Our Love and Culture: How Best to Waste Your Time

Chapter topics and synopsis: How bodily is the soul (how soulful the body); discovering the Platonic world of ideas; philosophical discourses and practical discourse; Greek crafts and craftiness, the symbol of Odysseus; conceits and metaphysics in poetry; how man is "vainly begot" and cannot be "forbidden vanity"; a Greek look at contemporary American politicians (and scholarship); the importance of imaginary questions; St. Augustine's and Kant's attitude towards sensuality (and why); how to remember something about the books you read; the importance of correspondence, beloved of the 18th century; how monogamy (or exclusive love) gets in the way of an ideal education; the "orange-juice theory of love"; once again we don't "get into the material."

I want to try talking from here this morning (sitting on the edge of the stage); because after the last two sessions I sat here and talked with students who came up afterwards, and I find that I'm much more relaxed. The interesting theme there is that our bodily posture influences our spiritual or mental state. When I'm standing behind a lectern, I'm more aggressive; when I'm sitting on the edge of a stage like this, I'm more relaxed, and easy-going, and charming. I have only to put on a pair of tennis shoes and I feel more athletic. What does that suggest? That mind and body are not as separate as Descartes' model, res cogitans and res extensa, a "ghost in a machine," would lead us to believe.

What I'm going to be wrestling with, in talking to you for 30 hours, is what I call the Cartesian model of man and human experience, which involves a very sharp differentiation between the "soul" and the "body", between the "inner" and "outer" world, the domain of religion and aesthetics and the domain of science. So I find one interesting theme in beginning: If I sit here on the edge of the stage, I'm easy-going; if I'm standing behind a lectern, I'm liable to get religious.

That was an irruption of religious spirit you witnessed last session. I raised my voice; I got intense. I'm concerned about the way the world is going—exceedingly concerned, Angst-ridden. Angst: capital A, n, g, s, t, Angst. That's one of the central concepts of Martin Heidegger, who introduces the existentialist movement in the 20th century. It means "anxiety" or "dread."

I will maintain that existentialism is not about our individual lives, but about our corporate life, our tradition. I don't experience existentialism in my personal life, which is a daydream, a marvel, but in the newspaper that's slipped under my door every morning, that depressing, mediocre News-Press I was talking about, and what it tells me about the world. Then I experience the concepts of existential philosophy: Angst, nausea, dread, absurdity, boredom. These are the central concepts of the school of philosophy that now dominates Europe.

The world is now divided into two philosophical camps. On the continent there reigns the movement called existentialism, whose leading figures are Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus. In the Anglo-Saxon world, England and the

United States

, there reigns an approach to real problems as linguistic problems; an examination of language, the so-called "linguistic analysts," Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, John Austin, Gilbert Ryle. The continent is concerned primarily with the "inner" life (feelings, moods, emotions), the Anglo-Saxon world with the "outer" life (the objective use of language). This carries on a very old tradition, the division between empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) on one side of the English channel, and rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and idealists (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) on the other.

Obviously, these are two half-things, emotions and the words in which we express them, like communism and free enterprise, or Christianity and the South Sea Islands. It's funny that a lot of the same themes crop up in both language-games. I want to give you an idea of them both. They're two deliberate responses—the most significant two our leading spokesmen have discovered—to the low-level language-game which rules all your minds, and holds you spellbound or "enthralled," imprisoned in low-level language like the prisoners in Plato's "cave" (Rep. 514a-518c).

The two movements are like the hedge-hog and the fox. The hedge-hog says: I don't know if what I say makes sense, but it is terribly profound. The fox says: I don't know if what I say is terribly profound, but it makes sense. I want to bring these two kids together—just the way I'd like to bring Romeo and Juliet together (after my colleague Friar Lawrence made such a botch of it with his "magic potion") and a whole host of others: Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, Faust and Wagner (as well as Margarete), Hamlet and Horatio (as well as Ophelia), Cyrano de Bergerac and Cretien (as well as Roxanne), the Pope and Rudolph Valentino (the two great symbols of "love"), Van Gogh and Gaugin, Milord Capital and the Collective Worker, the Omnipotent Administrator and the Super-masculine Menial--in short the two sides of life, which first emerge in the Symposium in Pausanias' distinction between the heavenly and earthly (or common) Aphrodite.

I was edified to hear from TAs and others that there had been some vigorous group-formation going on after the last class. In the first class I stressed the need of seminar-partners with whom you share everything, so that you "learn to do by doing," so you get plenty of talking in, let down the barriers of the rather empty, ritual way in which we normally relate, and have a different type of relationship, which I call a "Platonic relationship," and may even become "Platonic love."

