1. No Republic for Old Men
   The overcoming of man’s maladies and vices, Cephalus says, is related to a man’s “character,” presumably his moral character, which is an element of the soul. If a man is right with himself, if his character is rightly ordered, both the problems of old-age and youth will be “moderately troublesome.” In many ways, the issue of moral character is the hidden theme of the Republic. The announced theme of the dialogue is, of course, justice, but justice is just one virtue of the human soul. Click here to read on…

2. The Purpose of Drama
   It is abundantly clear from his description that Augustine, writing of his own experience many years later and, significantly, after his conversion to Christianity, found no proper use for drama in a good life. One wonders whether a bit of Aristotle might have changed his mind. Click here to read on…

3. The Silent Teachings of Physical Media: Part 1 - Video Games
   With physical media, there is a direct, sensible, and temporal connection we hold to the past. This is not simply nostalgia. We develop our memories through experiences, and those experiences are necessarily embodied. With my video games, the connections formed between the past and the present allow me not only to revisit and reflect on my experiences with them whenever I choose, but to share my experiences with the people around me whom I love. Click here to read on…

4. The Imprudent Philanthropy of Socrates?
   “...I fear that I, because of my philanthropy, seem to them to say profusely whatever I possess to every man, not only without pay, but even paying with pleasure if anyone is willing to listen to me.” Click here to read on…
   

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—Plato, Euthyphro, 3d

Here Socrates reports to Euthyphro part of why charges of impiety and corrupting the youth may have been brought against him: he can’t stop talking to people because he loves them too much! The Greek is φιλανθρωπία (philanthrōpia), literally love for human beings. But this account of his own activity is strange for Socrates to give.

Could it really be that the wise man would be imprudent due to love of human beings, at least in a way that would make him incapable of keeping his mouth shut or speaking cryptically when his speech could get him in trouble? This does not seem likely unless the truth he is speaking is of more importance than his well-being, which is a very high threshold to meet. What, then, causes Socrates to speak to Euthyphro? Or anyone? Could it be that Socrates used to be imprudent in his speech, but has become more so with age? If so, how do we explain his speech in the Apology, which seems like purposeful self-sabotage?

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In Book I of Plato’s Republic, Socrates encounters three main interlocutors: Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus. Cephalus is an older gentleman originally from Syracuse who has apparently known Socrates for some time and is friendly with him. The entire dialogue of the Republic takes place at Cephalus’s home. Polemarchus is Cephalus’s loyal son, and Thrasymachus is a highly spirited sophist.

I’d like to share with you a few thoughts on the old man Cephalus, who makes an all-too-brief appearance, followed by a quick exit, at the start of Book I.

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Cephalus is a wealthy merchant, who seems to be approaching his horizon. He expresses his desire to see more of Socrates but admits that he is no longer able physically to trek from the Piraeus (i.e., the Athenian port), where he lives, to Athens, where Socrates lives. Cephalus admits that he is becoming physically decrepit, although he still seems to be mentally active. He no longer experiences the “pleasures” of the body in the way he once did, but he is still capable of experiencing the pleasures associated with the mind, especially those associated with “speeches.”

The exchange between Cephalus and Socrates is curious. Cephalus seems to suggest that he and Socrates are old acquaintances, if not friends. As such, you might expect Cephalus to be the person with whom Socrates would most want to converse. Socrates says that he’s “delighted to discuss with the very old” because they have traveled life’s long road of experience and can tell us “what sort of road it is—whether it is rough and hard or easy and smooth.” In other words, Socrates thinks that Cephalus might instruct him about wisdom or some part of it and the proper path of life to take. Age is not synonymous with wisdom, of course, but it is usually a necessary precondition. Socrates seems genuinely curious to learn about Cephalus’s life.

Cephalus goes on to recount conversations that he’s had with other older gentlemen about the nature of old age. Some reminisce about their youthful dalliances with the pleasures of the body: sex, drink, and feasts. These men lament what they have lost and feel as though they are no longer “even alive.” Others—including if not most importantly the great poet Sophocles—regard their abstinence from the things of the flesh as a cause for celebration. They are no longer prisoners or slaves to the desires of their bodies. Cephalus counts himself as among this latter group, which would suggest that he is now open in his dotage to the possibility of philosophy and the philosophic way of life—at least from the Platonic perspective. Old age, he says, “brings great peace and freedom” from the desires of the body, which are precisely the qualities necessary for philosophizing.

Is that necessarily such a good thing, though? There are men—including great philosophers—for whom the fire burns blue well into old age. I’ve known such men. And is it necessarily the case that the philosophic way of life is mostly devoid of desires? Would it not be truer to say that philosophers have a deeply erotic desire for knowledge of the most important things?

The overcoming of man’s maladies and vices, Cephalus says, is related to a man’s “character,” presumably his moral character, which is an element of the soul. If a man is right with himself, if his character is rightly ordered, both the problems of old-age and youth will be “moderately troublesome.” In many ways, the issue of moral character is the hidden theme of the Republic. The announced theme of the dialogue is, of course, justice, but justice is just one virtue of the human soul.

One might have thought that Socrates would have wanted to discuss moral character with a man who has experienced a long and productive life and might have some wisdom on the topic. Surely the task of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and truth about the most important matters related to living a good and virtuous life.

Oddly, though, this most important issue is not what Socrates wants to discuss with Cephalus. Instead, Socrates somewhat changes or narrows the subject and wants Cephalus to talk about money-making and the consolations of wealth for living a good life into old age. It is something of a mystery that Socrates does not follow Cephalus’s lead to talk about moral character. (Presumably, Socrates does not think he has anything to learn from Cephalus about virtue, moral character, or the good life, but it’s also curious that a man who seemingly cares not at all about money wants to discuss the subject with a man who does.) Cephalus, following Socrates’s lead, takes the bait and tells Socrates that the best life is to have both good character and at least enough wealth to not have to worry about it. Cephalus’s wealth is mostly inherited, but partly earned by his own efforts.

Socrates, more particularly, wants to distinguish between wealth inherited and wealth made. Socrates seems to suggest that the problem with wealth made is that it is driven by a desire no less mad than the desire for sex, which means that men who make their wealth tend to be obsessed with the size of their bank account. In other words, Socrates really seems to be critiquing something akin to selfishness. Curiously, Socrates seems to be suggesting that a son who inherits great wealth is morally superior to the father who made and earned it.

Socrates then asks Cephalus what the “greatest good” is that he has enjoyed from his “great wealth.” This line of questioning causes Cephalus to reflect upon the lies and injustices that men do to others in this life. The memory of these vices and crimes is a “terror” to men, who now, at death’s door, think about punishment in the afterlife for their own misdeeds. Old men, therefore, seek to atone for the things they have done wrong. They want to die with a clear conscience, partly because it’s the right thing to do and partly because they fear eternal punishment.

Not surprisingly, then, the unjust man lives in fear of death, while the just man sleeps well in life and death. Great wealth, particularly if it is inherited, contributes to men not giving in to the temptation to lie, cheat, and steal. Furthermore, the man of wealth can pay his debts and make the sacrifices to the gods. For Cephalus, then, justice is kind of low-grade self-interest that is manifested as a kind of law-abidingness and the recognition that one’s actions in this life are to be rewarded or punished in the next. Justice means obeying the laws of the city, which are enforced by the gods.

Socrates is not convinced, though, that justice is simply and always telling the truth and “giving back what a man has taken from another.” Truth-telling and paying one’s debts are just and good things, but there are powerful exceptions to rule, and so the rule is limited and not comprehensive enough to serve as a rule of justice.

Cephalus agrees with how Socrates problematizes his simple view of justice. And with that, Cephalus is done and leaves to make his sacrifices to the gods and assuage whatever guilt he might have.

Socrates is no doubt pleased that Cephalus and the kind of wisdom that comes with him has left the scene. The true philosophic party can begin now that the somewhat and sometimes pious father has left the house. Socrates remains with a group of impressionable young men, some of whom greatly respect, if not adore, him. The philosophic defense of justice will be found neither with the city (i.e., the ancestral or conventional) nor with the gods.

Socrates’s somewhat dismissive treatment of Cephalus is disappointing. Cephalus is no philosopher and he clearly has no interest in philosophic ways of thinking, but surely his life experiences and form of wisdom might have contributed to a more capacious understanding of justice and the good life. Cephalus might even have improved or deepened Socrates’s best city in speech. In fact, we wonder how the conversation might have changed or even been improved if Plato had replaced Cephalus with an Athenian Burke?

Addendum—My final words to Cephalus:

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Nearly two months ago, Sony announced that it would cease producing physical copies of its PlayStation games on discs in 2028. The announcement is unsurprising given trends in the gaming industry within the last ten years; video games have increasingly become downloadable, and more people play these games primarily on their smartphones instead of dedicated gaming consoles and computers. These developments in the world of video games may appear, at first glance, to have nothing to do with the work of providing students in our classes a quality education in the Great Books. But, given the rapid disappearance of physical media within the same span of time, we teachers ought to wonder what effect these changes may have on our students as they grow up in a world with drastically different relationships to physical media than we did. To do this, however, we must [re]learn lessons we took for granted by living in a world where physical media was readily available to us.

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It may come as a great disappointment to my peers that I still consider myself a “gamer.” As a millennial, I grew up with video games in a time when they made significant leaps from one console generation to another. I remember playing the original Nintendo in my youngest days; in elementary school I played the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and eventually the Nintendo 64; from middle school into high school, I acquired a PlayStation, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube, and original XBOX. During my undergraduate years, I bought an XBOX 360 and Nintendo Wii and played mostly on the former system throughout graduate school. I skipped a console generation after graduate school and switched to PC gaming before coming back to the XBOX Series X a few years ago. And it was in this return to consoles when I first noticed something odd.

Because I missed the XBOX One and PS4 console generation (2013–2020), I was late to discover the major shift that occurred in the production of physical games. Prior to this console generation, regardless of whether one purchased a game on a cartridge or a disc, the game was complete. To play the game, the console had to read the data from the disc in real-time. But after 2013, discs had to be installed on consoles before one could play the game. In many cases, the discs contained only partial games, and one would have to rely on the disc as a key to download the complete game from an online server.

As a kid, there was something cool about taking a game out of a console, putting a new one in, and hitting the power button to start a new game. Even as I grew up, I took delight in the different ways the GameCube, XBOX 360, and Wii handled the loading of discs. I look back on these experiences now and see that they were small moments of wonder arising in an unlikely place. The actions required to begin and end the playing of video games were thoroughly embodied. Even if the act of playing video games did not require much full-body movement, I remember (and still appreciate to this day) the different feel of each console’s controllers. Though I was not conscious of it at the time, all these tangible details taught me through their particularities how to differentiate things, to sense their differences. Yet the sensation of these differences would not have been possible if the games, consoles, and controllers themselves all did not possess these sensible differences before I ever encountered them.

Why does it matter, then, that video games are moving toward no longer being available in physical forms? To start, the simple act of taking a game off the shelf or out of its case and placing it into a game system teaches us how our intentions come to fruition in reality. I had to know what game I wanted to play and why I wanted to play it. I chose a particular game at any given time because there was something unique to the experience of that game that I thought was worth my time. The game I chose was definitively my game and no one else’s. Unless someone stole the game or I broke it, I knew it would be there for me to play whenever I chose to do so. The game, like me, had a clear place in the world and it fit into a personal order of things. When I played the game, it was an active part of that personal order. When the game sat on the shelf, its place in that order was passive. While that may seem like a small thing, I remember packing up my games ahead of a move a couple years ago and I instantly felt their absence. When things are present to us, even passively, their removal is and feels like a genuine loss. That sense of loss teaches us something about who we are in our nature as embodied creatures and in the characters we formed through our own choices.

What strikes me most poignantly about the move away from physical copies of video games is the loss of living memory that such a change inevitably creates. A few nights ago, my wife and I wanted to play “MarioKart.” While I had the game sitting out on a DVD rack in the living room for years, the console itself had been tucked away in a closet. When I set up the console, I recollected the night I waited in the Wal-Mart garden center to buy one on its launch day. When I put the batteries in the controllers, booted up the console, inserted the game and started to play, I instantly remembered some of the moments I spent playing the game throughout the years. Then I couldn’t help but notice the change in my state of life between those early days and now. I had not quite dreamed when I purchased the game as an undergraduate student that I would one day be playing it with my wife, using the same console, controllers, and disc that I used nearly twenty years ago.

