Love and Culture: Phaedrus and the Logos of Romanticism

Philosophy, poetry, and religion; daydreaming and adolescence; "appearance" and "reality"; the significant sense of seeing; romanticism and hero-worship; education and human improvement; the Platonic soul; nous and thumos; inspiration; unrequited love; a note on the question: Am I for real?

I want to create a kind of intimate environment here. Remember in the last session I was saying we have to leave stern, harsh, Angst-ridden, controversial "reality" out there. This is an imaginary world, the "Platonic world of ideas." Consequently I like to talk softly. When I start raising my voice, I find I'm getting preacherly, like the men whose rule over your souls I want to contest. They thunder—Luther and Knox and Bunyan and Zwingli and the whole lot—they thunder at you; and I would like to whisper to you.

The seminar groups are now forming. There are about seven on the list, the last time I looked: groups that are not yet complete, that have not yet found a complement. After this class you may form groups, if you would like, outside the hall, or you can go up to my office, 6808 Ellison, 6th floor—with our heads scratching the clouds: philosophy on top, where it belongs. Oh, when I think about it, I'm not sure philosophy belongs on top. I think literature belongs on top of philosophy. I think that, as philosophy was for 1700 years the handmaiden of theology, its deepest, truest, most proper function today is to be the handmaiden of literature, and to introduce you to the wonders that are contained in your dramas, your novels, your poems—which you're not getting. If "heaven is in the library," as I maintain, poetry must replace theology and philosophy remain a bonne a tout faire. We're No. 2 eternally, and must try harder. (For the notion of poetry replacing theology, cf. Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry," Norton Anthology, II, pp. 1108-30.)

Yes, here I am, trying to make announcements, and I keep zonking off into metaphysics. Ah, the groups we were talking about—yes, keep forming the groups. You are under no obligation to do so. Actually, we can only accommodate perhaps a third of you in groups whom we can assist, to whom I can send a volunteer or T.A. We only have 24, and 24 x 10 = only 240. I hope to have 900 in the class, although I slipped last time. I slipped. I lost 100 people with my talk last time. I threatened their faith. I thundered, I suppose.

I was reading Milton's Areopagitica last night, and he says: "Faith and knowledge thrive from exercise, like our limbs and complexion." Isn't that marvelous? "Faith and knowledge thrive from exercise, like our limbs and complexion." Limbs are important; they are the organic principle of power. We must build our limbs, and we build them by exercise. That's the important, essential side of life. And on the other side—complexion, the most superficial, unimportant thing (except, perhaps, as an index), but the thing which pleases others. To have strong limbs pleases you (or should please you, if you weren't so familiar with it that you didn't notice it), but to have a nice complexion is a gift you give others. Half of poetry is about beautiful complexions. So how is your faith to thrive, for yourself or others, without exercise, without challenge? If you guard your faith under your wing, you'll never find out whether it can fly, and, as Nietzsche says, it must ultimately become sickly of so much consideration. You have to throw the things you believe out there, to see how they fare in the rough-and-tumble of life. That's what I do, and that's why my faith is so strong. I live with people who disbelieve in words, education, and culture as much as I disbelieve in Christianity and my faith thrives from the constant challenge. If it weren't that others disbelieved so strongly, I would hardly believe at all--I would just float along with the quiet, satisfying life of a Professor of Portuguese. As it is, I'm on the barricades all the time, bursting with my new belief, born of the contest with those who do not believe. I must find the answers.

I don't want to draw you away from Christianity. I don't want to convert you to or away from anything. I've known two distinguished Christians in my life: Brother Doyle at Loyola High School (who tended the rose-bushes), and Francois Hartmann in Paris. I should never want either of them to be different, and I would be delighted if most people were a little like either of them. I'd love to see some genuine Christianity in the world, although I would still argue that that was not the goal, that we could then begin celebrating life. I believe my challenge can only produce better Christians, as wrestling and weight-lifting can produce more powerful and pleasing bodies. Nietzsche says, "It's only because of us anarchists that monarchs sit securely on their thrones." And in another place, "Whatever teeters needs a little push." I doubt anyone is going to become a better Christian by fleeing my lectures.

So I challenged your faith last time: Christianity, guruism, and the East. Even if I haven't thundered against the East yet, I think you must suspect that I am as hostile to the resigned religious ideas which come to us from the East as I am to the ideas which come to us from the Middle Ages and the fire-breathing theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The history of culture I see as a great conflict. For you it's all one—all lumped into one thing—that great western tradition that you are not sure is worth anything. But Wittgenstein says, "I will teach you differences," so let me begin with this difference: the history of our culture is the eternal conflict between poetry and theology. Poets and theologians are not saying the same thing, nur mit ein bisschen andren Worten. Nur mit ein bisschen andren Worten is from Faust, where Faust attempts to explain his belief to the lovely Margarete—Faust, the pinnacle of culture, attempting to explain to a simple girl what he believes in the great mysterious questions of human life God, freedom, immortality, virtue, goodness. Faust tries to explain, and Margarete replies, "That's just what the Pastor says, only with slightly different words," nur mit ein bisschen andren Worten. For her, you see, wisdom, knowledge, authority is unitary. Of course poets and theologians are saying the same thing. They all belong to the same tradition; we carve their names side by side over the entrances to our junior high schools and libraries. You'll find Bunyan's name next to Pope's; we make no differentiation. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the poets are singing of something quite different from the theologians. Theologians sing of "another world"; poets sing of this world.

