LOVE AND CULTURE 

by W. B. Macomber

The teacher as masochist; Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger on love; Achtung, Angst, and eros; paradise and other people; Eryximachus as the direction of Western history; Christian science and technology; the ideal of constancy and regularity; life as illness; the need for stability, but we overdo it; we lose belief in history and society loses its head; the three great questions for Kant and Gaugin; Heidegger's answer to Kant's three questions; contemporary suburbia as die Entropie der Welt; the attempt to manipulate desire in theology and advertising; Marxism and Christianity as forms of high blasphemy; why one who does metaphysics should be called a "metaphysician."

I'm making myself an object for you, and this is called masochism. In his book Being and Nothingness (the chapter on "The Body") Sartre argues a priori that all love is either masochism or sadism. It's one or the other: either I make you an object for me, or I make myself an object for you. It's got to be one or the other. This is clear, as clear as 2 + 2 = 4. That is what it is to argue a priori. Jean-Paul Sartre is the leading French existentialist, and Being and Nothingness is his most important work.

But I was trying to explain the history of love, and we've reached Aristotle, when love has given way to a cooler notion called philia, or "friendship." In the Middle Ages, as I say, love breaks up into two quite different and radically opposed things: caritas and cupiditas, charity and cupidity. And then modern philosophers simply forget about it all together.

The three towering figures of the modern age (on the Continent) are Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger. Each of these men has given rise to an epoch of European thinkers. One after another they have ruled the minds and hearts of men. Not in the way a theologian does, by telling men how to act, nor in the way Marx does, by precipitating collective action, but by presenting men the terminology in which to think. After Descartes, everyone speaks Cartesian (the language of "mind" and "body")—until Kant. After Kant, everyone switches and begins speaking Kantian (the language of “subject” and “object”)—until Heidegger. With Heidegger everyone switches once again—Kant is old-fashioned now, and we talk Heideggerian (the language of "openness" and "thrownness" and the "impersonal one"). Theologians, sociologists, philosophers, literary critics on the Continent—they all talk Heideggerian now. That's how Heidegger rules. You may think what you like, for Martin Heidegger, so long as you think in Heideggerian. His counterpart in England and America is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here everyone thinks with the approach and language Wittgenstein taught us. This is the marvel of how great a single individual can be.

It's really a kind of joke to imagine Rene Descartes or Immanuel Kant or Martin Heidegger writing about love. It might take a graduate student in philosophy to appreciate the humor of this. I have no idea what Descartes thinks about love; I've never seen the word in Descartes—never. Possibly as an example of an activity of the mind. You know, cogitare isn't just "cogitating," isn't just thinking in the way we ordinarily understand the term. It's also doubting, willing, imagining—perhaps, by way of an example, loving. But there's nothing special about love to attract Descartes' attention, so far as I know.

We know very clearly what Immanuel Kant thinks about everything, and this includes love. Kant distinguishes two types of love. One he calls "pure practical" love, and this is reverence for others and oneself, Achtung. Achtung is the highest moral, spiritual, human word in Kant’s vocabulary. When Kant uses it, it means reverence or respect. But in the army and train stations it also means "attention": Achtung, Achtung! (Auf etwas achten  means to pay attention to something.)

Achtung, for Kant, is what human life is all about. It's something we do, in some sense: a matter of how we treat people, not how we feel about them. This is the only sort of love, he argues, which can be commanded. This contrasts with a form of love which Kant says simply happens to us, and which we might describe as sensual attraction. Sensual attraction simply happens to you, for some reason which is utterly unfathomable. This sort of love Kant calls, in a purely descriptive (not an evaluative) sense, “pathological,” pathologisch. Why does Kant call sensual attraction pathological? He might equally have said passionate or pathetic, since all these words have the same root: passio in Latin, pathein in Greek. The word means simply "to suffer." I don't mean the way you might take it, as an unpleasant feeling; I mean to be passive, as in the expression, "I will not suffer that remark." The Greek pathein means to be passive rather than active. That is what it is to be pathetic, passionate, pathological. The fundamental metaphysical sense of suffering is not an unpleasant feeling. The unpleasant feeling is secondary and derivative, from being acted on, and unable to act. The mystery of the "passion of Christ" is not that God takes on unpleasant experience but that He becomes an object, capable of being acted on, an object nailed to an object.

You can see that sensual attraction happens to you. You have no control over it; you are pathetic, passive, pathological. Insofar as you learn to treat people with reverence or respect, you create yourself as a being beyond nature, beyond sensuality, beyond the physical; you become a spiritual, responsible being, a being of culture. Kant is interested only in pure reason as it manifests itself in pure practical love of one's fellow men, in  respect for the dignity of every man, and contrasts it with what would be called eros in Greek, sensual attraction. You remember the perfumed handkerchief? So Kant is concerned with love, a form of love which commands my respect (as Kant himself commands my reverence), but not with what we would ordinarily call love, or the love which Plato and I find most mysterious. He never thinks about eros.

And then there's Martin Heidegger. Who knows what Heidegger thinks about love? Although I'm a Heidegger expert and read his books for seven years, combed every line, I can't remember Heidegger ever talking about love. For the lonely, dark figure of the Schwarzwald, Angst takes the place of eros in Plato's thought, as the threshold of revelation, the feeling (or, as he would put it, mood) with the greatest metaphysical significance.

