“Protagoras” by Plato (translated by Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell).

In “Protagoras” Plato has Socrates recall a debate he has had with the sophist, Protagoras. Socrates has to urge Protagoras not to give long winded speeches, but to debate him succinctly. Socrates states, “To me, the mutual exchange of a dialogue is something quite distinct from a public address.” The back and forth in conversation is how Socrates prefers to probe for the truth.

In this dialogue, the questions entertained are whether virtue can be taught, and, perhaps even more importantly, what exactly the definition of virtue is to begin with, particularly whether virtue is one thing or can be many. Socrates starts out by explicitly stating that virtue cannot be taught. He says, “The wisest and best of our citizens are unable to transmit to others the virtues that they possess…. I just don’t think that virtue can be taught.” However, Protagoras claims that, while in other fields of expertise one is wise to only let the experts take the lead, in claims of justice and politics, everyone, particularly in democratic Athens, believes that they are qualified to judge. He states, “But when the debate involves political excellence, which must proceed entirely from justice and temperance, they accept advice from anyone, and with good reason, for they think that this particular virtue, political or civic virtue, is shared by all, or there wouldn’t be any cities…. They will say that everyone ought to claim to be just, whether they are or not, and that it is madness not to pretend to justice, since one must have some trace of it or not be human.” The sense of justice in us all is what makes us human, what makes us social, what allows us to develop cities and live together.

Socrates later asks, “Is virtue a single thing, with justice and temperance and piety its parts, or are the things I have just listed all names for a single entity?” There is quite the back and forth between the two philosophers, culminating in a debate on the nature of courage, of knowledge, of pleasure, of self-control, of aspiration, and on goodness and badness. Socrates prods Protagoras, “Those who make mistakes with regard to the choice of pleasure and pain, in other words, with regard to good and bad, do so because of a lack of knowledge, and not merely a lack of knowledge but a lack of that knowledge you agreed was measurement…. So that is what “being overcome by pleasure” is—ignorance in the highest degree…. Are not all actions leading toward living painlessly and pleasantly honorable and beneficial? And isn’t honorable activity good and beneficial?… Then if the pleasant is the good, no one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better. To give in to oneself is nothing other than ignorance, and to control oneself is nothing other than wisdom…. Now, one goes willingly towards the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good. And when he is forced to choose between one of two bad things, no one will choose the greater if he is able to choose the lesser…. If what I said up to now is true, then would anyone be willing to go toward what he dreads, when he can go toward what he does not?… When the courageous fear, their fear is not disgraceful; nor when they are confident is their confidence disgraceful…. So, can we conclude that cowardice is ignorance of what is and is not to be feared?… So the wisdom about what is and is not to be feared is courage and is the opposite of this ignorance?”

In the end, it is Protagoras who points out to Socrates that their positions have seemed to have changed. While pushing the point that virtue is one thing alone, knowledge, Socrates has admitted that it can indeed be taught. Protagoras states that someone looking on at their debate might claim, “Socrates and Protagoras, how ridiculous you are, both of you. Socrates, you said earlier that virtue cannot be taught, but now you are arguing the very opposite and have attempted to show that everything is knowledge—justice, temperance, courage—in which case, virtue would appear to be eminently teachable. On the other hand, if virtue is anything other than knowledge, as Protagoras has been trying to say, then it clearly would be unteachable. But, if it turns out to be wholly knowledge, as you now urge, Socrates, it would be very surprising indeed if virtue could not be taught. Now Protagoras maintained at first that it could be taught, but now he thinks the opposite, urging that hardly any of the virtues turn out to be knowledge. On that view, virtue could hardly be taught at all.”