And the poets are singing of adultery. Let us for heaven's sake call a spade a spade: the great subject of poetry is adultery. Richard Lovelace writes "To Althea, From Prison" and "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." Matthew Prior's better answer "To Cloe, Jealous" or Alexander Pope's love-letter "Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation." Pope is writing to a girl named Zephalinda, and at the climax of his impassioned love-making, we hear about another woman named Parthenia! What honesty! But the situation is unequivocally adulterous. Adultery, the word seems to say, is for adults. Let's have a look at that honesty; the last stanza of Pope's poem:

Notice how the young Mr. Pope professes his unbounded love when he is not plagued by physical distress or his inability to "do his own thing." His bodily condition and his literary ambitions come first, and he can say this in a love-letter, because of his marvelous wit and style. As Fellini says in 8½, "Happiness is being able to tell the truth (or say what one thinks) without hurting other people." His reference to another woman at the very climax of his lovemaking is a tour de force unparalleled in history. He is not going to express his love for Zephalinda by swearing there is no other being who excites his imagination, nor pledge to love her for all time. The "love" he's speaking of can't be pledged—that's loyalty—and is primarily in and for the present.

Seven Centuries of Verse was not a required book—that was a goof on the part of the bookstore—only recommended. I shall be quoting poetry quite often, trying to get it into your soul, and in that volume you will find almost all the poetry I quote. That's my book of poetry. It's going to be a companion to me, my best companion, for (I would imagine) 10 years, that book. Seven Centuries of Verse can't be read in three weeks, as one of five or six books on a reading list. I am going to try to alter reading lists in universities radically. I would like to laugh them right off the university campus, the present reading lists. Ten volumes of Reinhold Niebuhr is too much. I'm not going to get to know Niebuhr speed-reading my way through ten of his books! Give me a half of one book by Niebuhr, and a seminar partner, and ten weeks to work on it, and we'll know Niebuhr, at least the way we might a person in ten weeks.

Anyway, I lost 100 students because I came on too strong right at the start, thundering at them as though I were a preacher and a follower of Luther and Bunyan. In high school, in my Jesuit high school, we learned the "please-and-shock" method. That was the way we were to make converts. When we got on a bus, we would take a place next to whoever, and we were instructed to engage them in conversation, find out what they like, talk to that, please them and make them feel important, get a good conversation going, and then, all of a sudden, you turn to them and say, "Why aren't you a Catholic?" (Laughter). That was the "please-and-shock" method of Loyola, but now it comes wafting back to me in memory, as I realize that I used the opposite method and lost 100 of my beloved students. I shocked you first, and now I'm going to go on to an attempt to please you.

Ah, have you all seminar partners? Raise your hands, people who haven't got seminar partners. Still a lot. Okay. This is your last chance. Go out there and pair off! And look at people seriously, too. Pick someone who is attractive, whom you would like to be around. You'll study better, get into it more. That's the new lunge forward from Professor Dewey to Professor Freud to Professor Macomber.

Why are you reluctant to avail yourselves of what ought to be the most thrilling opportunity of your life (which I've set up for you)? The right to walk up to your choice of 700 people and say, "Would you like to be seminar partners?" I would go out of my mind at the prospect! But over 100 of you shrink from my instructions, holding back like the wallflower at Booth Tarkington parties. Why? Ah, I think I know. There'll start by being 100 of you out there, and then 80, and then 60, and then 40, and then 20, and 10, and 3—and finally just l—who'll it be? (Laughter.) That man is liable to be very, very great. (Laughter). Because he will be consumed by passion, limitless desire, which I call lust. (Laughter). He'll be consumed by lust—lust for what? To transform himself, from top to bottom.

In Sacred Heart School, Redlands, we used to choose up sides for baseball, football, basketball, anything you'd care to name, and I can't remember exactly—for reasons which Jean-Paul Sartre goes into in detail in his book, Being and Nothingness—but I think I was always the last man chosen. (Laughter). At any rate, I grew up with an immense lust to transform myself. When I graduated from high school I believed—and with pretty good empirical evidence—that I was unlovable. I was so screwed up in high school—you'd never believe it.

They put us all together, all the precocious, very bright, super-ambitious, super-aggressive ones, after the first year of weeding out, in classes called 2-A and 3-A. We sat tight, the teachers moved. A very good system, by the way. You build up personal relations among the students that way. I knew the students who sat next to me and in front of me. We stayed together the whole day; that was vitally important. I will never forget Donovan or Mitch LaRue or McGivern or Steritz or Zimmerman. What's in a name? Who was the most intelligent of that group? Donovan, LaRue, McGivern, Steritz or Zimmerman? Have you guessed? It was Zimmerman (laughter)—Herbert Zimmerman. And who was second? Steritz. And in what order did I name them? Donovan, LaRue, McGivern, Steritz, Zimmerman. My God, my God, I put the most intelligent last! I put my heroes first! (Laughter).

