Homelessness is not easy to think about. In fact, one would rather do something about it than think about it. It is the tradition of the pragmatic American way. The plight of the homeless demands action more than thought. Nevertheless, there is much to think about in assessing the homeless and many questions [...]]]> by Paul A. Lee

Homelessness is not easy to think about. In fact, one would rather do something about it than think about it. It is the tradition of the pragmatic American way. The plight of the homeless demands action more than thought. Nevertheless, there is much to think about in assessing the homeless and many questions come to mind after working with the homeless for the last six years. Why has there been a growing population of homeless every year since the late 1970s? What has happened in our country that people lack shelter and have nowhere to go at night when it turns cold and dark?

Isn’t the right to shelter one of the basic human rights not to be denied anyone?

Is a philosophy of homelessness possible to develop and is this a task this book should attempt to fulfill, even though, as Tillich says, in his address on the “Philosophy of Social Work”, appended to the end of this book, beyond anyone’s power to do so?

I can’t say I develop a philosophy of homelessness in this book, but I do raise some philosophical issues and the basic theme of the book-”the quality of mercy”-was given to me as. a title before I knew what it meant in terms of the discussion developed here. I came to realize that it was a great phrase for an ethic of abundance, in this case spiritual abundance, where the measure you give is the measure you receive, not in the sense of quid pro quo. No, quite the contrary, more in the sense of a lack of measure, where the phrase-go for broke-comes to mind. We were willing to risk it and we were rewarded by the success of our programs. It has been as simple as that.

We didn’t mind taking on something beyond our power like the cause of homelessness in Santa Cruz because there were so many who were willing to help. We now have a community of people involved in the task of alleviating the misery of homelessness in Santa Cruz.

In our work with the homeless, I have been guided by a saying I had already taken to heart as a major statement, even before the homeless issue came up. It was a saying waiting for me to apply it. It provided me with food for thought in terms of a philosophy of social work even though it is a statement that seems to argue that the infinite dignity and worth of a human being is now so eroded that it has to be formulated in an almost crazily exaggerated way just to make the point. The principle was formulated around 1910, by Josef Popper-Lynkeus, a Viennese social reformer and scientist, who was a figure of great inspiration for many who knew him, such as Einstein and others. Freud revered him and wrote an essay about him, but didn’t want to meet him lest the reality disappoint the image.

Popper-Lynkeus called his statement a basic principle of a moral social
philosophy:

When any individual, of however little account but one
who does not deliberately imperil another’s existence, disappears
from the world, without or even against his or
her will, this is afar more important happening than
any political or religious or national occurrence, or the
sum total of the scientific and artistic and technical
advances made throughout the ages by all the peoples of
the world.
Should anybody be inclined to regard this statement as an
exaggeration, let them imagine the individual concerned
to be themselves or their best beloved. Then they will
understand and accept it.

These two paragraphs are deceptively short thanks to their terse pungency. They demand a very close reading in order to grasp their meaning. What is meant, for instance, by “disappearing from the world”? It is a term close to Paul Tillich’s remark about “feeling unnecessary”, a prelude to despair and hopelessness. In his remarkable book: The Courage To Be, Tillich mentions how people in the Great Depression thought they had ceased to exist because they were unemployed. Having a job in

America means existence itself. Not having a job means disappearing-ceasing to exist. You see it in the photographs of the faces of men sitting on park benches in the Depression, in the depths of despair, where they are absent from themselves. They have disappeared.

A situation was to occur within a few decades that would exemplify what Popper-Lynkeus meant by ‘disappearance’. He anticipated the ‘disappearance of the Jews’ in the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. The Final Solution, organized by Hitler and Himmler, was for the Jews to disappear. What was meant was extermination. This has to be the criterion, or the reference point, for the meaning of the word- ‘disappearance’. At the same time, millions of people ‘disappeared’ in the terror of the Russian purge under Stalin. In more recent history, there are those who ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and in Chile; those who ‘disappeared’ in China, during the Cultural Revolution; those who ‘disappeared’ in the South during the Civil Rights struggle; those who ‘disappear’ every day, somewhere in the world, of however little account, without or even against their will.

Homelessness is just such an issue of “disappearing from the world”. The homeless have disappeared right in front of our face. There they are, lying in a doorway of a store or business, on the sidewalk, in a vacant lot, abandoned and forgotten. Although this is seldom seen in Santa Cruz, where it is a criminal offense to be caught ‘sleeping’ in a public place, it is a common scene in various areas of big cities, such as San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam, Lisbon.

What else can “disappearing from the world” mean, in this case, where a human being has become a piece of refuse? Against this, Popper-Lynkeus poses the most exaggerated statement in the history of human thought, in order to dramatize the juxtaposition: the infinite worth and dignity of a human person against the whole sum of cultural achievements by all the peoples of the world. Not even this sum is equal to one person who has disappeared!

And then he says: if you think this is an exaggeration, (when it is the greatest exaggeration ever formulated), think of that person as yourself or your best beloved, to drive the point home, in what is known in philosophy as an argumentum ad hominem.

The idea of the infinite value and worth of a human being has eroded in this century, a century of world wars and wholesale slaughter of human lives through genocide. Popper-Lynkeus anticipated this in his odd formulation. He had to put the issue on a personal basis: think of yourself or your best beloved.

What do you value?, he wants to know. He says a person is valued on a scale from zero to infinity, which seems to imply that the value of a human being is a mystery. A human being is of incomparable worth. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

He takes umbrage with a famous German art historian who had the gall to say that all of the deaths of Greek slaves were not worth one sculpting of Phidias. That made Popper-Lynkeus mad. He proposed that the art historian suffer slavery for a few decades and then retire with an apartment at the Louvre where he could look at sculptings and think of what he said now that he has some personal understanding of it.

What would you do if there was a fire in the Louvre?, he asks. Would you save the people or the paintings? If an angel of death were to ask for the lives of two common day laborers to save Michaelangelo or Raphael or Shakespeare would you give them up for sacrifice? No, of course not.

I had a strange experience in this regard. I was at the Museum of Modern Art at an exhibition of the late paintings of Cezanne, one of my favorite artists. I turned from one painting and looked at a young woman who was a Punk, with pins in her cheeks and garish hair and I had to admit that she was of greater value than the Cezanne, another order of value. I know the difference between a painting and a person.

I think of Wittgenstein when I think of this saying of Popper-Lynkeus. He lost his sense of human decency in the trenches of the First World War and never again wore a tie lest it be thought he could resume his place in the company of decent men. It was a symbolic moment for this century’s great philosopher when the value and worth of a human being is lost along with the sense of human decency.

Paul Tillich, as a chaplain at the front, in the same war, heard the screams of his men calling on “Lieber Gott”; their screams went unanswered.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in the trenches of Verdun, thought of the breakdown of Western culture and sketched out in his mind his great work: Out of Revolution, where he quotes Lefebvre: “Shall dogs and horses scent a thunderstorm and man and woman not sense the breakdown of a social order that has lasted a thousand years? ”

With this breakdown in Western culture came the decline of the value and meaning of humanity itself. Human beings were cannon fodder, pawns in the great wars of hostile nation states, bent upon self-destruction. And then came Hitler to fill the void.

No wonder that Popper-Lynkeus had to define the value and worth of a person negatively, when seen against the sum total of cultural achievements; one person is worth more than the sum of it all, when that person is allowed to disappear; the value reappears in the most absurdly exaggerated formulation of that value.

Does this account for the impact the homeless make on us as we go our way in our effort to ignore them, denying the moment, in the course of our lives, when we are called upon to meet the plight of a human being in need? “What we deny, in our refusal to help them, we deny in ourselves: a sense of human decency. It may be that we have reversed the Popper-Lynkeus equation: the homeless have no worth at all because we have so little sense of the value of ourselves and our best beloved. “So what?”, we say, almost one hundred years later: “I’m not worth much, my best beloved is only worth a little more, to me, and therefore the homeless are nothing!”

The sense of the infinite worth of human beings, as such, ourselves included, is no longer generally recognized or affirmed. Life is cheap and easily expendable. We have lost our sense of human decency which depends on such a valuation of infinite worth. Then Tillich’s “law of listening love”, no longer applies, because it cannot be summoned or counted on.

But this is not true.

Against all measures of skepticism and cynicism, people step forward to respond spontaneously to the depth of human need and something happens. It is almost impossible to plan and difficult to predict. It happens. And when it does, one gets a sense of “the means of grace”, still operating in our midst and the original meaning of the words: caritas and agape…Where it comes from is to be trusted.

This has been our experience in working with the homeless. We went into the effort without a plan, with little experience, in response to an emergency need. We found countless others who were willing to help, often without even calling on them to help-they appeared: with blankets, with food, with appliances, with clothing, with money, whatever was needed. There were vast untapped resources of care and concern in the Santa Cruz community that rallied to the cause to refute the prevailing notion that the homeless were unwelcome and should leave, especially if they wanted to escape a beating at the hands of the police.

One of the motives for writing this book is to thank all of you who have contributed to alleviating the plight of the homeless and who have helped make Santa Cruz a place where the quality of mercy is not strained but abundantly evident in the generosity of those who have contributed to the cause.

…Continue reading as a pdf: pages 1-80, pages 81-160

When I started to take an interest in botany and the plant kingdom, a friend introduced me to the botanical writings of Goethe, after Alan Chadwick had made me aware of the Vitalist tradition in horticulture, in particular the biodynamic system developed by Rudolf Steiner. My friend gave me a copy of Agnes [...]]]> by Paul A. Lee

When I started to take an interest in botany and the plant kingdom, a friend introduced me to the botanical writings of Goethe, after Alan Chadwick had made me aware of the Vitalist tradition in horticulture, in particular the biodynamic system developed by Rudolf Steiner. My friend gave me a copy of Agnes Arber’s edition of Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, which was to open the theme of metamorphoses, of changes, as though the main text for botany were the I Ching. I read Goethe’s essay and did not understand it. I read Rudolf Steiner on Goethe (he was the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings at the Weimar Archive) and did not understand him. But I plugged along. As the pieces began to fall into place, where fragments never became the larger design continued to shift and never knew exactly how to put it until I found the key: Physicalism versus Vitalism![i]

I was aware of the implications of this larger design for the philosophy of science and the theme of the structure of scientific revolutions. Although Thomas Kuhn (1962) the proponent of the theme, could assume the structure of Physicalism as the structure of scientific revolutions and write a purely formalistic account of the revolution, as though the Physicalist camp were all there was, I had picked up the Vitalist thread, the defeated point of view, the refutation of which defined Physicalism. It was a negative definition: you are defined by what you reject. The rejection of Vitalism by Physicalism thus became, for me, a key to our culture.

While I was studying philosophy and theology at Harvard, Paul Tillich introduced me to a theology of culture and prepared the way for my intellectual path. He gave me the definition of industrial society as “a world above the given world of nature,” where I came to see how the “above” was brought about through “artificial synthesis,” as in the isolation of active ingredients and their synthetic counterparts. The role of synthetics in industrial society was comparable to the role of plastics and the emphasis on simulation. All this took on an ersatz odor for me, thanks to the teaching of my German-born theologian. In the tradition of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, Tillich (1975) was looking for the means to do philosophy of nature again. He tried, in his Systematic Theology, to work out a philosophy of life (following Nietzsche), but the transmission from Schelling never seemed to find expression. Tillich’s most important paper on Schelling still remains untranslated, although his two early works, expounding Schelling’s theory of guilt and of religious symbolism in antiquity, are now in English.

I began to think of Schelling (one of the most neglected of all the major Western philosophers) as the key to the last century and a half, so much so, that I toyed with the notion of being in some strange relation with him. I thought that to me had fallen the opportunity to discuss the theory of vital roots and their replanting as a new hope for the philosophy of nature especially in this late stage of the self-destructive tendency of our industrial society.

Neo-Vitalism is not a term I should like to live with, but it expresses the resurgence of movements and forces (since 1970 and the Earth Day Celebration) which were thought to be dead and buried after 1828 and the artificial synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wohler, one of the fathers of organic chemistry.

The Physicalist-Vitalist conflict is the deepest conflict in our culture. It is now possible to delineate it because we are now able to grasp its history, thanks to the resurgence of the Vitalist point of view in the form of the environmental and ecology movements. I cling to the notion that the clarity with which we can grasp this past struggle indicates our distance from it, even though we continue to read its truth every day in countless guises.

The theatre of ideas I have called into play is determined by two masks-the Vitalist Smile and the Physicalist Frown: it is the comic and tragic together. Why they are split apart in science, as in drama, I do not know; all I know is the expression on the masks.

These expressions are paradigm features-they define the point of view. From these central masks, countless other masks may be assumed. Actors can even change places, representing now one, now the other point of view. But the fixity and precision of the initial determination remain. The Physicalist and Vitalist shall come to center stage and state their views. In our effort to develop a leading metaphor for consciousness, we shall see that the Vitalist Smile takes us back to “vital roots.”

The Kantian Recoil from Vital Roots

Issac Newton and Goethe are the supreme embodiment of the Physicalist and the Vitalist, even though Newton kept cabbalistic esoterica locked in a trunk (as though his Vitalist side could not come out of the closet) and Goethe carried on his exacting experiments in the development of his theory of color for the express purpose of refuting Newton’s Optics. Everything follows from these two in terms of characterizing the victory of one trend over another. In order to add to the symmetry, we will give Kant to Newton and Schelling to Goethe.

Kant knew what was coming. Perhaps it was Kant whom Goethe had in mind as the figure for Faust. Then the pact with the Devil becomes the sin against the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the vital root of existence. The quandary over whether existence is a predicate, a technical problem in philosophy which Kant decided in the negative, comes in here. It is the background for the plight of existence in industrial society and the origins of existentialism as the protest against industrial society.

Kant decided against existence as a predicate, and, if we are to follow Heidegger on Kant, this was because of the Kantian recoil from the unknown root of existence. Kant betrayed the existential root. It was the price he had to pay for his “Copernican Revolution” and accommodation of philosophy to the protocols of a physicalistically oriented natural science. From Kant onward, German philosophers tried to find the root again, and failed. The leading theme of German philosophy became the “prison of finitude” as an expression of life in industrial society.

Martin Heidegger inherited this Kantian recoil from “vital roots,” arecoil necessary for the development of industrial society as a world “above” nature and therefore devoid of vital roots. This recoil is the Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Kuhn’s book on the structure of scientific revolution is an effort to make us feel comfortable about the “recoil.” The recoil is the revulsion of the mind over its own unknown root. As Heidegger (1962a) puts it-it is more familiar to us than we are to ourselves:

This fundamental constitution of the essence of man, “rooted” in the transcendental
imagination, is the “unknown” of which Kant must have had an intimation when he spoke of “the root unknown to us”; for the unknown is not that of which we know absolutely nothing but that of which the knowledge makes us uneasy. However, Kant did not carry out the primordial
interpretation of the transcendental imagination; indeed, he did not even make the attempt despite the clear indications he gave us concerning such an analytic . .. Kant recoiled from this unknown root. (Heidegger, 1962a, pp. 166, 167) It is the flight from our own ground!

Heidegger retired to the Black Forest, in a forester’s hut. with his water spout of pure mountain water dripping into its trough, walking the path back to the vital root. From Goethe’s journey to Italy to Heidegger in his woods, from the journey to the Ur-plant to the path to the vital root, we have the hidden movement of Vitalism in a world determined by the Physicalist victory. This impulse-to find the root again-was shared by Alan Chadwick and myself, when we started the Student Garden Project at the University of California in Santa Cruz. In order to find it, we had to “double dig. ”

The Renewal of the Philosophy of Nature

Double digging is a horticultural technique practiced by Chadwick. It is clearly set forth in John Jeavon’s How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine, and Tom Cuthbertson’s Alan Chadwick’s Enchanted Garden.

We would also like to use “double digging” metaphorically. The upper crust is not all there is; like Ahab, we have to go to a little lower layer. This opening of the subsoil, for roots, is the basis for a renewed philosophy of nature, The linkage, for me, has been something like this: Schelling represents the breaking point in the defense against the rise of industrial society. Countless critics and witnesses inveigh against it. One of the most powerful, Simone Wei!, who was drawn to work in a Renault factory as a missionary to some heathen tribe, wrote the central meditation on this revolt: The Need for Roots (Wei!, 1979).

Schelling is the breaking point because of his turn from Naturphilosophie, and his alliance with Hegel, to existentialism (in his Berlin Lectures of 1841-1842), where the audience seemed to sense that a historic move was being made, initiating a philosophical position for the coming century and a half-so much excitement was there in the packed classroom, with Kierkegaard taking notes.[ii]

This breaking point was to continue until the rejected forces could resummon themselves in trying to put things right, when the “unforeseen” consequences of industrial society would provoke the environmental movement. For historical dating purposes, existentialism plays the role of chief mourner for defeated Vitalism (and Natiirphilosophie) until the Earth Day Celebration in April of 1970. This past decade has seen the groundwork for a renewed philosophy of nature, now that science has actually succeeded in unveiling nature’s mysteries in the DNA code of the double helix and in the structure of the atom. Nature’s mysteries were turned into scientific problems to be solved. The mystery became a secret. Those who penetrate to the secret receive Nobel prizes (the story is begun by Watson, 1968, and told in full by Judson, 1979).

The breaking point, represented in the turn of Schelling, is only shared by those who, so far, assume a minority view in their reaction against the pursuit of science under Physicalist protocols defined by the rejection and elimination of Vitalism.

The environmental and ecology movements are contemporaneous with the penetration to the secret of life. Think of the moment when Francis Crick, in a loud voice in a pub near Cambridge University, announced that he had solved the secret of life. Given the forces that are ranged against them, the ecology and environmental movements have achieved only partial toeholds. Look at the Environmental Stuclies Program at your local university-they are beleaguered enclaves in the midst of a hostile, science-determined organization of knowledge whose purpose is to train servants of industrial society.

However, all the signs are clear about our being in an advanced stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, as we know it. The economy of the United States is a symptom of this self-destruction. The organized system of industrial society is best expressed on the faces of unemployed blacks in the inner city in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once having driven through these areas, replicated in every major industrial city in the United States, one never forgets it. It is like escaping from an armed camp.

For this reason, we have tried to elucidate the metaphor-vital roots-as a leading metaphor of consciousness, and we have moved from applying the metaphor in a critique of industrial society to an uncovering of the metaphor in the origins of our culture in ancient Greece. It should be obvious that this metaphor was discovered in the actual development of a university garden project where countless students rediscovered their roots. In this sense, horticulture and agriculture, seen in the light of the ecology movement, are prerequisites for the development of any culture worthy of the name. Industrial society alienates us from this ground and provokes in us the longing for roots. Only in a discussion of the metaphors of consciousness do such considerations take on the meaning they deserve.

The Metaphors: “Vital Roots” and “Thymos” According to Freud, the metaphor for consciousness is the neurone, an electrical charge along a nerve pathway. In order to distinguish the neurones appropriate to consciousness, Freud tried to postulate a qualitative charge in the neurone, but it did not work, and he sent his famous “Project for A Scientific Psychology” off to his cohort-Wilhelm Fliessand never asked for it back. It was found among Fliess’s papers, and came to light only a few decades ago in the publication of the Freud-Fliess correspondence as the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1954).

Freud would have done better with a metaphor like “vital root” rather than “neurone,” but his Physicalist training under Ernst Briicke prevented him from using a vitalist metaphor. Why? Because Physicalism in alliance with positivism eschewed terms with a metaphysical ring. Neurone is a nice empirical word; “vital root” is a metaphysical metaphor.

I have been working with the metaphor, as a metaphor for consciousness, ever since teaming up with a man who assumed responsibility for replanting it-Alan Chadwick, sometimes referred to as the world’s greatest living gardener. When we started the Student Garden Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1967, I witnessed Alan Chadwick’s Singular devotion to creating a garden, working fifteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, without a break. I had to think of some way of putting it. The formulation appropriate to the phenomenon was to say that Alan Chadwick had been uniquely appointed to replant the vital root of existence. The supposition was that if it could happen somewhere, and it had to happen somewhere in order to prove that it was possible in a world where vital roots were endangered and in jeopardy, then it could happen elsewhere, as has been the case, given the thousands of students who have been trained in the methods and systems devoted to the replanting of the vital root, practiced by Chadwick, the French Intensive and Biodynamic. I came to appreciate that these were more than names for styles of hand-intensive systems of horticulture and agriculture, they were forms for the replanting of what industrial society had uprooted.

In fact, they were new forms for the supplanting of industrial society! We had joined a revolutionary movement which erupted nationally in 1970, on a given weekend, when countless Americans celebrated Earth Day I-April 22, 1970. We were ready for it in our garden in Santa Cruz.

After 1970, prompted by the inspiration of Earth Day, I started to think through what historical forces we were opposing in order to get a clear view of what we were up against. It became a marvelous detective story as I began to unravel the clues. Now that I have it mostly figured out, I can see that it has given me the central metaphor for consciousness in the notion of the “vital roots” of consciousness.

Here is how it goes: the ancient Greek term for the “vital root” is thymos, a Homeric word meaning vitality, courage, or spirit. There is now a fairly extensive philological and philosophical literature on thymos, but no one has fully elucidated its philosophical significance, although there have been a number of good attempts, beginning with Tillich (1952), Ricoeur (1965), and Strasser (1977). A new contribution was added by Jutian Jaynes (1977) in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He utilized what was well known to anyone interested in classical philology, namely, the work of Bruno Snell and the linguistic approach to Homeric anthropology through the analysis of the metaphors for consciousness in the Iliad and Odyssey. Snell found that all the words for consciousness were words that referred to organs or quasi-organs-they had a material ring to them that had to be appreciated in order not to read back into them the subsequent linguistic elaborations of the terminology for consciousness. When Homer said “psyche” he meant the breath, consciousness was “breathing” in the sense of “one gasped one’s last,” the literal meaning of consciousness or “psyche.” Consciousness {“psyche”} is only mentioned in reference to death; there is no “psyche” but this “last gasp.” By the time we get to Plato, “psyche” is the name for a structured consciousness with three parts-the rational, the vital, and the appetitive. Plato’s words are nous, thyoas, and epithymia.

So from Homer to Plato we can catch the growing density in the linguistic evolution of rational self-consciousness-from “vital breath” (in the moment of death, as in, “he blew his life away”), to a structured self-consciousness ruled by reason. The carriers of this development are the pre-Socratic philosophers, about twenty of them, who prepared the way to Socrates as if he was what they meant. I like this existential reference. It has been immortalized in the syllogism:

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The second line in the syllogism is called an enthymeme, when it is understood, in which case the syllogism would read:

All men are mortal
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

An enthymeme, derived from thymos, is in the middle. In principle, we take it for granted. I have come to develop a whole philosophy out of it. I have moved from thinking of thymos as in the middle to thinking of thymos as “vital root.” I had my metaphor for consciousness.

In order to develop a metaphor for consciousness, it is good practice to go back to Homer, where all the terms are metaphors, because Homeric culture is an oral culture, preliterate, and preconceptual. The Homeric metaphors for consciousness are phrenes, thymos, psyche, and nous, etc. They can be considered protoconcepts, or the metaphorical roots of concepts, in the sense that these metaphors for consciousness, based on organs in the body, become the concepts of Plato with no bodily references.

The key metaphor in Homer is thymos, the most widely used term in the Iliad. Imagine my delight when I began to excavate this central term, rather like Schliemann digging up Troy. Forgotten and buried under the successive layers of language, representing the linguistic evolution of rational self-consciousness, thymos was waiting to be found. I was able to dig down to the vital root of consciousness.

When I saw the book by Jaynes (1977), one day as I walked through a local bookstore, I thought-”oh-oh”-somebody got there before me. I saw from the index a number of entries on thymos. I held my breath.

When I got to his definition of thymos, I exhaled. He had missed it by a step. He calls thymos the adrenalin-based reaction to an emergency situation, which is not bad for defining vitality, but more appropriate to epithymia, or the “lesser thymos,” the region of longing-drives, desires, and appetites, below the region of “spirit.” What step had Jaynes missed? No one in the area of classics had made the obvious connection between the word and the bodily organ, even though Snell had specified the relation between psyche and breath, phrenes and liver, etc. Even Snell had missed the obvious. Thymos is the thymus gland. I had found the vital root of consciousness in the thymus gland.

The thymus, therefore, is what Homer referred to when he used the word thymos. This is the hypothesis for unravelling the mystery of the vital root. Although the gland was formally named by Rufus of Ephesus (c. 100 A.D.), the correlation, in Homeric terms, between thymos and thymus carries through the principle of organs, or quasi-organs, as the basis for words for consciousness.

My speculative faculty was set into play when I went on to make the connection with the herb thyme, also derived from thymos. Now I really had a connection with vital roots, although the thymus, as the center of the immune system, was vital root enough.

The herb grows wild all over Greece, and its highly volatile essential oil makes it one of the great germicidal and antiseptic herbs. Therefore, its vital function. Like the thymus, it is a guardian of vitality in the defense against disease and illness. In this role, thyme has always been associated with courage.

The more this configuration of ideas came into focus, the more I was convinced that I had lucked into a key to the riddle of “vital roots” as the leading metaphor for consciousness where thym6s was the root. I knew I had to extend the work of Tillich, Ricoeur, Strasser, and Jaynes into further areas of exploration in order to develop a Thym6s Doctrine, drawing, as well, from the work of classical philologists-Snel1, Onions, Havelock, Dodds, and Adkins.

Origin of the Word Thymos

Thymos is a Greek word meaning the raising of the soul, passion, courage, spirit. Its origin should be found in the Indo-European root dheu-to rise in a cloud, as dust, vapor or smoke (relation with breath). In Sanskrit, dhumah (dhumo-) means smoke or vapor, giving in Latin “fumus,” in English “fume,” “fumigate,” “perfume.” There is also the idea of undulation, waving, and ebullition. In Irish, dumhach means foggy. In Sanskrit, dhulih (dhuli) means dust or dusty soil or pollen. In middle Irish, duil means desire, movement of the soul. The root dheu (dheua) has the connotation of “being animated by swift movements,” to swirl or whirl. In Sanskrit, dhutah means shaken. In Greek, thuella means storm, whirlwind; thuein: to sacrifice; thuas: incense for sacrifice; thumas: soul, courage, anger. Some authors think that dheues (dhes) belongs to the same root; it became in Greek, theas: God, and theian: smoke or sulfur. Thua originally denotes a violent movement of air, water, the ground, animals, or men. From the sense of “to wel1 up,” “to boil up,” it went to “to smoke” then “to cause to go up in smoke,” “to sacrifice.” Thumas is “that which is moved and which moves,” “vital force”! The meaning of thumos is quite extensive: desire, impulse, inclination, consideration. Later on, thumas took the meaning of “wrath,” particularly in the New Testament.

The Continuing Struggle between Physicalism and Vitalism

The vital root of consciousness is more than the elucidation of a word, although even that is a prodigious task and beyond any single effort. Tillich’s Courage to Be begins the work in his masterful elucidation of the meaning of thymos in Plato, the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, etc. It is as though Tillich was able to carry through Kant’s failed attempt at developing the transcendental imagination. As we mentioned, according to Heidegger, something happened to Kant to make him recoil from carrying through his interest in the vital root of consciousness in the constitution of the transcendental imagination.

If the problem is the vital root, then we can understand why metaphysics was abandoned and even rejected by the Physicalist trend in the system of the sciences, as if the best way to deal with a problem one has renounced the language for formulating is to bracket it and hope it goes away, as in the Positivist and Linguistic revision of language for the purpose of excluding such issues as “pseudoproblems.” If Kant intuited this and recoiled from it, if Kant saw what was coming-industrial society-and that philosophy would have to accommodate itself to it, then Kant is part of the problem.

When I found the passage in Heidegger, I thought it was too good to be true. Here was Heidegger (1962a), as though complaining about himself and his inability to carry through the project of Being and Time Heidegger, 1962b), isolating the moment in Kant where the recoil from the unknown root occurred-a recoil he was to inherit. It is a commentary, buried in philosophy, of the uprooting of our modem period as a result of the rise and triumph of industrial society. It is the story of how our “courage to be” was undermined and eroded as a result of losing touch with “vital roots.”

So our metaphor for consciousness is indicative of the deepest perplexity in the depths of our culture. We are all worried to death about the outcome of this revived debate, thought settled in 1828 when Physicalism defeated Vitalism (a view repeated throughout the literature, as though a war had been fought to decide the issue). This assumption reigned supreme for a century and a half. Should you look up any references to Vitalism in the literature, including references to philosophy of life (Nietzsche) and philosophy of nature (Schelling), they will uniformly refer to names of defeated points of view-with existentialism inheriting the defeat and presiding over the last rites.

No one could have predicted the reemergence, historically, of defeated Vitalism in the celebration of Earth Day. It is the historical end of existentialism as chief mourner for defeated Vitalism. Even though the nails may not have given way, the coffin came unglued, and we witnessed the return of a point of view thought dead and buried.

This neo-Vitalist resurgence in the environmental and ecology movements reenjoined the debate. It has lead to the realization of the Thym6s as Biopsycltological Metaphor necessity for dismantling industrial society in order to minimize the damage due to its self destruction. What we need now is the amplification of this renewal in a new view of consciousness. For our own point of view, by renewal we mean discovering your thymus gland as the biological basis of your spirit, and we mean discovering the medicinal properties of herbs, as in the herb thyme. These two roots, glandular and herbal, will put you in touch with thym6s, the vital root of consciousness. I can sum it up in a parable:

Once upon a time, a famous poet and man of letters, who was also an
accomplished scientist, particularly in botany, dropped out of German society
to take a long walk as though he went in search of something as profound as
the vital root of existence, although he was not able to put his longing into
words, He went south, to Italy, as though in search of cultural roots, mindful
of the danger they were in which he foresaw. Based on his botanical studies,
he was actually in search of his own version of the vital root-what he called
the Ur~plant. He had formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis based on
the relation of leaf to stem. He had envisaged a primal plant exemplifying his
theory, a plant that would be the morphological prototype of all possible plant
development. He wanted to find one.

When he entered the oldest botanical garden in the Western world, in Padua, founded. in 1545, he sensed that h.is quest was realized.

When he gazed upon the palm growing in the middle of the garden Chaemerops
humilis-he designated it the Ur-plant.

To commemorate the finding of the Ur-plant in their garden, the Paduans
built a glass case to cover it. They called it “Goethe’s Palm,”

The vital root of existence in the form of the Ur-plant was squirreled away
under glass in the oldest botanical garden in the Western world to wait out the
triumphant rise and self-destructive demise of industrial society as a world
above the given world of nature and therefore devoid of vital roots,

The vital root is alive and well in Padua.

The Pysicalist-Vitalist Conflict in Pschology[iii]

The physicalist-vitalist conflict also pervades the discipline of psychology. On the one hand, we find the “hardheaded” and natural science-inspired approaches in psychology (e.g., physiological psychology, behaviorism, and cognitive psychology), which follow the strictly experimental approach of rigorous scientific causal analysis. This approach seeks to uncover the roots of behavior in the prepersonal terms of physiological and psychological functions, without appeal to the experienced reality of consciousness and personal self-agency. In this view, behavior is a consequence of antecedent reinforcement and situational manipulation circumventing the awareness and choice of the participants; action is the result of the operation of certain information processing loops steered by feedback. The physicalistic-positivistic approach is the serious attempt to simulate man as an assembly of variables and response tendencies with a general information-processing capability of an “artificial” intelligence with emergent properties. The ideal of the Physicalist view is the complete simulation of man, the creation of the android under scientific management and control.

On the other side of the psychological spectrum, there are the “soft” humanistic and existential approaches which insist on the reality of selfhood, self-realization, and self-agency, and which emphasize the importance of personal consciousness, of meaning and values. The activities of each human individual require an “intentional analysis” and interpretational reading, a Uhermeneutics of existence,” rather than a causal analysis. Human reality is preinterpreted reality; people act on the meanings they perceive the situation to have. Action implies choices between alternatives, choices of direction leading into the future and ultimately to the creation of a way of life. The Vitalist emphasis in psychology stresses the reality of embodiment, meaningfulness and intensity of experience. It is thus sympathetic with both the human-potential movement in humanistic psychology and its emphasis on the experience of the body, and transpersonal psychology, which retains an appreciation for man’s vital connectedness with the realities of the spirit, of values, and ultimately with the realm of the Divine. The existential emphasis on authenticity, on the right relationship of the person to others and to his/her world, also represents the Vitalist position of insistence on quality, on will, and on commitment, on the courage to be, the courage to incarnate values.

Methodologically the humanistic and existential approaches emphasize case studies, descriptions of experiences, and personal stories, working directly on one’s involvement and experiences in the sense of a spiritual and psychological praxis. The expression of experience becomes important; the use of personal testimony, of symbols and metaphors, is seen as helping the interpretation and serving as guiding images and is favored over conceptual classification, measurement, and the expression of knowledge as cognitive objects.

Although the natural scientific approach moves in a denotative way, using specified operational definitions, the humanistic-existential approach favors connotative ways, which are suggestive, which invite participation, and which emphasize the plurality of meanings that symbols can carry. Although the physicalist-positivist psychologies aim for mastery and control by a professional scientific elite (e.g., computer diagnostics), the vitalist psychologies seem to favor and further emancipation, self development, and taking matters in one’s own hands. The search for the appropriate metaphor and symbol to live by and the task to embody spiritual insight, wisdom, and knowledge in a viable and responsible assembly of activities and in collaboration with a social ensemble, defines the vitalist task in psychology: to create an optimal way of life together, on Earth, from within the conditions in which we find ourselves. In this day and age, the issues are defined by the limits to technological carrying capacity in a limited earth-resource environment, a historical development that has brought our very rootedness in the land, in our body, and in our spirit (as the source of illumination as to the right way on earth) into question and existential jeopardy.

The journey and account of one person through this complex interdisciplinary terrain of issues and ruling metaphors, and his discovery of a root of renewed existence in “double digging” (the biodynamic French intensive mode of horticulture), in the ecology movement, in the Greek word thymos, in the herb thyme, and in the human thymus gland, offers a Vitalist testimonial and a summons to everyone to become involved with roots again. The story of the journey evokes our personal and collective existence in its unfolding. Thymos is a vital reality and a biopsychological metaphor that may keep us on the right track by calling us to our roots and to the sources of our vitality, to the ground of our life-making.

References
Cassirer, E. The problem of knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
Cuthbertson, T. Alan Chadwick’s enchanted garden. New York: Dutton, 1978.
Freud, S. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. In M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, & E. Kris (Eds.), Origins of
Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1954.
Heidegger, M. Kant and the problem of metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1962. (a)
Heidegger, M. Being and time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (b)
Jaynes, J. The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bialmeral mind. Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1977.
leavon, J. How to grow more vegetables than you ever thought possible on less land than you can
imagine. Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1979.
Judson, H. The eighth day of creation: The makers of revolution in biology. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979.
Kuhn, T. H. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Merz, J. History of European thought in the nineteenth century. Darby, Penna.: Arden Library,
1978.
Ricoeur, P. Fallible man. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965.
Strasser, S. Phenomenology affeeling. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Duquesne University Press,
1977.
Tillich, P. The courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.
Tillich, P. Systematic theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Watson, J. D. The double helix. New York: New American Library, 1968.
Weil., S. The need for roots. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Additional Reference
For the best introduction to the botanical origins of modem science, see:
Annytage, W. H. The rise of the technocrats, a social history. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1965.

[ii] Kierkegaard’s notes are contained in his Papers and Diaries (an unpublished manuscript
amounting to some 75 pages in Danish). For other references to his attendance at Schel·
ling’s lectures, see the last volume of his papers, translated by Howard and Edna Hong.
Paul Tillich calls these notes the “Ur·text of Existentialism.”

[iii] The remainder of this chapter was written by Rolf von Eckartsberg, and is included with the
author’s permission and approval.-Eds.

The depiction of Hygieia in the mural devoted to medicine at the University of Vienna, by Gustav Klimt, expresses the artistic and cultural background that formed Paul Tillich as a German philosopher and theologian. Vienna was the center for the “fin-desiecle,” as well as the center for many of the prophetic visions and [...]]]> by Paul A. Lee

The depiction of Hygieia in the mural devoted to medicine at the University of Vienna, by Gustav Klimt, expresses the artistic and cultural background that formed Paul Tillich as a German philosopher and theologian. Vienna was the center for the “fin-desiecle,” as well as the center for many of the prophetic visions and movements of the century to come, expressed in the Viennese novelists and satirists Karl Kraus, Musil, Kafka, Brock, Von Dodderer. Freud discovered psychoanalysis there, when, as a latter-day Heraclitus, he searched for himself, like a deep-sea diver, and began the process of self and other-analysis, which, along with Existentialism and Expressionism, became the form-breaking powers of the 20th century. As the daughter of Asclepias, Hygieia is the bearer of healing power, particularly in her priestess and hieratic pose in Klimt’s rendering. Bearing snakes, the ancient symbol of the convergence of poison and medicine (where dosage determines the difference), Hygieia heralds “the unity of life and death, the interpenetration of instinctual vitality and personal dissolution.” (Schorske). The snakes of Asclepias, wound on the staff, the caduceus, were said to come out at night and lick the wounds of those who came to sleep in the temples in a practice known as “incubation,” where the God would appear in a dream omen announcing the prospects for a cure.

In his comprehensive discussion of Western modes of healing, Tillich mentions how Asclepias vied with the Christ as the preeminent bearer of healing the Great Physician of the ancient world. When I was a young graduate student at Union Theological Seminary, I heard Tillich deliver the Bampton Lectures at Columbia University-Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, where he overcame the Humpty Dumpty problem in Western religion by putting the two cultures together again in all of their dialectical tension Athens and Jerusalem. While at Union, I discovered the essay–The Relation of Religion and Health and copied it out longhand. As the son of a doctor, I had decided against medicine and for theology and philosophy as a career. Tillich restored to me the lost unity of these two subject matters, as well, by placing the theme of ‘healing’ and the meaning of health in its old cosmic frame, within the context of salvation and its etymological origins. Healing is restored to its religious dignity. Tillich shows this ancient unity of powers and functions before their historical separation. He anticipated the longing for their mutual convergence as currently expressed in the Holistic Health Movement now sweeping the country in all of its varied forms. As a thinker on the boundary line, Tillich was able to negotiate territory neglected by others who remained bound to the confines of their own viewpoints and specialties. He was able to show the deep associations between otherwise seemingly separated fields. Therefore, the current split between industrial medicine and traditional medicine, as practiced worldwide in non-industrial nations, as well as ethnic groups in rural areas everywhere, is an unfortunate consequence of a trend of a century and a half. When biochemistry isolated the active ingredients of natural medicine to synthesize artificially from inorganic sources, biochemistry undermined the botanical foundation of medicine. Tillich’s discussion reviews the long historic development and sets the stage for re-evaluating the contribution of neglected and rejected styles in the healing arts burdened by their association with religion and a vitalist approach to health and disease. In “The Religion of Health and Tillich” sketches out the background for what he carried through in “The Courage to Be.” I have come to call it “The Thymos Doctrine,” the old Homeric word Tillich translated as “The Courage to Be.” When I found out that the word for the herb thyme and for the gland thymus were cognates, thymos became the theme for my life’s work.

In my judgment, Tillich anticipated the development of modern immunology in “The Courage to Be”. Once one follows  through the meaning of ‘thymos’ in the discovery of the thymus and the central role of the thymus in immunology, as well as the classic herb thyme in the rediscovery of the healing properties of herbs and the significance of traditional or herbal medicine worldwide, “The Courage to Be” is seen as an essay in theological and philosophical immunology, a discourse on the vital dynamics of self-affirmation in the face of all that would undo and destroy us, where our constitutional defense is called into play, otherwise known as our immune system. Tillich gives us a spiritual biology of the immune system, where “The Courage to Be” is our thymic vigor. After reading in the field of immunology for the last ten years, it is possible to mount a new argument for the existence of God based on the infinite diversity of antibody response to antigens (anti-body generating). As though to fulfill the vision of Leibnitz that we live in the ‘best of all possible worlds,’ immunology is now discovering that we have the best of all possible immune systems. With his unerring facility for language and theoretical formulation, Tillich picked just the right word for his pursuit of the meaning of health and the relation of religion and health begun here in these two essays as the background for “The Courage to Be.” The Thymos Doctrine is sketched out here in his effort to construct a theoretical model of the human self for the purpose of determining a complex of relations necessary for any discussion of the meaning of health. This model, although the term’ thymos’ is not mentioned, should be read as the theoretical background for the subseql’ent elucidation. To read these two essays as a preparation for “The Courage to Be” provides the student of health with a rich historical and theoretical background. It is appropriate to introduce this material into the current discussion for the sake of supporting the quest for models of wholeness that overcome the bifurcation of the healing arts into technical specialties with everyone lost in their own niche. It is time for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. To think through the cultural modalities of the healing arts in order to restore the full dimensions of human health is the task we all share in this late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society. Tillich points the way, as he tried to do in everything he thought and wrote, as one of the great fighters against the demonic ‘structures of destruction’ that would destroy life as we know it on this earth, whether through synthetic simulation or radiation and pollution. Healing, again, can become a religious vocation, when the medical arts and sciences join with the priest and the prophet, the curendero and native healer, in the mutual acknowledgement of converging domains, where wholeness is the consequence of a new “planet medicine.” This “planet medicine” is the avowed goal of the World Health Organization.

In 1978, upon the successful completion of the campaign to rid the world of smallpox, Dr. Halfdan Mahler, the Director-General, announced the goal for the year 2000 “Health For All” through the promotion and advancement of traditional medicine worldwide. For someone like myself, a student of Tillich’s, and a spokesman for the medicinal herb renaissance in America, this goal strikes me as the basis for one of the most creative and promising dialogues of the next two decades. When I met a second year Stanford Medical School student a native American Indian who told me about his initiation into the herbal medicine of his tribe, I thought I had encountered the best example of the new ‘cross-fertilization of cultures,’ which the dialogue between traditional, basically herbal, medicine and modern industrial medicine entails. In such figures, we may hope to see the confluence of themes and trends, styles and models of medicine and health, developed in different times and in various climes, brought together, for the benefit of all. In this way, the healing arts and sciences and their history, so richly reviewed here with all of their problems and complexities brought to light, may contribute again to the history of salvation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Woman’s Herbal, by Jeannine Parvat, Freestone Collective, 1978. AS C LEP lAS, by Karl Kerenyi, Bollingen Books, Princeton University Press.

FIN-DE-SIECLE, by Carl Schorske, Random House, 1981. HYGIEIA,

IDENTITY AND THE LIFE CYCLE, by Erik Erikson, Psychological Issues 1,1, International Universities Press, New York, 1979

PLANET MEDICINE, by Richard Grossinger, Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1980.

THE BIOLOGY OF ULTIMATE CONCERN, by Theodosius Dobzhansky, New American Library, New York, 1967.

““The Courage to Be””, by Paul Tillich, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952.

THE DOUBLE FACE OF JANUS and Other Essays in the History of Medicine, by Owsei Temkin, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978.

THE METAPHORS OF CONSCIOUSNEss, ed. byRonaldS. Valle and Rolf von Eckartsberg, Chap. 25, “Thymos as Biopsychological Metaphor: The Vital Root of Consciousness,” by Paul Lee, Plenum Press, New York, 1981.

“Wholeness and Totality,” in TOTALITARIANISM, C. J. Friedrich, ed., Harvard University Press, 1954.

On the Wings of Thymós The plumage that was Plato’s is indicated by the name given to the group of those who followed Socrates-the fellowship of the swan. Philosophy, according to Socrates, is swan song, with one foot in the grave, meditating on finitude, mortality and having to die. This definition of philosophy [...]]]> by Paul A. Lee

On the Wings of Thymós The plumage that was Plato’s is indicated by the name given to the group of those who followed Socrates-the fellowship of the swan. Philosophy, according to Socrates, is swan song, with one foot in the grave, meditating on finitude, mortality and having to die. This definition of philosophy based on the shock of non-being is juxtaposed against the imagery of Homer and the post-mortal fate of the eidolon or ‘shadows’ – ‘the after-images of used-up men’-where the dead are nothing because they are pure past. Socrates and Plato have another view of death’s illumination of life: the journey by chariot in the procession of the gods past the vision of being where ultimate concern for the perfect mysteries sustains one through the life to come by virtue of what is glimpsed. We all want to remember it; deep in our souls this longing precedes our birth. Socrates knew this vision and told stories to illustrate it. Evoking a new dimension of our being through the myth is the purpose of the Socratic theology. It is the high artifice of Plato to sneak this vision into a playful dialogue about ‘disinterested’ love, something only Greeks with a philosophical bent would give panegyrics on, under the sway of empty and vain but wonderfully formalistic oratory. In this sense, the spoken word resounds through Plato even though he signifies the transition from oral to literate-the dialogues were written down! This wrench makes even the gods wince. Hence, as a result of the new literacy, a new theology, contemporaneous with the emergency of philosophical rationality. Old stories, retold by Socrates, with a very clear and long-lived historical intent; like the oracle at Delphi, Socrates reaches out with his voice for thousands of years.

‘On the wings of thymós’ is a good phrase for the emergence of literate consciousness. The transition from the oral transmission of culture to the textual or literate transmission makes Plato the key moment in this breakdown and new point of departure: Socratic consciousness at its finest hour. It is the movement from Homeric thymós to Socratic thymós and the development from thymós as ‘the adrenalin-produced emergency reaction of the sympathetic nervous system to novel situations …’[i]- to thymós as the unreflective striving toward what is noble transmuted into the courage to be-this is the heart of the Socratic theology.

The Phaedrus is as playful and as full of irony as any dialogue in Plato’s authorship. The dialogue begins badly, with the playful Socrates teasing Phaedrus into telling one of the worst scrambles found anywhere. To match the speech of Phaedrus, which is really his bad rendition of the speech of Lysias, Socrates has to cover his head in shame, the proposition to be debated is so fraught with error: It is better not to be in love with the beloved in order to serve the pleasures of the beloved with a so-called ‘disinterested’ intent. Socrates plays along and then realizes he had better offer a recantation and atonement. Love, of all human experiences, is not objective; hence, the theme of the ‘blessings of madness,’ from this failed beginning, as though

the truth could only follow in self-evident clarity after so much incoherent babble, Socrates goes right to the heart of the matter. In dithyrambic excess he tells Phaedrus that this thymós, this desire for the beloved, must strive for what is noble; as thymós is wedded to eros, so vitality to intentionality, or vital drives to moral norms-this is what it is to grow wings.

And so, if the victory be won by the higher elements of mind guiding them into the ordered rule of the philosophical life, their days on earth will be blessed with happiness and concord, for the power of evil in the soul has been subjected, and the power of goodness liberated; they have won self mastery and inward peace. And when life is over, with burdens shed and wings recovered they stand victorious in the first of the three rounds in that truly Olympic struggle; nor can any nobler prize be secured whether by the wisdom that is of man or by the madness that is of god.

This is the taming of thymós (spiritual vitality) and epithymia (lustful desire) for a moral life, rather than a life of self-destruction through the arbitrary willfulness of uninstructed desires. A metaphysical decision in the soul to seek the Good, eventually to stand on its measure, joins thymós to the Golden Mean.

But inside thymós, in the heart of our centered self, a struggle is going on between Eros and Atê. Eros is the part of Thymós eager to ascend to the heights of human aspiration, striving for what is noble. Atê is self-delusion, leading to self-destruction. It is blindness, rage, interiorized aggression. Thymós, in this negative mode, means smoke, anger, wrath, mental pathology. This negative side of thymós is best expressed in the French word resentment. The French tradition of the reflection on sentiment and resentment follows in the path of the Platonic doctrine of thymós. This conflict between Eros and Ate as the inner struggle of thymós, in relation to reason and desire, is the inner dialogue of the soul with itself.

Plato’s dialogues are the greatest expression of this dialogue. It is soul that encompasses our life; we are hedged about from birth to death by soul. Thymós means the heart of soul. Thymós is the vital root of consciousness. A horse representing thymós in the Phaedrus myth becomes the center of consciousness in the Republic. We are grounded in the middle, which is why Plato calls man the in-between being. The Myth of Er at the end of the Republic is a further elaboration of the myth in the Phaedrus. It is another story in the Socratic Theology. The myth of the winged steeds and their charioteer in the Phaedrus is amplified by the Myth of Er in the Republic through an expansion of the reincarnation cycle in the tale of Er. Three intervals between lifetimes are necessary to escape punishment for our crimes, as though three generations are a minimum structure for any historical grasp of life. In this three-fold sequence of consecutive lives, we undergo the most extreme choice. For Plato the supreme choice is philosophical. Plato issues the loudest call to the ranks of philosophy anyone has uttered. He wants us all to become Socratic, like his teacher, and practice the Confession of Ignorance/Delusion and be delivered from the snares of Atê. Plato provides us with it all-the Cave, the Divided Line, the Ring of Gyges, the Helmet of Hermes, and the Shield of Achilles. He supersedes everyone in his effort to get us to strain every nerve in order to glimpse the mysteries in our three-time round of earthly and ephemeral existence. So fraught with existential dramatics is the Greek view of life that without this glimpse, we would not be the supreme spectators that we are; we would forget, we would make the wrong choice, we would fail in the very foundation and substance of our being. In the Phaedrus, we meet the winged steeds of the soul who can distract the Charioteer from glimpsing the vision of Being and the mysteries of the Forms, thereby condemning the soul to commit grave mistakes about the choice of self in the next go-around. It is all based on the Platonic doctrine of thymós, or the vitality of the biologically based root of consciousness. Only here, in this dialogue, it is construed as a steed partial to its unruly neighbor, human desire, the horse of a different color. How do you get your unruly steed to run well with your noble steed in order for your reason to glimpse the Forms when you make your cosmic round? By practicing dying and preparing yourself for the ultimate test. Plato urges us on to participate in this flight from life to life, where, in the interval between lives, we can get a glimpse of the Forms, enter philosophical beatitude and be blessed by the mysteries we behold in the very marrow of ourselves.

by Paul A. Lee

Bumping into a friend at the Harvard Coop who told me he had applied for a position at Santa Cruz but had changed his mind, I said, “Well, [...]]]> Santa Cruz in the ’60′s

“How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? —and I tell my life to myself.”
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo

by Paul A. Lee

Bumping into a friend at the Harvard Coop who told me he had applied for a position at Santa Cruz but had changed his mind, I said, “Well, maybe I’ll apply.” He looked at me askance and said: “Do you know anything about the California University sssssystem?” I didn’t, but I registered the hiss in the way he pronounced the word system. I thought: snake in the grass? I was teaching at M.I.T. and my term was about to expire and I needed a job. Soon after an article appeared in the New York Times that Kenneth Thimann had been appointed Provost of Crown College, UCSC. I went to the phone. I was a Fellow of a Radcliffe House where Thimann was Provost and I knew him. He was a very distinguished professor of botany at Harvard. We went over for tea and he hired me.

