“The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

This epic fourteenth century poem is one wild ride from its beginnings in Hell, before passing through Purgatory, and into Paradise. The poem’s hero, Dante, though still mortal, is guided through the lands of the dead by Virgil. “I once was man. Both of my parents came from Lombardy, and both claimed Mantua as native city. And I was born, though late, sub Julio, and lived in Rome under the good Augustus—the season of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang the righteous son of Anchises who had come from Troy when flames destroyed the pride of Ilium.” Dante is first led by Virgil through the torments in each of the circles of the Inferno. “How many up above now count themselves great kings, who’ll wallow here like pigs in slime, leaving behind foul memories of their crimes!”

Dante, the poet, understandably drops many references to classical myths during the course of the epic. “Within that flame, Ulysses and Diomedes suffer; they, who went as one to rage, now share one punishment. And there, together in their flame, they grieve over the horse’s fraud that caused a breach—the gate that let Rome’s noble seed escape. There they regret the guile that makes the dead Deidamia still lament Achilles; and there, for the Palladium, they pay.” However, this is no doubt a Christian poem and the repeated juxtapositions between God and Lucifer are stark. “If he was once as handsome as he now is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows against his Maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its source in him!”

Another theme that runs through the Comedia is the decay and sinfulness that abounds in contemporary Italy. “Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows, you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas, no queen of provinces but of bordellos! That noble soul had such enthusiasm: his city’s sweet name was enough for him to welcome—there—his fellow-citizen; But those who are alive within you now can’t live without their warring—even those whom one same wall and one same moat enclose gnaw at each other. Squalid Italy, search round your shores and then look inland—see if any part of you delight in peace. What use was there in Justinian’s mending your bridle, when the saddle’s empty? Indeed, were there no reins, your shame were less.” At one point Virgil also explains his own personal circumstances, so to speak. “Before the spirits worthy of ascent to God had been directed to this mountain, my bones were buried by Octavian. I am Virgil, and I am deprived of Heaven for no fault other than my lack of faith.” He continues to describe the fate of all those who also lacked Christian faith, through no fault of their own. “There is a place below that only shadows—not torments—have assigned to sadness; there, lament is not an outcry, but a sigh. There I am with the infant innocents, those whom the teeth of death had seized before they were set from human sinfulness; there I am with those souls who were not clothed in the three holy virtues—but who knew and followed after the other virtues.”

As Dante and Virgil transition from the Inferno to Purgatorio the tone of the whole poem shifts and begins to lighten. “When all the staircase lay beneath us and we’d reached the highest step, then Virgil set his eyes insistently on me and said: “My son, you’ve seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see. I’ve brought you here through intellect and art; from now on, let your pleasure be your guide; you’re past the steep and past the narrow paths. Look at the sun that shines upon your brow; look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs born here, spontaneously, of the earth. Among them, you can rest or walk until the coming of the glad and lovely eyes—those eyes that, weeping, sent me to your side. Await no further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole—to act against that will would be to err: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.”” Dante finally catches sight of his beloved, who has brought him on this journey. “Although the veil she wore—down from her head, which was encircled by Minerva’s leaves—did not allow her to be seen distinctly, her stance still regal and disdainful, she continued, just as one who speaks but keeps until the end the fiercest parts of speech: “Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am!””

In Paradiso, the poem shifts tone again and becomes a more overt explication for Christian belief. ‘To mortal eyes our justice seems unjust; that this is so, should serve as evidence for faith—not heresy’s depravity.” Dante feels the awe of Christ himself. “Thus, if the penalty the Cross inflicted is measured by the nature He assumed, no one has ever been so unjustly stung; yet none was ever done so great a wrong, if we regard the Person made to suffer, He who had gathered Himself that nature. Thus, from one action, issued differing things: God and the Jews were pleased by one same death; earth trembled for that death and Heaven opened.” As Dante, the hero, travels through Paradiso, Dante, the poet, tackles the minutia of Christian theology. “How distant, o predestination, is your root from those whose vision does not see the Primal Cause in Its entirety! And, mortals, do take care—judge prudently: for we, though we see God, do not yet know all those whom He has chosen; but within the incompleteness of our knowledge is a sweetness, for our good is then refined in this good, since what God wills, we too will.”