I was unlovable in those days because I was so ambitious. I was consumed from within by the desire that the world be different and I be great. I used to daydream of having $400,000,000—that was the largest sum my mind could compass—senior partner of the law-firm Macomber, McEvoy, Martin. And this enabled me, in the midst of a very drab and sordid and uninteresting high school career, to walk around with great dramas exploding in my head.

The scene I enacted repeatedly was arriving at the office in the morning. I would walk through a large room filled with lovely, well-scrubbed secretaries and junior executives, walk down the aisle, and right and left they would say, "Good morning, Mr. Macomber "Good morning, Mr. Macomber." And I would smile-right and left and say,"Good morning, Good morning!" And then I would go into my office and close the door—and that was the end of the daydream. (Laughter). What did I do in the office? I had no idea; I didn't care! (Laughter). The point was getting there! The point was other people!

And so throughout my pursuit of philosophy, and clear thinking—or deep, profound, ponderous thinking—I went after deep, profound, ponderous thinking rather than nice, clean, clear thinking. That is to say, I studied the Germans instead of the British. I went in for what I call Teutonic metaphysics. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger: Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und Phanomenologischer Philosophie. Shwee, I'm exhausted after I’ve read the title! (Laughter.) The Englishmen like to write titles with nice, clean, simple words, like How To Do Things With Words. That's marvelous! That's what I want to teach you—not Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und Phanomenologischer Philosophie but how to do things with words.

Must we mean what we say? A student asked someone, who mentioned it to me after the last class, "Is he for real?" That's a very good question! (Laughter.) It raises the question of what we mean by "real." Am I really like this? I'm going to begin each session, I think, when I remember (but I always forget things), writing a little maxim, a thought that you're supposed to think about, and maybe I'll comment on it the next day. It'll be a kind of game. I throw you a thought; you can elaborate on it for a couple of days—What's he driving at with that?"—and then I'll tell you. The maxim I was going to put down today (and forgot about) was: Is that athlete sincere? (Laughter.) He appears to be quite splendid and superhuman—is he really? The greatness of the athlete is not behind his performance, though you must train your eye to see his performance. That's what I want to do, train you to see, to see the performance of the man who is distinguished, superior, excellent in any way. To see greatness—that's the miracle and the marvel, and it requires training.

"Seeing," Gilbert Ryle says, "is an achievement word." He means, of course, seeing in any significant sense. The chemist and the child come into his laboratory, and both in a sense see what is there. You and your parents sit down and listen to some acid rock. Both of you hear what is there, but in a relatively uninteresting sense. When I was in college, I loved football games—the next mutation of the daydream. Remember the high school one? Walking to the office as a lawyer? In college it shifts. $400 million vanishes without a trace. Law is replaced by university teaching, and the senior partner of the firm of Macomber, McEvoy, Martin becomes a Mr. Chips figure, who appears at football games in a tweed jacket with 7:50 binoculars strung over his shoulders, and a hip-flask. I loved football games, and I liked especially the pre-game ceremonies at the Kezar club, across from Kezar Stadium.

Where was I? Oh, yes, at the football games in college. Marvel after marvel would transpire on the field, and the guy next to me would say, "Wow, did you see that? Did you see that block? The key block! Fantastic!" I never saw it! (Laughter.) I was looking like crazy but I never saw the greatness that transpired there. I had eyes to see, and I saw not. The reason I couldn't see, presumably, was because I didn't attach enough importance to it; it didn't figure in my life-plan—the same reason most of you do so poorly in school. I could fake it okay, though. I faked it. That's where you have more trouble. It's a theory of motivation I'm trying to present to you here, and the connection between reminiscence and philosophy. Knowledge is recollection. A la recherche du temps perdu.

Oh, we were to get into Phaedrus today. The doctrine of love which Phaedrus proposes, the attitude towards love which he exhibits and talks about, I call romanticism, with the specific form of hero-worship. Phaedrus is Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship. His view of love isn't adapted to the girl half-way down the next block; he isn't talking about Mable. He's talking much more of something as big as Winston Churchill, a force so great it's capable of transforming the world, and seems to come to you from without. I call this the adolescent dream of grandeur. This is the first flush of love—"falling in love" in an adolescent, romantic way. I'm now drawing adolescents and romantics together in a conceit.

Phaedrus praises eros because it's a source of motivation, and creates energy, inspiration. Dante saw Beatrice just twice, and keeled over in a dead swoon both times, then sat down and wrote The Divine Comedy. That's the sort of thing Phaedrus is extolling. He praises love because it is the source of inspiration or motivation, the creative motivation to excel, to be splendid, at least to appear splendid, and create something of the aura which I knew only by myself in my daydreams of the law firm Macomber, McEvoy, Martin. It is daydreaming a deux.

We're not talking about all love, remember; we're talking about one specialized form of love, romantic love. Phaedrus is a young romantic, and when he talks of "love" (eros), he doesn't mean all love, but a specific form of love called romantic. He specifically contrasts the love for which he lives with other forms of love: conjugal, paternal, filial, fraternal, collegial. When this form of love dawns, all the rest shows its unimportance, its triviality. When this form of love bursts upon us, everything else vanishes, "like stars with the rising of the sun," in the great romantic image of Thomas Hobbes.