Richard Baker, the eventual Zentatsu Myoyu and Zen Roshi, called, looking for Tillich and Erikson to invite to a conference he was organizing at Asilomar. I had been Tillich’s Teaching Assistant and Erikson was my thesis advisor. They weren’t available so I offered myself and he bought it, including my wife, so we flew out and got a look at Santa Cruz before moving there.

Driving down Pacific Ave. in l965 was like driving down the main street in Paducah, in l937, although I had never been to Paducah. It looked impossibly dull and old-fashioned. There was a men’s clothing store that looked like used Sears. Definitely unhip. And then–stop the car!–the Hip Pocket Bookstore and over the door a Ron Boise sculpting from the kama sutra, a couple in a position, flagrant and delectio. Definitely hip! I double-parked and ran in to take a look and picked up a copy of the Black Mountain Pree, an underground newspaper, edited by Claire somebody. It was an island in the forthcoming “ocean of desire”.

We met the Bakers at Asilomar and over drinks found out they were practising Zen Buddhists. I didn’t know any up to then, although I had attended a seminar given by Tillich and Hisamatsu, at Harvard. Hisamatsu, a famous Zen Master, was in residence at Harvard. I hardly understood a word, but he was interesting to observe and made a pronounced impression. I was intrigued by the challenge of an American, like Baker, taking on an Asian religion–an experiment in the cross-fertilization of cultures, or mind and migration, the title of an essay Tillich had written about the affinity of the mind for the migratory impulse. Here was a living instance, my new-found friends. I decided to appoint myself as Baker’s protestant theological witness.

As I was a member of the Leary Group at Harvard and a founding editor of the Psychedelic Review, I told Baker, who was organizing conferences and symposia for the University Extension, he should do one on LSD, as it was going to become a big
deal. He did. Berkeley tried to cancel it after they woke up to the hot potato and Baker had to compromise by moving the venue to the San Francisco campus and disinviting Allen Ginsberg, who showed up anyhow but did not appear on the program.

So a month or so before we moved to Santa Cruz, in l966, I gave the opening address at the notorious LSD Conference in San Francisco. The conference was scheduled for a week which meant lots of time for parties and lots of fun. I thought of it as my reception to taking up residence for a new life in California. The first stop was the Psychedelic Bookstore in the Haight. Then on to the party thrown by the Grateful Dead in Marin with Owsley handing out his homemade acid to everyone who wanted it. It was a hoot. Hundreds of people on a big estate, almost all of them naked, swimming and passing joints rolled in newspapers. I had never seen anything like that before. I was there with Nina Graboi whom we picked up at Alan Watts’ houseboat in Sausalito. She wrote up the event in her book on the ’60′s. I wasn’t clear about what I was going to speak about so I decided to describe the party as the wave of the future and called my talk: “Psychedelic Style”. I had never seen freaks before and there were a lot of them. We wore button down shirts and Brooks Brothers suits and thought we were running the show from Harvard. We were wrong and stood corrected. At one point a guy came out and announced that everyone had to move their cars as the neighbor had complained and they didn’t want the cops to come. There were a lot of cars and everyone was stoned. An elephant seal like groan went up from the group. I thought, o.k., this is a test. If it happens without mishap it bodes well for the movement. It did. I felt hopeful. The Dead came out and played. A guy stood with his head inside one of the huge speakers and I asked: “Who is that?” Neil Cassady, I was told.

The week long conference was great–Rolf and Elsa Von Eckartsberg, Ralph Metzner, Leary, Huston Smith, our gang from Harvard, and Gerd Stern, and a host of others working in the psychedelic vineyard, took their turn. We had a party every night and Owsley hung around because someone had taken his dealer customer list by mistake in a purse exchange. He finally recovered it. When we met he was wearing a powder blue jump suit and looked up at me and said in a slightly blurred drawl: “My you have a friendly and familiar face!”

Someone fresh from down south gave me a joint of Panama Red as a present and the Von Eckartsbergs and my wife and I drove down to Santa Cruz, rented the wedding suite at the Dream Inn, lit up and watched Herman and the Hermits on Ed Sullivan. After I scraped myself off the wall, we went out and rode the roller coaster and thought we were goners, pitched out over Monterey Bay, although we landed instead at Manuel’s Restaurant at Seacliff Beach. Oh boy! Chicken mole and red snapper. We talked about the Conference and there was Clair from the Hip Pocket Bookstore with John Lingemann at the next table and he was straining every nerve to hear every word and finally unable to restrain himself came over and introduced himself and could hardly believe his good fortune at meeting a psychedelic philosopher and a psychedelic existential phenomenological psychologist who had taken acid at Harvard and were founding editors of the Psychedelic Review. John was a psychedelic well digger and a witcher, given his ability to locate water. Of German ancestry, he was a rude force. He eventually bulldozed his house from which his wife fled and ended up living in a cave on the property with a young woman. He offered to take us around and show us Santa Cruz the next day and we took him up on it. Some intro.

We had to go back to our summer home in Northern Wisconsin to collect our things and our daughter and drive back, so we did. After a week in motels, a different one every night, as I had some kind of phobic reaction to the smell, we finally landed in Rio del Mar, at Hidden Beach, just off the ocean. It was paradise. I stood on the deck and listened to the roar of the surf and wondered how long it would take to get used to it.

We met some of the early Heads in the area: Zoo, who was a wild Irish mover and had Superman painted on his truck, aka Gary Dunne; Tox, without the vobiscum; and Charlie Nothing, whose wedding to Carol Cole, one of Nat’s daughters, my sister-in-law had attended in Los Angeles. They were complete nuts and had formed a group called Eternity, partly because it seemed like that long before they stopped playing. They had Ron Boise’s Thunder Machine as their lead instrument and they performed at an ice cream store next to Shoppers’ Corner. They always took acid and so they played for at least eight hours. I neglected to take it in. I never went to the Barn, either, the main psychedelic venue in the area.

They went down to Esalen as often as they could where they acted like the house band for the employees who liked getting stoned at night after work and going crazy until the wee hours, jumping across bonfires in an orgy of psychedelic bravado. I had occasion to witness this when I gave a seminar with Alan Watts on the future of consciousness. It didn’t look good, but it was lots of fun, the future I mean. One night in the baths two mountain men hippies who had gone native living in the woods for some years stumbled in on their first night out and wanted to know who was President and what had happened in the world in their absence. Everyone in the baths laughed out loud.

The Eternity boys ended up living at Lingemann’s in the trees. They came down one night and tracked mud into my house and laughed derisively and poked fun at my Buddha, a Siamese Walking Buddha, a beautiful bronze sculpting. I never liked them after that.

I assumed my teaching duties. Santa Cruz was a hotbed for psychedelics and the university was thought of as a country club retreat in the redwoods where students could turn on. Dealers, so I was told, went up and down the corridors of the dormitories, on Saturday, hawking their wares. Like Alice’s Restaurant, you could get anything you want. I thought of an apt metaphor for the students: oceans of desire. The place had a way of releasing this particular longing, this surplus desire, a Marxist concept I should look up on google, but one that seemed to fit as there was definitely a lot of it. I remember going to Berkeley where there was even a greater buzz in the air than Santa Cruz and noticing a phenomenon I called the psychedelic eye. When you made eye contact with someone passing in the street there was an unspoken helllooooo and a goodbyeeeeee….as if time had stopped and the eternal now had had its moment. Ships in the night in broadest daylight. The ache of longing, the desire to get it on, the interest in chance encounters and willingness to risk it, seize the moment, all in a glance–it was that kind of a time.

We had arrived in Santa Cruz just after the demise of the Sticky Wicket, a local watering hole, where everyone hung out. We found out that Manuel Santana, who was a remarkably talented artist as well as a restranteur and Al Johnsen, a local potter, had organized the art scene in town. I bought a piece by Tony Magee and a construction piece by Joe Lysowski, a chair, a table, a pair of skis and a painting, in a fabulous psychedelic style. I still have the group minus the painting.

We started making pilgrimages to San Francisco at least once a month to visit the Bakers and catch the action. Quicksilver Messenger Service was my favorite group. The first Be-in took place. Leary was there, the guest of honor, and so was Suzuki-roshi. We had a picnic on the grass and everyone was mellow on grass. The tribe had gathered. I took slides. Afterward we went to Margot Doss’ for dinner with Leary who was flushed with excitement over the day. Margot wrote a popular column on walking in the Bay area for the San Francisco Chronicle. She fixed up Tim with a lovely young thing who was in a trance state over the encounter. Margot had a mound of crab on a buffet that was eye boggling. A mountain of fresh crab, the delicacy of the area; more than anyone could possibly eat.

I was invited to give a talk on the Be-in by my first Santa Cruz friend, the Rev. Herb Schmidt, whom my wife and I had met on our Asilomar trip. He met us at the front door wearing a black bikini and holding a martini. I thought this is my kind of Lutheran. He set it up as a debate with the Assistant Chief of Police, Officer Overton, a big mistake. I showed my slides thinking they would educate the group to the new style of life and what to expect from the younger generation. They were appalled. They thought Overton should cuff me and take me away before I was lynched. Fortunately, I lived a block away and figured I could make a run for it if I could only get out the door. A young Sunday school teacher stood up and berated the group for their ill will toward me and started to weep which further alerted me to my peril. That settled things down a bit and I got home safely. The experience didn’t make me any more cautious and I continued to speak publicly about psychedelics thinking I was carrying on my duties as an educator. I went to Rice University and spoke and met Rusty Schweikert, the astronaut, who was on his way into outer space without the use of drugs. I met Danny Lyon, the photographer, who was doing a shoot on the Texas penitentiary system and had met one of the symbolic prisoners in the country, Billy McKuen, who had cut his penis off in prison; we carried on a correspondence.

I was critical of the psychedelic movement after it became clear that there were casualties to take into account. Students who never recovered from a bad trip became a new type of social welfare recipient–crippled for life, they went on the dole. I talked about the tyranny of being hip and the pressure to take drugs although it deterred no one. I was worried about deformation, about the de-structuring of consciousness that
occurred under the influence of the drug, often associated with a death experience. from which some experimenters never recovered. They were permanently de-structured and found it impossible to return to what they had been if you want to call that normal. They became wards of the State. I met one of the casualties out on the road in front of Stevenson College. I remember the moment vividly–a former student, Tom somebody, who, for a year or more had been living on the beaches and probably in a cave and whose eyes flashed like a movie projector gone haywire, you could almost hear the sound of the film flapping off the reel.

I understood the yearning of the spirit and the desire to form an opposition
movement against the socially dominant estrangement–Leary summed it up in the slogan of the time: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. “She’s leaving home……” the Beatles sang. This inner emigration swept through the younger generation like a wave and they disengaged psychically from the collective insanity that was going on around them, learning how to hide in public view. I was fascinated by this covert ethic, as I called it, exemplified by watching students in a circle, say, at a wedding, or some social gathering, passing a joint and taking a toke as if no one noticed. An invisible line separated the straights from the hip. It was clear that this freedom of the spirit was indistinguishable from arbitrary willfulness.

It became apparent to me that there were certain users who lived to light up. They were constantly looking for the moment when they could get stoned, all other experience, including time spent with one another was subordinate to their central and all-consuming obsession; they were addicts. It was a matter of observation to watch them bide their time and to give off the impression that at any given moment they could repeat the ritual they lived for: to light up! They seemed to be entirely oblivious that this was the case and that an observer such as myself could call them to account. The reason for doing so was because one had the feeling of being used–manipulated– for the purpose of collusion in the assumed mutually shared interest in getting stoned. There was a perceived psychic drumming of fingers and an imperceptible hum to mark the time.

It reminded me of visiting relatives in Norway who put on a Sunday afternoon spread for a prince. Plums in clotted cream and aquavit, the national drink, which entailed a ritual. Everyone raises their glass and says skol, looks one another in the eye, clinks glasses and bottoms up. Refill. Wait. Small talk. Some quiet drumming of fingers and a little humming. And then someone breaks the suspense when the appropriate time has passed and says skol and the ritual is repeated. Needless to say, as this goes on, the intervals get shorter and shorter and the sham of waiting becomes more and more transparent and provokes great hilarity. It was the Norwegian version of stoned.

I taught at Cowell College the first year before I moved to Crown. Page Smith had hired me accomodating me until Crown opened. We became great friends, as well as his wife, Eloise. They were the spirit of the place and imbued Cowell with a charm and culture that was stunning and unforgettable. I met Mary Holmes and we fell in
love on the spot, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. And then came Chadwick.

I have had a few clairvoyant experiences in my life but this was one of the best. Maybe clairvoyant isn’t the word. It was more like being guided. I thought a student garden project would be a good thing for the campus, even though I wasn’t interested in gardening and didn’t know where the idea came from, although, after all, the campus was on a splendid ranch landscape, the weather was perfect, and “Flower Power” was in the air, another slogan of the times, wafting down on a cloud of smoke from the Haight. We all got a whiff of that. So I asked the Chancellor to lead a walk to look for a prospective site. He thought it was a good idea. Quite a few people showed up and I carried my daughter on my shoulders and we looked around up behind Crown where there were running streams and gorgeous stands of redwoods, eucalyptus and oak.

Two weeks later, Chadwick arrived. I was told of his coming by Countess Freya von Moltke, who was visiting the campus and had heard of my project. She said she had my gardener for me. I met Chadwick at the Cowell Fountain and asked him if he would take on the task and he said he would. The next day he went out and bought a spade and picked out the slope below Merrill College and started to dig. I remember driving up to school and catching him out of the corner of my eye and thinking oh boy here we go! I think it was the first organic garden at a university in the country. l967.
We were right in line for Earth Day, three years later, as if the garden had been planned as a place to celebrate it. The garden jeopardized my career, although not publishing was another factor. I thought the garden would count as a bad book but I was wrong. And it didn’t help that I was the founding chair of religious studies and my field was the philosophy of religion. My colleagues at Crown gave me the thumbs down. The handwriting on the wall appeared fairly early. After the suicide of a colleague, I thought the message was clear. I was finished. So I dreamt up a nonprofit corporation as a pipe dream that might afford me a place to work–I called it U.S.A., University Services Agency. Three days after the new year–l970–I ran into my pal, Herb Schmidt, who was campus chaplain, as he was about to get the franchise for the only public restaurant on the campus and I proposed my idea. The non-profit took off like a rocket. We started the Whole Earth Restaurant and Sharon Cadwallader took on the task and her cookbook sold a million copies. Eventually we had something like thirty affiliates and millions in cashflow. I thought of writing it up as: How To Become A Spiritual Millionaire When Money Is No Object. It anticipated Page Smith and me starting the William James Association, after I was bounced. When Page retired in protest over the issue, he said: “any place that doesn’t have room for Paul Lee doesn’t have room for me.” Even today it has a nice ring.

The Loyalty Oath was an attempt to break the spirit of American intellectuals and one was practically forced to sign it in order to get paid. University professors were suspect in principle. It was a test of one’s mettle–what I call thymic juice or the ability to say No! (Thymos is the ancient Greek word for courage.) It takes courage to resist and the willingness to accept the penalty for noncompliance with evil which is Gandhi’s definition of satyagraha, his term for the moral equivalent of war. There was a penalty
to pay either way: might as well come out with one’s integrity intact. I witnessed the courage of colleagues at M.I.T., when I saw them take a stand and refuse to sign. I didn’t have to sign because I was on my way to Santa Cruz. I knew Erik Erikson at Harvard and I knew he had refused to sign at Berkeley and was forced to leave his position. He told me they had an office for the purpose that was open 24 hours a day so faculty could sneak in at three in the morning undetected. I admired him for his courage but I signed. I was ashamed of myself because I transgressed a scruple against swearing my true faith and allegiance to the constitution of the State of California. Allegiance, sure, but true faith? That was reserved for more transcendent swearing. I went to Santa Barbara to be on a panel. The lady in charge offered me a piece of paper to sign after I finished speaking. I asked what it was and she said the Loyalty Oath. I told her I had signed it. She said it didn’t matter. I had to sign every time I spoke at another campus in order for them to pay me. I handed the paper back. No thanks. Keep your honorarium. Years later, the Loyalty Oath was overturned and I called Santa Barbara and they sent the check. No interest. I realized I had lost and won a round with myself. How many rounds does one get?

I remember the first time I saw Ralph Abraham. It was at a Faculty meeting in the fall of l968. He was sitting in the front row. I did a doubletake as I walked by. I thought holy shit, they hired Abbie Hoffman; now they’ve gone too far! We were asked to lead a student protest against the regents who were making a visit to the campus. Reagan was governor. The Democratic convention police riot in Chicago had happened a few months before and the campus was a tinder box ready to explode. Ronnie and the regents were the match.

I arrived for the march wearing my Harvard PhD robe, red silk with black bands, a representative of lawful order and adult circumspection; Ralph showed up wearing an American flag shirt. We both had beards and Ralph had an afro out to there.
The students for the most part behaved but there were some outside agitators from Berkeley who acted as provocateurs and wanted to foment trouble. I invited the biggest loudmouth out into the parking lot but he declined.

Bill Moore, who was to become a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Program, had called for a Black Studies College in honor of Malcolm X and the Chancellor, McHenry, had laughed derisively at the suggestion. Bill was considered an inside agitator and was persona non grata for making speeches on the campus. In the middle of the ruckus he was removed from the campus by the police. I found out about it and picked him up at the bottom of the campus where he had been deposited and brought him back where we were met by student supporters with whom we locked arms and marched into the Crown College courtyard where we were met by Rich Townsend, a student sympathetic to Moore’s proposal, who told us that Jesse Unruh and a number of regents were waiting to talk to Bill. In we went to the Crown Library and Bill sat down to repeat his proposal, this time to sympathetic ears. Eventually, the X in Malcolm X was transposed to Oakes and a college devoted to Black Studies was instituted.
Ralph’s and my picture appeared in many of the state newspapers in articles about the demonstration. Hate mail poured in. People didn’t like professors with beards and they really didn’t like their flag worn as a shirt. McHenry dutifully sent copies to us with a little red check on a tab on the side of the document. One of them suggested we fill our pockets with shit and lie down in front of a bus and become instantly embalmed. I thought that was an example of a rare imagination. Ralph had tenure and I didn’t. I thought the jig was up for me and it turned out to be true even though the Crown faculty gave me a vote of confidence at the time which was really a veiled kiss of death.

A Vietnam Teach-in was organized and many of us spoke, including John Kroyer, my colleague in philosophy, who recommended that students hand back their draft cards; after all it was government property, let the government take care of it. The Chancellor took umbrage at the event and especially Kroyer’s remarks and proceeded to censure him which meant his advancement was jeopardized. It precipitated a nervous breakdown not helped by a bad mescaline trip and I had to have him institutionalized. He was eventually released after shock treatment and bought a gun and shot himself. I thought it was a message sent to me that I was dead as far as my teaching career was concerned. I had to conduct his funeral service. I quoted Dylan Thomas: oh you who could not cry on to the ground, now break a giant tear, for this little known fall.

McHenry eventually went after Ralph Abraham. McHenry was an ex-marine, which explains something. Steno pool wastepaper baskets were raided for incriminating evidence. Are you kidding? Charges were trumped up. Ralph decided to write to all the major mathematicians in the world to complain. He was fed up. The day after they got the letters McHenry called it off. Chalk up one round for the good guys.

I started to get critical of the institution, remembering the hissed ‘s’ and appalled at McHenry’s repressive behavior. I thought of three things haunting higher education: the triumph of the obtuse, the bureaucratization of the learning process and the principle of anonymity, where students would never find roots or a place to nurture them. And I could tell that the first five years, from l965 to 1970, when the humanities counted, would soon be swept away or at least under the carpet by the triumph of the sciences. We were enjoying what was only a brief grace period. Short but sweet. It always surprised me that for Page Smith this was enough. That it had had it’s time at all seemed to be a matter of unassailable affirmation for him. Sometimes brief flowerings of the spirit are better than no flowerings at all.

Page did have second thoughts about it, though. Late in life he wrote a blistering indictment of the university system entitled: Killing the Spirit, his critique of the deadening force of reductionism that had descended on higher education like a pall with the message that only the sciences counted for knowledge and all the rest was a waste of time to be reluctantly tolerated. To pay homage to the book and the critique I wanted to install a spiritual cloakroom at the entrance to the campus in front of the sign bearing the school slogan: Fiat lux. Incoming students would check their spirits for safekeeping and I would give them a number and when they graduated it would be returned to them if we could find it. It didn’t surprise me at all when the former chancellor, M.R.C. Greenwood consistently referred to the university as a major research institution and not a university.

I decided to teach a course that would critically examine the university. I called it “Organizational Climate”, a term developed by a former colleague at Harvard Business School. I thought the students should study the institution they were enrolled in and not take it for granted. I organized the class as a non-profit corporation, as I was enamored of the form, and issued stock. We took on some interesting projects, the first having to do with a seasonal erosion of a hillside at the entrance to the campus where the soil spilled down onto the road every winter in the rainy season. There was a dispute between the County and the University over jurisdiction and responsibility. The class met in the only geodesic dome on the campus and we called in the appropriate authorities and interrogated them and the dispute was resolved. Then we decided to build a retaining wall in front of the Chadwick Garden as it was also eroding in the rains. We got the stone from the quarry on the campus and a crew turned out and we did a nice job. I got a nasty letter sent to me with a copy to the chancellor from Building and Grounds disavowing any responsibility with the wall and its tumbling down in the first rain. It’s still there.

One student said she wanted to make bread and give it away. I said ok. She wanted some money so I gave her some and she obtained the kitchen at the Congregational Church on High Street. Her name was Bonny. She was famous for taking acid in high school and taking her clothes off before she was arrested. I forget how many loaves she baked. That summer, while we were in Wisconsin, I got a letter from her saying this guy is hitchhiking out to see me and borrow some money to start a bakery. He had the ovens but he needed money for flour. I winced. Days later I get a call from Eagle River, a town ten miles away. He’s here.

I drove in to pick him up. He doesn’t talk. We sit on the back porch steps for a few days enjoying the quiet and I finally mention I will take him back to the phone booth in Eagle River and he can hitchhike back. He didn’t say a word. Shortly after, I get word that my colleague, John Kroyer, had shot himself and I was asked to return to perform his funeral service. I was so down I looked up the baker and there he was in a little hole in the wall on Seabright and Murray, sitting on his oven. I gave him the rent I was collecting on our home so he could buy flour. He got started and eventually sold it and it became the Staff of Life Bakery. I never got my money back, just like my rent for the Bookshop Santa Cruz. I should have gone to Harvard Business School instead of Harvard Divinity School. But I developed a pained appreciation for an economy of gift and the application of Erik Erikson’s definition of identity: you have it to give it away!

One day after an Organizational Climate class, a coed came up and said she was going home to visit her grandmother. I was a little perplexed but I said say hello to her for me. She came back after the break and handed me a check for ten grand. I said
who’s your grandmother? Mrs. J. C. Penney. So we designed a project for the summer. A group from the class would spend the summer with Hassler, a former Merry Prankster, who lived on Last Chance Road. They had a ball. I was a little concerned about accountability so I asked Hassler to write up the project. He handed in a very nice document of about 25 pages entltled: “No Holes Barred Finishing School, The Same Eastern Polish at a Fraction of the Cost.”

A student got caught in an elevator malfunction with Ken Kesey in San Francisco. For some hours. I guess it was a life-transforming experience. She came into my office and wanted me to agree that she should drop out of school. I agreed. Then she fell in love with Hassler and wanted me to marry them. I agreed and we performed the ceremony at the Sacred Oak in the middle of Pogonip. My daughter, Jessica, was the bridesmaid.

I had a horse that I kept on campus. His name was Charley when I bought him and I renamed him Xanthos, the horse of Achilles, who prophesied Achilles’ death. I thought it was a good name for a philosopher’s horse. I had gone riding with Mary Holmes and she said why don’t I get a horse. I almost fell off. I had wanted to be a cowboy in the summer and a fireman in the winter when I was a boy. I never thought I would fulfill one of them. She found a quarter horse gelding, a magnificent specimen. I was in seventh heaven, another name for the saddle. I had to move him eventually and found a stable up on Spring Street at Windy Hill Farm with a lady who had run polo ponies at Pogonip.

I could get on to the Pogonip across the road and it afforded me 614 acres of prime riding space. One day while doing a turn in a meadow I looked up at the solitary oak standing in the middle and saw the Crucified. The oak tree was in the form of the Crucified, a major limb had broken off leaving a head. The outstretched limbs below looked like arms. It was the place name–Santa Cruz, Holy Cross–in an oak. I started having services there on Thanksgiving, Christmans and Easter. The year was l977. Pogonip was threatened with development by the Cowell Foundation and I thought: over my dead body. I started the Save Pogonip Greenbelt Group with Mark Primack and he drew the oak for the poster and we passed an initiative that lead to the city acquiring the property as a park. I continue to do services there with my colleague, Herb Schmidt.

In l970, I met Jack Stauffacher, of the Greenwood Press, in San Francisco, one of the great fine press typographers in the world. He was a devotee of Goethe and when he found out we had a Goethean Gardener in Alan Chadwick, he wanted to meet him.
Alan practised biodynamics, a form of horticulture developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early part of the last century. Steiner was a Goethean and took much of his inspiration from Goethe and particularly Goethe’s botany. We had adopted the slogan of Goethe’s Italian Journey: Et in Arcadia Ego, for our garden. Arcadia is the garden theme of Greek letters, comparable to Eden. Virgil’s Georgics is the classic text. Jack did a broadside devoted to the theme, commemorating the garden. We formed a lifelong friendship and eventually he did a fine press edition of Plato’s Phaedrus and dedicated it to me.

I nominated Jack for a Regents’ Professorship and he came to Cowell College and started the Cowell Press. He had a distinguished group of students some of whom went into fine printing and have had great careers. I gave a talk at Holy Cross Church on Goethe’s Italian Journey on the occasion of the 200th anniversary and Jack did an exquisite broadside for the occasion.

When Page Smith and I left the university in l972, we started the William James Association. Page wanted to start the Civilian Conservation Corps over again as he had been in a leadership training camp in Norwich, Vermont, in l940, inspired by William James’ address at Stanford in l906: “A Moral Equivalent of War.” It involved his beloved teacher–Rosenstock Huessy–to whom he was devoted for the rest of his life and it was an experience he never got over. It was something like an unpaid debt as the camp was shortlived due to the war and Page was drafted. So we went to Washington, D. C. , but we didn’t get anywhere. Then Eloise asked me to ask Baker-roshi to ask Gov. Brown to nominate her as the Chair of the State Arts Council, about to be newly formed. She knew I was friends with Baker-roshi and he was a friend of Brown and so I did. When she and Page were in Brown’s office in Sacramento to be named he gave the State of the State Address and announced the forthcoming California Conservation Corps. Page jumped in his seat and told Brown about our work to that end at the national level. Brown said be my guest and so we got to do the early planning for the corps. That was a coincidence of an unusual sort. Makes one wonder.

After some months, this guy appears in our office in Santa Cruz, and introduces himself as the new director of the Corps–Boyd Horner. I ask him what he had done before. He had studied for the Rudolf Steiner Priesthood in England. I said oh go on your’e just shitting me. In fact, I looked up my sleeve thinking something strange and weird had crawled out. He proceeded to make the Corps a Rudolf Steiner Corps. God wot! He was the moonbeam in the Governor’s office. I was sent to England to the Steiner School there–Emerson College. He wanted Steiner gymnasts, Steiner dieticians, Steiner dancers (Eurythmy), and probably Steiner geometers. Anything Steiner I could get. I went into a pub in Forest Row and they could tell I was from California. When I told them I was visitng Emerson, they ducked, and I thought a bat had flown in thru the window. The Steiner group was pretty weird. I had fun going into London on weekends and hanging out with Harrison Ford, my brother-in-law, who was acting in Star Wars. We drank single malt scotch. McCallums. I got to go to the set and watch him being made up and thought his uniform was the dickiest thing I had ever seen, like they had made it out of old handkerchiefs. I thought this thing is never going to fly.

Horner didn’t last long and that was the end of that as far as our relation to the Corps was concerned.

I thought land reform was going to be the next big thing after civil rights. I organized a conference at the Civic Auditorium. There was a guy running for the presidency on a land reform plank, his name escapes me. I was his local campaign manager. Harris. His name was Harris. There was Riis Tijerina, who was a Southwestern radical and had staged a demonstration in favor of minority rights. And there was Cesar Chavez.
I thought they were continuing the tradition of a moral equivalent of war.

No one came. Fortunately, I had invited about forty speakers. They made for a small audience and talked to themselves. Stauffacher did a broadside. I was not only ahead of my time, I was out of my time. But it did lead to my starting the Northern California Land Trust, with Erich Hansch and Warren Webber, an organic farmer in Marin, who just hosted the Prince of Wales. The idea of a land trust had just come to me as the vehicle for land reform and land conservation and someone said there was a guy who had just moved to Santa Cruz and had written a book on how to do it. Take me to him. It was Erich. He was living in a garage with Don Newey. I remember the shirts and pants on hangers on a pole. Erich was a follower of Steiner. He was an Anthroposophist. Really, the coincidences were piling up. I thought this makes up for a lot. Erich was wonderful and I loved him dearly. He reminded me of my grandfather in Milwaukee who was into the occult.

Migrating hippies wandering through Santa Cruz became known as the Undesirable Transient Element or “Ute’s”. Some inspired local bureaucrat must have made up that one. One of the first things Page and I did in the William James Association was to organize the Work Company so that the transients could find short term, part time, employment. We found 30,000 jobs during the life of the project. Not bad. We started a Community Garden project with Rock Pfotenhauer. Page and Eloise started the Prison Arts Project which had a remarkable success and became a national model. And then we got involved with the homeless in l985 and opened the first public shelter in Santa Cruz, and then the homeless church program, with churches taking in the overflow, and then the Homeless Garden Project and then then the Page Smith Community House. But that takes us out of the 60′s and 70′s.

I almost forgot about the Wild Thyme Restaurant. That was in the ’70′s. Max Walden had developed Cooper House from the old County Court House and made it into the center of downtown life. Bob Page and Ed Gaines and I opened the first shop in the Cooper House–The Wilderness Store. The first one in Santa Cruz. We even got the first Levi Franchise. Max had a series of failed restaurants in the basement and so I offered to start one. I was enamoured of the herb thyme because of the Greek root–thymos–my favorite word and the herb was thymus vulgaris in the Latin, derived from the Greek. So was the thymus gland, the master organ of the immune system. So we served sweetbreads which are calve thymus glands, the supreme achievement of French cuisine–Joanne LeBoeuf was the chef and had a knack with the glands, and hamburgers with thyme, which made people protest because they thought it was pork, so I got laughed at. I went around and lectured people on their thymus glands, remember this was early, so almost no one knew they had one, and once I had their
attention, on the physicalist/vitalist conflict in the system of the sciences as a rap on the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society. I had a cue card that gave the bullets so you could get the main points at a glance.

Buckminster Fuller came in one night with a student from the University. He said hello, Paul, which knocked me out as I had met him with a hundred other people at a reception in Los Gatos, months before. I was having a meeting in the back room of a group that was going to publish a journal as part of our Bicentennial Grant which Page and I had received for art projects for Santa Cruz. Page was the Bicentennial Historian as the first two volumes of his History of the U.S. were to coincide with the Bicentennial. I asked Bucky if he would say a few words to the group and he was glad to oblige and charmed everyone with his remarks. He invited me to his table and I sat down. I thought this was my chance to ask him what he thought about Kurt Godel and the incompleteness theorems and the undecidability problem. He never heard of Godel. I was stunned but I proceeded to tell him what I knew as the kid with him grew more and more agitated and kept saying, Bucky, do you realize the importance of what this man is saying. I enjoyed the response but he seemed a little over-heated. Finally, he ran out and I asked Bucky what was the deal and he said the kid had been raised at Synanon, the ex-drugger group, where his mother was in residence and he was rather hyper-active. Maybe I should check on him. I went to the front of the restaurant and there he was on the phone booking a plane for Princeton to see Godel. He said he had a document in his pocket that was fraught with the greatest importance for mankind and he wanted to show it to Godel. I asked him what it was and he wouldn’t show it to me. Only Godel. I was sorry I had told him.

I met Bucky once again at a conference where Chadwick was in residence. He came out of a portable potty standing in a field. It looked like he had just landed. He didn’t remember me.

Jay Greenberg, a mathematician colleague at UCSC, had told me about Godel around l970. He told me that Godel had written a proof for the existence of God. I saw stars. I thought if I could get the proof and publish it in a journal I was promoting for the History of Consciousness Program in order to fulfill the publish or perish demand that I knew they were going to get me on, I would be safe. I would get tenure on Godel’s Proof. Moreover, a proof by the world’s leading mathematical logician would be irrefutable. I wrote to Godel. He wrote back and said the proof was incomplete. Everyone laughed. I was waiting for Godel. And, he asked, what did theology have to do with consciousness. That threw me for awhile. I had occasion to call him at Princeton when I told a friend of mine, Adelaide de Menil, to take a picture of him, as she was going to Princeton to visit her brother. Adelaide is a fine photographer. She said I had to set it up. Hello, Prof. Godel. This is Prof. Lee. Remember me? Yes. I wrote to you about your proof. Is it complete? No. Oh, too bad. And when you asked about the relation of theology to consciousness, oh, never mind. Could I have a friend of mine come and take your picture. No. Why not? I have two perfectly good pictures of myself.
I had occasion to have coffee with Octavio Paz shortly after that and I told him the story about Godel. He spilled his coffee in his lap. I thought that’s how startled and excited a world renowned poet gets when he hears that existence has become a predicate again. Kant said existence is not a predicate because it doesn’t add anything conceptual to a thought. Existence is always assumed in the thinking of anything. At least conceptual existence. If you say that you have the thought of a hundred dollars and then that the hundred dollars exists you can’t find it in your pocket. So with that Kant undermined arguments for the existence of God. He thought it was like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Since Kant, such arguments, which constitute a major theme in the history of philosophy have suffered in validity. Not after Godel. Ha ha. And the proof is now complete and is to be found in the third volume of his collected papers. The only problem is it is completely unintelligible, at least to me and anyone else who is not a technically proficient mathematical logician. But I don’t care. I still like the way it looks and am proud of having corresponded with Godel and spoken to him on the phone even if it didn’t save my ass.

So much for the ’60′s and 70′s. They were fine while they lasted and I got my kicks on Route 66. Psychedelics were certainly the defining feature, and even though in many ways the 60′s were a disappointment, psychedelics were terrific as a defining style. But it was thought to be more than that. It was hoped to be more than that. What happened to the longing that was released? The utopianism? It was nowhere, literally. And then it ended. They had a ceremony for it in the Haight. It was the death of the hippie. It had been co-opted by commercialism. Industrial society had absorbed it more than it was transformed by it or undermined by it. The opening of the doors of perception, the inter-modal sense quality experience, synesthesia, mystical flights, seeing the world in a flower, listening to Leary read from James Joyce, walking through a doorway, the revelatory power of a painting like when I discovered Cezanne at the Museum of Fine Arts in Chicago and my eyes were opened to his brush stroke and use of color, the symbiotic rapport and the sense of clairvoyance, Don Juan and Castaneda and the renewed appreciation of shamans, and all the gurus who filed through, many of them bogus and frauds, and then came that evil creep, Manson, and the Hells Angels beating to death an innocent bystander at a Rolling Stones concert.

Well, what is marijuana, after all, but an herb that burns?

by Paul A. Lee

Platonic Academy Press 131 Spring St. Santa Cruz, California 95060

1997

for Charlene over a caffe latte

to be read as an online accompaniment to THERE IS A GARDEN IN THE MIND, Alan Chadwick and the Origins of the Organic Movement in California,

by Paul A. Lee the Greenwood Press, [...]]]> Alan Chadwick and the Arcadian Garden: A Memoir and a Tribute

by Paul A. Lee

Platonic Academy Press
131 Spring St.
Santa Cruz, California
95060

1997

for Charlene over a caffe latte

to be read as an online accompaniment to THERE IS A GARDEN IN THE MIND, Alan Chadwick and the Origins of the Organic Movement in California,

by Paul A. Lee
the Greenwood Press, San Francisco, California, 2009

“Nature, too, mourns for a lost good.”

Schelling

Preface

Alan Chadwick and the Salvation of Nature was the working title of the book I intended to write about the UCSC Garden Project, until I changed my mind. It led me down a garden path I had misgivings about. I was afraid of losing my way. I was inspired by a sermon with that title by my teacher, Paul Tillich: “The Salvation of Nature”. He made reference to the then newly formed science of survival and the endangerment of just about everything–the end of nature and the end of us. It was the late ’50′s, when scientists announced the formation of such a group, as if science could get us out of the fix, although even they must have had doubts about any recovery given the responsibility science has for the predicament. It must have confirmed for Tillich his description of “the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society”, a phrase I learned from him that became, for me, a kind of negative mantra, a fancy way of referring to an obsessive preoccupation–the fate of the social order I had to call my own. Tillich makes clear that the scientists didn’t mean the survival of humans, or the survival of endangered species, or the oceans, or the forests, or the air–they meant the survival of the earth as we know it, our planet, largely ruled, as it is, by industrial society. It meant the fall of a very large order–bigger than the Roman Empire.

Tillich mentions how the first time things turned sour, in the Biblical myth of the flood, God regretted–the word used is “repented”– what had come to pass with creation and caused a flood to wipe out almost everything; now, this time, we are doing it to ourselves. It is the Flood the second time around with ourselves to blame. Tillich was the only one I knew who used the phrase–”the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society”–our society–what he called “the world above the given world of nature”, long before the science of survival was proposed or environmental awareness had taken on anything like a national character, after the Earth Day event in 1970.

His formulation stuck in my mind. As a world above the given world of nature, industrial society is a sub-world, a reduced world, where science and technology are in charge as agents of self-destruction, under the ideological sway of Physicalism, the opponent of Vitalism. Physicalism is the reduction of everything to physical and chemical properties; Vitalism argues for the integrity of organic nature against the reduction. Physicalism defeated Vitalism in the early 19th century and now Vitalism has re-appeared in the environmental movement and a host of allied movements, what could be called a Neo-Vitalist revolution. The struggle has been re-enjoined even though Physicalists, or most scientists, having enjoyed a century and more of victorious rule, are reluctant to admit it. They see themselves as servants of industrial society devoted to its continuation, no matter what the cost. Universities are where these servants of industrial society are trained.

This is a bleak view. No wonder that instead of destined to direct history we think it our fate to suffer it.

The Chadwick Garden opened my eyes to the bleak view of the deep conflict in the culture–industrial society and organic nature. Two trends in the history and philosophy of science–Physicalism and Vitalism turned out for me to be the best way to conceptualize this conflict.

I needed a key to exemplify the historical process of self-destruction in order to account for it, a descriptive case that told the story. I found it in the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict, a major issue in the history and philosophy of science, now largely forgotten or simply taken for granted.

The Physicalist takeover (1828) and the attempted and largely accomplished elimination of Vitalism, reveals the full scale of the predicament we are in. It was the major lesson I learned from the Chadwick Garden Project. The Physicalist take-over, in league with industrial society, still determines what counts for knowledge. Much of what follows will be devoted to describing and interpreting this conflict.

A line from Schelling stuck in my mind: “Nature, too, mourns for a lost good.” It was the line that came to me when I was told that Chadwick had died. He was the lost good. Tillich, a devoted student of Schelling, used to talk about how nature, as well as human beings, participated in the Fall. When God made the covenants, God made one with nature, as well as with human beings. The universe, as we know it, is involved in the dynamics of self-destruction or what the Bible calls the wrath of God. It is a larger theological issue than just the fate of industrial society, as a world above the given world of nature. The Greek word for the wrath of God, driving us to our self-destruction, is thymos, an old Homeric word, meaning wrath, rage, as well as courage and vitality. It is best symbolized by fire. In the biblical usage, it is our vitality directed against ourselves, driving us to self-destruction. It has prompted me to think about the tragedy of culture as the history of self-destruction, where all our effort, all our striving, stands under the curse of the Preacher–vanity.

The Apostle Paul had a lyrical vision of the bondage of nature under the curse of vanity–all creation groans with eager longing for redemption from decay and shares with us the message of salvation: it is a cosmic message. We know this groaning with sighs too deep for words.

I thought of the words of Schelling and the vision of the Apostle Paul when I got the word of Chadwick’s death. I was on the phone with Baker-roshi, my Zen priest friend and Abbott of Zen Center, who had taken Alan in to care for him after Alan had become ill with cancer, and he told me Alan had died. I put the phone down and was swept out of my home on a rush of mourning, a trajectory of some irresistable force that shot through me, as I burst out of the front door and into the front yard, where an invisible sky-hook came down and picked me up into the air for one enormous somersault of death, and then let me down again. In this burst of grief, this paroxysm of nature, I knew what nature had lost.

I have thought a lot about the salvation of nature and how bleak the prospect looks, so I dropped it from my title in favor of another image of nature–the Arcadian garden and the affirmation included in the slogan: Et in Arcadia Ego. After all, it was the slogan we had taken for our garden at the university, derived from Goethe’s “Italian Journey”, a motto from the 18th century, a retrospective affirmation of the goodness and sweetness of life. I wanted to express my gratefulness for the renewed affirmation many of us found in Chadwick’s gardens where ancient themes were restored and renewed. This is the power gardens have over us, because the garden is the symbol of the salvation of nature, where paradise is remembered and anticipated. Gardens are affirmations of the goodness of creation.

Tillich knew how to put it:

“The “garden” is the place where the curse upon the land is overcome. In it vegetable nature is liberated from chaos and self-destruction; “weed” there is none. This “”garden of the gods,” of which every human garden is a symbol and an anticipation, will reappear in the salvation of nature.”

Paul Tillich: The Meaning of Health

Chadwick’s Arcadian Garden was the place where the original affirmation of the unambiguous goodness of creation was made again–he gave us all a second chance. It was definitely a place where nature was healed, as well as those who practiced the method –I saw that with my own eyes and experienced it myself. Nevertheless, Chadwick, a force-fit almost everywhere he went, was most definitely a force-fit at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Force-fit is a pun, especially for those who suffered the brunt of Chadwick’s temper tantrums, the force of his fits. And yet, over forty years later, in spite of all odds against it, the Chadwick Garden is still there, albeit an unintegrated appendage to the University; a mute but eloquent testimony to the unresolved character of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict.

This story is the fate of organic nature generally–this fate of a Garden Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Note

I tried to write this material in a conventional book form but I found that my mind skips unaccountably, otherwise known as free association and I always wound up with multiple books in a jumbled mess. The interview form released me from the serial order of paragraphs into chapters. I could just let it flow in response to simple questions I could put to myself. It made things easy because I knew all the answers. And I could speak in my personal voice rather than the neutrality of academic prose, although there is still plenty of that. (I am happy to note that the book:  There Is A Garden In the Mind, Alan Chadwick and the Origins of the Organic Movement in California, will be published this year, 2009, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Chadwick’s birth, 1909.)

I could have concentrated exclusively on Chadwick and his work. I know that this aspect has been submerged in my own narrative of his influence on my life and thought which takes up the greater part of this interview. I hope the spirit he brought to Santa Cruz and transmitted to me is expressed in all I have to say in this tribute to him and this memoir of mine.

There are many acknowledgments to make. I hardly know where to begin. Thanks to everyone who has played a part in this effort to renew the integrity of organic nature in the glory of gardens. Never give up hope in the ultimate fulfillment of the Arcadian and Edenic paradise in the promise of the salvation of nature.

On the Interview

The interview was conducted from December, 1995, to April, 1997. It bears the brunt of that historical period with projects underway that never came to fruition, such as Ecotopia, a design strategy for the new millennium for Santa Cruz.  Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Biography

Paul Lee was educated at St. Olaf College, where he studied philosophy with Howard Hong. He attended Luther Theological Seminary and the University of Minnesota and received his divinity degree (S.T.B.) and PhD from Harvard. He taught at Harvard in the humanities program and was Paul Tillich’s Teaching Assistant (1960–62). He has taught at MIT, UCSC, and as guest lecturer at a number of colleges and universities. He was denied tenure at UCSC, for not publishing, when Page Smith, who came to his defense, resigned in protest. They formed the William James Association, a nonprofit corporation, in Santa Cruz, in 1972, devoted to voluntary work service as a moral equivalent of war. Page Smith died in 1995.

Paul Lee was a member of the Board of the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, which he began in 1985, with Page Smith and Paul Pfotenhauer, now the Homeless Services Center.  The Paul Lee Loft is named for him and provides shelter for over forty homeless clients.

He is Executive Director of United Services Agency, which he began in 1970, with the Rev. Herb Schmidt. He has scored Santa Cruz as Ecotopia, the ideal point of destination for the eco-tourist, a design strategy for the new millennium, with the aim of solving the problem of homelessness.  This has not come to realization.

He has written two books on the homeless issue: The Quality Of Mercy, and Florence the Goose, both published by the Platonic Academy Press.  He is finishing his book on Chadwick:  There Is A Garden In the Mind, which should appear in late 2009, to celebrate the centennial of Chadwick’s birth.   He has written a play:  A Lullaby For Wittgenstein, which he has submitted to the Yale Drama Competition (2009) and he has almost completed his book on faith:  Paul’s Letter to the Athenians, the letter St. Paul wished he had written but didn’t.  He is working on a number of projects for his website, Ecotopia.org., with his grand daughter, Camille Zajac, Evan Schaffer and Bradley Allen.

He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, Charlene, and happily gardens in his backyard, where the Tower of Jewels he got from Roy Rydell (Echium) have almost taken over. He still lives under the motto: Et in Arcadia Ego, which, roughly translated, means: Let my garden be my grave.

Et In Arcadia Ego

Trees, plants and flowers—of virtuous root: Gem yielding blossom, yielding fruit,

Choice gums and precious balm;

Bless ye the nosegay of the vale,

And with the sweetness of the gale

Enrich the thankful psalm.

Christopher Smart from A Song To David

The text for the Trial Proof for Alan Chadwick and Paul Lee of the UC Santa Cruz Student Garden Project   A Broadside designed by Jack Stauffacher

22 Jan. ’72 The Greenwood Press

Where did you first meet Alan Chadwick?

We met at the Cowell College Fountain, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sometime in the Spring of 1967. It would be better to ask what it was like–he hit me like a ton of bricks, although the impact was felt later, partly because of the force of his temper, which did not show up right away. Freya Von Moltke warned me about it. He was impressive. A great shock of hair, fine features, enormous hands, tall and dramatic in bearing, he carried himself like a ballet dancer. In terms of looks, he was a cross between Samuel Beckett, Ronald Reagan, and Danny Kaye. He was a stickler for deportment and elocution, because he had been a professional actor on the British stage and toured with a theatre company in South Africa. For some who weren’t taken in by him he was a complete ham. He appeared to be in awe of professors but it was more of an act, a kind of formal deferential courtesy. He always made a point of calling me “Professor Lee”; privately, his nickname for me was “Sausage”, a term popular among actors, which I detested.

How did you meet?

I had started a Garden Project, completely off the top of my head. I must have anticipated meeting Chadwick; it’s the only reason I can think of why I had the impulse. “Impulse” is a lead word in the Rudolf Steiner vocabulary and Chadwick gardened in the Steiner tradition of Biodynamics, so the word easily comes to mind. Chadwick turned out to be the “imp” in that impulse, let me tell you. I thought of certain influences later that had some bearing on the impulse. I wasn’t really interested in gardening, although “Flower Power” was in the air, wafting down from Haight Ashbury. I was interested in the idea of a garden. I was busy teaching philosophy, religious studies and the History of Consciousness, an innovative graduate program, but something, an impulse, prompted me to found a garden on the campus: The Student Garden Project.

So you acted on the impulse?