With physical media, there is a direct, sensible, and temporal connection we hold to the past. This is not simply nostalgia. We develop our memories through experiences, and those experiences are necessarily embodied. With my video games, the connections formed between the past and the present allow me not only to revisit and reflect on my experiences with them whenever I choose, but to share my experiences with the people around me whom I love. Our students’ parents knew and lived in a world where this was possible, but our students are living in a world where physical media is disappearing. With that disappearance, our students lose the chance to form living memories that give them more expansive views of their lives than the immediate present. How could we expect them to take long looks at anything when the media in their world no longer persists as it did for their teachers?

For those who think video games have little to do with education, I encourage them to look back to the Ancient Greek language for some wisdom. The Greeks’ word for “education” is paideia; it is derived from the word for “child,” pais; through this root, “education” is closely related to the word for “play,” paidiē. All forms of play are different manners of education. The habits and actions needed to begin, sustain, and end playing all require engaging our nature as embodied creatures. These habits and actions form our character at least as much as studying, if not more. This formation is a form of teaching, and it would be best if we approached such teachings not as if they happen by chance, but reflection and choice. Both teachers and students can have video games in common now in ways they could not fifty years ago. For us teachers who played (and still play) these games, we can use our experience to think about how our students have been formed differently than ourselves. From there, we can be more careful and intentional with the formation we aim to provide them in our classes.

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As the semester opens and a new batch of students arrive on campus, I am reminded of Book III in Augustine’s Confessions, where he describes leaving home at seventeen to go to Carthage and study rhetoric. Recalling the travails of being a young student, he details his escapades and foibles and the various “carnal corruptions” of his soul. Often, readers turn to this part of his recollections to understand his embrace of Manichean philosophy or to discern the effects of reading Cicero on beginning the change in his intellectual trajectory. Yet one of the most striking (and perhaps confusing) passages is where Augustine describes his distractions from piety while attending dramatic plays. He expresses perplexity about the human desire to consume drama. “Why does man like to be made sad when viewing doleful and tragical scenes,” he inquires, “which yet he himself would by no means suffer? And yet he wishes, as a spectator, to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very grief his pleasure consists.”

Augustine describes with a considerable psychological acumen the strange emotional state of an audience. Viewing a tragedy, the viewer does not himself experience the grief that he expects from the players. Instead, he wishes to be pleased by the degree of authenticity of their portrayal of grief. Yet no one in attendance would wish either to experience such grief themselves, nor to be called on to help alleviate such grief were it real. Yet the “wonderful madness” of it all consists in the fact that the viewer derives actual joy in partaking a profound performance of the deepest emotional torment. On the surface, it is indeed strikingly strange. For Augustine, it evoked his shame at developing such a love of reveling in tragedy that he described himself as “defiled with a foul infection.” Indeed, his “love of griefs” produced in him a “burning, swelling, putrefaction, and horrible corruption.”

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It is abundantly clear from his description that Augustine, writing of his own experience many years later and, significantly, after his conversion to Christianity, found no proper use for drama in a good life. One wonders whether a bit of Aristotle might have changed his mind. By the time Augustine wrote, Aristotle’s Poetics had been lost to the Latin West, and so we can never know for sure. Though only an incomplete work as it has come down to us today, the Poetics provides a robust argument for how one might not only tolerate enjoying a drama, but actually deem it essential to human flourishing.

For Aristotle, the character of fictional portrayals has roots in the human tendency to pursue mimetic (that is, imitative) activity in childhood. Imitation is “one of [humanity’s] advantages over the lower animals.” It is, he continues, “natural for all to delight in the works of imitation.” He explains how an accomplished artist shears away the non-essentials of the subject matter under consideration and then distills the core or what could be true. Art is, for Aristotle, a kind of projection of possibilities. Surely, the dramatic playwright might envision pleasing us by isolating the deepest anguish and affliction, but for a purpose. The joy one might feel from the experience of a great tragedy derives not, as Augustine suggests, because it is perverse and a distraction from piety, but rather, as Aristotle explains, because it allows a release of powerful emotion (katharsis) and a grasp of some essential truth contained in the relationship between the events of the drama and the conceptual insight into how human beings act in the world.

The explanation for why we might take pleasure in viewing tragedy, Aristotle avers, is because “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind.” Though not always overtly didactic, art for Aristotle can function as a path to growth and development of a full human life. By experiencing the isolated and refined artistic depiction of the joys, sorrows, angers, and pleasures of a well-done drama, the individual extends and enriches his mental and moral horizons. Though Augustine adroitly notices the apparent paradoxical nature of people who rejoice in tragedy and cry when the hero succeeds, it is through this process that we can extend our emotional lives beyond our own experience.

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1. “The Odyssey” as Christopher’s Nolan’s Cinematic Odyssey
   The thoughts that have crystallized in my mind in the time since first watching The Odyssey is that its primary purpose is not to be a faithful portrayal of Homer’s poetry. Rather, the film is more about Nolan’s personal cinematic odyssey over the course of his filmography. Click here to read on…

2. Nobody’s Odyssey
   Nolan has removed one of Homer’s clearest demonstrations of the kind of man Odysseus is. Practically, he has removed the reason why that man has such difficulty getting home. Philosophically, he has removed a lesson in moral character about how great or intelligent men can err. Click here to read on…

3. Why Teach?
   The believer says: “I teach students not because they are excellent or because one day we will discuss Aristotle over wine and cheese, nor because I fancy myself as capable of ‘saving the west,’ ‘deconstructing whiteness,’ nor advancing whatever other political project through the teaching of Aristotle to half-asleep 19-year-olds. I teach because…” Click here to read on…
   

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In a cheeky dialogue published here, I present two interlocutors grappling with why they teach. Their names are heavy-handed: Philanthropos, the lover of humanity, speaks with Aristion, the excellent man who seeks out the excellent. Each begins as a kind of caricature, both of myself (I contain multitudes) and of the human types one finds among the professoriate around higher education. But, as things progress, each character becomes subtler because the problems become more difficult, and I’d like to speak more plainly to those perplexities here.

The basic question of the dialogue is: why teach? Early on, I divided the interlocutors according to piety: Philanthropos is pious, Aristion not. And I think this is a helpful division in approaching the question. Granting that the believer and non-believer can concur about many things, I do think teaching is one place where they are more prone to part ways than not.

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Take the impious first. One way of conceiving of the task of education without reference to divine law or love is that it serves a dual purpose: to make human beings better and, oddly enough, to make them friends. The latter reason is much more intelligible to me than the former. Friendship, as Montaigne reports, seems like the greatest thing a human being can engage in: two souls so mixed together that they seem like one. And of course, one imagines that their conversations are aimed at something higher than the two or their mixture: the ideas. It’s unclear who could deny that this is a fantastic thing. And there is ample evidence that good teachers and good students can, in the very long run, form these kind of connections.

But the earlier purpose, to make human beings better without a view to friendship, is less intelligible to me on all-too-human grounds. This reason appears first in the mouth of Philanthropos in the dialogue, who claims that he makes his students into gentlemen (that is, conventionally decent people) if they are not capable of being philosophers (that is, potential friends of wisdom). This can look like making them into craftsmen or moneymakers (engineering or finance majors) or statesmen (political scientists, the queens of the scientists).

Aristion balks at this on the grounds that: 1) moral education ceases at an early age such that adolescent or young adult pupils are not fit for it; 2) the teachers of virtue are often ironically vicious themselves, making the entire enterprise seem suspect; 3) the attempt to make political life better through educating a handful of human beings is simply too small in its consequences to have any real impact, and the one who hopes to change political life for the better would do better to try through other means; (4) the study of philosophy does not seem relevant to the kinds of things the potential gentleman would need to know, like how to run a business or build an engine.

To my mind, these are powerful critiques of liberal education that require a response, and to which I hope the wider world of civics education, popular as it is today, can embody such a response. Philanthropos the pious offers no substantive defense, in part because he senses that none will please Aristion. Aristion is the kind of man who only wants the best, seemingly having ignored what Aristotle says about human limitations and the relative rarity of the best in any human life. And Aristion wields this desire for the best like a cudgel over his own students, though only rarely over himself.

To such a human being, a fitting response seems to be humiliation. And so Philanthropos gets Aristion to admit that his heroes, Plato and Aristotle, would look at him like he does his merely gentlemanly students—as a necessary evil at best, and laughable and worthy of contempt at worst. Loving the excellent seems very commendable to me, but despising the low is another matter perhaps not implied . And it’s this contempt that the pious Philanthropos cannot share.

The picture comes together very quickly: the religious devotee, especially the Christian, has good reason to love the low. This is called charity, agapē, exemplified best by Christ’s death on the Cross. And it’s something that makes teaching people who will not become one’s friends intelligible if the counterarguments against liberal education presented above and others besides prove persuasive. The believer says: “I teach students not because they are excellent or because one day we will discuss Aristotle over wine and cheese, nor because I fancy myself as capable of ‘saving the west,’ ‘deconstructing whiteness,’ nor advancing whatever other political project through the teaching of Aristotle to half-asleep 19-year-olds. I teach because these students matter as individuals, simply, and any good I can bring to their souls is a job well done, and all, frankly, that I seem to be reasonably able to hope to do with the peculiar education I sought with my own peculiar soul.”

The dialogue purposely drops off after Philanthropos asks for a parallel account from Aristion, inviting a stronger formulation of the non-believer’s account of teaching from the reader themself. So I will ask you, the reader, to provide such an account. What might the non-believer’s case be for liberal education that is not reducible to hoping for philosophic friendship?

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**Spoiler Warning: This post contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and several of his other films.**

When it was announced that Christopher Nolan’s next film after the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer would be The Odyssey, I was of two minds. On the one hand, I feared Nolan would gut the gods from Homer’s epic and make everything thoroughly human. On the other hand, Nolan is one of the few directors whose work I’m personally interested in following. It’s not simply because of my trust that a Nolan film will put on a good show, nor is it a matter of the IMAX experience (though I can attest that the 70mm film IMAX version of The Odyssey was worth driving to Atlanta to see…at 7:15 AM). What interests me more about Nolan’s films is the sense that he is genuinely thinking through some ideas and he wants his viewers to think along with him. There are spectacles in his movies, and while they are entertaining, there is a substance beneath them that he invites viewers to see should they choose to do so.

Since it has been three weeks since I’ve seen The Odyssey, I cannot speak as precisely about the film’s details as I would like. I also want to avoid direct comparisons to Homer’s work, in part because I would prefer at least a second viewing to help solidify my judgments on what Nolan decided to keep and change from the original epic.

The thoughts that have crystallized in my mind in the time since first watching The Odyssey is that its primary purpose is not to be a faithful portrayal of Homer’s poetry. Rather, the film is more about Nolan’s personal cinematic odyssey over the course of his filmography. This is evident in the film’s cinematic presentation, the visual callbacks to his previous films, and, most importantly, the movie’s central themes.

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The Progression of Nolan’s Cinematic Presentation

At the most obvious level, The Odyssey is the final step in Nolan’s work with IMAX cameras and film. Back in 2008, The Dark Knight (the sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins) was the first Nolan movie to include whole scenes filmed in IMAX, the most notable of which are Joker’s opening-scene bank heist and the street chase around the SWAT truck with Harvey Dent inside. With the exception of Inception (2010), every Nolan film since The Dark Knight—The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), Oppenheimer (2023)—had increasing amounts of scenes shot in IMAX. The Odyssey is the first film Nolan has done completely in IMAX.

Nolan’s use of IMAX in his filmography has never had the feeling of being a gimmick like 3D movies were in the last decade. With its increased resolution, larger image, and more powerful sound, the IMAX format immerses viewers more deeply into the story. Nolan is insistent on his movies’ images being on film, on something tangible. Across his movies, Nolan finds ways to ground the most fantastical elements of his stories in reality. At the same time that the movie theater experience is meant to take us away from the world for a few hours, it’s also meant to be a full sensory immersion in the film’s story and its characters. If you have a chance to catch The Odyssey in IMAX before it leaves theaters, listen to the roar of the seas and feel each crack of thunder. Would you think Poseidon and Zeus are silent actors in the movie when these events happen?

Nolan’s Visual Callbacks in The Odyssey

Throughout The Odyssey, Nolan includes elements that remind viewers of his previous films. There are likely far more of these visual callbacks than what I note here, but I will limit myself to the ones that have been most persistent in my thoughts lately.

