Some thoughts about the Iliad

The possibility of understanding the Iliad rests on the possibility of encountering death as (possibly) utterly annihilation. Only in this light does the full weight of what everyone wagers in battle become tangible, and only in this light is Achilles' decision to fight for revenge become fully intelligible. Thetis tempts him away from his destiny with images of the happy long life he will live if he turns from the fight and returns to his native land, but Achilles chooses to enter the fight, recognizing that this decision guarantees his death. Amidst the sea of blood that is spilled in the Iliad, we nonetheless must recognize that the work affirms the absolute value of what the heroes are fighting for precisely because they are willing to risk absolute destruction. It might seem as if a belief in immortality makes life weightier, since our actions in this world effect an eternal destiny. Yet I think that perhaps the contrary is true: for we are used to looking upon what is most rare as the most precious of all, and if every life is infinite, then moments of life as are common as grains of sand. But if every life is not infinite, then a decision to risk one's entire existence in battle is the hazarding of one's most precious possession. [as an addendum, I am advancing this argument principally for the purposes of helping us understand the Iliad, not as an answer to the question of the immortality of human life] Only with this realization does the tragic dimension of Achilles' decision come fully into relief, along with the strength of the affirmation of life harboured within his decision to kill Hector.

Why I think congress should not pass the health care bill

This is out of place, but I am going to weigh in on the issue nonetheless. I believe that the current health care bill facing Congress should not be passed for the following reasons:

1) It mistakes the fundamental problem with American health care. The problem with health care in America is not that people don't have insurance, it is the very insurance system itself. Just as one would not expect to use one's car insurance to cover routine maintenance on one's vehicle, the fact that we use insurance to pay for routine preventative health care creates a massive inefficiency in the American health system. Health insurance should only be allowed to cover major expenses; as a matter of economic fact this will force down prices for routine procedures. Instead, by putting even more money into the picture, the bill will necessarily drive up health care prices.

2) The rhetoric with which the current legislation is being pushed suggests that the insurance companies are some sort of evil force. While I think ideally health insurance should be severely curtailed or abolished, the rhetoric is misplaced populism of the most dangerous variety: the average profit margin range for a large insurance company is somewhere between 3.8 (Aetna) to 7.3 (Wellpoint). These are not unreasonably large profits; consider that in the case of Aetna a relatively small increase in expenses could easily turn the profit into a loss. The biggest problem with the rhetoric is that it blinds the public to the truth of the matter, which is that the bill simply cannot do anything to drive down insurance premiums. Again, this is a matter of economic fact - if we increase the demand for health care services by some 30 million persons without instantaneously increasing the supply (impossible given the lengthy schooling doctors require), the result must be either an increase in price or a shortage of health care.

3) The bill's proposed 3.8% investment income "medicare" tax is ill-conceived. First of all, it is not actually a medicare tax; it is instead compensating for the fact that the bill is raiding the already underfunded medicare fund to decrease its overall effect on the federal deficit. Secondly, the price will encourage persons subject to the tax (higher-income taxpayers) to invest and save less, which is precisely the opposite of what the government should be doing to encourage job growth. In my view it would be much better for the economy if they raised taxes on ordinary income instead of on capital gains and dividends.

4) The bill requires all taxpayers to purchase health insurance. Something about the federal government requiring all citizens to give money to private corporations does not seem right to me. I'm not really sure where in the constitution we can detect this right; and while I'm hardly a strict constructionist, I do not think it is a good precedent to be setting. Consider how completely new it is - while the government necessarily spends tax proceeds to purchase services from private entities, it has never required its citizenry to patronize some particular class of business.

For these reasons, I do not believe that the health care bill should pass congress. It does not address the actual problem (the perpetually rising cost of health care); in fact, by throwing more money at the problem it is explicitly exacerbating the problem since it is removing the incentive for anyone to find a cheaper way of doing things. While it seems increasingly likely that it will pass, I do not think even five years from now anyone will think it was a very good idea.

"A City in Speech"

My attempts at interpreting T.S. Eliot have been temporarily derailed, so I thought I might return to Republic and make some more comments about the meaning of Socrates' statement that he will "watch a city coming into being in speech."