I organized a walk with the Chancellor–Dean McHenry–who turned out to be an old farm boy, whose father planted by the moon; he was sympathetic and willing to play along. We went for a walk through part of the campus with about seventy-five people to look for a possible garden site. I remember carrying my daughter, Jessica, on my shoulders. It was the first time we walked out behind the campus into the rough and beautiful landscape that had been fenced off with No Trespassing signs.

And then Chadwick arrived, as though on schedule?

Weeks later, on schedule, indeed, the fulfillment and the reason for my impulse. I wanted a garden and here came the gardener, as if providentially arranged.

Who told you about him?

Countess Freya Von Moltke, who was visiting the campus.

Who is Freya Von Moltke?

She is a very special person, the widow of Helmuth Von Moltke, the great resister to Hitler, who was executed near the end of the war for conspiring about the future of Germany in the famous Kreisau Circle. She heard I wanted to start a garden and Chadwick was on the way to visit her in Santa Cruz. She said: “I hear you want to start a garden.” I said, “Yes, Countess.” So she told me a remarkable man who was a gardener was coming and she would set up a meeting with Chadwick the day he arrived for his visit.

They were friends?

They had known one another in South Africa, where Freya fled after the fall of Germany, at the end of the Second World War. Chadwick was at the Admiralty Gardens in Cape Town, if I remember correctly. Freya gave him to me as a gift and he was received in the same spirit. I had no plan, no resources, I thought the thing would spontaneously combust and we’d have a garden. And it did. Chadwick was the spontaneous combustion.

Can you point to the influences working on you?

There were three that come to mind:

1. George Huntston Williams had been my Church History professor at Harvard Divinity School and he had written a book: Wilderness and Paradise, tracing the motifs of desert and garden in the history of Western thought with sources in the Bible. I helped him a little and he mentioned my name in his acknowledgments, the first time my name appeared in print. The second half of the book is about the origins of higher education in America, acting out the motifs of wilderness and garden, when pioneers from the East Coast went out into the wilderness to sow the seeds of a garden and start a school. So the book is a scenario of what happened historically as a result of the biblical themes. I wanted to plant a garden on this new campus to commemorate the origins of a school in this spirit. I had no idea what I was up against.

2. Donald Nicholl and I shared an office at Cowell College in the fall of  1966. He was a visiting professor of history from England and had a rare sense of the fate of the human spirit at an institution like UCSC. He worried about how any kind of real community could happen under the reign of the obtuse bureaucrat and bent upon the training of servants for industrial society. He gave a lecture: “A Sense of Place” about the British poet and artist, David Jones, and it had an impact on me in its relevance for Santa Cruz. We had a long talk before he left to return to England about how “lacerated” he was, in the sense of Dostoievsky, over the spiritual vacuity of the campus. He planted the seed.

3. Page Smith was the deep motivational source, the guiding spirit of Cowell College, where I taught the first year before moving to Crown College. He was the reason Freya Von Moltke was visiting the campus, but there is a long story here which I will go into later. It goes back to the Civilian Conservation Corps and Camp William James, a leadership training camp for the Corps, where Page was the Director, in 1940. At UCSC, Page was a major influence in his bearing on the spirit of the place: he put his stamp on Cowell College as the first Provost of the first college. We had a five year grace period and then the institution clicked into place–it was almost perceptible.

What do you mean by “the click”?

I had the same experience of “the click” when I read: The Way Of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler. There is a moment in the novel where your worst fears are realized, a perceptible click, when the children of the parents, so vital and spontaneous in their youth, suddenly become as restricted and repressed as the adults. Donald Nicholl intuited and predicted this “click” and he was right. It can happen’ to institutions just as it happens to people. Max Weber called it the “routinization of charisma”.

Was there anything to prepare you for this experience?

I remember talking to someone at the Harvard Coop about going to Santa Cruz to teach and he asked: Do you know anything about the California ssssystem?” He hissed the ‘s’, as though it was a snake in the grass. I said “no”. It was my first warning.

What prepared you for wanting to start a garden?

I come from Norwegian immigrant farmers, my ethnic background on my father’s side, although I was a city boy, raised in Milwaukee, with no ostensible affinity for gardening, let alone farming, although farming left an indelible impression on my father.  It formed him in a way that never left him even though he became a doctor.

Do you regret it–joining the faculty of UCSC and eventually being denied tenure?

Of course, it ruined my academic career. Once bounced, it is almost impossible to find another job–the denial of tenure becomes a stigma. Page Smith, as I said, departed with me in 1972, so that was a consolation. We thought the Garden Project should have been equal to a bad book, in terms of publish or perish, but we were wrong. Years later, Page wrote Killing the Spirit, his indictment of higher education. We were on the same wave length on that one, along with our colleague, Mary Holmes, Professor of Art History at UCSC. She was also part of the Chadwick network and we eventually formed a trio, leading a downtown discussion group called the Penny University, which Page and I started, over twenty years ago, in 1973. Now Jim Bierman, Professor of Theatre Arts, has joined us, after Page’s and Mary’s death.

How was Mary Holmes part of the Chadwick network?

She gave Chadwick his first place when she was living out on Empire Grade. A small cottage. It was perfect for him. Then he bounced about until he found a more permanent place, although Chadwick was impossible to live with. The University eventually gave him an apartment at Cowell College. He acted up. Whenever you flushed the toilet, for instance, the noise in the pipes was orchestrated just to set Chadwick off, he couldn’t stand the sound of the water flowing through the pipes. A faculty couple we know, with two boys, lived in the apartment upstairs from Chadwick. He terrorized them if they flushed the toilet after 5:00 pm. It was absurd. She was the only one I know who said “Good” when I told her Chadwick had died.

But you were very moved by his death?

He had a Pieta of Raphael and a Shakespeare Sonnet, Number 15, pinned up next to his bed.

When I consider every thing that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;

When I perceive that men as plants increase,

Cheered and check’d even by the self-same sky,

Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

And wear their brave state out of memory;

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,

Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay, To change your day of youth to sullied night;

And all in war with Time for love of you,

As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

He put up a vase of flowers and kneeled down next to the bed to pray. And he died.

So there were all these connections?

I can easily catalogue them. Let’s give it a try. Page and Eloise Smith, Donald and Dorothy Nicholl, Roy and Francis Rydell, Jack and Josephine Stauffacher and The Greenwood Press. Eva Fosselius. Michael Stusser. John Powell. Phil Armour. Stephen Decatur. Rory. Jim and Beth Nelson. Michael Zander. Kate Stafford. Will David. Tom Whitridge. Ann Arnold. Ann Fabian. Angie Kuper. Linda Jolly. Ramon Chavez. John Dotter. Chris and Stefanie. Jodi. Agaja. Allen York. Craig Siska. Putney and Perry. Alfred Heller. Filoli. Sim Van der Ryn. The Farallones Institute. Sunset Magazine. Huey Johnson and Nature Conservancy. Richard Wilson and Covelo. Betty Peck and Saratoga. Bernard Taper and the New Yorker Magazine. John Jeavons and Ecology Action. Francis Edmunds and Emerson College. The Homeless Garden Project. The Farm Apprentice Training Program. Chez Panisse and Alice Waters. The Greens and Deborah Madison. E. F. Schumacher. Edmund Brown, Jr. Frank Davidson. The Civilian Conservation Corps. Boyd Homer. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Freya Von Moltke. Rolf and Elsa Von Eckartsberg. Camp William James. The Peace Corps. The Zen Center. Richard Baker. Virginia Baker. Acacia. Wendy. Sir George Trevelyan. Paolo Soleri. Paul Hawkin. Stuart Brand. The Whole Earth Catalog. Louis and Virgina Saso. Kent Taylor of Taylor’s Herb Garden. Fukuoka. Robert Rodale. Wendall Berry. Jim Robertson and the Yolla Bolly Press. The Wild Thyme Restaurant. The Whole Earth Restaurant. Count Helmuth Von Moltke. Kreisau, Pudleston, Richard Senior, etc.

It turns out to be a big memory network and these are names that just come to mind in the moment. I’m so sorry I can’t remember everyone. They know who they are. And I don’t know the half of it. These are all connections I could draw and everyone has their story.

Didn’t Findhorn–the famous garden in Scotland–also begin out of a Steiner impulse about the same time?

Yes.

Did you ever think of yourselves as Findhorn West because of the tie to Rudolf Steiner and Biodynamics?

Of course, but only later. We didn’t know about Findhorn at the time. Chadwick kept quiet about Steiner, although his influence was indicated through Biodynamics. Francis Edmunds visited a number of times. He was the Principal of Emerson College, the Rudolf Steiner College, in Forest Row, England, where they had a biodynamic training center under Koepf. So that was more of a professional tie than Findhorn. In 1976, I was in residence at Emerson for a month and gave lectures. They sat in stunned silence for a very long time after I gave my Physicalist/Vitalist spiel, showing where Steiner fit in the historical context of the defeat of Vitalism, which made a big impression on me. It was the most amazing response I have ever had.

Was there any reciprocity between The Garden Project and Emerson?

We eventually sent student apprentices there for additional training. .

But no interchange with Findhorn?

We didn’t know about Findhorn, even though we were contemporaries. It was a kind of morphic resonance, I suppose. They were more airy-fairy, with devas lurking behind the plants and huge vegetables you could choke on. We were more practical and had to cope with a fairly conventional academic institution, although UCSC had a reputation for being far-out. We were the far-out, I’m afraid, even though we played down the Steiner connection for political reasons. Even so, we were branded as a cult, just because Chadwick planted by the moon and eschewed the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in his affirmation of the organic in his use of compost for soil fertility. That’s how ideologically touchy it was.  It was Paul Hawkin who wrote the book on Findhorn and then when he located in San Francisco, took an interest in Chadwick and decided to start Smith and Hawkin in order to import the Bulldog tools Chadwick used.

You mean just launching an organic garden was far-out?

An Agriculturalist Emeritus, that’s how he signed it, which I took to mean ‘Old Fart’, wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Agricultural Sciences at UC, complaining about a cult that had fixed itself on the campus at Santa Cruz and wanted it shut down immediately because they didn’t use chemicals which was against the scientific approach the University was supposed to promote. The Vice- Chancellor, I think his name was Kendrick, wrote back and said it would be a better learning experience not to shut it down but to let the students watch stuff die because they didn’t use chemical pesticides or fertilizers. I thought that was pretty Solomonic.

But Chadwick employed another system as well: the French Intensive.

The French Intensive system was almost a shield or screen for the Biodynamic aspect. Steiner is like a carefully guarded secret you only find out about if you are interested in the occult or the esoteric, which means digging under the surface. It is an interesting issue, now that I think about it, as it relates to the discussion of “occultation” in Heidegger’s discussion of the Greek word for truth–aletheia--which he translates as “unconcealedness”, an almost unintelligible English rendering, although it simply means that what is revealed is still concealed, if you can take that in, as if remembering what is still forgotten or mostly forgotten. “Garbled” might be an interesting way of putting it. “Lost in translation”. Hide and seek.  Anyhow, the Steiner system was definitely an occultation, with the French Intensive acting as a front. It was a great amalgamation of two systems.

So the scientific establishment at the University would have opposed, in principle, any “occultation” no matter how effective or meaningful, especially an occult form of food and flower production.

You would think they could have chilled out over that one, but not so. I laugh now over a surreptitiously occult garden sneaking in under the unsuspecting noses of the Physicalists, most of the scientists on the campus, who were sleeping at the switch.

What do you mean?

Well, I remember going to dinner at a colleague’s home and a chemist, one of the guests, stepped it off with me as we proceeded in to dinner and telling me that the garden had done more to ruin the cause of science than anything else on the campus. I was dumbfounded. What was the cause of science that an organic garden should ruin it? I would like to underline the importance of this moment because of the consequences as it sent me into a lifelong quest for the answer. I know now what I would have answered then. It was the first moment in my eventual discovery of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict. I’ll bet he was an organic chemist, complaining about an organic garden as if he owned the word, which is the argument between Physicalism and Vitalism. So you have to understand the rubrics of the argument to catch the drift–the two paradigms in conflict–the Physicalist and the Vitalist–personified by the experimental laboratory organic chemist and the organic gardener.

You mean Kenneth Thimann and Chadwick?

Exactly. One was my boss at Crown College–an internationally renowned experimental laboratory botanist and the other was the organic gardener I had hired. One had won at the expense of the other–historically– and grave and disastrous consequences followed for all concerned. Thimann represented the Physicalist botanist and chemist and Chadwick the Vitalist organic gardener. They embodied the two conflicting paradigms. The conflict has a clearly delineated history. I have studied it for a long time: the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict in the system of the sciences, from 1828 to the present, although it has earlier roots in Galileo and the rise of modernity, when mathematical physics began to call the shots, by way of the mathematization of nature, carried through from Galileo by Descartes and Newton and the rest of the early Physicalists.

So the garden opened up a critical view of modern science?

That it did, indeed. I don’t mind science as science, which I define in a large sense as ruled cognition, cognitive work with propositional content, but the definition of science has hardened into experimental laboratory protocols under the pressure of the immense success of physics and chemistry, in alliance with mathematics, the so-called hard sciences. This is the reference point for what counts for knowledge ever since the Physicalist takeover. Every other kind of knowledge is a descending path from there. You begin to lose your way in the social sciences and by the time you get to the humanities, forget about it. It’s like climbing the Tower of Babel, or the Pit of Babel, as in Kafka?s Parables.

The natural sciences? Why `natural’?

“Natural” is a little misleading, isn’t it? Especially if you know their role in undermining organic nature. A sea change occurred in the definition of nature under the influence of modern natural science. They should be called the Material Sciences. It would go a long way to clearing up the confusion.

What would that sea change be?

Originally, nature, the Greek word physis or phusis, meant “what grows”, what emerges in organic nature, a garden, a plantation. I first learned this from Rosenstock-Huessy in a section on “Nature”, in an essay on “Liturgical Thinking”:

“Physic meant “plantation” in Greek; Plato called God a planter or physis! The word comes from a verb, which means “living growth”! Physics, however, in the Renaissance, became what it is today: the science of dead matter. For the first time in the history of thought, dead matter was held to have preceded living growth. In a living universe, too, we may have to cope with corpses. But the mechanical “natural science” after 1500 tried to explain life out of its corpses by making nature primarily a concept of dead mass in space! Only recently have we discovered that the term “nature” between 1500 and 1900 was used in a sense or with an accent unheard in any other epoch: mass, quantity, space, i.e., dead things, filled the foreground of scientific thought. Physics was held to “explain” chemistry, chemistry biology, biology psychology, psychology theology! Dead things were to explain the living. This new horrid degradation of the term “nature” itself made all personality values appear as the result of some drop of adrenalin in the glands.” p. 3

To continue the line of thought, hyle, the word for matter, which is what underlies physis, originally meant forest. The latter I learned from a remarkable book: Forests, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Even he has to press home the point when he says:

“Let us repeat that: hyle is the Greek word for forest.”

These are such important steps rather buried in linguistic considerations that bells and whistles should go off emphasizing the points.  I hope you see what I mean. After Newton and Galileo and the new physics of the Renaissance, the word nature–took on what appears to be an opposite meaning: nature took on the meaning of “dead things in space”, under the influence of geometry, where Galileo is the reference point. So the word for nature, a plantation, physis, becomes dead things in space, mathematical physics, and the word for forest, hyle, becomes matter, the underlying dead stuff of the dead things in space, a kind of dead substratum. If you can digest this issue without spitting it out you have one of the cenral points in my line.  Then came Organic Chemistry, with the fatal blow, the argument that synthetics or laboratory productions, are equal to what is produced by organic nature. You see, once dead things in space took hold, they started making them in labs, and then in factories, also known as “plants”. Factories are called plants as a result of this seachange in terminology and perception.  You can hardly keep a straight face.

So this is at the basis, this conflict in definition, of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict?

To go back to the first paragraph in the quotation from Rosenstock-Huessy which we could pause for a long time, to reflect on what he says, echoed in countless other passages by other authors.  The science of dead matter needs elucidation which is easy to give. My favorite source is the book by E. A. Burtt:  The Metaphysical Origins of Modern Science. You see, so much of this is buried in the literature.  You can tease it out and find the pithy quotes to elucidate the case but you have to retrieve them from their context.  The shift of meaning in given words, as described, with the key terms, physis and hyle, tells the tale. Who controls the definitions? Who decides?  What side do you take in the conflict over meaning and the conflict in interpretation? Take the following as an example. I worried about this conflict in interpretation when I entered the herbal industry as a second career after leaving the University. Physic is an old word for medicine or herbal therapy, which still carries the old meaning of natural products of organic nature that cure and heal. And materia medica was another one, an old term for herbal medicine. Why materia? Harrison answered that for me, as well. Here is what he says:

“Yet there is one word that Aristotle could not avoid using when he spoke about the unspeakable–hyle. He is the first to give the word its philosophical meaning of “matter.” But hyle in Greek does not originally mean matter, it means forest. The cognate of hyle in Latin is silva. The archaic Latin word was sylua, phonetically close to hyle. It is strange that the Romans should have translated the Aristotelian hyle with the word materia when the Latin language possessed such a cognate. But even the word materia did not stray very far from the forests. Materia means wood–the usable wood of a tree as opposed to its bark, fruit, sap, etc. And materia has the same root–yes, root–as the word mater, or mother.” (p.28).

I also noticed the point in a book that means a lot to me in my work on Santa Cruz as ecotopia: The Architecture of Paradise, by William Alexander McClung:

“Hyle, Aristotle’s term for the chaos that is informed by nous, or mind, literally means “forest”, so Virgil … signifies by silva a psychic realm of violent and primitive passions.” p. 16.

There is a line of thought that goes something like this–when we moved out of the forest and founded cities, the forests became the forbidden place of the fearsome, the uncanny, the demon haunted. In fact, the psychic realm represented by forests is thymos and epithymia, the dynamic realm of the passions which have to be repressed and suppressed in city life in order for people to order their lives. This is the remarkable line of thought developed by Harrison in his book. I was delighted to read about this meaning of hyle as I had guessed this or intuited it when I was trying to think of hyle as `root’, in terms of the “vital roots” of herbal medicine. I picked up the thread when I tried to think about the meaning of “materia medica“, the traditional term for herbal medicine: the hyle of the physic. Why materia, I thought. It was as though I could hear these old connotations reverberating in the word. Medicinal herbs are the vital roots of what grows in the forests.  And I would like to add here that Aristotle’s father was an herbalist and a court physician so that Aristotle learned about materia medica, or herbal medicine, from his father and carried it into his thought which is materially grounded in the nature of things, the famous conflict between Aristotle and Plato on the problem of mathematical forms which Aristotle is said to have brought down to earth from Plato’s heaven of ideas. I blush to admit that I have been working on an herbal cookbook in the tradition of Aristotle:  Being and Thyme.  I have hoped to spark a new national cuisine based on culinary herbs where herbs are featured instead of throwaway accompaniments, like parsley.

So just as the Latin binomials for medicinal herbs gave you the legendary origins of the herbal tradition in Ancient Greece, you have also found the key terms in the shift of meanings according to your theme.

And don’t forget–thymos–my guardian word in all of this etymological retrieval.

So this shift is what you call a move from an ontology of life to an ontology of death?

Yes, terms I picked up from Hans Jonas and Tillich. They make the same point when they refer to the elimination of psyche from psychology under the sway of reductive behaviorism.

You seem to be interested in the history of conflicts: organic gardening versus laboratory chemistry, herbal medicine versus industrial or synthetic medicine, and so on.

Conflicts tell the story. In a way, the old conflicts between the oral and the rational/literate cultures, the conflict between poetry and philosophy, the conflict between “the ancients” and “the moderns”, the conflict between sapientia (wisdom) and scientia (science), the conflict between the so-called cultural or spiritual sciences (geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (naturwissenschaften), as well as what is called the warfare between science and religion, are involved here. It is a big debate. These conflicts represent the larger theoretical level. I like bringing it down to the case level of Physicalism and Vitalism in terms of the content of the structure of scientific revolutions when the major revolt in the early decades of the l9th century took place, say, with the formation of the Physicalist Society in Berlin, on the heels of the artificial synthesis of urea.

Sounds like the old C. P. Snow routine on the “two cultures” conflict.

This is the best example of the larger theoretical level, which never got to the historical case. In other words, the old two-culture debate that C.P. Snow made famous is where the scientific hegemony erupted and the debate was enjoined, except Snow turned it around and made the humanities guys feel ashamed because they didn’t keep up with the developments of science. They didn’t know the third law of thermodynamics. Now there is a whole school of literature and science to make up for this and it is an interesting development.  Marjorie Nicholson was an early anticipation of this. But Snow touched the nerve of the issue and it was a cause celebre for a while even though the discussion never cut to the quick, but remained on the academic level of the sciences versus the humanities. I saw all this at first hand when I taught humanities at M.I.T.

So you are really interested in the political ideology of science.

All of this is germane in terms of a big discussion of what counts for knowledge and who counts! Snow was talking about University culture where the split and the consequent disadvantages are most pronounced–the split between the humanities and the natural sciences, with the social sciences as a kind of disputed buffer in between. The takeover by the Physicalists was so wholesale no one seems to notice anymore. Why shouldn’t it be obvious to everyone how knowledge is organized and structured at a University and the power relations that this entails, as well as the history of it? Well, it isn’t. In spite of all the effort to expose it, there is a kind of conspiracy of silence–the show must go on, although there is a growing literature on the subject now that institutions of higher learning have turned into research centers.  A recent book:  The Last Professor tells the story even though it is still a story to be told, although there have been a lot of stabs at it. The contraries line up in such a way as to expose the problem–Physicalist/Vitalist; experimental lab/botanic garden; artificial synthesis/organic nature, the sciences versus the humanities, etc.

Is there a tell-tale reference point in the story?

The artificial synthesis of urea, in 1828, has been the classic reference point as the historical triumph of Physicalism over Vitalism. There is a straight line from there to the “elimination of metaphysics” by the Logical Positivists in the philosophy of Physicalism, a slogan that became their battlecry, a clever move to mask their own metaphysical position and to assume the argument with Vitalism was won as a foregone conclusion.

Hold on. You jump from an experiment in chemistry and the origins of what is called Organic Chemistry to Logical Positivism. Can you give a little background?

They are directly related. The urea experiment is credited with the defeat of Vitalism. That is the main historic point. It takes almost a century for the philosophical foundations of the experiment to show up in the school of the Vienna Circle under Carnap, a kind of mop-up of the gains of Physicalism. The movement goes from the Physicalist Society in Berlin to the Logical Positivists in Vienna. Logical Positivism is just another name for the Philosophy of Physicalism, which is how the Circle members thought of themselves. They were in charge. They were going to establish the foundations of modern science on a system of mathematical logic to which all right thinking scientists could subscribe–it was the 20th century version of a ma thesis universalis, an effort begun by Leibniz and Descartes to develop a universal calculus or system of signs on which to ground the sciences in terms of a mathematical foundation.

So the Logical Positivists play a key role in your sketch.

They have always represented to me the hardening of the arteries of the Physicalist position, so they are a good place to look as a reference for the Physicalist victory over Vitalism, which is what the Positivists meant regarding the elimination of metaphysics. For metaphysics read Vitalism. They tried to shift the argument to mathematical logic which hardly anyone understands. It was like Von Neumann telling Shannon to use the term “entropy” in information theory because no one knew what it meant and he would always have an advantage in any discussion.

That’s funny.

The irony is that the Positivists hosted Kurt Godel, as a student in their midst, who wrecked their whole program with his undermining the foundations of mathematics, which, according to the expectations of the Physicalists, was going to provide the ssure and certain foundation for a unified science. Godel pulled the rug out from under their pretensions with his incompleteness theorems and his undecidability problem. He’s one of my heroes. I corresponded with him and even talked to him on the telephone in a memorable conversation.

I can see that we are going to have to unpack much of this, which for you seems obvious, but for the uninitiated is pretty obscure. We don’t have to go into it now, but be prepared to elaborate on the points you make. You jumped rather fast from the reference point–the artificial synthesis of urea–to Godel?

I know. I have lectured on this for so long it is second nature to me. The sequence is very clear and I can delineate the moves, as well as the supporting literature. It is the consequence of decades of study on my part–it is my line of thought. The whole point of this book, this interview, is to get it off my chest. Books are divestitures. I’ve been carrying this load for a long time.

It interests me that you talked to Godel? Before you answer, I think it should be mentioned that Kurt Godel, who, as you say, came out of the Logical Positivist Circle under Carnap, was probably the foremost mathematical logician of the 20th century You called him at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Research?

Yes. I had already written to him after I was told he had formulated a new proof for the existence of God, in the tradition of Leibniz. I had heard about it from Jay Greenberg, a mathematician friend at Crown College, at UCSC. I can still remember the moment when we were chatting in the hallway outside the steno pool and he told me Godel had developed a new proof for the existence of God. It had a great impact on me.

What year was it?

The year was 1970. I immediately realized “Godel’s Proof “ could make existence a predicate again, and refute Kant, who more or less commanded the field with his view that existence is not a predicate so there were no valid logical proofs for the existence of God, given the finite limitations of the human mind.

This sounds like a technical problem within philosophy–logical proofs for the existence of God. I don’t see what you mean by Kant’s notion that existence is not a predicate, either.

This is a classic problem in philosophy, but it has had profound implications for the meaning of existence in the 20th century. I see the roots of existentialism in this problem in Kant. For Kant, existence is a term empty and devoid of meaning. It is just a word with no predicative value, more or less what Quine says about being–it is just the function of an arbitrary variable–which is what it looks like when you look at how the word “is” is used in any sentence, just like this one. According to Kant, existence is always assumed and therefore the word existence doesn’t add anything to what is already assumed. To say the table exists doesn’t add anything to the concept of a table the existence of which is already assumed to exist if only in thought. You might as well say the table tables. And if you say the table exists, the thought doesn’t suddenly appear in time and space as a tangible or empirical thing. Kant used the illustration of money. Imagine a hundred dollars (thalers) as in the concept of a hundred dollars. Now say the hundred dollars exists. Dollars don’t suddenly appear in your pocket, so what good does it do to say they exist when existence is already assumed in the thought of a hundred dollars. Therefore, existence is not a predicate.  It doesn?t add anything to what is already assumed.

So you think this deflating of existence actually sets up the problem of existence in the late 19th and 20th century in the movement of thought known as Existentialism.

Well, if you want a philosophical background, this is it for me–I see it as an extension of the theme of the “Kantian recoil”. He bracketed existence in his transcendental idealism which Husserl continues in his transcendental phenomenology. The recoil is a powerful metaphor for the problem as if existence became too hot to handle in the emerging industrial society. So existence became a thing, a means of production in the labor market, a commodity to buy at a starvation wage. I have always been vexed by this issue, which I see as part of the origins of Existentialism, as if Kant recoiled from existence for some reason, with strange consequences. Heidegger says as much when he talks about the Kantian recoil from the unknown root of the transcendental imagination, which is where I picked up this theme.

How is anyone to understand these issues unless they have some prior understanding of these themes? You act as though these buzz words are common parlance.

I know they are peculiar to a philosophical context. It’s true that I have picked them out as symbolic of the issues. Kant “recoils from the unknown root”, as Heidegger puts it. When I read about the Kantian recoil, I thought I had found a clue to my thematic which made existence problematic, a theme that haunts the last century and a half–from Schelling and Kierkegaard to Sartre and Heidegger. And “the unknown root” is the metaphor for my concern over organic nature. It is probably a good clue to what Heidegger means by “unconcealedness”, the unknown root that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, all too familiar and yet unknown. If this is the case, then I can interpret this arcane or obscure line in Heidegger–his interpretation of the Greek word for truth–aletheia. It is a meditation on the fate of the vital root of existence in the 20th century, as the heritage of Kiekegaard, whom I definitely prefer to Heidegger and whom Heidegger himself revered. Envied even.

And this carries through to Godel’s Proof for the Existence of God.

I thought Godel’s Proof for the Existence of God would be a new point of departure for philosophy. In other words, to find the root again. I was wrong in terms of any major impact, because it has been thirty years since he formulated the proof and not only do few people know about it at all, it hasn’t made any impact except for a few Godel scholars. Godel was right when he made it clear that his proof was a technical issue in the history of mathematical logic, following Leibniz. He didn’t know what I was talking about in terms of its historical significance when we spoke on the telephone. In fact, a rumor was circulated that this proof was an example that Godel was nuts. There was a period in his life when he was mentally ill. He was exceptionally paranoid and was institutionalized for a while. He thought he was going to be poisoned. I could make hay on this, but I’m going to pass.

I don’t understand. Let what pass?

Oh, I was just thinking that here is the most famous mathematical logician of the 20th century, trained in the school of Logical Positivism, undermining their entire program, formulating a proof for the existence of God, as if to rub it in, and then worrying about being rubbed out. It’s too much.  He almost starved to death because he thought he might be poisoned.  It is reminiscent of Simone Weil and her Waiting For God or the Need For Roots and Beckett making a play out of it.  Waiting For God- oh!  Simone starved herself to death out of despair over World War II.  They were all waiting for Godel/Godot to finish the proof.

You mean Carnap could have hired a hit man. But you were interested in the Proof and wrote to Godel about it.

I was trying to put together a Journal for the History of Consciousness Graduate Program, called Thymos, my favorite Greek word, meaning spirit or courage or vitality. So I wrote to Godel and asked him if I could publish his Proof. I thought if I could publish his Proof, it would get me tenure, as if only an argument for the existence of God could save me. He wrote back and said it was incomplete, which some people thought was funny, as Godel was already famous for his Incompleteness Theorem. It was like waiting for Godot, only here it was Godel, to finish the Proof. Kierkegaard has great things to say about waiting for someone to finish such a proof in his critique of Hegel. Godel did say something even I thought was funny, when he wrote to me: “what does theology have to do with consciousness?”

What did he mean by that?

Well, I was looking at the Proof within the context of the history of philosophy and the history of Western culture and he thought of it as a technical exercise in the tradition of Leibniz. He didn’t seem to get the implications of what he had done outside of professional mathematical logic.  I should say that one has to be very careful about these issues and not extrapolate from them willy-nilly, as I tend to do.  Godel is very technical and at a level I cannot aspire to.  So these are just musings on my part.

Then what?

Then I wrote to him again after I intuited that he had written the proof of the existence of God to ground Einstein’s unified field theory. He and Einstein were great pals at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. After Einstein retired he still went to the Institute every day just to walk home with Godel, he had such esteem for him. He didn’t answer my reply, so I had an occasion to call him one time when I was visiting a friend in New York who had a brother teaching economics at Princeton. She was on her way to visit her brother. She is a wonderful photographer, so I told her to get in touch with Godel–the smartest man in the world, next to Einstein, and take his picture. She told me to set it up. Well, I hadn╒t expected that. So I called the Institute and asked for Herr Professor. He said “hello”. I said: “Professor Godel?” He said: “Yes.” I said: “This is Professor Lee. Do you remember me? I wrote to you about your Proof for the Existence of God?” “Yes.” “Did you get my second letter?” “Yes.” “Was I right about Einstein’s field theory.” “Yes.” Then we chatted briefly about the issue as I saw it and I could tell that he didn╒t know what I was talking about, so I stopped, and said: “Can my friend, Adelaide, come and photograph you?” “No.” “Why not, she is a wonderful photographer.” “I have three perfectly good photographs of myself.” That stopped me. So I said good-bye. This also was funny because there is a very famous photograph of Godel, by Arnold Newman, a very famous photographer, sitting next to a large empty blackboard, as if posed by Sy Twombley, who is famous for his slightly erased blackboards, one of which my friend, Earl McGrath once owned and which I enjoyed looking at over the dinner table.

So, what did you make of it?

Godel confirmed my hunch about Einstein and we had a nice conversation. He was wary about my embroidering his proof, as I said, which he saw as a technical issue in logic. The reason he hadn’t published it, I found out later, was that he didn’t want to make it seem that he was a believer. Can you beat that?

Didn’t you tell this story to Octavio Paz?

Yes, I met him a few days later in Cambridge, through my friend, Bob Gardner. We had dinner together and were having an espresso afterwards at Paz’s apartment and I told him the story and when I got to the punch line about the proof for the existence of God, Paz spilled his espresso in his lap. I thought, ah ha, the poet is startled about existence becoming a predicate again.

It was a dramatic moment. I had a similar experience with Buckminster Fuller. He came into my Wild Thyme Restaurant, in Santa Cruz, and I sat down and wanted to discuss Godel with him. He had never heard of him. I was somewhat dumbfounded, so I gave him my Godel spiel. He had a young student in his party who got so excited, he kept jumping up and down and hollering–did everyone understand the importance of what I was saying. I was rather pleased that he thought I was so smart but I started to think I didn’t even get it, when he got up and ran out. I was a little worried about him and went to check and he was booking a flight to Princeton the next day. He wanted to show Godel some scheme he had in his pocket that he refused to show me. I never found out what happened. This is material for a Kierkegaard or a Kafka or a Beckett. In any event, as far as I’m concerned, Godel wrecked the Positivist plan to unify science in the philosophy of Physicalism, one of the greatest dumb-down efforts in the history of modern thought, and I am grateful to him for that.

Can you elaborate?

The Physicalist/Vitalist conflict taught me what was at stake in the deep cultural conflicts of the 20th century, in terms of our introducing an organic garden with a tradition going back through Steiner to Goethe, a tradition that had been discounted, refuted, and rejected for over a century and a half. In current parlance, Vitalism was so politically incorrect as to be almost ludicrous. The University, as the servant of industrial society, stood for Physicalist science, not for organic gardening, let alone a tradition that went back through a clairvoyant (Steiner), to a poet (Goethe), who thought he was smarter than Newton. We had stepped right into the conflict without knowing anything about it at the time. It was nothing less than a struggle over what counts for knowledge and the direction a culture should take. The trend was in favor of industrial society, even though in its late stage of self-destruction, which only very few were willing to admit. Looking back, it is easy to see how the cards were stacked against a vision of organic integrity and representatives of the old culture, like Goethe. All you have to do is listen to Schubert’s “Songs of Goethe” and his lieder cycles and you have the music for the end of European culture–swan songs.  They are filled with the pathos of the realization of the end.  Goethe knew it all too well.

Sung by Fischer-Dieskau, of course. And Chadwick represented this old culture, which is what made him unique. But wait a minute. First you talk about the self-destruction of industrial society and then you skip to the destruction of old European culture.

Sorry. Industrial society was built upon the ruins of the old culture. It also helped destroy what it superseded. Look at what happened in England: from verdant fields to mill towns. Vitalism was a name for what was lost–the integrity of organic culture. Many sensitive individuals at the time anticipated it. They could see it coming, like a storm cloud on the horizon. They were already looking back, as it were, over the loss of Western culture, as if looking back on a great garden that was to be abandoned. The slogan throughout Europe was Et In Arcadia Ego, a retrospective affirmation of the goodness and sweetness of life in a culture that was about to die. A voice from the tomb: “I am in Arcadia”. Curtains. It was a life and death struggle, the throes of which we are still in up to our ears, a struggle for the soul of the 20th century.  And now the 21st where it hangs in the balance.

Time is running out.

Goethe suffered a nervous collapse over it and he was not alone. Jacob Burckhardt saw what was coming. Nietzsche went mad over it. It is exactly what he meant by the death of God. Max Weber, one of the greatest minds of Germany, fell into an unaccountable depression and sat looking out the window picking at his fingers. William James had an apparitional visitation of pure despair. Strinberg. Ibsen. Hamsen. Munch. As I mentioned, this is the Existentialist motif, this lament over the place of the person and the life of the spirit in technical and industrial society. Husserl was one of the most penetrating commentators on the Physicalist takeover as developed in his famous Vienna Lecture and his essay: “The Crisis Of Western Science”.  Soren Kierkegaard, some decades before, knew it in the depths of his being and produced the greatest literary achievement as a cultural critique: the end of Christendom. Kafka continued the meditation even to the point of writing parables in the tradition of Kierkegaard. All of this presentiment segues into Existentialism and a full-scale revolt against Industrial Society which turns a person into a thing, a loathsome thing, like Gregor Samsa, who doesn’t go to work one day.

How does this relate to Chadwick? Was he a Luddite?

That’s not a bad association, if you think of the Luddites as the protest against industrial society. There is a book I mean to read I just noticed in the New York Times today: Kirkpatrick Sale: Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Chadwick was the representative of organic integrity and against all of the denial and exploitation and manipulation of organic nature. He was a unique hold-out against the overwhelming trend of industrial society. He knew the meaning of organic integrity and he wanted to smash the notion that synthetics were “equal in dignity” to organic nature, the great swindle in the decline of authentic taste. He knew that soils were alive and nurtured by living organisms not by synthetic fertilizers loaded with synthetic urea. And this was all on the level of food–what persons put in their mouths. I remember how he jumped on the quote from Robert Graves, in a speech he gave at MIT, about the decline of taste as symptomatic of the decline of culture: “The decline of a true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic, personal taste, they lose their personality and become instruments of other peoples’ wills.” Chadwick would often begin a talk with this quote and then refer to strawberries.

Why strawberries?

Oh, come on! If you think the supermarket stuff and the effort to develop a berry for shelf life is to be compared to a true organic berry then you still have to be converted or you have lost your sense of taste. But I have to admit that strawberries are now part of the organic movement and it is possible to get edible strawberries again. We pick strawberries with our friends, the Kubeks, on a farm in Northern Michigan every summer, and it is a sacramental event. I’m of Norwegian ancestry and a good strawberry to a Norwegian is a gift from God, practically equal to the pearl of great price, what cheese is to the French. On a visit to relatives in Norway, when I was a teen-ager, I went to a carnival and saw a Norwegian, who had won a pint of strawberries at some booth walking around and savoring them. It is an unforgettable image.

Name another.

Wilderness waters would be another example. Rolf and Elsa Von Eckartsberg and Chadwick and I, went on a wilderness trek up in the Trinity Alps, above Covelo, in Northern California, and the waters up there were the waters of life. They were baptismal waters, so radiant with the vital power of being. I have never forgotten it. In fact, I saw a new meaning to Heraclitus’ saying: “You can’t step into the same waters twice.”

Because they were such vital waters?

Exactly. Once was enough! Although someone recently told me that those waters are gone;  they are polluted and you can’t drink them without worrying about some parasite.

So you took these experiences into a cultural analysis encompassing the last two hundred years and more.

Listen to this quote from Goethe, where he prophesies the impending barbarism in the destruction of Old Europe:

“Mankind will grow more astute and more perceptive, but not better, happier, or more vigorous–not permanently, at least. I see a time coming when God will not enjoy it any more, when he will have to smash everything once again, to rejuvenate his creation. I feel sure that everything tends in that direction, and that the starting time and hour of the rejuvenation period are already appointed in the distant future. But there will be plenty of time yet.”

Quoted in Karl Lowith: Nature, History, and Existentialism.

He said that on October 23, 1828, maybe on the same day as the discovery of synthetic urea, anyhow, the same year.  Isn’t that amazing.  You know they met once, Goethe and Woehler, in a rock shop in Frankfort.  I think Goethe intuited that he had met Faust in the flesh and went home and finished his poem.  This is one of the most amazing encounters in the history of thought as far as I╒m concerned.  Goethe and Woehler.  It is worthy of a play.

And how does this relate to Chadwick? Is this your replanting the vital root of existence theme, what Goethe calls rejuvenation?

Yes. Here’s another quote, this one from Lewis Mumford:

“One day a book will be written that will expose the contradictory workings of mechanism and vitalism as profound religious influences from the sixteenth century onward. This book will show that even while the mechanical complex was consolidating its control, it was being modified willy-nilly by the growing appreciation of organic nature in every aspect: witness the better regimen of child-care, hygiene, and diet introduced by the Romantic movement, mainly through Rousseau’s writings, if not his practice; witness the growing interest in play and sport which modified the harsh attitude toward such relaxation introduced by Calvinism and utilitarianism: witness the kindly teaching practices introduced by Froebel’s Children’s Garden (Kindergarten)–the precise antithesis of Comenius’ mass-organized drill-school; while at the same time the growing love of nature expressed itself in zealous amateur gardening, in landscape design, in rural sports, and outdoor exercises–hunting, fishing, rambling, mountain-climbing. In some degree these activities cushioned the impact of mechanization, and for over a century they have been opening the way for a more organic culture. When that book is written it will show further how this growing appreciation of all that distinguishes the world of organisms from the world of machines gave rise, at a given point in the nineteenth century, to a fresh vision of the entire cosmic process. This vision was profoundly different from the one offered by those who left out of their world picture the essential qualitative attribute of life: its expectancy, its inner impetus, its insurgency, its creativity, its ability at singular points to transcend either physical or organic limitations. The name given to this new vision of life was bestowed belatedly, only when it began to be systematically pursued: it is now known as ecology.”

The Pentagon Of Power, “The Organic World Picture”, Lewis Mumford, p. 385

So the Chadwick, Steiner, Goethe tradition was what Mumford was talking about? And your book is that book?

Yes, as far as I’m concerned, although I would be surprised if Mumford had Steiner explicitly in mind. He could have been thinking about Frank Lloyd Wright. This interview is about that book:  There Is A Garden In the Mind.

So Chadwick was your wild hair in terms of the University?

Unwittingly, with Chadwick, we had brought a neo-Vitalist critique–the renewal of organic nature–right into the imperialist, hegemonic, stronghold of the Physicalist victory, like I say, under their unsuspecting noses–the Science Establishment of the University of California. Had they been forewarned or realized what was happening, they would have shot Chadwick on sight, or bagged him and dropped him in Winnemucca. The Garden was a Trojan Horse. Chadwick was our Achilles, only with a Bulldog spade, instead of an ash spear. He had the temperament of an Achilles, so the comparison is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The word for that kind of temperament is thymos, a peculiar blend of vitality and rage or wrath. As I said, it’s my favorite word. The wrath of God is thymos, creative and destructive, purging and renewing. There was something of the Old Testament Prophet in Chadwick. He liked to rant.

Physicalists are what you call scientists?

It’s a code word for me. Physicalism is a characterization of a specific philosophy of science which I consider generic as a general ideological position. There is a cluster of associated names and positions, all related under the Physicalist banner–determinism, empiricism, mechanism, materialism, positivism, scientism, etc. They all have their respective characterizations and should not be confused with each other but they all represent the trend. As I have mentioned, it came to prominence in the 19th century and found its major expression under Rudolf Carnap and the Logical Positivists, in Vienna, at the turn of the century, and before them, in Comte, and the Philosophes, in France. Saint Simon is the most absurd, only because he is so extreme in his views about the new priesthood–the monks of science. But, more formally, the trend refers to the Physicalist refutation of Vitalism and the rejection of the Vitalist argument in behalf of the integrity of organic nature. This is shorthand for a very long retrieval of the issue. It is my scholarly domain–the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict in the system of the sciences, from 1828, to the present, although, as does Husserl, it can be taken back to the network of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Kant. The Physicalist/Vitalist conflict is the great key, not to everything, but to practically everything. It is the deepest conflict in our culture.

What is some of the literature on the subject?

Johannes Merz has done the overview in his two volume work on science and philosophy in the 19th century. It is very instructive in a kind encyclopedic way.  Ernst Cassirer discusses it in his: The Problem of Knowledge. Erich Voegelin has the hardest hitting critique of it in an essay: “The Origins of Scientism”, and he continues the discussion in his Anamnesis. Husserl is brilliant on the issue in his famous essay: The Crisis of Western Science. Polanyi discusses it in his book: Personal Knowledge. And, of course, Kuhn did the formalistic critique in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, without, unfortunately, ever mentioning the historic case that nails his theme. But what would you expect from someone who did his work under the auspices of the Physicalists, namely, Carnap, so Kuhn was in the Physicalist camp, which is why he assumes the victory without mentioning the historic case that illuminates his thesis, the victory, the revolutionary victory of physicalism over vitalism .

But hasn’t science superseded this old conflict? It sounds old hat.

That’s a good question. In some ways “yes” and in most ways “no”. There is this perception that cracks have opened in the Physicalist ranks, there’s no question about that. Arthur Koestler’s last book: Janus, A Summing Up, has a good discussion of the cracks. Immunology, one of my favorite subject matters, plays a role here, especially in terms of immune memory. Koestler was very cognizant of that as a Vitalist surd in a Physicalist science. But it is piecemeal, at best. The tired old ideology of Physicalism is like a secret bolshevism of Western science, with its attendant apparatchiks, all in a row.

Much of Koestler’s authorship has a Neovitalist drift. The Ghost In the Machine is one title that comes to mind. As well as The Sleep Walkers.  He had an unusual grasp of the issues you adumbrate.

It would take some organizing to indicate the literature on the debate. Here’s a quote by Adolf Meyer, who, in 1934, saw Physicalism and Vitalism as merely “worthy old ideologies” that no longer have any real theoretical validity:

“One cannot escape the impression that these highly respected ideologies have fallen behind in the development of the special biological disciplines; in any case they have nothing more to teach those who pursue them. Vitalism negates the modern Galilean-Newtonian-Kantian ideal of a mathematical natural science and thereby robs biology of unquestionably fruitful possibilities of knowledge, while mechanism degrades it to a special and meaningless appendage of theoretical physics.” p. 212

It is vexing to science to have this debate continue. There has even been an attempt to debunk the urea legend as a spurious piece unworthy of its reputation as responsible for the defeat of Vitalism. Not so. The conflict is very deeply imbedded in our culture of industrial society. Once you see the significance of the Physicalist victory over Vitalism, you understand the grounds for the environmental protest and especially the Earth First gang who are the neo-Luddites.

So you encountered the conflict at Santa Cruz and it was not old hat.

It was not old hat in the 1960′s at UC Santa Cruz, believe me, three decades after the quote from Adolf Meyer, given the reaction to a simple organic garden project; how this plays in the 1990′s and on, is open to question. Lots of important issues have intervened. What inroads they have made is another matter. I think very little. Look at the inclusion of Environmental Studies in the university curriculum as an example of a neo-Vitalist critique of industrial society. The development of Environmental Studies in the curriculum after Earth Day was a symptom of what crawled through the cracks in the Physicalist armor as the proponents of industrial society. The example of UCSC is a case in point. Although one would have to make a specific study of it in order to figure it out, my hunch is that Environmental Studies is not much more integrated in terms of what counts for knowledge than the Chadwick Garden, as far as I can tell. The Physicalists still hold the cards. Neo-Vitalist Environmental Studies is grudgingly tolerated.

You mean Environmental Studies smacks of a covert Neo-Vitalism?

That’s one way to put it and so it is grudgingly tolerated by the power-block of Physicalists who are still in charge and call the shots. They refuse to believe that this old dead view reared its ugly head and had to be accommodated. They simply had to acquiesce to the political pressure of the Environmental movement and open up a new subject matter. The representatives of what should be a brand of neo-Vitalism –Environmental Studies–have to suck up to the Physicalist scientists in order to gain some self-respect, which is like pandering to the enemy, so it is a very contradictory situation to be in.

This is a snide way to put it.

It is difficult to remain emotionally neutral on the issue when there is so much at stake. Careers are ruined because of the interest one takes in certain themes or points of view.

Can you give an example?

I encouraged students to ask scientists if they were Physicalists or Vitalists just to register the look on their faces. They found one closet Vitalist in biology, who admitted to secret Vitalist sympathies. He was a botanist.  It would be interesting to study the conflict and the impact on careers. It goes all the way to the conflict between Christianity and secularism. Page Smith and I always referred to Rosenstock-Huessy as a prime example of being scapegoated by the University establishment. He had a notable career at Dartmouth, but within the ranks he was rejected by modern scholarship even though he was one of the best ever. He shows up the split as well as anyone. When he was at Harvard, the elder Schlesinger said either he goes or I go. So they kicked him out. He was too much of a Christian for Schlesinger, Sr.

Didn’t Page Smith have a hard time getting into Harvard just because he was his student at Dartmouth.

Yes, they rejected him at first, but he managed to get in under a different subject. His career as a narrative historian put him under attack by the establishment historians who had no interest in the big picture as opposed to monographic studies. He was ostracised.

Any other examples?

Socio-biology is another good example. I just read E. O. Wilson’s autobiography: Naturalist. His title is an example of his bravery, because it is an example of Vitalism. Rachel Carson was a Naturalist, which immediately struck me as her booby prize appellation because of her Vitalist sympathies.

And you mention Agnes Arber as another example.

Yes. I remember broaching the subject to Kenneth Thimann, the Provost of Crown College, at UCSC, who hired me, and he said, “Oh, yes, Vitalism, what was that woman’s name?” And he meant Agnes Arber. That was a tell-tale response. It reminds me of my looking up Vitalism to see what was in the literature and there was Hilda Hein and I thought, I’ll bet she’s a Roman Catholic, and she was.

So, what about E. O. Wilson?

He tells the story of how biologists at a major conference tried to vote the subject matter of socio-biology out of existence. They wanted to out-law it so nobody could do it any more. Can you believe it? Margaret Mead got up and shook her cane at everyone to protest this rear guard reaction of conservative Physicalists to a new field that looked too neo-Vitalist even for biology. She valiantly carried the day. The vote lost by a narrow margin. This is for me a prime example of the problem. On the other hand, you have many scientists who manage to negotiate the territory without losing their soul–they find a balance in their work that overcomes the split.

What about Rupert Sheldrake and his offer of a monetary prize for experiments that confirm his morphic resonance theory.

