Motives for Philosophy in Plato’s Protagoras

 

     Though philosophy today is most often regarded as an abstruse special interest which, indeed, struggles to survive even within academia, this isolation is distinctly modern.  If one sees the end of philosophy as the search for a formula for leading the best possible life, it is clearly a matter for everyone’s consideration.  If philosophical speculation is aimed at a determination of ethics, it is likewise a subject that engages all people.  The goal of understanding one’s place in  the cosmos or getting some sense of ultimate reality has been ceded to religion.  Yet we understand that in ancient Athens Socrates plied his trade in public places, the gymnasia and the agora, always a devoted amateur, and in such places made a name and attracted followers and challengers.  General interest in philosophy and skill with words became sufficient to support a class of teachers, the sophists, who, unlike Socrates, were professionals whose tutelage came at a price.  In one Platonic dialogue, Protagoras, traditionally regarded as the first sophist, engages wits with Socrates before an audience of over twenty onlookers who probably would have considered such an encounter as a world-class contest of ideas, as worthy of watching as the Olympics.  From their disputation two motives for philosophic training emerge that suggest that intellectual training has value for everyone. 

     The course of their dialogue suggests several purposes for philosophic thought, though the putative topic under discussion is a somewhat different theme: whether virtue is teachable.  These days few would think of justifying the work of philosophers by its value in furthering social ends, since their expertise seems irrelevant to the lives of most citizens.  Yet Protagoras claims that that he can “promise to make men good citizens” [1], only for Socrates to object, saying that social decisions are made by everyone together, regardless of profession, and neither any individual nor any particular profession has particular expertise in statecraft.          

      Of course, in Classical antiquity, skill in logic and rhetoric was closely associated with deliberative and forensic arenas, either the assembly and other governmental forums or the courts.  Not only did every free Athenian male have a voice in deciding issues of the common good, but, for those engaged in litigation or legal defense, the jury system made persuasiveness of cardinal importance.  Today a mere vote is thought to be all an individual owes the state, though some will go so far as to write an occasional letter to the editor or to put out an election yard sign.  Yet in the view of the ancient Greeks (and the founders of the United States), a healthy democracy requires fuller participation by all, apart from slaves, foreigners, and women.  The disastrous recent American election of a would-be dictator, propelled to power by uneducated voters, reveals the hazards of an ignorant population. 

     For the Greeks a man’s identity was largely constituted by his political role, and the necessity of sound reasoning by the populace is required for a healthy, well-functioning democracy.  Moreover, the training that qualified one to formulate one’s views in a coherent and convincing way and present persuasive arguments when discussing legislation or pleading a legal case, is applicable in many  arenas of life.  The ability to manipulate symbols is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The general intellectual skills of taking in information, analyzing it, and producing astute responses are, of course, critical in all endeavors requiring thought and judgement.  Often in our era, with the decay of debating as a common practice in American secondary schools and philosophy classes on that level virtually non-existent and ignored by mot collegians, the development of even fundamental proficiency in thinking and self-expression is left to the belated attention of those who teach freshman English classes in universities.  Whether one engaged with a professional teacher like Protagoras or simply a talkative figure familiar about town like Socrates, the Greeks’ system may have been more effective at encouraging a generally educated populace, more capable in their civic role and in private life as well.  The assumption that every person should possess logical and verbal skills is so strong that people are suspicious of sophists who claim a special expertise and work for hire, and Protagoras concedes that some think ill of professionals like himself, though he is willing to proudly affirm his profession in spite of the “malice and ill-will” and “intrigues” of their critics [2].

     In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates is pleased to be able to meet with Protagoras, ostensibly to gain wisdom from him, but  the reader suspects, even more to enhance his own reputation by showing up a rival in philosophical argumentation.   The traditional subtitle of “On the Sophists” suggests a focus on evaluating those who teach logic and speaking professionally, so, though the general topic is whether virtue may be taught, the rivalry of Socrates and Protagoras provides the drama.

     In the end, as in other Platonic dialogues, especially early ones, most of the logical argumentation has been negative, indicating that received ideas are flawed yet providing no definitive alternative answer to settle the question.  The reader, along with Protagoras and Socrates’ friends, is left wondering.  In  the Meno this process, at the heart of much Platonic ἔλεγχος, is described as a beneficial in itself [3], though in that dialogue aporia is simply a way-station preceding truth.  In the Protagoras there is no further resolution.  The discussion can dislodge error, but it makes little attempt to formulate a correct answer.  What, then, is the point? 

     Greek philosophy offers several options to avoid the cul-de-sac of finding a desired answer unknowable.  In Stoicism suspended judgement, or ἐποχή, is appropriate for some sense experiences (φαντασίαι), while others are sufficiently convincing as to be kataleptic  or “graspable.” [4]  For Skeptics, however, particularly the Pyrrhonist variety, all impressions are doubtful, but in withholding assent and denial alike, the individual might find a serene mental state or ἀταραξία, following the recognition that nothing can be certainly known.  Here, in a mysterious reversal, not-knowing is transformed into enlightenment. 

     Both Plato’s Protagoras, though, and his Socrates seem clearly to be in pursuit of answers.  They are also competitors as providers of wisdom, and each is characterized as polite yet jealous of his reputation.  So the reader might imagine Socrates here as elsewhere playing devil’s advocate for the more vigorous play of ideas and the chance to display his ratiocination to greater advantage.  He may care more about out-talking Protagoras than in finding Truth.  The discussion is civil and good-humored, more in the nature of a friendly game of cards than an angry argument.  The audience listens to both and the conversation, enjoying the spectacle, making the event resemble an athletic contest or a dramatic production, both of which encode tensions and antagonisms in  a generally harmonious form. 

     In the last analysis, the Greeks at Callias’ [5] house were passing the time of day, amusing themselves with intellectual calisthenics that they found pleasurable for their own sake, without necessarily coming to a conclusion or uncovering new knowledge, a form of play very like attending the theater, a foot-race, or any other diversion.  What makes philosophy superlatively entertaining is that human cognitive skill, the ability to deal in subtle symbols and recombine words in ever new combinations , is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The speakers and the audience in the Protagoras are doing neither more nor less than having fun with their brains.  So philosophy here is a sort of highest level divertissement with no further end in view than the kitten has when tossing a stuffed mouse, the dog in retrieving a stick, people idly chatting over a backyard fence, or while sitting on barstools. 

     Though neither good citizenship nor amusement is likely to occur to people today as motives for philosophy, their endurance in antiquity is suggested by the fact that both are cited by Cicero three hundred years after Plato.  In his Tusculan Disputations he argues that civilization itself is the result of philosophy, allowing people to live together in large numbers.  He then notes that some come to the Olympic Games to compete, while others come to sell their goods to the crowds, and yet a third group come simply to look on, for the sake of the spectacle.  This last, he says, resembles philosophers, who observe life itself, purely out of curiosity, because they wish to “look with interest into the nature of things.” [6] 

     Philosophy as an enabler of democracy and as an entertainment may seem to have little in common, even to be opposed: one seems serious, even lofty, aiming toward the betterment of society, while the other might appear frivolous and trivial, simple amusement.  Yet casual conversations such as that depicted in the Protagoras form the basis for close ties among fellow-citizens while providing practice in ratiocination and communication that can equally serve the larger community in legislative and legal deliberation.  Philosophy here represents a shared belief that people do have common problems and a common language for inquiring after solutions, and that the quest for knowledge is a primary human pleasure, whether or not anyone ever can arrive at the Truth. 