I went into the need for group discussion: 6, 8, or 10 of you. The aim is to build running discourse, and to get to know one another quickly, because that will make the talk better. When the talk gets good, you will understand what a "Platonic idea" is, and why it is "more real" and "more true" than anything physical. You'll understand what a "Platonic world of ideas" is—that's the world I live in all the time, as I'm walking down the street or waiting in line in a supermarket, or pounding away at the typewriter, or sitting here talking to you. I'm in "another world."

If the talk gets good, you'll find that a lot of your dissatisfactions with life drop away, fade into insignificance, and you are concerned only with the question, only with the talk, with the ideas, and it's marvelous. Because Plato lives primarily in this world of talk, this world of "ideas," rather than a world of action (of doing and making), he says talking is more significant than any doing or making, the life of philosophy more "real" or true, a "higher life," than that of the statesman or artisan.

Philosopher, statesman, and artisan: the artisan makes things; the statesman does things; the philosopher thinks about things, and talks about them endlessly. Philosophical conversation never ends—it's only interrupted from time to time, when one or the other partner says, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I've got to catch a train." The so-called "real world" is constantly impinging on us, and we have to answer its demands. Otherwise, philosophical discourse is not meant to end, but to go on and on without end, et in saccula saeculorum, Amen (laughter).

Practical discourse is meant to end. Practical discourse is about the real world: shall we go to the mountains or to the beach? This sort of talk is meant to end, and ideally as promptly as possible, so we get on with it, so we go to the mountains or the beach, instead of just sitting around trying to decide. But philosophical discourse, the sort of discourse that goes on in the Platonic world of ideas, is not like this at all. The question is: what is it about the mountains that so fascinates and attracts you that you always want to go to the mountains? What is it about the beach I find so exciting I always want to go to the beach? That is a very different sort of question, to be discussed in a very different way, from the question, where shall we go, to the mountains or the beach? So in these hours I want to introduce you to philosophical discussion, discussion that's an end in itself. When you appreciate discussion as an end in itself, you'll understand what Plato means when he says that his world of ideas is “more real” and “more true” than the world of sense, the so-called “real world” the world in which we do and make things, consume and accumulate and enjoy and fear and love and hate things.

Now the official announcements were that, instead of testing you in all those different sessions, we're going to test you right here every other Monday, beginning a week from today. You'll have an objective test right here for the first half-hour, and then I'll have at you for the remaining half-hour. This is, of course, a great simplification, but it involves a renunciation on my part, to give up two hours of your ears—two hours! But it's obviously the way to do it. It's very nice that there's no class after this one in this hall, so when we have these half-hour tests, I'll go on for 20 or 25 minutes; then I'll have a short break, and anyone can go then who wants to, and then I'll go on for another 20 or 25 minutes, so I'll have my full session with you.

By the way, these objective tests I'm giving you—the TAs are responsible for dreaming up questions. Each of them should dream up 5 or 10 questions each day, and I'll simply have to go over them and say, “Well, that's an interesting question--oh, that's nice, that's nice . . .” I pick 50 out of perhaps 200 or 300 possibilities that are submitted to me, and that's your examination! No work for me at all (laughter).

Aren't I clever? I'm Odyssean, a follower of Odysseus. Odysseus is clever, crafty, wily. You must be clever, crafty and wily to get the most out of life, because there are a lot of life-denying forces and institutions and people who will try to keep you from it. I don't want to make you profound as much as I want to make you clever. Because I'm Greek, and un-Christian, anti-Christian. The Greek extols the crafty hero, Odysseus. One cannot imagine a crafty saint. But the Greek admiration of craftiness is of a piece with their worship of crafts. It's getting the most out of the material, getting the most out of life.

Ten years, trying to find your "way home." It took me almost 20. The Odyssey is the Greek epic of individual life, to balance the epic celebrating our great collective endeavor, a kind of Old and New Testament—War and Peace and Ulysses. Do I lay it on too heavy? It is out of an inordinate desire to please and win your respect—which I have never succeeded in doing here. It may well be counter-productive by this point, my brilliance: cramming in "goodies," much too fast and furiously, in the desperate effort to get some response! This is why Descartes believes he has to prove that there are people under the hats, and why so many great men—Swift, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Van Gogh, Gerhardt Kruger, and Ezra Pound--trundle off to Charendon in the end. We lack Odyssean cunning. As we no longer believe in the collective undertaking, War and Peace is as dead as a doornail. Ulysses is the pattern of the (foreseeable) future: how the individual can get through life, or get the most out of life, which requires great cunning and craftiness. Increasingly, it would seem. It's interesting that it's the wily hero Odysseus, rather than the powerful hero Achilles, who wins the war and turns the tide of history with his power of concentration, just as Phaedrus says.