That’s a good one. I have always worried about the terms for such an offer. I still hold with Polanyi that a conversion is necessary even to look at the facts. We have a local psychologist at Cabrillo, our community college, who has offered a small award for any evidence that would confirm a psychic event just to parade his scepticism. Obviously, he wouldn’t know a ghost if he saw one. The effort to try to demonstrate the superiority of organic farming to industrial farming is another sad commentary. But, I suppose, it’s a game that must be played in the world of contending ideologies.  I might mention a complex of literature that portends a new appreciation of what got lost with rejected vitalism.  Ralph Abraham has introduced me to it in his work on the quantum vacuum and consciousness.  One of the key figures is Irvin Laszlo and I have just started reading him.  It is too complicated to comment on here and I am at the beginning of my attempt to study and understand it, but it picks up on my introduction to Dirac decades ago and the theme of the monopole which I immediately thought might be the physics the old vitalists lacked.  We can get to more on this later.  The important theme is the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict.

So the Chadwick Garden opened up this conflict for you?

Yes, Chadwick represented the lost or rejected Vitalist tradition, in need of recovery. He brought it to the campus when he broke through the Physicalist hardpan with his Vitalist spade and started an organic garden. The key word is “organic”. It so happened that the Provost of Crown College, where I taught, was Kenneth Thimann, whom I mentioned, a renowned Physicalist Botanist, what should be an oxymoron, but for the scientific revolution. His domain was the experimental lab. He did the work on Agent Orange, the Vietnam defoliant, which was a little hard to swallow even as a defining symbolic piece of work for a Physicalist. He was the precise counterpart to Chadwick, the Vitalist Gardener, right within the field of botany, if you include horticulture and agriculture. It was a point I could not miss. They personified the split. It is remarkable to me, now that I review these themes, what shook out under their example. I had a world-renowned Physicalist botanist, as my boss, the head of my college, and Chadwick, who, according to E. F. Schumacher was “the greatest gardener in the world”, my Newton of the grassblades.

So they defined the problem you have now spent decades working through. Vitalism, for you, means the integrity of organic nature?

Well, I say that, but now that you ask, not exactly. Nature doesn’t need an ‘-ism in defense of it’s own vitality. Vitalism is a position within the system of the sciences, an ideological stance, opposite to Physicalism and the reduction of all living things to their physical and chemical constituents. Vitalism is the affirmation and defense of organic nature against the reductionist stance of Physicalism, which thought that “life-force” or “vital force” were nonsensical combinations of words, with no defensible reality, no physics or chemistry to back it up. There was no physics or math for the “life-force”; therefore, it was thought to be “metaphysical”, in the bad sense of the word, which came to be almost every sense of the word–empty and vain speculation without empirical confirmation. Metaphysics became associated with spiritualism, as in Ouiji Boards. Vitalism is the ghost in the machine. It sounds abstract, but it is a very real issue. I am hesitant about the word ‘integrity’, but I don’t have a better term. The vital root of organic nature would be a good metaphor.

But you see the artificial synthesis of urea as the key point in the undermining of organic integrity and the refutation of Vitalism.

When Vitalism was refuted, the organic collapsed into the inorganic. Organic integrity was subverted when you could simulate it in the lab from inorganic sources. Chemical structures were all you needed to know and they were reciprocal. Once they were determined you could artificially synthesize anything found in organic nature from inorganic sources. This is a key point because the Physicalists argued that inorganic simulation or synthesis was identical to organic nature. Organic nature faded into the background in favor of the experimental lab. It brought about a cluster of words that are confused with the organic, said to be identical to the organic, and so on, such as artificial and synthetic and virtual. They are approximation substitutions for the real thing. Physicalist science proclaimed it and people bought it.

This, for you, is the Big Lie, as you call it, the identity of the synthetic and the organic.

Yes. It comes down to Tang is Orange Juice and all such swindles. I found this quote from Descartes: “All the things which are artificial are natural as well.” (Prin. Phil. 4.203) Lachterman refers to this pairing of mechanization and symbolization as the advent of radical modernity, an effort of outwitting “Nature”. “From now on the “natural” will be measured by its accessibility to artifice”. The Ethics Of Geometry, p.125.

Was Steiner aware of this split and the significance of the urea experiment?

I’m glad you asked. Yes, he was. Here is a particularly penetrating quote from his quite remarkable history of philosophy:

“An example that shows how the results of natural science took on forms that could be of a deeply penetrating influence on the conception of the world is given in Woehier’s discovery of 1828. This scientist succeeded in producing a substance synthetically outside the living organism that had previously only been known to be formed within. This experiment seemed to supply the proof that the former belief which assumed that certain material compounds could be formed only under the influence of a special life force contained in the organism, was incorrect. If it was possible to produce such compounds outside the living body, then one could draw the conclusion that the organism was also working only with the forces with which chemistry deals. The thought arose for the materialists that, if the living organism does not need a special life force to produce what formerly had been attributed to such a force, why should this organism then need special spiritual energies in order to produce the processes to which mental experiences are bound? Matter in all its qualities now became for the materialists what generates all things and processes from its core.” The Riddles of Philosophy, p. 263-4

So the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict is a deep split in our culture?

I think it is the deepest split in our culture. It is certainly a key to the split. I have organized my thought around it.

What other example could you give?

It sets up a confusion in authentic taste, as Robert Graves points out. Tang is confused as orange juice. Add the sense of smell. Are synthetic scents (perfumes) the same as organic scents? No. Aroma therapy fights in defense of the healing power of organic herbal essences against synthetics. As a Platonist, I have to laugh over the notion of “synthetic essences”, another oxymoron, if I ever heard one, although it is a version of an issue that concerned Socrates, when he wondered about the essence of slime. Sartre has a fix on this in his phenomenology of slime. I can hardly believe I know such stuff.

I see how tangled it gets.

But it works right on down the line. Herbal medicine versus synthetic drugs; aroma therapy with organic essences of herbs versus synthetic perfumes; artificial fertilizers versus organic compost; synthetic fibers versus cotton and wool and linen; my grandmother, Ome, I called her, I am amazed to report, sold synthetic vanilla and synthetic flavorings–orange, grape, cherry, etc., made by a little chemical factory in Milwaukee where she worked. Customers would come up the back steps and buy bottles out of her kitchen. She always had a quart of synthetic juice in the fridge. My mother always hid the fact from her mother that she preferred genuine vanilla to the synthetic stuff. Maybe that’s where I first picked up the distinction. I’m sure it is.

How about a cotton versus a dacron or nylon bathing suit?

OK, ok. I worried about the logic, especially when I found George Washington Carver arguing for “the synthetic” as another order of God’s creation. That threw me. He was a very affirmative guy.

You suspected he had developed medicinal uses for the peanut.

In fact, he had found a medicinal use for peanut oil–polio. He was so inventive about the uses of the peanut, he made it his life’s work. Over one hundred uses, if I remember rightly. Some were medicinal and then I get his affirmation of the synthetic as another order of creation. Like I said, that threw me. I had already been worrying about a theology of the inorganic, which Tillich calls for. A theology of the inorganic stumped me and then I find the quote from Carver about a theology of the synthetic. Stumped again.

It would be interesting to know if people who are allergic to perfume are also allergic to synthetic scents and not organic ones.

I don’t know if this has been pursued, although one would think so, given the problem of environmental sensitivities and the onslaught on the immune system.

Can you give another example of the Physicalist/Vitalist split?

Here is one of my favorites: Vitalist Ode and Physicalist Oath. The split goes through Freud and characterizes the conflict in his career and in his authorship, very representative of the times. Freud goes to a public lecture, as a young man, and hears the lecturer recite: “Goethe’s ‘Ode To Nature’.” He is so moved, as he tells this story in his Autobiography, he decides on his career in that moment–to enter the medical sciences in order “to unveil nature’s mysteries”. A rather tell-tale phrase. Sounds to me like indelicately lifting the chemise of a goddess, in fact, the goddess, Natura, the subject of the Ode. Ironically, he enters the laboratory of Bri cke and has to take the Physicalist Oath. According to Julian Jaynes, the Oath was taken in blood! The Oath was already one of my favorite themes even before I found that out.

Taken in blood?

Taken in blood. Freud moves from the Vitalist Ode to the Physicalist Oath! How symbolic of the issue! I would characterize the mixed discourse in Freud’s authorship as his inability to deal with this split which goes through him. He had a nervous breakdown over it. It is deeper than the cocaine issue, which is interpreted as the great crisis in Freud’s career. No, it is the Physicalist/Vitalist Crisis.

So, for you, the crisis is marked by four stages: 1. the Ode to Nature, 2. the Blood-Oath of the Physicalists, and the Fliess Period, and, 3. after the Cocaine Episode, precipitating his nervous breakdown, 4. the Founder of Psycho-analysis and the rediscovery of consciousness, especially the unconscious.

He wrote a monograph on cocaine which he thought would make him famous. He was wrong. Instead, he was kicked out of the experimental lab. Erikson calls this Freud’s “psychosocial moratorium”, a neat phrase. He is forced to analyze himself in his distress and out of this self-analysis psychoanalysis is born, but the mixed discourse persists, the mixed discourse of Physicalism and Vitalism. Paul Ricoeur has the best discussion of this mixed discourse in his Freud and Philosophy, a book I was proud to edit. He calls it the conflict between “energetics” and “hermeneutics”, or the conflict between a “play of forces” and a “play of meanings”. It is a version of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict. There is much to be said about this, including the strange fate of the Ode.

You helped edit Ricoeur’s book?

I worked on the English with my friend, Denis Savage, who translated it. Ricoeur is an old friend of mine. We met at Harvard. I heard him lecture and liked the way he said “spot”; it sounded like a champagne cork going off, which, for a Frenchman, is pretty good. He was lecturing on the symbolism of evil, which, eventually, became one of his best books under that title. I did my thesis on Freud at Harvard under Erik Erikson and that set me up for Ricoeur and my help with his book on Freud. I also consider him to be the successor to Tillich in terms of philosophical theology and his philosophy of finitude, what he calls “Fallible Man.”  He was given the Paul Tillich chair at the University of Chicago, which confirms this.

So, you think Freud exemplifies the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict?

It goes straight through him. His nervous breakdown is symptomatic of this conflict in the culture. He wanted to make a

career in the Physicalist lab after taking the Oath, formulated by Brucke and DuBois Remond, and he is dismissed and has to re-discover the psyche, from the unconscious to the conscious, after consciousness had been eliminated from scientific psychology as a Vitalist entity: the ghost in the machine. The history of psychoanalysis as a science is riddled with this burden of refuted and rejected Vitalism and the dilemma of consciousness in an industrial society ruled by Physicalism. Consciousness had become psycho-physics with an emphasis on the physiology of perception, a specialty of Helmholtz. Freud partly broke away from this straight-jacket, but he had to pay the price in terms of psychoanalysis as a suspect science, rather like Wilson’s difficulty with sociobiology, when the hard-liners try to close ranks and draw a line in the sand.

So this accounts for your interest in Freud’s Letters To Fliess.

Freud’s Project For A Scientific Psychology, is one of the items in the letters he sent to Fliess. This only came to light in the early fifties and became for me a critical piece in the Physicalist tradition. It was Freud trying to develop a Physicalist theory of consciousness and even he thought it was a force fit. He never gave up Physicalist models: electrical, hydraulic, chemical, mechanical, topological. But he transcended them. Erik Erikson wrote a critical review of the correspondence when it was published which is very insightful. I foolishly traded my copy of the correspondence some years before, when I was at Luther Theological Seminary, for a beautiful hand knit black v necked sweater. Now there is a new edition.

You mean he was still theorizing from the neurone.

He was trying to develop a neuronic concept of consciousness–it defined the field–the attempt at an anatomical or molecular theory of consciousness. It turned out to be as banal as Oparin, as leaps go.

You mean qualitative leaps?

Don’t forget that point. “The Project For A Scientific Psychology” has always represented the watershed for Freud. He calls it a golem, this little consciousness-machine; kick it and maybe it will run, the switch was stuck, this qualitative leap in the neurone. Behaviorism is Physicalist psychology on the condition of the elimination of consciousness, which is psychology without the psyche. Try as he did with his mechanist models, Freud could never make the rediscovery of consciousness fit in with strict science because Physicalism naturally precludes consciousness. That’s how dumb it is.

The leap is too qualitative. What about Goethe’s Ode?

It is a rather odd story. Goethe didn’t compose the Ode, but he thought he had. It entered his authorship uncritically, you might say, when he included it in his canon late in life. It was an old Orphic Hymn to the goddess Natura. Goethe thought he had composed it. That’s what happens when you write a lot, I guess. And if you’re that good you confuse your own stuff with Orphic Hymns. This is a good story in terms of grist for my mill, because it involves Rudolf Steiner. I mean where would you stick him in? He is the Editor of Goethe’s Scientific Writings in the Goethe Archive and he finds this Ode and did the literary-critical work on it showing that Goethe didn’t write it.

It was an Orphic source? Remind me, what is Orphism?

The religion of Orpheus. It is a strong mythical tradition in the West, part of the Platonic Theology. It was a reformation of the Dionysiac orgies–enthusiasm in the service of the god. It has an affinity with Christianity in terms of the Shepherd of Being, a wonderful mythical figure of speech that Heidegger picked up, and the salvation of nature where the lion lies down with the lamb to listen to the songs.

Isn’t that one of your main interests–the Platonic theology?

We can’t go into that now, it would take all our time, but the Eden/Arcadia themes exemplify it. Athens and Jerusalem, Jesus and Socrates, Paul and Dionysius the Areopagite, Orphism and Christianity, these correspondences and relations are my chief interest. Tillich showed me the way in his Columbia University. Lectures: Biblical Religion and the Search For Ultimate Reality. I was a summer student at Union Theological Seminary when he gave the lectures. I was so excited I could hardly breathe. He put the two cultures together for me and they have only become stronger ever since, although when I want a corrective cold shower I re-read Rosenstock-Huessy.

It helped you overcome the Humpty-dumpty problem. the split in the culture which is hard to put together again, But let’s go back to the Orphic Hymn.

I have a great footnote on it from Curtius’ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages:

“Natura is cosmic power. She stands between Zeus and the gods, governs marriage and generations, and through her complaint can intervene in the course of history. Claudian is here close to a late antique theology which has been best preserved for us in the Orphic hymns, a collection made in the third or fourth century by an unknown author, presumably in Egypt or Asia Minor. The tenth hymn is dedicated to Physis. Over eighty predicates of the goddess are compressed into its thirty hexameters. She is the age-old Mother of All; father, mother, nurse, sustainer, all-wise, all-bestowing, all-ruling; regulator of the gods; creator; first-born; eternal life and immortal providence. This universal goddess is not the personification of an intellectual concept. She is one of the last religious experiences of the late-pagan world. She possesses inexhaustible vitality. But what varied masks the Orphic Physis can assume! Among Goethe’s writing on the natural sciences there is a celebrated “Fragment on Nature,” which first appeared anonymously in 1782 or 1783 in the “Tierfurter journal,” which was circulated in manuscript. Goethe writes to Knebel (March 3, 1783) that he is not the author. A few weeks later Frau von Stein announces that the fragment is by Tobler, of Zurich, who had visited Weimar in 1781. In 1828 Goethe saw it again. On May 24 he wrote to Chancellor von Muller: “Although I cannot remember composing these observations, they are quite in accord with the conceptions to which my mind then soared.” Georg Christoph Tobler (1757-1812), however, had translated the Orphic hymn into hexameters. The fragment which appeared in the “Tierfurter Journal” is an analysis and amplification of this translation–with additional matter from Shaftesbury.” pp. 106-7.

See what I mean in terms of what is revealed by an Ode to Nature?   I simply introduce this as part of the scholarly record. Such references and texts can be adduced endlessly, as we speak.

Do you have other examples of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict?

Yes, what Goethe called the Urpflanze or urplant, a kind of metaphysical principle of plant evolution, what I call “the vital root of existence as we mentioned, in terms of the Kantian recoil, a suggestive way of translating urplant and transposing a botanical concept into a metaphysical one as a way of suggesting the symbolic background of Goethe’s quest.

Well, you’re getting a little ahead of me. Let’s back up a bit. Chadwick was a Vitalist in his affirmation of organic nature. Say some more about that.

Think of organic gardening and farming as opposed to industrial or synthetic chemical gardening and farming and the respective methods and procedures they represent. It all turns on soil fertility, organic quality, or organic compost versus synthetic urea. The key is organic as opposed to artificial in the development of synthetic soil additives in terms of fertilizers and pesticides. There is a world of difference, which many people want to play down or disguise. Here’s what Bette Midler has to say about compost: “My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.”

You should get a picture of her with her compost pile. My sister-in-law used to play tennis with her.  I could ask her.  Joseph Beuys thought compost piles were works of art. I have a picture of one of his art piles.  And my old friend, Ernst Winter, I have to mention him here, ran a biodynamic training center in Austria in an old castle or schloss and when he had to give it up and move all he took were his compost piles.

Synthetic urea?

It’s part of the key. Synthetic urea is the basic component in artificial fertilizers and goes back to the actual experiment Physicalists refer to in the refutation of Vitalism. The experiment conducted by Friedrich Woehler in 1828. Everyone who knows me knows this date.

There is nothing like a date.

I found the discussion in the literature as though waiting for me. It explained everything. A date. An experiment. A chemist. A place. A refutation. A defeat. Bingo. The key reference point for my account.

What is the importance of 1828?

I have nailed all my fortunes to this date. It is my main bet. It is the year of the inception of Organic Chemistry, the chemistry of artificial synthesis, the subversion of the integrity of organic nature, the defeat of Vitalism, the triumph of Physicalism, the victory of industrial society, and the problematic of synthetics and artificial productions.

The artificial synthesis of urea?

It is the year in which Friedrich Woehler artificially synthesized urea in Germany. It is the year Vitalism was refuted and everything shifted to Physicalism There were a few hold-outs, like Albert Schweizer, in darkest (Vitalist) Africa–he was practically driven there in his defense of reverence for life, which could be understood as a Vitalist version of the defense of organic integrity, undermined in his time. He is a symbolic figure in this context. He went into penitential retreat over the conflict and the crisis in Europe.

There were others, as you mentioned, especially Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bergson, in France, and his elan vital, and Whitehead, in this country, and his process philosophy, after he had had his fill of Bertrand Russell. Frank Lloyd Wright, of course, and organic architecture, but the trend shifted overwhelmingly in favor of Physicalism and the reduction of all living entities to their physical and chemical constituents. It was all that mattered, pardon the pun. You might as well defend arguments for the existence of God, as defend the Vitalist integrity of organic nature, after 1828. The path was laid out and pursued with ruthless determination. They meant business, hence the blood oath.

I don’t understand. You mean the integrity of organic nature was logically undermined? Can you explain that further?

Logically and then practically. Organic chemistry and industrial society in cahoots. Until Woehler, it was thought you needed an organ to get an organic product; in this case a kidney, to get urea, the nitrogen waste part of urine. Woehler heated up an inorganic substance–ammonium cyanate–and at 100 degrees c., he thought he got organic urea. Guess what he said?

What?

Urea! I found it!

That was it?

That was it. The Archimedian point in the conflict with Vitalism. and the triumph of industrial society. It not only was bought at the price of Vitalism, it was the foundation for the formulation of the notorious blood oath for all of the initiates: “So Help Me Helmholtz!” There was so much blood shed they eventually dropped the Oath as a condition for becoming an Experimental Laboratory Scientist. It was assumed as a matter of course.

You’re kidding.

I’m kidding. But there was an Oath, taken in blood; that I know, from Julian Jaynes. How he knew, I don’t know. He mentions it in his famous book: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Hard to beat for a title. A Loyalty Oath of Physicalists, taken in blood, to smoke out any closet Vitalists who were caught crossing their fingers behind their back. It is reminiscent of the McCarthy inspired Loyalty Oath of the 1960′s, which haunted academics and made many cave in. The Physicalist Loyalty Oath already had been in effect without much attention. As I said, it was assumed you had taken it even if you hadn’t heard of it. Now we would call it a Mission Statement. The key deformation subject is Organic Chemistry, my favorite oxymoron, the chemistry of artificial synthesis. The double-talk gives it away. There is a tell-tale deformation in language when some major obfuscation is needed in order to obscure or dumb-down the issues and confuse things. Here it is the obfuscation between the organic and the inorganic, thanks to the blur of carbon compounds in-between.

In between what?

In between the organic and the inorganic. The distinction collapsed. Chemists like to tell you that artificial doesn’t mean artificial and synthetic doesn’t mean synthetic. Or that synthetic

is identical to organic. That’s another good one. The Big Lie of Physicalism. It’s worthy of a TV Blooper Series. Even Linus Pauling fell for it with Vitamin C, arguing the identity of chemical structure, although I was told recently that he conceded, late in life, the difference between organic and synthetic. Until then, he bought the Tang is Orange Juice line, which follows from factories are plants. I always get my biggest laugh from that one–when they started calling factories plants. Why can’t you make orange juice down at the plant? It is funny, when you think about it, until you get to the squash court in Chicago, where they smashed the atom and took the risk of destroying the universe. That event became the absolute zero point for me.

Aren’t you writing a play about the smashing of the atom?

I’ve thought a lot about it and I actually started a play, with music by the Kronos Quartet, but I haven’t carried it out. The account of Arthur Holly Compton, who headed the project, lends itself to a play, so I put him on the witness stand and incredulously interrogate him. “What do you mean you decided not to tell the Chancellor of the University of Chicago of the risk of destroying the universe and assumed the responsibility on your own?” Questions like that. I became obsessed with the smashing of the atom as the apotheosis of the Physicalist victory when I found out that Fermi was worried about a possible wayward reaction. So he did the math for it in order to determine the risk factor which for me is the mathematical formula for the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society.

You could add that formula to the formula for synthetic urea. So you are fascinated by the chance they took?

Of course. Compton mentions in his memoirs, Atomic Quest, that the worry was there from the start. A nuclear chain reaction, liberating enormous energy might be uncontrollable and blow up those who attempted it. In later calculations, Compton made an error corrected by Kistiakowski–it was a question of straightforward thermodynamics which Compton had used before in calculating the forces that explode flash bulbs in photography. “It is to me a matter of no small interest that the same theoretical formula includes equally a tiny flash bulb and a hydrogen bomb.” p.58. Do you mind if I expand on this some? It is a very telling example of the power of science and technology to destroy the universe.

O.K. Expand away. Then go back to Woehler.

Oppenheimer, who had been recruited to the project, gathered a group of scientists in Berkeley, in 1942, to discuss how the bomb might be made to explode and what its effect would be. He was worried enough to journey to Chicago to see Compton who had gone up to his summer cabin in Northern Michigan, not too far from where my wife and I spend our summers at Cisco Point. He called Compton who invited him to come up to the lake.

“1 will never forget that morning. I drove Oppenheimer from the railroad station down to the beach looking out over the peaceful lake. There I listened to his story. What his team had found was the possibility of nuclear fusion–the principle of the hydrogen bomb. This held what was at the time a tremendous unknown danger. Hydrogen nuclei, protons, are unstable, for they could combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature. But might not the enormously high temperature of an atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen of sea water? Might the explosion of an atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself?

Nor was this all. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might it not be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere? These questions could not be passed over lightly. Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”

Compton and Oppenheimer agree that unless a “firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, these bombs must never be made.” Then comes Compton’s appraisal. “In due time, the calculations gave the firm result that while the nuclei of hydrogen are indeed unstable, the conditions under which they can explode are far removed from anything that can be brought about by atomic explosions. In this sense atomic explosions are safe.”

The key phrase is “far removed”. Not to mention “safe”, now that we know better in terms of the disposal problem of nuclear waste.

O.K. Back to urea. If I understand you rightly, you mean that synthetic urea was a breakthrough rather like artificial intelligence?

Very good analogy. They are on a continuum. Organic nature could be replaced, I like to say, supplanted, pun intended, by Organic Chemistry, as the chemistry of artificial synthesis, just as the human mind can be superseded by computers, a kind of synthetic brain, or artificial intelligence. The whole debate about whether machines can think is part of this confusion between organic and synthetic which the Physicalists try to argue is identical. It is as if they try to impute a kind of virtual or synthetic or artificial “life” to their ontology of death, just to get the sucker to move.

And Woehler began the confusion with his synthesis of urea?

Woehler said his synthetic urea was “absolutely identical” with organic urea. The stupidity is compounded by a continuing array of nonsense formulations palmed off as truth, such as: “Life is nothing more than physical and chemical constituents”, which is all that matters, emphasis on matter. It is the reductionist dumb-down syndrome again. Or “Life is a qualification of dead matter”, in the definition of Oparin, the Russian biologist, which is a variation on Freud’s failed definition of consciousness as a qualitative leap in the neurone. You can hardly believe the wool pulled over your eyes. And yet these failed formulae are axioms for the Physicalists.

So you see the defeat of Vitalism as the loss of the dimension of organic nature?

Vitalism was the hold-out for organs or structures that distinguished organic entities from artificial and synthetic ones as a product of laboratory or manufacturing procedures. Vitalism was defensive about the distinction between organic and

inorganic in the realm of nature, the difference between a carrot and a stone, or, Tang and orange juice.

So organic chemistry ruined all that?

Organic chemistry collapsed the distinction–it was simply a matter of chemical structure with no attention to realms or spheres such as organic and inorganic, in terms of qualitative differences. In fact, it is a fallacy known as metabasis eis allo genos, confusing one realm or dimension with another, the old mixing of apples and oranges. At least they’re fruit.

But are they organic? Ha ha.

You see how silly it can get? Vitalist qualities were considered “occult” which is only worthy of contempt. Think about it: occult qualities? It is reminiscent of the notion of life as “a subtle hoax of nature”, a term I learned from Hans Jonas. It is a great way of putting this issue. I would like to know where he got that from. He makes it clear that the entire movement of science in the modern period is an ontology of death, where life is the great mystery. Science doesn’t know what to do with a mystery like life. The lab and the factory took over from organic nature and the garden. We can mimic it, they said, and you won’t know the difference. So shut up about it. Factories are plants.

Can you give me an illustration?

I just did. How can you beat the factory/plant confusion? “Where are you going, honey?” “Oh, down to the plant”. Call it an identity, if you will, so it can work both ways. Plants became little factories for the making of chemicals, just so you didn’t argue for some life force or vital principle to distinguish them from the big factories which really turned out the stuff. Tang is orange juice. Velveeta is cheese. Remember when they tried to palm off a bread made of wood fiber? It’s one of the few failures in the ersatz column. Ersatz coffee, at least, is called ersatz. Or is it Postum? Substitutions are made on the principle of identity which is a hoax. You see the turnabout? First they call life a hoax of nature and then they give us the hoax of synthetics as the real thing. Synthetic urea, artificial intelligence, mystico-mimetic psychedelics, virtual reality, are all symptomatic key terms for the progression of the Big Lie, based on a series of eliminations: the elimination of Vitalism or the vital force, the elimination of metaphysics and meaningful discourse about aesthetics, ethics, and anything unverifiable, according to experimental laboratory protocols, the elimination of consciousness in reductive behaviorism, and so on. The major event, I have come to appreciate, was the smashing of the atom and the risk they took. This is the Physicalist trend I am keen to identify.

And now there is the possibility of cloning a human being after Dolly, the sheep, and the monkey.

Well, that would do it wouldn’t it. Clinton has tried to put a hold on such research and made some moral pronouncements, but it will happen. Someone once said if there is a door science will open it. The smashing of the atom and the bomb are perfect illustrations, at the risk of destroying the universe. Fermi came in one day and said, “Nah, I don’t think it will happen. Let’s do it!” Kirkpatrick Sale, the author of the Luddite book, had this to say in the Times today:

“But neither he (Clinton) nor Congress will be able to ban the technological imperative that is inevitable in a culture built on the myth of human power and the cult of progress. The essence of this imperative was perhaps best defined by two men who crafted its apotheosis, the atomic bomb.

“When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it,” said Robert Oppenheimer.

“Technological possibilities are irresistable to man,” said John von Neumann. “If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.”

These men were creating a weapon they knew could obliterate the earth. They couldn’t stop.

If the cloning of human embryos is possible–and no one really doubts anymore that it is–it will happen. In a world that not only permits but also commodifies gene-splicing, amniocentesis and in vitro fertilization, there cannot be any lasting legal restraints on any breakthrough in reproductive technology. The history of science is the history of the dominance of technology, establishing its own definitions and boundaries, over settled human societies and ordered perceptions. Nothing suggests that the President or Congress has the power–or ultimately the will–to defy that relentless juggernaut.” New York Times, Friday, March 7, 1997.

So you think science and technology are a relentless juggernaut?

That is exactly what I think.

Is there another illustration you can give?

O.K. Take Kant. He stood there with Goethe at his side, and played dumb, what he would have called “Critical Ignorance”, in a tradition I happen to love, going back to Socrates and the

confession of self-delusion, through Dionysius the Areopagite and Negative or Apophatic Theology, and Nicholas Cusanus and Knowing Ignorance, but which hits the wall with Kant, which we have already mentioned, when Heidegger discusses how Kant recoiled from the (unknown but all too known) vital root. That’s hyperbole of a high order if you know what is meant. Kant tried to line up with the consequences of Newton and Galileo and the mathematization of nature and the philosophical basis for industrial society. It is in figures like Kant that the trend gets its mind, the mind it deserves, it is a very great mind, one of the greatest in the history of thought, but it is a fundamentally flawed mind, one that recoiled from the vital root. I would say that Kant recoiled from the vital root of organic nature, although in Kantian studies it is the vital root of the transcendental imagination, where most people would draw a blank unless they can make their way through the Third Critique: The Critique of Judgement. We have been living out the Kantian Recoil ever since, which I see as an accommodation to industrial society and experimental laboratory science. Husserl is the one who understood this recoil and Heidegger tried to follow it through. I wish I was smart enough to write a book with that title–The Kantian Recoil– following Husserl’s and Heidegger’s lead. Here is something I wrote that I found in my notes:

“Kant’s estimation of Newton is expressed in his elevation of physics and mathematics as the primary science, with biology unequal in scientific status. According to Kant, there was no hope for a ‘Newton of the grass blades.’”

That’s a good reference for Chadwick. For you, he really was a “Newton of the grass blades”.

But for the tide running against us, maybe so, but we were small potatoes, believe me. Newton was probably the smartest guy who ever lived, so he deserves the honors. But Chadwick as a “Newton of the grass blades” is a lovely moniker. If I could only do it over again and if I could have understood what we had in our hands, namely the organic revolution, back to affirming organic integrity, if national recognition had come to Chadwick and what he tried to do in teaching his method then he would have been a “Newton of the grass blades”. The title is so ironic I can hardly bear it. To continue what I wrote:

“Kant stated this as an antinomy of judgment, as though Physicalism and Vitalism were the names for the antinomy: Mechanistic Physicalism without purpose, or purposive Vitalism without Mechanistic Physicalism. It was the conflict of cause and form. As a logician, Kant wanted to make the point clear and he accomplished this to the disadvantage of Vitalism in his celebrated distinction between regulative and constitutive principles, a distinction in value between two sorts of concepts. Causal concepts are constitutive–they cut the mustard, just as they ‘count’ for knowledge; rmal concepts are regulative, merely regulative, inasmuch as purpose or form is only an “idea” or a “heuristic maxim.” We’ll take it is up again in the debate between Goethe and Schiller on the meaning of the urplant which Schiller called “only an idea”.

Is there more?

One more paragraph:

“Therefore, in the Kantian tradition, Physicalism and Vitalism is the conflict between physics and biology, with physics calling the shots, inasmuch as biology is a less objective science.

“He could dwell on the special rights and value of biology but could not assign it the same rank or the same objective value in the hierarchy of knowledge as mathematical and physical knowledge. The latter possessed, and would always possess, a true objectivity, and this distinction could be neither belittled nor disputed.”

Cassirer: The Problem Of Knowledge, p 211

Doesn’t one have to be a student of philosophy to follow these thoughts.

No. Any student will do. I think any intelligent person can see what I am trying to bring to bear on the case I am trying to make. Philosophy provides the formulations germane to the issue, which is what philosophy is for. Why can’t anyone interested in these matters be a student of philosophy? It is open for everyone. It is a field of inquiry and disclosure. So go ahead and be a student of philosophy, no one is stopping you. Read the books. Enter the discussion. Take part in the debate. It is all there for your perusal and enlightenment. Transcend yourself. Don’t get stuck in your little domain where they pull the wool over your eyes. The stakes are so high now as to be insurmountable. As Sale says at the end of his letter: “It will be a chaotic future. Better get used to it.”

So Kant leads to Husserl who leads to Heidegger?

Think about the symbolism of the terms involved. Heidegger’s mourning over “the oblivion of being”, and his concept of “the cancellation of being”, follows in this line. He writes the word–”being”– as crossed out. Kant started it with his argument that existence is not a

predicate. Husserl brackets existence in his famous phenomenological reduction. All of this, to me, reflects the fate of “existence” in industrial society and leads to Existentialism as the protest movement against this fate and the outcry of this fate. In such technical tangles you have major symbolic events illustrative of the course of history and the fate we are supposed to suffer. Here is my point: hardly anyone sees the symbolism because they get stuck in the technical points. I am working this out in a detailed way as a preface to a philosophy and mathematics of chaos. I see chaos thought as a neo-Vitalist development and an unforeseen consequence of the trend of deconstruction and spiritual deformation. It is a key part of the central shake-up and characterizes the age we live in. The affirmation of chaos is a good thing. I hope. We are going to have a lot of it.

Whoa, this is getting more dense than I expected. The Kan tian recoil from the unknown or vital root….? You see this in connection with his famous argument that existence is not a predicate. Let’s get that straight before we go on to chaos.

That’s right! We talked about this. We have touched on that before. These issues turn into philosophical problems but that’s my metier. It all comes out in the wash. I can gloss every point at length, chapter and verse, including graphics. Just keep asking questions. Think of it as a revelation with a variable lag: it will get said! I have twenty-five years invested in this line. I can provide the literature, bibliographies, footnotes, reference works, chapter and verse, you name it. It is a line of thought.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t count your chickens. Forget Kant and the philosophers for the moment. How did you meet Chadwick?

Freya von Moltke arranged it. She said he would do my garden for me. I completely accepted it, as I said. It was a gift. Chadwick was coming back from Australia where he thought he might settle. She knew he wouldn’t like it and she was right. She was his muse. He was very devoted to her. So when we met, I simply asked him: “Will you do a garden for us?” He said: “Yes.”

Then what?

He went downtown, bought a spade and started to dig. He didn’t ask me anything, not where, not when, not how. I found him there digging, in the space he picked, a slope below Merrill College, where the soils seemed terrible, as only poison oak and wild chaparral grew there, but he wanted a slope for a number of reasons, exposure to the sun, drainage, etc., and it was a perfect one. He turned that space into the most fertile garden in the world. He dug and he dug.

How long?

Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two years, before we persuaded him to take a week-end off. You see what I mean about replanting the vital root…? He was on a mission.

And then?

And then, two years later, we took him to Tassajara as a reward–the Zen Mountain Retreat in the Carmel Valley, my friend, Baker-roshi, had started. For a week-end.        loved which The water, the river, the baths, the pool, the Narrows, tI the lfood, it. The bread. It was Shangri-la prepared and ready and waiting.

And he proposed their putting in a garden for him. food needs. garden to supply their basic

That’s when he met Richard and Virginia Baker? .

Yes. They became devoted members of the Chadwick Memorial or whatever you want to call it, morial important part of the history, a very

Chadwick is buried at Green Gulch, the Zen Farm at Muir Beach? .

Yes. They brought a stone up from Tassajara to mark his grave.  They took care of him in a way for which I will be eternally grateful after he contracted incurable cancer of the prostate. They took him back.           ey

Let’s go back to UCSC. OK

You had your garden going/growing by the time of Earth Day One in April of 1970?

Yes. It was a big triumph for us. The garden began anticipate and celebrate Earth Day and the awakening though to environmental movement which was a neo-Vitalist upsurge, a re-affirmation of the integrity of organic nature in the recognition of the dangers posed by industrial society. It was a personal triumph because I had met Gaylord Nelson, the Senator from Wisconsin, during the summer of 1969, on a wilderness wild river canoe trip in Northern Wisconsin. We summer there every year and I was on a sabbatical through the rest of the year. A few months later, I saw him announce Earth Day while watching the TODAY show. I was invited to speak at UC Berkeley, the day before Gaylord spoke, on that great and epoch making weekend of April 22, 1970.

Then what?

Exactly. Life returned to (ab)normal. Now we have celebrated the 27th anniversary. Time marches on. I hate to say it, but in my darker moments I think of Earth Day and the environmental/ecology movements as the death rattle of defeated  Vitalism. The Physicalists thought they had nailed down the lid on the corpse of dead and defeated Vitalism, but the coffin unglued, and the corpse sat up, and made this awful sound for  some decades: unh, unh, unh, unh unh unh.

This is your way of characterizing the environmental movement?

In my despair over the future. It nails my case, to reverse the metaphor: The Environmental Movement As the Death Rattle of Defeated Vitalism. We have a Club of Despair, in Santa Cruz, sort of a cultural Hemlock Society–Mary Holmes, Ralph Abraham, and a few others, are members, but only through affinity–it is not something you would recruit for. We are not exactly without hope–there is always the unexpected to watch out for, as Heraclitus said, but this is hoping against hope, where hope can break the heart, hope can be too strong. I’m thinking now of the lines from “A Lady Is Not For Burning.”

What precipitated this despairing line of thought?

Existentialism. I studied this philosophical movement when I was in school. My teacher–Tillich. was a major exponent and interpreter of it and I was influenced by him. He spoke of the outcry, the protest against industrial society, on the part of Existentialism, in all of its forms–philosophy, literature, drama, the arts. I began to think about the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, the phrase became a mantra, the leitmotif of my thought for four decades. When the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict opened up for me, as a result of the Garden Project vs. the University, I came to see how Existentialism was chief mourner for defeated Vitalism. No one had seen it in this light and it fit perfectly into my sketch.

So existentialism is the movement of thought that picks up where Vitalism left off, mourning, as it were, the consequences for existence of the triumph and then self-destruction of industrial society.

Don’t forget –”the world above the given world of nature..”

Devoid of vital roots.

And the smashing of the atom, in the squash court in Chicago, when Fermi worried about the destruction of the universe, in a possible wayward reaction, that did it for you.

That did it for me.

The zero point of the sketch. Then Existentialism was superseded by the environmental movement?

Exactly. 1970 is as good a year as any to announce the end of Existentialism, especially in its role as chief mourner for defeated Vitalism. First 1828 and the refutation of Vitalism. Then comes Existentialism as Chief Mourner. From 1841-42 to 1970. Those are the dates for the beginning and end of Existentialism. From despair to a very fragile renewed hope. The struggle was re-enjoined. The outcry took on a different note. It was a moment of renewed hope as though something could be done and the age of environmental activism was ushered in. But the extent of self-destruction, just take the single problem of the disposal of nuclear wastes, now seems so intractable, so pervasive, so all-consuming that the re-affirmation of the integrity of organic nature takes on the character of an historical episode, a passing fancy, like the health food movement and medicinal herbs, for instance.

Wait a minute. Before you explain what you mean by that, tell me whether you think the wayward reaction happened anyhow, only in a different form.

I wondered if you would catch that. I have thought about it, partly because the concept of a “wayward reaction” is so compelling. So, in a way, they did their destruction anyhow and the wayward reaction has taken different forms, beginning with the bomb and now the problem of the disposal of nuclear wastes as well as all of the attendant health issues for those who have been exposed to radiation and so on. We’re not out of this destructive path of the wayward reaction by any means. It is a good term for suffering the consequences of what Fermi and Compton did. It sets the standard for the measure of self-destruction and when I found that Fermi had a mathematical equation for the possible wayward reaction, I thought I had found the equation for self-destruction.

Although you are still looking for it. Why is the trend so strong?

The Physicalist stronghold and the grip it has on us is the driving power of our culture, for the most part, and withstands any and all critical assaults. No one is equal to it. It is basically business as usual, with some minor modifications or concessions. Look at the history of the Superfund, as a good example, and the effort to clean up industrial society seepage. It is a juggernaut.

You don’t paint a rosy picture. What did you mean about health foods and herbs as a passing fancy.? Do you mean they are a fad?

The herbal industry has definitely been on a roll and lots of people have made lots of money, but as for the restoration of the botanical basis of health care, forget about it. Hardly a dent. I still wait for the return of the subject matter to the curriculum of the training of health professionals. This would change my mind about the fad phenomenon. Until then, it is still fringe and suspect, in terms of the structure of health education and delivery. There is little hope for an integrative medicine.

You said you see hope in the Chadwick Garden. You said it gave you and others a second chance and yet you despair.

Chadwick did give us a second chance. I don’t deny that, just when we thought it was all over. We were able to step outside of the self-destructive trend and become neo-Vitalists and step into an organic garden and affirm this best of all possible worlds, in spite of the destruction going on around us, and take Goethe’s motto for our own–we were in Arcadia.

Even though you are still a part of the self-destruction?

Of course! Everyone is who lives in this social order. How can you escape it? Now it is worldwide. Look at the effect of Chernobyl on the Lapps and the reindeer, just to juxtapose an ancient native people with an industrial society disaster. The destruction of the rainforests. Acid rain. Mercury contamination. Oil spill. Endangered species. Massive pollution everywhere you look. Think of the difficulty of transforming the oil and gas economy, which is soon to run its course, in order to effect the transition to electricity and solar power–that gives you a good idea of how entrenched the current industrial power structure is. I’ve been involved in electric vehicle technology for about five years and it is very slow in coming about.

Give me an example from your own experience of the self-destructive trend.

One comes immediately to mind. Finally, under Chadwick’s influence, we turned our backyard lawn into a garden and we grew lots of vegetables and salads. I noticed my wife was buying them from the supermarket rather than picking them in our own backyard and I thought, my god, I have to get a supermarket cart and a check out stand in order to go into my own back yard and pick the produce to eat for dinner that night.

You mean you were programmed so completely to buy produce from the store.

Exactly. It was a horrible realization.

Chadwick understood all this?

Completely. He was old-fashioned about it, almost a Luddite. He ranted and raved about the destruction of taste as a symptom of our decline. He ranted and raved about all of the shortcomings we all took for granted. But most of all he would talk about the marvels of natural processes. He would talk about the little electrical-like veins in strawberries and their relation to our taste buds, and on and on. He loved revealing mysteries of nature like the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee which he would act out before a startled audience. There was a quality of a wizard about him. John Cage perceived it. Norman O. Brown recognized it. Jacqueline Onslow-Ford communed with it. John Jeavons was drawn to it. Countless students committed their lives to it. Birds came and sat on his shoulder–I saw it with my own eyes.

Did he drive a car?

It’s one of my best stories. He drove a bicycle. A sturdy Raleigh. Then someone gave him a car and on the driver’s door was painted: ╥This Too Can Be Yours╙. One day he was going down Bay Street from the campus and a policeman stopped him for speeding, five miles an hour over the limit. Chadwick got out of the car, flipped him the keys, pointed to the sign on the door, and said, “You can read!”, and stalked off. The officer told him to stop and pulled his gun on Alan, who proceeded to walk over, disarm the officer, hit him, knock him down, throw the gun away, and leave. Well, he had to appear in court. When the judge heard the story and looked at this Shakespearean thespian in his finest blue serge suit that actually looked like a reject from Good Will, he called the officer over and bawled him out–”You arrested this distinguished gentleman, you drew your gun on this distinguished gentleman, you were disarmed by this distinguished gentleman–he took your gun away? You should be ashamed of yourself.”–and dismissed the case.  We all cheered and should have carried Alan out on our shoulders.

Didn’t you box with Chadwick once in a while?

Much to my regret. He was like a Tasmanian Devil. He came at you like a windmill gone mad, arms all flailing with a wild fury. He liked throwing clumps of soil at students just to be a mean tease and I remember when Rory lobbed one back and hit Chadwick right on the bean. It was a moment. Chadwick liked him after that. He liked it when you stood up to him, took in the fire, got some steel in your spine. He tested your mettle and almost no one at the university even knew what that was. I watched boys become men under the pressure.

What were the main influences on Chadwick?

His mother was an Anthroposophist, as the story goes, and Rudolf Steiner visited their estate called Puddleston, which we thought no longer existed, but has been restored by a wealthy family.  My friend, Alan’s grand nephew, Richard Senior, visited there and showed me photos of its restoration. Chadwick told me he received some lessons in raspberry production from Steiner when he was a boy, although you didn’t know if he made it up, he was such a Baron Munchausen. I didn’t really think that, other people did.  I enjoyed the Chadwick Myth and reveled in the legendary.  The Steiner influence was infra dig; he never made much of it. The Garden spoke for itself. It was a place of incomparable beauty and fecundity–you could see the Great Chain of Being there and climb right up to heaven. I used to get up early and go up at sunrise and pick flowers with the students. Those were the days. All the flowers were set out in a kiosk across from the garden and anyone could pick up a bouquet for their office on their way in to the campus and students would come down and get bouquets for their rooms. Once you saw the sacrifice behind this give-away you never got over it–it initiated me into thinking long and hard about an economy of gift. Everything was given away. It was my initiation into an economy of gift which returned to me in the Homeless Garden Project.

What did you think of the students at UCSC.

They were wonderful. I called them “Oceans of Desire”. It was a good metaphor, expressive of the ’60′s, when an awesome longing went up from so many, albeit with a psychedelic edge. It was another lament for me because the institution was not in tune with it. The longing went unsatisfied. The University was simply waiting for critical mass when the place would click as another campus in the system of campuses. And, of course, the Vietnam War politicized it and the repression set in. I went back up a few years ago, sort of sneaked back in and gave a course with Ralph Abraham in the History Of Mathematics, on one of our favorites–John Dee, the philosopher, mathematician, and visionary, of the British Empire, under Queen Elizabeth I.

It must have been strange for you.

I felt like Rip Van Winkle. Over twenty years had passed. And my red beard had turned white. It took me a few days to get the new metaphor that described the new generation of students and then it came to me like a revelation–”Abandoned Waifs”. To effect the look, they get their clothes from discard boxes at laundromats. Grunge is in. My nephew, Willard Ford, who was in the class, took me aside after the first lecture and told me to watch out what I said. He wanted to caution me. I innocently asked why. He said everything was monitored for racism, sexism, and class. He said it like an ideological formula. I thought I had stepped into Brave New World or Animal Farm, the University had become a negative utopia. I said you mean the content of the course is incidental to my stepping on a politically incorrect land mine or into just plain dog shit? “Sure”, he said. “Wake up, Rip!” From then on, I hallucinated a snapped shut sphincter hovering over the students’ heads in the classroom, like a surrealist painting, as if taunting me to poke it to see just how snapped shut–a far cry from the openness and generosity of spirit of decades before: from “oceans of desire” to “abandoned waifs”.

So your career was sacrificed on the altar of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict?

That’s what people tell me. How could I be tolerated at a college devoted to natural science and pursue the line of thought I had discovered? Besides, I was identified with Religious Studies as the Founding Chairman, which almost none of the scientists at my college wanted to support, and I taught in the Graduate Program-the History of Consciousness–which the scientists thought was just more frou frou. So I had three strikes against me.

It sounds like the entire knowledge production system was organized against you.

It looks that way. It was a bitter pill to swallow to get drummed out over publish or perish as the cover story for my starting an organic garden, after I had cut my teeth at Harvard and M.I.T .

So you have developed the Physicalist/vitalist conflict into a major critique of the organization of knowledge, the fate of botany as a science, the hardening of what counts for knowledge under the model of experimental laboratory protocols and the sequence

of events in terms of the steps characterizing the Physicalist victory.

The history is pretty clear. There is an account given by Hayek in his: The Counter Revolution Of Science, although we can begin the thread of our historical narrative with an account of the development of botanic gardens in the Renaissance and the establishment of scientific academies. The development can begin with Francis Bacon and his reorganization of knowledge–The Great Instauration– which we can pursue when we develop the theme of the rise of botanic gardens in the Renaissance: from the Garden of Eden and the recreation of paradise in great civic botanic gardens in the transition from medieval herb gardens to the development of scientific academies and the eventual triumph of Physicalism. Hayek describes how the French technical schools created a new type of human being– the technical engineer of industrial society. This was the outcome and triumph of the Physicalist trend: the French engineer.

So the Botanic Garden/Arcadian/Edenic beginnings of the modern period in the European Renaissance prepared the way for the development of industrial society and technocracy?

Precisely. These are the critical themes for my sketch. Francis Bacon is a key figure as is John Dee. The English Renaissance is a focal point because the themes are so powerful, given Elizabeth I as the guiding light of the movement. It was an incredible period. Dee is the tail end of the hermetic tradition and Bacon is where it turns around, although the esoteric symbolism is still intact, represented by the alchemy of Newton. It is as if the esoteric, occult side, is a symbol of the historical ferment, out of which a new world was being born, the brave new world that would lead to industrial society, the world of science and technology. Bacon was an initiate into these mysteries, the secrets of Arcadia, nurtured by a brotherhood of poet-scientist-adepts of which Dee is the relatively unknown central symbolic figure. All the occult streams, indicative of this brotherhood, converge in him. He is the Renaissance Magus. I take great pleasure in saying I know something about this period and its meaning because it takes a long time for the meaning to come clear. Much of it is still unknown territory for me, the ciphers, the actual practise of alchemy, and angel-conjuring, but there is so much information and interpretation available it is now possible to enter this arcane world and not get completely lost.

Why was Dee consigned to obscurity and everything he represented?