Phaedrus presents a specific form of love, and argues for it, tries to convince you to pursue it. He is trying to romanticize you with his speech. His speech is not meant simply to say something; it is meant to do something. It is meant to move your hearts and make you more romantic, more feeling and emotional. On what grounds does Phaedrus recommend this form of love? As a source of motivation, or what I call inspiration. When we fall passionately in love, we are set into intense activity, and the activity is an end in itself. You want to please the beloved; that's what the game of love is all about, for young Phaedrus. As soon as he sees a vision of beauty, it is as though the world were bathed in a new light, and it is easier for him to be splendid, because he now wants to be. I say when I am not in love, John Kennedy's life strikes me as more significant than my own. Such a view is typically adolescent, typically at its height in high school. We learn to concentrate for the first time in high school, but not in the geometry classroom.

In this form of love, from Phaedrus' remarks, there is a sharp differentiation between lover and beloved. There is the beautiful one who is attractive, and the lonely one who is attracted. The lonely one is set in motion, attempting to draw the attention and win the approval of the beloved. This activity, trying to be splendid for the beloved, is an end in itself because its goal is excellence—like the great actor, David Garrick, on the stage. Have a look at Goldsmith's magnificent Epitaph: that captures the spirit of Phaedrus. This is the birth of what is called thumos.

I'll try to get used to that thing (projector) but it's taking me a while. I'd like to write things down, but on the other hand, it's doubtless better if the lectures are filled with mysteries, things you don't quite get, things I rush over. "What was that name again?" Kant: K, a, n, t—Kant. It's good if you learn a lot from one another. What I mean to do here is to shock you with a great deal of things to talk about. I want to draw you into activity, thinking about the things I talk about. There will be loose ends all over the place; the challenge is to tie them up, find the unity. There is an immense unity pervading all of this. That’s why I can just sit here and talk about it off the top of my head, because it has become so unified in my experience. It's up to you to find the unity. I am above all an interesting specimen, a specimen of a thinking man. And you are not likely to have many of these in front of you (in a way that you can appreciate) in your entire life.

I don't believe that any improvement is coming from the Vatican, nor from the Eastern gurus, whose doctrine may be beautifully adapted to the banks of the Ganges, but not to the penthouses of Manhattan and the seminar rooms of Santa Barbara. I believe that all improvement of man is improvement of mind, as we gradually open our eyes, as we take our faltering steps toward the light. I worship the humblest school room, like the one portrayed in Ryan's Daughter. What a marvelous old school room! Your professors, therefore, are the word of God. They're all you have; they're your only chance. This involves what I would call hero-worship, and hero-worship is the theme of the first speech of the Symposium—young Phaedrus, the young dreamer.

Your other professors are God as much as I am. (You see, I'm not an exclusive God or a jealous God, like the Christian God. It's a Pantheon I want.) But you won't understand your other profs as readily as you understand me, and you won't see them thinking right in front of you, for the most part, but reporting thinking which they've done all by themselves in the Cartesian posture, in the privacy of their isolated study. I'm thinking for you right here, right in front of you. It's like Michelangelo's Prisoners. We both learn what I think about things at the same time. That's the way you should eventually learn to think.

There is an argument in the speech. Do you see the argument? It's not the feeling of love. Phaedrus calls us away from worshipping or reveling in the feeling of love. I know love is a groovy feeling. I have it myself a lot of the time, and I can't move away from it; I revel in it, the groovy feeling of love. But Phaedrus is not recommending the feeling because it's pleasant; he's recommending the activity that stems from it (or ought to stem from it) because it's immediately rewarding; it's thumos.

Thumos is the second part of the soul in Plato's division. In the Republic Plato distinguishes three "parts" of the soul: (1) nous, or mind, the thing I just exploded about, (2) thumos, or the desire to please and impress others, and (3) desire. Notice that the first two I told you in Greek. Nous is Greek for mind or reason or intellect or understanding, and thumos is the desire for recognition, the desire to please, to be splendid for others, rather than to enjoy anything for ourselves—complexion rather than limbs. Both these are distinctively Greek, nous and thumos, and this is why we remember them by their Greek names, which are not easily translatable into English, or any Christian language. The third element of Plato's soul is common to all mankind, and is called "desire." All men desire and desire equally, and it makes no sense to differentiate between desires, which are irreducibly given, not to be evaluated, and so on. The realm of desire is the realm of nature. But sitting on this part of the soul, for Plato, are two other parts which he calls nous and thumos: pure thinking and the competitive desire to excel, the philosopher and the athlete.

Is Plato's portrayal of the soul valid? Is it true for all times and all places? No, no, of course not. No, it's true of 4th century B.C. Athens. It's the Athenian soul he portrays, the Greek soul, not any old soul. In our culture, for example, nous figures very slightly, and thumos almost not at all. Nous survives only in the present-day multi-versity and thumos in big league baseball, both rather tawdry Roman copies of Greek ideals, the Academy and the Games.