“The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of four of Griffiths’ essays, ostensibly about Victorian poetry, but far reaching into the depths of culture, politics, religion, and marital relations. His first essay, “The Printed Voice”, most directly deals with the differences between the spoken word and the word on the page. Griffiths writes, “No page displays a voice’s pace, its dips and rises, how some words come readily to it and others only with reluctance, the ever-varying timbres of allegiance, longing, shyness, or disdain which colour utterance and give character to a voice, give voice to a character…. Print does not give conclusive evidence of a voice; this raises doubts about what we hear in writing but it also gives an essential pleasure of reading, for as we meet the demand a text makes on us for our voices, we are engaged in an activity of imagination which is delicately and thoroughly reciprocal.” In this essay, Griffiths first quotes John Hollander, “speaking and writing are both language…. it is the region between them which poetry inhabits.” And then, almost immediately, W.B. Yeats, “English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printed-press.” Griffiths continues, “Whatever else poetry may be, it is certainly a use of language that works with the sounds of words, and so the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word creates a double nature in printed poetry, making it both itself and something other—a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the voice in air.” Griffiths comments on meter and form, “metre tends to ‘divest language in a certain degree of its reality’ because it provides, as it were, an alibi for the words in a poem…. The metrical form of a poem records the poet’s compositional activity which may or may not entirely square with the drift of what is said, or the state of mind implicit in that drift…. Poetic forms…. speak to the divided soul of man.” Again speaking of poetry in general, Griffiths quotes T.S. Eliot, “To be living on several planes at once/Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.” Griffiths concludes that “ambiguity, in fact, requires the concept of intention, for to detect an ambiguity is to ascribe two or more possible intentions…. If reading is to be a response to a work, then ‘what seems important’ to a reader must be influenced by what was of moment to the writer of that work. Accent is the sound of what was of moment in writing.”

Griffiths' second essay, “Tennyson’s Breath”, focuses special attention on how Tennyson’s poetry sounded read aloud. Tennyson, himself, seemed to be of two minds. He wrote, “the Poet swears no being, existent or possible can read this but himself” and “He will not admit that any one save himself can read aloud his poems properly.” But later in his memoirs, Tennyson admits, “poetry looks better, more convincing, in print.” Griffiths considers, “Every body breathes, and poems written in the rhythm of the breath must be of all others those most patent to any body, but no two bodies breathe alike…. Tennyson’s verse sounds as if the body thought.” Griffiths returns to the effect of meter in this essay as well. “Metrical stress and the stress of meaning need not be identical.” Another theme of Griffiths’ essay is Tennyson’s conceptions of mortality and morality and how those affected his poems. Tennyson wrote, “I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself.” He was, at heart, an individualist. Griffiths relates, “Goethian moral evolution, quite as much as Darwin’s physical evolution, worried Tennyson because growing thus ever upward, we might outgrow each other, and find that, from the perspective of our higher selves, our past lives and those we shared them with, had become dead things…. [Tennyson] repudiates the theory of infinite development because one of the simplest reasons for wishing to believe in immortality [of the soul] is the desire not to be separated from what we have loved, including our own selves. An immortality in which we endlessly change, though, would itself be a process of separation; finite people infinitely developed would eventually become incapable of recognizing each other.”

In Griffiths’ essay, “Companionable Forms”, he touches on how the Victorians incorporated into their poems ideas of love and marriage. He speaks of how “the lyric utterance consciously idealizes the facts of the dark world it issues from as it idealizes that world’s speech.” Griffiths relates how there might be multiple audiences for the poem- the (sometimes fictional) singular lover, as well as the reading public at large. “The world crowds itself betwixt poet and the unique addressee, lover and sole beloved, yielding up to public judgement lines which the fiction pretends are an intimate exchange.” Griffiths speaks to Browning’s use of rhyme to take us out of the direct exchange between two lovers to the page, while also relating the emotions between them. “The purpose of the rhymes…. when they have purpose rather than merely signalling his own exuberance, is to set the voice on edge with the demands of the page, indicating the distinct existences of the written text and vocal renditions of it, so that we shall not think that they are altogether such as each other, nor that we are altogether such ones as the speaker whose speech the text informs us of.” Line breaks can also serve the purpose of distinguishing verse from speech. “Lineation in poetry can make at once a ‘cut’ into speech, put speech in view of its own precarious position, and at the same time hold a firm ‘line’ of regular and decent behaviour.” Griffiths relates the strain and responsibility of the reader. “Particularly when a reader faces and tries to voice an intonationally ambiguous line, he is asked to reflect on the pull one reading rather than another exerts on him, and to ask why it does so. He comes to know himself in the act of becoming convinced that he knows the fictional speaker.” Griffiths again relates the tension between writing and speech in Victorian poetry in general, “writing may be regarded by the Victorians as an idealization of the actuality of speech, its refinement and correction, or speech may be the longed-for ideal of full and vivid communion on the condition of which writing continually only verges.” Later, he continues, “One condition of conversation which follows from the facts of acoustics is evanescence; the spoken word perishes as it comes into communicative being just to make way for the next word. Written words stay on the page after we have passed over them, and we may have recourse to them at will…. Print offers such time to revolve and absorb words which were too much for us in the prime of their occurrence.” Coventry Patmore writes, “In the finest specimens of versification, there seems to be a perpetual conflict between the law of the verse and the freedom of the language, and each is incessantly, though insignificantly, violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other…. The language should always seem to feel, though not to suffer from the bonds of verse.”