It is a question of the occult and the esoteric going underground, being repressed, and rejected. King James is a good example in his effort to suppress witchcraft. It is definitely a turning point. Causabon, the editor of Dee’s angel-conjuring diaries, is a good example of the debunking that set in with his accusation that Dee was a dupe as well as a charlatan, especially in his angel conjuring and his subordination to Kelly, his skryer–the technical term for crystal ball gazing or angel conjuring–Dee’s sidekick, who had a very bad reputation and was punished by having his ears cut off, so he wore a funny cap to cover the holes on either side of his head. It didn’t help that Dee was imprisoned under Queen Mary for being a sorcerer. He was lucky to have survived.

So the trend is a reductionist trend, leading to the French engineer who knows nothing of these occult streams in his service to industrial and technical society.

Once you focus on Dee as the end of the occult stream, the end of the polymath and the adept, in almost everything and go through Newton, who, even though he was a devoted alchemist, kept it all in the closet and away from public view, as if he knew the times had changed and occult sciences had to go underground or be abandoned, and then on to the French, after the Revolution, the stage is set with the scenes and actors in place. When they put the image of Athena, as the goddess of wisdom, on the altar of the Royal Abbaye of St. Denis, after emptying out the royal tombs and throwing the bones of the Kings and Queens of France in the surrounding ditches, that was it. Sacrilege was the order of the day.

So the plantocrat anticipated and preceded the eventual technocrat and there is a direct line from the botanic garden to the experimental laboratory anyhow.

I’ll get to that. We’ll go back to the establishment of botanic gardens in the European Renaissance and their ambiguity in terms of the conflict between the restoration of paradise or Eden and the origins of natural science which gives us the transition from plantocrat to technocrat. Note the irony. First, the theme of Eden and Arcadia, represented in world-wide exploration and the period of the plant hunters, who are looking for Eden and every new species they can find, especially plants of medicinal and commercial value. Second, the civic botanic garden as the compromise when they failed to locate the geographical Eden. Build your own Eden right here in the middle of town and plant it with the new species brought back by the hunters.

Third, the development of science within the botanical gardens as the seed beds for astronomy and chemistry. The trend is clear. Once you get to the French Academies and especially the development of the Ecole Polytechnique, as stated by Hayek and others, the curriculum precluded the humanities and thus eliminated what makes a person educated in the classical sense.

Hence, the obtuse engineer of industrial society, basically a know-nothing when it comes to culture, who could care less about the consequences.  Just give me a bridge to build.

So the technical or Physicalist trend had an effect on the organization of knowledge already in the 18th century?

A wholesale effect. In fact, it set up the bargain counter sale of the humanities. Hannah Arendt has a great phrase for the sell-out sale on the bargain counter of Western thought–the humanities end up at a garage sale; it sounds terrific in German, but I can’t re-locate it or I would quote it. I have pieced together the narrative line of my account from a variety of sources. Once you get the drift you can find the missing pieces–they appear as though summoned. The sequence of the literature is one of my best efforts. There is a story to be told and a host of scholars who have contributed to it. The key made it possible for me to elaborate the line, key added to key, from the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict and the synthesis of urea , to the themes of the Ontology of Life versus the Ontology of Death, to the role of Existentialism. It is one finely explicated cultural history with the history of great botanic gardens as a backdrop, including the themes of Eden and Arcadia. Finding Armytage was a big help. And then Hayek. They gave me the development of the garden academies and the plantocracy into the technical education of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Industrial Engineer. The French botanic garden is where they come together. It is one of the highest triumphs of French culture.

Continue the line.

“Technology had found its clerisy in the academies –220 of them by 1790. …Collecting, measuring and examining everything they could see or lay hands on, these academicians devised telescopes and microscopes, experimented, travelled and wrote.

Though such groups appeared at the same time and in the same places as the botanic gardens, they were in every sense, discrete. And they become more discrete as they wrote about, as well as to, each other. In the eighteenth century theirs was truly a commanding world view. …’an international general staff endowed with a strong esprit de corps’. ”

This is Armytage, who tells the story up to Hayek, whom he quotes, in The Rise of the Technocrat. Hayek makes it clear that it was in France that the scientific intellectual appeared as a new type of man of the emerging technology, with training at the Ecole Polytechnique, a school set up to produce and train the new type. The military metaphors are not just arbitrary either–it was a type of war and it laid the foundations for the military-industrial combine, Eisenhower is famous for exposing. A war against nature and then a war between contending super-powers. Here is what it took to produce such a human being to serve such a machine or The Pentagon of Power, as Mumford calls it:

“Its physico-centric curriculum (students studied mathematics, physics and chemistry exclusively) produced a new type of man, ‘appearing’, according to Professor Hayek, ‘for the first time in history’. Having never learned to interpret human life or growth in terms of mankind’s literary past (since their training did not include history, literature, or languages), they tended to see life in scientific terms. As its self-appointed spokesman Count Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825), expressed it: ‘We must examine and co-ordinate it all from the point of view of Physicism’. ‘Physicism’ according to Saint-Simon would need a new physical ‘clergy’ to both interpret and organize society on scientific lines.” “Thus a whole generation grew up to whom that great storehouse of social wisdom, the only form indeed in which an understanding of the social processes achieved by the greatest minds is transmitted, the great literature of all ages, was a closed book. For the first time in history that new type appeared which as the product of the German Real Schule and of similar institutions was to become so important and influential in the later nineteenth and the twentieth century: the technical specialist who was regarded as educated because he had passed through difficult schools but who had little or no knowledge of society, its life, growth, problems and values, which only the study of history, literature and languages can give.” Hayek: p. 196

“It has been well described how the whole of the teaching at the Ecole Polytechnique was penetrated with the positivist spirit. The very type of engineer with his characteristic outlook, ambitions, and limitations was here created. That synthetic spirit which would not recognize sense in anything that had not been deliberately constructed, that love of organization that springs from sources of military and engineering practices, the aesthetic predilection for everything that had been consciously constructed over anything that had ‘just grown,’ was a strong new element which was added to–and in the course of time even began to replace–the revolutionary ardor of the young politicians.” p. 202-3

You must jump in your seat when you find such passages. They are like buzz words for your synthetic construction versus organic growth.

Yes, it’s true. It is like a treasure hunt. The step from Williams to Prest to Armytage to Hayek to Voegelin is one fine progression of thought, let me tell you, all grist for my mill and don’t forget, I went from Harvard to M.I.T., to teach humanities because they wanted to put a little frosting on the nerd, so we gave them Homer.

Who do you recommend for the clearest presentation of the spiritual deformation under Physicalism?

I think Eric Voegelin is the best for the most succinct understanding. He makes it clear why the spiritual dimension, the dimension of depth, as Tillich called it, the dynamics of ultimate concern, flattened out and became banal. Tillich was equally prescient and so was Rosenstock Huessy. They make one rare trio of thinkers on this issue and I consider them my finest teachers, along with Howard Hong, at St. Olaf, the great Kierkegaard scholar, who was my first teacher of philosophy and my guiding light.

What does Voegelin have to say?

Here is Voegelin’s summary:

“The symbols of ideological dogmatism dominating the contemporary thought of Western societies do not express the reality of knowledge but the rebellion against it. They do not attempt to draw men into participation by persuasion; rather, they constitute a language of obsession designed to prevent the contact with reality, a language developed by men who have closed themselves against the ground. The access to consciousness as man’s center of order is blocked massively by the ideologies of Positivism, Marxism, historicism, scientism, behaviorism, also by means of psychologizing and sociologizing, by world intentionalistic methodologies and phenomenologies. For in the symbolism of the rebellions one cannot find the logos of the reality of knowledge, unless it be in the mode of second reality which is present even in the rebellion and its symbols, but which can be recognized as such only from the reality of knowledge. The nihilistic rebellion cannot be overcome on its own level of experiences and symbols, for instance, by means of a criticism of ideology, culture, or the times, as attempted by intellectuals who no longer feel easy in their situation. Such attempts can lead only to a confused stirring around in the nothingness of lost reality. The non-noetic thought about order of the kind that rebellion produces offers no point of contact to the noesis. Anamnesis, p. 187-88.

What does noesis mean?

It is the Greek word for knowledge. Logos and noesis are structurally related. Logos is the rational order of reality which makes language possible and noesis is the rational faculty for knowledge. This classic order is now under attack by deconstruction and its criticism of logo-centrism and the onto-theological tradition–my tradition! I can see now how Kierkegaard is a key figure in this development. His pseudonymous authorship takes on a new meaning in the light of Voegelin’s remarks, as though hypothetical or fictitious figures appear on the scene who have no reality or I should say no historical actuality. They are representatives of the disturbed bourgeois intellectual who are devoid of the inwardness and spiritual subjectivity his Edifying Discourses address. Once you get the sense of the damage done to human spirituality you start to wonder about the dark side of the science establishment.

Do you think science is evil?

I have thought about it for a long time. It is an irresistible conclusion, once you get the drift. Clearly, not science as such. But this specific ideological trend within science generally, what is known as scientism: the ideological stronghold of science that has become all-consuming and is now under a strong attack–Physicalism. There is clearly an evil side to it in its anti-spiritual revolt. And it has brought us to the late stage of the self-destruction of our society–industrial society. Karl Jaspers is the only one I know who has addressed the problem head on. He has an essay entitled: “Is Science Evil?” He backs off and doesn’t carry it through. Erich Voegelin has more courage. In his “The Origins of Scientism”, he gets positively nasty. He calls the Physicists eunuchs, having undergone castration of their spiritual life in order to enter the ranks and take the Oath, the castrati of Saint Simon’s clerisy, the version of a modern priesthood. Instead of a monastic vow, they take the Physicalist Oath. He puts the issue as well as anyone in his formulation of the scientistic creed:

1. the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform;

2. that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena;

3. that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary, nonsense, in terms of technical logic.

4. (I would add a fourth) constructed models that are self-referential as no one has a clue about a real reference–reality is what anyone thinks it is–it is up for grabs.

He would be the first to go on record in the affirmation that science is evil in this precise sense of positivistic scientism, what is known as Physicalism. He calls it an intellectual attitude that draws on the prestige of the mathematized sciences in the service of an antispiritual revolt for the purpose of civilizational destruction. That is as well as the matter can be put. It is what Page Smith meant by killing the spirit, even though he restricted his critique to the University and higher education.

Voegelin also cites Hayek’s: “The Counter-Revolution of Science” and “Scientism and the Study of Society.” Economica, vol. 8 and 9-11.

He makes it clear that “we are still far from a full comprehension of the social and political disaster that scientism has worked and still is working, and we are equally far from a full understanding of the sources from which the movement draws its strength.” This is exactly what I have concentrated on for the last forty years.

Didn’t you know Voegelin at Harvard?

Yes, I was teaching at M.I.T., when he was giving courses at Harvard and I went over to hear him lecture. You had the sense that he could communicate sources like no one else. Aristotle is very difficult to understand and Voegelin could deliver him on a plate. Blue plate special. He had been a big influence on me because I was at sea at Divinity School, studying for my exam in Old Testament theology, which was a mass of confusion, when his first volume of Order and History came out: Israel and Revelation. It was the answer to a prayer. He is one of the best interpreters of the history of cultural symbolism I have ever read. As I mentioned, I have had a series of great teachers: Howard Hong, Paul Tillich, Paul Ricoeur, Erich Voegelin, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and Hans Jonas, all of whom I had the good fortune to know personally, with the exception of Jonas. I had coffee with Voegelin after every lecture when he would hold court with a few graduate students who would ask him if so and so was a gnostic, which I found very tiresome. Voegelin had a bad side which was his politics, a very profound version of William Buckley, whom I abhor and he had a big stick to hit the spooks with and the spooks were the gnostics, all the know-it-ails in the history of thought, but for him. I should probably be more careful about this as I have not made a study of his political thought and my uninformed opinion is an impression made on me from Voegelin’s critics. I don’t want it to cloud my appreciation for his work in cultural symbolism.

Would you say that Voegelin is your best interpretive source for the theme of the self-destruction of industrial society?

Yes, thanks for asking that. It has vexed me for years-how to adequately describe the dynamic or even demonic structure of self-destruction, which is actually how Tillich defines the demonic. Here is just one quote from Voegelin that expresses the point well:

“Under the impact of the modern advance of science, however, this core [of rational-utilitarianism] has acquired the characteristics of a cancerous growth. …the mass creed that the utilitarian dominion over nature through science should and will become the exclusive preoccupation of man, as well as the exclusive determinant for the structure of society. In the nineteenth century this idea of utilitarian exclusiveness crystallized in the belief that the dominion of man over man would ultimately be replaced by the dominion of man over nature, and that the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. At this point we have to guard against the error into which critics of the totalitarian movements have fallen so frequently–the belief that an idea is politically unimportant because philosophically it is stark nonsense. The idea that structure and problems of human existence can be superseded in historical society by the utilitarian segment of existence is certainly plain nonsense; it is equivalent to the idea that the nature of man can be abolished without abolishing man, or that the spiritual order can be taken out of existence without disordering existence. Any attempt at its realization can lead only to the self-destruction of a society.”

This is the evil that is science or Physicalism?

As Voegelin says: “Here we can see in the raw the fascination of power that exudes from the new science: it is so overwhelming that it blunts one’s awareness of the elementary problems of human existence; science becomes an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”

And then to add insult to injury, the notion prevails that obvious calamities which accompany the age of science must be cured by more science. I’m sure that Kenneth Thimann, the Provost of my college at UCSC, Crown College, thought this about the consequences of Agent Orange. Science produced it and more science will take care of it. Just be patient. Which is difficult to

tell a patient suffering from its effects.

Is there an evil side to Vitalism?

That is an interesting question. On a trip to Pittsburgh, while visiting my friends, the Von Eckartsbergs, a friend of theirs who is into philosophy of science starts to chat and I tell her about my interest in the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict in the system of the sciences and she says: “Oh, you’re interested in Nazi Science!” That was a jaw dropper. Nazi science was Vitalist. It skewed everything for a moment. There is a recent book, very muddled and wrong-headed, almost a caricature of a scholarly work, as if done by a perverse comedian, on the involvement of the Nazi movement in Steiner’s biodynamics through Rudolf Hess who was an Anthropop. So you see how hard it is to keep things straight or your head screwed on right.

Wait a minute. You didn’t ans wer the question. Is Vitalism evil or does it have an evil

element?

If Vitalism was restored in Nazi science, then, of course, there were evil aspects. Nazi science was evil. I don’t know enough about it, but for the book I mentioned, which is so garbled it is impossible to untangle. I refer to Vitalism as the representative of organic nature and what Physicalism refuted and renounced. You asked and I can think of a counterpart example which I gave, but that doesn’t falsify the central meaning as I use the term, although anything touched by Nazism is tainted. It is undoubtedly partly why the term is difficult to reclaim.

But don’t you make that judgment about Physicalism, which you seem to see as a unitary

phenomenon.

This is a very important opener. I can see a whole nest of issues through the opening which I would have to think through and have not done so. I gave you the original lump, the various affiliated trends or points of view, early on. To enter into a critique of Physicalism would entail a very detailed study. I have two recent books on the subject with an enormous bibliography. It would take some months just to get up to speed on the literature of Physicalism, but I don’t have the interest to enter the technical discussons. It is boring to me. I would have to study Willard Van Ormand Quine, who is considered the leading philosopher of the subject, my enemy. I would rather eat tripe, the only food that makes me sick. So it is a standard philosophy of science subject matter. I admit I gloss over all that and mostly use the term as a key to the subject matter at its most formal, which is why I was dismayed that Kuhn, whose death was announced today, by the way, did not fill out the historical case. His New York Times obituary even mentions his interest in the historical case; he used simple anecdotal or illustrative examples rather than the broad sweep of the two contenders I see as paradigmatic. It is too bad because Physicalism and Vitalism would have given such teeth to his work, although, as I said, I can see why he didn’t do it because he would have been so partial to Physicalism. His formalistic account lacks the cultural context of the sociology of knowledge.

So you sweep up the issues into a generalized discussion of Physicalism and Vitalism hoping not to distort the issues too much through over-simplification.

That’s a good way to put it. I hope I succeed. But at what? At this level, this interview, it is simply a matter of talking about it. I would have to write a carefully constructed account in order to make my case. This interview is the easy way. Here I can sketch it out and hope the reader takes it from there or waits for any improved sequel. It is more a matter of opening the issue, looking down from above, reluctant to enter the fray, although that should be done, but it would take so much time, painstakingly working out the issues step by step, from either side. I have to admit, I don’t have time for that. I give the schematic and that provides a basic orientation.

I can see that there is a certain level of discussion you have carved out for yourself, a certain level of cultural analysis, where it is not necessary to exhaust the meaning of key terms in order to know what they mean. It is like using the word idealism, hopefully correctly, which is seldom the case, without entering the ocean of materials on the debate over what it is and what it means.

Most academics have their guns cocked ready to shoot as soon as someone says the equivalent of “bird”. Tillich can help here in his distinguishing between two types of meaning: definitional and configurational. I like the second type even though it is not as esteemed as the former. It is the old conflict between univocal and equivocal, to which Paul Ricoeur has devoted so much thought in his work on hermeneutics and his interest in symbol and metaphor. Specificity of meaning and a gestalt of meaning are the two sides: nail it down versus let it breathe. Meaningful pictures of issues are often more instructive than formal definitions, although that’s where cognitive knowledge in the form of propositional content nails the point. Unfriendly interlocutors can always play dumb and say: “I don’t see it.” They don’t get the picture. I would prefer one illuminating anecdote to one verifiable proposition, but I have always been more daydreamer than logician.

I also see that you try to reach a larger audience than a strictly academic one and address yourself accordingly to bring them into the story or the account, and then they can go peruse the literature however they care to and make up their own mind.

I don’t see this material taught within a university context because there are too many vested interests involved to get a free hearing and besides it is too generalist, as you say, too interdisciplinary and that is completely against the trend. So my only hope for a hearing is with a wide and fairly well-educated audience who will take me at my word and, as you say, make up their mind. The university is like a prison when it comes to ideas like these.

I suppose you are familiar with Foucault’s discussion of society as a prison?

Yes, it is germane here. I was thinking of him, in fact. I am fond of the superb summary of this theme in Habermas and his discussion of Foucault–how the French, in a given year in the 17th century, over a few months, rounded up all the social undesirables in Paris and locked them up and how the penal institution became the measure of social structure. Voegelin ends his piece on scientism on a reverse Foucault note–the insane have succeeded in locking the sane in the asylum. He notes that the “scientistic utilitarian dream of transforming society into a prison from which no escape was possible began to take shape after the middle of the eighteenth century in the works of Helvetius and Bentham.” (p. 494.) The possibilities of personal escape into the freedom of the spirit was what Chadwick’s Garden represented to a generation of students. This was the liberating effect of “flower-power” and an “economy of gift”, based on an “ethic of superabundance”.

Isn’t there a Chadwick style garden at the San Francisco Prison?

Yes. It is a famous project run by Catherine Sneed, although none of the convicts can eat any of the produce they grow. Can you beat that? The prison only allows for pre-processed institutional food, which, when you think of it, sounds consistent. Why give criminals good organic produce even if they grow their own? All of the organic farm produce is sold on the market. Although it defies belief, it is what you might expect.

So Chadwick was a gift and he gave it all away as a gift.

He taught me the meaning of the principle of plenitude in an economy of gift, where you have it spilling over in your lap, heaped up, more than enough for everyone, as in the words of the Apostle Paul: the ethic of superabundance. I take this very seriously. The slogan for this economy of gift is “too much zucchini”, which is always the case if you have ever grown any.

Doesn’t “too much zucchini” refute theories of the limitation of food production like Malthus?

Chadwick and his food production system–the Biodynamic and the French Intensive– is the refutation of Malthus. But you have to remember, the Chadwick System is dependent on an economy of gift, not the economy of greed and scarce resources that Malthus depended on in his population theory. Malthus is the bad penny in the capitalist camp. Paul Ricoeur describes the Chadwick economy of gift in his essay on “The Golden Rule.” I was looking through an old manuscript I started and didn’t finish about our first nonprofit–U.S.A. (University Services Agency). It is called “How To Become A Spiritual Millionaire, Where Money Is No Object.” I was amazed to find some of the seeds of these themes in the text which is over twenty-five years old. I plan to finish it and put it on my home page on the Internet.

I know that this leads into your association with J. C. Penny and the Golden Rule theme and so on, but let’s leave that for later. What about Goethe? You refer to him as the source for the Chadwick tradition.

Goethe was one of the major Vitalist figures of the 18th- 19th centuries, which makes him a central reference point. The link to Goethe, for us, was Rudolf Steiner, whose system of food and flower production–Biodynamics–Chadwick practiced. This represented the Vitalist tradition I am at pains to elaborate. Goethe was the inspiration for Steiner, so we had a Vitalist line from Goethe through Steiner to Chadwick. We should have had a baseball team; we could have specialized in triple plays.

Wasn’t Steiner an editor of Goethe’s writings?

Steiner was the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings as a young scholar at the Weimar Archive and because Goethe was a great botanist and wrote extensively on botany and even coined the term “morphology”, Steiner picked up Goethe’s botany as the source for his Biodynamics.

This is an inference on your part?

Of course. I assume that Steiner, as Goethe’s editor, familiar with his botanic writings, developed Biodynamics out of this interest. Think of the symbolic aspect. Goethe loses in his effort to refute Newton on optics and a theory of color and tries to stabilize botany against the Newtonian assault and he gets a clairvoyant–Rudolf Steiner–one of the most controversial figures of the next century– to carry the ball with his botanical interests. This spiritualist direction of Vitalism is very difficult to assess as Steiner is such a mixed bag as is the case with anything occult and esoteric. To anyone unsympathetic, it looks like a form of insanity. But, in Steiner’s case, there was such a strong creative impulse in so many diverse areas, he commands a certain measure of respect. I am always drawn to the analogy in architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright and the theme of the organic. I was amazed to learn long ago that Olgivanna, Wright’s last wife, was a student of Gurdieff, who was another representative of the esoteric tradition and even more controversial than Steiner, partly because he was a tyrannical bully.

But you seem to emphasize the scholarly side of Steiner and his relation to Goethe as the source for the Vitalist stream that came to Santa Cruz.

Steiner was very much aware of the Vitalist orientation of Goethe, as evidenced, for instance, in his effort to refute Newton’s Optics, in his experiments with prisms and his theory of color. Steiner wrote a good book called: Goethe The Scientist. I’ll bet it isn’t read by anyone in higher education today where Steiner is universally ignored, let alone the scientific interests of Goethe, although there is some scholarly literature on the color theory. Goethe saw Newton as the bad guy–the Arch-Physicalist, in spite of his closet alchemical interests, which Goethe would have shared. Here there is a funny cross-over. Goethe trying to be a scientist and expending vast effort on it with painstaking experiments and Newton spending more time in the closet on alchemy than anything else and trying to keep it all secret because it defied the law of gravity.

I can see how these themes lead into endless tributaries and unending inquiries.

You have to realize that some of this is my own construction built upon what I have learned from the sources over the years. I can pretty well pinpoint what I have formulated and what I have relied upon in the literature as the foundation for my studies. I have a good retention of the scholarly discussion which I continue to pursue. After twenty-five years, the list of references gets to be a burden, although I have an appetite for it that grows by what it feeds on. I was just thinking of a book I recently read about the Newton/Goethe color/optics conflict, a great early instance of the Physicalist/Vitalist theme. The bibliography has item after item I would like to read, just on the color theory issue, some of which I have pursued. When you are teaching you get the chance to offer a course or a seminar on such subjects and that gives you the chance to work up the material. I lost that opportunity over twenty-five years ago, so much of my discussion is cursory and lacking in scholarly acumen which research for courses provides as well as discussion with students and colleagues.

What did you learn about the Goethe/Newton conflict?

I remember finding out that Edward Land thought Goethe was right and Newton was wrong and that he had spoken and written on the issue. I called Polaroid to get copies of his articles but they never arrived. Anyhow, I know where to find them. This is an example of the never-ending character of two major ideologies, one victorious in the defeat of the other–the discussion has no end. It is not my interest to penetrate any of the technical discussions, partly because I lack the competence to do so, but it is my interest to be informed of them and pursue them sufficiently so I am familiar with the issues and the scholarly discussion.

So the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict has had great organizing power for your studies?

Very much so. I think it is the key development in the history and philosophy of science and it is so neglected because most scholars line up with Physicalism and the victory over Vitalism as a foregone conclusion. There is no contest. It was decided over a century and a half ago. The defeat and refutation of Vitalism is like beating a dead horse which is a terrific metaphor especially if one thinks of the paper by Freud and the description in Dostoievsky. Physicalist scientists don’t see the implications for the undermining of organic nature and the move from the garden to the lab, from organic integrity to artificial synthesis. It is the classic case of paradigm formation in the structure of scientific revolutions: this is the revolution, which Kuhn never specified in his famous book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as we mentioned. He formalized it as though he acceded to the fait accompli. of the victory of Physicalism over Vitalism. He wasn’t going to get caught up in a defense of Vitalism as an acceptable paradigm in order to dramatize and exemplify the revolution in the very historical cases that are the point. I wrote to him about his ignoring the historical case that exemplified his thesis but he never responded. Hardly anyone wants to defend Vitalism, as such, because it is the name of a defeated and rejected point of view–a dead horse. Then it revived in the environmental and ecology movements as the great criticism of industrial society after the Earth Day celebration in 1970.

Do you ever wonder if you’re wrong?

I’m reminded of a talk I gave on the subject at Barnard, at the invitation of Elaine Pagels. Her husband, Heinz Pagels, was in the audience. He was a famous physicist, very tall, very imposing. He was the first to raise his hand and I thought to myself, “oh boy, here it comes”. He got up and said: “Professor Lee, the reason Vitalism lost is because it was wrong!” He said the last word as if it was a winning world series pitch, although for me it was a bean ball. I didn’t know what to say and I was too tired to duck.

Well?

I guess I didn’t make a very good case for my view. It is hard to defend a defeated point of view such as Vitalism, especially against a smart physicist. And right and wrong is not the issue for me. This question could open up a larger discussion which leads to one of my favorite themes–the confession of self-delusion. I have learned about the meaning of this confession from Mark’s Gospel and Socrates and the tradition of Negative Theology, also known as Apophatic Theology, represented by Dionysius the Areopagite and Nicholas Cusanus. But this is a particular theme in terms of a special tradition of mystical theology, where self-delusion is a consequence of original sin. I may be wrong about certain facts I have tried to memorize by carefully checking again and again to make sure I have the date right, like 1828. If I had that wrong, say, it would be stunningly embarrassing to me. Such things happen. I may be more off base than wrong about the identity of synthetic and organic urea. I have worried about that and haven’t been able to carry it through to my satisfaction.

You mean synthetic and organic urea could be identical? Wouldn’t that ruin your case?

It would be the difference between arguing at a theoretical level regarding the fate of the integrity of organic nature and a particular aspect or experiment in the history of science. The drift is clear to me even without the hold-out over the identity or difference of synthetic and organic in the case of urea or anything else. I have to penetrate to a level of comprehension of the issues which I feel I have not achieved.

Where else might you be wrong?

I may be wrong about interpreting certain key events and themes, such as Fermi’s supposed formula for the wayward reaction. I have tried to check where I found out about it in Richard Rhodes’ book on the making of the atomic bomb and I couldn’t find it on the first re-read. So you begin to wonder if you dreamed about it. I corresponded with Philip Morrison, who is the Book Editor for Scientific American and one of the members of the Manhattan Project. I asked him about the formula and he wrote back and corrected me but he misunderstood what I was after–I wanted to know about the Chicago event and not the Los Alamos event, the smashing of the atom not the detonation of the bomb. He said there was no risk. He even did the math, himself, he said. I wrote again, but he didn’t respond. Just this one point has been a sore spot with me. I have Fermi’s Collected Works–I bought the two volumes just to have them, one is in Italian, but the equation was not there. I have called the University of Chicago Physics Department, the Fermi Lab, the Fermi Archive. To no avail. They told me to hire a graduate student to go through the material and that’s where it ended. So I’m stuck on that one. There are a few such examples where I have made symbolic hay out of whatever and I╒m not sure if the facts are right.

Like what?

Goethe’s Urplant in the Paduan Garden. The Italians may have made it up. Goethe was there, that is known, but whether he designated the palm tree–the Chaemerops humilis– in question, as the urplant, is suspect. This could be confused with their naming it “Goethe’s Palm”, as a simple tribute to his visit. On Goethe’s own testimony, he thought of the metamorphosis of plants in Sicily when he was in Palermo. I keep thinking that the issues raised are somewhat independent of the occasion that illustrates them. They are illustrative anecdotal accounts independent of their factual bases. But I worry about it. The Physicalist/Vitalist conflict, at least, is perfectly clear.

Who else has written on this besides the list you have already given?

I mentioned Michael Polanyi, who has a nice section on “Scientific Controversies” in his Personal Knowledge, which is to the point. He makes clear that it is a matter of conversion from one paradigm to the other, almost like two religions or ultimate concerns. This is what makes them ideologies. You have to enter a very carefully traversed field of thought at this point where much discussion has gone on in the history and philosophy of science. Ernst Cassirer has a chapter on Goethe and Vitalism in his The Problem of Knowledge. Paul Feyerabend is one of the most symptomatic in his tweaking the debate. He was an anarchist in thought and liked calling scientific method: “the rule of thumb”. I like that. I wish I was as smart as he was. He was able to enter the debate with all the power of his intellect as a professional expert whereas I have a kind of bird’s eye view of the issues. A cock robin’s eye view.

So Goethe is seminal as a representative of the Vitalist tradition?

Absolutely. His Faust is a parable of the coming age and selling your soul to the Devil to unveil nature’s mysteries–what a way to put it–what Voegelin means by spiritual castration–more like selling your spiritual balls to the Devil. I tried to make the point that it goes right straight through to Freud, who mentions, in his Autobiography, how he had to check his Faustian tendencies in order to enter the experimental lab, which is a kind of double negative. But more than the Ode to Oath example, my favorite is the urpflanze or urplant, a typically German construction, a primal or archaic plant, a metaphysical plant, the plant of plants, the morphological exemplar of all plant evolution. It’s tricky to put it just right but one can take off from the idea and play with it. There is a book on Goethe’s alchemy, where the urplant is an alchemical idea related to the transformation of the human spirit analogous to plant formation. That’s why I call the urplant “the vital root”, exactly what industrial society would uproot and what Kant recoiled from, because he bought into the Physicalist trend of reductionism. The Vital Root of Existence–what a nice ring it has to it, especially since I developed a second career in the medicinal herbal industry and actually became a vital rooter in my role as cheerleader for medicinal herbs.

Isn’t there some old tradition of thought on “roots’?

I’m reminded of “the roots” of Empedocles in the Presocratic tradition. He was the first to speak of the four elements as the “roots” which are also the divinities–Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, which shows the transition from mythic imagery to rational concept in a very nice way, inasmuch as these divinities represent earth, air, fire and water. There is a recent book on the tradition by Peter Kingsley: Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition.

Expand on Goethe’s urplant.

Goethe dreamt up his urplant as the exemplar of botanical morphology and then wanted to find one–he went in search of it in his famous Italian Journey in the late 18th century. Now this is partly fanciful and partly based on the literature and the evidence–he had discussions with Schiller on just this topic, which are well known. He walked to Padua, where the oldest botanical garden in the Western world was established, in the long line of great civic botanical gardens, an effort to re-establish paradise, or the garden of Eden, so indicative of the European Renaissance.

So you see this journey as symbolic of your themes?

Yes, it has a great relation. The anniversary of Goethe’s walk–the bicentennial anniversary–was celebrated in 1988 and I organized an evening gala and gave a talk. Jack Stauffacher did a beautiful commemorative broadside. The motto, as I said, became important to us, as we took it as our own, which gave me the Arcadian theme. Goethe was even enrolled in the Arcadian Society in Rome and gives a detailed description as well as the text of his initiation. So that was an impressive association with his motto–his Arcadian journey. He was definitely looking for the urplant, just as he was looking for the roots of classical culture in the ruins of Rome and elsewhere. He also had a vision of the urplant in the botanical garden in Palermo while he was thinking about the Odyssey. Think of the great epic tradition, ending with Goethe, beginning with Homer, and then Virgil and Dante, the great national epics of Western literature, add Milton and Shakespeare, who divide the honors for England, or, more appropriately Spencer, as the Fairie Queen is part of the Arcadian thematic, with Goethe thinking about Odysseus’ bed as a kind of ur-tree, vitally rooted in Ithaca, where one of the bedposts is a living olive tree, around which Odysseus constructs his bed and his bedroom, to give himself a sense of place. The Homeric vital root: Odysseus’ olive tree bed, the secret sign he shares with Penelope, so that she knows it is indeed her husband who has returned–to their bed.

What were the discussions Goethe had with Schiller about the urplant?

They are famous. Erich Heller wrote about their encounter and discussions in The Disinherited Mind. Schiller was a kind of empiricist and had a hard time following Goethe’s more Platonic way of formulation. Even though Schiller was a poet, he seemed to lack the imagination for the concept of the urplant. When Goethe described it to him he called it “just an idea”, which to a Platonist is absurd. He said: “But that is no experience, that is an idea.” It annoyed Goethe. Ideas are experiential and existential, which is what Goethe answered. He said: “Then I can only be too glad to have ideas without knowing it, and to see them with my very eyes.” He could see his urplant in the plants he looked at just as Plato could see the forms in Socrates. It is a removal of veils. A revelation. Schiller couldn’t see it or grasp it or be grasped by it. “How can there ever be given an experience which would be adequate to an idea? Surely it is the very essence of an idea, that an experience can never be equal to it!”

So Schiller was a Kantian. What about subsequent thinkers. Is anyone interested in the urplant theme?

Heisenberg writes about the urplant idea in an essay on Goethe, as if Goethe were after a kind of early version of DNA in terms of the plant kingdom. It is a fascinating theme and many issues come to bear on it. I would urge you to read Heller’s book–The

Disinherited Mind– because it is right on the mark. Incidentally, in a dream last night, I was thinking about Husserl’s Origins of Geometry and suddenly made the association with Goethe’s urplant. Goethe was interested in what Husserl calls “idealities” and their structural meaning. So, in this sense, Goethe was a phenomenologist and the urplant was what could be called “an a priori of plant structure”. What Husserl has to say about the nature of geometry and the figures of pure space and time could be transposed to Goethe’s urplant. It is a high level of abstraction, but no less meaningful for all that–you have to learn the language, which I have been struggling with for a couple of years. What obviously applies to geometry and mathematical structure would not seem appropriate for botany, but I think Goethe saw idealities in this way. He did not want to mathematize botany or nature as Husserl accuses Galileo of doing, but he wanted to formulate the meaning of ideal forms for botany in terms of plant structure. This is one of the problems in mathesis universalis, whether conceptual idealities can or should be reduced to mathematicals.

Or in what sense they exist?

Yes, another perplexity, which is why Goethe presumably went in search of one. The existence of ideal entities is a good way to think about it. I have thought a lot about this in terms of Socrates rendering the forms existential–he embodied them–he was transparent to them in his confession of self-delusion, which opened him, as it were, freed him for true idealities, so that Plato could see them in him, masked, as they were, by his ugliness. So little attention is paid to this in favor of flattening the meaning. Socrates the saviour is a tradition almost entirely lost, certainly among philosophy departments, where the Greeks are looked upon as the first thinkers, understood mainly as logicians, and the first scientists, which really dumbs it down. Plato coined the term theology because of his insight into the being of Socrates, the bearer of the forms as well as the pharmakon, the bearer of the remedy, who is the wounded healer, or the scapegoat. Incarnation is a good word to describe these existential idealities which can only be expressed symbolically.

What interests you about Goethe’s Italian Journey besides the urplant theme? Say some more about the Arcadian theme.

The slogan for his journey, which, as you know by now, we adopted for the garden project: Et in Arcadia Ego. “And In Arcadia I Am”. And I am in that paradise garden where the affirmation of creation and the goodness and sweetness of life is made, especially if there is a pear tree with ripe pears. Eden and Arcadia link the two traditions–biblical and classical–Israel and Greece–in the vision of the original garden–the ur-garden. One of the central themes of my scholarly work is this link between the Biblical and the Greek Classical traditions. The Arcadian theme is pictured by Poussin, in his famous “Shepherds of Arcadia”, at the Louvre, where the Arcadian inscription is the voice from the tomb announcing the affirmation of the goodness and sweetness of life from the point of view of death. I should say retrospective affirmation, in keeping with the nostalgic passing of the old culture. The affirmation of the goodness of creation is another theme gardens represent. In the painting by Poussin, four youths ponder the inscription on a tomb in the wilderness, what could be in an abandoned garden. They look at that the voice from the tomb is Western culture speaking to them: Arcadia Entombed. There you have it with a kind of pained recognition in an image and a phrase.

So retrospective here means at the end of Western culture and not just one’s personal death.

So the story goes that Goethe designated a palm tree (Chaemerops humilis) in the middle of the Paduan Garden as the Urplant. The Paduans were so honored by the visit, they named it “Goethe’s Palm” and built a glass tower to encase it. When I saw it in the 1970′s, on a visit with my friend, Rolf Von Eckartsberg, I thought, what do you know, the vital root of existence, squirreled away under glass, in the oldest botanical garden in the Western world, to wait out the rise, triumph, and self-destruction of industrial society, as a world above the given world of nature and therefore devoid of vital roots. That’s what I thought when I saw the urplant. There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. And then Goethe goes on from Padua to Rome where he is initiated into the Arcadian Society. It must have been one of the high points of his life. And then on to Palermo, Sicily, where he had another vision of the urplant in a reverie about Homer and Odysseus’ olive tree bed.

So, for you, the urplant is a philosophical principle and you engage in the same interpretive exercise, thinking through the permutations or metamorphoses of the principle, in the spirit of Goethe. So Goethe’s Urplant is Heidegger’s Unknown Root.

And even part of the quest for a mathesis universalis, which is usually restricted to mathematical logic, but could include botany as well, especially if you want to think through the metaphysical meaning of metaphors like “vital roots” and “grounding” and “the earth”. The urplant is a spiritual substance given to me in the form of thought, although in this case, I visited it, rather like visiting the relic of a saint. The urplant is a relic of Vitalism. It reminds me of the counterpart example–urea. They actually have some of Woehler’s original stuff in a Museum of Science in Munich, another order of relic.  I saw it with my own eyes on a visit there.

What do you mean by the quest for a mathesis universalis?

What is universally true. The word basal comes to mind, I don’t know why. Basal concepts, does that make sense? Rock bottom. Euclidean geometry is the model–true for everyone everywhere no matter what. Goethe tried to make the urplant something like that. Fundamental. The a priori of botanical thought, but also an insight into the fundamental principle. Transcendence toward the ground is the phrase Voegelin uses. Thought in pursuit of its own axiomatics, would be one way to put it, a set of propositions that sums up or formulates the cognitive content. Theses full of sense.

I still don’t understand.

Mathesis universalis is a theme in the history of Western thought made famous by Descartes and Leibniz. It relates to the mathematical foundations of thought generally, as in Leibniz’s unsuccessful attempt to develop a universal calculus. I am interested in the relation of

mathesis universalis as a system of signs establishing the fundamental principles or axioms of any structure of thought whatever; not only mathematics, but any of the sciences or divisions of thought seeking their own foundation through basic axioms that are constitutive of the subject matter. Goethe was after something like this with his urplant that I see related to the search for a universal system of meaning. He saw it in botany whereas Leibniz and Descartes saw it in mathematics and logic. Kant thought it was restricted to math and physics.  Another association is the search for a universal language.  There is an excellent review of the historic theme by Umberto Eco.

But this cascade of terms, … “squirreled away under glass…” Anyhow, you see the urplant or Goethe’s Palm under glass in the oldest botanical garden as a thematic expression of your concept of vital roots and the danger industrial society poses for organic nature. I now see what you mean by a constellation of ideas or configurative thought.

I tried to make an acronym of the whole line of thought, but it didn’t spell, although I have summed it up in the old children’s story and song: “Who Killed Cock Robin?” The point is you could have a potted Chaemerops, which I have in my backyard and some synthetic urea, which I have in my herbarium, under glass, in fact, and you have the two icons of my Vitalist/Physicalist conflict.

The imagery is compelling. I see the palm under glass next to the tomb in the Arcadian wilderness.

That’s a more salubrious coupling than the urplant and urea. So get the sequences here. Goethe meets the young Woehler in a rock shop in Frankfort and goes home and finishes Faust, having met him–the Faust-to-be– and Woehler grows up to synthesize urea and becomes one of the fathers of organic (synthetic) chemistry. I’m in London and go to a bookstall and find a book entitled: Crucibles: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Chemists. I experience a small shiver and think, “whoa, maybe there’s a chapter on Woehler”, and I open to the Woehler/Goethe meeting. That’s a rare find about a chance encounter of a most unusual kind. The champion of Vitalism meets the kid who will subvert everything he stands for when he grows up–the Faust-to-be! Goethe was stuck in terms of finishing Faust. I imagined him going home to complete it, after seeing Woehler in the rock shop and intuiting who he would become. Urea is synthesized in 1828 and Vitalism is refuted. Newton triumphs over Goethe the second time (the first time was in the Optics/Theory of Color debate) through the chemistry of artificial synthesis, if you want to see it that way. The Physicalist juggernaut of mathematical physics picks up Organic Chemistry and a dead head of steam. Goethe dies in 1832, and Existentialism begins in 1841-42, in the Berlin Lectures of Schelling, which were a kind of civic sensation. Engels, Bakhunin, Jacob Burckhardt, and Soren Kierkegaard are sitting in the class, because they got there early. Some class. Think of looking down on those guys dozing off.

I see now why you call Existentialism chief mourner for defeated Vitalism, following, as it does, on the heels of the defeat and refutation of Vitalism, after the urea experiment. I suppose you carry through the subsequent steps of the Physicalist victory.

Yes, they mostly fell into place. I was amazed. This is the inner drama and content of the structure of scientific revolutions, the shift to Physicalism, as the triumphant paradigm, in league with industrial society, and the elimination of Vitalism and everything associated with it, as the price to be paid. There is a lot to be said about Schelling, partly because he was my teacher’s main influence, where Tillich picked up the Vitalist refrain in the tradition of German Naturphilosophie, which has a very bad press in the literature because it is associated with Vitalism and because of the contempt for it on the part of Physicalism.

So Schelling and Kierkegaard become the inheritors of the Goethean tradition and the founders of Existentialism.

It is interesting that Tillich calls the Berlin Lectures of Schelling, the “ur-text” of Existentialism: urplant and urtext. We have about seventy-five pages of notes in Kierkegaard’s hand, translated by Howard Hong. The lectures represented Schelling’s turn against Hegel–the Germans have a word for such things–”kehre”–in Greek it would be “metanoia”–a change of mind tantamount to a sea change. Metanoia also means repentance, precisely in the sense of the confession of self-delusion. Kierkegaard was disappointed in what he heard in Schelling’s class and went back home to Denmark to carry through the more substantial and radical program of Existentialism. He was the greater influence, especially in Germany, when he was discovered in this century. He is a very major figure for me because of Howard Hong and his wife, Edna, who are the great translators of Kierkegaard. I still remember vividly when Tillich came to St. Olaf, in 1953, when I was a senior and gave three lectures on Existentialism. It was the beginning of a long journey. I remember arguing with my roommates late into the night that what we heard was important even though we hadn’t understood a word of it. They disagreed because they didn’t get it. I thought a little humility was appropriate in the face of the truth that was over our head.

You have already indicated what these subsequent steps are in the Physicalist takeover, as you call it. Do you want to elaborate on them now?

The list is easy, although the respective cases generate a lot of material. Here is the list in a nutshell. I can elaborate on any or all later. Helmholtz is the big cheese at the end of the 19th century, probably the most famous scientist in the world, the formulator of the law of the conservation of energy, neither created nor destroyed, so much for God. Helmholtz takes His place. He is the background for the Physicalist blood-oath formulated by his students, Brucke and DuBois-Reymond: “…so help me Helmholtz! Freud is the student of Brucke, when he enters his lab and works on the nervous system of a certain order of fish and worries about the neurone, so the sequence continues very nicely in Vienna, where, contemporary with Freud, the Circle, under Carnap, is organized as the philosophical foundation for Physicalism and mounts the effort to develop a unified science as the Physicalist mop-up. They call for the elimination of metaphysics even though they have their own which they hide like a mentally ill relative.

Doesn’t Lamarck and the conflict over the inheritance of acquired characteristics form part of this sketch?

Kammerer and Bateson fit in here in the discussion after Lamarck on the question of inherited characteristics, considered to be a Vitalist violation of the Central Dogma of molecular biology as Mr. Crick calls it, one of my favorite Physicalists, who is so transparent as to be laughable, to wit, his recent book on consciousness, rather like Monod, who tries to smuggle in purpose, with his notion of teleonomy, which Koestler ridicules. I am stunned at how such smart guys make such fools of themselves when they venture where angels fear to tread. Chargaff, a great molecular biologist, thought Watson and Crick were two circus cons–I think he called them “pitchmen”, with a very low intelligence, so much for them. Koestler has a wonderful account of the Kammerer/Bateson issue in his: The Case Of the Midwife Toad. This is a more technical discussion in the fields of genetics, molecular biology and immunology. But I was amazed to find how close Koestler was to understanding the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict and how cleverly he could interpret it. I carried through my interest in his work when I heard about E. J. Steele, who, inspired by Koestler’s last book: Janus, A Summing Up, tried to show the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the immune system of mice, which dovetailed to some extent with my interest in the work in cancer of Dr. Leonell Strong, who was the breeder of the famous oncomouse strain, known as C3H.

You met Dr. Strong through your interest in thyme.

Yes, he had written the only paper in the literature, in 1935, on the effect of oil of the (thymol) on mice with cancer, so I went to visit him and we became friends. I became an advocate of his cancer research but it came to nought. He introduced me to John Dee and the Voynich Manuscript. He was an authority on Francis Bacon and worked with Baconian ciphers and had successfully turned his ability to the challenge of the Voynich and deciphered it–the most mysterious manuscript in the world, the summit of cypher studies. As John Dee was connected to the manuscript as a one-time owner, I took an interest in Dee. Strong’s work on cancer and his development of the C3H mouse prepared me for following the career of Steele and the excitement in the air when he teamed up with Sir Peter Medawar in England which came to nought.

Didn’t this kind of controversy flare up again a few years ago in Nature and demonstrate the bias of the Editor in selecting articles that exposed his Physicalist prejudice?

Yes. You get the sense that there is a conspiracy to sabotage what could be called neo-Vitalist research, anything that conflicts with the Physicalist canon, which Rupert Sheidrake has exposed. Steele was heralded as the new Iamarck by Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel prize winning immunologist, who wound up with egg on his face when the whole thing fizzed.

An egg cream.

I happened to be in London when a comparable case hit the press, the one you refer to, in a next installment and it reminded me of the Steele controversy. It was over the AIDS virus issue. The Editor of Nature refused to discuss or allow for the discussion that AIDS is not a virus. This takes us far afield, although it is a good example of the politics involved and who holds the cards, in this case the editor of the most prestigious scientific journal. There was a big review of the problem in the New York Review of Books. They have just found the protein link in the transmission of the virus so maybe the case is closed on the AIDS controversy. I don’t know.

Didn’t your friend, Callahan, the monopole detecter, have some line on the AIDS problem?

Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. I went to the Conference in Wichita the following year and there was Callahan with a paper he had written on the character of the AIDS virus as an antenna phenomenon. It’s a bizarre story, but typically Callahan. He saw the blow up photo of the AIDS virus on the cover of Scientific American and noticed the antenna-like character of the symmetrical balls surrounding the virus and then flying into an airport looked down and there was the same configuration in the radar landing device. To Callahan, they looked identical. Upon doing the math for both they turned out to be exactly equivalent to scale, so he started to think about frequency problems as a way of defusing the virus given the antenna phenomenon. I sent the paper to Elizabeth Taylor, in her role as an AIDS advocate, but I never heard from her. Another one of those.

Go back to the sequence.What comes after Lamarck and Freud and the Logical Positivists in Vienna?

Then comes reductive behaviorism and the elimination of consciousness: from Pavlov to Skinner. It is the elimination of consciousness from psychology. No more psyche. Only observable behaviors. Freud is ignored and deemed unscientific. It takes Timothy Leary’s flip from a behaviorist psychologist to the High Priest of psychedelics to resurrect consciousness, but the volatility of the rediscovery forces Leary and company out of established academics and conventional science. He is a good example of the split and the penalty paid when you try to mediate it or cross over.

How do you mean?

Tim was a behaviorist psychologist, which, to me, is psychology without the psyche. He was also a game theorist, applying the concept of games to behaviors. Then he took the mushroom in Mexico with Frank Barron and discovered consciousness, big-time, not unlike Freud after his break with the Physicalist lab of Brucke: Freud on cocaine precipitated a similar career break–he was kicked out of the Brucke lab, just as Tim was kicked out of Harvard, for fooling around with drugs. When I teased Tim about being honored by the American Psychological Association just a few years ago and only referring to his behavioral work in the section devoted to him at the meeting, so that his psychedelic work was ignored, he was annoyed and called me mean-spirited. It took me off-guard. I thought he had rejected this past, but he hadn’t. He still thought of himself as a Physicalist scientist as well as a High Priest.