So that's a short history of love: from the passionate love of a teacher for a student in Plato, to friendship or collegiality in Aristotle, then splitting apart into "noble" and "base" love, caritas and cupiditas—and on the base side into beastly concupiscence and frivolous Cupid (the little creature who appears on Valentines)—after which modern philosophers (quite understandably) don't take love seriously and forget about it altogether.

Love may be very nice and interesting—joyous, fantastic to be in—but it's not “philosophically interesting.” What is "philosophically interesting"? Well, science, for one thing. Science is very philosophically interesting—and logic. Most universities in the United States nowadays stress logic and the philosophy of science, including little Webster College somewhere in Pennsylvania: "Only Ph.D.'s need apply; we stress logic and philosophy of science." I can understand this from U.C.L.A., if you will, and Berkeley and Harvard, who are entrusted with our common destiny. But really! That little Webster College thinks it has to ape these institutions, in a society devoted to individualism!

In a nation which lays such great importance on individualism, wouldn't it be nice to have a couple of little colleges advertising: "We stress philosophy in poetry and prefer M.A.'s"? There would be room for great differences among all the colleges and universities which dot our great nation (80-some in the Boston area alone). But they're all more or less alike, all interested in the same things and doing things in almost precisely the same way.

Science is philosophically interesting—it creates power. Power is philosophically interesting, for me the only thing which is philosophically interesting. Love creates power, too, as Phaedrus reminds us, but this apparently is not interesting. Well, at present what is philosophically interesting is the use of language, for men on this side of the English Channel, and Angst and nausea and dread—the "white man's burden" of thinking—on the other. These two movements are called linguistic analysis and existentialism, and neither has much to say about love. Love is left to the poets, with their mooning and spooning and Juning and crooning. And our lives become more and more loveless. We don't know anything about love, and do it very badly. Love is what theologians and poets write about—that's the split between caritas and cupiditas—and we don't take either of them seriously.

But love is philosophically interesting! Because it's here that the “two worlds” meet, in Plato’s view—it's here that the “sensible world” and the “ideal (or dream) world” come together. The form of the beautiful, Plato says in the Phaedrus, is the threshold of philosophical reflection and awareness. It answers to something so deep and intimate in us that we seem to ourselves as gods (when all is going well). There doesn’t seem to be any resistance, the hard-edge thing ordinarily called "reality," the reality principle which someone defined as “that big hairy thing pushing on the other side of the door.” When we're in love, we feel most deeply, intimately, consummately ourselves. We seem to live in a world of spontaneity and daydreaming, where we are god, and yet it simply happens to us. It's mysterious—we can't control it—and that's why it seems to be the expression of pure activity and pure passivity, as these can be taken for Plato's “two worlds.”

So we've been discussing love, but not any old love—not caritas, for example—only eros. And eros might perhaps better be translated “passion.” That's where we began, anyway, with the grand passion of Phaedrus. And from there forward the ideas move with a kind of unalterable necessity.

The most interesting question and the question most frequently overlooked in commentaries is: What's the connection between the speeches? Not what's in the speeches, what's the connection between them? As in Hegel's Phenomenology (as he himself tells us), the important question is how he gets from one chapter to the next. What's the direction there? Find the pattern—that's the challenge, and this is between the speeches, not in them.

So remember Phaedrus' speech culminates in what I call the “Phaedrean ethic,” which I hope you’ll always remember. The Phaedrean ethic says: When you must confront a decision of whatever kind, imagine that your life takes place on a stage—“All the world's a stage”—and you and the person (or people) you most respect and admire and love in the world are sitting in the audience. You simply play to please yourselves. It's a substitute for binding moral principles you have to live up to in order to be something.

Young Phaedrus is only an adolescent, and he can't imagine that his life could have any dignity if it were a drama simply for himself. That's why he must have his beloved sitting next to him. With her (or him) to share his life, it becomes a kind of thrilling drama in which everything gains immensely in intensity and excitement and interest. When I first began to learn judgment, my first question when I encountered anything was not “What do I think of that?” but “What would Kant think of that?” And even now I judge things on how well they would go over at the club—a club consisting of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Donne, Matthew Arnold, Marcel Proust, William James, Clarence Darrow, William Butler Yeats, and Eldridge Cleaver, people whose judgment I must respect.

Andrew Marvell is being ironical in his poem "The Garden," when he says, "Two paradises 'twere in one / To be in paradise alone." Imagine yourself in paradise. Where's paradise? Well, I'll just project one, imaginatively. In Jamaica, say, Port Antonio: a  handsome villa overlooking a magnificent coast line, with a cook, and a bartender, and a great white sandy beach, and alcohol from England, Scotch and local rum, and a swimming pool, and a fantastic stereo, and ten or fifteen marvelous books. Now compare being in this paradise alone, all by yourself, or with someone else, and I think you'll see the irony of Marvell's saying, "Two paradises 'twere in one / To be in paradise alone."