Griffiths' final essay, “Hopkins: The Perfection of Habit”, relates the strain that Gerard Manley Hopkins felt in leaving the Anglican Church for Rome. In particular, Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism was to play a large role in the subject matter, as well as the form, of his later verse. Hopkins was well aware of his new minority status in England, as well as the hostility his newfound Catholic faith often engendered. “Hopkins was an artist consciously at odds with some parts of the community of English-speakers and so needed to resist as well as to collaborate…. Part of the nature Hopkins himself strained against was that Leavisian ‘spirit of the language’, as the numerous preciosities and dare-devillings of his poems against the norms of English speech show…. We should then expect Hopkins to be wary of the language while also schooled in it and responsive to it…. Language is such a ‘part of this world of objects’…. A language essentially informs the mediacy between the self and other selves. The conduct of poetic style within language, then, forms part of the broader activity of ‘knowing one’s place’ in a culture.” Griffiths writes of Hopkins’ use of repetition, “Hopkins characteristically and purposively creates his repetitions, as also the exclamations in his verse, to have such a double aspect, at once of baffled and of heightened fluency; repetition would not of itself suggest a range of possible bearings on vocalization but the short-term density of repetition in Hopkins and its frequent occurrence at points where it interrupts syntactic cohesion or strains liaison between words often lends it this dramatic aspect.” Another technique of Hopkins was his use of silence in his poems. “Hopkins’s attempt to make his poetry vocal and for realizing that the difficult reserve of his written texts, the occasions when they do not sit easily with spoken English, represent, amongst other things, an attempt to produce in verse something approaching ‘the silence and severity of God’ with regard to the language in which they are written, to make that silence itself audible.” Griffiths continues, “In Hopkins’s work, the drama of voicing exemplifies the activity of faith in search of understanding…. The special claim of the Catholic Church was to be the living bearer of the meaning of the Scriptures, writings were not a text for the Catholic, but a voice.” Hopkins, himself, wrote, “My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.” Griffiths relates that the success or failure of how a poem is received by the reader is often a perilous circumstance. “It baffles poets when the page yields only with reluctance their intended voices back to readers…. It strikes a poet particularly, though, because the pleasure of poetry dwells in an exactness of words, blurs show up more clearly in the reading of poetry, especially in the reading of it aloud, like stains which are the more evident the whiter the table-linen is.” Griffiths concludes, “The language is a witness, and poetic work bears witness in and to a language and the world of those who use it.”

“Septology I-VII” by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls)

This novel is a collection of three volumes, themselves broken into seven sections total, which flow back and forth chronologically. All the action takes place in the countryside of southwest Norway’s coast and its big city Bjorgvin. The narrator, Asle, is a successful painter, who has a doppelganger, also named Asle, a less successful painter. Doubles, twins, reoccurrences, repetitions, and de-ja-vu all play an essential role in the narration, which drifts between first and third person. The novel revolves around themes of art, aesthetics, religion, and duty. Asle admits, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me…. once a picture is finished the picture says whatever it can say, no more no less, the picture says in its silent way whatever can be said, and if it’s not finished yet then how it’s going to turn out and what it’s going to say isn’t something that can be said in words, I think.” A converted Catholic and long-since a widow, he muses to himself, “God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit, He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say, and I say that no thing, no person, creates itself because it’s God who makes it possible for things to exist at all, without God there’s nothing, I say…. But no one can think their way to God, I say Because either they can feel that God is near or they can’t, I say Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence, I say.” Finally, Asle pontificates more on painting, “now he’ll paint away the pictures he has in his head, but he doesn’t want to paint them exactly how he sees them in his head before his eyes, because there’s something like a sorrow, a pain, tied to every one of those pictures, he thinks, but also a kind of peace, yes, that too, yes he’ll paint away all the pictures he has collected in his head, if he can, so that only the peace stays behind.”