The great danger of reading Plato (a danger that Socrates is keenly aware of) is that we assume that we already know what he is talking about. What makes Socratic philosophy so glorious is that this danger is itself the very subject-matter of all the dialogues. Thus the question "what is justice," which is ostensibly motivating the entire dialogue, both presumes that we already have some idea what we are looking for (that is, we have some correct opinion about the nature of justice) and that we nonetheless do not know what we are looking for (since we cannot look for what we already have). Thus Socrates dismantles the fine arguments of Cephalus and Polemarchus, arguments that are not incorrect (after all, we do generally say that it is just to "speak the truth and give back what we take"). Yet their definitions are incomplete, and they must be dismantled if they are to be properly reassembled into the appropriate dialectical whole.

The above sounds rather Hegelian, so we should point out the manner in which Socrates is engaging in something completely opposite from Hegel. One way of seeing the difference is to observe Socrates' deep reverence for the divine. We find in Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates expressing a fear of inadvertently offending the gods by speaking unjustly of the nature of love. Hegel interprets the daemon that speaks to Socrates as the voice of reason; we should not make this mistake as Hegel is purposely (but necessarily) misreading the dialogues. The practice of dialectic will lead to the knowledge of justice, not the creation of justice.

Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors

Amos has presented an amazing poem by Yeats in an article on his blog Philosophy KTL (I wonder what the KTL stands for?) He raises some questions about the poem that I will now seek to answer. First, the poem:

Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors

What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

We are in the presence of something magnificent and dark. There is unquestionably an echo of the scaffold with "undertook" and "hang" and "blade." Amos sees in this poem "the cold, unpitying savor of tragic joy." Yeats is never one to ignore the tragic dimension that is (almost) inextricably bound up in human life, but I wonder whether there may not be another dimension to this poem that runs deeper than tragedy. The phrase "bring to pass" has scriptural echoes; aside from its literal usage in the gospels the "pass" brings to mind both Passover and the Passion. With a diamond-like degree of compression Yeats is evoking the profound mystery of death and rebirth that lies at the heart of all human activity. Any "action / is a step to the block;" a reality reflected in the dual meaning of the word "undertake." Despite the distinct possibility (and for most instructors high probability) of their eventual effacement, teaching, like all genuinely humane activity, maintains an inner necessity that is not rendered less compelling or less noble by the possibility of passing into nothingness.

"All things hang like a drop of dew." It is connected to the main sentence by a semicolon. Semicolons are generally used to connect what grammarians call independent clauses. The clauses connected, however, should be related (otherwise a full period or even line break would be appropriate). Therefore we must question the manner in which the hanging upon the blade of grass and the bringing to pass are related. Because of the passion reference I would be inclined to say that Yeats is specifically invoking the image of the dying god hanging upon his tree (albeit in a diminished form: his "tree" is but a "blade of grass"); but here, "all things" are consigned to this fate. The manner of this hanging is like "a drop of dew:" radically contingent and yet utterly necessary. For no doubt the presence of any dewdrop on any blade of grass is a matter of what we call chance; yet that there will be some dewdrops on some blades of grass in an absolute necessity. The unknown instructors have precisely this manner of existence. Their personality is obliterated but what is most proper to their being as instructors is preserved in their instruction, as it must be for their to be any instructors now.

And so, in answer to the question that Amos poses - "can we be grateful for nothing?" - I would answer "yes," so long as we have the humility to recognize that what lies in oblivion is what we owe everything to. Despite the extremes to which Yeats took his quest for otherworldly knowledge, I would like to think he maintained even in his darkest moments a deep piety towards that greatest of the Athenian deities: the unknown god.

Digression

Since the Four Quartets has reduced me to (what I hope will be temporary) speechlessness, I would like to offer the following digression, which is a short meditation on a quote from Schopenhauer:

"[We] know not a sun, and not an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth... the world that surounds [us] exists only as idea - that is, only in relation to something else, the one who conceives the idea."

taken from The World as Will and Idea, paragraph 1.

This is a well-distilled articulation of the essence of modern philosophy. The human spirit is transformed into the human subject. Subjectivity becomes an acceptable term under which to describe feeling, sensing, thinking, and knowing. Man therefore ceases to be a "thing" defined in advance as a rigidly fixed entity dwelling amidst other entities. But instead of freeing philosophy to reflect on the essence of man, such an action instead transforms man from noun into verb instead of restoring the human essence to the non-grammatical. "Subject," as the new name denoting human essence, becomes "the support of the world," and "the condition of all phenomenon." Philosophy therefore becomes the examination of the contents and structures of subjectivity - that is to say, epistemology and ultimately psychology. Nevertheless, philosophy remains metaphysics within these transformations. It continues the errant identification of a mode of being (subjectivity) with being itself that has always characterized metaphysics. In the case of Hegel, we even see all the old metaphysical categories restored, but precisely as modes of being of the subject instead of modes of being of objects.