With eros going for us, we don't have to be commanded to pay attention (Achtung) to our fellow man. The being we find beautiful and fascinating commands our attention. We learn to concentrate in adolescence, but not in the geometry classroom. So Phaedrus has to have someone seated next to him for the drama of his life to make sense. I say, when I'm not in love, John Kennedy's life strikes me as more significant than my own.

Now, what’s the transition from Phaedrus to Pausanias? Pausanias' analysis begins when other people begin to trickle into the theatre, until eventually it's filled with a vast audience you don't even know or respect, and they're the people you're playing your life for. What will people think? What will the neighbors say?

I have this from Martin Heidegger; it's his "impersonal one," das Man, which he regards as a tyrant that rules all our lives, determining what one does and does not do, what one says and does not say, and ultimately even what one thinks and does not think. He's quite uptight about it—his pupil Sartre calls it "bad Faith"—but I see it simply as part of our animal nature (we're a herd animal, as Nietzsche says) and an index of our profound sociability. Existentialists are still offended at our animal nature; their ideals are angelic; like Greta Garbo, they vant to be alone, and they can't make it. Sartre's hero Requentin in Nausea would be serious about Marvell's couplet.

So Phaedrus stands for the young idealist, the adolescent dreamer, and Pausanias for the middle-aged, respectable member of the community. That's how we move from Phaedrus to Pausanias.

Now we come to Eryximachus, and we hit a snag, because Erximachus' speech doesn't seem to be about love at all—there are no human relations going on there. So I suggested we had to change the word "love" to the word "passion." Then it works: Eryximachus' speech is a speech about passion. Not your passion or my passion—our passion, the great collective passion. Passion for what?  To master, dominate, and transform the world. Our collective passion is not to master a woman, but to master the woman, Mother Nature, so that she gives us anything and everything we want.

How is this possible? Through science and technology, which began to get going in the 17^th century, and are really set in motion by Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes after centuries of "pathetic" survival.

Even though this dream only became realizable in the 17^th century, the way had been set throughout the long incubation of the middle ages. At the beginning of the Christian era, we get into a space ship—Space Ship History, I call it—and all sit around while the most excellent among us stand in front and utter magnificent Latin incantations but nothing happens. Every now and then there's a little bump (the discovery of Aristotle, the metal plow), but by and large, for sixteen centuries, nothing happens. Then in 1637 there appears the Discours de la methode by Rene Descartes, and all of a sudden: Umph, Lurch, Pow!—we're in motion.

Once we're in motion, things begin to happen quite rapidly to fulfill Descartes' promise to make us "lords and masters of creation," i.e. God. Within half a century, by 1687, Descartes' project is carried out into a complete world-view in Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. From that point on, we're really moving. Nature and nature's laws lay hid by night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

It all begins in the 16^th and 17^th centuries—but not really, because we had to be prepared for sixteen centuries before we could become scientists. A "Christian scientist" is a tautology. A "tautology" says the same thing twice, for example, a "square rectangle"—or a "rectangular square," I suppose, would be a better way of putting it. That is to say you can't dream of becoming a scientist unless you are a Christian, or a product of Christian culture. No other culture sticks pins into things to see what makes them work—no other culture! All other cultures see nature as somehow divine, or unalterable; they simply adapt to it. They are women--beautiful but “lowly” (no power).

Bertrand Russell faults Aristotle for claiming that a cow has the wrong number of teeth. Silly old Aristotle! He had only to go out into the field, and not try to think it all out a priori; he had only to go out in the field and pull open the cow's mouth and count! But Aristotle would reply: What sort of way is that to think? Pulling open a cow’s mouth and looking right in it! Hah!

The Greek could never conceive the notion of controlled experiment, or at any rate, no impersonal method of discovery. (Archimedes is the exception, and leaves no Discourse on Method.) Nature is divine, and you don't put the divine under a microscope; you don't stick pins into it. But nature is only a "vale of tears" for the Christian, and so (although one doesn't say this) you can do anything you like with it.

That's why, after 1700 years of Christian incubation, the training of our whole hearts, minds, and beings, we're prepared to become scientists and proceed to the transformation of the world, the thing we prayed for, in unintelligible Latin mumbo-jumbo, for 1600 years—we're prepared now to undertake that task in earnest. We only need Descartes and Hobbes to tell us that God doesn't speak the language of mediaeval theology but the clear language of mathematics. Nature will answer any question we put to it in clear mathematical (or quantitative) terms. It's as though we force it to answer. When we discover science, as Kant says in his most memorable metaphor, we no longer go to nature as a child to a teacher, to be instructed in anything it sees fit (as with the things which simply happen to us), but as a judge to a witness, whom we compel to give answer to questions of our own devising. For Kant that's a great mystery.

Once Descartes and Hobbes had dreamt a new dream, and Sir Isaac Newton had carried its first phase to breathtaking completion (in just 50 years), we move into our collective adolescence, and fall prey to hybris, overweening pride. We immediately come to believe that we will become gods. No one in the Enlightenment doubts this for a moment (except Hobbes and Spinoza).