“The New Testament” (translated by David Bentley Hart)

This is a very different translation to the New Testament than the King James version. Hart states, up front, “To be honest, I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought.” He continues, “This is not a literary translation of the New Testament, much less a rendering for liturgical use…. I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation.” On the background of the times, Hart adds, “When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of “radicals” (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture…. The New Testament knows very little of common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism…. Everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgment that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent.”

“Waverley” by Walter Scott

Scott’s first novel, after a successful literary start as a poet, is considered the first book in the genre of  historical romance. Set against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the novel details the coming of age of Edward Waverley. Although descended from a British Jacobite noble family, his father, currying favor with the current regime, buys him a commission in the British army and gets him posted to Scotland, where he comes under the sway of a Highland chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, himself raised in exile in France after his father was executed by the Crown. “These stout idle kinsmen of mine account my estate as held in trust for their support; and I must find them beef and ale, while the rogues will do nothing for themselves but practise the broadsword, or wander about the hills, shooting, fishing, hunting, drinking, and making love to lasses of the strath. But what can I do, Captain Waverley? everything will keep after its kind, whether it be a hawk or a Highlander.”

Before long, Waverley, already a hopeless Romantic and a poet, falls in love with Fergus’ sister, Flora. She explains to the eponymous hero, “A Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation, were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.”

Waverley, himself, at first has some doubts about the honor of the Jacobite cause, “He felt inexpressible repugnance at the idea of being accessary to the plague of civil war. Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had, according to the united voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own. Since that period, four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad, and its liberties at home. Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long settled and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, for replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited?”

After the defeat of the Jacobites by the Duke of Cumberland’s army, Waverley reflects on the doomed nature of the whole quixotic enterprise, “Here fell the last Vich Ian Vohr, on a nameless heath; and in an obscure night-skirmish was quenched that ardent spirit, who thought it little to cut a way for his master to the British throne! Ambition, policy, bravery, all far beyond their sphere, here learned the fate of mortals.” And as another Jacobite “traitor” the Baron of Bradwardine lamented, “But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour.” Colonel Talbot, a loyal British soldier, though also a friend of the house of Waverley, was less forgiving in his memories of Mac-Ivor, “Justice which demanded some penalty of those who had wrapped the whole nation in fear and in mourning, could not perhaps have selected a fitter victim. He came to the field with the fullest light upon the nature of his attempt. He had studied and understood the subject. His father’s fate could not intimidate him; the lenity of the laws which had restored to him his father’s property and rights could not melt him. That he was brave, generous, and possessed many good qualities, only rendered him the more dangerous; that he was enlightened and accomplished made his crime the less excusable; that he was an enthusiast in a wrong cause only made him the more fit to be its martyr.”

“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

This novel hits at the heart. It is a brutal love story set in old world New York, written by an author who imbibed that milieu. “New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure…. You couldn’t have everything, after all.” 

The protagonist, Newland Archer, is a man of this world, who ever-so-gently pushes its boundaries beyond their comported norms, before, most often, scurrying back to the safety of habit. “Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.”

And yet, Archer was never quite satisfied with what he sensed he was missing out from life. “Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” His unconsummated love, separated by familial propriety, created the tension that was to become his existence. “He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency.”

Wharton, unsparingly, takes the measure of the man, “He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in.” Archer, late in life, was also able to take measure of himself, “Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else…. There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered. . . .”

“Fragments” by Heraclitus (translated by Brooks Haxton)

Heraclitus was the heir to the throne of Ephesus in the sixth century B.C. His treatise, described as the first book of philosophy, has been lost to history. What remains are these “fragments,” aphorisms that are often cryptic jewels of wisdom. He writes on knowledge, “Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.” And on the unknown, “Whoever cannot seek/ the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way/ is an impasse.” Sometimes it is hard to tell if he is speaking in metaphor, “Men dig tons of earth/ to find an ounce of gold.”

Heraclitus uses fire as one metaphor for the ever-changing elements of human life. “That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure/ as it burns away.” Also, “As all things change to fire, and fire exhausted/ falls back into things, the crops are sold/ for money spent on food.” Change is another recurring theme. “What was cold soon warms, and warmth soon cools. So moisture dries, and dry things drown.” Perhaps his most famous fragment describes the aspects of a river, “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone—/ those waters/ giving way to this, now this.” Some of his fragments sound almost like zen koans, “Under the comb/ the tangle and the straight path/ are the same.” The metaphor of the river recurs, “Just as the river where I step/ is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.”