So in our evening's discourse we hear first a young idealist, talking of the inspiration—the energy and impetus to action—that he derives from the vision of something splendid in the world. The beloved here becomes Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. Aristotle says that the whole motion of the universe is towards something which does not itself move, and this unmoved, not source but goal of motion, this abiding goal of all striving, Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. As Professor Fakenheim explained to me in graduate school, the Unmoved Mover is like a beautiful woman on the beach: everything else is in restless motion—she's completely relaxed, tranquil, self-absorbed. Young Phaedrus represents the romantic approach to love, which he doesn't extol as a feeling—not for the groovy feeling but for the activity, the motivation. The benefit of this sort of love he ascribes ultimately to the lover. The real benefit of love accrues to the lover, not to the beloved, because it is he who is restlessly in activity to please the other. So his final claim is, "It's better to love than to be loved," and he even seems to suggest that the best thing of all would be to love and not be loved in return, i.e., unrequited love. And unrequited love is perhaps the greatest theme of romantic literature.

This is a doctrine of love which involves nothing mystic, no reference to God or any injunction or obligation to love. It makes perfect sense. We are all active beings by nature, and our supreme desire is to give (if we only have something to give). Loving makes giving a pleasure, and that's the divine mystery we all pursue. We all desire to be the source and not the beneficiary of activity; it's not only "more blessed," it's easier to give than to receive—a gift or advice or anything else. At the very least, we must say, with Marcel Proust: "The time at our disposal in any day is elastic: the passions we feel expand it; the passions we inspire contract it—and habit fills what remains (presumably when we no longer feel or inspire it)."

I didn't really do justice to that question whether I'm "for real,” I'm afraid, and would like to have another shot at it. That little word "real" (or "really") is what philosophy, or metaphysics, is all about. We used to say that philosophy was an inquiry into the ultimate principles of reality, as though it were something like what scientists are up to, only "deeper," and you can do it in an arm-chair, just by using your head. Now it's fashionable to say, in the English-speaking world at least, that it's reflection on language—which of course a man can do in an arm-chair, just by using his head. This is called "linguistic analysis." In linguistic analysis, one way of approaching any question is to ask how a word is ordinarily used, and this technique is called "ordinary language philosophy." Even though I'm interested in Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche, who are thought to be concerned with ultimate reality-questions rather than questions of language and the proper use of words, I like to think of myself as an "ordinary language philosopher," and attempt always to think in ordinary language which any man can understand.

So take that little word "real" (or "really"). How is it ordinarily used? It isn't ordinarily used in the way traditional philosophers seem to have thought, as the basis of questions of "ultimate reality." No ordinary man would think of asking, as idealists are thought to have asked, whether a table or chair or physical objects generally or the entire physical world is real—absurd question! We talk of "real gold" or "real man" or a "real friend" or "real prime minister." We don't ask whether a thing is "real"(as German idealists are thought to ask of a chair or table) but whether a person is "for real." What we mean by "real" here is "valuable" or "genuine" or "exemplary," whether it measures up to some yardstick or ideal of what the thing in question ought properly to be.

It's in this sense that philosophy or metaphysics is an inquiry into the ultimate principles of "reality." It's a cultural question, not a (quasi-) factual or scientific one, a question we have to go around peering and probing to find the answer to. What the philosopher is up to is utterly different from what the scientist is up to, as he peers at the universe through his telescopes and microscopes. It's reflection on a culture's (or man's) implicit sense of values, and the yardstick (built into our language) of what we regard as genuine or exemplary, what we regard as real achievement real life, real love or a real friend (though we’re more likely to say "true")--and especially a real man.

The great systems of metaphysics down through the ages—Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Hobbes, Kant, Dewey, Heidegger—will tell you what a particular epoch regarded as a "real man." Not simply a man, that minimal question—as people seem to be forever thinking—but a real man, the sort of thing we ought all to be pursuing, as when we ask someone to "be a man," or a "real man." That's value stuff, not fact stuff, going on there, and that's what philosophy is all about—the implicit goals we're pursuing and are not aware of because they're concealed in the ordinary language we all take utterly for granted as reflecting the world as it ("really") is. Words like "sinful," "pure," "patriotic," "objective," "just," "property," "love," "egoism," "individuality," "sick," "abnormal," "deviant," "pervert"—all with a view of life underlying them which the philosopher is hell-bent on bringing to light (especially in himself). What am I all about (as I find it reflected in my judgment of all manner of questions, or what it is I value, reflected in the way I use words)? Not just what the words mean ("objectively": "really") but the way I use words, my words.

This is what Socrates must mean by Gnothi seauton, Know thyself, which he makes the (real) goal of philosophical discourse. Philosophy existed for some time, from the pre-Socratics through Plato, only in the adjectival form, and always modifying "discourse" (I don't think even "way of life"). With Aristotle it first becomes a substantive, or noun—a set discipline, almost a method, or body of doctrine. General truths first come into being with Aristotle, who accuses Socrates and Plato of having neglected them.

We can see how important language is, as a key to what is going on in human being at the depths. It's at this point that the two great philosophical movements of the 20th century, existentialism and linguistic analysis, can be seen to converge, despite their two apparently quite different concerns: what's going on in the depths of a man's soul, and what's going on in language, particularly the ordinary language which is so fundamental to our thinking and whole approach to (real) life, and which we take so much for granted that, like the glasses on our nose (or better yet, as we can now say, a pair of contact-lenses with which we were born), we are scarcely ever conscious of them, can hardly become conscious of them, in any "objective" or ultimately satisfying way.