Well, Plato seems to have foreseen this incredible phenomenon in the 4th century B.C. It sounds fantastic, but you're looking at the dialogue. I maintain that Eryximachus' speech is about science and technology (and bureaucracy and suburbia), as the final upshot of the grand passion of the West. Eryximachus represents the old man after Phaedrus the young man, and Pausanias the middle-aged man. Eryximachus, the old man, is interested in what all old men are interested in—regularity. "Oh give me," he says, "that old regularity." There's a marvelous passage near the end of Ulysses about regularity. It's a letter (or prospectus) Leopold Bloom finds in a drawer, signed "Wonderworker," and it reads:

Dear Madam,

It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking wind, assists nature in the most formidable way, insuring instant relief in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action, an initial outlay of 7/6 making a new man of you and life worth living. Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when they note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on a sultry summer's day.  Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends, lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end.

Wonderworker

In Eryximachus we see man against the background of the entire cosmos. Pausanias, the sociologist, has looked at human life against the background of society. This is an "excellent beginning," but Eryximachus, the physician and man of science, proposes to carry this line of reasoning to its conclusion by seeing human life against the background of the entire cosmos. The order is one of expanding context, but unfortunately at this point human relations disappear altogether, and we're only concerned with our individual and collective welfare.

It's interesting that Eryximachus is a physician. He sees the entire world, or human life, as ill, deficient in some quite radical way which requires human intervention and rectification. The trouble with the world, apparently, is that it's unpredictable, unreliable, erratic. The aim is to tame and civilize it, domesticate it, if you will, to make human life regular, reliable, so that we can get through it with minimum trouble and disturbance. Such a view of the world I identify as Christian (the "fallen world"), and the ideal of life is fairly identifiably that of contemporary suburbia, where for the first time man has everything predominantly under control.

In suburbia we finally have the No Change place we prayed for for centuries. The insurance company (which is in turn insured by an insurance company) reduces all happenings to a minimum. Motels, for example, lose television sets by the bushel. (The car's right outside the door, you see, and so one doesn't have the problem of getting the thing through the lobby.) But they don t care; they're insured. It just means that the price of a room is $.31 a night higher, or something, which is utterly negligible. And so a happening is reduced to a non-happening. This appears to be the direction of modern life, which I label "suburbia." Eryximachus sees it, astoundingly four centuries before Christ.

The Eryximachus ideal, I argue, is one of stasis or equilibrium. Change as such is viewed as an evil, the thing from which we suffer. We can readily see how appropriate such a view is during  the long centuries when we have no control over life whatever, and you may be wiped out at any moment by plague, holocaust, draught, marauding princes, rampaging barbarians or whatever—when every "surprise" is (overwhelmingly) likely to be for the  worse. All we can attempt to control of these natural disasters is the last, and we keep showing princes the sacred Book in which they can read what awaits them for that kind of thing, though it never seems to have done very much good. For the rest, we're on our knees praying. Mediaeval artists give us the best picture of what life must have been like during all these centuries. The world was a scary, horrendous place, full of demons and hobgoblins. That is all over—or could be over—from the time God sends us Sir Isaac Newton. For centuries, I claim, we prayed for a No Change place. Our metaphysics puts down change as such, in contrast with the eternal and changeless—puts down roses, as I like to put it, in favor of triangles. The criterion of true being is changelessness; the world of change is simply a place we pass through to get to it, and we put it down. Heidegger regards this as the distinguishing mark of metaphysics as such; I regard it as the basic attitude of Christianity, which Western metaphysics adopts from St. Augustine until Hegel.

All this is simply an abstract dispute among theologians and metaphysicians. If true being is eternal and immutable, if “true” = “changeless,” then “true love,” for example, is changeless love, and the criterion of love is, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

Stendhal takes a different attitude:

I have seen a man of 60 set out to keep the most capricious, irresponsible, lovable and marvelous actress on the London stage, Miss Cornell. "And you think she will be faithful to you?" he was asked. "Not in the least," he replied, "but she will love me—and perhaps wildly at that."

And he goes on to comment:

She did love him, for a whole year, and frequently to distraction; for as long as three months in succession she gave him no cause for complaint.

Sir John Suckling carries this attitude to its extreme when he writes:

Out upon it! I have loved

Three whole days together,

And am like to love three more,

If it prove fair weather.

The whole poem is a joyous attack on the Christian, monogamist ideal of love. (A great deal of poetry is.) Not as an ideal of love, perhaps, but as the ideal, binding on us all, whatever our disposition and circumstances. There was no being quite like Miss Cornell throughout the millennium and a half during which our Christian values took shape. Okay, Eleanor of Aquitaine, perhaps, but Stendhal's world has little in common with St. Thomas Aquinas'. But naturally their values will be different. Thomas couldn't afford or imagine Stendhal's; Stendhal couldn't imagine or endure Thomas'.

Stendhal and Suckling are at the greatest possible remove from Eryximachus, for whom constancy is the ideal of life—and accordingly of love as well. Desires which are good, or "sound and healthy" are temperate; those which are bad, or "morbid," are intemperate. There should be no "jarring elements"; all extremes and opposites are to be ironed out and reconciled in a cosmic harmony. This is the point of his issue with Heraclitus and the bow. I see this as the direction of history, in its most recent phase, that we are all becoming more alike. One can imagine the world, transformed by the wonder of science and technology, covered with comfortable, split-level ranch-style bungalows, or whatever arrangement we hit on collectively—what then?