     Practice in thinking, analyzing, understanding, writing, and speaking had been the basis for all education for millennia.  We moderns can deplore, though we cannot change, the contemporary destruction of the ideal of a liberal education and the transformation of post-secondary schooling into vocational training.  Perhaps a rebirth of philosophic studies justified by social utility or the pure fun of it might rejuvenate our stricken American political culture and reawaken people to the joys and benefits of juggling concepts.  

 

1.  ὑπισχνεῖσθαι ποιεῖν ἄνδρας ἀγαθοὺς πολίτας 319a.

2.  In Greek the terms are φθόνοι and δυσμένειαί (316d).

3.  See Meno (84c)  “Isn’t this numbing then a good thing?” (ὤνητο ἄρα ναρκήσας;).

4.  Epictetus, Discourses 1.18.1 maintains that all human decisions originate in “feeling,” including the suspension of judgment associated with uncertainty.  Thus the ignorant are not to be blamed for their errors.

5.  According to numerous authorities (Andocides, 130, Aristophanes, The Frogs, v. 432, Athenaeus, iv. 67; and Aelian, Varia Historia, iv. 16 as well as Plato Apology 20a), Callias is said to have spent his patrimony in support of sophists and ended his life in penury. 

6.  Book V, section 5 for the growth of civilization and V, 9  for the disinterested inquirer into truth, acting out of curiosity.  In this latter passage the relevant Latin phrases are “sed visendi causa venirent studioseque perspicerent, quid ageretur et quo modo” (“but come to visit to see what was going on and how”).  It is these who “rerum naturam studiose intuerentur” (“look with interest into the nature of things”). 

The Limits of Howell’s Realism in Theory and Practice [A Modern Instance]

 

Endnotes appear in brackets.  References in parentheses refer to the original edition of Criticism and Fiction or to the Penguin edition of A Modern Instance which reproduces the 1977 University of Indiana edition.

 

     Probably the most influential American man of letters in the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells produced not only a great deal of fiction, but abundant criticism and reviews as well, introducing American readers to a wide range of foreign authors and advocating Realism.  Since he, like many writers of polemics, was prone to overstate his case, his exposition of the concept of Realism was not wholly consistent internally, nor was its application.  An examination of the ideas in his Criticism and Fiction (1891) and of their use in his novel A Modern Instance (1882) [1] clarifies the limits of his Realism in both theory and practice. 

     Howells opens Criticism and Fiction by agreeing with an author with whom he might be thought to have little sympathy, John Addington Symonds, who notes that Bolognese painting was once highly regarded, but, Symonds says, had come to be condemned for its “emptiness and soullessness.” (1)  Objecting to the fluctuation in artistic value judgements, Symonds proposes that art should be judged by permanent criteria and prescribes that paintings should be “simple, natural, and honest” (2).  He hopes that “the scientific spirit” might make men progressively more and more conscious of the “bleibende Verhältnisse” (“enduring relationships,” what might be called general truths) implied by artistic works such that, since  everyone has comparable experience of life, any reader may readily “test the excellence” of any work.  As an opening thematic statement, albeit at second-hand, this seems more obfuscatory than revealing.

     After all, apart from the gap between Howell’s very bourgeois American concerns and Symonds’ aestheticism (not to mention his homosexual themes), Symonds’ views raise more questions than they answer.  What to do with the many works which seem to fail the stated standard, that is, to some extent to be complex, artificial, and even misleading, yet have been celebrated by readers for centuries, such as Noh drama, the poems of the Troubadours, or The Faerie Queene.  Even less of the literature and art valued in the last century could be described as “simple, natural, and honest,” adjectives that do not apply to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or Pablo Picasso, to pick a few names at random.  And how in the world is one to know which are the important “bleibende Verhältnisse” when vision differs so from one artist to another?  Besides, must thematic implications be the heart of every work of art?  Finally, the notion that, given the right standards, everyman will be an equally qualified critic seems as unlikely as it is pointless, though the idea seems to have convinced Howells. [2]

     Howells’ own often-quoted formula seems straightforward.  “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (73)  He quotes with approval Burke’s claim that art must be judged neither by other art nor by critics but solely by fidelity to nature (7).  Nature, though, is itself problematic.  For Howells the word is capitalized to indicate its metaphysical significance, already a suspiciously unnatural sign.  “No author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent.” (14) 

     This insistence leads him to question conventional views of beauty.  Since in his view true art embraces the whole of the observed world, it cannot be judged by its prettiness: “The ugly delights as well as the beautiful.” (4)  He turns the tables on those (plentiful in his time) who would shrink from distasteful scenes.  “We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore ‘the worth of the vulgar,’; in believing that the superfine is better.” (81)

     The excessive gentility of the taste of his day to which he was responding is clear in the initial review of A Modern Instance in The Nation.  The critic objects to the vulgarity of Howells’ depiction of “cheap boarding-houses and restaurants, and of the internal economy of a newspaper establishment.”  Declaring “here is a collection of disagreeable people whom he would gladly forget,” he pronounces Howells characters “unpleasant individuals,” “people whom one does not care to number among his intimate associates,” “types of character from which we turn away with irritation.”  For him the novel focuses unpleasantly on “that which is ignoble.” [5]  

     Howells shared nonetheless a preference for the proper.  His characters were middle-class, not working class, and he shrank from any representation of the sordid or the really wicked.  Howells’ rhetoric identifies Realism with democracy and the great American middle class.  He quotes Daudet in support of the idea that European culture is worn-out.  “We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.” (135)  In contrast America has freshness and “the large, cheerful average of health and success” (129) as well as a wholesome classlessness noted by Matthew Arnold who “found no ‘distinction’ in our life” (138).  He calls for an end to “fine literary airs” in favor of “the dialect, the language, that most Americans know -- the language of unaffected people everywhere” (104).  “The arts must become democratic,” he proclaims, “and then we shall have the expression of America in art.” (140)

     If literature is simply “the expression of life,” every man is an equally qualified critic.  Howells welcomes the advent of a “communistic” era in taste in which he says, using Burke’s authority to reinforce a view that in recent years has been associated with reader response criticism, that “the true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” (8).  To Howells Grant’s Personal Memoirs, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century in America, is “a great piece of literature” (90) and possesses “natural” excellence (89) specifically because it is non-literary (43).  The assumption that every simple straightforward effect must necessarily be true and beautiful is, of course, an absurdity on its face.

     The apparent plain-spokenness in Howell’s formula for Realism, “nothing more and nothing less,” belies the elusiveness and editorial choice entailed in deciding what is “truthful” as well as what “treatment” best serves to express it.  Howells acknowledged that just recording facts will not automatically generate beauty.  In spite of his use of Keats’ well-known formula “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty (6), he plays Symonds’ wild card he had earlier introduced, the “bleibende Verhältnisse,” as a further qualification.  He specifically denies that an accumulation of data is sufficient, saying that when the writer “heaps up facts merely, maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish, too.” (15-6)  The simple ideal of mimesis has all but vanished.