Heraclitus’ idea of sleep and the dream world is original in its radical subjectivity, “The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own.” He speaks about the gods with a casual reverence, which is hard to tell if it is feigned, “To a god the wisdom/ of the wisest man/ sounds apish. Beauty/ in a human face/ looks apish too. In everything/ we have attained/ the excellence of apes.” However, his reverence for custom, culture, and institutions appear sincere, “People ought to fight/ to keep their law/ as to defend the city’s walls.” However, he was not a fan of democratic mediocrity, “As for the Ephesians, I would have them youths, elders, and all those between, go hang themselves, leaving the city/ in the abler hands of children. With banishment of Hermodoros/ they say, No man should be/ worthier than average. Thus, my fellow citizens declare, whoever would seek/ excellence can find it/ elsewhere among others.”

“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)

This is one of Murakami’s most straight forward novels. There are no strange dream sequences and no talking cats. His translator makes the claim that it is also Murakami’s most autobiographical work. After all, the protagonist is a small-town boy who is making his way through college in late 1960s Tokyo. He even has a part-time job at a record store. Music, both classical, jazz, and, of course, the Beatles, punctuates much of the plot. It is also a dark work. There are more than a handful of gruesome deaths referenced, most by suicide. In fact, the narrator’s working motto became, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

Although a more or less straight bildungsroman, the book is still told with Murakami’s dead-pan flare built into his simple lines, “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.” In fact, the suicide of his high school best friend would be the defining event of Toru Watanabe’s existence, “Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult.”

“The Language Animal” by Charles Taylor

This is slight departure from Taylor’s usual oeuvre. At first glance, this is a more scientific than philosophic endeavor. The book specifically deals with how, teleologically and historically, humans have used language—specifically how our species has used language to separate our mental representations from other animals. Taylor begins, “Linguistic beings are capable of new feelings which affectively reflect their rich sense of the world…. Linguistic beings can be sensitive to distinctions which are lost on prelinguistic animals. Important among these are distinctions involving moral or other values…. Only language beings can identify things as worthy of desire or aversion. For such identifications raise issues of intrinsic rightness. They involve a characterization of things which is not reducible simply to the ways we treat them as objects of desire or aversion. They involve a recognition beyond that, that they ought to be treated in one way or another…. Being in the linguistic dimension not only enables a new kind of awareness of the things which surround us, but also a more refined sense of human meanings…. Speech is the expression of thought. But it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently. It is constitutive of reflective, that is, linguistic thought…. Our power to function in the linguistic dimension is tied for its everyday uses, as well as its origins, to expressive speech, as the range of actions in which it is not only communicated, but realized.”

Taylor makes the case that it is impossible to separate the growth of language from the evolution of human culture. “We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value…. We acquire the range of meanings which make up our world through an interplay of embodied expression, and of articulation…. Language allows us to think in universals, as we might say, using concepts and not just proper names…. To understand reality is to break it down into its component parts, and then map how they combine…. This epistemology stressed that our knowledge of the world was built from particulate “ideas”, or inner representations of outer reality. We combine them to produce our view of the world…. Reasoning is combining, and language helps us to do this expeditiously and on a grand scale.”

Language is more than just a third person-objective scientific description of the outer world and of nature. It is embodied in human reality and as such cannot be entirely separated from the subjective viewpoint. Taylor asks, “Would it be possible for us to drop all these other things: tropes, images, symbols, templates, and of course, gestures and literature, and just have this austere language of description and explanation? (I won’t even ask the question whether this would be desirable.) This is a question about human beings; we are not asking whether some kinds of beings which could be imagined could meet these austere and limiting specifications…. It is one of my basic claims in this book that this kind of restricted language is a human impossibility…. [There is an] impossibility of human language in the narrow sense outside the whole range of “symbolic forms”.”

Human language cannot be completely separated from subjective human expressions. “Possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation. In other words, we always sense that there are things we cannot properly say, but we would like to express.” Taylor quotes the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt, “[There is always a] feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the [mind/soul], spurred on by language must supply.” Taylor continues, “This endless striving to increase articulacy is the real point behind the famous Humboldt saying about using finite means to infinite ends. The “finite means” here doesn’t refer to an existing stock of words, as the Chomskian interpretation seems to assume; rather it is the finite stock of sounds at our disposal, with which we can find expression for an unlimited range of phenomena…. What Humboldt is on to here is the experience of wanting to say what we cannot yet satisfactorily express…. We need to find a formula which figures the phenomenon we are trying to disclose, be this through metaphor, or analogy, or creative extension of existing terms, or whatever…. The “right word” here discloses, brings the phenomenon properly into view for the first time…. We devise an expression which allows what we are striving to encompass to appear.”