The first (and perhaps most jarring) visual callback in The Odyssey is in the armor of Nolan’s Agamemnon, which looks quite close to his vision of Batman.

While it might seem strange for Nolan to reference his work with Batman, we should remember that Bruce Wayne’s stated purpose for putting on the suit in Batman Begins is to become something more than “a man”: he wants to become a “symbol.” In The Odyssey, Agamemnon’s armor allows him to function as the symbol of the king who leads the attack on Troy with Odysseus’ help. We hear very little from Agamemnon in the movie until we meet him (as we do in Homer’s poem) in the underworld. The softness with which he speaks contrasts greatly with the imposing image he tried to convey as a king and a general. Beneath that image is a man who destroyed his own family to win a war. Odysseus faces a similar choice, but Agamemnon does not want him to meet the same fate.

There are a few scenes involving the Trojan horse in The Odyssey that call to mind Dunkirk in two ways. First, a good portion of that movie takes place on the beach as the British troops wait for a way to get home. Nolan’s Trojan horse sits half-immersed on a beach, waiting to be taken into the city. Second, on a few occasions, we receive glimpses into the Trojan horse and watch as it floods with water, causing some men to drown. Throughout Dunkirk, there are several claustrophobic scenes within ships (either on the beach or at sea) where we watch soldiers fight for their lives (and many dying) as their vessels flood with water.

The next two visual callbacks more clearly tie to consistent themes in Nolan’s work. In Inception, the characters all must have physical, real-world “totems” that they recreate in their dreams to help them distinguish between their waking reality and their dreaming states. The most famous totem in the movie is a spinning top. In the real world, the top will eventually fall over; in dreams, it spins constantly. In The Odyssey, before Odysseus leaves his home, his wife Penelope gives him a small statue of Athena that he carries with him throughout the events of the film. At a vital moment in the movie, the statue helps to remind Odysseus of Penelope’s name, which he had forgotten because of his martial exploits.

When Nolan’s Odysseus returns to his home in Ithaca, he has a conversation with Penelope at night while he is still in disguise. It is the moment when Odysseus confesses to his wife why he did not want to return home. Between Odysseus and Penelope, there is an iron grate/screen that changes its appearances depending on how the firelight flickers. Nolan uses the same visual trick in Interstellar when Cooper must find a way within the black hole to communicate with his daughter Murph inside the home he left to go on a journey to save the world.

Both Cooper and Odysseus, hidden from their homes in different ways, must find ways to speak with those whom they love to find their way back to them.

Nolan’s Central Themes

Going into The Odyssey, I knew that the theme of fathers finding ways to return to their homes was central to two of his movies. As noted above, the central drama of Interstellar involves Cooper desperately trying to return to his son and daughter (his wife died of cancer before the movie’s events take place) after agreeing to join a secret space program created to find a new planet for humans to inhabit since the earth’s crops were dying of blight. The journey he expects to take several years transforms into a decades-long odyssey to return to his family. Similarly, Cobb, in Inception, has been on the run, away from his children, and infiltrating people’s dreams since being suspected of murdering his wife Mal, who we learn committed suicide. As the movie unfolds within a multi-layered dream, Cobb experiences what feels to him like decades of being removed from the world. Finally, though not as family-driven, Dunkirk’s central drama involves the thousands of British soldiers who need to return home by crossing the English Channel from occupied France (though this operation took less than two weeks).

One very anachronistic theme in The Odyssey that is consistent with Nolan’s prior films is the idea of “civilization.” As portrayed by Nolan, Odysseus, through offering the false gift of the wooden horse to the Trojans in order to defeat them in war, broke “Zeus’s law” and the Greeks’ respect for hospitality. It is the same law that the suitors violate in Odysseus’ home as they use up his goods, waiting for Penelope to marry one of them. The Trojan horse in the film functions in part like the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, forever changing the world after its creation and use in war.

Civilization has always been precarious in many of Nolan’s films. In both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, the League of Shadows operates behind the scenes to “restore balance” to the world by destroying “decadent” civilizations. With The Dark Knight Rises in particular, class resentments and the presence of a nuclear bomb within Gotham City contribute to its descent into lawlessness. In the climax of The Dark Knight, Joker orchestrates a situation where two ferry boats (one containing civilians evacuating the city, the other containing prisoners) hold switches to detonate bombs on the other boat. He aims to prove to Batman an argument he made about people in their mid-movie interrogation scene: “They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show ya’—when the chips are down, these ‘civilized people,’ they’ll eat each other.” With Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet, the characters all work to escape civilization-ending events; where the threat in the first movie is never clearly attributed to natural or human causes, the latter two movies blame (like Oppenheimer) the creation of human weapons.

To my mind, the biggest thematic thread running through Nolan’s movies concerns the destructiveness of lies. This was the one I was most curious to see him handle in The Odyssey since Odysseus is (with Athena’s help in the original epic) a crafty and wily liar. Throughout Nolan’s movies, lies are central to many of their plots. On every occasion, Nolan never vindicates the lie. His stories always condemn those who lie, especially those who think they do so for good reasons. Before returning to The Odyssey, it would be helpful to trace this theme throughout Nolan’s films.

First there is Memento (2000), which is the story of a man who, because of a defect in his long-term memory, chooses to lie to himself. Consider The Prestige (2006) next, where the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier choose to do great harm to themselves and others through lies that protect the illusion of their greatest magic tricks (which, among magicians, is called “the prestige”). At the conclusion of The Dark Knight, Commissioner Gordon and Batman/Bruce Wayne choose to lie about Harvey Dent becoming Two-Face for the sake of keeping the criminals he prosecuted in prison; in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane stands outside of Blackgate Prison and reads Commissioner Gordon’s private letter with his regrets for this lie immediately before releasing all the prisoners and plunging the city into anarchy.

In Inception, we learn that Cobb’s wife Mal killed herself on account of his attempt to remind her of a truth she “chose to forget.” Mal, choosing to live in the dream world as if it was reality, took her spinning top totem and locked it in a safe laying down (as opposed to perpetually spinning). With this act, she lied to herself about what was real and what was a dream. Cobb, to bring his wife back to reality, set the top spinning again. When Mal re-entered the waking world, she no longer believed it was real, and so she jumped out of a hotel window and fell to her death thinking she would wake up. This event haunts Cobb throughout the movie, even though he told his wife the truth that she tried to hide from herself.

With Interstellar, the elder Dr. Brand tells his daughter (also referred to as Dr. Brand) and Cooper that they will be able to return to earth after journeying across the stars to find a new planet to call home. As the movie enters its final act, we learn that the elder Dr. Brand told what his daughter would call “a monstrous lie” for the sake of saving humanity. When Cooper and the younger Dr. Brand find this out on a desolate ice planet through Dr. Mann—a man who was supposedly “the best of us” but in on the lie, a man who was truly a vicious coward—both characters are rightly horrified and angry.

In light of his previous films, how, then, would Nolan handle Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns” who must find his way home after twenty years away? In his pivotal visit to the underworld, Odysseus meets Sinon, the soldier he deceived to tend to the wooden horse on the beach until it was picked up by the Trojans. Odysseus and his men waited inside the horse as they heard Sinon be killed. Sinon, however, was never told he would be sent to his death. In the underworld, Sinon tells Odysseus to be truthful to his men and make amends for their deaths, deaths he caused through his lies. This is why the movie ends with Odysseus and Penelope reunited but leaving their home and their kingdom in the hands of their son Telemachus. Odysseus the king, general, husband, and father, must live a truthful life, otherwise there will be no peace for him.

Final Thoughts

What I appreciate most about Nolan’s films, and the reason why I will keep watching them, is that they are usually so well-constructed and thought out as to reward repeat viewings. In this respect, his movies remind me of what it is like to read the Great Books, especially when a single author is responsible for several works. In both cases, we can find strong evidence of the questions driving the works’ creators. We see the development of their thoughts through recurring themes and ideas. Above all else, we can see the substance and weight they carry because their creators take their work seriously.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may not be the cinematic presentation of Homer that some wanted, but I do not think that is what Nolan set out to do. Nolan has ideas and questions driving his works that show he thinks seriously about the world and the choices people make within it. His films are worth watching and re-watching because of this. Like the Great Books, we can learn by seeing the conversation among his films. Nolan’s Odyssey seems to be a capstone for all his films. While I will remain curious about what his next film will be, for now, I recommend using The Odyssey either to visit or revisit his prior works. I suspect those who do will find several things worth thinking about. A director who commits his stories to living according to truth rather than lies will always be worth our time.

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Conservatives are spending considerable time fighting about Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey. Ben Shapiro has called it a “masterpiece” and accused conservative critics of “missing the Biblical forest for the woke trees.” He praised Nolan’s film as a “large-scale win for civilizational values.” Elon Musk accused Nolan of “desecrating Homer.” Matt Walsh attacked the film’s casting as “just as woke as you fear, if not more so.”

The debate over whether Nolan’s Odyssey is “woke” or “traditional” obscures Nolan’s greatest failure. Shapiro understands what Nolan has done. He is wrong only in thinking it a virtue. Nolan has “poured” Christian morality—or, more precisely, a modern approximation of Christian morality—into “a Greek vase.” In doing so, he has poured Homer out.

The nous (mind) and mētis (cunning) that define Odysseus give way to trauma and introspection. Xenia and the sacred order of the hearth become a generalized injunction to be kind. Athena is a projection of Odysseus’ wounded psyche. The restoration of household, kingship, and Ithaca becomes a story of personal healing.

Nolan preserves the names, monsters, battles, the bow , ships, and scenery of Homer’s poem while replacing the moral universe and religious beliefs that give those things their meaning. This film is not The Odyssey. It is something else.

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The first indication of this is Odysseus himself. Matt Damon is a fine actor, but throughout the film, I found it impossible to forget that I was watching Matt Damon. This is especially strange in a Nolan film. Nolan is a master at creating a universe into which the viewer enters and, for several hours, remains. Here, the sheer celebrity of the cast continually breaks the spell. Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there is something so recognizably contemporary—and, frankly, Bostonian—about him that I couldn’t imagine him as a king from Ithaca.

Anne Hathaway’s Penelope presents a more substantive problem not with her acting, but with the script itself. Homer’s Penelope is prudent, intelligent, measured, long-suffering, and almost Odyssean in her ability to conceal what she knows. Her weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud is an exercise in rule akin to Odysseus’ rule over his men. Nolan, however, gives us a Penelope who is frequently angry and brooding rather than wise and measured.

The woman who is Odysseus’ intellectual counterpart becomes something more familiar to modern audiences: the resentful wife of an absent husband, or the bitter woman tired of the character of the men with whom she must share a city. Rather than outsmarting the men, she tries to beat them at their own game. Rather than the strength of her mind and spirit triumphing over their brute strength and sheer numbers, we see a woman ready to come to blows with the suitors, her son, and her own husband if he ever returns. She doesn’t want her husband back; she wants to rule. Nolan’s Penelope takes on the character of Homer’s Calypso.

Likewise, Nolan gives us an Odysseus without nous. Homer announces the character of his hero in the opening lines. Odysseus is “the man of twists and turns” who has seen men and “learned their minds” through the “many pains he suffered”; in other words, Odysseus sees, understands, and recognizes. The Odyssey is consequently structured around acts of recognition: Odysseus must recognize his homeland, Telemachus must recognize his father, Argos recognizes his master, and Penelope must finally recognize her husband. Odysseus’ homecoming requires him to know Ithaca again—after he has seen other men and come to know them—and Ithaca must gradually come to know him so that he might know what to do politically for the good of the city and his loyal citizens.

Nolan replaces this structure of recognition with the language of psychological trauma. Rather than looking around, Nolan’s Odysseus looks inward, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Nolan’s Odysseus has PTSD, to put it frankly. He is a veteran haunted by guilt, violence, memory, and the men he could not save. That is an intelligible modern story, and it may even be a moving one, but it changes the question at the center of the poem. Homer asks whether Odysseus can return to the order from which he has been absent for twenty years. Nolan asks whether a damaged man can come to terms with what war has done to him.

Because Nolan’s Odysseus is not Homer’s Odysseus, the mutilation of the Cyclops loses its Homeric meaning and Nolan thereby loses the Homeric plot. Two key omissions occur.