I've told you how I followed Christianity right to the top: Jesuit high school (like James Joyce's in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) Jesuit University, Santa Clara; Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, the highest intellectuality in Christendom, I think (what a marvelous historical method, which has now transformed my life.) Up through the Church to the highest echelon, and on into the clouds (laughter)--or through the entire Church and out the back door. But it was marvelous training, and I have been Christianized to the core. That is to say, I care about other people, and in some sense all other people.

That's what I take it the Christian message is all about: concern for our fellow-men, including "the least among us," for everyone. I call such love indiscriminate. Barber-chair love. Call out "Next!" and come what may (laughter). I gave away my library, and my inheritance, and I have very few possessions. But I'm not sacrificing anything; I'm just living with minimum baggage (laughter). Diogenes—do you know Diogenes? The first cynic—walked around

Greece

looking for an honest man. He had only one possession, a cup, until he saw a boy drinking from a fountain with his hands—and he laughed, and threw the cup away!

Well, I was trying to tell you about the group-discussions, and how what you want to get going there is Platonic discourse, philosophical talk, about all the interesting suggestions I throw out here in class. It was a mistake on my part to conjoin the groups with the elitist writing-program, which I will also get into today. There is no connection at all between the discussion groups and the writing program. That was a faulty, early idea, a Fehlschritt. No, the groups are distinct—you form your own groups. Not all of you, I'm afraid, are going to get TAs or volunteers to visit your groups and help you with them, because we have only about 22 or 24 people to work with; the 10 TAs who are assigned to me, plus 12 or 14 volunteers from my upper-division Plato class. By the way, I'm very proud of the volunteers. They are doing this for nothing, because they think I'm onto a good thing, and that Plato's worth talking about endlessly, and they see my point when I say you learn more by teaching than by listening. So only about 22 of your groups will actually have a TA or advisor coming along. He comes along as a guest, as an advisor or consultant. It's your group: you should moderate it, structure it as you like; he's your guest. Extend your hospitality to him—give him free drinks, or whatever.

I won't have those in the writing program write an essay and a critique every week—that's just a little too much. An essay every other week and a critique every other week, of equal length—a critique of another student's initial essay. The way the two dialogues are set up, there are 10 speeches. So you write an original essay on Phaedrus and a critique of someone else's essay on Pausanias, and an original essay on Eryximachus and so on, alternating. If you are in the writing program, I would suggest you give up another course to do it properly.

I claim that this course could change your life, that this course could be as valid to you as all the other courses you take this year together. Hah! Phew! (Laughter.) Am I an egoist! How conceited! My mind tumbles with conceits (laughter). A "conceit" is a technique of expression which abounds in the 17th and 18h century, and is the basis of what is called metaphysical poetry, the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, I think—whoever these people are who are called metaphysical poets; they're splendid, I love them. A conceit is a kind of verbal trick that invites us to draw things together which we understand are deeply different. That's what a conceit is—that's Dr. Johnson's definition. To view Richard Nixon as an adolescent is a conceit. Well, there seems to be some connection between conceit and metaphysics: metaphysical poets, with their conceits, and metaphysicians, conceited men (like me) who presume to say something about the entire universe. Whew!

"Metaphysics" is philosophy qua philosophy, the part of philosophy that doesn't touch on anything but philosophy. The other parts of philosophy all have borders contiguous with other disciplines: epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, philosophy of literature, and so on. All of these are the real meaningful disciplines of philosophy, and then crowning them all, right at the sixth floor of Ellison, with its head in the clouds, is metaphysics. That's philosophy qua philosophy, and it's not about anything anymore. As Ken King loved to say when the elevator stopped: "Sixth floor--Notions!" (Laughter.)