     Howells readily accepts artful alteration of nature, praising in Gogol and Balzac “the touch of exaggeration which typifies” (19), though such efforts should be discreet since “intense effects” are “cheap effects” (151).  Most essential to his project is the preservation of the traditional claim that art teaches morality.  He quotes Juan Valera in favor of art for art’s sake only in order to object by maintaining that beauty is “a divine and spiritual principle” and thus “perforce moral” (60-61).  To him “as long as men are men and women are women” ethics will always be inferred, beauty inevitably “clothes” morality and art always has either a good or bad ethical effect (83).

     Howells is no Baudelaire, so he insists on the beneficial option only.  With the close association he imagines between beauty and ethics, he believes that novels should coax a reader into being be “a helpfuler and wholesomer creature” (106).  Thus licentious French novels cannot be aesthetically successful, and in fact stories of more virtuous love are “truer to life” (150). The moral role of literature is for him critical.  “If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (95).  Stories without retributive justice are “deadly poison,” (95) while mere entertainment will “clog the soul” (96).

     To Howells realism, truth, and beauty are identified, a link he seems to consider a novel insight in  spite of the precedent of Plato.  Thus, for him, asking “is it true” involves “the highest morality and the highest artistry” and “this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak.” (99)  “No one hereafter,” he maintains, “will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties.”  “No conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong.” (98) 

     Bartley Hubbard’s life is unquestionably shaped by moral considerations.  His career is a cautionary ironic American success story, from rags to riches like Horatio Alger’s popular novels which were popular when A Modern Instance was published, but Bartley, unlike Ragged Dick or Tattered Tom, had a corrupt heart and for that reason his eventual fall was as inevitable and as much a convention as their rise.  The critique of capitalism’s amoral rapacity inverts Alger’s optimistic enthusiasm about social mobility in America. [4]

     Other central concerns of the book are likewise ethical and social.  His observations about the potential for damage of newspapers governed primarily by the profit motive (as virtually all still are) and his implied acceptance of divorce in some cases may have excited topical interest, but, if so, such appeal has faded.  As a theory Howells’ Realism requires, apart from observation of lived reality, the assumption of a natural moral order uncreated by humans, embodied in a sort of Platonic form that conflates truth, beauty, and morality.  

     Though Howells opened with Symonds’ comment objecting to changing fashions in visual art, Howells in other passages enthusiastically accepted the evolution of standards.  He notes the overturning of neo-Classicism by Romanticism (15), and even speculates on some post-Realist era, though he usually depicts Realism as a climax in art’s evolution

     In practice Howell’s Realism promoted a focus on middle class characters, which is to say the group that composed the majority of his readers.  They are not only middle class, they are also generally of mixed character, neither exemplary heroes nor utter villains.  He fancies that such characters are more “real” than other varieties of humankind.  Likewise, he approvingly quotes Valdés’ condemnation  of “effectism,” by which he means seeking “vivid and violent emotions” through the means of displaying “invention and originality,” (65) preferring instead a prose style close to that of everyday educated speech.  To flaunt one’s idiosyncratic language would be to him vulgar.

     For Howells “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper” deserves representation.  He declares that “the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper must die out.” (12)  This judgement fails to recognize either the array of potential expressive possibilities of the image or the fact that Howells’ “realistic” grasshopper is every bit as artificial as the alternatives.  Yet for a time Howells represented progress.  He enlarged the scope of fiction and developed further a sense of American identity which he embodied in both theory and practice.  While he did move on from prior models to occupy territory already claimed in  France by Balzac and Zola, he remained an American, man of his times whose very limitations are perhaps more instrumental than his themes in his pictures of lived experience.  He was unaware that what he did not know, what he preferred not to express, was as significant what he included.  The fact that he was unconscious of such considerations only makes them more meaningful.    

 

  

1.  In Criticism and Fiction Howells had the scope to develop the ideas he had been promoting in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly.  To George Perkins A Modern Instance was Howell’s first major work of fiction.  See his “A Modern Instance: Howells' Transition to Artistic Maturity,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1974).

2.  See below for Howells’ notion of the coming “communistic” era of taste.

3.  As it happens, Alger, like Howells, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

4.  Howells was a progressive, though no radical.  Apart from supporting Lincoln’s presidential campaign, he defended those arrested for Haymarket “riot” and was active in the Anti-Imperialist Society.  He was a Christian socialist at a time when many, among them William Dwight Porter Bliss, Henry James Sr., and  William Henry Channing, found capitalism inconsistent with the gospel. 

5.  Atlantic Monthly, November1882.  This and similar attacks are detailed in Herbert Edwards, “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Nov., 1931).   

A Take on Plato’s Parmenides

 

     The informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be called philosophical.  My reading of Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic.  Yet I have always found that the subjectivity of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians. 

 

     Plato’s Parmenides is to many a puzzler.  One modern reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another, equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it "aporetic." [2]   In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and “how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be shouting, “but no!”  In the Parmenides the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the elder philosopher.  Parmenides even scolds like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.”  [3]  Plato’s point of view can always be elusive, given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing, but where is the authority here?   The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first.  Finally, through the entire dialogue the argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish. 

    If one persists, the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of ratiocination.  Perhaps some savant might be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought, but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a contemplative to the sublime?  A good many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can.  Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their never quite measuring up to the original flash.  (Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?) 

     For me the Parmenides induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.  The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed.  Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s equanimity.  In singing the song of powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders and limits of humanity. 

     I imagine Plato winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high intellectual amusement.  In Plato’s wink, though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.

     (Another Platonic actor may provide a parallel.  Gorgias had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously Skeptical position.  Having concluded that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of words.  Sitting on a Mediterranean terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes.  Behind such pleasant theatricals, though, there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each person arises, though only temporarily.)

     This notion is not entirely a vagary of my own.  There is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on Parmenides himself.  As early as 1894 the author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy” found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the Eleatics.”  He believed in actual influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4]  Since then a variety of scholars have examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and Nagarjuna. [5]  At least one professor of Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India. [6]  

     While Plato’s precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.”  Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7]  One reader, at least, of the Parmenides imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece, already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold world.  

 

 

1.      1.  Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.

 

2.     2.  R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).

 

3.      3.  I use Jowett’s old translation.  The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).

 

4.      4.  Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).

 

5.      5.  See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4; and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses Shankara in particular. 

 

6.      6.  Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).

 

7.      7.  Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others.  Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing.  "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.”  Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”

 

8.      8.  Aristotle in his Physics explicitly refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.  

 

Platonic Love

After touching on the history of the concept of Platonic love, I present new translations of a selection of the lyrics traditionally attributed to Plato along with a few unsystematic comments.