So you see psychedelics in this line of Physicalist imperialism.

Why not? You could call Leary the qualitative leap in the neurone, if you want a funny one. If the issue is the artificial synthesis of mysticism or psychosis, it continues the synthetic line going back to urea. But it involves consciousness and no one in science knows how to deal with it. Consciousness is too Vitalist? Physicalist behaviorism had eliminated it and now it returns with a vengeance. It was a big shake-up. One of the reasons Tim was dismissed from Harvard was for violating an experimental protocol by taking a small dose of acid with his subjects, as did his team–Alpert, Metzner, Litwin, Katz, and Weil. This meant they couldn’t be objective, which is absurd when it comes to consciousness, but the scientists at Harvard were horrified over the transgression in experimental protocol. And then in order to effect behavior change in criminal convicts by utilizing religious themes in an attempt to model the experience as mystico-mimetic

rather than psychoto-mimetic, as in whacko, namely, a model psychosis or training psychosis for psychiatry students, only added insult to injury.

Isn’t that where you came in as a student of theology?

Tim wanted to recruit some divinity students to take the drug and to evaluate the so-called religious experience issue. So Huston Smith, the reknowned authority on world religions, who was teaching at MIT, called a meeting and I was invited. My wife and I took LSD on a memorable Saturday at Huston’s and I joined the Leary entourage and became the Editor of the Psychedelic Review, along with Ralph Metzner and Rolf von Eckartsberg.

But your view that an imitative or synthetic mystical experience only follows in the line of the artificial would prompt you to discount it.

Well, now you touch on a sore point. We have here another example of the organic/synthetic problem.

This is where my ability to think the scheme through fell down. I didn’t know what to make of it. There are natural psychedelic substances used as sacraments going way back–they are now called entheogens, inducing an encounter with god or the holy or the sacred. We have that tradition to wonder about in terms of drug-induced mystical experiences. It is a fascinating tradition involving shamanism and curanderos and sorcerers, as well as the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece where it looks like ergot, the mold on grain, was the LSD delivery substance. Wasson and company have mined this field in their Road To Eleusis and his own work: Soma, and now carried on by Terence McKenna. So scientists have synthesized and produced all kinds of variations of psychedelics. Some of us tried to distinguish between natural substances and synthetics in terms of their side-effects, like psilocybin and the mushroom, or peyote and mescalin, etc., but it is a very provisional distinction in terms of making sense of the experience. Basic to the problem is the definition of hallucinations which no one knows what to do with. Our language is not equal to the task, it seems, especially after a century and a half of the Physicalist hegemony. This muddle is indicative of the confusion our whole culture is in.

By provisional you mean a thin line between organic or natural products and synthetic or laboratory produced products or chemicals.

Yes, exactly. This is my complaint with synthetic urea when Woehler called it absolutely identical to organic urea. That made me suspicious–the word absolutely. But now that they have produced a lamb synthetically, namely through laboratory manipulation, an exact clone of the original, the confusion continues. Once they clone a human being this trend I am depicting will have been brought to its Frankensteinian conclusion. It is only a few years away. A nice way to celebrate the millennium. With my clone. What a thought.

Puts a lie to the song: “There never will be another you”. So Leary’s behaviorism left him untroubled by your Vitalist concerns.

Seems so, which is why he took so strongly to artificial intelligence and cybernetics, let alone freeze-drying his head, which I was glad to see he finally rejected.

But psychedelics, as they defined the ’60′s, proved to be a kind of watershed.

That’s for sure. Before Leary there was artificial intelligence or cybernetics and eventually virtual reality. Then the artificial synthesis of mysticism (or psychosis) in the psychedelic explosion. I see this as the internalization of the smashing of the atom in the squash court in Chicago, where Fermi and company took the chance of destroying the universe, in a possible wayward reaction. Psychedelics de-structured consciousness, smashed it, really, in a way not unlike the bomb. I thought I had been bombed when I took LSD and used the metaphor in my report of the experience. Likewise, the de-structuring of consciousness in the psychedlic experience is the background for Derrida’s deconstruction and the chaos revolution. It was the un-hingeing of consciousness, a term Derrida likes to use. However, the turning point for me was 1970 and Earth Day I and a new ball game as far as a neo-Vitalist critique is concerned, emerging in the environmental movement and the reaction to industrial society and the late stage of its self-destruction. So the sequence is the artificial synthesis of urea and the Physicalist refutation and elimination of Vitalism; the elimination of LaMarckianism and the inheritance of acquired characteristics; the elimination of metaphysics by the Logical Positivists; the elimination of consciousness by reductive behaviorism; artificial intelligence in the computer revolution, leading to virtual reality; and then, after the smashing of the atom, the de-structuring of consciousness in the artificial synthesis of mysticism (or psychosis) with psychedelics. I get the drift. The sequences are compelling. They are all consequences of the relation of the history and philosophy of science to industrial society. When I took LSD, I thought I had been bombed internally, it was as though my consciousness was the atom that was smashed and then exploded. Their respective historical occurrences were in the same period of time, if you go back to when Albert Hoffmann discovered LSD, so the analogy is a good one. Frank Barron agrees with me on this.

So we’re back to Chadwick and the Neo-Vitalist upsurge in the renewal of organic integrity.

Like I said, right on time.

What was it like working with Chadwick at UCSC?

I wish I knew then what I know now. It doesn’t seem fair for it to have taken so much time to figure it out. I was completely unprepared for the entire effort. Chadwick mostly had to fend for himself. I was not much help when it came to organization, although I supported the Garden Project as much as I could and spent an enormous amount of time on it. Even so, there was no organization, no budget, no support, and I had no experience with a bureaucracy such as UCSC. I was young and dumb. We received no help from anyone at the administrative level to begin with. Buildings and Grounds considered us unwanted interlopers.            What do you mean you want to borrow a shovel? What? And a rake? I don’t think so? Who said you could enter our turf? How do we write up this expense on our re-charge forms? What do you mean he doesn’t observe an eight-hour day? Who is this guy? What do you mean he is divinely ordained from on high to replant the vital root of existence in the late stage of the self-destruction of what? Not on our campus. What would the Regents say?

Didn’t they see the Garden as an improvement, as a benefit for the campus?

I built a stone wall as a terrace at the front of the garden with some student help from Organizational Climate, a class I taught, which was devoted to investigating the University bureaucracy and the only thanks we got was a memo from Harry Tsugawa, the campus landscape architect, absolving himself from responsibility when it sloughed out in the first heavy rains, because we did not follow proper engineering practices, or whatever. Thanks a lot, Harry. It’s still standing thirty years later.

But wasn’t there some good publicity connected to the Garden?

Yes, it was featured in a Life Magazine article on the campus and it was featured in Sunset Magazine and so on. The public relations aspect was milked for what it was worth but with little attendant support for the project itself.

But you said the Chancellor defended the project.

Yes, eventually, but with almost no initial support. He liked getting a box of organic produce from Chadwick every week. Bureaucrats don’t initiate; they impede. That’s been my experience. If you enter their self-serving loop, you do so at your own peril. I should have just kept my head down and minded my own business. Innovation is counter-productive in a highly institutionalized environment such as UCSC. McHenry called me in for a talk a few months after the Garden had begun and as much as told me my goose was cooked, because I didn’t know how to organize the project. Where was the budget? Where did I think the money was going to come from? I thought that was his province. He had all the resources; it was just my idea. He could have cooperated and told me what resources were available and how to tap them but instead he wanted to spank me. He was basically a bully. An ex-Marine, with a bald head like a small bomb. His smile was like a muscle flexing in the rear end of an ape. A black cloud followed me out of his office–remember the character in L’il Abner, the guy with the black cloud over his head?– and I knew that my career was over. It was as obvious as that. I had done something innovative and without initial support already in place. Therefore, I was going to have to pay for my smart ideas with my career on the line. The garden was not going to count as a bad book, so the rubric for my demise was publish or perish. I became my own compost.

Why didn’t you publish?

I’m a late bloomer. They would have found some other reason. My smile. I had a 7th Grade Teacher who told me every day to wipe that sickening smile off my face. She was just trying to tell me something; warn me, I guess. It finally caught up with me. I have a friend who thinks I’m the prototype for the “Have A Nice Day” face, which is enough to make anyone hide. When the Faculty Committee met to discuss my tenure, the Chairman did not bring the file of support letters. It was already decided. Page Smith, who was at the meeting, had to tell him to go back home and get them. Page resigned in protest over the process, saying: “Any place that doesn’t have room for Paul Lee, doesn’t have room for me.” That has a nice ring to it even today. My years with him exceeded getting tenure–he was my tenure. He stood by me. How often does that happen in a lifetime?

Eventually, I want you to detail the relation of Page to Chadwick.

O.K. It is a good story. We were all in it together. And he wrote the epitaph for Chadwick, which I consider the last word.

So how did Chadwick manage?

He never made any demands. He just went about his business. He dug beds. He finally received a couple of hundred dollars a month and he lived on that with the most modest needs. He grew his own food for the most part right in the garden.

Wasn’t there a time when he was almost dismissed?

Oh, that’s a good one. The University, actually Howard Schontz, an administrator, called one tray and said he thought Chadwick would have to leave. He was sorry. I asked why. Because he was an alien (a British subject) and there was a law on the books of the University that no aliens could work on the campus–a hold over from removing Japanese from gardening positions during the Second World War. I said Chadwick wasn’t Japanese. Didn’t matter. A law is a law. I asked if they would try to work it out. I should have known better. Howard called back a few weeks later and said they had come up with a solution. Chadwick could enroll in a dummy class at Cabrillo College (a local community college) and that would make him a student and as a student he could continue to work in the garden. I couldn’t take it in, but I didn’t say a word. I went over to Cabrillo, paid his fee and enrolled for him. I don’t think I ever told him. I think it was $73.00. I thought of it as a blood tax for cooperating with the obtuse bureaucrat.

Chadwick sounds like a free spirit.

He was. How many free spirits do you get to meet in your life? There were no strings on him. It was the ground for his being a representative of an economy of gift. That’s the great thing Chadwick taught me. There is always more than enough. Who hoards the resources? And because he worked such hours he had almost no leisure time. He just went home to bed and got up before sunrise and was back at it. It wasn’t all work. We had our share of parties–Alan was a great cook and would prepare banquets with the greatest of care. He loved putting on a grand show. My wife and I marvelled at his stewpot, the way he would layer fish, meat, poultry, vegetables, etc. Then, when it was time to sit down and enjoy, something would set him off and he would split. So the party went on without him. His temper tantrums often got in the way of his enjoying a good time. It was a great strain for everyone. No one had ever met such a tempestuous and preposterous person, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. He had been on a mine-sweeper in the Second World War and had broken his back and the strain of it all had made him neurasthenic, an old fashioned word for very neurotic. His nerves were permanently jangled, which is why he resorted to gardening. Other people were the problem. A loud cough could set him off. He could have a fit if you sneezed. Everyone had to get used to it, which was impossible; I should say, ignore it, which was impossible; O.K., live with it. It was impossible. Steve Kaffka, who worked with him the most, Chadwick called him “Cherubim”, would often come down to my house and complain that he couldn’t take it any more and I would give him my standard lecture on the distinction between idiosyncratic display and institutional process, and then send him back up into the lion’s maw. It worked for a while.

Didn’t Kaffka finally break with Chadwick?

Yes, he turned his back on Alan and became the student Director of the Farm Project and Alan was more or less stuck in the Garden, so he began to make plans to leave.

What was the story about going to New Zealand or Australia?

First of all, he repeatedly threatened to leave. There was always a small group of disciples who were willing to go off with him no matter where. The Seychelles, which no one had ever heard of before, was the first destination. Then New Zealand. He actually booked passage. One woman was going to leave her husband and a rag-tag of students were going to trip along. It seemed preposterous. I decided to subvert it. Huey Johnson, the head of the Trust for Public Lands, was coming to the campus to meet the Chancellor. I asked him to meet with Chadwick and tell him how important it was for Alan to continue to do his work in California. It did the trick. Huey was very persuasive and Alan changed his mind and decided to stay.

Where did he go when he did leave?

He went to Saratoga and began the garden there behind the Odd Fellows, which was pretty symbolic in itself, with the support of Betty Peck. She invited him to come over and she made a place for him. It was one of the best gardens Alan designed and it served the Saratoga school system. Everythime I went to see it, I was impressed and inspired. It was an idyllic scene, a kind of small utopia. Everyone who entered that space was enchanted and transformed, somehow even more so than the UCSC garden. He had free rein for his magic and Betty Peck was his muse and she brought school children in and offered instuction. We had started that process somewhat in Santa Cruz. I got Alan to put in a little garden at West Lake School, where my daughter was a student. Eventually LifeLab, which is a national gardens in schools movement, using gardens as a science lab, developed out of this impulse. Now we hope to do the same with our Americorps grant, using homeless gardener labor to put productive organic gardens into local schools.

How did his departure come about.

Out of complete despair. I was at my wit’s end. He started sleeping on the floor in the little garden chalet. There was no bath room, no bed, no nothing. I remember lugging my grandmother’s refrigerator up there. I gave him a fancy horsehair mattress, Bill Russell, a student friend of mine from Harvard, had given me, which his grandmother had owned. I built a toilet and bath and paid for it myself. I hardly believe it looking back. Alan slept on the floor and I thought my god he has become Bartleby in the story by Melville. There was a great refusal going on and finally he left. Another play on words–refuse, refusal, and refuse, what you would throw away or what isn’t wanted anymore, garbage. Chadwick ended up like refuse. Compost. He suffered his own fate. His theme was life into death into life. So he left and went to Saratoga.

Then after Saratoga he went to Green Gulch, the Zen Farm at Muir Beach.

Yes. Alan was very fond of Richard and Virginia Baker, close friends of mine, as I said, and he started the famous farm at Green Gulch, which eventually became the supplier for Chez Panisse and the Greens, the great restaurants in Berkeley and San Francisco. I happened to be visiting the Bakers when Alice Waters showed up to discuss buying produce and I met her then. Deborah Madison, who trained at Chez Panisse and was the chef at the Greens, acknowledges Alan in her second Greens Cookbook. All of this is wonderfully connected for me–I think of Alan as having a central significance in the formation of California cuisine, which is associated with the success of Chez Panisse and the host of restaurants who have followed in Alice’s example. Chadwick’s produce, partly because of the French intensive system he employed, a system which supplies the Paris restaurant market, was a natural for a new high-quality restaurant trend in California. Strictly organic and of very high quality.

But your herbal theme still goes begging.

I would like to see this carried through with a major emphasis on herbal cuisine. No one has made culinary herbs the central feature of a new menu, but for a few herb garden restaurants, like the one outside of Seattle–the Herbfarm–with Ron Zimmerman and Jerry Traunfeld, at Fall City, which is a national model. I’m waiting and biding my time. It will happen. It is one thing I can predict as the obvious next step in terms of restaurant trends. There will be a new herbal cuisine where vital roots in the form of culinary herbs come to the dinner table and everything is subordinated to them. The menu will be organized around the herbs. That’s my dream cuisine.

No more sprig of parsley as throw away garnish. Aren’t there restaurants in China that operate on this herbal theme?

Yes, they’re called Public Health Restaurants and the menu is organized according to ailments and recipes with special herbal ingredients appropriate to those ailments. That’s the idea. In our country, this would be difficult because of the division between food and drug, where medicinal herbs constitute a kind of no man’s land in-between, thanks to their rejection by the medical profession and the suppression by the FDA, although this has lifted somewhat in the last few years due to legislation favorable to the health food industry. Medicinal food is an oxymoron to the Food and Drug Administration.

Didn’t you run a restaurant in Santa Cruz with such an herbal theme?

It was called The Wild Thyme. And it was. Page was the maitre d’ in his Gary Cooper shoes–he bought Gary Cooper’s loafers from the sale of his effects after his death. He was smashing, pouring coffee and seeing people to their tables, in his blue blazer and rep tie, the foremost American historian and one of the handsomest men I have ever known. He loved it. We had a great time, although I was out of my depth. Another example of “call my bluff’, which will be inscribed on my tombstone, as one of my two epitaphs. Eloise Smith and my wife were in the kitchen. Marta Gaines was our hostess with the mostest. We had fun, but I got sciatica from the strain, an admission that I was out of my depth.

You must have had some highlights.

When Buckminster came in he told me it was the greatest restaurant idea he knew of but for one in New York he was writing a book about. When someone like that resonates with your ideas you can put up with a lot of boobs. I had a whole story line about thyme and the thymus gland (we served them as Sweetbreads or Ris de Veau) and thymOs, the old Homeric root term. I happily gave my Physicalist/Vitalist spiel to anyone who would sit still for it. Jack Stauffacher designed the table text which included the main ideas. Virigina Baker was my big fan and goaded me into table-side recitations, which I finally could make to fit any time frame, from five minutes on. I had it all diagrammed on a large display card. It went well with dessert, like a vintage sauterne.

Why didn’t you launch your herbal cuisine from there?

I tried, but it was too early. And I was too inexperienced as well as too pre-occupied with the day-to-day strain. And nobody I was involved with shared my thematics. We had taken over a failed operation and it was all we could do to pull it up and make it a success, which we did. The cooks we inherited were basically fry cooks and thought I was a crank. Now it would work. I remember demanding from the kitchen that they make a hamburger to a Julia Child recipe, which included thyme. I thought that would be terrific–a thyme burger. Customers complained about the pork. There wasn’t any, but they associated the thyme flavor with pork sausage. So they all laughed at me. I made them serve Sweetbreads–thymus glands– which Joanne LeBoeuf made, a wonderful dish. Ris de Veau.

Why thymus glands?

I was a devoted student of immunology and was studying the relation of herbs to the immune system, e.g., thyme and thymus. Thyme is Thymus vulgaris in Latin which is what set up the whole line of thought–my Thymos Doctrine. Thymos is the Greek root word for both the herb and the gland. I learned about thymos from Tillich as “the courage to be”, which makes additional sense when you understand the thymus as the organ of courage, the center of the immune system, the defense against illness and disease. I still think this is one of the best connections I ever made.

What made you think this would work as a restaurant theme although I can see that this is a spectacular example of your associative abilities?

My ideas were fairly clear, but executing them was another matter, especially on a menu. I was still more professor than restaurateur. I thought the thymOs theme was perfect for a restaurant. I was just a little ahead of my thyme.

You started the Whole Earth Restaurant on the campus? That was before the Wild Thyme?

Yes. In 1970. So I already had some experience under my belt, although I was not involved with the day-to-day operations once it was set up. It was a good project and the purpose was to have the Chadwick Garden supply the produce. I returned to Santa Cruz, in January, of 1970, ready for Earth Day, just off of my sabbatical, knowing my days were numbered, as I was coming up for tenure. I had suffered a mild nervous breakdown while on sabbatical because a good friend and colleague of mine in philosophy went mad and shot himself and I had to fly back and bury him. I took Alan by surprise and showed up at the garden before the funeral just to say hello. He saw me and ran down the path and jumped full tilt into my arms. I don’t know how I kept my balance, his legs around my chest. It was a typical stunt. Then he looked into my eyes for the longest time as if searching my depths knowing the despair I was in. He sensed what this death meant to me. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was dead as far as my career at Santa Cruz was concerned and my colleague had acted it out for me by putting a pistol to his head. I took it personally.

What prompted him to take his life?

His suicide was a result of the Chancellor ruining his career over a Vietnam Teach-in talk he had given. He was singled out by the Chancellor as the scapegoat for the event–there must have been thirty of us who spoke– and the Chancellor brought censorship proceedings against him which was the death knell for his career. His death meant I could no longer avoid the end of my career at UCSC. I knew I was dead so I had to resurrect myself. I needed a new life free of the institutional confines of the obtuse bureaucrat. So I dreamt up a nonprofit corporation called USA–University Services Agency. I was going to reconstitute the US of A in myself, out of dread and concern over what was going to happen to me. It was the beginning of free fall and I didn’t have a parachute, golden or any other color.

What prompted you to think of starting a nonprofit corporation?

I had heard the Rev. Ike, on midnight radio, in Northern Wisconsin and had sent for his prayer cloth. He was one of the Black prosperity preachers. “You can’t lose with the stuff I use!” “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” That sort of thing. (I just read that he has died. His  obituary was in the New York Times for July 31, 2009).  I had visited Father Divine, another   prosperity preacher, when I was at Union Theological Seminary, which was my introduction to the type. It sounds nuts to me, as well, but it’s what happened. I fingered this little piece of serrated cut red prosperity prayer cloth in my pocket and up came a million dollar non-profit corporation, so I said to myself, “O.K., let’s do it!” Upon my return to Santa Cruz, I ran into Herb Schmidt, the campus chaplain and a great friend of mine, we’re fellow Lutherans. It was January 3, 1970. He was the first person I met when we first visited Santa Cruz before we moved there. He met us at his front door on a Sunday afternoon, barely wearing a black bikini and holding a martini, my kind of guy.

So you fell in with him?

He was on his way to the administration to get the only public restaurant on the campus, so I nailed him and we started USA (University Services Agency) as the corporate entity and the Whole Earth Restaurant, our first of many affiliates. The Chadwick Garden supplied the restaurant. We couldn’t get Chadwick produce into the food services at the colleges, even though we tried, because organic was still out to lunch and sometimes his lettuce had a bug in it, which was unacceptable to an institutional food service, like Saga, where everything had to be pre-packaged and homogenized, not unlike a prison.

So who ran the Whole Earth Restaurant?

It started out as a group effort. My wife and I, and Jerry Lasko, who was the Roman Catholic Chaplain, and Herb Schmidt and his wife, Grace. We started it and then we hired Sharon Cadwallader, who wrote The Whole Earth Cookbook and sold a million copies. We celebrated the 25th Anniversary in 1995.

You should have franchised it?

I forget the name of the guy who started the Good Earth Restaurant chain, which I guess was very successful, as an organic restaurant effort. Yes, I thought of it, but I had no business training. The restaurant was the first in a series of nonprofit entities or project affiliates?

We lucked into a vein. I invited Stuart Brand, the Editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, to come and gave a talk at the restaurant and he spoke about the hip sub-economy that was going to appear in the 70′s as a consequence of the 60′s. He was part of the Briar Patch Trust, which was very much like our effort in Santa Cruz, another nonprofit umbrella for all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises. Dick Raymond was the guiding light; they had a better sense of the economics involved, whereas I was just dabbling in community development, not knowing it was going to be my future career, even though I put myself deliberately on this path. I should have trained myself for it. I regret now not having gone to Harvard Business School as well as Divinity School.

So you added affiliates to USA.

It happened almost immediately, just as Stuart said it would. We started the Child Day Care Center at the University and then some hippies came up and talked to me and Herb about a food store downtown and I remember we looked at each other and bang!–we had a sense of what we had launched. We eventually had twenty affiliates. Herb applied his prodigious energy to the effort, his Lutheran manly chestiness of conviction, his thymos, which he has in abundance. We eventually passed the million dollar mark, on up to almost three million in cash flow. I wrote it up as How To Become A Spiritual Millionaire, Where Money Is No Object, but I never published it. I took an interest in the historical background of nonprofits and realized I had been trained to it anyhow at Harvard Divinity School by two professors–George Huntston Williams and James Luther Adams. George was the historian of the radical reformation and I learned from his book on the subject that the radical wing of the reformation included the Anabaptist movement which started on a given evening, I forget the date, when a priest was re-baptized. I do remember his name–Joseph Blaurock. This event established the right to assemble for the freedom of worship, in other words, a voluntary association, for which the nonprofit corporation is the legal form. I remembered the spiritual roots of the work we were doing in Santa Cruz when USA became a dynamic force in the community and it was extraordinary that the three of us running the show were all ministers. James Luther Adams was my professor of social ethics and taught the history of voluntary associations. Adams and Williams were Unitarians, so they were part of the free-spirited left wing of Protestantism, which had established a center at Harvard, which was in decline when I was a student there, the tail end of a great tradition. I found a book recently called: Knights of the Golden Rule, which tells the story of the great social reformers in the American tradition of the social gospel who preceded J. C. Penny, who was a great exponent of the Golden Rule. I learned about some of them from Jim Adams, who was the translator and interpreter of my teacher, Tillich, I might add.

Tillich had a social activist side, didn’t he?

Yes, he was a Religious Socialist in Germany between the two world wars out of concern for social action and he was President of SelfHelp, in New York, where he maintained an open door for all the refugees from Germany who beat their path to him for advice and aid. I include his wonderful essay on “The Philosophy Of Social Work”, in my book on homelessness–The Quality of Mercy.

So your nonprofit experience was another initiation into the Golden Rule and an economy of gift?

Exactly. I saw the nonprofit as the vehicle for addressing not only economic development but any social need. Ideally, it is the institution of free spirits. Adams was fond of mentioning that nonprofits, or an office with a phone and typewriter, was the first thing Hitler shut down when he came to power. Free spirits are anathema to dictators, in politics and religion.

How come the role of the nonprofit is so overlooked in terms of its importance for American life?

It is astonishing. There are millions of nonprofits in the U.S., representing every conceivable interest. It is the big institution between family and government and a kind of silent structure, drawing very little attention to itself. It is easy to start one, rather easy to run one, and mostly very rewarding in ways altogether different than the economy of greed. You almost never get rich in a nonprofit unless you are the former head of United Way, that jerk with the perks.

Doesn’t Malthus come in here again?

Yeah, another jerk. When I read about his population theory and the impact on capitalism and the starvation wage and the piling up of enormous profits for the business tycoon, the Captains of Industry, I put two and two together.

Wait a minute. Elaborate, if you please, on the themes you mention.

Well, Malthus argued that the food supply would always be out of phase with the population, inasmuch as population proceeds exponentially and the food supply arithmetically. There would always be more people than food and jobs. It was an argument regarding population theory applied to capitalist exploitation, the basis of Social Darwinism. If there would always be more people than jobs, you could pay a starvation wage and therefore build up enormous profits, which is what happened.

So what did they do with the money?

They made so much money, they had to find a means of giving some of it away, so they started charitable foundations of which the nonprofit corporation is the recipient in terms of tax-deductible grants. So you have a major structure of twin institutions–the charitable foundation and the nonprofit corporation, as the triumph of Protestantism and the capitalist spirit–the old Max Weber theme in action.

Does that bother you?

Not if I get some of the grants. You know the ad for scotch: “While you’re up get me a Grant.”

Why didn’t you institutionalize the garden as a nonprofit?

It never occurred to me. Sometimes it is better to let a project go its own way and not impose a structure on it. The nonprofit has a lot of disadvantages and is rather cumbersome in terms of hands on activities. In other ways, it would have helped, I can see that now. We just never thought of it. Chadwick would have found it stifling, just as he eventually found the University stifling. We received a few donations along the line, but not much.

Isn’t there a story about the first donation?

Oh, you mean the Easter Event. Putney and Perry run an auto repair firm in Santa Cruz and Vern Putney took an interest in Chadwick and wanted to make a contribution. I think it was $400, which in those days was considerable. So I staged a little ceremony. It was Easter Sunday and it hailed and Chadwick went bananas. He thought it was some kind of bad omen, big hail, snowballs of ice, busting through the garden. He ran and hid in his fury and I had to send Jasper Rose to look for him so we could receive the contribution. Chadwick finally reappeared and I gave a little speech and Vern stood there with the check and then Chadwick ceremoniously opened his hands very slowly–he had these enormous hands–and looked at everyone and said: “Do you see these hands? Do these hands look like they would touch money?” He meant to say filthy lucre. We were all a little dumbfounded. I grabbed for the check and missed, but we eventually got it. It was a typical Chadwick stunt. The dramatic note squeezed for all it was worth. One time I was going to have him record something and we went over to the studio on campus and he stood in front of the mike and was about to speak and suddenly said the hell with it and left in a huff. That’s how unpredictable and skittish he was, although he did perform in some theatrical works on the campus and did that as a seasoned professional.

Are there any good memories of events?

Oh, lots of them. One of the best was when I wanted to read the “Smokey the Bear Sutra”, by Gary Snyder. I knew Gary through the Zen Circle around Baker-roshi. I got my dad to dress up as Smokey the Bear, in an actual bear costume. It was hilarious. My father always reminded me of a bear–there is a poem by Delmore Schwartz–which begins with a line from Whitehead: “The withness of the body”. My father was that line. I had Chadwick present him with his shovel. an came forward at his stentorian best and intoned in a loud voice–”I do believe, no, do I perceive, no, could it be, will wonders never cease–is it Mickey Mouse?, No!, Donald Duck?, NO!–it’s SMOKEY THE BEAR!” And with the greatest Shakespearian flourish, he presented the shovel to my bear-dad and then I read the Sutra, in the courtyard of Crown College. My daughter was along for the show.         *

She was still on good terms with Chadwick?

Oh, you know that one, as well? That was another bad episode. We had an open house at the garden and my wife and daughter came up with me–there were lots of people milling about. Chadwick had a pet bird in a cage and my daughter, who was about five, opened the door and reached in to pet it or hold it and squeezed it to death. It was inadvertent. One of my favorite words for such occasions. As opposed to criminal negligence. Chadwick came a moment later and had a fit. I pretended to spank her and got her out of there and she never went back. When Chadwick had a fit it had a lasting effect.

In spite of the temper tantrums, Chadwick was a generous person?

Yes, he was. He was very patient with students. The first talk we had I remember telling him about the drug problem on campus, what with students experimenting with psychedelics. I told him the Garden would probably function as a therapy station and I was right about that. Students would stumble in coming off of a wayward LSD high and Chadwick would patiently show them how to dig a bed and plant seed in a flat and prick out into double-dug beds after germination. The garden played a crucial role in this respect and some students actually dropped out of school to work in the Garden because it was more meaningful for them. Turn on, tune in and drop out. Chadwick became the flower power guru for that generation of students who were trying to find the root again.

What is your best memory?

There are two. One is the picture of Alan taken by Lucy Kennard, when she was a student at UCSC, now a famous photographer, sitting among the delphinium, columbine and foxglove. It was a breathtaking setting, one of my favorite memories of the glory of the garden. The other is getting up early and going up and picking flowers with the students at sunrise, practically to Hayden’s Oratorio: Creation. I can hear the music now, the dawning of the day on the Third Day of Creation, when God planted a Garden. You can’t beat bending over to pick daisies or tulips at daybreak with beautiful coeds who also had the bloom. You could hardly tell the difference between them and the flowers. All of the flowers would be put out in a kiosk across from the garden, so University people and students could stop and pick up a bouquet for their office or room. It was the economy of gift in action. Chadwick never wanted money for it–he wanted to give it away. It was an uncompromised principle of his. It was the principle of plenitude and an economy of gift. That’s where I learned it in practice, although Erik Erikson first told it to me in theory.

How was that?

He came over one day shortly after my daughter, Jessica, was born and we were chatting in the study and he said: “Do you know how I define my theory of identity? I said, “How?” He said: “You have it to give it away!”

So gardens are this image of self-sacrifice and transcendence toward the ground and therefore gardens are associated with creation?

Of course. You put it well. I have been struggling with Voegelin’s phrase–”transcendence toward the ground” as a term for spirituality and you could almost take it literally in terms of the symbolism of gardens and their association with creation and paradise and our essential being. It is a little complicated, but not if you understand the metaphorical meaning of “rooted” when applied to spiritual life. Think of transcendence toward the ground and the restoration and reaffirmation of vital roots in juxtaposition with industrial society as a world above the given world of nature and you have a good contrast.

And the garden has always suggested the horizon of original goodness in creation, more original than original sin.

The theme of the unambiguous affirmation of the goodness of creation, a theme I learned from Paul Ricoeur, came alive in the Chadwick Garden. It is complicated because the first account of creation (Genesis 1–2:4) is the unambiguous goodness account; the second account (Genesis 2:4 ff.) is the ambiguous one, where, on the Third Day, the Garden of Eden comes in and the prohibition not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge That Everything Is Possible, otherwise known as the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This would take us into a disquisition on the Genesis account of Creation and the Myth of the Fall, and the two texts involved. I learned about it from Kierkegaard, Buber and Erich Voegelin, as well as Tillich and Ricoeur. Gardens, nevertheless, are reminders of paradise and anticipations of the Kingdom of God, so that’s enough for me.

Why did you change your title?

It has to do with this theological problem. The salvation of nature, where nature participates in the Fall, is a theme I picked up from Tillich, although it goes back to the Apostle Paul, and the Paradise/Arcadian Garden theme. I thought the latter was simpler and more direct. I hesitate to get into the theology of the salvation of nature. It is part of my despair over the future, I guess. I was going to include Tillich’s sermon on the salvation of nature, but I gave that up, as well. I regret it, because the title spoke to me and I wanted to think it through. It was important to me because Tillich spoke of salvation as an act of cosmic healing, where nature and society, as well as human beings, are saved. This goes against the Protestant dumb-down where only our souls are the object of salvation, a kind of terrible effect of Cartesianism. Nature and the social order can go to hell. The manipulation and control of nature in industrial society and modern Physicalist science and technology has contributed to this view even though most scientists would deny the meaning of the soul let alone saving it. Spiritual life is at such a flat stage, I didn’t know how to carry through the theme of the salvation of nature.

Like Rosenstock-Huessy said: “The sound of the axe is the natural philosophy of America.” Only now it is the chain saw. There is a need for a new philosophy of nature, with a theological dimension.

Isn’t there another sermon of Tillich’s that relates to your theme?

Yes, it is the line from Schelling, that I thought of when Chadwick died, which is the title of Tillich’s sermon in The Shaking Of the Foundations: “Nature, Also, Mourns For A Lost Good.” Tillich begins with the words of Paul, which are profound, to say the least:

“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” Romans 8:19-22.

This ecstatic Pauline meditation on nature has had a great play in what you call the theological dimension of the environmental movement.

As well it should. Lynn White, Jr., opened the debate with his obtuse attack on the Christian or biblical tradition in a famous article on the historic roots of the environmental crisis, and the theme of stewardship of creation which he took to mean domination and exploitation which is an absurd distortion of the biblical meaning and then tried to make up for it by extolling St. Francis as the patron saint of the environmental movement. Anyhow, there is a great resource for reflection in the biblical tradition, foremost being the garden/wilderness theme that George Williams elucidates in his wonderful book–Wilderness and Paradise–which, as I mentioned, figured so centrally as an inspiration for me.

So you took the easy way out by using the slogan of the Garden derived from Goethe’s Italian Journey, which gave you a quasi-pagan reference rather than a biblical one.

True. It did make it easier and it was our motto. Arcadia is a great theme and serves me well. There is a nice essay by Bruno Snell in his Discovery Of the Mind, I should reread: “Arcadia and the Discovery of the Spiritual Landscape.”

Wasn’t there a movie made of the Garden?

Michael Stusser was a student and I obtained a small grant and he shot a half hour film. There is only one brief glimpse of Chadwick in the entire film, which is odd; he was so dramatic he should have been the star. But Stusser focused on the Garden and the students working in it. The remarkable part was the night he went to the studio to look at the rushes and coincidentally Norman 0. Brown, our big shot professor at the time, was recording his meditation on the garden, which he called “My Georgics” and it happened to come over the loud speaker in Stusser’s studio. Stusser ran around looking for him and talked him into letting him use it as the sound track for the film.

Eventually, Chadwick ended up in Covelo?

Yes. Huey Johnson was riding on an airplane with Richard Wilson, who was an environmentalist-rancher in Round Valley, or Covelo, in Northern California. Huey asked Richard Wilson to take him on and move him up to Covelo. Baker had to move him out–they

couldn’t take him any more at the Zen Farm at Green Gulch. He thought they sat too much and rode around in fast cars, when they should have been gardening. So Wilson took him and set him up with a garden project in Covelo, a small town in Round Valley, in Northern California. Dennis Tamura and Steve Decatur and Ramon Chavez went up with him and they carved out a garden only to watch it wash away in the odd flash floods in Covelo. Then he moved to a small farm area and developed a wonderful garden and an apprentice training group. It was a further consolidation of the Chadwick network where many young people were coming to receive the training and the discipline from the Taskmaster. He took on the role of a Master and proceeded to reveal mysteries. Richard Wilson was devoted to Alan and provided for him and the remarkable community that gathered, including woodworkers and crafts people, as well as gardeners. It was a very powerful time and Chadwick came into his own, much more so than at the University. We have over a hundred fifty lectures, all of them on tape, in an archive preserved by Wilson and Craig Siska and Virginia Baker, which we have developed at UCSC Special Collections.

You must have visited him there.

Yes, Page and I made a number of trips over the years. They

were memorable. Page was fun to travel with because he was like a shield and he always paid for everything. He was generosity personified.

What do you mean by “shield”?

He was “larger than life”, as the saying goes, so he opened up this space for you, which was very protective and nurturing and inspiring, at least it was for me. He made you feel invulnerable by following in the swath he cut. I remember the little motel where we stayed the first time we went up to Covelo, which, you have to realize, was like Shangri-la, a perfectly intact round valley you drop into, about thirty miles in diameter, surrounded by the Trinity Alps. We venture into the Buckthorn Bar, a redneck hangout, where you had to be careful. Page ordered a double bourbon with a particular flourish. I never knew anyone who routinely ordered a double, so I was impressed. We had a wonderful trip there one Easter and I arranged for an Easter egg hunt and have this photo of Page proudly showing off an egg he found which is special because Page referred to himself as a chicken rancher. He had taught a seminar and written a book-The Chicken Book–which he was proud of. I remember one episode where we stopped at the edge of the valley on our way home and Page bought some bantam chickens from an old Indian woman. He was a connoisseur of chickens. Late in life, under the influence of his wife, Eloise, he became an artist and did etchings of chickens and barnyard foul.

He illustrated your childrens’ book on the homeless–Florence The Goose.

Yes, he did. I was thinking who I might recruit in Santa Cruz to do the illustrations and one day I realized that Page had all these etchings of geese, so I asked him for them and they just fell into place for the book. It was magical. There was Florence in all manner of poses.

You brought Chadwick into your C.C.C. connection with Gov. Brown.

We had a C.C.C. Encampment at Covelo and Frank Davidson, who had been instrumental, along with Page, in starting Camp William James, in 1940, came out from Boston. We slept out on the lawn in front of Chadwick’s house and I sneaked in and slept in Chadwick’s bed and he had a fit when he found out–I should say FIT. He was also outraged over our cleaning the fridge which was filthy, which must have embarrassed him. I found a book from the UCSC Library taken out in my name: Goethe The Scientist, by Steiner, so I put it in my car to return. This all made him mad. Freya Von Moltke was there visiting and they had been up at Richard Wilson’s place in the mountains. We were going to have a great banquet in Freya’s honor and Chadwick stalked off in his temper and we were left to carry on without him. That was the last straw for me, so I didn’t speak to him for a year. I was just fed up. He finally came down to Santa Cruz and called me and we had a reconciliation and he told me about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and so on and I didn’t have a clue. He was telling me about the future of his work and my role in it and speaking in Arthurian Round Table riddles and then asked me if I understood what he was alluding to and I sort of nodded my head and then he hollered at me knowing I didn’t get it at all. It was embarrassing.

But this was an entry point for your interest in the Elizabethan Arcadia, including Dee and Bacon.

I knew nothing about it at the time. Now we could talk. Chadwick would have loved to have re-established the Entertainments which were famous in England, beginning in the summer of 1575, in a kind of aesthetic outburst of these themes. The Entertainments revived the Order of the Round Table and introduced the Faerie Queen who is Astraea or Gloriana–the Virgin Queen and the British Minerva. All of these associations were intact in a kind of morphic resonance–they were alive in their meaningfulness with Queen Elizabeth as their embodiment. The Good Shepherd (Poimandres) and the Hermit (Hermes) or wise man were incorporated in the Entertainments and set the scene for the Arthurian and Arcadian imagery of Sydney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Fairie Queen. So my current interest in Arcadia and Ecotopia is another version of this kind of utopian thought of the Golden Age, “which permeated and influenced the whole development of Elizabethan pageantry, culture, learning, politics and national belief’, as Peter Dawkins puts it in his essay: Arcadia.

Then Chadwick fell ill, didn’t he?

Then he got cancer and he left for parts unknown. He lived in a cabin for a while with a friend and then he went to West Virginia on a hooey hooey venture, where he was taken in, in both senses of the phrase, by a spiritualist teacher named Paul Solomon, both names assumed–the Apostle and the King– in a remarkable act of self-aggrandizement. Talk about an egomaniac. It was in the Shenanodah Valley, the place of my favorite song, sung by the St. Olaf Choir. It was a New Age center, a spin-off from Edgar Cayce, who was Solomon’s guru, where the esoteric and occult were available for breakfast. Paul Solomon had a belly like a basketball and I was so shocked when I met him, I asked him how he could be a New Age Guru and not be able to tie his shoes. He didn’t think it was funny. Tara Singh was there, an Indian mystic, who was as delicious looking as a chocolate bar. At the Conference, Tara spoke about the two masters in residence, one false and one true, and we were supposed to guess which one was Chadwick and which one was Solomon.

What was the occasion for your going there?

I went there to give a lecture at the Conference Solomon organized. I knew Alan was dying and I wanted to see him. When I went in to see Alan I saw the Angel of Death hovering over him. It was heartbreaking. Bucky Fuller was there and gave a talk so it was nice to see him again although this time I don’t think he remembered me. Sir George Trevelyan was there, a famous Anthroposophist, from England and Barbara Marx Hubbard. My great friend, Rolf von Eckartsberg went with me and I remember driving up into the mountains for breakfast and having a shorty beer and the people around us talking as though they had won the Civil War.

Did Alan seek any medical treatment?

Alan refused conventional medical therapy, but I had heard that he had undergone psychic surgery and I found a woman who had witnessed it and asked her to tell me about it. I should have taken

notes. It was very bizarre. She told me in detail about the “entities” who entered the room and did their bit and then sat in a row against the wall. She was able to see them. She described them to me. It was not successful. Alan finally left when it was clear he was dying and he came back to Green Gulch, along with Acacia, his devoted nurse-attendant, who saw to his every need. I arranged for his return with the Bakers and they were willing to care for him. People lined up to hear his last words, including Jerry Brown. There was the Governor of California, with hat in hand, waiting to go in to hear him. Why not? Chadwick revealed nature’s mysteries from his deathbed.

Didn’t you have a final conference meeting before he died.

Yes, I organized a good-bye at Green Gulch. Jack Stauffacher did the broadside for it. I asked Alan to speak. I had seen him do it in West Virginia, where he was already so ill, it was curtains. He got himself up in his powder-blue Good Will suit, and came in to tell

us, again, the fairy tales of Rosemarinus and Calendula and the Nightingale and the Emperor. Everyone was moved, except for one guy who thought Alan was a ham, which I thought was ungenerous, given the circumstances. There was a huge storm, you could hardly move, as though nature itself was acting up, a horrendous ocean storm, a stage setting for Alan as King Lear, to rage against the coming night and the dying of the light.

Are you glad you knew Alan?

I have regretted meeting some people in my life, but not Alan Chadwick. It was a fate. There is no subjective opinion about it. That’s what I meant about institutional process–what we had to do with one another, small scale conceded, was far beyond our personalities or our own subjectivities. That was idiosyncratic. Even though it kept getting in the way as it usually does.

Wasn’t there some other event involving a psychic?

Yes, the lady in Santa Barbara. I went down to see Lotus Land, a fabulous garden developed by Ganna Walska, who was a famous Russian beauty and an opera singer. Her garden is very famous, especially for the Blue Garden section and the planting of Euphorbias around the house–unforgettable. This was some years after Alan had died. I met this woman psychic there. She saw an aborigine lurking behind a tree. She looked like she sold shoes at a military commissary, one of those utterly dumpy women with psychic powers. Somewhat later, I received a tape of her seance with Alan and it was quite remarkable. I don’t have any reason to believe she knew Acacia, who took care of Alan during his illness and she refers to her by her other name. Alan had asked after her and had a message for her. He had a message for me. He described me standing on the great greensward or meadow in front of the Pogonip Club, overlooking Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay and said something about how one day I would save it or be involved with it in some special way. There would be a garden there on a great scale. I was amazed because I went on to organize the Greenbelt Initiative to save Pogonip and have plans for a large-scale botanical garden there in Chadwick’s memory which may still come to pass with our Homeless Garden Project. So what do I know?

Tell about the opening of the Whole Earth Restaurant.

Sharon Cadwallader, was doing filing for me and she said she was writing a cookbook. We had just taken on the Whole Earth Restaurant Project and we needed a manager and chief bottle washer and Sharon was willing to do it. That was a big success. She made a career out of it as a famous cookbook author.

How come you were so good at getting other people jobs?

He saved others but he couldn’t save himself. One of my favorite lines. Ironically, one of our most successful projects–The William James Work Company, found about thirty thousand jobs for people during the late ’70′s. Page and I were very proud of that achievement. It was the preparatory training for our homeless work.

Isn’t there some other story about the opening of the Whole Earth?

Oh, that. We had the Red Mountain Boys play and the party went on to two in the morning. I completely forgot that Chadwick’s apartment was across the street. We hollered good-bye to everyone in the parking lot hanging out over the balcony as they drove away. After everyone left, my wife and I got into our Volvo Station wagon and started up the hill and here came Chadwick in his bathrobe, like a Banshee Owl, he seemed to be flying. He jumped up onto the hood of my car and looked into the window and said: “I knew it was you! You miscreant! You blackguard! Don’t move! You are under arrest! This is a Citizens’ Arrest! Wait here for the police!” I thought this guy has gone apeshit. I speeded up and swerved. He swung off and we were gone. That was a thriller. We had escaped the clutches of the Mad Gardener. The next day he acted like all was forgotten.

Didn’t something similar happen with Page Smith?

You mean acting like it never happened? It had to do with a reception my wife and I gave for Alan at Cowell College when we began the Garden to introduce him to the university community. We served watercress sandwiches, with watercress from our stream, which, if it had been polluted, might have killed someone. Polluted watercress. Nobody told me. Fortunately, it was o.k. We get so soon old and yet so late schmart. And we served champagne, which we thought was pretty fancy. I got a letter from Page congratulating me with the greatest sarcasm about thinking myself a pretty smart fellow for breaking the rules about alcohol. I didn’t know that a terrible, near fatal, accident, had occurred the year before after a cocktail party and everyone was up tight, as a result. He, if anything, was personally more cordial and gracious to me in person, after that. I still have the letter.

Didn’t you organize some lectures for Chadwick?

Yes, I was on to the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict and I thought it was important to tell as the context for Alan’s work at the University, so I talked him into giving a series. I gave an opening lecture: “Up With Goethe and Down With Newton”. We started in a classroom and wound up in the Quarry, which was a perfect setting for Alan, a large amphitheater in a natural setting on the campus where commencement and special events are held. Jack and Josephine Stauffacher had become friends by then and they brought a group from the City, including the artists–Gordon and Jacqueline Onslow-Ford and people from the opera and the theatre. Alan was charmed and it reminded him of his theatre days in London. We had wonderful lunches at the Whole Earth Restaurant after his lectures. It was the period of the Chadwick Salon and some of the happiest events as an was on his best behavior. I had to go away one weekend and Jack Stauffacher introduced him. His son, Mario, took some wonderful pictures.

These lectures are available?

Yes. We have audio tapes and transcribed texts. We made a false start at publishing them. Virginia Baker and I fell in with Sam Francis, the famous painter, who started the Lapis Press, with Jack Stauffacher, as the typographer and designer and we were going to do a book, but they were impossible to edit. Virginia is trying her hand at it again and they may come out after all. It is the perfect example of the dead letter versus the living voice or Chadwick versus Derrida.

Derrida?

Derrida is the French philosopher who makes so much of the distinction between writing and speech. It is a very large contemporary discussion. Jack Stauffacher and I developed a perfect friendship over the Chadwick Garden. He is the fine printer and typographer of the Greenwood Press, in San Francisco and a Goethean, so when I told him about our Goethean Garden at UCSC, he was eager to meet Chadwick. He did a series of Greenwood Press Broadsides commemorating our work, utilizing the theme of Goethe’s Italian Journey–Et In Arcadia Ego. The first was executed on Jan. 22, 1972. He did another for the last meeting with Chadwick at Green Gulch and he did one for me when I gave a talk commemorating the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s “Italian Journey”. They are treasures. So our collaboration on this book is the culmination of a great friendship.

Tell about meeting Robert Rodale and Wendall Berry.

I can’t remember the year. Whether I was still teaching or not. It was around 1972. I heard they had come. I knew about Rodale, of course. His father had single-handedly restored the integrity of the organic in the true meaning of the word, although credit has to be given to Frank Lloyd Wright, as well. They were two voices crying in the wilderness of industrial society, affirming the theme of the organic, against all odds. Rodale made a publishing empire out of it. I was first introduced to Rodale and Organic Gardening Magazine, at St. Olaf College, by Mrs. Julius Larson. She received grain from some organic wheat farm in Montana and made the best bread I ever had. She lived in a home designed by her son, Les, a good friend of mine, in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, called “Wheatledge”. Edna Hong’s bread was just as good, as I remember. She may have used the same source for flour. This was my second experience with the “organic”, in terms of the staff of life, after synthetic vanilla. It was 1950. The bread was an epiphany. It was a way of life. The Hongs lived it with the utmost consistency. They had an enormous influence on me as witnesses to the good life. We had Thursday afternoon philosophy discussions at their home on the campus which they had built and designed out of native stone and Edna would bring in freshly baked bread and cheese and it was heavenly to an impressionable young student sick of cafeteria food and Wonder Bread.