It's necessary to stabilize change. That's when genuine awareness begins, as William James says, as well as genuinely human life. Otherwise we are sunk in the quivering responsiveness of the animal, and like him are essentially pathetic. You can't enjoy an ice-cream cone if the Big Guys are likely to come and take it away from you at any moment. You can't even be properly aware of it, James suggests. You relate to it like an animal, like men in Hobbes' state of nature. The Big Guys here stand for an utterly capricious world of which one understands nothing, where anything is likely to break loose at any moment, and all life consists, basically, of suffering whatever happens. It's hard for us to imagine to what an extent people lived in this way until quite recently. As I like to put it, if we allow people to represent centuries (for a person can live that long) and seat them around a table, there are only three or four whom we could understand. The others would all seem to come from another world.

Okay, so we need some stability, but we overdo it. We in the West, we Christians, are always overdoing it. (Remember the duck-hunt in The Magic Christian?) We're overdoing it absolutely dreadfully in Vietnam. First we need stability and regularity, but then we need variety, change, difference. "Being," Aristotle says (from the pinnacle of culture), "is difference." Yes, in the salons of Stendhal and Proust, everything hinges on the turn of the nose, the precise curve of the breasts. Now we are jaded of regularity and reliability, and require the genius of artists, and the beauty of women, to “keep a drowsy emperor awake.” In France for centuries ladies of the court would treasure a handkerchief scented under the armpit of the cavalier of their choice. They were so far removed from nature. Nowadays we like burlap textures and rough beard and old bricks—rustic things.  It's the same principle.

We overdo the stability thing, and then it seems as though we're all flying on instruments. A great deal of Heidegger's philosophy, the whole first half of Sein und Zeit, is about this. It's the phenomenology of das Man, Herr Keiner, modern mass-produced man, who (as so many of our leading spokesmen tell us) now makes the opening question of Hamlet (and Descartes' argument for the existence of other minds) utterly appropriate. The man who reaches work by elevator, walking over carpeted hallways with Muzak playing softly in the background, is not likely to be as human, as alive and aware, as the cowboy who has to get there, rain or shine, by horse. It's as simple as that. M. Amiel's lament is not par hazard or von nirgends her; it looks as though it’s the fate of (human) beings, das Geschichte des Seins. Of course, from this point of view, as “things progress, souls decline.” No “but” about it! It looks as though it's the pay-off, or "gift" (Geschenk) of history (Geschichte). What a conceit!

Heidegger is just a shade from claiming that history has all been a bad joke. By the time of Sein und Zeit, the hybris of Descartes and soaring faith of Bach and boundless optimism of Thomas Jefferson and Bishop Berkeley had all been shattered, and the  consensus of our greatest spokesmen is that modern man (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) is not altogether a success.

When staid old Bishop Berkeley looked across the Atlantic in the 18^th century, and dreamt of the prospect of human life in America, with its boundless natural resources and the cleansing power of a virgin continent of unknown extent, where society could at last be consciously set up and directed along rational and humanistic lines, he burst into song, and wrote a peaen of praise "On the Planting of Arts and Learning in America," which concludes:

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay, 

Such as she bred when fresh and young, 

When heavenly fire did animate her clay, 

By future poets will be sung.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.

The four first acts already past,  

A fifth shall close the drama with the day—

Time's noblest offspring is the last!

That, I suppose, is what Eryximachus would say as well. From the worship of the past in Phaedrus, we have moved to the worship of the future in Eryximachus. But not so the consensus of artists and thinkers in this century. The dominant motifs, wherever one looks, are despair and outrage. We can hardly go to the theater without being insulted.

Intellectual disgrace 

Stares from every human face, 

And the seas of pity lie  

Locked and frozen in each eye.

That sort of thing. All America has produced, Europeans now think, is the slob and phony. "We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men," we are told by our leading poet, who fled to England to enjoy a civilized life. A “hollow man” I take to be a “phony,” and a "stuffed man" to be a “slob.” I'm only trying to put a bit more bite into it, since it seems to me that no one is getting it. Surely Mr. Eliot would have judged that, in our last election, we had the choice between two of the former and one of the latter. That is an exercise in a priori thinking. Do you know what I mean? Do you think I'm imaginative enough to divine Mr. Eliot's sentiments in this matter, and carry out his thinking as Eryximachus claims to do with Pausanias? (Not so, I hasten to add, in this election.)

These are not necessarily my views. I am only trying to put a fine point on intellectual history. I am doing what Kant would  call transcendental analysis—with perhaps a bit of existential commitment, for we are told nowadays that objectivity in such  matters is impossible, and the attempt to be impartial ("on the one hand, on the other hand") simply is selling out. I suppose I have already let it out of the bag that they are my views as well, but I argue that they are not simply (or even primarily) mine. That is how I am constantly being understood, because I fall prey to the Christian-existentialist dimension of my being and thunder. I've apologized for this already.

With the new approach to philosophy which he calls transcendental, Kant attempts not to tell us what he believes and we ought to believe, but to lay bare the basic beliefs we all share by virtue of being part of a single great cultural enterprise. We all believe in science, whether we know anything about it or think we believe in it or not. We testify to this every time we step into an automobile, as we show that we believe in causality every time we look and wait before crossing a busy street. We testify that we believe in something like objectivity, that one man's view is not as good as another's, every time we argue, and that we believe in value every time we praise or blame or assess anything.