Dante concludes with words of hope for those still living justly, amongst all those who sin. “Oh, in those richest coffers, what abundance is garnered up for those who, while below, on earth, were faithful workers when they sowed! Here do they live, delighting in the treasure they earned with tears in Babylonian exile, where they had no concern for gold. Here, under the high son of God and Mary, together with the ancient and the new councils, he triumphs in his victory—he who is keeper of the keys of glory.” Dante ends with words of love, which triumphs over all. ““O lady, you in whom my hope gains strength, you who, for my salvation, have allowed your footsteps left in Hell, in all the things that I have seen, I recognize the grace and benefit that I, depending upon your power and goodness, have received. You drew me out from slavery to freedom by all those paths, by all those means that were within your power. Do, in me, preserve your generosity, so that my soul, which you have healed, when it is set loose from my body, be a soul that you will welcome.” So did I pray.”

“Timaeus” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

This is not a dialogue, but mainly a long speech delivered by Timaeus, an Italian philosopher, likely invented by Plato. Timaeus attempts to explain the creation of the Universe, followed by the creation of Man. He begins by describing the nature of the universe. “Since the god wanted nothing more than to make the world like the best of the intelligible things, complete in every way, he made it a single visible living thing, which contains within itself all the living things whose nature it is to share its kind.”

After the god formed the lesser gods, the daemons, and the four main elements, next humans were formed. “The first innate capacity they would of necessity come to have would be sense perception, which arises out of forceful disturbances. This they all will have. The second would be love, mingled with pleasure and pain. And they would come to have fear and spiritedness as well, plus whatever goes with having these emotions, as well as their natural opposites. And if they could master these emotions, their lives would be just, whereas if they were mastered by them, they would be unjust. And if a person lived a good life throughout the due course of his time, he would at the end return to his dwelling place in his companion star, to live a life of happiness that agreed with his character.”

Timaeus next speaks of the Soul. “We must pronounce the soul to be the only thing there is that properly possesses understanding. The soul is an invisible thing, whereas fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as visible bodies. So anyone who is a lover of understanding and knowledge must of necessity pursue as primary causes those that belong to intelligent nature, and as secondary all those belonging to things that are moved by others and that set still others in motion by necessity…. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been nor ever will be surpassed.” However, Timaeus also speaks of a second Soul housed within man. “And within the body they [the gods] built another kind of soul as well, the mortal kind, which contains within it those dreadful but necessary disturbances: pleasure, first of all, evil’s most powerful lure; then pains, that make us run away from what is good; besides these, boldness also and fear, foolish counselors both; then also the spirit of anger hard to assuage, and expectation easily led astray. These they fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust, and so, as was necessary, they constructed the mortal type of soul.”

Timaeus speaks of the dichotomy between the Necessary and the Intellect. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe.” Next, Timaeus speaks of the nature of evil. He states, “no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them.”

Timaeus goes on to relate the nature of Forms and detail the difference between Understanding and Belief. “If understanding and true opinion are distinct, then these “by themselves” things definitely exist—these Forms, the objects not of our sense perception, but of our understanding only. But if—as some people think—true opinion does not differ in any way from understanding, then all the things we perceive through our bodily senses must be assumed to be the most stable things there are. But we do have to speak of understanding and true opinion as distinct, of course, because we can come to have one without the other, and the one is not like the other. It is through instruction that we come to have understanding, and through persuasion that we come to have true belief. Understanding always involves a true account while true belief lacks any account. And while understanding remains unmoved by persuasion, true belief gives in to persuasion. And of true belief it must be said, all men have a share, but of understanding, only the gods and a small group of people do.” Timaeus goes into more detail on the nature of Forms. “That which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding to study it.” Finally, he states, “There are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things which existed even before the universe came to be.”

Finally, Timaeus speaks about the necessity of proportion in the well-ordered life. “Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned…. In determining health and disease or virtue and vice no proportion or lack of it is more important than between body and soul…. There is in fact one way to preserve oneself, and that is not to exercise the soul without exercising the body, nor the body without the soul, so that each may be balanced by the other and so be sound.” Timaeus ends by going back to philosophy and the search for the higher truths. “If a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.” However, we must remember that we cannot ever be sure how much Plato, himself, agreed with this account of Creation, which he has sketched out through the imaginary voice of Timaeus.