So you had an early understanding of the organic/synthetic confusion.

Then, years later, Robert Rodale, the son, and Wendall Berry, the poet; arrived to pay homage to Chadwick. Robert and Wendall had come to Santa Cruz, because Robert’s daughter, Heidi, was working in the Garden. They made the mistake of first going to the Farm and meeting Kaffka and then going up to meet Chadwick at the Garden. He refused to see them. It was a breach of protocol. So I intercepted them and brought them down to my house–I live just below the campus– and we had a talk. I gave my Physicalist/Vitalist spiel and Robert got it in a flash.

So you told Robert Rodale how his father re-constituted the integrity of the organic?

It was no news to him. Can you imagine single-handedly restoring the meaning of a word and the word is ‘organic’? I was keen on giving the philosophical and historical context which was news to him. He appreciated that. We kept up contact over the years until his tragic death in Russia. He called me before he went to China and we talked about the future of organic food production in China. I see Wendall every once in a while and revere him as the poet of organic integrity. He exemplifies it and he defends it as well as anyone I know. He should get the Nobel Prize just for the stand he has taken and the voice he has given to it: the witness to the organic. His book on the decline of the family farm–The Unsettling Of America– is an important contribution to the discussion.

You have as good a view as anyone of the Chadwick legacy–what can you say about it?

Well, the meeting with Alan before he died was designed to establish his legacy in some organized form: the Chadwick Archive, which would be a deposit of his tapes and memorabilia, the Chadwick Apprentice Network or Guild, namely, everyone who carried on the work, and the Chadwick Society, devoted to Alan’s memory. We did it for a while, with Virginia Baker as the Director, but we never found any money to sustain it. We did a fancy newsletter. It finally faded. Now we are trying to establish an archival deposit at UCSC Special Collections, at the McHenry Library, with Carol Champion. Craig Siska has over one hundred fifty tapes, as I mentioned, and is willing to donate them and we have other things to include. Siska is just now securing 1300 acres in North Carolina in order to fulfill the legacy of Chadwick in a project he calls Verdant Earth. It is a wonderful vision. Doug Boyd has joined him there–the biographer of Rolling Thunder. He came for a visit recently and we had a discussion of mutual interests and concerns.

The John Cage Mushroom Library Collection is at UCSC isn’t it?

Yes. Cage came to visit around 1969 and I introduced him to Chadwick. We took him mushroom hunting and it was one of those legendary days. Alan was in great form, leaping like a deer down Marshall Field, jumping in the air and clicking his heels. Robert Duncan, the poet, came along. We found bushel baskets of mushrooms, a few varieties Cage had never seen before. He was completely charmed by Chadwick and even wrote a piece about it. * He came back to my house afterwards and we had a bottle of wine and he said he’d like to give his collection of mushroom books to Alan and the Garden Project. So he did. The collection wound up in the McHenry Library in Special Collections.

You had met Cage in New York before you moved to Santa Cruz?

Yes. My former student at Harvard, Jake Brackman, who is famous for writing the cult film, “Main’s Gardens” and songs for Carly Simon, was a friend of his and he arranged for us to have lunch at Barbetta’s, a wonderful restaurant in New York. Jake was writing for The New Yorker and he put the following anecdote about the lunch in “The Talk Of The Town”:

Overheard at Barbetta’s Restaurant:

`My father recently died and my mother was depressed, so I told her to go out to California and visit our relatives and have a good time. She said, Oh, John, you know, I’ve never enjoyed having a good time.’

It was pure Cage.

So the Chadwick legacy lives on?

Oh big time!  John Jeavons has done as much as anyone to carry the Chadwick message to the world. Meeting him was an event. It was Sunday night about 10:00 p.m.. The doorbell rang and there was Jeavons looking like a gypsy vagabond with a couple of wives out in the van. He wanted to know if we could speak in private. I was alone in my front room. I thought of looking behind the couch. We went out into an adjoining patio. He whispered something I couldn’t quite hear. After repeated “what’s?” I finally heard him. “Did I understand the importance of what was happening”, he kept muttering under his breath? What? Our standing out in the cold and whispering? He meant Chadwick. He was an efficiency engineer and he decided to apply his skills to the Chadwick Method. I remember delivering his slide show on the Chadwick Method to Madam Deng, Chou En Lai’s widow, who was probably the most powerful woman in the world at the time, when I was in China, in 1988, leading an herbal delegation. I continue to get John’s newsletter–Ecology Action– and keep up with his work. He is incredibly energetic and devoted to the cause. I talked to Jerry Brown on the phone today about his interest in homeless gardens and he told me about Jeavons advising him on a roof garden he has begun in Oakland. I hear from time to time of old apprentices and what they are doing. We have many Chadwick disciples in the area devoted to organic gardening and farming. Alan touched many people’s lives with the message and quite a number have made it into a life style. Jim Nelson’s “Camp Joy” is my favorite local example, as well as Dennis Tamura’s “Blue Heron Farm”. This is where the Chadwick legacy lives in the students who have assumed the lifestyle of organic integrity.

Would you say that the Steiner connection opened up some remarkable lines of thought, what chaos theory would call “strange attractors”?

Yes, that’s true. Once you get unstuck from the University, you become more open for otherwise taboo-type influences. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of reductionism, where openness is sacrificed for an ever more specific accuracy, so a requisite narrowing of vision is demanded. Page Smith always deplored this tendency even in historiography, e.g.,”The History of the Wisconsin Dairy Industry From 1899-1900.” He poured scorn on monographic history and marshaled his energy for the big picture narrative view.

What would be a theme you consider controversial?

I suppose the monopole is one example of a far-out theme that has grasped me and fascinates me.

What is the monopole?

It could be the physics of the life-force or vital-force of the old Vitalists, for which there was no physics, unless you resort to “occult qualities”. The monopole is a strict extrapolation of quantum theory, formulated by Paul Dirac, in 1931, the year I was born and the same year of Godel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”. The monopole is a magnetic force with only one pole which contradicts the definition of a magnet and undermines the distinction between magnetism and electricity. I have followed the work of Phil Callahan, the entomologist, whom I mentioned, who did the monopole detection and has worked out detailed experiments and an elaborate theory which interests me. You can get a pretty good summary of Callahan’s work from Christopher Bird’s book: The Secrets of the Soils.  If you google Phil Callahan and look for his publications with Acres USA, you will see what I mean.

Didn’t he write: The Secret Life of Plants?

Yes, with Thompkins. Both volumes are concerned with the esoteric or Vitalist scientific side of botany and related fields. Remember how Clive Baxter had to hook up plants to a lie detector and then threaten to burn them with a cigarette to find out they were alive. That was cute. I met Baxter at the same time I met Callahan at a conference in Witchita, organized by Hugh Riordan, at the Garvey Center. Callahan has a number of books which are a good read, published by Acres USA, in Kansas City, Kansas.

Callahan’s monopole work reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance”.

Rupert Sheldrake could be added to this mix, as one of the main philosophical exponents of neo-Vitalism. When we met, he told me his father had been an herbalist, which I was happy to learn. Sheldrake would go so far as to endorse pan-psychism, also known as hylozoism, in his effort to renew organic integrity. He is like a PreSocratic Greek in his understanding of life forms and his theme of morphic resonance. He has reversed the trend of an ontology of death, characterizing modern science ever since Newton and Galileo and has recovered an ontology of life. No mean feat.

What other figures follow in this tradition?

Arthur Koestler preceded him in this vein and his last book: Janus. A Summing Up, is a great testimony for neo-Vitalist themes cracking open the physicalist shell of modern science, which Koestler humorously calls the Trojan Horse syndrome. Koestler had a keen understanding of the issues. It’s very exciting stuff and I have enjoyed following it. Fritjov Capra is another neo-Vitalist scientist who has turned from physics to the green revolution. His Tao of Physics was a pioneer effort in the reaction to Physicalism. Sim Van Der Ryn, as an architect, is another example of a heroic dedication to organic integrity and environmental awareness and sustainability. He was the innovative genius as State Architect under Jerry Brown and a visionary environmentalist as a founder of the Farallones Institute. He arranged for a debate between Chadwick and Paolo Soleri which I had the pleasure of attending–I introduced Chadwick. I have lectured on the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict to Sim’s design classes at UC Berkeley over the years and we enjoy a close collaboration. Chadwick would have been delighted to know of these subsequent projects and these representatives of a modern Vitalism.

Who is your favorite writer on the issue?

The best single piece I know of on this larger issue of the Physicalist/Vitalist theme, taking into account the history of Western cultural thought altogether, is by Hans Jonas, who taught at the New School, in New York. He discusses the themes of “the ontology of life” versus “the ontology of death” in a very insightful way in the first chapter of The Phenomenon of Life. The Philosophy of Life or Lebensphilosophie was a strong tradition in Germany and has had some play in this country.

Are there allied influences?

William James’ Pragmatism has affinities with it, as well as with Existentialism. The same with Whitehead under the theme of organicism and process philosophy. Frank Lloyd Wright is very comparable to Steiner in his concern for organic architecture and was a beacon of light throughout this century. I bemoan the fact that Wright didn’t have an even greater influence, but it is remarkable that he was a force at all given the trend. Corbusier would represent the Physicalist or industrial side of the coin. The Bauhaus movement, as well. I wish I could give a course on this material because you learn something new in collaboration with students.

Can you give a summary of what Jonas puts forth?

The question is a little daunting inasmuch as the essay deals with the entire history of Western thought, but there is a page or so that gives a good capsulated version. The essay has a very strange title–you would hardly know what lurks there–”Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being”–what an awful title! He should have called it “The Physicalist/Vitalist Conflict In the History of Western Thought” or “An Ontology of Death versus an Ontology of Life–the Role of Science in the History of Western Culture”.

Here is what he says:

“Modern thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. [From the ancient view which is a concentration on life, with death as the great mystery]. Death is the natural thing, life the problem. From the physical sciences there spread over the conception of all existence an ontology whose model entity is pure matter, stripped of all features of life. What at the animistic stage was not even discovered has in the meantime conquered the vision. of reality, entirely ousting its counterpart. The tremendously enlarged universe of modern cosmology is conceived as a field of inanimate masses and forces which operate according to the laws of inertia and of quantitative distribution in space. This denuded substratum of all reality could only be arrived at through a progressive expurgation of vital features from the physical record and through strict abstention from projecting into its image our own felt aliveness. In the process the ban on anthropomorphism was extended to zoomorphism in general.           at remained is the residue of the reduction toward the properties of mere extension which submit to measurement and hence to mathematics. These properties alone satisfy the requirements of what is now called exact knowledge: and representing the only knowable aspect of nature they, by a tempting substitution, came to be regarded as its essential aspect too: and if this, then as the only real in reality. This means that the lifeless has become the knowable par excellence and is for that reason also considered the true and only foundation of reality. It is the “natural” as well as the original state of things. Not only in terms of relative quantity but also in terms of ontological genuineness, non life is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence.

Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. Left over as a borderline case in the homogenous physical world-view, life has to be accounted for by the terms of that view. Quantitatively infinitesimal in the immensity of cosmic matter, qualitatively an exception from the rule of its properties, cognitively the unexplained in the general plainness of physical things, it has become the stumbling block of theory. That there is life at all, and how such a thing is possible in a world of mere matter, is now the problem posed to thought. The very fact that we have nowadays to deal with the theoretical problem of life, instead of the problem of death, testifies to the status of death as the natural and intelligible condition.

Here again, the problem consists in the collision between a comprehensive view and a particular fact: as formerly panvitalism, so now panmechanism is the comprehensive hypothesis; and the rare case of life, realized under the exceptional, perhaps unique conditions of our planet, is the improbably particular that seems to elude the basic law and therefore must be denied its autonomy–that is, must be integrated into the general law. To take life as a problem is here to acknowledge its strangeness in the mechanical world which is the world; to explain it is–in this climate of a universal ontology of death–to negate it by making it one of the possible variants of the lifeless. Such a negation is the mechanistic theory of the organism, as the funeral rites of prehistory were a negation of death. L’Homme machine signifies in the modern scheme what conversely hylozoism signified in the ancient scheme: the usurpation of one, dissembled realm by the other which enjoys an ontological monopoly. Vitalistic monism is replaced by mechanistic monism, in whose rules of evidence the standard of life is exchanged for that of death.” p.11.

You could hardly get a more succinct formulation with greater clarity. I have been studying Husserl and his Crisis of Western Science, which is a superb critique of Physicalism. He talks about the mathematization of nature by Galileo as the beginning of the massive effort to control and exploit nature. I didn’t realize that Phenomenology was a correction and major critic of Physicalism until I read this essay. Now I have a great appreciation for Husserl even though he is rather old-fashioned in his belief in Western rationality and science. Jonas continues the critique of Physicalism with his discussion of an ontology of death. The entire essay is so tightly formulated it is a classic, in my estimation. This is intelligence at work at a very high level of conceptual ability. I add organic nature to his use of the term life. It is hard to believe that a revolution in physics and then chemistry should have presaged the entire reorganization of what counts for knowledge, but this is exactly what happened in what is known as modernity. We are going through a comparable re-organization now, under the theme of post-modernity. I’m sorry I never had the chance to meet Jonas. He and Tillich must have been friends.

Does Jonas say anything about the organism or the organic?

Yes, he does.

” …what the general nature of the world is, has been decided in advance: mere matter in space. Therefore, since organism represents “life” in the world, the question regarding life now poses itself thus: How does the organism stand in the total context already defined, how is this special order or function of it reducible to its general laws–how, in short is life reducible to non-life? To reduce life to the lifeless is nothing less than to resolve the particular into the general, the complex into the simple, and the apparent exception into the accepted rule. Precisely this is the task set to modern biological science by the goal of “science” as such. The degree of approximation to this goal is the measure of its success; and the unresolved remainder left at any time denotes its provisional limit, to be advanced by the next move.”

I wish I could put it as well. His essay deserves a book length elaboration and interpretation.  I have thought of doing a Jonas Reader where I would put together his discussion of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict along with a commentary.  His discussion is rather embedded in various essays and he never attempted a systematic approach to the problem even though he has the best formulations I have read.

One more sentence says it all:

“Today the living, feeling, striving organism has taken over this role (of the corpse in ancient thought) and is being unmasked as a ludibrium materiae, a subtle hoax of matter. Only when a corpse is the body plainly intelligible: then it returns from its puzzling and unorthodox behavior of aliveness to the unambiguous, “familiar” state of a body within the world of bodies, whose general laws provide the canon of all comprehensibility. To approximate the laws of the organic body to this canon, i.e., to efface in this sense the boundaries between life and death, is the direction of modern thought on life as a physical fact. Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death.” p.12

I see what you mean. In other words, Oparin’s definition of life as a qualification of dead matter is just a more formal pronouncement of the ludibrium materiae, a subtle hoax.

Exactly. Life as a “subtle hoax of matter”, what a perfect way to put the Physicalist view. Freud’s qualitative leap in the neurone as the origin of consciousness is of the same conceptual ilk. I was reading Habermas today: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and he has something very similar to say:

“The cognitive-instrumental one-sidedness of cultural and societal rationalization was also expressed in philosophical attempts to establish an objectivistic self-understanding of human beings and their world–initially in mechanistic and later in materialistic and physicalistic world views, which reduced the mental to the physical by means of more or less complicated theories. In Anglo-Saxon countries to this very day, analytical materialism keeps discussion of the mind/body relationship alive; to this very day, physicalistic or other scientistic background convictions underwrite the demand that everything intuitively known be alienated from the perspective of a natural-scientific observer–that we understand ourselves in terms of objects. For objectivistic self-understanding, what matters, naturally, is not any explanation of detail but the unique act of inverting the natural attitude to the world. The lifeworld itself is to be brought into the perspective of self-objectification in such a way that everything that is normally disclosed to us within its horizon-

performatively, as it were–appears from an extramundane angle of vision as an occurrence purely and simply foreign to all meaning, extrinsic and accidental, explicable only in accord with natural-scientific models.

As long as mechanics, biochemistry, and neurophysiology have supplied the languages and models, we have not been able to get beyond general and abstract correlations and foundational discussions about mind and body. Descriptive systems stemming from the natural sciences are too remote from everyday experiences to be suitable for channeling distantiating self-descriptions into the lifeworld in a differentiated manner and along a broad front. This changes with the language of general systems theory that has developed from cybernetics and with the application of its models in various life sciences. The models derived from intelligent performances and tailored to organic life come a lot closer to the sociocultural form of life than classical mechanics.” pp 384-5.

Well, that’s mostly technical jargon, following in the tradition of Husserl and his effort to recover the Lifeworld or Lebenswelt, but the point is made for our side. It is reassuring to know that the discussion is there, if you know where to look for it. Systems theory is a way of overcoming the Physicalist/Vitalist split. Likewise, organicism.

How do you find your way with these themes unless you know a lot about Western philosophy, let alone all the other fields you read in?

Well, start reading. The history of Western humanities is now an endangered species. The entire spiritual tradition, beginning with the presocratic philosophers and culminating in Socrates and the witness to him on the part of Plato, and then Aristotle, coupled with the biblical tradition and their eventual confluence in the late Ancient and early Medieval periods, is now so dead and buried we can hardly account for the death of the human spirit in modern times. The spiritual outburst of Greek culture, the origins of rational self-consciousness, the experiential context on which the meaning of reason depends, all of this is in need of restoration once the attack on the Dead White European Male has spent itself and is overcome. I am hoping the course I did with Tillich at Harvard in the early ’60′s eventually will be published as the restoration of the classic Core–what every intelligent person ought to know, but it will probably not happen. It would be nice to anticipate another Renaissance renewal of the ancient sources of Western culture at the end of the self-destruction of industrial society with all the attendant renewal of creativity in cultural and spiritual life this entails sometime in the next millennium. If it only happens every five hundred years we are about due.

Let’s go back to the monopole. I don’t get what the monopole has to do with anything.

You’re not alone. My association with the life force of Vitalism was just a guess but everything developed by Callahan bears this out. It is just that almost no one, I mean almost no one, pays attention to him. Callahan draws the implications for soils in his work, so you would have to look there for that line. I found out about the monopole in a completely fortuitous way. I was in Wisconsin campaigning for Brown for President when a reporter from the L.A. Times asked me why I was interested in Jerry Brown and I launched into my urea pitch only to show that Brown was the only politician who took into account the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, until someone kicked me. The reporter quoted me, making me look like a jerk: “When asked why he was campaigning for Brown, Herb Guru, Paul Lee, said, ‘In 1828, a German chemist’…”, and so on, and this guy reads about it and calls me up from Lockheed. His name was Dr. Randall Frost. I thought it was my friend, Earl McGrath, playing a prank on me and I kept saying, “O.K. Earl. I know it’s you.” Well, it really was Dr. Frost from Lockheed. Dr. Frost was involved with urea in the aging of metals, which was news to me. We fell into an interesting talk. It must have lasted for an hour. I thought this might be the guy I can ask about the difference between organic and synthetic urea. He told me about Lehninger, who wrote a classic text on organic chemistry and then we proceeded to discuss the difference. I remember the call as if it happened yesterday. Here is my retrieval of the main part:

Lee: What’s the difference between organic and synthetic urea?

Frost: Oh, that’s well known. The formulae are given in Lehninger’s text on organic chemistry.

Lee: Well, that’s news to me. The assumption is that they are identical, which is the basis for the refutation of Vitalism.

Frost: No, I’ll send you the pages from Lehninger.

Lee: If Lehninger gives the different formulae for organic and synthetic urea, how do you account for the difference?

Frost: Oh, that’s an interesting question. It is due to the monopole.

Lee:    at is the monopole?

Frost: It is a magnetic force, with only one pole, postulated by Dirac as a strict extrapolation from quantum theory. It is infinitely long and infinitely thin.

Lee: Infinitely long and infinitely thin?  What is it? God?

Frost: I’ve wondered about that myself.

Lee: Is it the life-force of the old vitalists?

Frost: That’s interesting. You might say so.

Lee: How do monopoles make the difference?

Frost: Monopoles don’t link to synthetics; only to organic entities. Lee: How do they do that?

Frost: Through soliton particles.

Lee:    What are soliton particles?

Frost: This is getting complicated. I’ll send you articles on the monopole and soliton particles from Scientific American.

Lee: O.K. Nice talking to you.

So that was when I became interested in the monopole. I was teaching a class on philosophy to high school students at the time and told them about the monopole and they took an interest in it and so we invited Dr. Frost to come and talk to us and it was one of those magical evenings where the subject caught fire. The next morning, the San Francisco Chronicle announced the detection of the monopole at Stanford. The next morning! Another remarkable coincidence. Then I met Phil Callahan at a Wholistic Health conference in Kansas and he handed me his paper on the detection of the monopole as we shook hands. He detected monopole events by hooking up a Ficus benjaminus tree in his front room and got monopole fluctuations over a seven year period, especially on the equinox and especially the summer equinox, or St. John’s Day, June 22nd. Keep it in mind next June and go with the flow.

You have developed contrasting examples right down the line, haven’t you? The monopole filled the bill as the physics for the integrity of organic nature with soliton particles as the link between monopoles and organic entities?

Yes, although this is still at such a preliminary stage of discussion and formulation all it does is open a door to a possible line of inquiry of which I am incapable of pursuing. It would take some collaboration the nature of which I have as yet to invite or find. Ralph Abraham has taken an interest in the theme, so we’ll see what he does with it. Rupert Sheldrake acted bored when I brought it up, but it is a natural for his morphic resonance theme.

Maybe this discussion will elicit some response.

Wouldn’t that be nice. I have an e-mail address:

DRPALEE@aol.com.  although I prefer:  drpalee777@gmail.com

And I have a web site: http://ecotopia.org and a home page: http://pacweb.com/palee

You seem to be in a difficult position in terms of everything you think not just your demise at the university.

Tell me about it. What has opened up is a long discourse which I can only outline. Maybe after this gets out I can turn my mind to it. I have already started thinking about it.

What is that?

Well, I formed a kind of study program three years ago when Ralph Abraham asked me to sketch out the philosophical origins of chaos theory. He was working on a new edition of Euclid as a result of our studying John Dee. Dee had been responsible for the first English translation of Euclid by Billingsley and had written a famous introduction to it which could be cited as an effort at a ma thesis univeralis, namely an attempt to develop a mathematical system of the sciences or a mathematically based system of the sciences. Dee’s introduction became the ground plan for mathematical studies for subsequent generations. It was even used at Harvard. Inspired by the confluence of Dee and Euclid for Elizabethan England, Ralph decided to go back and chart the transmission of the Euclid text throughout Western culture from its origins up to Dee and the 16th century. Then he decided to do a new edition of Euclid, complete with computer graphics. So this gave us the theme of the origins of geometry, which is practically the axiomatic science of all sciences, the reference point for a ma thesis universalis.

Didn’t Tillich write a System of the Sciences?

Yes, he did. He was always apologetic about it, as though it was a kind of aberration of his over-ambitious youth, but it is an interesting effort in the tradition, although instead of

mathematics, he utilizes theology as his thematic ground, the very subject matter to be excluded and rejected by Physicalism and Positivism and now the target of Derrida’s “Deconstruction”, in terms of onto-theology and logocentrism, which Tillich represented as well as anyone.

So you were able to supply the philosophical antecedents to chaos theory?

Yes. It turned out that a very interesting discussion was ascertainable, beginning with Husserl, who wrote two important essays: The Origins Of Mathematics and The Origins Of Geometry. The latter was distinguished by a very long introduction by Derrida, his doctoral thesis and his first published piece. This brought up all kinds of problems to think about. It took me to Husserl’s last work, the famous Crisis, which is his great commentary on Descartes, his critique of Galileo and the mathematization of nature, and his discussion of the telos of Western culture as the inner aim of history, beginning with the “Greek eccentrics”, as he calls them and their theme of thaumazein or wonder. This is all great stuff, because in the course of discussing all this, Husserl beats up on the Physicalists as dumb-down guys, much to my delight.

Where did this take you?

Well, I knew that Heidegger, as the student of Husserl, whom he betrayed after Hitler came to power, tried to carry through these themes, where they pretty much foundered, compounded as they were by his flirtation with Nazism, which introduced a virus or a taint into his thought, which no one can ignore, now that it has come to light. But he is so central to much of modern or post-modern thought, the line goes through him. Derrida picks it up and incorporates Godel, which is very important for me, as Godel is a key figure.

So this is where deconstruction and the incompleteness theorems and the undecidability problem prepare the way for chaos thought or chaos philosophy.

Exactly. It is a logical progression. You can see how the decks were cleared for chaos theory just by the sequence of terms which are symbolic of the trend: bracketing of existence (Husserl), cancellation of being (Heidegger), incompleteness and undecidability (Godel), and deconstruction (Derrida).

So you utilize the theme from Heidegger on the recoil from the unknown root in his critique of Kant and you play with his discussion of the Greek word for truth–aletheia–or unconcealedness.

It is one of the most obfuscating words anyone could imagine, but his discussion, especially in his lecture series, published as Parmenides, is compelling, because he takes it into a discussion of “The Myth of Er”, at the end of Plato’s Republic, one of my favorite texts, so I had to pay attention. And he is a very uncanny commentator. I have learned a lot from him. It’s just that he is controversial and practically impossible to apologize for.

Because he extolled Hitler as the savior of Germany.

Can you imagine making a mistake like that–as the nation’s foremost philosopher– and then never a word about it, afterwards, as the mistake of a lifetime? Karl Jaspers asked him

why he was so interested in Hitler–someone with such a low and vulgar intelligence– and Heidegger said: “But he has such beautiful hands.” Now that is one of the weirdest responses in the history of 20th century thought.

Doesn’t Derrida have an essay on Heidegger’s hands?

Weirdness compounded. Holding hands with Hitler. What is important for me in all this is the theme of what is hidden and revealed at the same time. The word for it is “occultation”. I am fascinated by it. I recently read Horkheimer and Adorno on The Dialectic of the Enlightenment and they have a handle on it which is very interesting to me because they utilize the myth of the Song of the Sirens, in the Odyssey, which I am fond of because of the parable of “The Silence of the Sirens”, by Kafka. Their discussion is a commentary on Kafka’s Parable, although they didn’t know of it, as far as I can tell. It is one rare coincidental juxtaposition of text and commentary.

This is related to your interest in the historical origins of rational self-consciousness, as you call it.

Yes, it is. From the Archaic Smile, through Homer, to the Presocratics and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It is a laboratory for the evolution of rational self-consciousness, predicated on literacy.

How did you get on to the theme?

Tillich introduced me to the whole sweep when we did the Harvard Course. It was a fabulous panoramic view of the Western cultural tradition. Then Havelock, whom I knew at Harvard, published: Preface To Plato. It was a bombshell. I remember John Finley, a rival classics professor, at Harvard, told me he stayed up all night reading it straight through in a fit of envy. It’s that kind of book. Havelock set the theme of the transition from native-oral-tribal Homeric culture to rational-literate-civic Socratic/Platonic culture. It is the classic study of the rise of rational self-consciousness and builds upon a school of thinkers, including Bruno Snell, E. R. Dodds, and the oral tradition scholars at Harvard–Milman Parry and Albert Lord. I was ready for Havelock because of the work of Bruno Snell on oral society and Homeric anthropology. All of this lead to my interest in thymos as a key term for vitality, courage and spirit or spiritedness, the bridge between reason and desire and the unreflective striving for what is noble (eros), as Tillich translated it in his study of thymos: The Courage To Be.

So thymos became your reference point for the evolution of rational self-consciousness on the track from Homer to Socrates/Plato.

As I said, it is my favorite word. In a way, thymos comprehends life in the biological spirit and life in the rational spirit. It is the linguistic basis for “soul” and represents exactly what we have lost. I have the model clearly in mind, as characterized by Socrates in the Republic. It is the basis for understanding the meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom, the friend of Sophia.

And Tillich gave you the history of the term in his Courage To Be.

Tillich also alerted me to the theme of the two types of reason in his distinction between receiving or revelatory reason and controlling or technical or instrumental reason. He was friends with the Frankfort School members, of which Horkheimer and Adorno were foremost, so they were on the same wave length. I am trying to organize a line of thought on these themes and have been working on it every summer for the past three years. I am interested in the theme of  mathesis universalis and what is universally true. It raises so many issues it makes one’s head swim, but I am getting clearer about it. What interests me is the progression of thought from the Kantian problem of “existence is not a predicate”, to Husserl’s “bracketing of existence”, to Heidegger’s “cancellation of being”, to Derrida’s “deconstruction” and Godel’s “incompleteness” and “undecidability” themes. It is a continuous clearing of the decks, as we have said, in the preparation for chaos thought which characterizes the current trend as well as the age.

You think this is the Age of Chaos?

Look around. It’s as good a term as any.

You seem to have a renegade streak that makes you gravitate to far-out or controversial subjects and movements, such as your involvement in the herbal industry. Your herbal interests followed from your interest in the theoretical issues and your involvement with the Chadwick Garden?

When I entered the herbal industry, it was a logical progression for me from Chadwick’s Gardena I was slightly bemused over being denied tenure and kicked out of my teaching career and ending up identified with the most despised and rejected subject matter–herbalism.

Why is it rejected and despised?

Oh, come on. It practically disappeared for fifty years, because it was identified with quackery, as a result of the Physicalist influence on the medical sciences. Here is a good quote from a novel I stayed up reading most of the night–The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies:

“The spirit of the medical school was firmly hierarchical; you crept upward, begging acceptance of the greater ones above you, questioning only when questioning seemed to be asked for, and if you had the makings of a True Believer, a Saved Soul, in you, you acquired a detestation of patent medicines, of osteopaths and chiropractors, of homeopaths and herbalists, of all quacks, midwives, and pretenders to medical knowledge, which was the property of your botherhood, and you knew with whatever modesty lay in you, that you were a measure apart.” p. 164.

So herbalism, for you, was another example of the elimination of Vitalism?

An example that practically defines the split.A direct consequence. I saw how herbalism, the botanical basis of health care, with thousands of years of tradition behind it, was practically wiped out by industrial allopathy or modern medicine, as a Physicalist form of health care, the direct consequence of the synthesis of urea and the development of Organic Chemistry. Synthetic drugs supplanted medicinal herbs, just as allopathy replaced homeopathy. In one stroke medicine became predominantly curative rather than preventive in terms of focus. Allopathy is big dose medicine–.millions of units of penicillin, as opposed to the inverse dose principle of homeopathy, which is about the best example of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict I know–Physicalist bomb versus Vitalist trace.

So homeopathy is the Vitalist counterpart to Physicalist allopathy and your best illustration of the split.

Homeopathy and herbalism represent the Vitalist side and they practically had to go underground for half a century. Now there is a big revival, but only with healthcare consumers, influenced by the organic movement and the return to natural products, as they are called. As I said, there has been almost no impact on professional health care training and practice on the part of what I call the herb renaissance, the rebirth and recovery of the botanical basis of health care. Conventional medical science, which is industrial society medicine, thinks of herbalism as quackery thanks to the implicit identification of herbalism with defeated and rejected Vitalism. There is nothing like a good explanatory line of thought to bring these ideological grudges to the surface. Herbal health care versus synthetic drug health care, or traditional medicine versus industrial medicine, or homeopathy versus allopathy, are my favorite illustrations of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict. The contrasts are practically self cancelling they are such logical extremes of the theme.

So you pursued your theme of “vital roots” from the Chadwick Method into the field of herbal medicine, which carries through your understanding of the move from the Vitalist garden to the Physicalist lab?

It was providential for me, a perfectly natural sequence. It all happened because of my obsessive interest in the herb thyme and the ThymOs Doctrine, as I call it, and the three components: vitality, herbs, and immunity.

Chadwick introduced you to herbs?

I knew almost nothing until he opened my eyes, partly by teaching me the significance of the binomials, the Latin names for herbs, and the legends they include.

How do you mean?

Well, Chadwick would delight in telling fairy stories about Rosemarinus and Lavendula, rosemary and lavender, and everyone would become a child, listening to him. It was “Let’s Pretend”, all over again, a radio program I adored when I was a child. It played every Saturday morning. I can even hum the tune and hear the magic whistle that transported you to the land of make-believe.

So you pursued the meaning of herbal nomenclature in Latin?

And Greek. It is one of my best memories in learning this new subject matter. I had to sit down and develop a repertoire of herbs after I became the Executive Director of the Herb Trade Association with responsibilities for organizing the national industry.

How did you get the position?

Ben Zaricor, of the Finali Herb Company, in Santa Cruz, was one of the founding members of the Herb Trade Association and he sponsored me for the position when I was working for him. I was the only one with a Ph.D. from Harvard, although it wasn’t in botany or traditional medicine. When I was in the Leary Group at Harvard and Editor of the Psychedelic Review, I knew Richard Schultes, an authority in ethno and psychedelic botany, because he came to our discussion group. He was the main figure in traditional or herbal medicine at Harvard, known as ethno-botany, the use of medicinal plants by native peoples and he specialized in the psycho-active ones. That was it.

So psychedelics were an introduction to herbalism.

Some of the guys in the industry dealt marijuana before they got into the other medicinals, so that was kind of an in-joke, although they were the first to admit it. All I knew about was thyme, Thymus vulgaris, so I set myself the task of developing a repertoire, beyond the few that Chadwick had introduced me to. I needed to learn as much as I could as fast as I could. I sat down and wrote a self-instructional manual which I called: The Long Lost Herbal of Cabeza de Vaca. I was much taken by his story, this Spanish conquistador, who landed on the coast of Florida with a large expedition of hundreds, which was reduced to

four.

Was that his name? Head of a cow?

His full name was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca, or Head of a Cow, is his noble title going back to a shepherd, named Alhaja, who helped the King of Spain beat the Moors in a decisive battle by staking out a remote mountain pass with the head of a cow. The King’s forces went through the pass and were victorious and the King knighted the shepherd with the title: Cabeza de Vaca. The title descends to Alvar Nunez through his mother. As the only survivors, he leads the other three on an eight year walk to Mexico City. In the area of El Paso, they were told by the natives there, who were naked and starving, either heal our sick, or die. So Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca prayed over the sick Indians and they were healed. He was initiated into the herbal medicine of the tribe and became a curandero. The transformation is stunning–a miracle: from conquistador to curandero. There is a wonderful literature on all this, not least his own letter to the King of Spain, which he wrote when he reached Mexico City, called Los Naufragios, the Shipwrecked Ones or the Castaways. It is an existential theme, made famous in philosophy by Karl Jaspers and his concept of “foundering”. I was very moved by this when Rolf Von Eckartsberg sent me a tape, reading the story of Cabeza de Vaca, by Haniel Long, a kind of imaginative update, as if Alvar Nunez wrote again and said what was between the lines in the original letter. It is a remarkable piece. Henry Miller wrote the Preface to it: An Interlinear to the Letter of Cabeza de Vaca to the King of Spain. Page Smith and I happened to go on retreat with students in a class we were teaching on the thought of Rosenstock-Huessy, to an Episcopal Monastery, in Santa Barbara and I listened to the tape in my cell. It was a great experience. “I am that Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca, who….”

Isn’t there a fairly recent Mexican movie on his life?

Yes, it is very surreal and exotic. I saw it in Santa Cruz. I thought about doing a film script myself but never got around to it.

So you wrote your self-instructional manual in his spirit?

Yes. I invoked a form of guidance. I asked for the blessing of his healing power on the herb renaissance and on my project to develop a self-instructional manual under his inspiration. I started with the question: what is the origin of the herbal tradition in Ancient Greece? My motive was to reconstitute the herbal tradition in myself–to receive the transmission of the spiritual substance of herbal lore and practice from its origins in ancient Greece all the way up to myself–and thereby overcome the short-circuit that had occurred as a result of the loss of the botanical basis of health care in the last generation in this country.

Your father was a doctor wasn’t he?

Yes. He was the son of immigrant Norwegian farmers in Wisconsin, which is important to me, as the family lineage is very strong–it’s where my vital roots are– and he practiced medicine in Milwaukee for fifty years. He died in 1995, at the age of one hundred. I was supposed to go to medical school, but I was too clumsy and inept for chemistry, so I transferred from pre-med to philosophy, at St. Olaf College. I felt I had betrayed my father’s hopes that I would eventually assume his practice. The herbal career was a kind of make-up, although he was mostly amused by it.

Was your self-instructional manual a success?

Let me tell you. I sat down with my sources and opened a Master’s Thesis from the University of Texas on the medicinal herbs of Texas that Mark Blumenthal found for me. I thought these were herbs Cabeza de Vaca could have used, herbs he was introduced to as a result of his initiation as a curandero in that very region. I started with the first herb–yarrow. I was going to fill out the culinary and medicinal uses and effects of about one hundred of the most popular herbs. I looked at the binomial–Achillea millefolium. I was stunned. I had the herb of Achilles as an opener. Remember, I asked to have the origins of the herbal tradition in ancient Greece revealed to me and the first herb I pick bears the name of the hero. of the Iliad. I found out Achilles used the herb to stop the wounds of his comrades at Troy, because yarrow was a styptic and coagulated blood when topically applied. I remember a slight shudder of bewilderment and wonder at the find. The next herb was wormwood. The binomial was Artemisia absinthium. I knew it was used to make Absinthe which does not make the heart grow fonder, because it stimulates the brain, leading to brain rot if you drink too much, as painted by Toulouse- Lautrec. Another stunner. I had the herb of Artemis. She was the goddess of the hunt, the woods, and the moon. A wild goddess. This was her herb. It glowed in the moonlight. It was the first herb I planted, in her honor, when I turned my backyard lawn into an herb garden. It grew to about fifteen feet in height which no one had ever seen before. I have had other such experiences with herbs planted or appearing as volunteers. She turned out to be the first in the genealogy, the source, the herb goddess of the ancient Greeks.

Who did she teach?

She taught Chiron the Centaur, who opened the first herb school in his cave at the foot of Mt. Pelion, where all the Greek heroes were apprenticed in their youth, beginning with Achilles. I was on a roll. The next herb, believe it or not, was Centaury which is the herb of Chiron, the medicinal gentian. There is a wonderful depiction showing Chiron receiving Achilles and Peleus, (or Plato and Asclepias, the attributions are a dispute), which adorns the herbal of Apuleius-Platonicus. Then came milkweed, the herb of Asclepias, the Greek god of healing and I had the first four, the Fab Four of the Herb Renaissance, right there in my garage, which was the office of the Platonic Academy of the Herb Renaissance. My prayer was answered. As I said– I had prayed for this in the name of the healing power of Alvar Nunez, which I wanted him to bestow upon me, vouchsafe to me, and it came to pass. I added Odysseus, just for fun, and gave him garlic: Allium sativum. I made up a story about how all of the heroes, upon successful completion of their herbal studies, at their graduation ceremony, were given an herb by Chiron that would forever after bear their name.

So Achilles got yarrow and Asclepias milkweed. Why did Odysseus get garlic?

Odysseus was such a smart-alec, Chiron gave him an herb as a task, one that was not named after him, but would figure in the prophecy given him by Tiresias in the Underworld when Odysseus is told that Hermes will give him a special form of yellow flowering garlic–Holy Moly–to ward off Circe’s snares. So Odysseus was given garlic and the task of planting it wherever he went on his extensive travels. It is not widely known that after Odysseus returned to Ithaca he sailed again after he killed the suitors and reclaimed his kingdom, the second sail that lead to his discovering America and winding up in Gilroy. Very few people know about it. He landed just north of Watsonville, on the Monterey Bay Coast, south of Santa Cruz, and walked inland over Mount Madonna, into Gilroy, where he met a Gilroy Indian, who

asked him why he was carrying a winnowing fan (an oar) over his shoulder.

Why did the Gilroy Indian ask him that?

Tiresias, the blind prophet of the Underworld, had told Odysseus his fate, how he would have to sail forth again after returning to Ithaca, West, beyond the sun, where eventually he would land and walk inland with an oar over his shoulder, until someone

asked him about the winnowing fan, mistaking the oar for a fan. This was the prophesy.

So that’s what the Gilroy Indian asked him?

He was then to plant the oar in the ground and that would be the point where he realized his destiny. At the very moment he planted the oar, he remembered that garlic literally meant “spear” or “oar shaped” (because of the leaves) and he had some in his pocket–some of the original stash given to him by Chiron– and that was how Odysseus discovered America and planted garlic in Gilroy.

Isn’t there a famous essay by Hermann Brock on this second voyage of Odysseus and how he discovered America.

Yes, there is. It is one of my sources for the legend.

Have you ever communicated your story to anyone?

I read my story at the Nickelodeon Movie Theatre in Santa Cruz when they showed Les Blanc’s film: “Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers”. My reading bombed because no one wanted to hear it–they wanted to see the movie. There was no light at the front of the theatre and they had to run around and find a flashlight for me to read by. People became restless. They threw paper airplanes at me and booed. My wife refused to walk out with me and met me in the parking lot. She just waved me on and acted like she did’nt know me when I walked up the aisle to pick her up. Can you believe it? It was one of those nights. I had to go back and do it the next evening, so instead of reading it, I recited it from memory running up and down the aisles. That didn’t help much but at least they didn’t boo. Energetic presentations carry a lot of weight.

Didn’t you want to re-enact it for the Gilroy Garlic Festival?

You would think I would have learned my lesson. I thought it would be a great ritual for opening the festival which is very famous. I called the Director of the Garlic Festival, he had gone to school with my friend Burney LeBoeuf; this is years ago, and told him the story over the phone and he said: “Odysseus who?”, in a very incredulous tone, like I was representing some pushy Greek in the wholesale business, so I knew he was more interested in portable toilets than my landing somewhat north of Watsonville and walking over Mount Madonna in a dress with an oar over my shoulder and a pocketful of garlic. It wasn’t the first time my best laid plans went nowhere.

What was another?

I wanted to introduce the citizens of Santa Cruz County to their thymus gland–it was before people knew they had one as the central organ of their immune system. This was over twenty years ago. I was going to give them a thyme ointment to rub on their thymus, called a Thyme Balm, so they could commune with their thymus after being introduced to it. I wrote to John Travolta and asked him if he would come and introduce “the Thymus Thump” as a new disco dance step. I thought that would catch everyone’s attention. He wrote back and said “no”. I thought we could lower the incidence of cancer by just that much. I thought it was an interesting application of the placebo effect. I wanted everyone in the County to eat a little thyme a day, to keep cancer away. I still think it’s a good idea.

Would you say your ideas are a little too imaginative for your own good?

I’m definitely before my thyme.

So you had the herb tradition at its origins. Then what?

The rest was easy. All I had to do was look it up. Hippocrates was born into the priestly family of doctors that took their direct descent from Asclepias, in order for the myth to enter history. From there, the sequence is clear. I found an herbal by Apuleius-Platonicus, linking the herbal tradition to Plato, who is famous for thinking of philosophy as therapy (overcoming the anxiety of having-to-die) and who thinks of Socrates as the phal makon or the poison/remedy/scapegoat. This is a brilliant theme that Jacques Derrida opened up for me in his essay on “Plato’s Pharmacy”, in Disseminations. It is one of my favorite essays in the philosophical literature. I have been a student of Derrida’s ever since, although I am an onto-theological exponent and a defender of everything he stands against. It is good to learn from your sharpest critical enemy. Derrida is one of the last steps on the way to chaos philosophy, which I am working on. The scapegoat theme is also pursued in a brilliant way by Rene Girard in his: Things Hidden From the Foundation Of the World. It is easy to think of herbalism as the scapegoat of industrial medicine seeing how the theme is part of the meaning of the word for drug or medicinal remedy or pharmaceutical.

How did scapegoat get to be part of the meaning of the word for drug?

Well, you have the tradition of the poison/remedy. Poisons in proper doses are medicines, that’s the ambiguity. And then you have the tradition of the wounded healer, for which the Crucified is the primary exemplar, which is where the scapegoat theme enters, the sacrificial one, who takes away the sins of the world. In the Greek case, it is to rid the city of pollution that the festival of the pharmakon was celebrated every year on the 6th Day of Thargelion in the Athenian calendar, the day on which Socrates was born, the one who was scapegoated by Athens. It is an extraordinary association for Derrida to have made–this conjunction between the scapegoat festival and the birth and death of Socrates.

Where does the herbal tradition go from Plato?

Aristotle’s father was an herbalist and ran an herb shop in Athens and was a physician to the King. Aristotle delivered herbs for him and hung out at the shop. Botany is the big theme for Aristotle which he conceptualizes as the transition from potentiality to actuality as in a seed to a plant, or an acorn to an oak. I can just see Aristotle’s father showing him an acorn when he was a boy and saying if you want to become a philosopher make this potential oak tree–this acorn–the center of your thought. Aristotle never forgot it. His philosophy is one of botanical dynamics which is what he meant by bringing the Platonic ideas down from heaven where they had been mathematized forms. I found an unknown text by Aristotle–his secret herbal that he wrote for Alexander the Great.

How did that happen? What does it contain?

It’s a secret.

You won’t disclose it?

No. It wouldn’t be a secret anymore, would it? But I can say this. I found out that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is another secret herbal, albeit abstract.

How is that?

He wanted to write an herbal, a public one, to honor his father and the influence herbalism and botany had on his work He saw it as a critical piece in his authorship–a kind of herbal theology, a meditation on the vital roots of being. His father talked him out of it because he knew herbalism would be suspect. Even in Ancient Athens, herbalism was a dubious enterprise, which mostly referred to the rhizotomists, the root-pickers. We would call them Simplers. They were a dirty lot, dirty feet, dirty hands and fingernails. Aristotle’s father found them repulsive and thought they gave herbalism a bad name, so after they talked about it his father thought of a compromise. He told Aristotle that he should write the herbal, but every time he used the word herb he should substitute the word–being. And to tuck it into his writings after the Physics, as a play on physick, as in herbal medicine or health care. So it became the Metaphysics, which literally means the book after the Physics. It is the original meditation on vital roots or being as such. This was a big eye-opener for me. The vital roots of being. Kind of puts a new twist on the text. It is as much of the secret as I can disclose. Metaphysics is good for you. Take a (meta)physic (powder).

Then who follows in the sequence?

Theophrastus. He was the great student of Aristotle, who helped tend his herb garden at the Lyceum, Aristotle’s school, the site of which was just discovered, by the way. Theophrastus went on the expeditions of Alexander the Great, another famous student of Aristotle’s, for whom Aristotle wrote the secret herbal, or the Secret of Secrets. Theophrastus collected medicinal plants along the way on these travels. He wrote the first great herbal in the tradition. Then comes Dioscorides who up-dated it. His herbal became classical up until the modern period. I include Mithridates Eupator the Vlth, because I like his name, although he was one of the worst rulers ever. A monstrously despicable tyrant. He was worried about being poisoned, as well he might have. He had a Court Physician, Krateuas, who is known as the father of botanical illustration. They cooked up the first immune enhancer, a tradition that interests me, as I helped establish the contemporary interest in herbs that promote immunity–it was probably my biggest contribution to the herb renaissance. It came off of my thymos, thyme, thymus connection, which formed the conceptual basis for my notion of herbal immunity.

What you call your Thymos Doctrine.

Right. The concoction that Krateuas cooked up became known as the Mithridate. The King took it in graduated doses, thus building his immunity to poison. He lost an important battle to Pompey and tried to commit suicide by taking poison and it didn’t work, because he was immune. So the recipe became famous and was improved upon if you could call it an improvement. Anyhow, added to. The Mithridate was made up in formal civic ceremonies throughout Europe until the 18th century. I have a broadside or poster showing the recipe from the University of Strasbourg, which Ralph Abraham obtained for me on a visit there. It is gnarly, as our surfers would say, the oddest combination of stuff, from vipers to opium.

What are your sources for this information?

After my own discovery of the mythical and legendary sources, I turned to Charles Singer, a famous medical historian, who gave me the ancient and medieval sequence, in an excellent article, although he expresses his complete contempt for modern herbalism, calling it a “perversion at fortieth hand”, given the generations involved, from Ancient Greece, until now. Thanks a lot, Charles. You could hardly put the herbal tradition in a worse light. His bias is so obvious as to be absurd. Agnes Artier has the classic study of herbalism–Herbals–which follows upon Singer, from the Renaissance on up, although she is completely sympathetic, just the opposite of Singer in attitude. She was an interpreter of Goethe’s botany and a wonderful scholar. It’s odd to have the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict in the herbal field, but Singer and Arber represent the two sides in terms of the history of medicine. There are other examples.

What is another one?

The field of pharmacognosy, which is the herbal basis for medicinal products, within medicine. Varro Tyler is a great example of someone who represents the split in himself. He is a Physicalist in pharmacognosy, where he considers the herbal basis as merely the source for synthetic derivatives, in the strict line from Woehler, his hero. With his left hand, he wrote an herbal, called The Honest Herbal, one of my favorite books to dislike. He comes from a line of Hoosier Herbalists, whom he betrays, such that “honest” means more or less “useless”, as far as efficacy is concerned. Honest means disabusing people of the notion that herbs are effective for anything. “It used to be thought that…but now we know better…” That kind of line. He has softened up over the years and his contribution is important now that he has become more sympathetic and somewhat liberated from his Physicalist bias. He is an excellent exemplary case of my theme, as he occupies both camps.

Did you ever publish your manual?