In an analogous way I try to lay bare what we all believe, not by any sort of Gallup Poll, but by consulting our leading spokesmen—our philosophers, novelists, poets, dramatists, artists, scientists and musicians, where I find an absolutely staggering consensus. I say we no longer believe in God (or the great collective undertaking which He represents), even though I know that the vast majority of men still do (or profess to) believe in Him. I mean simply that the notion of God is no longer a driving force in human affairs, as it once was, when the cathedrals were white. I say that we no longer believe in marriage, or the institution of monogamy, by consulting the steadily rising figures of divorce and free love. Within a decade there has been such a change here that, now, when students speak of a "couple," I no longer assume the people are married, simply living together. When I lash out at modern American education, or the quality of American life, I am only reporting what I see and hear everywhere I turn in my reading, theater-going, and experience of art. What I'm doing is transcendental analysis in the Kantian tradition, not simply venting my own feelings. That too, of course—and it gives me immense satisfaction, paying out Nixon and L.B.J. the way Henry Adams paid out U.S. Grant—but where did my feelings come from, if not my constant preoccupation with the history of culture (and, more recently, living with students)?

Imagine Dr. Johnson blaming the lack of great tragedy on the audience in the18th century!

Hard is his lot that, here by fortune placed, 

Must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste . . . . 

Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice, 

The stage but echoes back the public voice;

The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.

Every audience gets precisely what it deserves, in effect—marvelously ecological. Is there any scope in life any more for the loftiness and nobility of character which Aristotle required of tragedy? If you would assess our culture, consult our dramatists. What would Johnson think of today's audience?

A century ago the thought of U.S. Grant occupying the White House (that splendid house which had been in the family for so many years) could shatter Henry Adams' belief in Darwin and progress. Grant he saw as an anachronism, a figure out of the Stone Age who shattered the naive belief that laws of nature were working inexorably towards the improvement of the species. Grant, Adams writes, "should have worn skins, and lived in caves." That's as sharp as anything I say about Richard Nixon. But I would argue that Nixon makes Grant look as roisterous as Andrew Jackson, as earthy as Norman Mailer, and as cultured as T.S Eliot. And this is not simply a fact about the two men; it's a fact about history, and how we're doing. Quo vadis? When we project the development of the last two hundred years into the future—from statesmen of the stature of Metternich and Talleyrand, Disraeli, Gladstone and Palmerston, to L.B.J. and Nixon and Kosygin—Nixon may appear in retrospect like a combination of Andrew Jackson, Norman Mailer and T.S. Eliot. It seems to be the direction of history.

“History has been conceived as progress,” Disraeli wrote in the 1840's. “Progress to what?” That was when Bishop Berkeley's boundless optimism began to ebb seriously, and our belief in our great communal undertaking began to crumble at the very center.  Progress to what? Ulysses S. Grant? That? Henry Adams is profoundly offended, and pays Grant out in his immortal autobiography.

So after centuries of suffering and sacrifice and arduous effort, wrestling with the world and probing its mysteries and working on the emergent creature "man," what does it all finally lead to? What do the trumpets sound? Richard Nixon! Das Man incarnate. Herr Keiner. Der Mensch Ohne Eigenschaften.

Consider 

Carefully the reviewer.

I never mentioned a man but with the view 

Of selling my own works. 

The tip's a good one, as for literature, 

It gives no man a sinecure. 

And no one knows at sight a masterpiece. 

And give up verse, my boy, 

There's nothing in it.

That's another great American poet—poet and traitor and madman—writing about the direction of American culture: Ezra Pound on “Mr. Nixon.” A very important poem, I think. "Consider carefully the reviewer" is living life in the face of grinding television cameras, the transition from Phaedrus to Pausanias. "No one knows at sight a masterpiece" means that photographs alone don't show the difference between L.B.J. or Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, F.D.R., Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, that the difference is not something we can see but have to infer and speculate about.

In the Symposium Eryximachus is the direction of history. We have a great dream of transcendence, the Middle Ages, and then a deliberate and carefully thought through project of human life, like the 18^th century, and finally a perfectly adjusted environment and Man the Island, with everything he could desire but personal relations—in effect, contemporary suburbia. Can you see all Western cultural history reflected in those first three speeches? Isn't it uncanny, unheimlich? Plato seems simply to be giving his imagination free rein, and imagining the subsequent cultural history of the west. He has to write history before it happens, you see, in order to reflect on it, to do philosophy of history, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, full-blown. It's all a priori, pure imagination, like Lester Frank Ward's settlement in the wilderness. Couldn't it all happen very much like that—even if it hadn't yet happened?

But then the question is: what's going on? D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? That's Paul Gaugin who had to escape to the South Sea Islands to preserve his sanity—at least for better than a decade. Where have we come from? Where are we going? Where are we uberhaupt? These are the three fundamental questions of philosophy after Kant, the concern of Hegelian-Nietzschean philosophy of history, after the world (or human life) is no longer seen as a static or timeless order.

Kant's three fundamental questions were:

What can I know? 