So while I was a graduate-student and young lecturer in philosophy at Toronto, had just left the Church and was under psychoanalysis, and used to writhe on my bed sometimes, convinced that my life was simply projecting an image, and that behind the image I was sick, or hungup, or sinful or fixated at an early stage of sexual and emotional development, a pervert or broken-mechanism—I searched wildly through all the available terminology: what was I, then?—it was really a linguistic question I was enmeshed in, not a real or existential one. I was I, then as now, and the only question was how this could be put in words. The psychological conflict and spiritual debacle, which I experienced at the time, were all a consequence of this, of which I had not the slightest idea, as I pursued my studies in philosophy, combing its history for all the most significant language in which human life had been described, without any sense of the relevance of this to my "real" problem (or "real life").

I thought the psychotherapist held the key to my life, and that it entailed something about the world of which I was unaware (I suppose, how a man functions). I never dreamt my professors of philosophy held the key, much less that I would one day have it. (I was too Christian for that.) I had to get to know Ludwig Wittgenstein and the approach to philosophy which I called "linguistic analysis" before this could dawn on me—that ultimately our lives come down to the way we use language—and this didn't happen until I came to Santa Barbara. It all really began to happen at the time I read my great namesake's Henry IV, Part I, and encountered the incredible Falstaff.

All that time I was paying half my salary for psychotherapy, and feeling imprisoned behind a mask, struggling to claw my way out, and writhing on my bed in the Angst-ridden thought that I was nothing (Heidegger's Nichts, Sartre’s neant, Camus' absurd man), I was wrestling with words like "deviant," "perverted," and "fag." I was I (as I say), then as now, but I simply couldn't accept myself if those were the terms which best ultimately described me. I couldn't bear the thought of being a "fag"; it meant I ought to wear purple pants and affect a limp wrist. I thought I was "no man," in Falstaff's terms—or not a "real man," as we would say today.

I was not a man—not a real man--because I was no good at all (an utter failure) in bed and battle, which I took to be the two criteria of real manhood. I was sterile, for some reason I couldn't understand (that's where the broken mechanism came in), and cowardly—utterly spineless—for a "reason" I could understand all too well, but couldn't honor: I was extremely sensitive to pain (or "effeminate") and always shrank from bodily contact. I thought this meant that I didn't believe in anything—or it would give me the courage of conviction, the "faith that drives out fear."

I was no good in bed and battle, the two places where one ordinarily proves one's manliness, proves oneself a "real man." I knew I was a cowardly pervert, and could not believe I'd ever be a "real man," or that life would offer any satisfaction or fulfillment for me. How could a cowardly pervert ever be a real man, or know the satisfaction I was after? I had it all worked out apodictically, with mathematical necessity: it could never be. That was why I was writhing on my bed, and furiously studying Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel with Profs. Edison, Goudge, and Fackenheim, seeing how three of the greatest minds that ever lived approached the ultimate question of reality, without the slightest idea what that meant. Thinking it was all purely speculative, abstract, Ivory Tower stuff, not anything which would ever alter or transform my life. (That was the hope I pinned on Freud.) Thinking it was all simply a game with words to be played by cultivated people in Student Unions and common rooms, to make life more exalted. (And of course it's that too—but not only that.)

I wanted desperately to marry and be like other people—or at least seem like other people. I never worried much about the cowardice (though it bothered me), but I was outraged (or grief-stricken) that I would never know physical or sexual satisfaction—or, as I put it to myself then, that I would never know love. "Love" only meant what religion meant, particularly Christianity, which I had lost my belief in, or something grounded in sensuality or sexuality, and (really) possible only between a man and a woman, from which I found myself excluded (like Cyrano de Bergerac) for some reason I couldn't understand. I wanted to be married, wanted desperately to be married, feeling I would not know real fulfillment in life in any other way.

I never really minded being different from other people, only I was afraid I was hung-up, deficient in some very serious way—at the very least, biased and infantile—with my "unnatural desires." (I shudder at the words even now.) I was afraid that I was ill, and that I would never be able to see clearly with my deviant, deficient spectacles. At the very least I would always see life from a point of view which the vast majority of men did not share, which I could hardly imagine anyone sharing. As James Baldwin might be taken to be writing not simply of love, but of darky love, or homosexual love. All the influences working on me, from Freud and the poets to the mass media and popular songs, told me that I was simply missing it, basically ("really")—and we all take ourselves to be, in the first instance, what society takes us to be. This was the terror posed by my homosexuality, which had me writhing on my bed (when I had a bit of spare time) and paying half my salary to be "cured," straightened out, made like other people—conked, basically.

I find conked hair unaesthetic, I might say, because a Negro is trying to make his hair look like a Honky's. But what is the force of "because" in this statement? Really, it just doesn't look good—all plastered down and not quite straight. Black hair is so superb, when it doesn't pretend to be something else. It's much more "cultured” than ours: it stops growing, checks or inhibits itself for the good of the whole, (and, as I like to think, primarily for aesthetic reasons). By letting his hair grow to its full extent, the black achieves what is called the "natural," (which I would like to rechristen the "cultural" on the basis of my discovery just now). If the Honky let his hair grow any way it liked, it would drag along the ground and trip him up. And our hair symbolizes our culture—the thing blacks and other dissident minorities now protest so violently against—that we do not exhibit very much concern for the whole, the challenge Plato takes on in the Republic.