Thus modern philosophy persists in its metaphysical (and therefore Greek) roots precisely as it attempts to differentiate itself more and more form its origin. Even when it declares itself the completion of philosophy and declares its Greek origin unnecessary and flawed it still remains rooted to its origin, for it is still concerned with the same questions as the Greeks and can only claim completeness in virtue of its incomplete foundation.

Burnt Norton, part 2 [i]

We now will consider the second section of Burnt Norton. The previous section we considered was sung in the bass voice (a cello); it brought out the darker side of the earthly solidity that characterizes such a voice, though at its end it faded away into something quite different. Now we are faced with a section that is expressed through a soprano tone (violin); of all the parts of Burnt Norton it is the fieriest and bears (along with part 4) the closest resemblance to what might be immediately understood as poetry. Because of the density of this section this analysis will be divided into several parts.

Formally, this division of the poem is divided into three sections. The first, from "Garlic and sapphires" to "reconciled among the stars," is a carefully crafted incantation that attempts to distill and conjure up the essence of "Burnt Norton" in a single, spell-like saying. The second section consists in a commentary on the sentence "reconciled among the stars," written in verse form. The third section repeats the main theme of the relation that prevails between moments in time which we considered in the first divisions, though transformed by what has transpired in this division.

Writing any sort of commentary on the first section of this division is virtually impossible. It is one of the most tightly wound pieces of poetry I've ever seen; while much of Eliot's poetry has many handholds for the critic to use in his ascent, this section is like a sheer wall of glass or diamond. Nonetheless, I will make a few comments; they will be necessarily relatively more wrong than the majority of what I will write about the poem but hopefully they will still be at least helpful in some manner.

The pairing of "garlic and sapphires" in the section's opening stanza suggests the admixture of the common (garlic) and the precious (sapphire). Garlic and a carved gemstone would look rather similar if their forms were shrouded by mud. The mixture of peasant's food and the noble's rare jewels in the terrestrial mud (and of course both garlic and sapphires come from the earth) is a most fitting symbols for human life. For our lives are an admixture of both the most common "animal" functions (though the poem hardly makes the mistake of conceiving of them in this manner) which we share with other members of our race and with the lower animals and the divine fire which informs our human character. On earth these two poles are mixed together constantly; be wary of he who thinks he has left behind one or the other, or who thinks he can separate them in a clear and distinct manner.

The axle-tree bedded in the mud presumably belongs to some sort of wagon or cart. I've often imagined that it is a series of wagons or a caravan of some sort, carrying all sorts of wares, which might go some way towards explaining the actual presence of the garlic and sapphires in the mud; but such an interpretation is not necessary. The use of the word "clot" plays with the next line, where "the trilling wire in the blood" names that explosive (but musical) force that makes living things live. It trills; why it is not at peace is forgotten, but until the debt of the "long-forgotten wars" has been "appeas[ed]" the trilling goes on. This pattern is hardly simply human or simply "biological" or even simply earthly, however. All the manifestations of this pattern are "figured in the drift of stars." The phrase suggests that even the timelessly eternal stars, the forces which in the form of the Zodiac (the "circle of animals") were thought to control the world, are themselves not timelessly eternal but mutable. Now a command: "ascend to summer in the tree." It was clear (to me) that we were already on a muddy path, at night after a day of rain when the clouds have cleared; now the trees are explicitly invoked and are presented as the place of our ascension. Trees stretch their arms to the very heavens yet always remain rooted in the earth (which is why I find trees to be one of the most fitting symbols for human life). Summer, the season in which this section is transpiring (and which recurs in a later section), is a timeless season (like winter) in that it represents the zenith of the sun's ascension in the sky. It is the season in which the life that sprouted in the spring comes to fruition. Summer is traditionally associated with the southerly direction and with fire.

Now that we have raised ourselves above the trees, floating like the ghosts of the first division of "Burnt Norton" (but over a "sodden floor" instead of "dry leaves"), a great mystery is revealed to us: though the "boar" and the "boarhound" continue their serious play, they now have been "reconciled" among the stars. I shall steel myself against the temptation to pronounce this reconciliation as either "subjective" or "objective" and steadfastly state that it is at once both and neither, for reasons that will become clearer at a later point.