What ought I to do?

What may I hope?

These are questions, I argue, which presuppose the Cartesian model of man, and accordingly the Cartesian posture towards life, the concerns of Man the Island. The answer to all three questions, of course, is nothing—Heidegger's Nichts. What can we know?  Nichts. Our little lives are bounded by a sleep. What ought we to do? Nichts. Steal This Book! What may we hope? Nichts. History is a nightmare from which I am striving to awake. Heidegger's most important notion, das Nichts, is the 20^th century's answer to Kant's three celebrated questions.

Gaugin's three questions, which move away from a timeless, individual, Cartesian order to a collective historical process, are the title of his last painting from Tahiti (painted at a time when he made two unsuccessful attempts on his own life) and thought one of his great masterpieces. Everything he ever did was a masterpiece, and created new possibilities of vision. He and his fellow impressionists, Somerset Maugham tells us, taught that shadows are colored, not black and white. But he taught us more than that, if we had eyes to see. He was wrestling with more than colors. He reminds me of Kierkegaard's question: What is a poet? We say to him: Come, sing for us again! For we overlook the suffering, but the music—the music is divine.

We haven't heard the voices of our thinkers and artists. Hegel might as well never have existed—and William James and John Dewey and all the rest. We're still in pursuit of "timeless truths" about language and human life. We're still asking Kant's questions, at least the first two. As to the third, daruber herrscht Schweigen, we're still pre-Hegel, pre-historical. We might as well wear skins, and live in caves. Ah, Plato's cave, remember?

It's no good blaming history if it exhibits the principle of entropy and moves towards the equal distribution of energy, ironing out all differences (of rank, nationality, locale, race and sex) and leaving us all more or less alike. Then one must simply say, as Ian Chapman taught me: Die Entropie der Welt strebt einem Maximum zu. But by understanding history we may be able to direct it. There is, after all, some difference between nature and history, even if it makes no sense to blame either, and the difference must be that we somehow have a say in history, we do  it, though not nearly as simply as Eryximachus suggests, with the notion of the “expert practitioner” of medicine who can manipulate and control human desires, who can “replace one desire with  another, and produce the requisite desire when it is absent or remove it when it is present.”

That sounds like modern advertising, or the religious dream of personal transformation. It’s true that advertising manipulates our desires beyond our wildest imagining. We all desire and pursue things which have been suggested to us by society. Existentialists are offended at this, but it simply reflects our animal nature and the priority of the species. It shows how malleable we are and that we are caught up in a process of self-transformation. Only we don't know what we're doing. Hegel and Tolstoy and Heidegger all stress this, and Eryximachus seems to ignore it.

I tried for years to alter my desires, but without success. I found that my years of struggle with them only increased them. As Oscar Wilde says, the only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it. If you want to increase it, fight it. That was my way, and it worked beyond my wildest imagining. That's dialectic. It brought me here, but I didn't know what I was doing. So our long tradition of putting down the physical and sensual has made us the most erotic of all cultures.

So love may be a “mighty power,” in Eryximachus' view, but the real power is in the hands of the man who controls it, “guides” and “heals” it—the “diviner,” the master-technologist. The technologist or the theologian—they are the men who manipulate the imponderables of human life, especially desires, and imagine that they know what they're doing. The basic metaphysical view of both is that nature is ill or deficient and requires our control to be what it ought to be—the “fallen world” and the physician. Nietzsche says we should not imagine that being needs us. You are free to be anything you like—it will never be what you imagine anyway. There are not good desires and bad desires, and you can give expression to your nature; you don't have to keep it eternally under control.

Lurking at the back of Eryximachus' mind, like the theologian's and technologist's, is the fear of cataclysm: plague, disease, frost, hail, blight, sin, Communism. Release your control for a moment, and all hell is likely to break loose. St. Augustine says that, if infants don't wreak universal havoc, it's not from lack of will but lack of power to do so. Often such an attitude proves, as William James says, to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. We don't trust our emotions because they're erratic and irrational, but they're erratic and irrational because we don't trust them and require the full power of reason to control them.

Look how love-relationships, kept under too tight control, will suddenly erupt into recrimination and acrimony and nasty infighting. The present-day American is a thoroughly domesticated animal. In all our relations with one another we are as harmless as lap-dogs, all first names and casual informality. But something is-lacking, and erupts in the horror of Vietnam. Individually, in comparison with men of other countries, we are becoming gentler and gentler, but collectively we are becoming more and more brutal and beastly. That's the difference between Borodino and Vietnam, in just a century and a half. And Borodino was thought to open a new era of human bestiality!

Physician, heal thyself! Preacher, find something in life which you can radiate! With his dream of cosmic control—fantastic for the 4^th century B.C.—Eryximachus can't even cure the hiccups. We simply try different things, and eventually (D.v.) they go away. Everything simply happens. We don't do it (in the way we ordinarily think), or know what we're doing. This is Tolstoy's indictment of Napoleon: he thinks that he is doing it, and knows what he is doing.

