The intensity is gone completely. Amanda shared with me this poem from Neruda recently, and while it describes places I think I’ve been, I can’t help but feel, especially when looking at lines like these:
Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to my vague memory of
you. I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm….I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every
window.Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because
of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires: shooting
stars, falling objects.
…I can’t help but feel those lines are conditional. Neruda’s poem has imagery that moves upward – from flowers to statues to climbing vines to things that fall from heaven. He makes a simile between himself and a flower, and yet situates the poem at night finally, making the reader wonder not only how he moved from spring to summer so easily, but why “day” was assumed as the setting the whole time. I never thought of a flower as seeking daylight, but that is indeed what they do.
And now I realize where time really passes one by. Neruda’s love is dreamlike because so much of love depends on the deepest, highest desires.
I suspect the love letters weren’t products of dreams, but attempts to dream.
2. Somebody actually had the courtesy recently to ask me where my political vision/hope for education is going. That made me smile and wonder: I don’t think we ever get a Socratic dialogue where Socrates is asked straight-up, in a good way, what he would like for Athens and his own citizens.
I think it’s safe to say that despite this blog’s flaws, despite my flaws, this is a love letter of sorts. Last time I said that aloud when blogging at another site I was thoroughly castigated. “How dare I assert that my writing is better than that of other bloggers” was the tone – at that site, since we were all blogging as part of a community, clearly all writing was created equal.
Truly worrisome is the fact I’ve made friends that I can’t and couldn’t do much for, despite their immense need in some cases. It may be the case I don’t have the right to write a love letter.
So perhaps this is just an attempt, once again. Dreams may only be understood when achieved.