Well, "vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity." (Lord Brooke, "0 Wearisome Condition of Humanity.") That's "vain' in two different senses; that's a "play on words": one word means two different things. Hear it again: "Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity." Vainly begot means born to no purpose. Man is here apparently to no purpose—like a work of art, as opposed to an instrument. The difference between an instrument and a work of art is that the instrument is useful or purposive, points forward into the future, and what you can do with it: the shoe, the car, the typewriter. In the performance of its function, it disappears. You're not supposed to notice it. You're conscious of the (damn) thing chiefly when it malfunctions. The work of art, on the other hand—"vainly begot" because it is to no purpose—announces its own presence, points to itself, vainly and says, Look at me! Look what colors can be—or wood, or sounds, or words! So man, who is vainly begot, who cannot find his purpose here, must come to rejoice in himself, and that's what I do now. Joseph Conrad says, in his marvelous way, "I suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all” —moral, religious, right-wrong, good-evil. "It's a real spectacle," he says, "a great spectacle for laughter or reverence or awe or anguish, but never for despair." The passing scene must be for itself: All the world's a stage!

Richard Nixon worships and projects the being of the instrument, transforming himself into pure function. No one would ever accuse him of vanity; he is everybody's "humble and obedient servant." But he also thinks that he is doing momentous things in the world, Tolstoy's indictment of Napoleon. He doesn't recognize the vanity of all his worldly ambitions, vanitas vanitatum. I'm like the work of art, which calls attention to itself and rejoices in its own being.

Nixon and I are like the athlete and the day-laborer. Do you know the difference between the athlete and the day-laborer? The day laborer’s vital activities terminate outside himself; his energy flows into the outer world, into roads and ditches and sparkling dishes, often leaving him with a sense of being diminished—Van Gogh's “Potato Eaters” or Edwin Markham's "Man with the Hoe." The athlete's energy and vital activity are directed towards his own being and terminate in himself, making him the increasingly splendid product of his own effort. Well, that's Richard Nixon and your genial (and ingenious) philosophy professor. "Genial" is apparently the only adjectival form we have for "genius," and indeed I expect the genius to be genial. After he comes back to "this world" from putting the final touches on a great Oratorio, J. S. Bach is not likely to fly into a rage because someone forgot the marshmallows (laughter.) Nor to care very much whether we go to the beach or the mountains, or all the things we crazy earthlings seem to care about.

Much like the day-laborer, Richard Nixon's activities terminate outside himself, in laws and treaties and the things he does for other people. My activities terminate in myself, leaving me joyous and delightful and vain in a twofold sense, like the athlete or the sonnet; Nixon is like a note to the milkman. He doesn't enjoy life, doesn't enjoy being in the White House—any more than the average American tourist enjoys traipsing all over Europe. That's the difference between him and John Kennedy, eyes flashing this way and that, playing life as a great game.

Richard Nixon symbolizes the tragedy of our culture far more than the exploited and abused day-laborer. For exploitation has been going on for 10,000 years, but life at the top always used to be splendid, and quite unlike life in Gary, Indiana and Des Moines, Iowa. The common man always believed in this, belonged to a society which, for all its injustice, he respected. The medieval serf could see something of himself in the great cathedrals, and 50,000 Russian serfs died cheerfully for the Czar (and Leo Tolstoy) at Borodino.

As a French aristocrat once said, "I give my parties for the people who will never receive an invitation.” In effect, the aristocracy—the leaders of society—always played a splendid role for the men they ruled and exploited. That was the game, and it worked quite admirably. It gave us the country squire and Georgian town houses, King's College, Cambridge and Marlborough House, Gladstone and Disraeli and the Viscount Palmerston. These are a different breed of men altogether from the Nixons and Johnsons and Humphreys—who are supposed to symbolize what our culture is all about, and not simply keep it functioning.

We can't all become instruments, as Heidegger argues, or all meaning is lost. We must believe in the men at the top, whose lives must be like works of art, ends in themselves, radiating joy and vitality, so that we may all believe that life is about something, even if many of our own lives don’t seem to be about anything in particular. The 17th century peasant had no doubt that life was meaningful—not his own life, perhaps, but the duke who thundered through his village in his great coach. Who could doubt that his life was meaningful?

Is the temporary hard-hat or corporate executive, the man in advertising or packaging, so far removed from the 17th century peasant? The pit in Elizabethan England could pick Shakespeare out of the air like a fly, remember. In what sense, then, have we made progress? In what sense are we better men, or do we lead fuller, richer lives? This is the question in what sense western culture, the western tradition, is about anything, or going anywhere (like the duke.)

I would wager that there is hardly a man today who enjoys Macbeth or Midsummer Night's Dream as much as almost anybody in the pit in the Bard's own day. Not even—or especially not—our cultivated literary critics, who only affect those powerful feelings which men in Elizabethan times really had. For the most part their experience in the theater is (what I would regard as) empty, pretentious, beside the point, sterile and boring.