In using language to map our reality, Taylor is describing a generative process. “To grasp a new meaning is to discover a new way of feeling, of experiencing our world. This cannot precede expression…. The constitutive power of language operates here in different ways, one might say at a different level, than it does in our description of independent objects…. In the realm of metabiological meanings, expression opens new and unsuspected realms. The new enacted and/or verbal expressions open up new ways of being in the world. We are in the domain of cultural innovation…. Many of the meanings in our lives come to exist for us when we mark distinctions heretofore unnoticed in our life experience…. After articulation, it becomes part of the explicit shape of meaning for us…. Articulation here alters the shape of what matters to us. It changes us…. The new articulated descriptions allow the world to impinge on us, to moves us, in new ways. That is why we call them “constitutive”.”

Taylor concludes, “The basic thesis of this book is that language can only be understood if we understand its constitutive role in human life…. I have tried to explain this constitutive force of language in terms of the “linguistic dimension”, where the uses of either words or symbols, or expressive actions, is guided by a sense of rightness…. Linguistic awareness is not limited to that facet of the semantic dimension, where the designative logic prevails; in other words, to that set of language games where we are concerned with accurate description of independent objects…. Language is also used to create, alter, and break connections between people. This is indeed, ontogenetically its “primordial” use…. And language can also open new spaces of human meanings: through introducing new terms, and/or through expression-enactment…. It is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Chronicles” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter introduces the last book of the Hebrew Bible, “Chronicles, fixed in Jewish tradition as the conclusion of the Bible, is, at least from a modern perspective, the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. In all likelihood, it was composed sometime in the late decades of the fifth century B.C.E., after the Return to Zion…. It was probably written by a priest…. The main focus of the book in on the kings of Judah…. Linguistically, because Chronicles hews so closely to the Deuteronomistic History, it does not exhibit a great many features of Late Biblical Hebrew, as one might expect, though not infrequently it reflects a certain loosening of syntactic and idiomatic norms that is characteristic of this late period…. Most prominently, this is a historical account that is intended to highlight the eternal legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty and its firm integration with the priestly hierarchy, which traces its own origins back to Aaron…. This is, in sum, a representation of David as an exemplary establishment figure, unswervingly virtuous, providing precedents and a model for the political and cultic tradition that he is seen as having founded…. It should also be noted that Chronicles incorporates a variety of narrative details that appear nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History. Where they come from remains a matter of conjecture…. In the end, Chronicles offers an object lesson in how as a tradition evolves it may be prone to domesticate the unruly and challenging traits of its own origins…. The national history is painted in black and white, and the haunting shadows, the chiaroscuro, the sudden illuminations of classical Hebrew narrative, vanish in this work.”

Chronicles is, if anything, primarily a list of names and details of the history of the Davidic dynasty. Alter notes that in 1 Chronicles 1:1, “Adam, Seth, Enosh. Chronicles begins abruptly with a patrilineal genealogical list that runs from the first man to Saul, his sons, and his grandson, at the end of chapter 9…. For the modern reader, this is scarcely an inviting way to begin a book.” In 1 Chronicles 4:9, Alter describes a bit of word choice detail and playfulness, within the original Hebrew, “I have born him in pain. Like many naming-speeches in the Bible, this one features a loose approximation between the name and its purported meaning. The Hebrew of her son’s name is ya’bets, and the word for pain is ‘otseb, the same three consonants that appear after the initial yod but in a different order.” Alter explains the main emphases of the book in 1 Chronicles 6:1, “The sons of Levi. The Chronicler appears to have had two special interests in compiling his lengthy lists—marking out the line of David, presumably in the hope of a restoration of the Davidic dynasty, and accounting for the priesthood, probably because he himself belonged to the priestly circles.”