I hope blacks are not simply exhibiting ethnic pride when they let their hair "do its own thing" (Henry Moore's technique with wood, following the grain, and Heidegger's aesthetic). I hope they see it aesthetically—which, in a sense, would mean they appreciated the Honky's hair as well. I don't believe one has a genuinely aesthetic view of music, both classical and folk-rock (Mozart and Peter, Paul, and Mary), until one can respond significantly to both, and rejoice in the difference. This is the gulf which separates aesthetic from moral, religious, or political approval, and all culture depends on it, along with the voluntary restraint of power, which Negro hair already exhibits. It might be that I have always been appalled at conked hair because it symbolized precisely what I was doing to myself—although, as I say, the force of "because" here is a profound mystery.

My great fear, as I was going through what I now call my existential/psychiatric phase (which I then took to be "life"), was not about what I might never be, but about what I might never see. My homosexuality was not a threat to my so-called real life, but to my chosen or professional life. I didn't mind being excluded from things (like conflict, sexual-relations, and the family) which I didn't particularly enjoy anyway, but I was afraid that, being excluded from such things, I would never be able to understand them, which I had made the overriding project of my life in the same way Bobby Fisher has made chess. I was afraid I would always be mediocre in my craft, detached from "real life" and talking from hearsay. That's what was so scary. For I was banking on philosophy to provide compensation for everything I was missing in life—which I greatly exaggerated, taking myself simply for an aberration. I hoped that Freud might repair my broken mechanism and save me from my anti-sensual upbringing, but psychoanalysis puts the same exaggerated weighting on sexuality as my Jesuit education.

It was two figures out of literature who finally got me to accept myself—in fact, to revel in and celebrate myself, including my inadequacies (which are an integral part of the whole): Falstaff and Socrates. Falstaff was a brilliant coward—Coward/Falstaff/Shakespeare I call him now—and redeemed me (redeems us all) with his brilliant words justifying cowardice. Falstaff is for the pub, not for the battle-ground, as Oscar Wilde is for the drawing-room, not the frontier and John Wayne for the frontier, not the drawing-room. I saw so many cowboy movies as I was growing up, and I always had a queasy feeling thinking how I'd have made out in that world. How absurd! If you transplant an orchid to an iceberg or a Polar bear to the Congo, of course they're in trouble! I was a product of a hot-house environment: the pub, the drawing-room, the senior common room, the seminar. I was precisely what everyone says we ought to be (in that environment): peace-loving, considerate, accommodating—and blamed myself for failing to have the qualities we extol in literature, movies, and popular songs. Do you see the utter bifurcation of our values between the office and church, Saturday night and Sunday morning, the real life which is right around us and the dream of greatness far away? This bifurcation occurs in Pausanias, with the distinction between the "heavenly" and "earthly" (or "common") Aphrodite.

Falstaff showed me I was as much a man as Harry Hotspur or John Wayne, in a different context—where their greatness would trip them up. We two types are both what people want, and accordingly value, under radically different or opposed conditions. I suppose I would rather be in a drawing-room with John Wayne than on the frontier with Oscar Wilde, but that is simply a bias of my animality, the same thing which makes me value my dentist over Shakespeare. (If one had to go, it would have to be the Bard, I'm afraid.) What if it were for all eternity, like Shaw's Don Juan in Hell or Sartre's No Exit? Oh dear! I might then have to pay for all eternity for my animal bias.

Now the question is: how would I like to be John Wayne, and for all eternity? I do not say: if one were John Wayne. The active man might rejoice in this. Men rejoice in everything imaginable—that's one of my issues with Christianity, which seeks to impose a unitary ideal of life, one to which we are all committed, whatever the environment and our most intimate subjective tastes (as these two, of course, belong together). Not if one were John Wayne, if I were John Wayne—or had him as my sole companion for all eternity. All these ideas of "eternity" are playful, but I'm playing my life like an Egyptian pharaoh or Viking chieftain at the "second order", as though I were to be my own sole companion for all eternity, and the question is what I can take with me. I don't care so much about the "fact of the matter." It still strikes me as the way to live, even if total extinction proves to be the inconceivable "fact of the matter." This is the philosophy of "As If..." It keeps me most quiveringly alive, whatever the eventual "fact of the matter," the function which "heaven" used to perform, thrilling and inspiring men and calling them eternally up, when the cathedrals were white.

Falstaff first gave me a sense of my own manhood, my own "reality" in something more than the physical sense, and a playful sense of eternity, my eternity. Nietzsche suspects our love of others typically reflects boredom with ourselves, and I am over this hangup. As Rick Long says, "communication is making oneself real for another person” (including, I would add, oneself), and I'm pretty good at that. I would not mind having myself as an eternal companion, and will continue throughout my life making preparations for the "journey." Falstaff taught me my own proper sense of manhood, which I had never encountered anywhere else—just being good with words; that and nothing more. He taught me that manhood doesn't mean one thing, but many things, and reconciled me to my cowardice—so much so that I can now trumpet it from this stage, confident (with W.H. Auden) that:

Then Socrates reconciled me to my sexual deficiency, and gave me another sense of eternity. I had known for a long time that he is called the "barren midwife," but I had never translated that expression into terms which made sense in "real 1ife," in my life. The "midwife" is the teacher, who does not pour things into a student but draws them out—the proper sense of education. He is "barren" because he cannot give birth but only bring to birth; he is sterile, or impotent. The "barren midwife" is accordingly the sterile teacher, and lo and behold (!), that was me.