What evidence have I for such a claim? Wittgenstein put me onto it: their writings—the empty, pretentious, boring things which fill journals of literary criticism, especially the so-called learned journals. I read a fair amount of literary criticism at one point in my career, and I never got anything out of it—except from men who were literary figures in their own right. What is all that about, I'm now capable of asking. For the most part it is the sheerest academic garbage, elaborate thought-games which make the work into grist for the critic's mill, but never get around to saying what the work is all about.

We have men writing of Donne and Yeats who have never been in love (in any significant sense) professors who lead drab, boring, humdrum lives and scratch their heads over what Faust may be all about, critics writing about Hamlet who are terrified by the present Generation Gap (and don't see any connection), authorities on Oscar Wilde without a trace of wit or deviant tendency, Catholic critics who find St. Ignatius Loyola more imaginative than Marcel Proust, men who wax rhapsodic over Swift and Blake and Tolstoy who have never encountered, much less been torn apart by, the poverty and degradation which support their own marvelous lives.

If the sort of abstract garbage which fills their scholarly articles is actually what critics experience during and after the play, poem, or novel—if they are giving us their peak literary experience—I feel sorry for them, as I feel sorry for students whose imaginations are "cultivated" by constant exposure to such trivia. I would much prefer to experience Midsummer Night's Dream through the eye and ears (and genitals) of the men in the pit in Shakespeare’s day. And since I take this to be the peak experience of life and best index of a culture, how can I believe that the western tradition is going anywhere, that we are all doing anything, that our collective life on this planet (not our individual lives) has any point or purpose?

When I see students who are cosmically bored because of their moral revulsion to their society, I want to shake them to bring them back to life. We must hold student's interest at this critical juncture, or we are lost. (And we are not doing this, as far as I can see, in any significant degree.) Being utterly immersed in their own solipsistic problem is itself the problem. Circular as this is, I know of no other way to put it. What the problem is, aside from this, utterly eludes me. Hamlet and Wagner are surely the two most boring young men who ever lived. The one doesn't even try to communicate, except to himself; the other just mouths pious platitudes.

As eminent a critic as T.S Eliot makes Shakespeare responsible for this—for having failed to produce an "objective correlative" of Hamlet's immense emotion—when the whole point is that there is no "objective correlative." We ask what can account for today’s youth's extraordinary behavior, and in Prof. Austin's words, we do not know what to say. That's life, not Shakespeare's failure as a dramatist.

So the crucial problem of our society, I maintain, is at the top not at the bottom. We all need to be aspiring, and when life at the top is obviously no different from any old life, when it becomes clear that Mr. Nixon's life is really no different from any corporate executive's the bottom drops out of society (privileged society) as we're witnessing. The horror is that Mr. Nixon and Mr. Johnson have made this a life-project, demonstrating that they are just folks, second-generation meat and potatoes, a pure reflection of the multitude they represent. I don't fault them solely for their policies, but for their style, their taste, the lives they lead and radiate. The war in Vietnam, as I see it, is about their lives, and their difference from Brezhnev’s and Kosygin's, which strikes me as simply ludicrous! If we're not distracted by differences of ideology, as William James and Wittgenstein caution, if we look at the actual lives they lead, all four are absolutely indistinguishable non-entities. The Earl of Beaconsfield and the Viscount Palmerston would find being with them simply embarrassing. In 19th century terms, "dreadful little counter-jumpers." Imagine any of them at a dinner party with Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and Edmund Burke—their peers in the 18th century. Or nowadays with T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, and Eldridge Cleaver—all of whom, for all their differences, would get along very nicely together. Their lives are empty and meaningless, and they reveal this in their photographs, as well as their pronouncements—Nixon's first words across interstellar space, assuring the astronauts that he is "not reversing the charges." Simply embarrassing!

Mr. Nixon is the nihilism of the 20th century writ large. He is what the vast bulk of our literature and drama and existential philosophy and social criticism is about. Even our art and music: a Campbell's Soup label or Charles Ives' concerto in which “The Star-Spangled Banner” is gradually transformed in a series of variations, into a hurdy-gurdy song, a carousel turning, with the golden ring. I claim that the great theme of 20th century art is that modern man is not altogether a success. And our "great" men embody and reveal this in a way which is impossible to overlook and which makes culture ludicrous—a matter of how one holds a teacup (with the little finger curled daintily.) Then all the suffering and injustice is really absurd, as Camus thunders, and the specter of violence is at the door.