First, in Homer, trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, Odysseus announces: “Nobody—that’s my name.” When the blinded Polyphemus cries for assistance, the other Cyclopes ask who is attacking him. “Nobody,” he tells them. So, nobody comes to help. Nolan eliminates the trick entirely. He thereby eliminates the positive dimension of Odysseus’ polymētis (many-wiles). Odyssean polymētis becomes a vice insofar as it led to victory and Troy, and victory at Troy led to Matt Damon’s PTSD.

The second omission is just as important as the first. In Homer’s account, Odysseus’ polymētis allows him to escape, but he cannot resist hubristically shouting back at the cyclops—named Polyphēmos, which in Greek means “much fame”—“If any man on the face of the earth should ask you who blinded you, shamed you so—say Odysseus, raider of cities.” This scene is a key moment signaling Odysseus’ hamartia, that is, the term Aristotle uses in the Poetics to describe “the mistake” committed by tragic characters. Polymētis saves Odysseus, but his hubris, which stems from his pride in the power of his polymētis, endangers him. Polyphēmos now knows Odysseus’ name and can call upon his father Poseidon to punish him.

Nolan has removed one of Homer’s clearest demonstrations of the kind of man Odysseus is. Practically, he has removed the reason why that man has such difficulty getting home. Philosophically, he has removed a lesson in moral character about how great or intelligent men can err.

Something similar happens to what Nolan repeatedly calls “Zeus’ law.” Nolan understands that hospitality matters in Homer, but he translates xenia into something approaching a watered-down Christian Golden Rule: be kind to others, treat strangers well, or the stranger before you might be divine (this is what Shapiro admires about the film). Yet Homer’s world is considerably stranger and more demanding than this.

Xenia exists within a sacred order organized around the household, the stranger, the suppliant, sacrifice, kinship, and the gods. The “hearth”—hestia—is not merely a cozy symbol. It is the sacred center of civilization. When Odysseus reaches the Phaeacians (a people omitted from the film), he approaches their household as a suppliant. Hospitality has forms and obligations because it has divine sanction. Zeus is “Zeus Xenios,” the protector. This explains much of the reason for the Trojan War itself. This fact regarding the gods links The Iliad and The Odyssey. The offense of the suitors is much greater than being rude men: their conduct is akin to the conduct that set in motion the Trojan War. They are violating an order that joins household and divine law.

Nolan gives a surface-level nod to that order and loses the world that makes the rule intelligible. He extracts something like “be kind to others” from Homer and makes it the moral teaching of The Odyssey. But Odysseus is not trying for ten years to return to a place where people are nice to each other. He is trying to return to his hearth, his wife, his son, his household, his ancestral gods, and the political community over which he is king. In Homer, home is not primarily an emotion or a place of comfort: it is an order connecting man to the gods.

Even Nolan’s Ithaca does not look like Ithaca. Nolan presents the kingdom as almost ruinous, as though twenty years without its king has reduced a kingdom to complete ruin. The strain for symbolism removes the viewer from the Greek world. Homer’s Ithaca is not in ruins. The problem is much more interesting. The scandal of the suitors depends upon the mismanagement of Odysseus’ kingdom: they are eating his cattle, drinking his wine, sleeping under his roof, courting his wife, threatening his son. All these things still exist, though they are dwindling through the political mismanagement of the suitors as they defy Zeus’ divine order regarding the household.

Homer’s Ithaca has been corrupted, not destroyed; disorder has invaded an existing order. The hope and drama of the poem is whether Odysseus can return to Ithaca after reconciling with the gods, and restore Ithaca’s moral order and honor the gods by honoring his home. Instead of an Ithaca that may still be redeemed and reconciled with the gods, Nolan presents the cinematic image of a civilization physically collapsing because it suits his psychological interpretation. The external ruin of the city symbolizes the psychoanalyzed Odysseus. Homeric politics and household order give way to modern literary psychoanalysis.

Nolan’s bow competition is wrong in subtle ways, and this makes one wonder why Telemachus should inherit the throne. The suitors must string Odysseus’ bow and send an arrow through twelve axes. The suitors inhabit Odysseus’ house but cannot wield Odysseus’ weapon. In Homer, Telemachus comes close, but this is lost in the film because Nolan’s Telemachus is a wimp at best and a side-kick at worst; he doesn’t even try the test in the film.

When Telemachus comes close in Homer’s poem, this signals that he may be able to inherit the throne, though he may rule differently than his father. As Tennyson tells us, Telemachus will “fulfil/ This labour, by slow prudence [rather than brute strength] to make mild/ A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees/ Subdue them to the useful and the good.” The Odyssey, and Telemachus’ inheritance, signals that 1) “We are not now that strength which in old days/ Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are”; and 2) that “men that strove with Gods” will no longer rule.

Through this test, Ithaca recognizes the disguised Odysseus and Odysseus recognizes his son’s capacity for rule. The entire final movement of The Odyssey is saturated with these recognitions because restoration requires recovering distinctions: master and usurper, husband and suitor, father and son, guest and violator, Odysseus and “Nobody.”

Because Nolan’s Ithaca is not Homer’s Ithaca, he may as well remove the most beautiful scene in the entire poem. Penelope tests Odysseus. She tricks him into revealing himself. She tells Eurycleia to move their marriage bed and Odysseus, prideful of his craftsmanship and strength that built the marriage bed, cannot restrain himself. He asks:

Who could move my bed? Impossible task,
even for some skilled craftsman—unless a god
came down in person, quick to lend a hand,
lifted it out with ease and moved it elsewhere.
Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,
would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,
a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.
I know, I built it myself—no one else

What better image could one devise for marriage and civilization? Their bed is living and constructed, natural and conventional, rooted and cultivated. Odysseus built his household around something that grows from Ithacan soil. The image of the bed sheds light upon the deep wrong that the suitors attempt in trying to assume the bed that Odysseus created. Because Odysseus made the bed that connects the household to Ithacan soil and the Ithacan kingship, no one else can claim either. Because the bed is rooted to Ithacan soil, the marriage cannot simply be picked up and moved somewhere else because husband, wife, household, and place are joined together. Only Odysseus and Penelope know this secret.

In sum, home, in The Odyssey, means something greater than comfort and recovery from war-time trauma. It means more than being nice to neighbors.

The conservative arguments over Nolan’s Odyssey seem so trivial because they don’t understand the moral center of Homer’s The Odyssey. Shapiro recognizes that Nolan has changed the moral world of the poem, calling it “Christian morality poured into a Greek vase.” But once Homer’s gods and Greek customs have been poured out, what exactly remains inside that Greek vase? A very expensive Christopher Nolan film, perhaps a good and entertaining one, but not The Odyssey.

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1. “Why do you hate the South?”
   Enter William Faulkner, the essential poet of the South and the American Civil War. When Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom!, he believed that he captured the essence of the Civil War by conveying the fictional story of Thomas Sutpen, a northerner who became a plantation owner in the South and then a colonel of rebel forces in the Civil War. When Faulkner sent the manuscript to a friend, he said, “I think it’s the best novel yet written by an American.” Click here to read on…

2. The Best “Civic Education” is Simply Good Education
   Madison’s philosophic digression shows us that what Americans need is not merely an education suited and bound to their form of government, but an education that is open to nature and politics. In short, Madison’s example teaches us that the best education is simply a good education. Click here to read on…

3. Cicero and Vico on Choosing a Major
   As we prepare to aid in the transition of new students to the halls of academe, we would be wise to encourage them to slow down, survey the landscape, and take seriously the need to read widely and deeply (as we do here at Lyceum), to make a full self-examination before selecting a major and life’s course. Click here to read on…

4. The Foolishness of Knowledge?
   “...It is dangerous to go too far away from the house of Scripture. A child, indeed, never wants to go too far away from home. There is the same danger in the sciences, for people spread out so much through the consideration of their [own] knowledge that later they are unable to return to the house of Scripture…” Click here to read on…
   

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—Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaemeron, Collation 17

Here St. Bonaventure warns his audience about knowledge pursued for its own sake. Scripture reveals what man must know. The mind easily wanders in pursuing its own way, and reason, as the great thinkers teach us, seems capable of a lifetime of exercise upon this way. But is it the case that mind, insubordinate to anything but itself, must necessarily enter into the “house of Daedalus,” a labyrinth? Whereas Scripture provides a “house,” the mind alone provides a maze. Despite what we often hear about the dignity or grandeur of undertaking the journey through that maze, could such journeys be only foolishness if they tarry too long? Is there a prodigality of the mind which must be frowned upon, even if always forgiven?

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WARNING: THIS ESSAY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

Click here for a (mostly) spoiler free intro to the novel.

Though the Civil War is far and away the most studied period of American history, it eludes precise understanding. For example, the U.S. citizenship test accepts three answers as correct to the question regarding the “problem that led” to the Civil War.

The Civil War, and the relationship between the North and the South, cannot be comprehended by historical accounts; comprehension of its causes, effects, and meaning requires recourse to poetry because poetry can hold two contrary views in tension and allow the reader to use his mind to consider the question for himself.

The Antebellum Period and the Civil War were when the nation was most at tension. Any comprehension of those periods in American history requires a retelling adequate to capture and convey the tension between those two communities—North and South—that went from being “unanimous” at the time of the signing of the Declaration, to engaging in a bloody war of brother against brother.

Enter William Faulkner, the essential poet of the South and the American Civil War. When Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom!, he believed that he captured the essence of the Civil War by conveying the fictional story of Thomas Sutpen, a northerner who became a plantation owner in the South and then a colonel of rebel forces in the Civil War. When Faulkner sent the manuscript to a friend, he said, “I think it’s the best novel yet written by an American.” Faulkner believed that was the case because he captured the character of what was, to him, the most important event in U.S. history with the tension demanded by the subject’s telling.

Thomas Sutpen’s story, like all great American stories, is a true rags-to-riches story. He is the American Adam. He is an impoverished northerner who became a rich southerner by integrating his northern habits into the southern way of life. In doing so, he became the richest and most powerful slave owner in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

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At the outset of the novel, Sutpen arrives in the town “out of the soundless Nothing” and “as in a thunderclap” (like a Greek or Roman god). When he buys one hundred acres from the native Americans, he began “pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.” In this way, Faulkner describes Thomas Sutpen in the language of a Greek god acting akin to the God of Genesis.

Sutpen owns the largest track of land in the county, and his mansion is the largest building in the county, courthouse included. He seems to command the power of the Greek gods and the Christian God, and that provides him with a plantation that is more powerful, and more grand, than the county’s most important political office—the office at which he might be adjudicated if he were to become a lawless man or a bad actor. At the outset, he is an outsider to the South and the demands of its manners; throughout his “design,” he becomes a man outside the law as well. His power provides him with great freedom.

Yet, Sutpen is also described in terms opposite to a god. He is called a “man-horse-demon.” The description shows that he is, in some sense, a beast. For instance, he “tore violently a plantation. . . without gentleness.” Given his northern upbringing, he is a hard worker; even the mules feel the need to keep up with his work-ethic, given his “proximity” to them. The first teller of Sutpen’s story insists that he is a “demon” (as does the last), that his existence in the South resulted in the South’s loss of the Civil War: “God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.”

Is Sutpen a beast or a god? Is he both? This is the foundational question that the novel asks the reader to adjudicate alongside the young man, Quentin Compson, who has never met Thomas Sutpen but is charged with remembering his story. Related to this is an adjudication of the southern way of life.

How did Thomas Sutpen become Thomas Sutpen, the “god” or “man-horse-demon”? It began with his first encounter with slavery. Sutpen was originally born in severe poverty, in what would now be the state of West Virginia. His father brought his family down from the Appalachian Mountains into the South to start anew. Thomas is charged with calling upon a plantation owner for the sake of “business,” but he is turned away from the front door: Thomas is told, by a slave, that he is too poor to enter the front door of the first great mansion he sees in his life.

This slight sets in motion Sutpen’s “design”: neither he, nor his descendants, will ever be turned away from a rich man’s front door again. He will learn the ways of the South, and he will excel in those ways through grit, ruthlessness, and hard work. He will outperform the thing that slighted him in the performance of the very thing that led to the slight. He will become the kind of human being for whom he first felt severe hatred.

Sutpen succeeds valiantly, but success in such an endeavor was fated to be a failure. He cannot preserve that thing that he has created, the Sutpen’s Hundred. The town turns against him. His family turns against him. His children forsake him. His wives either begrudge him, die before him, or prove incapable of bearing him an adequate heir. Finally, the one man who remains loyal to him ultimately becomes his own undoing… after Sutpen slights him in a way similar to the plantation owner who slighted him to set his “design” in motion.