In 1 Chronicles 12:2, Alter alerts us to a historical tidbit, “with either their right hand or their left. The Benjaminite warriors may in fact have trained themselves to be ambidextrous. In Judges 3, the Benjaminite Ehud is able to kill the Moabite King Eglon because, in a surprise attack, he suddenly pulls out his hidden short sword with his left hand.” In Chronicles 21:1 Alter notes another historical and vocabulary detail, “And Satan stood up against Israel…. In 2 Samuel 24 it is God Who incites David, but the Chronicler, not wanting to represent God as perverse, makes Satan the agent. At this late period, it looks as if “The Adversary “ (hasatan) is moving into becoming a demonic figure, and he appears here without the definite article ha, suggesting it has become a name, not just a function.”

Alter describes a bit of history revealed in 2 Chronicles 30:1, “to all Israel and Judah. Hezekiah came to the throne in 715 B.C.E., six years after the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. If the report here is grounded in historical fact, it provides evidence that, although many of the subjects of the northern kingdom were deported by the Assyrians, substantial numbers of them remained. Hezekiah’s political move, then, is to unite the whole Israelite population, north and south, around the Temple cult in Jerusalem.” In 2 Chronicles 35:1, Alter alerts us to a vocabulary choice, “And Josiah made a Passover to the Lord in Jerusalem, and they slaughtered the paschal lamb. The same Hebrew word, pesah, sometimes refers to the festival and sometimes to the sacrifice of the lamb that is the key element in the celebration of the festival. The meaning must be judged according to context.”

Finally, Alter ends his annotations with 2 Chronicles 36:23, “and let him go. This is a single word in the Hebrew, weya’al, and according to the Hebrew canonical order, which this translation follows, it is the very last word of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition has accordingly made much of the appearance of this word at the very end: it is the verb used for “going up” from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel (and retained as such in modern Zionist usage), and it concludes this story of exile and Scripture as a whole on a literally upbeat note, Cyrus’s urging the exiled people to go back up to its native land.”

“The crisis of narration” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han always riffs on similar themes—the end of ritual, the decay of culture, and the effects of modernity. This short treatise revolves around the topic of narration and the purpose of stories in shaping man. Han suggests, “We live in a post-narrative time…. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments…. Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times—no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption…. Ultimately, a narrative is an expression of the mood of a time…. Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds meaning and identity…. Narratives create a community…. Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative.”

Narrative is an essential component of humanity. It is how we make sense of our world. Han states, “Human beings do not exist from one moment to the next. They are not momentary beings. Their existence comprises the whole temporal range that opens up between birth and death. In the absence of external orientation and a narrative anchoring in being, the energy to contract the time between birth and death into a living unity that encapsulates all events and occurrences must come from the self. The continuity of being is guaranteed by the continuity of the self.” The Self is made up of episodic memories, not an all-encompassing span. “Human memory is selective. This is how it differs from a database. It is narrative…. A narrative depends on a selection and connection of events. It proceeds in a selective fashion…. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily incomplete…. Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps…. To be able to narrate or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal.”

This book would not be a Han treatise if he did not explicitly condemn modern life. Han opines, “Life in late modernity is utterly naked. It lacks narrative imagination. Pieces of information cannot be tied together into a narrative…. The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other…. By establishing strong connections between events, a narrative overcomes the emptiness and fleetingness of time. Narrative time does not pass…. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life…. The eye of the modern city dweller is overburdened with protective tasks. It unlearns contemplative lingering…. Stories create social cohesion. They offer meaning and bear values that create community…. Myths are ritually staged shared narratives…. Shared action, the we, is based on narrative.”

Han espouses the essentiality of theory to cut through the thickets of modern data. “Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything…. As a narrative, theory designs an order of things…. It develops conceptual contexts that make things intelligible…. Theory is a form of closure that takes hold of things and thereby makes them graspable…. The end of theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit [Begriff als Geist]…. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new narrative…. Data-knowledge marks the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers…. Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates—even risks to suggest—a new form of life and being…. New narratives allow for new forms of perception…. The world is, so to speak, re-narrated, and as a result we see it with fresh eyes…. Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent…. We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory, that is, the courage to create a narrative. We must always bear in mind that, in the final analysis, thinking is also a narrating that progresses in narrative steps.”

“On Giving Up” by Adam Phillips

This is another short collection of essays by Phillips around the theme of giving up. Phillips begins, “We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment…. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future…. Giving up is at once a risk and a prediction.” He continues by describing the feeling of wanting, “It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites…. Acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants…. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want…. Modern people, we take it—at least in so-called detraditionalized societies—leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide…. Anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse…. In this account, we are always found wanting—in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent, need for others—and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want.” Phillips always selectively riffs (and attempts to modernize?) Freud, while paying due respect to the master, “Fulfillment and non-fulfillment of a vital necessity or desire, Freud suggests, may not be as different as they seem; the satisfaction of a wish and the frustration of a wish both entail suffering…. If wanting sustains us, it also threatens to destroy us; if not wanting starves us, it keeps us safe. In the Freudian story, what you most want is what you must not have.”