When the aristocrat's hand trembles, and it becomes clear that he doesn't know what he's doing, we're all in trouble. Oppression really begins, Sartre teaches us, when inequality is experienced as unnecessary, when we no longer have respect for the game which makes it inescapable (though we'll never own up to this.) We once thought of statesmen, generals, millionaires and movie-stars as superior men. Now we don't respect anyone or anything. We know that movie stars are just like other people—everyone is "just like other people"—and life in the White House is (obviously) as banal and uninteresting as anywhere else, from Gary, Indiana to Des Moines, Iowa. This is my present terror. I get it from Friedrich Nietzsche, who is thought to be the philosopher of Nazism, our last great corporate attempt to make life meaningful and exciting. We must stop making ourselves entirely into instruments, like Richard Nixon, and rejoice in our own lives like works of art, vain and no longer forbidden vanity—once we get over our Christian illness.

Well, last time I began getting religious and that meant that the "real world" came booming in. And now here it is again! But I say, it’s okay to keep the real world out there for a while. It's an imaginary world we're entering here, the Platonic world of ideas. It's important that this would be imaginary (and imaginative) not real. If we talk about what goodness is, what truth is, what beauty is, what difference does it make? What difference does the question "What is beauty?" make? No difference at all. It won't increase your appreciation of a painting or a woman's body any more than Freud's or Bergson's theory of laughter is likely to break you up. It's an imaginary question.

For a long time men have said philosophy is imaginary; metaphysics is all imaginary—it's not about anything. That is quite right. Philosophy, and especially metaphysics, is made up of imaginary questions, questions in words about words, for which practical consequences are not immediately apparent. And this means that we can think about them with more coolness and detachment, and practice our judgment, our expression, our vision, in a way we can't, so long as we are talking about more practical questions of life, like politics and our love relationships (to start with those two).

As long as we're talking politics, we square off as Democrats and Republicans. Phew! Tempers flare, and people don't listen to one another any more. Even when it was just the difference between Democrats and Republicans, who now appear as close as Winstons and Marlboros. And similarly in human relations. Are we going to go to the mountains or the beach? What do you think of me? What do I think of you? How important am I in your life? There we rarely have cool detachment. This is traditionally the difference between love and friendship: love is intense (or "hot") and brief; friendship is cool, you talk about things, and it's longer-lasting. This is Andy Burnham's distinction: long-term friendships and short love affairs, not long-term love-affairs and short friendships—that would be like South Atlantic and North Pacific.

Well, this is all free-association of a very cultured sort. I'm a cultured free-associationist. I think much in the way jazz artists blow. I want to jazz up this University! You know, the marvel of jazz only recently struck me. I'm just barely getting into jazz now. I got into folk-rock first, and then, through folk-rock, I began to have some appreciation of what was going on in jazz.

Of course, when I was studying Immanuel Kant, and living it all the time, I wasn't much into jazz. You may sense this without knowing precisely what "Kant" means. But you've heard the name Kant. He was the one who first began to transform my life, with his Copernican Revolution, the notion that the human mind gives structure and order to the world. But he wouldn't like jazz; he's very uptight about perfume. In one characteristic passage he inveighs against perfume. It's distracting. There's old Prof. Kant, holed up in his study, like Faust, forging the Critique of Pure Reason, and in wafts the scent of a perfumed handkerchief from another room. It drives him up the wall (like Schopenhauer on noise).

This is why St. Augustine hates women—because they distract him from his prayers. (Laughter.) He wants to get his whole mind, heart, and being together in relation to that one unitary Being around Whom his whole life centers. Like Soren Kierkegaard, he wants to "will one thing." He wants to concentrate on that one Being Who is the source and goal of his life, the way I try to concentrate here. And in the midst of this there come annoying, distracting images of breasts and arms and soft embraces by candlelight, the promise of sensual, physical love! And St. Augustine goes wild! (Laughter!) Women distract him from the object of his deepest longing. You'll see it in the Confessions (if you don't read the Confessions the way William Jennings Bryan read the Bible).