We don't even know how to raise our arm. If we know, we can explain, surely. That's what Socrates assumes, as he wanders about Athens asking men what they're up to. If you know anything about light or engines or chess or supply and demand, I expect you to be able to explain it to me. So if you think you know how to wave your arm, tell me—how is it done? You see, you don't even know how to raise your own arm, and yet you presume to tell a man how to live, what we should do and avoid, how to make the world a  better place or lead the struggling peoples of S.E. Asia to human freedom and dignity?

Physician, heal thyself! We Americans should attempt to get more freedom and dignity into our own lives before we presume to export it wholesale to Vietnam. Beginning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon. Neither of them radiates what I call freedom and dignity.  Would you want to change places with them? My Mother's life had more dignity than Johnson's and Nixon's rolled into one.

Oh save us from our physicians. That's Moliere's passion, and a frequent theme in Plato. Of course we want medical attention when we're sick—though modern dentistry has created most of our dental problems and the American fetish for hygiene leaves us all particularly vulnerable to disease. How did people get along for centuries without dentists? I was astonished to hear on the radio recently that, even now, only one Frenchman in four uses a toothbrush, and only one in ten uses it regularly. (I don't mean you shouldn't; you're "hooked.") But when Plato and Moliere talk of physicians, they should be understood symbolically. They're talking of men who tell us how we must live, of pedants and preachers and politicians, men who purport to have the cure for the ills of human life, and whose passion is to rectify deficiencies at whatever cost.

Eryximachus sees all life as ill, or in need of redemption. So, I would agree, does the Christian, with his notion of a "fallen world," and man's "fallen nature." So does Karl Marx, whose obsession with injustice is thoroughly Christian, and whose hope for the redemption of human life requires a world-wide cataclysm, the Proletarian Revolution, a new form of Armageddon (pressing towards confrontation). Anyone who sees life as illness, Nietzsche thunders, is ill.

Christianity and Communism are two forms of blasphemy, since both regard life (or being) as requiring justification and redemption, the one in an afterlife, called "heaven," the other in the dream of the millennium, a future "heaven on earth." In either case life is utterly unacceptable simply as it is. For Nietzsche, who worships life, that is high blasphemy! That we should condescend to redeem life through our fancies! All this is very close to Eryximachus, who dreams of "just and temperate consummation, whether in heaven or on earth"—that's Christian—but whose "orderly principle of the body," applied to Aristophanes' hiccups, calls for "an appalling union of noise and irritations"--that's the blood-bath of Marxist Revolution, Armageddon.

With his dream of cosmic harmony, Eryximachus is not a physician but a metaphysician. He reminds us of Leibniz, with his "best of all possible worlds." "Metaphysician" is a strange word, since it sounds like a healer rather than a theoretician. We have physics and meta-physics, Aristotle's terminology, and metaphysics means simply "after physics." Accordingly, I would expect to have physicists pursuing physics and meta-physicists pursuing meta-physics. Mary Baker Eddy is a metaphysician, healing through thinking—not dour old Immanuel Kant. How does this curious situation come about?

Well, with the crazy problems we get ourselves into, it appears life does need a bit of redeeming. We have to get our heads straight in order to get into it, in order to revel in the sensual and the life of the body. How utterly we have de-sensualized life, "with flint in the bosom and guts in the head." So that we can't appreciate the glory that's all around us: the sunset and the steak and the sonnet and the symphony, Plato and the swing of Pleiades. Why is there so little joy in people's lives, now that we have the cosmic harmony Eryximachus dreams of?

I can only say that Kant gave me the sunset, ten years later. He helped me to get my head straightened around, so that I could appreciate the immediate, the sensual and the bodily. He got me off the tread-mill of life, the obligation to live up to other men's (or no one in particular's) expectations of me, or what I now call the Richard Nixon syndrome, living one's life constantly before grinding television cameras. I believe that is what robs most men of life—even though, in another sense, living up to other men's expectations (or what I call thumos) is the only way to "new and higher life," and has given me the marvel of my present life. Kant began to liberate me, as I hope to liberate you, through the continuing miracle of education and culture.

It does seem to me that we are all sick in some way. Our society is temporarily ill, with the twin symptoms of boredom and violence, and the university mirrors this. There seems to me to be tremendous suffering here at U.C.S.B., and I ask myself why. Why are people suffering? What are they afraid of? Why isn’t a university a joyous place, where we celebrate life, beginning with the facet of our choice: philosophy, literature, history, art,  or whatever? I want to diagnose the illness of our tradition, or our society and institutions. I conceive that to be the proper role of the meta-physician in any era, but especially at this critical juncture. I am not trying simply to get an impersonal or objective picture of the world, like the physicist. The "truth" that I'm after unlocks motivation. Truth is not what works but what gets us to work. All metaphysics is projective metaphysics, imagining and projecting new possibilities of human being. And this requires diagnosing the confused ideas which keep us from tapping the natural reservoir of motivation which we  must have, simply by virtue of being living, sentient, conscious beings.

The question is not why you should throw yourself into anything, but why you don't (or can't) throw yourself into anything. After Galileo the question is not what causes or produces but what impedes or obstructs. Life cannot be ill—doesn't require any justification or admit of any redemption—but a culture can be ill in its approach to life, and my task as a metaphysician, as I see-it, is to diagnose that illness in order to liberate the life which it obstructs. The task, however, is far more difficult than Eryximachus imagines.

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