Thomas Sutpen’s epic success is a tragedy of epic proportions.

After Quentin has told his roommate at Harvard, Shreeve, the story, Shreeve has one final question: “Why do you hate the South?” Quentin responds “quickly, at once, immediately”:

I dont hate it. . . I dont hate it. . . I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

And that is how William Faulkner ends the “greatest book” written by an American. Why? Well, you, like Quentin, have to figure it out for yourself.

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In the post I wrote a few weeks ago for the 250^th anniversary of America’s founding, I pointed to James Madison’s “Federalist No. 37” as an excellent example of what someone with a philosophic education can see in a question that we tend to view as primarily political. In that post, I quoted the bookends to a series of arguments where Madison traces the difficulties in using words that would be effective in “marking the proper line of partition, between the authority of the general, and that of the state governments.” In this post, I want to spend more time with the text of Madison’s philosophic digression from “Federalist No. 37.” My goal here is to use Madison’s example to wonder if there is something misguided in those who think what Americans need today is more and better “civic education.” Specifically, Madison’s philosophic digression shows us that what Americans need is not merely an education suited and bound to their form of government, but an education that is open to nature and politics. In short, Madison’s example teaches us that the best education is simply a good education.

Let me begin by highlighting the first passage I used in my previous post. From his statement about the difficulty in properly partitioning the federal and state governments, Madison writes, “Every man will be sensible of this difficulty, in proportion as he has been accustomed to contemplate and discriminate objects, extensive and complicated in their nature” (emphasis added). In the context of “Federalist No. 37,” Madison wants his readers to be aware of how difficult it was for those attending the convention to partition the federal and state governments in ways that struck a proper balance between energy in the government (a principal defect of The Articles of Confederation) and citizens’ liberty. Notice, however, what the second clause of the sentence implies: the extent to which individuals would be “sensible” of the difficulties such partitions require depends on whether they have been “accustomed” to contemplating and discriminating “extensive and complicated” objects. In other words, individuals’ capacity to understand partitions in government—partitions vital to the protection of their individual liberty—depends on their education.

Based on Madison’s thoughts, education has two general foundations: the activity of contemplation, and objects of contemplation. Part of contemplating an object is seeing it for what it is. In doing this, though, we must also be able to “discriminate” (or distinguish) one object from another. While we all have the capacity to contemplate and life presents us many objects of contemplation, we may not necessarily be “accustomed” to contemplating in ways that expand our natural capacities. On the one hand, we may not have learned how to see objects fully for what they are by looking at them closely. On the other hand, we may have so narrowed our vision that we do not know how several objects (whether similar or different) relate to each other. To strengthen our capacities to contemplate and discriminate, education must present “extensive” and “complicated” objects of contemplation. The more extensive and complicated the objects, the better our education will be.

What objects, then, does Madison have in mind as being helpful for the work of distinguishing the federal and state governments? Does he start with political treatises? No. His first appeal is to philosophers’ inquiries into human nature:

“The faculties of the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined, with satisfactory precision, by all the efforts of the most acute and metaphysical philosophers. Sense, perception, judgment, desire, volition, memory, imagination, are found to be separated, by such delicate shades and minute gradations, that their boundaries have eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of ingenious disquisition and controversy.”

Next, Madison mentions those who examine nature itself:

“The boundaries between the great kingdoms of nature, and still more, between the various provinces, and lesser portions, into which they are subdivided, afford another illustration of the same important truth. The most sagacious and laborious naturalists have never yet succeeded, in tracing with certainty the line which separates the district of vegetable life, from the neighboring region of unorganized matter, or which marks the termination of the former, and the commencement of the animal empire. A still greater obscurity lies in the distinctive characters, by which the objects in each of these great departments of nature have been arranged and assorted.”

With his first two appeals, Madison shows readers that he approaches political questions as someone whose intellectual interests extend far beyond the realm of politics. Educated in both philosophic and natural inquiry, Madison’s contemplation of the extensive and complicated objects of human nature and the natural world has some bearing on addressing the political question of partitioning the United States’ new government.

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To build a bridge between his reflections on human nature and nature and the questions surrounding the new constitution, Madison turns to contemplation’s inherent limits:

“When we pass from the works of nature, in which all the delineations are perfectly accurate, and appear to be otherwise only from the imperfection of the eye which surveys them, to the institutions of man, in which the obscurity arises as well from the object itself, as from the organ by which it is contemplated; we must perceive the necessity of moderating still further our expectations and hopes from the efforts of human sagacity.”

The human eye and the human mind are both imperfect, and we must account for this when we respectively use each to see and contemplate different objects. Regarding the “institutions of man” that fall under the mind’s purview, Madison first finds difficulties in attempts to distinguish the branches of government and their powers:

“Experience has instructed us, that no skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces, the legislative, executive, and judiciary; or even the privileges and powers of the different legislative branches. Questions daily occur in the course of practice, which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science.”

Next, appealing to both history and jurisprudence, Madison sees challenges in how various forms of law relate to one another:

“The experience of the ages, with the continued and combined labors of the most enlightened legislators and jurists, have been equally unsuccessful in delineating the several objects and limits of different codes of laws, and different tribunals of justice. The precise extent of the common law, the statute law, the maritime law, the ecclesiastical law, the law of corporations, and other local laws and customs, remain still to be clearly and finally established in Great Britain, where accuracy in such subjects has been more industriously pursued than in any other part of the world.”

Sticking briefly with the specifics of Great Britain, Madison finds limits to the precision of setting its various courts’ jurisdictions:

“The jurisdiction of her several courts, general and local, of law, of equity, of admiralty, &c. is not less a source of frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed.”

Finally, not even new laws are immune from the need to determine their meaning over time:

“All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”

Taken together, we see how extensive Madison’s view of political and legal questions is. Whether this view is informed by philosophy, history, experience, or the study of law, Madison sees how complicated and extensive these matters are. He can see this because he has accustomed himself to contemplating complicated and extensive things, though not necessarily in the areas in which we would first expect him to undertake this work.

Here another vital insight from Madison breaks through. What is constant in Madison’s arguments is the activity of contemplation. What changes are the objects of contemplation. Whether it is human nature, nature, perception, experience, history, government, or law, it is always Madison himself who contemplates these matters. As much as Madison contemplates, he does not lose sight of himself. A good education heeds this lesson. Part of what makes contemporary university education so fractured is that many forms of study, in the name of objectivity, require anyone who undertakes them to become practitioners of certain methods. The effect of this approach is to lead those who practice these methods to lose sight of themselves. Madison’s example presents us a more human alternative. The human activities of seeing and contemplating are education’s natural foundation. The need for integration in education is constantly fulfilled when we remember that every object we ask students to contemplate is secondary to ensuring that all the intellectual work they do is a natural extension of who they are.

This brings us to the final part of Madison’s argument concerning the limits of words in settling firm partitions between the federal and state governments. Here Madison begins with words’ inherent tension, for though they aspire to clarity, some ideas are too complex for words to capture:

“Besides, the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other, adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity therefore requires, not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many, equivocally denoting different ideas.”

Words will, despite our best efforts, run into equivocations, thus compounding the problems that already exist in objects of contemplation and our human faculties:

“Hence it must happen, that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be conceived, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate, by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined.”

Madison now completes the line of argument that began with the partitions of government. The complex and extensive objects of contemplation here come up against language’s limits. The more complex the object, the more difficult it is to define. That does not mean, however, that we should run from this work; rather, the difficulty is something of which we must be cognizant and act accordingly. Lest anyone have trouble with Madison’s arguments about words and ideas, he concludes with a brief statement about how this difficulty presents itself in religion:

“When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.”

Many matters may admit of difficulties in knowing them clearly and precisely, but we should not avoid contemplating and attempting to explain them. Even if the fullness of the ideas eludes our grasp (like God and the word of God), we can pursue their meanings with humility regarding our capacity to understand them fully.

Madison’s view on language’s natural limits gives us one final idea we can apply to education. Contemplating complex and extensive objects requires language capable of matching them. What is especially worthy of notice in Madison’s concluding arguments is the lack of specialization in his arguments. It is natural to Madison to bring difficulties he finds in understanding what God wishes to communicate to human beings to bear on understanding the political problem he’s attempting to solve. Contemplation inspired by religion does not necessarily need to be kept separate from contemplation about politics. To broaden our view, is it difficult to imagine that reading works of literature, science, philosophy, history, and mathematics could help us become clearer thinkers about politics? And fully recognizing language’s limits, would not our own use of language in these different objects of contemplation aid us in our attempts to see and resolve political challenges?

At the end of looking more closely at the above arguments from Madison’s “Federalist No. 37,” it strikes me that while Madison is celebrated today among America’s greatest statesmen, his text teaches us that the primary aim of his education was not strictly statesmanship. For those who hope that “civic education” would prepare the way for more James Madisons to arise, his example suggests their hopes are misplaced. What is most necessary is a broader yet simpler sense of education, one attuned to all that human beings can see and contemplate. Life, after all, is naturally more complex and extensive than politics. Why not start there?

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As the faculty at The Lyceum look forward to reconnecting with our returning students and to greeting the new cohort of Lyceum Scholars who will arrive soon, I’ve been contemplating what it means for young people today to begin college. Leaving home and moving away to college has always represented a massive transition in the life of a young person. Every parent of a college-bound child knows that choosing a college was likely the most significant choice that their son or daughter will have made by that point in their life. In the past, the choice of a college led next to another equally if not more consequential choice soon to follow—selecting a major. In the halcyon days of yore, as you wandered a campus, you would have opportunity to happen upon a creature scarcely known today, the one known as the undeclared. This hearty young soul had not yet fixed a course of study, preferring instead to sample and survey the possibilities before making a commitment to something as significant as a major. Today, this is not so.

Driven by the immense pressures from their parents, the culture, the state of the economy, and perhaps their own anxieties, our young people have worked so radical a reconfiguration of this narrative as to have inverted it. The preponderance of students today appears to select their intended major (and the career choice it implies) before finalizing their college choice. Long before they experience any actual college classes, the young today pledge their loyalty to their plan of study. The aids to this future obligation are many. As one conspicuous source of suasion, the young are inundated with reports of the potential remuneration that this or that major brings. Having predetermined their major, students only then turn to assemble the list of schools that will facilitate that choice the best. Not surprisingly as a response, the institutions themselves now promote placement rates and job and salary outcomes not merely as evidence of effectiveness, but as a means of recruitment.

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Contemplating these changes in the landscape of how young people think about their education brought to my mind the guidance provided in one of the books we read with our Lyceum Scholars. The Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero knew well the challenges of sending his children off to be educated. He presents his treatise De Officiis (On Duties) as guidance to his second child and only son, who had recently returned from Athens on a course of study with a tutor. In Book I, where Cicero explains the virtuous propriety in exerting oneself in those things to which one is suited, he guides his son to do the hard thinking that comes in choosing a life and ultimately a career. “Above all we must decide who and what manner of men we wish to be and what calling in life we would follow,” he notes.

“This is the most difficult problem in the world. For it is as adulthood approaches, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking. And thus he becomes engaged in some particular calling and career in life, before he is fit to decide intelligently what is best for him.”

Cicero recognized the challenges of attempting to guide young people in selecting a career. He understood that many were “so imbued with the teachings of [their] own parents” that they would default to following their parents’ callings. Many others, defaulting on the duty of independent thought, “drift with the current of popular opinion and make especial choice of those callings which the majority find most attractive.” Only a few, he laments, “as the result either of some happy fortune or of natural ability, enter upon the right path of life, without parental guidance.” The rarest types, “endowed with outstanding intellectual ability or a splendidly learned education,” might succeed in making a fitting choice of calling (major). If such a young person “has also had time to deliberate over which course of life he wants above all to follow,” Cicero notes, then “the decision must turn wholly upon each individual’s natural bent.” Just as a virtuous man orders his individual actions to what is proper according to the nature of the situation, so too “we must exercise much more care when establishing our whole way of life, so that we can be constant to ourselves for the whole length of our life.”

The constancy to ourselves that Cicero recommends to his son translates to living an integrated life, a life of principle. He knows the paramount importance of measuring one’s life not merely by the pleasure of a momentary choice or a transiently attractive reward, but by how it affects, conditions, and redounds to the whole. Only by reference to one’s own nature can such a decision be made. Though there are, to be sure, some young college-bound men and women who have made such thorough self-examination that they can confidently dedicate themselves to a major, Cicero is more likely correct. It takes time, reflection, and a willingness to deliberate.