     In popular usage we all know that Platonic love means love without sensual indulgence, love conceived as spiritual or intellectual rather than physical. Yet, without venturing on the seas of defining what Plato in fact thought about love, any reader of the Symposium or, indeed, most of Plato’s dialogues will surely notice that their scenes are lit with a warm erotic glow. His circles of Athenian men who congregate to enjoy each other’s mental play in conversation were doubtless at the same time enjoying each other’s bodies in and out of the local gymnasium. According to Diogenes Laertius the philosopher’s birth name was Aristocles, and he was given the sobriquet Plato (“broad”) by his trainer, Ariston the Argive wrestler, in tribute to his physique. [1] As the centuries passed, the notion of sexless, so-called Platonic love is repeatedly presented as an ideal, but also regularly ridiculed as absurd or impossible.
     In Lucian the residents of the Isles of the Blessed enjoy corporeal pleasures in spite of being deceased. They “see nothing indecent in sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and indulge in it quite openly, in full view of everyone. The only exception was Socrates, who was always swearing that his relations with young men were purely Platonic, but nobody believed him for a moment, and Hyacinthus and Narcissus gave first-hand evidence to the contrary.” [2] Here Socrates sounds as though he is playfully coy, a gentleman offering a discreet if inaccurate disclaimer.
     The collocation “platonic love” (albeit in Latin) was first used by Marsilio Ficino in 1469 in his commentary on the Symposium to describe an ideal love of the type he enjoyed the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti whom he regularly addressed as “amico mio perfettisimo.” [3] For centuries scholars assumed that, due to Ficino’s Roman Catholicism, he could not have been a “sodomite,” though the tables have turned and more recent writers often treat his homosexuality as an established fact. In late fifteenth century Florence same sex relationships among men, though illegal, were exceedingly common. [4]
     In the first half of the seventeenth century, Plato was much à la mode in the court of Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I. An observer described the vogue: “The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a love call’d Platonick Love, which much sways there of late; it is a Love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of Mind, not in any carnal Fruition. This love sets the Wits of the Town on work; and they say there will be a Mask shortly of it, whereof her Majesty and her Maids of Honour, will be part.”
     In this intellectual climate, phrase “platonic love” enters English usage in William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers (1636). The play mercilessly satirizes Theander and Eurithea’s wholly spiritualized love as absurd, contrasting it to the natural love of their siblings, Phylomont and Ariola. A medicine eventually cures Theander who awakens then to the physical side of love, replacing his erstwhile courtliness with a conventional male chauvinist marriage, telling his beloved “Your charter's out of date, and mine/ Begins to rule.”
     At the end of the nineteenth century Oscar Wilde made a brave and spirited speech at his first trial defending “the Love that dare not speak its name" as “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.” (His admirers recall that later his pride caused him to give up, as Socrates had done, his chance for exile.) Wilde speaks of a “spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect,” but whether that spiritual purity precluded carnal relations the reader of the testimony at the writer’s trials may judge.
     If one is to believe Aelian’s Varia Historia [6] Plato had written epic and tragic poetry and was about to enter a tetralogy in the competition at the Dionysia when he happened to hear Socrates speak, whereupon he immediately abandoned literature for philosophy (though many would say he continued to write a sort of poetry during his entire career). None of his youthful works has been preserved for certain, but his name has been attached to a group of lyrics in Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus, and in the Greek Anthology. The authorship of these poems was long treated with considerable suspicion by scholars but Plato the lyricist has, in the last fifty years, found more defenders, though most still date the lyrics considerably later than Plato’s time. [7] Whoever may have been the author, the fact that a group of love poems are attributed to Plato indicates that readers in later antiquity were quite willing to accept Plato as a romantic and sensualist, enjoying physical relations with both men and women.
     The simple existence of deep friendships among same-sex heterosexuals is enough to demonstrate the possibility of passionate attachments in which sexuality plays no clear part, and many would see a broadened sort of eroticism in virtually all affectionate relations. Some feel so faint a physical desire as to be almost asexual, while others may experience an actual aversion to physical love. The issue will not be here resolved. For my part it is sufficient to have a new look at these poems, so ardent, so selfish and generous, so direct and yet sophisticated, so very human. Whether Plato had anything whatever to do with them, in my fancy they enhance his reputation.



Poetry attributed to Plato

i.

᾿Αστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς, ᾿Αστὴρ ἐμός· εἴθε γενοίμην
οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

Greek Anthology VII.669, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You see the stars, my star. I wish I were
the sky that you might fill my many eyes.


     What grand sensual greediness! Heavenly bodies possess an extravagant but rather abstract beauty, and this compliment employs a well worked vein of convention, extending it in a novel and dramatic image. I think of the earthier Catullus 13 in which the poet confesses his lack of most resources for hospitality and asks Fabullus to bring supplies for a party, but assures him that it will be worth his while, because Catullus will contribute the scent lent his lover by “the Venuses and Cupids,” so intoxicating that his friend will wish to be “all nose.”


ii.

᾿Αστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζωοῖσιν ῾Εῷος·
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις ῞Εσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

Greek Anthology VII.670, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You shone then like the star of dawn, alive,
among the wasted dead you’re Hesperus.


     This bit is paradigmatic of the Greek lyric pairing of pleasure and pain, circling every joy with a sense of loss. Well before Plato, Sappho had called love sweet-bitter (γλυκύπικρον). The coming-into-being and the passing away of the beloved is here assimilated to the grand procession of the heavens, known to be cyclical and apparently eternal. The poet borrows a bit of that cosmological glow to compliment the deceased. The word I translate “wasted” is derived from φθίω, meaning not so much completely gone as “wasted away,” “decayed,” “dwindling,” “fading,” suggesting the specifically Greek horror at becoming in Hades a weak and spectral shade. Achilles in the most memorable anti-heroic moment of the Odyssey (XI.488) cannot be consoled.  There is, however, a redemptive enthusiasm in the couplet above as well as a reassuring structural dualism. If death is to life as the evening star to the morning (which are in fact identical), where then is its bite? Only in an individual's loss of a dearly beloved.


iii.

τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν εἶχον·
ἦλθε γὰρ ἡ τλήμων ὡς διαβησομένη.

Greek Anthology V.78, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

Kissing Agathon, my heart (the wretch)
came to my lips to try to pass to him.


     This was a familiar topos, appearing, for instance, in Rufinus who says that his lover in a kiss “draws out his soul from his very fingernails” (V, 14) and Meleagar (V, 171) whose lover “drinks up his soul” with a draft of wine. The imagery resembles Donne's describes in “The Extasie” in which the lovers’ souls are said to have emerged and “hung twixt her and me,” though here used more strictly as a witty compliment, suggesting that the poet’s disloyal soul would prefer to be housed in the more attractive Agathon. The name of the beloved, of course, signifies simply “the good,” allowing the verse to remain conveniently open to a metaphysical reading. Though I use the word “heart” since the issue is love, the word ψυχή is often translated as spirit or soul.


iv.

νῦν ὅτε μηδέν, Ἄλεξις, ὅσον μόνον εἶφ᾽, ὅτι καλός,
ὦπται, καὶ πάντῃ πᾶσι περιβλέπεται.
θυμέ, τί μηνύεις κυσὶν ὀστέον, εἶτ᾽ ἀνιήσει
ὕστερον; οὐχ οὕτω Φαῖδρον ἀπωλέσαμεν;

Greek Anthology V, 100 and Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

I only just said that Alexis is fair;
now everyone everywhere ogles that youth.
O heart, you toss to the dogs a bone
and then regret. I lost my Phaedrus so.


     This verse provides a glimpse into the competitive homoerotic arena of ancient Greece. In a tradition familiar in the blues in, for instance, “Woman be Wise,” which advises “don’t advertise your man,” the lover finds that his praise for the beloved has only brought him rivals. The implication that the intruders are “dogs” is properly vituperative, perhaps, but it entails the unfortunate suggestion that the lovely Alexis is a “bone.” With the mention of Phaedrus it becomes a four line soap opera.


v.

δάκρυα μὲν Ἑκάβῃ τε καὶ Ἰλιάδεσσι γυναιξὶ
Μοῖραι ἐπέκλωσαν δή ποτε γεινομέναις:
σοὶ δέ, Δίων, ῥέξαντι καλῶν ἐπινίκον ἔργων
δαίμονες εὐρείας ἐλπίδας ἐξέχεαν: [p. 60]
κεῖσαι δ᾽ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν πατρίδι τίμιος ἀστοῖς,
ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων.