Phillips has an essay on the feelings involved with being left out. He explains, “It was Freud’s contention that we are involved in the lifelong project of leaving ourselves out of our own lives, that we can only survive by exclusion. Our unconscious includes us and excludes us at the same time…. In Freud’s view, people want to have as little in common with themselves as possible…. No one is remotely acceptable to themselves. Human beings, as Freud sees it, are radically at odds with who they take themselves to be…. He was looking at what we are tempted to leave unattended to in ourselves and others, at our passion for ignorance, our fear of our own desire…. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting…. There are all the ordinary accidents and catastrophes and frustrations of childhood: being left out of the satisfactions one seeks, the safety one requires, the unmet needs, the unrecognized preoccupations that will inform the child’s entire life…. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want…. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others.”

Finally, Phillips deals with the concept of projection, “From a psychoanalytic point of view traditional distinctions begin to attenuate and blur; there is no them and us, the sane and the mad, the good and the evil, the primitive and the sophisticated, reality and fantasy; or there is no them and us now, because we are described, by Freud, as projecting the unacceptable, the inadmissible, parts of ourselves, of which there are many, into other people. That what we are also really up against is the unacceptable and inadmissible in ourselves.” Freud, himself, proclaims, “We have recognized that it is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and psychically abnormal.” Phillips concludes, “What would it be, Freud gets us to wonder, to live in a society that believed in the unconscious? What could it possibly mean to believe in the unconscious? Which, of course, is not like believing in God, or love, or justice. It would be to believe that we are largely unaware of who we are, and that we mostly want to keep it that way because we are too disturbed by who we experience ourselves as being.”

“The Renaissance” by Walter Pater

Pater was an Oxford fellow in the nineteenth century. This a collection of essays on his somewhat idiosyncratic conception of the Renaissance. Foremost, he uses the history of the period for a larger discussion on his views of art, aesthetics, criticism, and the good life. He begins, “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative…. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics…. The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.” Next, Pater defines his conception of the Renaissance, “For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, makes themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment…. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival to religion.”

Pater discusses what makes the different forms of artistic expression similar and unique. “It is a mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought…. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations…. Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.”

Next, Pater takes on the spirit of aesthetic criticism. “Criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is the child of his time.’ But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of the previous generation which first excited, while they directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste [for the Renaissance] was fixed in Greece…. Pagan and Christian art are sometime harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place.”

Finally, Pater concludes a bit philosophically, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve…. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song…. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most…. The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner…. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is ‘so much to know,’ rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear…. The nature before us is a revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth…. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself.”

“The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig (translated by Anthea Bell)

Zweig wrote this memoir in the midst of the Second World War. He would commit suicide before its end. He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, at perhaps the pinnacle of the Habsburg Empire, in the heart of its capital, Vienna. “Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” He was also raised with art at his bosom, “Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy…. It was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance…. It was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese…. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city.”

Zweig first moved to Paris shortly after finishing university and quickly ran in a bohemian circle. Of his friends, he remembers, “They were not ashamed to live in a modest way so that they could think freely and boldly in their artistic work…. No money was wasted on prestige and outward show.” Eventually moving back to Salzburg, he still traveled back and forth between all the great European cities. Zweig reminisces on his greatest writing mentors, “Think how inspiring it was for us young people to be in the presence of such stern servants and guardians of language, admirably true to themselves, loving only the resonant word, a word meant not for today and the newspapers but for what would last and endure…. One lived in Germany, another in France, yet another in Italy, but they all inhabited the same homeland, for they really lived only in their poetry…. Each also made a work of art out of his own life.”

The interwar years were a time of turmoil for Zweig and his family. With the rise of Hitler and Nazism next door in Germany, Zweig realized his time living in Austria was numbered. “For the first time I really came to understand the eternal character of the professional revolutionary who feels that he is raised from his personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition.” On persevering in his craft, Zweig offers, “Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.” Eventually emigrating permanently to London, he still stayed away from involvement in politics, “Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent.” Zweig concludes, “If there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy…. In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.”