Now I know that Socrates had children, as I always somehow knew that I would not. His sterility or impotence is not literal or physical, but spiritual and symbolic. He cannot teach people anything, at least anything important—how to live, what to do. But there is a whole tradition of philosophers who never give birth. Besides all the philosophers of the Middle Ages, when the tradition of the celibate teacher gets going, the list of great minds who apparently shared something of my "hang-up" is illustrious indeed, including Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Liebniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, C.S. Pierce and Wittgenstein—all "barren midwives" in more than the symbolic sense.

In the Christian tradition, this is made a requirement, with the tradition of celibacy of clergy. For 1700 years of our cultural history, one can only be admitted to the life of learning by foregoing the prerogative of having children, leading to Nietzsche's aphorism, Aut liberi aut libri, "with children or books" (but not both). The role which homosexuals have played in the history of our culture is absolutely staggering, especially given the tremendous opprobrium in which it has been held, and the concealment and deception this has brought in its wake. Besides Socrates and Plato, and virtually all the Greeks, who held it to be noble, (as we learn from Phaedrus and Pausanius), the list includes Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Lichtenberg, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin—to name only those who happen to have come to my attention. I have never investigated this question, although it now strikes me as eminently worthy of investigation. I never cared much about homosexuals, or Gay Liberation, until I read recently, in an anonymous article by a homosexual playwright explaining why he chose to write under a pseudonym: "The homosexual will never win pride in himself until his own leading figures stand up for him." I'm only now beginning to realize how long and illustrious that list is—as I lash out at the hypocrisy that condemns and conceals it.

The history of culture has largely been made by homosexuals, bachelors, childless men, and unhappily married men. I am convinced that these are all basically the same phenomenon, like the failures, dropouts, radicals and apathy in the present-day university. It's the happily married—or "normal" man who's the exception: Blake, Johnson, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence. Learning (or culture) and marriage have been in conflict since the Middle Ages, when we made the two incompatible by fiat. Then all learned became childless—the clerics who were freed from the onerous demands of life to devote themselves entirely to the life of the spirit—all became "barren midwives." That's why when you have undergone the initiation rites and qualify as "learned," we stamp you all—men and women alike—Bachelor.

So two great figures out of literature finally brought me to life, my own life, and gave me a sense of being "real" in a way not generally recognized in our society. Falstaff taught me that I could be a “real man” without courage, and Socrates that I could be a “real man” even though I was impotent and would never know what ordinarily passes for “love.” I could be real (a “real man”) even without "balls" in the ordinary sense. Falstaff is the wit whom I would be delighted to have as an eternal life-companion, Socrates the paradigm of the teacher for all time, whom I strive eternally to emulate, and call "the founder and master-craftsman of my art." Both brilliant men of words, with an altogether different make-up from the normal man, the first order man, or the man of action.

I'm sorry if you find all this embarrassing. I'm trying to show you that everything can be brought to expression, transformed by style. I don't find it in the least embarrassing any more. It's fascinating—I learn so much, mulling it over constantly (Platonic recollection: once more in words). I'm trying to show how philosophy can become relevant to "real life," your lives, to get you talking about a whole host of crucial and fascinating questions which we don't ordinarily talk about in what passes for "communication" in this crazy world. You too are somehow wrestling with that little word "real," striving to be a real something, even if you think of this only as your real selves. I have no doubt any more that I am a real philosopher, a real teacher and this gives me whatever tenuous claim I have (as anyone has) to being a "real man." This is likely to be the case with you too—that you will find yourselves in and through some "thing" which you throw yourselves into with passion, with reckless abandon, much as Phaedrus recommends. That's my conviction anyway.

So am I "for real"? Well, as a philosopher, I'm not so much concerned with the answer to that question as with the way it's approached. You should peer at my words, not behind them—asking if I'm "sincere" or really mean all the things I say. My reality is in my words, not behind them, like the athlete and his performance. I'm the very opposite of a Christmas card with printed name. There's nothing "behind" words in the final analysis. We don't really have to be so hung-up on the question of "sincerity," in ourselves or others. (That's a Christian myth.) We are ultimately the things we do and say, not something eternally concealed behind all the things we do and say.

That's what you must concentrate on, with all your friends and associates: the things they do and say, not something lurking mysteriously behind everything they do and say. If you don't see this, you'll be caught eternally in the game we play as children, plucking the petals of a daisy: He loves me, he loves me not... (loves me on Tuesday, but not on Wednesday and Thursday, and then loves me again, or professes to, over the weekend). This is true to everyone, but especially to me. My "reality"—what I call "real"—is in my words, not behind them. Like the love-poem. It makes no sense to ask if John Donne and Andrew Marvell are "sincere," if they really feel the love they write about. The love is right there in the words—the poem is the love—right there before our eyes, for anyone who can see.