Some seventeen centuries later, Giambattista Vico, reflecting on his own reading of Cicero, made similar observations in an inaugural oration to students at the University of Naples:

“[T]he situation of adolescents who have to be educated in the liberal arts and sciences most certainly seems difficult to me, given that their parents, who neither have knowledge of such things nor even inquire of those who do have such knowledge, without exploring the inherent constitution of their children and without discerning their native talents, push the youth to study one or another of the arts and sciences, most often contrary to their inclinations, on the grounds of their own desires or to satisfy family needs.”

As we prepare to aid in the transition of new students to the halls of academe, we would be wise to encourage them to slow down, survey the landscape, and take seriously the need to read widely and deeply (as we do here at Lyceum), to make a full self-examination before selecting a major and life’s course.

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1. Reflections on How America Achieved Independence
   Reflecting this year on the semi-quincentennial of American independence, many across the country have naturally turned to the justly celebrated Declaration of Independence. The soaring rhetoric and memorable phrasing came largely from the hand of Thomas Jefferson, but the ideas, according to Jefferson himself, were not “new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of…” Click here to read on…

2. A Few Reflections Centered on “The Gettysburg Address”
   In The Lyceum Address, which he delivered in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln worried that memories of the founding generation had begun to fade, and about growing lawlessness throughout the land. He therefore spoke of venerating anew the old laws that the Founding Fathers had given to the nation, to revive the spirit of 1776. Click here to read on…

3. Our Forgotten History
   Carlo Botta’s “History of the War of Independence” is our nation’s forgotten treasure, and it attests to the universality of those truths that the American revolutionaries took to be “self-evident” and applicable to all men in all times and all places, regardless of nationality, race, or origin. Click here to read on…

4. The American Founding, Philosophy, and Rule
   The philosophic dimensions of the revolution are worth pondering as the United States celebrates the 250^th anniversary of its founding. For today, more than other times in my life, it occurs to me that the American Founding embodies a distinct answer to an enduring question first posed by Plato about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Click here to read on…

5. Germans and Americans: A Reflection on the Enlightenment and Political Realities
   The Americans and the Germans are different people. They certainly were different in the eighteenth century and, despite some perhaps newfound similarities, they remain different. But something that seemingly united them in the eighteenth century was a fervor for the Enlightenment, for a new kind of political life, whether discovered or invented, which promised to make men free—which is to say to make men most capable of being men in the proper sense. And so it is instructive to think about the German example in comparison with our own. Click here to read on…
   

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The Americans and the Germans are different people. They certainly were different in the eighteenth century and, despite some perhaps newfound similarities, they remain different. But something that seemingly united them in the eighteenth century was a fervor for the Enlightenment, for a new kind of political life, whether discovered or invented, which promised to make men free—which is to say to make men most capable of being men in the proper sense. And so it is instructive to think about the German example in comparison with our own. And it is hard not to pay attention to the failures of the Germans in light of our evident, if I may say so, successes.

Johann Georg Hamann, sometimes called the first and best critic of Kantian Enlightenment, wrote a letter to the chair of political science at the university of Königsberg, Christian Jacob Kraus, concerning Kant’s What is Enlightenment. He begins his letter to Kraus by writing: “To the “Sapere aude!” [dare to know!] there belongs also from the very same source the “Noli admirari!” [marvel not!].” Referencing Kant’s use of Horace’s Sapere Aude, Hamann cryptically appends to it this later line from Horace’s Epistles. What could this mean? Might it be an allusion to the hope of the Enlightenment taken generally, which might consist in the desire to remove marvels from the world? Or is it a hint to the reader that one ought not to marvel at the accomplishments of enlighteners such as Kant who hope to set themselves up as guardians of humanity itself? Hamann continues: “You know how much I love our Plato and with what pleasure I read him; I will also gladly yield myself up to his guardianship for the guidance of my own understanding.”

But in so yielding himself to this German Plato’s judgement, Hamann is dissatisfied, not least with the “definition” of Enlightenment given by Kant: “Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” Hamann writes:

“I can gladly tolerate seeing enlightenment, if not defined, at least elucidated and expanded more aesthetically than dialectically, through the analogy of immaturity and guardianship. Except that for me the proton pseudos [first lie or error] lies in that accursed adjective ‘self-incurred.’”

Whereas Kant understood the need for Enlightenment to arise from mankind’s lack of resolve to know the truth, to think for oneself, Hamann has quite a different picture in mind. He asks:

“But who is the indeterminate other, who twice appears anonymously? Observe…how the metaphysicians hate to call their persons by their right names, and prowl like cats around the hot broth [beating around the bush]. I, however, see the enlightenment of our century not with cats’ eyes but with pure and healthy human eyes, which to be sure have become somewhat dull through years and lucubrations and sweets, but which I find ten times preferable to the moonlight-enlightened eyes of an Owl-Eyed Athena.”

Here, Hamann contrasts his own approach to the age of Enlightenment with that of those like Kant; he sees plainly with human eyes rather than with those “illumined” through moonlight, which is itself a kind of false light. He asks again: “Who is the other of whom the cosmopolitical chiliast prophesies?” He is asking here about the guardians of humanity who rule over it during its immaturity. Who, exactly, are these people? Is Kant separate from them? Hamann answers in the negative:

“…he [Kant] reckons himself to the class of guardians and wishes thereby to attain a high reputation before immature readers. The immaturity is thus self-incurred only insofar as it surrenders to the guidance of a blind or invisible guardian and leader. This is the true man of death—”

Far from being the fault of the lazy or cowardly masses, true Enlightenment is halted through the self-establishment of would-be “guardians” over the people. Hamann calls this type “the true man of death”—in a somewhat obscure reference to 2nd Samuel. He continues:

“With what kind of conscience can a reasoner [Raisonneur] & speculator by the stove and in a nightcap [in an armchair] accuse the immature one of cowardice, when their blind guardian has a large, well-disciplined army to guarantee his infallibility and orthodoxy? How can one mock the laziness of such immature persons, when their enlightened and self-thinking guardian—as the emancipated gaper at the whole spectacle declares him to be—sees them not even as machines but as mere shadows of his grandeur, of which he need have no fear at all, since they are his ministering spirits and the only ones in whose existence he believes?”

Here, the blind guardian is not Kant, but Frederick the Great, the Enlightened king of Prussia. In a word, Hamann reminds Kant of the character of Enlightenment politics as it actually exists—the highest guardian of the Prussians is well-armed, atheistic, and self-concerned; given this, Kant’s attempts to flatter Frederick are, in Hamann’s mind, only possible for an arm-chair philosopher who is not sensitive to political reality.

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“The enlightenment of our century is therefore a mere northern light, from which can be prophesied no cosmopolitical chiliasm except in a night-cap & by the stove.” The light of the Enlightenment is not that of the sun, says Hamann, but rather an ethereal and transitory one unsuitable for the sake of serious political philosophy or, in this case, political prophecy.

Hamann signs off, “Written on the holy evening of the fourth and final Sunday of Advent ‘84 entre chien et loup.” This phrase in French literally means “between the dog and the wolf,” and is a reference to the time of twilight, when, owing to darkness, a dog and a wolf can no longer be distinguished from one another. Might this be Hamann’s ownprophecy concerning the age of (Kantian) Enlightenment and its progeny? Is he saying that he writes at twilight, when friend and enemy can no longer be easily distinguished?

But all this is not enough for Hamann. He includes a brief post-script. He begins: “My transfiguration of the Kantian definition, therefore, comes to this: true enlightenment consists in an emergence of the immature person from a supremely self-incurred guardianship.” He follows immediately by stating “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—“and this wisdom makes us cowardly at lying and lazy at inventing—but all the more courageous against guardians who at most can kill the body and suck the purse empty—all the more merciful to our Immature brethren and more fruitful in good works of immortality.” Apparently there is something in the Biblical account of wisdom which Hamann thinks superior to that of Kantian Enlightenment.

Hamann concludes by mocking Kant’s distinction between public and private reason—and perhaps this is the crucial line—suggesting that the public use of reason, by which one may call for change, is nothing but an ornament worn by those who are otherwise in a condition of slavery. He writes: “What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home?”

Perhaps Hamann’s attack on Kant, and with him Enlightenment politics, amounts to this: whereas advocates of the new styles of political life that emphasize freedom, popular enlightenment, and so on, claim that a new age of cosmopolitan progress is on the way (especially as revealed religion recedes in political power and relevance), could it be that an age of a new form of tyranny is instead upon us, cloaked in the language of freedom and equality, but all the darker for its reliance upon a new species of artificial rather than true light?

How, then, does this Prussian quarrel over Enlightenment relate to our own place; either at its founding or at its present moment? How might we explain the different fates of Kantian and American Enlightenment political projects? One question for us in our current moment is whether or not we have fallen into a condition “entre chien et loup [between the dog and the wolf].” If so, how could this be, given that our founding never gave way to the catastrophes found in German political history? More, Kant is here described as a would-be guardian of Prussia. Is Locke ours? The Founders? Or did the Founders succeed in avoiding a repetition of the past by purposely not being or allowing for guardians in the Kantian sense to arise? It may be that the Americans understood something about political life better than Kant precisely because they were closer to it. What they understood is a topic beyond my grasp, and I invite the reader to consider the entries of my colleagues on this matter.

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As students, our first encounters with the American Founding happen in elementary school, with textbooks that frame it as a historical event. We learn, to the surprise of our young minds, that there is a reason why we get to watch fireworks every year on July 4^th. As our education advances into high school, we learn more about the specific disputes and flashes of conflict that preceded The Declaration of Independence. During this interval, our sense of history deepens to account for causes and arguments. Beyond high school, depending on where we study, we may learn that the American Founding had something to do with philosophy. The philosophic dimensions of the revolution are worth pondering as the United States celebrates the 250^th anniversary of its founding. For today, more than other times in my life, it occurs to me that the American Founding embodies a distinct answer to an enduring question first posed by Plato about the relationship between philosophy and politics.

Plato’s Enduring Question About Politics and Philosophy

One of the most [in]famous ideas in Plato’s Republic is the one about “philosopher kings.” When American readers encounter this idea, regardless of whether they are young or old, they instinctively rebel against it. The usual objections I hear reduce to some variant of “We’re a democracy; we don’t have kings.” We don’t come to read texts in isolation from some context. We have certain manners, habits, and ideas of which we don’t become conscious until we meet with texts that are radically different from what we know. One key to effective teaching is recognizing these predispositions in oneself and one’s students and using them to look more carefully at the text. If we meet Plato’s argument about philosopher kings on its own terms and in the context of the Republic, we find that this book allows us to see something philosophic at work in what seems to be the purely political act of founding a government.

A brief sketch of the Republic is necessary to help us understand how the question about the relationship between politics and philosophy emerges in the book. The dialogue’s central question is “What is justice?”, and to two young men in the dialogue (Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato’s real-life brothers), it is vital that Socrates reveals to them what justice is in the soul and why it is good for them to be just and not unjust. As an attempt to answer Glaucon and Adeimantus’ question, Socrates proposes founding a city in “speech” (logos) based on the rationale that seeing justice come into being in something bigger (a city) will help these young men see it something smaller (the human soul). This approach that appears at the beginning of Book II prepares the way for the big argument that appears near the end of Book V, namely, that there will be no “happiness” if politics does not “fall together” with philosophy (see especially 473c–474a). This is the grounds for Socrates introducing the idea of philosopher kings to the dialogue. It is beyond the scope of this post for me to address how this idea relates to Glaucon and Adeimantus’ demand about justice. (For more on how the drama of the Republic contributes to its arguments, please see this previous post of mine.) What I wish to emphasize here is what Plato’s philosophy aims to help us see about politics’ need for philosophy.

At their core, Plato’s arguments about philosopher kings suggest that philosophy could bring some constancy to politics’ inherent variability. As Socrates puts it in Book VI, one great difficulty every political regime faces concerns whether the “reasoned-speech” (logos) at its founding remains present throughout its life (497c–d). Relying on philosopher kings to accomplish this work binds it to a certain type of person. The unstated implication is that reasoned-speech does not preserve itself.