Well, you see, if you have a big seminar-partnership, you talk over everything in Plato, and the things I tell you here about your own lives, tell one another about yourselves, mainly what you think about everything. (It'll get you to think about everything.) You are extraordinary, fascinating, interesting people, with all sorts of experiences and memories slumbering in you, waiting to be recollected, and mined for their significance. Everything from things that happened to you in childhood and high school to things you ran into that day. Remember: if it's interesting to you, it's interesting to other people. You only need the verbal style to put it across—first to other people and then to yourself. The only reason we don't realize this is because we've drawn much too sharp a distinction between the "inner" and "outer" world. It's that Cartesian model of human life I'm always lashing at, the butterfly in the suit of armor. So that I can spend 30 hours reading a novel, and not think it's worthwhile for others if I lay it on them in 15 minutes. Since I've developed my new technique, I've gotten novels in an hour or two better than I got them years ago spending 30 hours actually reading them. We must learn to take education at second hand more seriously, or our conversation will never be very good. The people I know best, the students closest to me, talk about the books they're reading (ideally chapter by chapter). If they've just read a book—Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse, for example—they lay it on me. Mike Lawson and Marty Cantrell both lay it on me, and I have it two different times, reenacted in an hour or an hour and a half. (Or we might talk for hours.)

I have Beneath the Wheel better than I had The Brothers Karamazov after reading it when I was 24 and already had an M.A. in philosophy. It must have taken me 50 or 60 hours. I'm a slow reader—and I thought it would never end! I was planning on going into continental philosophy, and Dostoyevsky was someone I had to know something about. So I read The Brothers Karamazov with a spot-light, read it to mine it completely. So I now wonder: what was going on in all those hours in which I slugged my way doggedly through The Brothers Karamazov? What's going on when most people read books? They're not able to articulate anything really significant about them, ordinarily, and so, with Socrates and Wittgenstein, I assume nothing is going on.

Ten years later, when Terry Dalton sat across from me in the S.U., having coffee, with The Brothers Karamazov on the table, I realized that I couldn't even remember who had committed the murder! Ten years later that 50 hours of really hard slugging work I had put in on that novel were gone, vanished without a trace, and I couldn't even remember who committed the murder. Now I can get into Beneath the Wheel just by talking it over with Mike Lawson and Marty Cantrell, and if I ever read it myself, I would really get into it.

I first got into a novel three years ago, when Rick Long and I discussed Swann's Way for three weeks on vacation in Jamaica. One literally recreates the novel. (You don't really have to work out any theory about it.) I don't believe any more that one can get into a novel alone, which is why I had never encountered one until three years ago. The novel is a whole world which calls out for recreating (in your mind). It's not like a sonnet or a painting, which you have whole and entire before you at any moment. It's hard or impossible to do this alone.

This is what the seminar partners are all about. I want to reverse the attitude of Kant and St. Augustine and bring sensual attraction into the process of concentration and learning, where it has always been seen as a competitor, obstacle, or threat. I invite you to take part in a great educational experiment to prove a 2,000 year tradition dead wrong, to prove that sensuality and learning, pleasure and achievement, are not incompatible, and need not pull in opposite directions—Civilization and Its Discontents. Recreation in words is Platonic recollection, and when you do it together, that's Platonic love.

Remember the Platonic maxim, "knowledge is recollection"? What does that mean, “knowledge is recollection”? Following the Catholic philosopher, Etienne Gilson, who says it of St. Augustine, I say it's no recollection of the past, but recollection of the present. Platonic recollection is recollection of the present. Now what can that mean, recollection of the present? Imagine you're listening to Indian music for the first time, or jazz, or folk-rock, or Brahms. You listen to music for the first time and you hear a sequence of sounds, which make no sense and don't move you. If you hear the piece 8 or 10 times, gradually you become aware of what's going on. What you hear is no longer simply sounds in a chronological sequence. Each sound now appears against the background of the sounds that have gone before and are yet to come. And in this larger context a sound becomes a note, and—lo and behold! —the notes form a pattern, and the pattern is music, and you're "carried away."

Platonic recollection is like this. Experience as it happens to you, comes in bit by bit: jarring, physical rough-edged, given. You can't understand it. Then you stand back and begin to recollect: what's all that about that's happening to you? You do this in words. Platonic recollection is recollection in words, recreating the thing by talking about it: once more in words. You discover a whole world of pleasure beyond the pleasures of the first order, the so-called "pleasures of sense"—what I call the pleasure behind the pleasure, which is behind the "bummer" as well. This is the "higher pleasure," Plato talks about, which doesn't depend on any antecedent condition of deprivation, like the pleasure of eating and drinking on hunger and thirst, and doesn't get involved, like sensual pleasure, in the dialectic of habit and familiarity (diminishing returns.)