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir)

Kafka’s most famous short story begins with the classic line, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The story takes place entirely in the Samsa apartment, in which Gregor’s parents and younger sister also live. Much of the tale takes place inside Gregor’s head, as he tries to fully inhabit the being of an insect, while trying to disturb his family as little as possible. This will prove hard to do. After all, they understandably find his new body disgusting. They speak about him as if he can no longer understand them. Of course, he cannot speak in a human tongue anymore to tell them that he does indeed comprehend. Eventually, Gregor gets used to his new form. “For mere recreation he had formed the habit of crawling crisscross over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed hanging suspended from the ceiling; it was much better than lying on the floor; one could breath more feely; one’s body swung and rocked lightly.” Soon, Gregor finds out how tightly bound family bonds actually are. “Grete’s words had succeeded in disquieting her mother, who took a step to one side, caught sight of the huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was really conscious that what she saw was Gregor, screamed in a loud, hoarse voice: “Oh God, oh God!” fell with outspread arms over the sofa as if giving up, and did not move. “Gregor!” cried his sister, shaking her fist and glaring at him. This was the first time she had directly addressed him since his metamorphosis.”

“Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Werner S. Pluhar)

This book is a slog, but it rewards with a comprehensive system that pushes the bounds of pure reason to its limits. First, Kant has to define terms. “By critique of pure reason… I do not mean a critique of books and systems, but I mean the critique of our power of reason as such, in regard to all cognitions after which reason may strive independently of all experience. Hence I mean by it the decision as to whether a metaphysics as such is possible or impossible…. Transcendental philosophy is the system of all principles of pure reason…. But the critique is not yet that science itself, because it carries the analysis [of a priori concepts] only as far as is required for making a complete judgement about synthetic a priori cognition. The foremost goal in dividing such a science is this: no concepts whatever containing anything empirical must enter into this science.”

Kant next delineates the terms: experiences, intuitions, categories, concepts, and appearances. “All experience, besides containing the senses’ intuition through which something is given, does also contain a concept of an object that is given in intuition, or that appears. Accordingly, concepts of objects as such presumably underlie all experiential cognition as its a priori conditions. Hence presumably the objective validity of all categories, as a priori concepts, rests on the fact that through them alone is experience possible…. Hence the transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts has a principle to which the entire investigation must be directed: viz., the principle that these concepts must be cognized as a priori conditions for the possibility of experience…. If concepts serve as the objective basis for the possibility of experience, then—precisely because of this—they are necessary…. We have a pure imagination, as a basic power of the human soul which underlies a priori all cognition…. By means of this transcendental function of the imagination the two extreme ends, viz., sensibility and understanding, must necessarily cohere; for otherwise sensibility would indeed yield appearances, but would yield no objects of an empirical cognition, and hence no experience. Actual experience consists in apprehension of appearances, their association (reproduction), and thirdly their recognition; in this third [element] (which is the highest of these merely empirical elements of experience), such experience contains concepts, which make possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition. Now these bases of the recognition of the manifold, insofar as they concern merely the form of an experience as such, are the categories. Hence the categories underlie all formal unity in the synthesis of imagination…. We cannot think an object except through categories; we cannot cognize an object thought by us except through intuitions corresponding to those concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible, and this [sensible] cognition is empirical insofar as its object is given. Empirical cognition, however, is experience. Consequently no cognition is possible for us a priori except solely of objects of possible experience…. As far as pure intuitions as well as pure concepts of understanding are concerned, they are elements of cognition that are found in us a priori.”

Next, Kant explicates the difference between analytic and synthetic judgements. “The supreme principle of all synthetic judgments is this: Every object is subject to the conditions necessary for synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience. Thus synthetic judgments are possible a priori if we refer the formal conditions of a priori intuition, the synthesis of imagination, and the necessary unity of this synthesis in a transcendental apperception to a possible experiential cognition as such.” Next, the difference between understanding and experience. “Everything that understanding draws from itself, rather than borrows from experience, it still has for the sake of nothing other than use in experience only. The principles of pure understanding—whether constitutive a priori (like the mathematical principles) or merely regulative (like the dynamical ones)—contain nothing but, as it were, the pure schema for possible experience. For experience has its unity solely from the synthetic unity that the understanding confers, originally and on its own, on the synthesis of imagination by reference to apperception; appearances, as data for a possible cognition, must a priori already have reference to, and be in harmony with, that synthetic unity. Now, these rules of understanding not only are true a priori; but, by containing the basis for the possibility of experience as the sum of all cognition wherein objects may be given to us, they are even the source of all truth.”