Yet there is another difficulty presented by the nature of philosophy itself. The challenge of how to form philosopher kings through education is the focus of Books VI–VII. Hanging over this, however, are two uncertainties from Socrates: 1) Can a city take to philosophy without being destroyed? 2) Is a city even capable of taking to philosophy? (497d–e). These questions are not compelling merely in the context of Plato’s Republic. They are enduring questions. The American Founding and what George Washington would call in his First Inaugural Address “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People” are answers to those enduring questions. The Declaration and the U.S. Constitution both demonstrate that reasoned-speech can endure, that such speech can be informed by philosophy, and that the republican form of government derived in part from philosophy can preserve itself without relying entirely on forming its rulers through a singular model of philosophic education.

The Declaration of Independence

As the founding document of the United States, The Declaration of Independence has some clear echoes of John Locke’s political philosophy as presented in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), though there is at least one curious difference introduced by a suggestion from Benjamin Franklin.

The clearest debt to Locke appears in the Founders’ application of his teaching in the final chapter of the Second Treatise, “Of the Dissolution of Government.” Consider the following passage from Locke’s work in comparison with The Declaration:

Second Treatise: “I answer, such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.” (XIX.225)

The Declaration: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Both Locke and the Founders are careful to insist that the dissolution of government is not something to be taken lightly. Both rely on the standard of “a long train of abuses.” That shouldn’t stop us from noticing, though, that the Founders appeal to prudence as the basis for their judgment. Those who read Locke’s Second Treatise (as students do in our sections of Introduction to Political Theory) may therefore wonder why the Founders rely on the virtue of prudence for their judgment while Locke does not extend this virtue to the people who will judge whether their government has been dissolved.

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Benjamin Franklin was one of the American Founders who sought to understand and practice the virtues. There were thirteen he identified as most important in his autobiography. Franklin is responsible for changing a phrase that Jefferson’s first draft of The Declaration took directly from Locke. Where Jefferson specified as three “unalienable rights” those of “life, liberty, and property” (see Second Treatise, VII.87 and VIII.123, for Locke’s definition of “property” as “life, liberty, and estate”), Franklin had “property” replaced with “the pursuit of happiness.” Considering “happiness” has only three appearances in Locke’s Second Treatise (VI.66, VII.92, VIII.107), it would be difficult to conclude Franklin’s change was just his own reading of Locke. To declare “the pursuit of happiness” as an unalienable right opens these natural rights to a broader, less precisely defined horizon. It is more likely that Franklin had something more classical in mind. The connection between happiness and virtue is, after all, something Plato and Aristotle contemplate in their political philosophy.

James Madison and The U.S. Constitution as Rule by Philosophically Reasoned-Speech

The U.S. Constitution, written and ratified in response to The Articles of Confederation’s failures, is first and foremost a legal document. It forms the principal parts of the American regime and determines what offices are needed to rule the country, how those offices act (both on their own and in relation to each other), what persons can hold those offices, and on what terms. It is not a work of philosophy and should not be treated as such. But this does not mean that The U.S. Constitution was formed without philosophy. On the contrary, it is a document that was formed by statesmen who carefully studied philosophy.

At some point in their education about the American Founding and The U.S. Constitution, students will be taught that the works of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau influenced the Founders. While this isn’t entirely off the mark, it obscures some of the novel work the Americans did.

James Madison’s “Federalist No. 37” contains a brilliant demonstration of what a philosophically-trained mind can see at work in a question that many would be inclined to think is a practical matter of politics. Speaking of the difficulties in “marking the proper line of partition” between the federal and state governments, Madison writes, “Every man will be sensible of this difficulty, in proportion as he has been accustomed to contemplate and discriminate objects, extensive and complicated in their nature” (emphasis added). To Madison, the more one learns to contemplate and distinguish objects from another in one realm, the better one will be able to contemplate and distinguish objects in another. Notice too the inverse side of his teaching: those who do not learn to contemplate and distinguish objects from one another in other realms will not be able to accomplish this work in whatever is before them.

Madison quickly moves from the challenges in contemplating and distinguishing matters of human nature, to nature itself, to the limits of perception (eyes, for example, are limited in what they can see by light and magnification), to “the institutions of man.” With institutions, complications arise first in distinguishing the work of the legislative, executive, and judiciary. Next, we find complications in all the different forms of law that exist and in defining their proper objects. Further, jurisdictions pose fresh challenges. Finally, there are new laws, the meanings of which are often not fully learned until they go through “a series of particular discussions and adjudications.” Step back for a moment and reflect on what this means for the relative parsimony of The U.S. Constitution. One of its principal authors was aware of all these difficulties, and yet could work with others to write a legal document that can function despite the inevitability of these difficulties. That legal document still governs our country, 237 years after its ratification.

In addition to all the preceding difficulties, Madison draws attention to the limits and challenges words place on our ability to contemplate and distinctly form a political regime with all its laws and institutions:

The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity therefore requires, not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many, equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen, that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be conceived, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate, by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. (emphasis added)

The creation of the U.S. Constitution, with all its deliberations, decisions, and drafting, is the work of reasoned-speech. That reasoned-speech produced a coherent account of how to form a political regime and work within its boundaries. It is a work that must, of necessity, compel us to see simultaneously the expansive possibilities of reasoned-speech and its many limits that could compromise the work of politics.

Let us not lose sight of a quiet kinship between Madison’s buildup to the limits of reason-speech in politics and Plato’s Republic. Madison’s movement from questions of human nature, to nature itself, and to our perception of nature should remind us of how Plato builds readers up to “The Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of the Republic. In this famous part of the text, Socrates describes philosophic education as moving toward a light that casts away the obscurities of human nature and nature itself, obscurities induced by continuous immersion in political opinions. It is this clarity of vision that would make philosophers the best rulers, for they would see through politics itself to what is true. While Madison has no interest in creating philosopher kings, we should not doubt that his own studies of philosophy sharpened his vision of politics enough to see through the challenges posed by faction and ambition. The U.S. Constitution, partly the product of philosophic vision and partly the product of political compromise, showed that truly and carefully formed reasoned-speech can govern people for two and a half centuries.

The Philosophic Legacy of the American Founding

The persistence of appeals to The Declaration of Independence and our continuous governance under the U.S. Constitution reveal to us that one of the American Founding’s great triumphs resides in how it used philosophy to establish principles and institutions for political rule that endure, even in the face of the most horrendous challenges. The words “All men are created equal” have been used to hold America to account throughout its history for the injustice of slavery. It is the words of the Constitution that allowed Frederick Douglass to argue that “the mere text, and only the text” demonstrate that it is an anti-slavery document. Abraham Lincoln was clear that the security of liberty in the United States has a “philosophical cause.” “The principle of ‘Liberty to all’” in The Declaration is an “apple of gold,” one framed and preserved by “the picture of silver” that is “The Union, and the Constitution.” Continuing, Lincoln says, “The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken.”

The American Founding is an achievement worth commemorating and celebrating not only for what it accomplished politically, but what it philosophically embodied. Indeed, we cannot and should not separate the American Founding’s political achievement from the philosophic skills and insight needed to perceive and instantiate its principles in texts that have endured for over two centuries. The truth of these principles stands, unrefuted, without the use of violence and force. These truths have been set before the world for 250 years, and their self-evident nature has not been destroyed. For all the faults in the practices of those who held and hold political office in the United States, this country’s founding through philosophically reasoned-speech proved, and continues to prove, that human beings “are capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” The American Founding is not only an answer to the political challenges faced by the colonists in their relationship to Great Britain, but an answer to Plato’s questions about philosophy and rule. And so, in addition to all our celebrations, perhaps we should see this July 4^th as a call to study and contemplate our Founding’s political and philosophical achievements together, for they are, in truth, inseparable from one another.

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Carlo Botta’s History of the War of Independence is our nation’s forgotten treasure, and it attests to the universality of those truths that the American revolutionaries took to be “self-evident” and applicable to all men in all times and all places, regardless of nationality, race, or origin.

Carlo Botta, like many great lovers of liberty and scholars of America, was born American but in the wrong place. He was born on November 6, 1766, in northern Italy. He was the son of a doctor and he trained as a doctor, but his true vocation was to record the history of liberty. In 1792, he joined the Piedmontese revolutionary movement against Victor Amadeus III, and was imprisoned for his involvement. One who knew Botta explained his reasons for joining the movement: he harbored in his soul a total “antipathy to absolute governments.” He went on to prove that antipathy.

After regaining his freedom, Botta fled to France, served in Napoleon’s army as a military surgeon, and revolted against Napoleon once it was revealed that he, like all men of boundless ambition, had a commitment not to liberty and republicanism but to personal ambition for power. While Botta was serving Napoleon, he was considering alternative possibilities for free government. Through this effort, he turned to the example of the American Revolution and wrote Storia della Guerra dell’Independenza degli Stati Uniti d’America (The History of the War of Independence in the United States of America).

250 years after the signing of The Declaration of Independence, Botta reveals truths about the American revolution, war for independence, and founding that we have forgotten. Thomas Jefferson read the book and proclaimed that it ought to become the “common manual” of the American Revolution. John Adams taught his son of the revolution using the book as the common manual, and he argued that it was “the most classical and methodical…the most entertaining and interesting narration of the American War, that I have seen.” James Madison said, “The literary reputation of this author, with the philosophic spirit and classic taste allowed to this historical work” meant that, for Americans, “the subject must always be deeply interesting.”

Yet, utterly contrary to Madison’s prediction, Botta’s work has become uninteresting rather than deeply interesting. In the past 100 years there have been a mere two academic articles (one of which is written in Italian and published in an Italian journal) written on the book that the founders took to be the “common manual” of their project.

Why did the Framers praise Botta and why have we forgotten him? What can foreign eyes tell us about the American experiment?

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First, Botta teaches us that the American Revolution was not democratic, and that democracy was a stumbling block for achieving independence and cementing the self-evident truths of The Declaration of Independence. Instead of democracy, which tended to traduce rights, the framers ushered in a republican form of government that was consistent with the maintenance of individual rights. Take, for example, Botta’s history of the American response to the Stamp Act. He argues that prior to declaring independence, the “multitude” sought rebellion. The rebellion became destructive and unprincipled rather than constructive of a new civilized society. He writes, “As it happens in all popular commotions, he that declaimed with the most vehemence was the most applauded, and deemed the best citizen. . . These outrages were represented in the most odious colors by the orators of the multitude, whose minds were continually exasperated by similar harangues.”

In the protestations against the Stamp Act, the vehement speakers inflamed the multitude, leading them to act contrary to property rights, the very thing they sought to vindicate. Botta records that “some imprudent words of theirs having exasperated the rage of the multitude, they broke open the doors, entered the lower part of the [Oliver] house, and destroyed the furniture of every description.” Following that destruction, the multitude proceeded to further destruction of property, in mobocratic fashion:

“In a state bordering on madness, they proceed to the residence of Hutchinson, the lieutenant-governor, about ten o’clock at night; they invest it, and employ every means to enter it by violence. After having sent his children, as yet of tender age, to a place of safety, he barricaded his doors and windows, and seemed determined to remain; but, unable to resist the fury of the assailants, he was constrained to quit the place, and take refuge in another house, where he remained concealed till four in the morning. Meantime, his mansion, perhaps the most magnificent and the best furnished house in the colony, was devoted to ruin and pillage.”

In describing these scenes, Botta signals that democracy or mob-rule would be insufficient to secure the ends of liberty and self-government. This explains why the Americans turned to republicanism.

Second, and related, Botta tells the story of the colonists’ firm attachment to property rights, rights that were left out of The Declaration of Independence and have been largely forgotten today. Botta records the essential fact that the colonists possessed land “not given or granted by others, but acquired and possessed by themselves; which they had first occupied, and which their toils had rendered productive.” The political implications of this simple fact are radical. A man who receives land from a king holds it at the king’s pleasure, but a man who clears it from wilderness, breaks the soil, builds his house, raises his children on its produce, and fends off predators, holds it on no one’s terms but his own.

The two relationships to property generate two entirely different relationships to political authority. The first produces a subject; the second produces a self-governing citizen. This single fact generated a Novus Ordo Seclorum. The First Continental Congress of 1774 marks the moment when the Americans unanimously asserted this as a fact of political philosophy. John Jay’s address to the British asked: “Why then are the proprietors of the soil of America less lords of their property than you are of yours?…Can the intervention of the sea that divides us cause disparity in rights?” The question was unanswerable because, to the Americans, rights do not vary with geography: they are natural and it is self-evident that they are natural. If British subjects were lords of their own property (and every Englishman believed they were), then American subjects were lords of property that they had acquired at greater cost and against greater odds. The sea or locality introduced no difference in natural and inalienable rights. “Reason,” as Jay put it, “looks with indignation on such distinctions.”