Thus we have quickly traversed the first section of this division of "Burnt Norton." Next comes the section that begins "at the still point of the turning world," which (as I indicated above) I take to be a commentary upon specifically upon the phrase "reconciled among the stars." More generally, it is a commentary upon the entire preceding section, but it specifically concerns itself with the essential nature of the reconciliation.

Burnt Norton, part 1

We left off last with the resolution to carefully consider each section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets with a view towards offering an interpretation of the poem as a whole. The limitations of the format in which I am writing will necessarily make this interpretation fragmented until we have finished going through the entirety of the poem; I only hope that it will nonetheless direct the reader back towards the poem and help bring them into confrontation with what it is trying to say.

"Burnt Norton," the first section of the poem, can be found at http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.html.

One aspect of the poem as a whole is its concern with the different modes in which time overtakes us. We say variously that time heals all wounds and that time destroys all things. The temporality of human existence is perhaps our greatest blessing and greatest curse. "Burnt Norton" revolves around several different considerations of the essence and meaning of time with respect to the possibility of freedom coexisting with determination. Let us begin to examine this problem in light of the first division of the poem.

This division begins (quite famously) "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past." Many readers (myself for some time included) have difficulty form the outset reading this since it in no way resembles what we are expecting to find in a poem. Formally, it appears to be a sentential proposition concerning the nature of time. This is the sort of thing one may expect to find in a philosophical treatise. What is it doing in a poem? Is this the criticized "elitism" or "abstractness" of Eliot's poetry rearing its ugly head?

Such characterizations miss the possibility (here necessary) of the poet to speak philosophically in his poetry while still remaining essentially a poet. Like musical instruments, the voices in the Four Quartets do not possess the sort of personality that one typically expects from the speaker of a lyric poem. They do possess a certain characteristic tonality which consists in a fitting of the "concept" being "expressed" in the section with the manner of "expression" (such words are useful so long as we recognize that here expression and mode of expression are one). It may be useful to think of each section as corresponding either to one of the registers of the human voice or one of the instruments of a string quartet; here, we have a bass voice (or a cello from the quartet, if you prefer).

In fact, what we can almost correctly call the hopelessness of the first section of "Burnt Norton" is precisely suited to the sort of pedantic despair with which the poem begins. The meaning of the opening lines is clear: if everything that has happened is contained in the future, and if the future is contained in the past, then everything has already happened. As absurd (at the outset) as such a view may seem it is precisely the position of the sort of popular scientific materialism we still find floating about. If there are exact and binding laws in the physical universe, and if the physical universe is the only dimension in which anything exists, then everything that would ever happen is necessarily determined from the moment at which the universe explodes into being. Every chemical action and reaction in my brain, as I am writing this, is a necessary step from the previous set of circumstances that brought me to this moment. If this is the nature of the world, then it is beyond even hope or despair; it is at a place where hope is a meaningless word. All time, as the voice states, is "unredeemable." This question of the meaning of the redemption and its relation to time is one we will take up later; for now, I would suggest that one look to Prince Hal's "redeeming time" speech from Henry IV or alternatively the section from Ephesians where it is considered.

The voice goes on to proclaim that hope, which is necessarily tied up to what could be, never existed: "what might have been is an abstraction." As the voice introspectively travels back to a prior moment we first encounter one of the poem's key symbols, the rose. "Into the rose-garden" we go, even though such a journey is only "disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves." Here doubt begins to enter into the darkness in which we began: for though it proves nothing to this mechanistic speaker, he recognizes how strange it is that people would be drawn towards contemplation of the past if the past was necessary. What is being encountered in such contemplation? The voice "do[es] not know."

The garden is filled with what the speaker only hears as "echoes," the fact that these sounds are heard as echoes, perhaps like the "withered stumps of time" observed Eliot's Wasteland, may have less to do with the sound and more to do with the listener. A bird urgently calls out to him to follow the echoes, which the speaker proceeds to do. However, he is from the outset prejudiced against this calling, as he enters "our first world," he does so decrying the "deception of the thrush" that led him there. He enters the rose-garden when it is already autumn; the leaves have fallen off the trees; the garden is filled with what he perceives as ghosts moving "dignified" and "invisible" over the "dead leaves." Yet the bird apparently has a different view of things; it sings in response to "unheard music hidden in the shrubbery." Not only that, but the speaker recognizes that the ghostly beings in the garden must be able to see what is happening, for the roses in the garden, as he observes, "had the look of flowers that are being looked at."