When you come out of a movie, the movie on the screen was not the artistic movie, the work of art. What transpired on the screen was only an invitation to a work of art, a first-order happening like any other—only greatly speeded up. Or say what we ordinarily call a work of art is only an invitation to a work of art. The real work of art is the movie in your mind, the movie about the movie, your movie about Zefferelli's or Bergman's movie. Well, that's recollection, or recreation in words, and it can be interesting and entertaining, i.e., recreation. Re-creation is recreation: thinking is fun. What a conceit!

Well, we were going to get into Greece today, but there is so much to say. One thing I forgot when I was telling you about the necessity of learning how to write—remember? You can't learn to think for yourself (the way I use the term) unless you learn to write, because that's what writing is, thinking for yourself, all by yourself. Putting it down, in a paragraph or page: what do you think about this, that, or the other? You can't really learn that in the university, because we don't give you sufficient opportunity to write. You write at most 100 pages a year. Consequently, if you want to get a proper education, it's imperative that you fall madly in love immediately—with someone far away (laughter). Then start writing them, out of your longing to be in their presence. When you get the technique, you'll want to present everything to them. That's what it is to love, isn't it? Like the little kid who brings the sea shells to his momma: "Lookit, lookit, sea shells!" That's what my correspondence is like—and my lectures, now. I'm like a kid with a pail of sea shells, and I come up to whoever and say, look at all these marvelous sea shells: the book I read, the lecture I heard, the movie I saw, the person I just met, the situation I'm in—all these things for the other person, in words. So I wrote not 100 pages a year—I don't know how much: three or four page letters twice or three times a week for about seven years—to one person. That was a great Platonic love-affair, in which I exploded in words, and learned how to write in a way which would never have been possible in the university, writing 100 pages a year.

In the first lecture I suggested that you should fall in love with someone right here, with whom you share everything in words, talking. Now I say, if you really want to learn how to write, you've got to fall in love with someone far away, to share everything with them in writing. But what have I committed myself to? That's right, that's how I came across my critique of the monogamistic system (laughter).

To share one's life with another person for its entire span is perhaps a great ideal, but it is ridiculous to make it a demand. So the present institution of wedlock has become an absurdity. Behind it lies what I call the "orange-juice theory of love" (laughter). The reigning view of love, held by all my competitors, is that love is like orange juice: the more you pour into one receptacle, the less you have to pour into another (laughter). If I give any of my love to Susie, I'm afraid I must take it away from Maybelle (laughter). That's true if love is like orange juice, but orange juice is something physical, belonging to the outer world; love is something spiritual, belonging to the inner world. One of the classic human hang-ups is to misunderstand the inner by a false analogy with the outer. The more people I love, the more I grow in love, and the more my love overflows to everyone I love. All monogamy does (any more) is throttle love, for the most part. It means we can't have any other great, wide-open, passionate relationship, whatever this one may be like.

So Socrates, in describing the ladder of love, has it open out gradually, from "one to two to many (all)." The "two" is important here. It means you don't swing from straight-laced monogamy ("one") to indiscriminate profligacy ("many") from Christian marriage to Don Juan. That's what I call the oscillation or pendulum syndrome, swinging from one extreme to another: upper middle-class families producing young drop-outs and revolutionaries, straight-laced Puritanical upbringing producing Henry Millers and Norman Mailers, students who've been force-fed 300 books during their four years in college never opening another book after graduation.

You should now be reading Phaedrus' speech on love. The first speech in the Symposium is given by a young man named Phaedrus, who's lucky to be at such an august gathering at all. He's only about 19, and he's a romantic dreamer type. You will encounter him again, he and Socrates alone now, in the Phaedrus. And so I want you to dive into that first speech and read it like Sherlock Holmes. You should read everything like Sherlock Holmes, alert to details which are packed with more significance than immediately strikes the eye, “clues" that take on significance when they're seen in a pattern, your pattern. That's what Plato gives you in his dialogues—no theory or long straight-line argument, like Emmanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. He's giving you clues, suggestions, startling details which challenge you to make sense out of them, i.e. to think. The point is, why did he say that? What's the point of Phaedrus' speaking that mythic terminology, for example? Phaedrus speaks the language of myth. Why? Of each significant detail, ask yourself: what's that about? What's he claiming? Try to put into one sentence what the fundamental claim of each speech is. Phaedrus' speech captures the Weltanshauung of a young romantic (me). It's the logos of romanticism, Plato's treatise on romanticism, so it's very important. Romanticism is the basic motif of all western history. Christianity is supremely romantic.