Kant moves on to cognition and reason. “All our cognition starts from the senses, proceeds from there to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which there is found in us nothing higher to work on the material of intuition and bring it under the highest unity of thought…. There is of reason, as there is of understanding, a merely formal—i.e., logical—use, where reason abstracts from all content of cognition. But there is also a real use, where reason itself contains the origin of certain concepts and principles that it borrows neither from the senses nor from understanding…. We shall distinguish reason from understanding by calling it our power of principles…. I would, therefore, call cognition from principles only that cognition wherein I cognize the particular in the universal through concepts. Thus any syllogism is a form of deriving a cognition from a principle…. The understanding may be considered a power of providing unity of appearances by means of rules; reason is then the power of providing unity of the rules of understanding under principles. Hence reason initially never deals with experience or any object, but deals with the understanding in order to provide the understanding’s manifold cognitions with a priori unity through concepts…. The designation, concept of reason, even if considered provisionally, already shows that such a concept refuses to be confined within experience…. Concepts of reason serve for comprehending, whereas concepts of understanding serve for understanding (viz., perceptions). If concepts of reason contain the unconditioned, then they concern something to which all experience is subject but which itself is never an object of experience.”

Kant explains idealism. “The existence of all objects of outer senses is doubtful. I call this uncertainty the ideality of outer appearances, and the doctrine of this ideality is called idealism…. Only what is in ourselves can be perceived directly…. Therefore the existence of an actual object outside me (if this word is taken in its intellectual meaning) is never given straightforwardly in perception. Rather, perception is a modification of inner sense…. Hence, I cannot, in fact, perceive external things, but can only infer their existence from my inner perception…. Hence by an idealist we must mean, not someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses, but someone who merely does not grant that this existence is cognized through direct perception, and who infers from this that we can never through any possible experience become completely certain of their actuality…. By transcendental idealism of all appearances I mean the doctrinal system whereby we regard them, one and all, as mere presentations and not things in themselves.”

Finally, Kant tentatively begins to pick through his theme, pure reason. “Apart from transcendental philosophy, there are two further pure rational sciences, the one having a merely speculative and the other a practical content: pure mathematics and pure morality.” Kant moves on to pure reason’s relationship with time and, therefore, causality and free will. “Pure reason, as a merely intelligible power, is not subjected to the form of time, nor consequently to the conditions of temporal succession. The causality of reason in its intelligible character by no means arises, or starts at a certain time, in order to produce an effect…. Of reason… one cannot say that the state wherein it determines the power of choice is preceded by another state wherein that state itself is determined…. Hence reason is the permanent condition of all the voluntary actions under which the human being appears. Each of these actions, even before it occurs, is predetermined in the human being’s empirical character. But in regard to the intelligible character, of which the empirical character is only the sensible schema, no before or after holds, and every action—regardless of its time relation to other appearances—is the direct effect of the intelligible character of pure reason…. In reason there is no antecedent state determining the subsequent state, and that reason therefore does not belong at all in the series of sensible conditions that make appearances necessary according to natural laws. Reason is present to, and is the same in, all actions of the human being in all circumstances of time…. Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. Nor can it have any other business. For what are given to it are not objects for the unity of the experiential concept, but cognitions of understanding for the unity of the concept of reason, i.e., for the unity of coherence in a principle. The unity of reason is the unity of a system.”

Kant now circles back around to the reality of the transcendental and to the nature of God. “One asks, first, whether there is something that is distinct from the world and contains the basis of the world order and of the coherence thereof according to universal laws, then the answer is: without doubt. For the world is a sum of appearances; hence there must be some basis of these appearances that is transcendental, i.e., thinkable only for the pure understanding. If the question is, second, whether this being is substance, and of the greatest reality, and necessary, etc., then I answer that this question has no signification whatever. For all the categories through which I try to frame a concept of such an object have only an empirical use, and have no meaning whatever unless they are applied to objects of possible experience, i.e., to the world of sense.”