Greek Anthology VII. 99 and D. L. (Plato)

Queen Hecabe and Trojan women wept,
The fates had ruled at birth that they should weep.
And after you had done great works and won,
Dion, the gods spilt all your grandest hopes.
You lie now honored in your airy town,
you who drove my heart so mad with love.


     The poet begins with what one might call an aerial view, surveying the legendary era to stress the inexorable workings of fate. Then the perspective moves to his own time in which the inscrutable turning of the wheel of fortune is illustrated by the passing of Dion who had been so victorious in life.


vi.

Ἀρχεάνασσαν ἔχω τὴν ἐκ Κολοφῶνος ἑταίραν,
ἧς καὶ ἐπὶ ῥυτίδων ἕζετο δριμὺς ἔρως.
ἆ δειλοὶ νεότητος ἀπαντήσαντες ἐκείνης
πρωτοπλόου, δι᾿ ὅσης ἤλθετε πυρκαϊῆς.
    

Greek Anthology VII, 217; Diogenes Laertius (Plato 31); and Athenaeus 589e

My love is Kolophon’s Arkheanasse,
O love lurks even in her wrinkled skin!
O fools who sailed her boat when she was young,
what flaming blazes you passed through with her!


     Here Plato appreciates the skills of a mature courtesan. His connoisseurship may be more literary than experiential, though Diogenes Laertius calls Arkheanasse his mistress. The woman’s name had already erotic associations, having earlier appeared in Sappho as well as later being used by Asklepiades to whom is attributed a very similar quatrain. Metaphors for sex using the language of both sailing and fire were commonplace, suggesting passion, intensity, danger, and excitement. [9]


vii.

μῆλον ἐγώ: βάλλει με φιλῶν σέ τις. ἀλλ᾽ ἐπίνευσον,
Ξανθίππη: κἀγὼ καὶ σὺ μαραινόμεθα.
    

Greek Anthology V.80.

An apple me -- and thrown to you for love!
Say yes,
o Xanthippe, both you and I will die.

     As both these lyrics indicate, the Greeks formalized the apple’s erotic significance in social ritual as well as in poetry. As a flirtation, one might toss an apple in the direction of a prospective lover; to accept the apple meant acceptance of its donor.  The current expression “the apple of my eye” preserves the usage.  One knows that apples, while beautiful and tasty, will in the end decay, heightening the urgency of seeking love in youth.

     The coincidence of the name with Socrates’ wife is accidental. Xanthippe was a vaguely aristocratic-sounding name, not uncommon. The theme would fit anyone.

viii.

ἡ σοβαρὸν γελάσασα καθ᾽ Ἑλλάδος, ἥ ποτ᾽ ἐραστῶν
ἑσμὸν ἐπὶ προθύροις Λαῒς ἔχουσα νέων,
τῇ Παφίῃ τὸ κάτοπτρον: ἐπεὶ τοίη μὲν ὁρᾶσθαι
οὐκ ἐθέλω, οἵη δ᾽ ἦν πάρος οὐ δύναμαι.

Greek Anthology VI, 1

I’m Lais the proud who laughed at Greece, when crowds
of young men thronged about my door. I give
my mirror to Love’s goddess. I cannot use it
now nor can it show me yesterday.


     One of the host of Greek lyrics lamenting the passing of youth, of beauty, ultimately of life, a loss that is the greater for lovers. The reader is reminded of Villon’s “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis” or Whitman’s more brutal “A Hand-Mirror.” A good many of the dedicatory epigrams in the Anthology carry similarly elegiac themes.
     Lais, perhaps the most celebrated hetaera of the Classical era is memorialized in a number of Anthology epigrams. [10]







1. III, 1. ἐγυμνάσατο δὲ παρὰ Ἀρίστωνι τῷ Ἀργείῳ παλαιστῇ: ἀφ᾽ οὗ καὶ Πλάτων διὰ τὴν εὐεξίαν μετωνομάσθη, Socrates himself clearly cared about keeping his body fit and criticized those who did not.

2. Chapter 2, A True Story (Ἀληθῶν Διηγημάτων) in Paul Turner’s translation.

3. De Amore. Ficino’s words are “amor platonicus.” His lover is not to be confused with the Troubadour Guido Cavalcanti who lived two centuries earlier.

4. According to Michael Rocke in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence during the late fifteenth century homosexual and bisexual behavior was the norm in Florence though technically forbidden. He claims that the Office of the Night, charged with prosecuting homosexuals, over a period of two generations punished 17,000 Florentines out of a population of 40,000. The Florentines renewed ancient attitudes, endorsing primarily an older/younger couple while frowning on the effeminate and the pathic.

5. James Howell, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Eliana, 255.

6. 2.30.

7. As my topic more nearly concerns Plato’s reputation than Plato himself, I need not trouble myself about this question.

8. XI.488.

9. Dozens of examples from comedy are catalogued in Jeffrey Henderson’s essential The Maculate Muse (161 for nautical images, 177 for fire).

10. See Antipater Sidonius 7.218, Pompeius 7.219, Agathias 7.220, Julian 6.18-20, Paul Silentiarius 6.71, and Secundus 9.260.

Hesiod’s Muses: A Study in Polysemy

Theogony 26-28
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.


     The Theogony tells us that when the Muses appeared to Hesiod they told him, “we know how to say many false things seeming true, but we also know, when we like, to sing the truth.” Being divine, and artistic and female to boot, even in this personal epiphany, they are likely to have intended multiple meanings and to have implied more than they said. Sketching out the semantic field defined by these few lines is a task without the closure of a single direct answer. As in poetry in general, the reader or listener constructs meaning from data less prescriptive than suggestive.


1.
     Considering the insults in the line preceding the Muses’ statement in which they address the poet and his fellow workers with the words “shepherds of the fields, miserable disgraces, nothing but bellies,” they may seem to be simply teasing the wretched ground-grubbing human with his limitations. Able to do nothing but stuff his mouth, he cannot hope to discern truth from lie. Any revelations they may make are then of no use to him, mingled as they are with misleading falsehoods. Though one might take their appearance as a seal of authenticity, an assertion of the authority of revelation, coming as they do from “aegis-holding Zeus,” this warning undercuts the guarantee as soon as it is delivered. The theme would then be one familiar to readers of Works and Days which admits humankind’s wretchedness and ignorance.
     In Plato’s Laws a similar sentiment appears. “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose—for as to that we know nothing.” (R. G. Bury’s translation, I 644d) Later Plato elaborates this notion, adding that, rather than feel despair over the darkness in which we must live, we should rather emulate the divine practice of play. “Man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.” (VII 803c) Art, of course, is the most sophisticated form of play.


2.
     An element of poetic play entailed in every performance or publication is the author’s demand for attention. Anyone seeking an audience cannot avoid the arrogance inherent in the writer’s position. The implicit call of every text is in the first instance, “Give me a hearing. Dismiss all other voices from your mind and listen only to mine.” All writers are in fact saying what the poet of the medieval romnce Octavian says at the outset.


Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge,
Lystenyth now to my talking.