The speaker and his ghostly cohort (and presumably the bird) move "in a formal pattern" into the "box circle." The importance of formal patterns will become more apparent when we enter the second section of "Burnt Norton;" the box circle, I believe, refers to the central section of the garden in which a circular pool is walled in (at some distance from the pool itself) by a very short hedgerow. Symbolically, it is a reference to "squaring the circle," a process that ancient geometers reportedly attempted and which certain alchemists claimed to have accomplished. While it is mathematically impossible to perform this function because of the transcendence of the number "pi," the alchemical meaning of the square circle pertains to the elevation of the material (lead) to its perfection in the spiritual (gold).

The pool appears "drained" and "dry" to the speaker. Yet all of a sudden, remarkable in the manner in which the speaker presents it as unremarkable, "the pool was filled with water out of sunlight." If such an event transpired in our lives we would no doubt find it noteworthy, yet the speaker only punctuates this event with a comma from the previous line that ended in "brown-edged." The surface of the water "glittered out of heart of light," a beautiful image that is reminiscent from the Wasteland, and the ghostly onlookers become visible by their reflections in the water. The lotus flower that floats in the pool, like the squared circle, symbolizes the transformation of the lesser into the greater. For the lotus (according to the interpretation in Hinduism) is planted deep in the mud of a pond, only to emerge and unfold as the most beautiful of flowers.

"Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty." What just happened? The symbols that we have just encountered all pertain to what we may generally and almost emptily call "transcendence." What a mighty word, and how low it has fallen now! We need now only understand by transcendence a shifting beyond the world in which one had previously lived; a shift that must be to some extent qualitative and not simply quantitative. The possibility of the existence of an undetermined realm in which freedom would be possible is not something that the speaker at the outset wished to admit. Yet even when he comes face-to-face with it, he seems completely unable to understand what he is looking at.

What Eliot is driving at here is an extremely important point to understand as the poem continues. While most of us believe that we are "free," none of us can easily explain what that means. Eliot is trying to force the reader in the whole of this first division precisely into the position where the tremendous tension that one must undergo to acknowledge the reality of freedom can come to pass. For there is no empirical evidence of any kind that human beings could possibly be "free;" the concept of free will cannot exist in a purely "physical" world, once "physical" has been understood in the light of the physical sciences. Yet though we cannot explain it readily, there are moments where we experience a sudden and fleeting vision and we seem to be actually capable of deciding our path for ourselves, beyond all the conditions and experiences that have made us who we are.

The section draws to a close as the bird exhorts the speaker to "go," for "the leaves are full of children." "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." These cryptic final words of the bird are its most profound utterance and possibly the solution to the riddle of freedom, a solution that is invisible to the section's speaker. Just as can only stare at the sun for brief moments before one's eyes are blasted, so it is with the experience of transcendental realities. The moment of ecstasy, like the statue by Bernini, pierces one with an unearthly ray of shining fire. Just as the man who goes to the surface in Plato's allegory and stays in the sunlight cannot with ease return to the cave, so too we who must live in this world cannot for long endure the experience of another world. This is the "reality" that the bird is speaking of. People usually read this as the bird suggesting some sort of flight to fancy and false imagination, but it is in fact making a quite true statement that we who (for better or for worse) must now live in a world of shadows simply cannot bear many glimpses of a higher sort of world.

The experience has in some ways changed the speaker, who concludes with a decisively different rephrasing of his opening lines:

"Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."

The possibility (which will be considered in the next section) that the coming-together of past, present, and future is actually the precondition for the possibility of freedom instead of its destruction is hinted at in the conclusion. For instead of proclaiming that all time is "contained" in time past, he now suggests that time "point[s] to one end," a very different sort of proposition indeed. The "might have been," which was before an abstraction, is now coupled together directly with the highly concrete "what has been." The experience of the lotus in the rose-garden has brought some measure of enlightenment to the deep voice that preached despair beyond despair.

We will continue next time with an analysis of the second section "Burnt Norton." This next section corresponds to the soprano register of the voice, and has a much more melodic and complex structure.