Kant explains the differences between philosophy and math. “Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts. Mathematical cognition is rational cognition from the construction of concepts. But to construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition corresponding to it. Hence construction of a concept requires a nonempirical intuition. Consequently this intuition, as intuition, is an individual object; but as the construction of a concept (a universal presentation), it must nonetheless express in the presentation its universal validity for all possible intuitions falling under the same concept…. Hence philosophical cognition contemplates the particular only in the universal. Mathematical cognition, on the other hand, contemplates the universal in the particular, and indeed even in the individual…. Hence the essential difference between these two kinds of rational cognition consists in this difference of form, and does not rest on the difference of their matter or [i.e.] objects…. Philosophy keeps to universal concepts only. Mathematics can accomplish nothing with the mere concept but hastens at once to intuition, in which it contemplates the concept in concreto, but yet not empirically; rather mathematics contemplates the concept only in an intuition that it exhibits a priori.” Kant also breaks down the difference in proofs of affirmation versus those of negation. “For no matter how modest and moderate someone may look who behaves toward the assertions of others in a merely declining and negating manner, yet as soon as he wants to make his objections hold as proofs of the opposite assertion, his claim is always just as haughty and imaginary as if he had adopted the affirming party and its assertion.”

Kant circles back to the relationship between appearances and pure reason. “In appearance, through which all objects are given to us, there are two components: the form of intuition (space and time), which can be cognized and determined completely a priori; and the matter (the physical [component] or content [of intuition], which signifies a something encountered in space and time and hence a something containing existence and corresponding to sensation…. You can say that properly speaking all life is intelligible only and not subjected to changes of time, and that it neither began through birth nor is ended through death; but that this life, on the other hand, is nothing but a mere appearance, i.e. a sensible presentation of the pure spiritual life, and the whole world of sense is a mere image hovering before our current way of cognizing, and like a dream has in itself no objective reality…. This is the fate of all assertions of pure reason: They [are synthetic propositions that] go beyond the conditions of all possible experience—the conditions outside of which no documentation of truth is anywhere to be found. But such assertions must nonetheless employ the laws of understanding; and these laws are determined merely for empirical use, yet without them no step can be taken in any synthetic thought.”

Kant, again, explicitly takes up the transcendental challenges of belief in God, free will, and the soul. “When I hear that an uncommon mind is supposed to have demonstrated away the freedom of the human will, the hope for a future life, and the existence of God, then I am eager to read his book; for in view of his talent I expect him to further my insights. That in fact he will have accomplished nothing of all this—this I already know beforehand with complete certainty…. Metaphysics has only three ideas as the proper purpose of its investigation—God, freedom, and immortality.... Everything else that this science deals with serves it only as a means for arriving at these ideas and at their reality.... Insight into these ideas would make theology, morality, and—through combination of the two—religion and hence the highest purposes of our existence dependent merely on our speculative power of reason and on nothing else.”

Kant concludes with a discussion on morality. “The moral law at least can rest on mere ideas of pure reason and thus be cognized a priori. I assume that there actually are pure moral laws that determine completely a priori (without regard to empirical motives, i.e., to happiness) the doing and the refraining, i.e., the use of the freedom of a rational being as such, and that these laws command absolutely (not merely hypothetically, on the presupposition of other empirical purposes) and are therefore necessary in every regard…. Hence pure reason contains—although not in its speculative use but still in a certain practical, viz., the moral, use—principles of the possibility of experience, viz., of the experience of such actions as could be encountered in accordance with moral precepts…. And hence a particular kind of systematic unity must be possible, viz., moral unity…. Accordingly, the principles of pure reason in its practical use—but specifically in its moral use—have objective reality…. The moral world is a mere idea; yet it is a practical idea that actually can and ought to have its influence on the world of sense…. The system of morality is linked inseparably—but only in the idea of pure reason—with the system of happiness…. The idea of such an intelligence wherein the morally most perfect will, combined with the highest bliss, is the cause of all happiness in the world, insofar as this happiness is exactly proportionate to one’s morality (as the worthiness to be happy), I call the ideal of the highest good…. Hence happiness, in exact balance with the morality of rational beings whereby these beings are worthy of happiness, alone amounts to the highest good of a world into which, according to the precepts of pure but practical reason, we must definitely transfer ourselves. That world, to be sure, is only an intelligible one; for the world of sense does not promise to us, as arising from the nature of things, such systematic unity of purposes. Moreover, the reality of that intelligible world cannot be based on anything other than the presupposition of a highest original good: a good where independent of reason, equipped with all the sufficiency of a supreme cause, establishes, preserves, and completes—according to the most perfect purposiveness—the order of things that is universal although very much concealed from us in the world of sense.”