     In support of this claim on the attention of others, Hesiod’s Muses pointedly describe some poetry as false and by this warning imply that their own revelations bear the imprimatur of heaven.
     This universal poetic pretension may also bear traces of its immediate history. It may be that the specific circumstances surrounding this poem include a conscious campaign to reconcile the myriad alternatives and contradictions in Greek religion to establish a canonical version of the mythological system which must replace all competing versions. The authority of Hesiod’s version depends on denying all the others. The success of an all-Hellenic theogony requires condemning other poets whose versions may feature regional forms of deity and local patrons. Having experienced a theophany, Hesiod is presumably on good terms with the Muses, his work authenticated by his divine encounter, while only deceit is associated with authors lacking such a benediction.


3.
     The text is often taken to mean that some poetry contains truth while some expresses specious lies, an idea easily assimilated to familiar aesthetic value judgements. If discerning the one from the other were a simple matter of checking the data of poetry against the reader’s lived experience, everyone would be a competent critic, but the Muses suggest that distinguishing true from false may be elusive.
     This is, of course, the very issue that problematized poetry for Plato. While conceding the divine inspiration of some poetry and acknowledging the power of art, whether fostering truth or delusion, Plato takes the safer option of forbidding poetry altogether in his Republic rather than risking that the wrong sort might gain influence. (He seems to have entertained no such fear of erring philosophers.)
     A similar view of poetry might be taken by less sophisticated Roman Catholics to whom accordance with church dogma is a precondition of good literature or vulgar Marxists who insist on working class heroes. Indeed, every reviewer who finds a book does not correspond to preconceptions might consider it to be lies, a retrograde standard indeed. The same criterion is implied when a work is praised as insightful or true-to-life.
     Complicating this sort of judgement is the fact that every text contains countless details and thus innumerable links to lived experience. Must every one of these prove accurate for the work to be deemed true? What about ambivalent relationships between the text and perceived reality: could a poetic line be partially true? Both true and false or neither? Who is able to determine an accurate measurement of truth? Short of revealed scripture (and then only for the fundamentalist believer) surely every text occupies an indeterminate middle ground.


4.
     Given the difficulty of assigning a poem a truth value that will be accepted by all informed readers, it may be that the Muses had in mind a more modest assertion and meant to claim only that some texts seem real, while others seem to lie. In this case they simply distinguish between imaginative works that possess verisimilitude, whether in details of setting, psychology, or theme from those constructed with the use of other conventions. Sidney’s Arcadia could hardly be taken for the record of actual events, nor could Barthelme’s Snow White, but this is not because the authors were incapable of representing plausible events, but because their projects were altogether different. The Muses might in this sense be thought to be boasting about the range of effects of which they are capable.
     The writer’s choice is not binary. Often poetry is found in the borderline territory between apparent truth and seeming fantasy. In their division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to find the extraordinary in the mundane while Coleridge was to work on the recognizable within the exotic, but for both it is the contrast, the mixture that generates poetry. Though such a systematically self-conscious approach is exceptional, any number of combinations of the convincingly realistic and the conspicuously fabulous may be effectively used construct aesthetic texts.


5.
     The Muses’ formula may also be taken as a definition of literature, described with the unique quality of being at once both true and false. Every fictional story is, of course, false in the sense that it did not literally happen. Every poem as well might be read as fiction, as though prefaced with the words, “Imagine that a person were to say this . . .” Paradoxically, literature acquires its general truth, what critics call its theme, its application to lived experience, by avoiding faithfulness to the mere details of what has actually happened.
     Hesiod’s theme would then be similar to Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in the Poetics), though Aristotle mentions only the use of typical or most likely human behavior, saying “By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.” (W. H. Fyfe’s translation ix 1451b6-7) Due probably to his focus on drama, Aristotle omits therefore the poet’s depiction of non-psychological themes based on what seems likely, typical, or general. Aristotle here fails to comment on perhaps the most assertive form of rhetorical lying, the use of figures of speech such as metaphor which signify something other from what they say on the surface. Yet these, too, are aimed at shadowing forth a greater truth beyond mere facts.
     By facilitating lying and in general the ability to speak of things unseen, the development of language forty some thousand years ago fostered not only better organized hunting but gave birth to art and religion as well. (See David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave) A recent scholar has suggested that the Muses mean to say not that their propositions might be falsely taken for truth, but rather that poetry is, in fact, a quasi-truth. “Seeming true” is then misleading; a better rendering would be “in a certain way equivalent to truth.” (See Bruce Heiden, “The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, "Theogony" 27 and Its Translators,” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, no. 2 [Summer, 2007].)


6
     The perverse coyness of Hesiod’s muses will perhaps recall to the contemporary reader certain French theorists of the later twentieth century. The denial of straightforward signification, the questioning of the subject and mystification of the object may have startled Of Grammatology’s early readers, but such gestures became not only conventional, they became clichés in major literary conferences by the ‘eighties.
     The muses themselves are presumably as authoritative even as a Sorbonne professor when they cast doubt on the reliability of poetic truth. The ambiguity upon which they insist sounds altogether consistent with différance, and their magisterial attitude has a good deal in common with the mandarins of Paris and New Haven.
     Enough! The webs of signification have no end, but must be cut, like the threads in Atropos’ hand. The possibilities here outlined are sufficient to indicate some of their trajectories. As well as describing poetry, the Muses’ declaration embodies it. Aesthetic language differs from other discourses by its exploitation of polysemy. Each of the options outlined above is plausible. Each is founded on the text and on the characteristics of poetry. None is the whole truth, though each is true.

Utopia

     Throughout history people’s social relations have been shaped primarily by power relations. The rich take advantage of the poor and think it only right [1].  The strong and violent victimize their weaker victims. The necessary suffering arising from illness, accident, anxiety, and death has been supplemented by ceaseless exploitation, coercion, and war imposed by people upon themselves. Yet some have always dreamed of a truly just social order and have recorded those fantasies in myths of a golden age and in utopian fiction. A few have consciously sought to construct a better society than the one in which they found themselves. Fictional accounts of a happier existence are sometimes located in remote and undiscovered lands, sometimes projected backward into the beginnings of time or forward into a future yet to arrive. However chimerical the scheme, each utopia presents a critique of the author’s lived reality inspired directly by the particular time and place of its composition, though many across the centuries have also had certain elements in common. One is so universal that it must strike any student of utopias: in Asia as well as Europe, through the centuries, in both myths and semi-practical proposals alike, the residents of utopias are freed from alienated labor either through the magical elimination of work altogether or, in more realistic programs, through the institution of communism.
     Once one separates the true utopias from dystopias like Brave New World and 1984 and from satires like Gulliver’s Travels and Erewhon, the fact is evident [2].  A sampling of examples will establish its range. In Hesiod (circa 700 BCE) the fabulous character of the Golden Age is evident in the fact that people had no need to toil at all. They were nonetheless able to feast due to the fact that at that time “the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint.” [3] A decline is then steadily traced in increasing inhumanity beginning in the Silver Age during which they begin “wronging one another” [4] including making war until finally even families break apart. This notion of the earth providing food without labor occurs again and again, as in Hindu accounts of the Krita (or Satya) Yuga, Vergil’s Eclogue IV, a second-hand plots of one of Athenaeus’ loquacious diners, The Faerie Queen, “The Land of Cokaygne,” or “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” [5].
     Yet some texts go beyond the Pinocchio-like fantasy of a land of no work and all play. The Confucian Book of Rites describes a similar primordial ideal society and its subsequent devolution. In early times Confucius says crime and malice did not exist. Under the “Great Way” (Datong), “ the world belongs to everyone.” [[6] Here the intersection of the utopian with the practical attracted the attention of modern reformers in search of a workable plan for a peaceful society [7].
     Utopianism sometimes intruded into the world of affairs in a variety of ways. Early Christian teaching clearly counseled communal living. The central passage in Acts could not be more explicit.