Third, Botta shows us how the Americans came about their conception of natural rights. At the outset of the revolution, Americans merely argued that they should enjoy the “privileges of Englishmen,” which included the equal rights of citizenship. Throughout the movement toward revolution, the Americans developed a new concept: natural and inalienable rights, belonging to all men, in all times, and in all places.

Richard Henry Lee’s speech for independence, which Botta quotes at length, is the culmination of a decade of this philosophic development from the privileges of Englishmen to the natural rights with which the Creator endows all men. For Lee, the crisis was about “whether we shall preserve, or lose forever, that liberty which we have inherited from our ancestors, which we have pursued across tempestuous seas, and which we have defended in this land against barbarous men, ferocious beasts, and an inclement sky.” The liberty at stake was the liberty that labor, sacrifice, and self-government had created and confirmed. Lee then distinguished American liberty from its British expressions: it was “not that which was the exclusive privilege of a few patricians, but that which is the property of all; not that which was stained by iniquitous ostracisms, or the horrible decimation of armies, but that which is pure, temperate, and gentle.” American liberty, according to Lee, was universal and inalienable from the human person. It was liberty grounded in the nature of human beings and, as such, extended to all men on the same basis, subject to no exclusion that history, class, citizenship, heritage, location, or legal status could impose.

For Lee, this revolutionary philosophic foundation of rights, as natural, was the essence of the American Revolution and the sole cause of war. However, this revolutionary foundation for liberty cleared the path for peace by creating the reasonable foundation for a just rule of law. In his speech, Lee implored the American colonists:

“Let this most happy day give birth to the American republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and conquer, but to re-establish the reign of peace and of the laws. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us; she demands of us a living example of freedom, that may contrast, by the felicity of the citizens, with the ever increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose.”

Do we still hold these truths self-evident? The saddest fact, one that will not be reported or noticed at America’s semi-quincentennial, is that we believe these rights are not only self-evident, but self-executing. Not only have we forgotten the right to property, but we have forgotten—to quote Jefferson’s understanding of Botta’s History—the “essential facts” of our nation’s history. We celebrate the day with bonfires or barbeques, but in at least 100 years, we have evaded a serious engagement with the reasons for which we celebrate. To celebrate the Fourth of July is to return to America’s first things; to return to those first things is to remember the revolution as those who pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” remembered the events that followed that pledge. Botta provides the essential text that allows us to understand the American Revolutionaries as they understood themselves.

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(Samuel Postell’s research and publication of Carlo Botta’s History of the War of Independence has been sponsored by a generous gift from the American Revolution Institute and the Society of the Cincinnati.)

Among many other things, my grandfather, Richard L. Mathey, fought in World War II, and he was for a time imprisoned by the German enemies. A couple of weeks after he died, in October of 2003, I flew from Toronto to Florida to visit my grandmother and great aunt. I forget why, but at one point during that visit those two old girls recited the Gettysburg Address, word for word, hitting every beat. Mary Caroline and Virginia had been high school educated, and neither had recited the Address in years. They’d been taught to memorize it back in grammar school—which would have been around a hundred years ago, when the Declaration of Independence was 150 years old.

In The Lyceum Address, which he delivered in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln worried that memories of the founding generation had begun to fade, and about growing lawlessness throughout the land. He therefore spoke of venerating anew the old laws that the Founding Fathers had given to the nation, to revive the spirit of 1776. When he became president in 1861, of course, the United States was threatened with fundamental lawlessness. At Gettysburg, Lincoln would refer to memory, nobility, and bravery; he hearkened to The Declaration as he called for a new birth of freedom, and for his countrymen to continue their violent struggle.

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Ours is a credal nation, grounded upon a simple belief. At the same time, we have inherited a complex history—and it contains no small measure of sacrifice, greatness, or nobility. But every generation of Americans risks forgetting what “our fathers brought forth.” Today, clearly, the spirit of presentism is among our direst plagues, where distractions drown out any of the stillness needed to reflect on where we have come from, and how we might continue.

On this 4^th of July weekend, let’s enjoy the fellowship, the beer, the hot dogs, and the fireworks. Even more, though, America’s 250^th birthday offers us the chance to pause and think again about what it is that we wish to celebrate. In that spirit, consider a small but not insignificant challenge: Why not start to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address?

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Reflecting this year on the semi-quincentennial of American independence, many across the country have naturally turned to the justly celebrated Declaration of Independence. The soaring rhetoric and memorable phrasing came largely from the hand of Thomas Jefferson, but the ideas, according to Jefferson himself, were not “new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” and the document did not intend “merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” Eschewing any attempt to craft original principles or sentiments, the Sage of Monticello instead aimed to present “an expression of the American mind.”

A scant six months before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration, though, American independence was manifestly not an expression of the American mind. Indeed, many across the colonies remained steadfast in their hopes that they might somehow, against the odds, find a resolution to the imperial crisis and thereby remain British subjects. From our perspective two hundred and fifty years later, with the backdrop of what appears a nearly ineluctable progression of events that led up to the Declaration, it may be hard to fathom both how much contingency and peril remained about the ultimate fact of American independence. If we hope to understand and appreciate how significant an achievement it was, to pay due homage to those who helped make it happen, and most especially to understand how, we must exercise our historical imagination to revisit precisely how the American mind changed on this crucial question.

That the colonists experienced a sea change in sentiment on the numerous questions surrounding the state of imperial relations might appear obvious to those who benefit from hindsight and historical insight. Yet from just a generation after the fact, this Revolutionary transformation of thinking elicited a fresh reconsideration from the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Having just witnessed the young United States emerge from its second war against Great Britain in 1815, the now-retired statesmen corresponded that summer about who might write the history of the American Revolution and how. Judging that the loss of so many documents would make the task difficult, Adams ruefully recalled that during his time in Congress the speeches were universally extemporaneous. Jefferson responded in kind as he lamented that most of the work of the Revolutionary Congress happened behind closed doors and without any member making notes. Yet it was during this exchange that Adams offered his profoundly insightful observation that the real “Revolution was in the minds of the people” in the fifteen years before Independence. Three years later, Adams elaborated that point again in a letter to the newspaper editor Hezekiah Niles. There he reiterated that the Revolution happened before the War for Independence and transpired “in the minds and hearts of the people.”

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In re-orienting the perspective on when the real revolution took place, Adams demonstrated a feat of historical thinking unusual for someone who lived through the events. Indeed, it is a credit to both Jefferson and Adams—in many ways the twin pillars of the Revolution—that they could coolly reflect on the world historical changes that they experienced with a sense that those events were neither necessary nor inevitable. They escaped the customary human tendency each of us possesses to recall past events (both those that are historical and especially those in our own lives) as the natural and inescapable process that brought us to the present. In thinking of one’s own biography, continuity is the rule. Changes in our own perspectives or intellectual commitments fade with time, causing us to consider our current thinking as something we have always known and believed. Despite this, Adams focused our attention on exactly the opposite: namely, the strange and curious fact that across a diverse group of scattered colonials, living with disparate religious commitments and varying governments, having but infrequent direct interaction, there came to be a unified movement for national independence and a government on newly understood principles. Understanding how this happened was and is a vital task.

Adams was assuredly correct that the process of change began as early as 1760, but we need only to consider the events of 1775 to understand how difficult it was to fit the final piece into the puzzle. Having endured over a decade of dissatisfactory, discriminatory, and debilitating changes to the imperial arrangements under which they had to live, the colonists clearly desired a re-working of Parliamentary policy toward them. They had, after all, made a considered case that their hereditary rights as Englishmen had been violated by a succession of acts that, as Adams alleged, constituted “a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” Notwithstanding the Intolerable Acts in 1774 that effectively canceled the Massachusetts government to be replaced by a military occupation, the colonial resisters still sought to de-escalate the conflict and resolve the differences. No less than Edmund Burke, William Pitt the Elder, and Isaac Barré stood in Parliament and attempted to calm tensions. By the early days of 1775, few would have envisioned severing the colonies from the mother country.

As the new year opened, considering colonial petitions for relief, Lord North and Parliament attempted reconciliation without resolution. Even after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord spilled the first blood and announced the shot heard round the world, the colonists still sought a way out. Even though Congress created a Continental Army, drafted a justification for their part in the hostilities, and supported colonial militia actions, they nevertheless persisted. In the summer of 1775, the Congress sent John Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition to King George III, pledging their loyalty and requesting his intervention to resolve the crisis. Much as John Adams had suspected, the King refused to read the petition, instead issuing a Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition in August. Despite more open battles and hostile action by imperial officials, the response from Congress in 1775 illustrates just how far away independence was. Again, still justifying their actions and opposing Parliament within the confines of the British Constitution, the colonial leaders referred to the “calamities. . .incident to a civil war,” emphasizing the connection between the sides and not their separation. Armies were in the field; colonial governments ceased to exist; and yet many still could not contemplate, could not consider, could not condone a breach with Great Britain.

It was at that dark moment in January 1776 that a fiery flash ignited the final change. Though the intellectual revolution described by Adams had worked its logic on the minds of colonials for fifteen years, a final step remained. Enter Thomas Paine. Having immigrated to America from England just fourteen months earlier on the back of a string of personal career failures, Paine found his footing as a newspaper man in the colonies. A full-throated radical, he seized upon the moment and issued Common Sense in early January 1776. From his gifted mind, what would become the most successful pamphlet of American history quickly sold over half a million copies to a population of just over three million.

Widely discussed and circulated, Paine’s mere forty-seven pages demanded something of Americans; like it or not, they could not dodge the issue nor dally any longer without confronting the basic question he posed: did the Americans have the right, the natural right, to self-government and independence? Paine laid it all bare before the public. No less than George Washington, who owned a first printing copy of Paine’s work, described it as “sound doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning” that should leave none “at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.”

Washington proved correct. Through the spring and early summer of 1776, independence was the watchword. Support grew, but action lagged. Congressional leaders wanted independence, knew the war effort needed independence, and sensed the American public would rally around a resounding public statement, but now their uncertainty surrounded the authority that members had to take such a step. The brewing American identity had developed but not fully coalesced; it needed a public statement of principles to give it concrete form.

Once the existing colonial authorities sent authorization, Congress finally acted. On May 10, they called on the now disorganized colonies to establish new governments. On May 15, they adopted Adams’s preamble for Richard Henry Lee’s eventual resolution for independence. Throughout June, the last vestiges of opposition succumbed to the forceful efforts of Adams, Lee, and others to move the body to adopt the Lee Resolution on July 2. Working since mid-June behind the scenes, Jefferson and the Committee of Five had submitted the Declaration of Independence itself, which Congress then adopted as its official proclamation on July 4. In the days and weeks that followed, patriots printed hundreds of copies of the Declaration, distributed it throughout the colonies, read the text aloud in public meetings, and expressed what had become not just the voice of the American people but an expression of the American mind.

Thomas Paine’s role in helping uncertain colonists take the final step to embrace independence is well recognized and needs little additional emphasis. The method and means by which he played that crucial role, however, do merit closer attention and analysis. It is precisely the how that matters and that contains the important lesson that one ought to discern from Common Sense. Understanding this will lead to a deeper and richer grasp of how patriots achieved American independence in the past. Understanding how to apply this will lead to a more robust and assured grasp of how to maintain American independence in the future.

“The cause of America,” Paine wrote, “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” From the very outset, he signals the general applicability of his argument. He resolves neither to the specific claims of British subjects nor the intricacies of colonial charters, but to the principles that ought to guide us in devising just governments. He proceeds logically through the original justification for government, identifying freedom and the protection of natural rights as its proper end. Drawing from “a principle in nature,” Paine methodically examines not simply the British constitution, but the very nature of monarchies and republics per se. Later, he notes that arguments contrary to independence are “repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things.” In sum, he takes reason and facts as his guide. He searches for principles that stand the test of time and not mere accidental details of history.

Paine’s distinctive method, which is the ‘how’ that helped Americans grasp the need for and the propriety of independence, was a ruthless disregard for non-essentials, an unwavering commitment to think through the question all the way, and a resolve to integrate his conclusions comprehensively across the facets of the problem at hand. For Americans today who wish to preserve their independence and, moreover, to recapture the spirit of liberty of the Founding generation, we would all do well to follow his example.

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