And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. (Acts 2: 44-46)


Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4: 34-5)


      This practice doubtless accompanied apocalyptic expectations in the earliest days, though the church never lost its preference for communism until the nineteenth century, referring, for instance, to monastic communities which eschewed private property as an ideal of which not all were capable. The church clearly condemned usury (then defined as charging any interest whatsoever), but Aquinas plainly goes further, condemning all commerce as a sinful form of theft, citing the traders Christ expelled from the temple as well as a phalanx of church fathers in support [8].  During the nineteenth century a number of Christian communities with socialized ownership of the means of production arose, such as the Shakers, the Oneida Colony, or the Amana Colonies in Iowa. Some groups survive yet today such as the Bruderhof, the Community Doukhobars, and the Catholic Worker movement.
     Doubtless the most fully delineated utopian design of Classical antiquity is Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, though the class system is fundamental, goods are nonetheless held in common to a considerable extent. There is dispute about the degree of common ownership outside the guardian class [9] but the preference is clear. Elsewhere Plato makes social ownership the prime desideratum of a just society.


“Friends have all things really in common.” As to this condition,—whether it anywhere exists now, or ever will exist,—in which there is community of wives, children, and all chattels, and all that is called “private” is everywhere and by every means rooted out of our life, and so far as possible it is contrived that even things naturally “private” have become in a way “communized,” . . .no one will ever lay down another definition that is truer or better than these conditions in point of super-excellence. In such a State,—be it gods or sons of gods that dwell in it,—they dwell pleasantly, living such a life as this. [10]


     Though other utopian communist visions of antiquity have been lost – I am thinking of those of Zeno the Stoic, Iambulus, and Euhemerus — the record is clearer as one approaches modern times. More’s Utopia is, of course, wholly communist, and virtually all the utopian novels from the centuries since have eliminated private property: Johann Valentin Andreæ’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae for instance, in which money does not exist, or Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun in which, as in Plato, lovers as well as chattels are held in common.
     During the nineteenth century a great many secular experimental programs were proposed by the thinkers whom Marx contemptuously called “utopian,” notably Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. Several hundred communes of greater or lesser duration were established along the lines of one or another of these authors including New Lanark and New Harmony (Owenite), the North American Phalanx and La Reunion (in Dallas) (Fourierist), as well as Brook Farm, the Ruskin Colony, and countless others which blossomed (and often as rapidly vanished) as people tried to build new societies in the New World.
     While orthodox Marxism frowned on the utopians, it had its own version of perfectionism not only in the classless withering away of the state foreseen in communism, but at the other end of time, in Engels’ notion of primitive communism in The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State in which he portrays an Edenic origin myth, a Golden Age in the early stages of tribal, what was then called “savage,” human culture. His claim may be myth with the pretense of science, but it is clear that cooperation before the rise of classes (dramatically multiplied with the development of language) provided much of the impetus for the success of our species.
     With considerable differences in detail and emphasis visionaries in the last century and a quarter have regularly prescribed communist arrangements: Morris’ News from Nowhere, the Brotherhood of Man in London’s The Iron Heel, Bellamy’s Looking Backward (where socialism is called “nationalism”), H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia, even B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two where stability is achieved through operant conditioning.
     Clearly these flights of imagination as well as the consistent attempts to form workable intentional communities all recognize that, just as conflicts among other animals may center about females or food, among people property is the central issue that inspires ego rivalry. Accordingly, short of the loss of ego that accompanies enlightenment, one can eliminate most human fights and thus increase efficiency and cooperation and presumably human happiness by ensuring economic democracy. The church fathers were correct in considering the pursuit of wealth to be a debilitating and corrupting temptation arising from greed. In our consumer culture, people, whether inner city hustlers or respectable business executives, are programmed to be addicts, to want always more regardless of need and regardless of the welfare of fellow humans. We assume today, as all cultures have done, that our own assumptions are the true ones, and that cupidity is an inevitable human characteristic. In doing so, we ignore the higher flights of the human imagination where other possibilities are proposed, including the arrangement of human affairs so that we need no longer waste our effort and ingenuity on the ignoble task of chasing the dollar, but instead make room to pause, look about ourselves, and figure ways to enjoy more fully the lives we have and to embrace our fellow creatures. Violence and exploitation may never be wholly erased from the earth, but the direction is clear toward a better future.



1. The bulk of writings from any age will illustrate this principle. A particularly telling, and not so very ancient, example is the vast body of apologetics for slavery prior to the American Civil War, the greater number of them from a putatively Christian perspective.

2. Among the other works often labeled utopian which do not fit my scheme are Luo Maodeng’s land in the Western Ocean whose primary salient characteristic is peace though details of how this is achieved are scant, and Bacon’s New Atlantis which focuses on the research plans of Salomon’s House. Among the rare exceptions is Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana in which private land ownership is limited and regulated but not prohibited. Plato's Republic and the Hindu first yuga combine social ownership with rigid class systems.

3. Works and Days, 113-118.

4. Line 135.

5. Mahabharata XII (Shanti Parva), 231.12-20, Book V of The Faerie Queen; Deipnosophists VI 268 b-d in quoting The Amphictyones a lost work of Telecleides.

6. Book of Rites, Li Yun 1.

7. Confucian scholar and calligrapher Kang Youwei (1858-1927) advocated communism on the Da Tong model in his Da Tongshu.

8. Summa Theologicae 2a2ae,77. Tertullian had flatly declared that trade arose from avarice, Ambrose said that lying was concomitant with trade, and Augustine said that trade always involved fraud. To the church fathers for over a thousand years it was theft to sell merchandise for a higher price than one had paid as well as to ask more from a borrower than had been lent. See An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community by Lianna Farber, p. 15-16.

9. See, for instance, Aristotle, Politics 1264a, 11–22.

10. Laws 739c-740b. The first quoted line cites a Pythagorean saying quoted also in the Republic (424a) and in Euripedes' Orestes 725.

A Skeptic’s Faith [Sextus Empiricus]

     I have pursued art rather than religion or philosophy because it seems to me to offer greater access to reality. Indeed, when the practitioners of those other realms appeal to me, in the person of the Buddha, say, or St. Francis, Plato, or Nietzsche, I assimilate them to art. After all, each of these sought symbolic manipulation that would in part make life seem livable. For me, understanding religion is largely a matter of interpreting metaphors, and philosophy’s most important role is that defined by the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese alike: to enable one to live a good life.

     Much of religion and art as well employs ample metaphorical mediation in rendering the world, often glorious and grand as in the Mahabharata or Dante. While I agree that the subtleties of human insight are more precisely expressed in the indirection of figuration, I also appreciate the early Daoists, and some among the practitioners of Zen and Vedanta who look at reality directly, without illusion or protective rhetoric and yet find illumination in that rigorously spare vision. I find elements of the same sort of consolation of philosophy digestible even to a faithless twenty-first century reader in certain of those philosophers of late antiquity, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics for whom the Olympian gods had become unsatisfying, but who were not attracted to the salvationist mystery cults of the era. I turn to the pre-Socratics for poetry, to Plato and Aristotle for magisterial system, but to Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, stories of Diogenes, and to the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus for strategies aimed at a well-lived life.

     Though Pyrrho of Elis, whose ideas we know primarily from Sextus Empiricus, is often named the originator of Greek skepticism, his ideas were by no means altogether novel. The Greek σκέπτομαι means to look about carefully, to view or consider, and thus a skeptic would originally have been simply an inquirer. Indeed the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus encourages continuous questioning and declines to be dogmatic even in its doubts, insisting that one must withhold judgment in the present state of knowledge while allowing for the possibility of knowledge through some future improvement in reasoning and perhaps through non-ratiocinative processes as well. Long before Sextus’ time, late in the fifth century B. C.E. the sophist Gorgias was the author of a lost book titled On Nature or the Non-Existent (an epitome is in Sextus’ Against the Professors) in which he maintained that nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. A more thorough nihilism is difficult to imagine.

     In some dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as a doubter, saying in the Apology “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” [2] Similarly the conclusion of the Theaetetus seems to leave the question of what constitutes valid knowledge entirely unresolved.

     Academic skepticism descended through later thinkers associated with Plato’s school, constituting an alternative Skeptical tradition to Pyrrhonianism, embodied in the work of what was also called the New Academy of which Carneades was the most prominent exponent. As a kind of skeptic fundamentalist in this long-established tradition, Sextus aims at providing a systematic formulation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and thus mounting a persuasive and thorough polemic against the Dogmatists , meaning chiefly the Stoics, but including all believers of every sort. He rejected the Stoic faith in reasoning as well as their monistic pantheism and qualified acceptance of sense data as an accurate register of reality.

     Aiming at providing a thoroughly reasoned case even at the risk of trying his readers’ patience, Sextus repeats the same series of arguments a good many times. His most telling points called tropes or modes, were for the most part inherited from Aenesidemus. [3] His most often repeated argument is that of infinite regress. Since the reason justifying a conclusion itself requires justification, no proposition can be certainly established. [5] For Pyrrho and Sextus every criterion for truth must itself be proven and the criterion used for that proof in turn requires always another proof. The Skeptics insist, in opposition to the implications of everyone’s daily behavior, that we never can be certain we are in fact perceiving reality nor can we know that our own perception is the same as another’s. Since different thinkers come to different conclusions, not only about ideas but even about sense impressions, since all humans are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatus, since consensus is inadequate as proof, [4] it is difficult or impossible to find truly “self-evident” propositions from which to rebuild, like Descartes, a structure of thought ascending all the way to the heavens.

     Perhaps the most surprising result of Pyrrhonian skepticism as described by Sextus is the state of mind that can occur after one admits one’s ignorance. According to Sextus the goal (or τέλος) of skepticism is ἀταραξία , a quietude in mind. According to Eusebius’ account of Pyrrho’s follower Timon the skeptic experiences “first speechlessness, and then imperturbability, but Aenesidemus says pleasure.” [6] Sextus readily recognizes that this calm may be imperfect and he allows for “moderate feeling” when “unavoidable.” [7] For Sextus as for Buddha, desire is the source of pain. When one suffers what seem to be “natural evils,” one “deems himself to be pursued by Furies, and when he becomes possessed of what seems to him good things he falls into no ordinary sense of disquiet both through arrogance and through fear of losing them.” [8] Pyrrho himself was said to have traveled eastward with Alexander and to have studied with Indian yogis (the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” whom the Macedonian king himself regarded most highly) as well as with Persian magi before returning to Greece. Many of the anecdotes recorded about him after he set up as a philosopher upon his return relate to his detachment and imperturbability, though tales of his needing to be protected from walking off cliffs or being run down by carts are doubtless hyperbolic. He so impressed his fellow-countrymen that he was made chief priest during his life (his agnosticism having been found no impediment), and statues were erected in his honor both in his native town of Elis and in Athens.

     Sextus emphatically insists that his skepticism in no way denies appearances which he recognizes “induce our assent involuntarily.” [9] To him the problem is in the account given of the appearances. We cannot deny, he says, that honey seems sweet, “but whether it is sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt.” He is not performing intellectual stunts (as one might suspect Gorgias of doing) but rather, as he says, “pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists.” [10] Like all people, he relies constantly on his sense impressions and his cognitive abilities. He differs only in thinking that these useful abilities may fall short of delivering Reality to the consciousness. This is far from being a cul de sac for him; it is rather a beginning. On the first page or so of his book, Sextus warns his readers that he does not “positively affirm” of any of his statements “that the fact is exactly as we state it, but we simply record each fact, like a chronicler, as it appears to us at the moment.” [11] He later restates the concept while commenting on the highly practical matter of his own medical professions’ remedies: “we are unable to say what is the true nature of each of these things, although it is possible to say what each thing at the moment appears to be.” [12]

     For Sextus the same tentative acceptance of the phenomena of everyday reality applies to dialectic, the art of logical argumentation. Thus Sextus concludes his book with a curious passage in which he says that the skeptic sage, being a “lover of his kind,” wishes, like a good physician, to “cure” the delusions of others. He will select the argument to use in a given situation, not on its rational superiority to other possible arguments, but on the basis of what is appropriate to use with a given opponent. [13] “Proof” is not a matter of positivistic conclusions, but rather of rhetorical victory, the verbal formulation that will accomplish the speaker’s task.

     Both this acceptance of admittedly imperfect vision and the elaboration of rhetorical goals sound to me very like poetry. While we cannot grasp at Truth and hold it firm in the hand, we can record a snapshot of the play of subjective mind, and, if we do so accurately enough, it will resonate in others. Every poem, every work of art, no less than the propositions of a skeptic, might begin with the words “it is as if . . .” If such a declaration is the closest we may approach to Truth, it is the part of wisdom to accept that reality and follow Pyrrho and Sextus and those Renaissance writers whom they influenced such as Montaigne in making the most of it.


1. See Sextus Empiricus I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21d. I use the Loeb Classical Library edition with a translation by R. G. Bury. Though quotations are in English, references are to sections of the original text. See also Diogenes Laertius II.32.

2. Apology 21, d.

3. Ancient skepticism described their basic arguments as tropes or modes. Sextus Empiricus’ attempt to set forth his position systematically leads to a great deal of repetition. Modern comments taking his arguments into account include those by Karl Popper and, later, Hans Albert who coined the term “Münchhausen trilemma” to describe the choice between dogmatism, infinite regress and “psychologism” (trusting sense impressions) in terms very similar to those used in antiquity.

4. See Sextus Empiricus I, II, 43 on consensus of the majority. The Academic Skeptic Carneades had attacked consensus as a basis for theism.

5. See, for instance Sextus I, I, 116.

6. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk.XIV, ch. 18, 1-5.

7. Sextus I, II, 25.

8. Sextus I, III, 237.

9. Sextus I, I, 19.

10. Sextus I, I, 20.

11. Sextus I, I, 3-5.

12. Sextus I, I, 93. As a physician, his name Empiricus would seem to suggest that he practiced in the Empiric tradition though he notes at one point that the Methodic school had much in common with Pyrrhonism, in that it “follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient.” [Sextus I, I, 237] Both schools were opposed to the Dogmatists.

13. Sextus I,III, 280-281.

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“