No, but I had a strange experience, one of my best, as a consequence of writing the manual. I put it in my file and forgot about it. A year or two later, I was introduced to Hanne and Maurice Strong, of Crestone, Colorado. Hanne was interested in starting an herb school as part of her new age development in Crestone, so I was asked to go and talk to her. Baker-roshi introduced us. His Zen Center is now located there. I was eager to go, because I was born near there–in La Veta, Colorado, some miles away, where my father began practicing medicine. It was a strange coincidence.

Isn’t there a LaVeta pass, through the mountains, over to Taos?

Yes, there is. It was a great place to be born, because LaVeta nestles at the base of two twin-capped peaks, the Huajatollas, or Spanish Peaks. It means woman’s breasts. So the first day I go to LaVeta to see where I was born and look at the breasts. You can see them right down the main street in front of the house where my folks had a small residential hospital. The next day we sat down at the Ranch to talk. The Strong ranch is called “The Baca Grande Ranch”, so I innocently asked what Baca means. Hanne says “cow”. I say, “no, that’s vaca”. Hanne says “v’s and b’s are the same in Spanish and interchangeable in English”. I say, just to be funny, “Cabeza de Vaca?” and Hanne says: “Yes! This is his ranch!” That was a show stopper. It took a couple of hours before I stopped vibrating from that hit.

Was it really his ranch?

It was a direct descendent, but it was good enough for me.

Did you do the herb school?

Not in Crestone, but I did in Santa Cruz and Hanne sent her daughter and her friend to enroll. We ran a two year course. I think it was one of the first such efforts in the country, although Rosemary Gladstar was ahead of me in terms of herbal education. We had grant support from Kit Tremaine, bless her heart, but we terminated it after two years because the money ran out and it was too difficult to sustain. I didn’t like being an administrator.

It was at least ten years before it’s time. I was keen on training a new generation of American herbalists as basic health care providers in the spirit of the Bare-foot Doctor of China. I even took Norman Bethune as our guide or bridge.

Who was Norman Bethune?

He was a Canadian doctor who went to China during the Revolution and worked for Mao at the front and was eventually martyred. His name still rings a big bell there. In fact, I took a copy of his film biography made by the Canadian Film Board and presented it to the Academy of Traditional Medicine in Beijing on my first trip. It was shown after my talk to a large audience of health professionals and most of them were weeping when the lights came on. Bethune is a communist saint.

You have mentioned the thymos doctrine a couple of times, particularly in terms of your theme of herbal immunity.          What is the Thymos Doctrine?

I can give you a partial summary. It is built upon the meaning of the Greek word thymos, meaning courage, vitality, spirit, in the sense of biological spirit–it is exactly what we have lost or are deficient in–the middle ground of our being in the structure of consciousness. Thymos is the background word for Vitalism. It is Vitalism at its source, it’s linguistic vital root in Ancient Greek culture, beginning with Achilles, in Homer’s Iliad.

Why Achilles?

He has the most thymos, which accounts for his manslaughtering vitality and his rage or wrath. Thymos is in the middle, between brain and groin, associated with the region of the actual thymus gland, in the throat, in the upper chest. Because it is in the middle, it can go both ways, which makes it is a dynamic center–up or down. The upward vector is “the unreflective striving toward what is noble” (Eros) and the downward vector is “the impulse to self-destruction” (Ate).

Can you give an illustration from Homer?

Think of the moment when Achilles has the impulse to run his sword through Agamemnon because Agamemnon threatens to take his mistress away from him. Athena appears and stops him. Achilles has to internalize his aggression by suppressing it. He turns black with rage. This is the downward stroke of thymos, the self-destructive stroke, vitality suppressed, turned against itself.

Where does Ate come in?

The Greeks were masters at characterizing the self-destructive nature of impulses. The Greeks personified the “imp” in impulse as a goddess–Ate–who leads everyone astray. She figures in the confession of Agamemnon in the Iliad, where he tells her myth about how she once deluded Zeus. She is the figure for internalized aggression, the inability to carry out the aggressive impulse. This internalized aggression is what Nietzsche called ressentiment, which is French for Ate, the self-destructive part of thymos.

Hold it. Let me see if I follow you. The Greek Ate is the French ressentiment, because it means internalized aggression, impulsive forces that are self-destructive. There is a compact meaning here that needs more careful differentiation.

Nietzsche develops the concept of ressentiment in his essay on the Genealogy of Morals. The best translation of ressentiment, besides the obvious cognate–resentment– would be our expression–”eat your heart out”. It is Freud’s “death instinct”, which he simply called:

thanatos, after the Greek word for death, but he meant thymos in the downward stroke-the impulse to self-destruction, what Homer personified in the goddess, Ate . This is a wonderful line of thought–I remember listening to a talk Aldous Huxley gave when he came to MIT, where he mentions this theme, which forms the basis or background for the theme of the confession of self-delusion, which I hope to work out at some point. The Socratic confession of self-delusion, misunderstood as ignorance, is in a direct line from the confession of Agamemnon and the Myth of Ate.

Ate is a goddess and her myth or story is told in the Iliad, in what is known as “Agamemnon’s Confession” and you call her the “imp” in impulse, or the motive force leading to self-destruction, the opposite of Eros, another god, who is the upward striving toward what is noble. That much I understand as the dynamic of thymos, which sits in the middle, between the head and the groin, or between reason and desire.

Ate is Freud’s death instinct–although he called it “thanatos”. Ate is much more to the point. So the inability to carry out the aggressive impulse is resented, internalized, and is developed in Nietzsche’s famous notion of ressentiment, the checking of impulses, which he descried. All of this is given such graphic treatment by Homer because these themes are viewed as mythical forces acting on the subject who is like a playing field at their mercy. So let me repeat the dynamic conflict again, as I want to make this line of thought crystal clear. It is one of my best discoveries and it leads directly to the Platonic structure of consciousness as adumbrated in the Republic.

So repeat the double vector of thymos. It is a little hard to take in because this middle ground, as you say, is not well understood, because it is missing from contemporary models of consciousness determined by the Cartesian cogito and the subject/object relation.

Think of vitality in the service of the erotic flight to self-transcendence and self-fulfillment as the upward vector, personified by the god–Eros. Think of vitality that drives us to self-destruction, our vitality turned against ourselves, the wrath of God, as the downward vector, personified by the goddess, Ate These two vectors constitute the dynamic of thymos, the dynamism of the middle ground between reason and desire.

This sounds like the ancient basis for our sense of self-conflict or our being in opposition to ourselves.

Exactly. The Greeks gave us the classic model. Now it is just this double-vectored middle region that has dropped out, after Descartes, with the enthronement of the subject-object split that set up the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict I’m fond of saying that thymos became the hyphen in the subject-object split, after it was dropped as the middle ground, between reason and desire.

So the elimination of Vitalism is the consequence of the subject-object split in the doctrine of knowledge?

And the loss of the thymos base which is biological spirit! You can see the sequence here quite clearly. Once the middle ground of vitality was eliminated from the classic concept of the structure of consciousness, the self-world correlation, as Tillich called it, was minimized or cancelled in favor of the subject-object split: the epistemological subject, over and against extended objects, is the Cartesian program of the Cogito, the “I think”. The Lebenswelt, Husserl’s term, was disregarded. In fact, with the rejection and elimination of Vitalism, it was proscribed in favor of objectifying science or Physicalism.

So the history of Western rationality is the history of an ever narrower understanding of reason with an accompanying diminution in vitality or the sad fate of thymos.

It is worth while to pursue the diminution of vitality from Homer on, where it is paramount, especially in Achilles, through to Socrates, with the rise of rational self-consciousness and the model of the self in Plato, where thymos is prominently in the middle, the upper chest, the sphere between reason and desire or the head and the groin. This is Nietzsche’s complaint. He favors Achilles over Socrates because of his native vitality, his impulsiveness. Nietzsche favored heroic action over rational deliberation. Think of Hamlet as the greatest dramatic expression of this conflict whom Nietzsche would have despised for his brooding inaction.

So Nietzsche was a proponent of thymic vitality. Go on with the characterization.

Thymos is the dynamic middle ground of the centered self, the seat of vitality and the region of courage, understood as the vital root of virtues. The dethronement of thymos from Descartes on, due to the subject-object split and the enthronement of the Cogito, or epistemological subjectivity, means that the calculating part of reason takes over and mathematical reasoning becomes the model to the exclusion or the subordination of other forms of reason such as intuition and imagination or reason open to revelation. The middle sphere drops out and we inherit this truncated self. It is why Nietzsche called men hollow, with no chest–the thymos has gone out of them. The middle sphere is filled with ressentiment, best translated as “eat your heart (thymos) out”.

So you see a decline in vitality as a consequence of the rise of rational self-consciousness? You first learned this line from Tillich?

Tillich, most of all, but also his pals at the Frankfort School of Social Research, such as Adorno and Horkheimer. They wrote about The Eclipse of Reason and about The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, in this vein, that reason establishes the conditions for its own self-destruction. It is a very interesting line of thought which must have had an influence on Tillich. I recently gave a lecture on the Enlightenment in Ralph Abraham’s Euclid Class which gave me an occasion to review this theme. I was amazed, as I mentioned, at how the Adorno/Horkheimer line worked as an interpretation of Kafka’s parable of “The Silence of the Sirens”, which is a brilliant expression of the ambiguity of reason. Here is the critical quote from Habermas’ exposition of this theme in his interpretation of Adorno/Horkheimer.

“Man’s domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken; for the substance which is dominated, suppressed and dissolved through self-preservation is none other than that very life as a function of which the achievements of self-preservation are defined; it is, in fact, what is to be preserved.”

Dialectic of the Enlightenment, quoted in Habermas: “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno”, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 109. It is reminiscent of Karl Kraus’ famous mot which Wittgenstein took up: philosophy is the disease of which it should be the cure.

So what about Tillich?

He was aware of these themes in his epistemology, where he calls Horkheimer’s instrumental reason, controlling or technical reasoning, as opposed to receiving or revelatory reason, in tune with the logos. He brought his therapeutic analysis to bear on the trend of technical reason in his analysis of the pathology of anxiety. He characterizes our present day mood as the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness, which is as close to the mark as you can get, especially if you see it as the loss of vitality: courage in reference to self-affirmation–the loss of the courage to be, the loss of thymos. Tillich pursues this line in his historical account of the philosophical meditation on thymos- -The Courage To Be, which I was delighted to hear is included in a New York Public Library display of the hundred most important books of the 20th century.

This obviously provides the background for your account of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict.

By the time you get to the Physicalist/Vitalist controversy, there is almost no thymos left and the thymus gland itself has shrunk in size, which it does after puberty, an anomaly of the gland, which no one understands. I have associated this atrophy of the organ of vitality, the central organ of our immune system, with the rise of literacy, the corollary and practical basis of rational self-consciousness: the culture of the book. You sit at a desk and read a book with your chin almost pressing on your chest which suppresses the thymus gland and it atrophies. I should add you sit still at a desk.

You don’t mean this literally.

This is fanciful, of course, but it illustrates the point. It is why we associate vitality with pre-literate or non-literate peoples. It is what is called ‘soul’. They don’t sit still for most of the day and read; they dance as the natural grace of their bodily being. They have not moved up into their heads to occupy their brains at the expense of their bodies or their vital center–the thymic region of affective vitality. When I found out that the thymus was the central gland of the immune system, the master organ of immunity, all of this fell into place as a field for speculation. My formulations are metaphorical and heuristic. I am well aware of that, but it is still a line of thought where I am trying to pursue the implications. I can see this as the basis for chaos theory, this dynamic center is the chaos center of the human psyche and it is being restored. This partly accounts for my interest in chaos theory.

What does heuristic mean?

It is a speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation of a solution or problem.

Thanks. Go on. Have you tried to pursue your ideas with empirical research?

I have thought about inquiring after the size of pre-literate thymus glands, but I don’t know where to go and it probably would not yield the results I would want. The metaphor works without empirical confirmation. I would very much like to link this to some deep structure in order to develop a code that would account for such phenomena. I am very interested in the work of Carl Schuster, based on the scholarly efforts of Edmund Carpenter, who has published a twelve volume work of Schuster’s thesis on paleolithic iconography and now a one volume summary: Patterns That Connect, which, by the way, I edited. I see a possible convergence of linguistics, in terms of the origin of language, paleolithic iconography, and the origins of mathematics, in this context. It is the task of deciphering a deep code, one that is transmitted through these branches before it all breaks up into independent and discrete fields of thought, where it is very difficult to comprehend the whole. Umberto Eco has just published a book on the origins of language which I have as yet to read. He probably would debunk the effort as do most scholars who are against unitary themes, in favor of discrete lines of research. Goethe was one of the unifiers with his urplant theme. I only have a dim sense of the possible unitary themes involved her. I was inspired by the Nobel Prize speech of Niels Jerne, whose work is in immunology, where he talks about language as a biological phenomenon after the model of the immune system, which is a kind of language, in its ostensibly infinite diversity, like all the possible variations of words in sentences. A language to the power of ten or more.

I don’t follow.

Jerne understands the immune system as a proto-brain, which I had already perceived when I found out about immune memory as a function of the thymus, which makes it a proto-brain because it demonstrates cognitive function–memory. The Homeric hero, for instance, is an exemplar of this thymus or thymos driven dynamic, before the rise of rational self-consciousness and literacy, which we all take for granted. The Homeric hero gave me the model of the deep structure I am looking for, an innate structure of consciousness, before it is covered over by brain function. Homeric culture is a memory culture which is the same as an Oral Culture, namely, preliterate. So Jerne’s speculation on the immune system was of great interest to me.

So this is all grist for your Thymos Doctrine mill?

There is an excellent scholarly line on these ideas relating to thymos, from Onions to Bruno Snell to Havelock, that turns into the larger issue of the relation of pre-literate or oral societies, native cultures, to literate rational self-conscious or civic societies, what we understand as Western culture. A major transformation took place when we became literate and rational in the Greek sense and acquired centered selves, dominated by the mind, with the move up from the thymus to the brain. Along with the anthropological literature, there is a large feminist literature on this theme–a kind of ideological attack on this history as if it were just a male conspiracy–the Riane Eisler line. It has great critical merit but I’m afraid they often throw the baby out with the bath.

What do you mean?

It involves such a complicated review of the history of Western thought. First, there is the supplanting of native society by rational self-conscious society, what is called the transition from oral to literate. Rational society seems to drive towards industrial and technical society, the Max Weber theme on bureaucracy, unique to the West, and this includes the racist component, to the extent that `white’ represents rational and `black’ represents native. I have just finished reading David Malouf: Remembering Babylon, a superb rendering of the problem, set in 19th century Australia. The theme of domination and violence is obvious. Second, there is the gender issue, which has come to the forefront of the debate in terms of deconstructing Western thought. I had to wince at the title Tillich gave to his lectures at Harvard when I recently proposed them for publication–”The Self-Interpretation of Man”–and, characteristically, not a single woman is mentioned in the four semester survey of Western thought. No wonder Hannah Arendt called him “old mutton legs”. But it was par for the period when gender was not an explicit issue and uppermost in everyone’s mind. In fact, it wasn’t in anyone’s mind.

But, as you say, you owe Tillich for introducing you to the thymos theme.

I can remember the first paragraphs on the subject in the article, which I must have read in the late ’50′s and later published in The Meaning of Health–”The Relation of Religion and Health”, where Tillich discusses the loss of the middle or thymic region of the self. You see, we’re really talking about the convergence of vitality and spirituality, something we hardly associate, because we think of spirit as non-vital, an old ghost. Tillich gave me the concept of biological spirit in his discussion of thymos.

As you develop this, I can see why soul and spirit are so easy to confuse and difficult to define, because the biological basis was abandoned in favor of the bloodless intellect.

Here is the quote from Tillich in the essay I remember copying out by hand when I found it at the Union Theological Library, when I was a summer student there in l955:

“`Psychic’ is here used, as it always should be, (1) not in the sense of occultistic, and (2) not in the sense of consciousness, but (3) as designating the sphere between the biological and the mental, as representating a middle sphere in which both these participate. This middle sphere can no longer be called “soul,” since the Augustinian-Franciscan-Cartesian separation of soul and body has led to an indentification of soul and mind.” The Meaning of Health, p. 26.

Didn’t you anticipate the field of psycho-neuro-immunology with your Thymos Doctrine?

I think so, although it’s a little vainglorious to put it that way. I could have predicted the field, but it never occurred to me in those terms. I thought I was a lone wolf out there with an eccentric fix on three words, the Greek root, the herb, and the gland. I remember the moment at Cisco Point, our summer home in Wisconsin, when I put it all together in a formulation: “there is an herb code in the immune memory of DNA.” This formulation unites immunology, herbology and molecular biology, or genetics. It was the beginning of trying to ground these ideas in a quasi-biological way. Immune memory as a genetic principle fascinates me and the notion of a code where we have imprinted in our deep (immune) memories our affinity for certain plants selected by the race or our ancestors for their medicinal properties is irresistible, although it is Lamarckian and therefore difficult to argue, given the current climate, but I don’t care.

Lamarckian?

The inheritance of acquired characters is supposed to be a refuted Vitalist theme, but the immune memory has restored it. I bemoan the fact that we suffer from a kind of immune amnesia as a result of our departure from the botanical basis of health care to the near exclusive dependence on synthetic drugs.

Immune amnesia?

We have forgotten the herb code in our immune memories. It is a form of amnesia. The entire profession of conventional health care in America neglects this botanical basis in favor of synthetic prescription drugs. Their Physicalist bias prevents them from re-discovering it. They think this Vitalist form of health care represented by botanicals is the superstition that Physicalism rejected in order to be scientific. They accept the side-effects of synthetics and their deleterious consequences. A friend of mine told me yesterday how he got a bleeding ulcer from taking aspirin as a preventive for stroke and when he had to undergo a second angio-plasti, his mouth filled up with blood on the operating table because blood leaked through the ulcer when they thinned it. This shouldn’t happen. There are thousands of deaths due to aspirin poisoning every year and they tell you to take it every night as a preventive. And yet hawthorne or Crataegus as the perfect heart tonic is almost completely unknown by health professionals, not to speak of the National Heart Association. I give up. If you could overcome this amnesia regarding the botanical basis of health care among health care professionals you could make a great contribution to public health, but it is beyond my capabilities. At least the health consumer has awakened; hence, the herb renaissance.

An herb code in the immune memory of DNA: do you have any evidence for this? It sounds like Rupert Sheldrake’s work on memory and morphic resonance.

This is exactly what a smart looking Chinese physicist in the front row asked me when I gave a talk in Beijing to a group of health professionals and scientists on my first trip in 1982. He was the first to raise his hand. “What evidence do you have for an herb code in the immune memory of DNA”, he asked. I told him I made it up. Everyone gasped.

Why did they gasp?

I guess because you’re not supposed to admit to being the instigator of a new idea. It was another example of the heuristic. I was proud of the gasp, because it is a good idea. It is a good example of what Polanyi calls an idea without empirical foundation, but one that might lead to the discovery of such a foundation. Most scientists turn their back rather than help in the effort to think the issue through to a possible experimental confirmation. Heuristic is a bad word among experimental scientists. They want it up front. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut until the empirical data is in. Smart ideas are a dime a dozen in this state of affairs. Sheldrake is a perfect example of this pilloried process. He offers prizes to anyone who can empirically confirm his notion of morphic resonance after the science establishment in England called for the burning of his book.

So you opened a restaurant to promote these views? You could have called it “Rupert’s”.

I didn’t know him then, although I am a keen admirer of his work and his effort to develop a neo-Vitalist point of view. He is one of the best theoreticians in this regard along with Koestler, Capra, Van Der Ryn, Abraham, Bohm, Nick Herbert, Theodore Roszack, on and on, a converging line of thinkers who have this affinity. One day we may come into our own. The restaurant, if you want to think of it as another type of laboratory, was an experiment in these ideas. It’s amazing what you’re handed in the course of your life. I’ve done everything I can think of to promote these ideas, this side of standing on a street corner with a sign. That could be next.

Wasn’t there an episode at the Wild Thyme Restaurant where someone found an essay for you on the three terms: thymos, thyme and thymus?

Yes. That was a wonderful event. Nilo and Patricia Lindgren were devoted patrons of the restaurant and got a kick out of my theme. Nilo asked me if I had ever done a computer search on the Thymos Doctrine and I said no, I had never done a computer search on anything. It never dawned on me that someone else was on to the same line. It was 1974. Nilo was associated with Xerox and so he said he would do one. He came back a week later, rather shamefaced, as if he hadn’t found much and he handed me a three page essay from the Journal of the American Medical

Association (JAMA). I was stunned when I read the title: “A Thymos Primer”, by Dr. Everett Spees. There it was: a column on the Greek root, a column on the herb, and a column on the gland, with a nice little bibliography. I learned that Rufus of Ephesus had named the gland.

Now, really, I have to say that things like this are very rare. What did you do with that information?

It took me a while to locate him, but I finally met Dr. Spees in Washington, D.C., where he was a transplant surgeon at Walter Reed Hospital. He looked like Jack Armstrong in his Navy whites. We had a great talk and he agreed to conduct an experiment for me to demonstrate the efficacy of oil of thyme on the incidence of cancer in mice. I asked Henry Hilgard, my colleague at the University, whose field is immunology, to do the same. Within a week, a student involved in the process, handed me a paper by Dr. Leonell Strong, from the American Journal of Cancer, 1935, entitled: “The Possible Effect of the Oil of Thyme on the Incidence of Spontaneous Cancer in Mice,” showing a substantial reduction in spontaneous tumors in mice fed with oil of thyme in their diet.

What happened then?

It took a while to locate Strong. He had been at Yale, but was long gone, had linked up with Salk, where he had discovered the genetic correction for cancer in mice, but Salk put him out because of a lack of funding. He was more interested in Picasso’s mistress. Leonell sued and won a judgment and set himself up with his C3H mice, so we finally found him operating a cancer research lab in San Diego. I went down to visit him. Nothing came of the my research project because I was distracted by Strong’s own work in cancer and his introducing me to the Voynich Manuscript and John Dee.

You mentioned this before. Tell the rest of the story.

This is a very long story, but I can give you a short version of it. I was in San Diego to interview for the Herb Trade Association position, which I obtained, which launched me on my new career. I met Dr. Strong during the same weekend and he told me about the Voynich as the summit of cipher studies and that he had deciphered it. I thought of the Voynich as my gift for entering the herbal field. It is a secret herbal, from the 16th century, now at Yale University, in the Beineke Rare Book Library, of unknown authorship, thought to be by Roger Bacon, probably not, or a forgery by John Dee, probably not, or by Anthony Askham, most likely. Dr. Strong had deciphered it and had established the authorship, but had not divulged the key to the full decipherment. He only had access to three pages at the time he worked on it, although he had successfully deciphered them. Robert Brumbaugh, a philosopher at Yale, whom I knew from his work on Plato’s mathematics, had written a book about the Voynich, called The Most Mysterious Manuscript, detailing the failed attempts and announcing that he had succeeded, but it was premature. He had worked hard on deciphering it and had come close–verbs and nouns, but not entire sentences.

Where does John Dee come in?

John Dee had owned it and had sold it to the Holy Roman Emperor, the bizarre, Rudolf II, whose interest in the occult and the esoteric is well known. Dee received a considerable amount of gold for it. It was thought to be a secret treatise on the Elixir of Life, by Roger Bacon. You see, it follows in the tradition of the secret herbal of Aristotle, of Pseudo-Apulieus-Platonicus and even Albertus Magnus. A secret about a secret elixir, an herbal concoction, an elixir of life, an immune enhancer, a Mithridate. I might as well mention Hildegard of Bingen, who is also included in this line of famous herbalists. She received herbal remedies from the Christ in prayer. I discovered her in the herbal field before she became known for her music. You see the tradition operating here.

So Dee sold it to Rudolf.

Dee received a large amount of gold for it. In the tradition of the Secret Herbal of Aristotle.

In that tradition. So I took a deep interest in Dee, whom I had never heard of and he turned out to be one of the most important but relatively unknown figures in the history of Western thought. Philosopher to and favorite of Queen Elizabeth, he was the visionary of the British Empire and Britannia, a term he coined, through his angel-conjuring or skrying, which he did with his side-kick Kelly or Kelley.

Angel-conjuring?

You heard right. That’s partly what accounts for his obscurity.  History conspired to forget him, as it were. I brought Ralph Abraham into the project and it renewed our friendship–almost twenty years ago. Leonell called the cipher “a reversed arithmetical progression”; he drew this circle in the air with his finger and then bisected it, I’ll never forget it, so I thought Ralph, as a mathematician, might help. Instead, we took on Dee as a subject matter to study and eventually we organized the John Dee Society to revive interest in his work, which we have up on the World Wide Web.

So this is a result of your collaboration with Ralph Abraham.

Now we know a lot. Ralph decided to teach a course on Dee in the history of mathematics, because Dee was an accomplished mathematician and helped introduce Euclid to England and applied Euclid to navigation. I helped teach the course–the one where I felt like Rip Van Winkle, as it was my first return after a fifteen year absence. It was enjoyable going in under cover, so to speak, to teach a course in mathematics on an angel-conjurer.

Did you get any angel-conjurers?

Believe it or not, they were in the front row for the first lecture and then introduced themselves. I thought “uh, oh, now what?”, as they walked up with a knowing smile on their face, made up and dressed like Goths. They were followers of Aleister Crowley, which was spooky. He thought of himself as the re-incarnation of John Dee. They put on an angel-conjuring evening for us, but no one came. No angels, that is. I think they were on acid. The conjurers, not the angels. I wouldn’t have come either, if I were an angel.

What happened to the Voynich?

A friend of mine–Tim Rayhel–who had studied ciphers in the army, picked up the project and has worked on it for years. I think he has finally succeeded in deciphering it, although he lacks scholarly credentials, so it may be difficult for him to publish his results. The last I heard he turned it over to some guys in Texas. He took all of Strong’s work and confirmed it. The text turns out to be by Askham, just as Strong said, who wrote an herbal. So the Voynich is simply a cipher of that herbal and an almanac, according to Rayhel, which is very disappointing. No elixir of life, I’m sorry to note. It is another strange episode as a result of my herbal interests.

Do you realize how –I don’t even know the right word for it–bizarre, odd, strange–this all sounds? And you owe all this to Chadwick?

He introduced me. It would not have happened without him. He opened the world of herbs to me. He thought herbs were the key to any garden and planted herbaceous borders accordingly. I became interested in Padua, as the first botanical garden in Italy, after I found out that Goethe had visited there. Chadwick and his apprentices designed an herb garden on the Paduan example in Covelo–great astrological concentric circles. Chadwick was the original vital rooter, as far as I was concerned. He had the closest affinity to the meaning of organic nature and thought of himself as the custodian of it. What he created in his gardens was pure magic, no one could match him. Life forms grew from his finger tips. He had the greenest of thumbs. And all of this he freely transmitted to anyone who wanted it.

You have had more than your share of strange experiences.

Just enough, as John Cage might say.

Tell me about your herb garden.

We had a nice backyard lawn with a stream running behind it and one day I thought, I own this yard, I can dig holes in it if I want. So I dug beds in the lawn and planted herbs and it became a wonderful herb garden. I collected varieties of thyme and eventually found out there were over three hundred, although I never had more than two dozen. It has been a stunning experience, watching the garden metamorphize over the years. It definitely has a life of it’s own. I should have kept track of its various moments, but c’est la vie. When I dug my first bed, I decided to plant Artemisia, in honor of Artemis, as the first herbalist in the Western tradition and it grew to about fourteen feet in height, the biggest one I have ever seen, a sort of omen. One day I discovered the Eupatoriums growing in our stream–the spring of Spring Street. That was an event! They just appeared there after I discovered Mithridates Eupator the Sixth. Knocked me out. We found a great liver tonic in milk thistle–Silybum marianum , and, lo and behold, it volunteered in my garden. It just appeared and announced itself. I once had a marijuana plant, I think it was a volunteer, and it grew into a twenty foot tree. No one knew what it was it was so big. How’s that for a weird kind of confirmation.

Of what?

If you don’t know, don’t ask.

Wasn’t your garden featured in a number of publications?

Yes. It made it’s way into Rodale’s magazine and in a book written by Steven Foster on herb gardens: Herbal Bounty. He lived with us for about six months and helped with the garden. It has gone through successive transformations, however. We used to keep a grid of the plantings in each bed, but now it just grows by itself and we go out and watch. It is Spring and all the bulbs are starting to show and the trees are budding out and the Orris root or Iris are about to bloom and the foxglove I brought back from the Island of Madeira are looking good. It is one of my chief delights. My garden.

Any other Chadwick influences?

Of course. Old species roses. He loved them. We learned about them from his plantings at the garden and he introduced us to Tillotson’s, now known as Roses of Yesterday and Tomorrow, in Watsonville, a source for old roses. I found the Goethe Rose there. We have large plantings of Cecil Bruner, Banksia, Seven Sisters or Rose of Seville, Lavender Lassie, Charles DeMille, Celsiana, Rosa Moisea, Mermaid, Iceberg, Perle D’Or, Queen Elizabeth, American Beauty, Bourbon Queen, the Chestnut Rose, on and on. My wife and I share a passion for them with Virginia Baker. It is another issue of vital roots versus hybrids, although developing a phobia for hybrid roses is a little extreme, but it happened to me, although we grow a few.

What’s your best rose story?

One of my friends went to Tibet and sent me seeds from a Tibetan rose and told me to propagate them. I had never grown a rose from seed; it is very hard to do. But I went ahead. I called our rose lady–who told me about the mixture which was very simple, some sand and some peat and some potting soil. Then I ran into this guy from Minnesota, I forget his name. He was promoting bird song as a way of getting big yields. You play taped bird song to your plants or crops and they think it’s morning and they make an extra effort and grow like mad. Yields times ten. And he had an algae spray. So I played the tape and sprayed the seed. Waltz of the Flowers. I kid you not. And by god the seed germinated and I got three plants. One finally bloomed three years later on Easter Sunday. How about that!? Easter Sunday!

Wouldn’t you like to design and develop a major rose garden at Pogonip?

It is my chief dream, part of my vision of Santa Cruz as Ecotopia which is a continuation of the Chadwick legacy. I want to say right now that this format, this interview, is such a relief to me. I am enjoying this chance to get my ideas and the history of this work expressed, finally, after many fits and starts. The last time I tried to write up the story it was three books in one and just didn’t work. It is very hard to develop a straightforward narrative when so many associations occur. This format is just right.

I’m glad you like it.    What is Pogonip?

It is a large parcel lying just below the University campus with views overlooking Monterey Bay. Partly because the Chadwick Garden adjoins the property and partly because I rode my horse, Xanthos, there almost every day for years. I formed the Greenbelt Group, in 1977 and we laid the groundwork for the Greenbelt Initiative, in 1979, which saved Pogonip. Mark Primack, who first told me about the London Greenbelt, and was part of our original group, drew the poster which included the sacred oak, my great tree, which stands in the middle of the property. It is now a 612 acre city park, although the Greenbelt, as such, cuts a swath across the upper region of the City. Pogonip is the perfect site for a botanic garden of the order of the great gardens of Europe. An effort on that scale, of course, is impossible now, but with various plantings, you can make a paradise. Chestnut or Linden allees as at Vaux le Vicomte and St. Germaine en Laye, and roses, roses, roses. A labyrinth hedge in box. An herb garden that wouldn’t quit. All of the thymes in one place. It would put Santa Cruz on the map, so to speak, and fulfill our vision of Arcadia, or Ecotopia, as I now call it, the point of destination for the eco-tourist. It’s interesting how Arcadia is the past garden and Ecotopia is the future garden. Parterres. Avenues. Clairvoyees. Words I learned from Chadwick and saw for myself, in the great French formal gardens, on a trip my wife and I recently made, a trip of a lifetime.

You have big dreams.

You have no idea.

Do you think you can bring it off:

It isn’t just up to me. It is a combination of events, a gestalt, a constellation, with all kinds of players and circumstances and resources. It either comes together or it doesn’t. All I can do is hope and work towards its actualization which I have been doing. I have been biding my time. Something has to click. I like orchestrating it. It is a magic wand effect. Something that Page Smith taught me. He gave me the sense that whatever we wanted to do we could do because he was behind it. He had that kind of power. Now I have to do it without him.

Tell me about Page.

O. K. He was my great friend. He was a little bit older, part older brother, which I never had, I was an only child, and part father and wise uncle. We could never be equals, although he was as diffident as anyone I’ve known about his own power and authority. Diffident is the right word, even though he lorded it over me, just because he was a lord. Everyone recognized it. He was a leader. He was a Major in the army at the Italian Front, the 12th Mountain Division, which was a ski corps. He stepped on a land mine and blew his legs up, but not off. He was paralyzed from the waist down for some months and then spontaneously recovered, although he walked with a kind of swaying movement. He played tennis until late in life. He played with Alan and got such a kick out of Alan jumping over the net to retrieve the ball, as if Page was too old or crippled to do it himself. Alan was a nut. It was all part of the fun. There is too much to say about Page and his wife, Eloise, they formed such a major part of our life. Page and I were left-handed Virgos, so we took one another for granted and just coasted into all the stuff we did. We jumped into the stream together and the current carried us. There was never a plan or a feasibility study–we just did it. I am proud of the fact that I gave him the time and occasion to write his history–his eight volume Peoples’ History of the United States–one of the great achievements of historiography of this century. I liked calling him America’s Greatest Historian. He always shrugged it off. He dedicated his Dissenting Opinions to me. I loved him for saying there is nothing as contemptible as a fact.

You were going to mention his connection with Chadwick through the Civilian Conservation Corps.

It’s a connection I was only able to make later. It has some strange permutations. If you think of experience as somewhat occult, forces operating under the threshold of consciousness, an intuition of which occurring only now and then, you can get my meaning. Freud talks about consciousness as a mystic writing pad. It’s like that. A palimpsest is another metaphor, a text written over a text, where it is hard, but not impossible, to discern the hidden text. It has a certain opaque depth to it. Occultation is another word for it, a term from astronomy, where one heavenly body passes in front of another, obscuring it from sight. What a great word. I am trying to understand its meaning in a number of philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, who talk about the concealed and the unconcealed. It is question of hide and seek. I wish I had been more attentive to it, more equal to the task, while it was happening. It is a great sorrow. But “we get so soon old and yet so late schmart”. This was a motto in the Herbel’s market and butcher store across the street on Villard Avenue, where Igrew up, in North Milwaukee.

Isn’t this also your personal versus archive distinction?

It is very hard to keep open two channels at the same time, namely a participation in the events as they occur and a recording or collecting of them in order to preserve them, especially if the events are very dynamic and don’t give you much time to discern what’s going on to the extent you are absorbed by them. This usually comes later in retrospect and then one realizes through the advantage of hindsight all or some of the influences at work. It was impossible for me to be the archivist and the participant at the same time. You either live it or observe it in the tension of participation and detachment. Some people can do both, but I couldn’t. Tillich used to talk to me about “the personal Tillich versus “the archive Tillich”, which is a version of the same problem, although there were plenty of people who kept a record of what he did and who he was and published books of their account. There is a Tillich Archive at Harvard Divinity School. I would like to start a Chadwick Archive at UCSC, although I wasn’t even careful of letters Alan wrote to me or various documents that were important. There was a letter from the Chancellor that gave the land to the garden in perpetuity and I don’t know where it is.

How about cleaning up your garage. No telling what you might find.

There you go.

It sounds like you think you should have lived your life backwards, knowing it all already.

Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Sartre calls it “the retrospective illusion” or anticipating the outcome as if it has already happened. His negative is my positive. He called it an illusion because it involves the Holy Spirit, his term for the occult force. It is being guided by the Spirit with sighs too deep for words which has meaning for me. Sartre says he smashed the illusion by throwing the Spirit out of the cellar, which is why he was such an asshole, otherwise known as a sophist.

What do you mean?

Well, the Sophists were the first in the history of philosophy to say that existence precedes essence in the question of universals. Sartre was famous for saying that and added the dumb theme that man makes himself. As well as other such caffe themes. I had the best cup of coffee in my life at his Caffe–the Deux Maggots–last year, when we were in Paris. So I have to give him that.

Wouldn’t Sartre call your slogan–Et in Arcadia Ego–a retrospective illusion?

Good point in terms of the issue of retrospective. Sartre thought he was clever in saying that existence precedes essence, as I said, the position of the Sophists, in Ancient Greece, the nemesis of Socrates. Sartre is against the Perfect Tense of epic action, as I see it, where the essential dimension of one’s life is under guidance. For me, the sign of the perfect tense, is seeing one’s life in the epic dimension, epics are the genre of the perfect tense, the tense of accomplished action, which, when retold, happen again in the perfect tense, so that at every point you know the whole–past perfect, present perfect, future perfect. Augustine’s Confessions is a good example of the perfect tense in the form of autobiography in the life of the Spirit–he is the exact counterpart to Sartre. Socrates understood philosophy as perfect tense meditation and comprehension, which he called having-one-foot in-the-grave, so that you comprehend your life as a whole, from birth to death, looking back over the whole of it. As Beckett says in Waiting For Godot:  “We give birth astride a grave. The light gleams for an instant and then no more. Isn’t that enough for you?”

You thought of the garden as your grave.

It was another slogan associated with the Arcadian theme: Let my garden be my grave. The raised bed, dug to scale. Gardens began on graves. I went to visit J. B. Jackson at Harvard, a famous architectural historian, and he told me about gardens and graves, when I told him about Chadwick and his raised bed technique. Speaking of garden/graves, the first resurrection appearance of Jesus is as a mistaken gardener. I like that. I have a Rembrandt woodcut of him wearing a large gardener’s hat and carrying a spade, as if he had dug himself out of the grave. Life into death into life. Adam was a gardener, so was the Second Adam. We should loosen up on these themes and learn how to live them. Jesus as the Christ–the child who grows up to be crucified–was born in the grave, which might just as well be symbolized as a garden bed: “Lo, How A Rose Ere Blooming.”

You know the Legend of Seth?

Of course, one of my favorites. The dutiful son of Adam and Eve. He re-traced his parents’ footsteps, when his father–Adam–died, to the entrance to the Garden of Eden, where the Angel still stood guard with the flaming sword. Seth begs the Angel for seeds from the Tree Of Life, access to which was denied when the expulsion from the Garden occurred, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations, the Tree that overcomes our natural mortality, not to be confused with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or better translated–The Tree of the Knowledge that Everything is Possible! The Angel relents and grants Seth some seeds from the Tree of Life. Seth returns and plants the seeds in his father’s mouth, when he buries him. From those seeds sprang forth the Cedars of Lebanon which were used in the construction of Solomon’s Temple, one tree being saved to be made into the Cross of Christ, who was crucified on the precise spot where Adam and Eve sinned.

What do you make of legends like that?

The mythical symbolism is so tight, so perfectly musical, if I may use such a metaphor, that such legends provide the inspirational basis for what Voegelin calls “transcendence to the ground”. They orient us to the ground and power of being, the underlying symbolic matrix of our spiritual lives. Without them we are lost.

So the Eden/Arcadia theme is this “transcendence to the ground”?

Eden/Arcadia is the symbolic matrix for the original affirmation of the unambiguous goodness of creation, although every time I repeat this I realize I have to correct it. The first creation account, in Biblical criticism known as the Priestly account,  Genesis 1 – 2:4, is the unambiguous affirmation; the Eden account, which is the second account, attributed to the Jahwist, is the ambiguous affirmation account, as it includes the prohibition not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge that Everything Is Possible (Good and Evil), which arouses the desire to transgress and leads to the Fall. I have to mention this every time I use the term unambiguous. They are two distinct accounts each with their own symbolism.

Wasn’t there some relation of Arcadia to the Santa Cruz Mission?

I was amazed when I found the only book on the mission: Mission Santa Cruz, by Torchiana, where I read that it was the first in the mission system to be secularized. He has a chapter on “California Arcadia”, the period of the flowering of Mexican culture in California, after the mission period, the “Completion of the Secularization of the Missions”:

“California developed into a semi-modern Arcadia; that is to say, a Spanish Arcadia, as exists today in the district of Andalusia, southern Spain, where under the azure skies a smiling countryside offers a lovely sight of palms, orchards, orange groves, banana groups, olive trees, loaded with fruit, and what not.” p.354

It was the time of the great ranches, the haciendas, the maidens in their mantillas, the proud caballeros, before the gringos took it over, presumably before the arrest of Isaac Graham, a Santa Cruz pioneer, who was the nephew of Daniel Boone, and a fur trapper, who came west and settled in Santa Cruz and became Mayor, and opened a whiskey distillery near Watsonville.. He was arrested by the Mexican authorities and imprisoned in Mexico, so California was annexed, lest that ever happen again to another American citizen. Thus ended California Arcadia, only to return in Chadwick’s little garden, at least for those of us who were involved. Chadwick continued the great English tradition of naturalists represented by Gilbert White, whose The Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789, is one of the most widely read books.

So more about Page.

When Page was a student at Dartmouth, he came under the influence of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a unique figure from European culture, a German professor, a polymath, who knew everything and knew it in a way that was unique to him. He was a kind of academic clairvoyant unique in his century. Tillich was comparable but different in many ways. At least we both had teachers who were summits and we both were equally devoted to them. Eugen’s central work, Out of Revolution,

Autobiography of Western Man, is one of the great books of the twentieth century but very little known, which is a shame. I would like to say that he was the greatest teacher in the history of American education, but I would have to know too much to make such a claim. I have been reading his lectures on Greek philosophy and it is a treat. There is no one like him. His insights are like beads on a rosary–you simply want to pray them–repeat them over and over–in order to commit them to memory. Some of the most important things I know I have learned from him, especially his caution about the Greeks and the history of philosophy and falling for rationalism. Eugen is like a cold shower in terms of my love of Socrates and Plato. Page’s relation to him was extremely close, an immensely profound spiritual tie, so much so, Page got tears in his eyes just at the mention of his name, the sentiment was so strong.

Wasn’t Freya Von Moltke the companion of Rosenstock-Huessy when he came to Santa Cruz?

Yes, that’s how we met. Page invited Eugen to teach at Cowell College after Eugen retired from Dartmouth and Freya accompanied him. We invited them to lunch and our fates were joined.

So you see the Garden as related to the past efforts of Camp William James and voluntary work-service?

All of these inter-connections eventually were disclosed. Eugen had been involved in voluntary work-service camps in Germany, with Helmuth von Moltke, before Hitler came to power. Hitler turned them into Hitler Youth Camps. Eugen came to America, taught at Harvard and then went to Dartmouth. He was interested in William James and the theme of “the moral equivalent of war through voluntary work service”–it is an incipient economy of gift, as I have come to understand it. You learn the spirit of self-sacrifice by devoting yourself to some cause for a couple of years, sharing the burden of the shit-work, so you get a sense of what some people have to suffer for a lifetime. It is the wedding of idealism and pragmatism, in an effort to alleviate the lot of those less fortunate or at least share their fate. It is at the core of American volunterism and the basis for civic virtue, contributing to your community.

How did Rosenstock-Huessy get involved in the C.C.C.?

Somehow, I forget how, Frank Davidson, a student at Harvard, came under Eugen’s spell and wanted to open the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) to middle-class youth, in the spirit of William James’ vision, as well as Eugen’s vision of planetary service. Up until then, you had to be a delinquent or a poverty kid to get into the corps, a practical alternative to jail or indigence. There was a means test to gain entrance to prove your predicament. Frank prevailed upon Eleanor Roosevelt, the Roosevelt’s were family friends, to support the opening of Camp William James, as a leadership training camp for the C.C.C., under Eugen’s direction. Dorothy Thompson, the famous journalist, also was an advocate. Page was the first Camp Director, in Tunbridge, Vermont. Then the war started and Page and others were drafted off into the army and the camp was stillborn. Eugen writes about this in an uncanny way about how what was started there would

eventually realize itself–he had a remarkable sense of timing. (include quote)

So the prediction proved true when you started the Garden at Santa Cruz and from there, with Page, helped start the California Conservation Corps with Jerry Brown.

I came to realize that the Chadwick Garden was the successor, the eventual realization of what Eugen pointed to–comparable forces were at work–it had the same impulse. But I realized this only after Page and I left the University and started the William James Association in order to re-establish the Conservation Corps.

You went to Washington, D. C. and lobbied for it?

We did and some of the old camp guys came, Frank Davidson himself, who took us to the Cosmos Club for lunch, and Jack Preis, who wrote the book: Camp William James. We went around and met with senators and lobbyists, like Don Eberly, who were working in behalf of the voluntary work service theme. I remember going into Ted Kennedy’s office and meeting the most beautiful strawberry blonde receptionist I ever hope to see. But nothing really came of it and then Jerry Brown announced the formation of the California Conservation Corps. We linked up with Governor Jerry Brown and helped start the California Conservation Corps, so all of these forces connected again for us.

The Peace Corps would be another example of what you mean by voluntary work service.

I should mention that the Peace Corps was Page’s idea. He wrote a long letter to Hubert Humphrey proposing it and then Humphrey championed it. I have tried to locate the letter in the Humphrey Library in Minneapolis, but to no avail. Sargent Shriver refers to Camp William James in an encyclopedia article on the Peace Corps, so he may have known of Page’s proposal. It is an important text still to be retrieved.

The California Conservation Corps was one of Brown’s favorite accomplishments as Governor.

It was all scripted for us and we were dazzled by it. Page and Eloise were in Brown?s office when he announced it, because Eloise was about to be named Chairman of the State Art Council, which I helped arrange because I knew Baker-roshi, who recommended her to Brown. Brown was informed of our interest and invited us to help with the planning. We organized some encampments and even had Chadwick come and speak at one. It was my dream to utilize the Corps as an extension or training program for the Chadwick Method. That never happened, even though the California Corps became the inspiration for the inauguration of comparable state corps throughout the nation. Now almost every state has one and Clinton has done his best, against Republican opposition, to promote voluntary service at the Federal level. So the wheel turned and these forces came into a certain confluence even if they were not realized as I had hoped. Then came the homeless problem.

You and Page opened the first public shelter for the homeless in Santa Cruz in 1985.

Yes, it was the greatest work we did together. We had already run the William James Work Company, which found some thirty thousand jobs for those in need of short-term, part-time, employment. That was the problem in the ’70′s. No one heard of homelessness, which became the issue in the mid-80′s. We opened the first public shelter in Santa Cruz in l985,and then organized churches to take in the overflow–the Interfaith Satellite Shelter Program– and eventually we started the Homeless Garden Project, with support from personnel trained in the Chadwick program at the University. So the wheel turned again. I am hoping we might link the C.C.C. and the Americorps with our Homeless Garden effort and extend it accordingly. We hope to get 24 positions funded by the Americorps this year. We thought of turning our homeless guys in the shelter into the Santa Cruz Conservation Corps and give them public works projects but it never happened, although we did take a group out on two successive Saturdays and police the banks of the San Lorenzo River. I would still like to see the homeless as a potential conservation corps.. A shirt and a patch and their name over their pocket and a new identity–no longer homeless. So, if we get the Americorps positions, this hope will be realized.

Why didn’t you do it earlier?

It takes more organizational savvy than I have been able to muster. Everything in its proper time.

And now you have the Page Smith Community House.

Yes. It is a forty person transitional facility with a very tight rehab program and support system in order to help people get back on their feet, although this will be mitigated by our having twelve of our Americorps recruits living there, inasmuch as we will provide training that will offset their need for support services. They will be service providers as well as recipients as part of their work/service duties.

Don’t you despair of the effort to help the homeless in terms of their re-entering conventional society?

Of course. But one success makes it worthwhile for me. We have a fellow who found his way into the Homeless Garden Project–Bill Tracey–who would most likely be dead by now and he is the first to admit it. He put his life back together and became one of our best workers with remarkable talents in terms of public spokesman and a writer for the Garden Newsletter. One like him in ten years is all I need to make it worthwhile. The Homeless Garden Project provided an alliance with the Chadwick Garden and Apprentice Training Program at UCSC and closed the loop for me. We have had good ties with the program and have hired trained apprentices who practise the Chadwick method.

You still think some kind of spiritual force seems to be operating under the surface?

I wish I could discern it better. The great example for me is the fate of Kreisau, the home of the Von Moltke’s in Silesia, now Poland. It fell when Germany fell; the communists took it over. Now, after the fall of communism, it is a center for voluntary work-service, which is a return to the youth work service camp effort of Von Moltke before the war. It is a miracle, pure and simple, although unlike Job, the Von Moltke’s don’t want it back; they don’t want it returned to them, although they support the work-service camp effort and Freya is the Honorary Chairperson. Helmuth Kohl, in his wisdom, selected it as the place to meet the Polish Prime Minister for talks about border relations between Poland and Germany. He provided funding for the center and the restoration of the schloss. It has great symbolic significance, not only because Helmuth held talks there about the future of Germany, after Hitler, for which he was executed as a traitor, for his ideas about the future of Germany, but also because the old German General, his Great-Uncle, is buried there, the founder of the modern German army under Bismarck.

You have written a play about these themes?

I wrote a play about the early part–the relation between Helmuth Von Moltke and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian and pastor, who was already a hero of mine and a great influence when I was at Harvard Divinity School–and their involvement in the assassination of Hitler; Helmuth con and Dietrich pro. It is called: “A Lullaby For Wittgenstein”. It was a great event to have Freya come to Santa Cruz some years ago when I staged a reading at my home where everyone took parts and we read the play. It was an amazing experience. A. R. Gurney, the dramatist, is an old friend of mine and he told me he would help if I staged a reading and then rewrote it. After listening to it, there was only one line I liked in the whole play, so the rewrite proved to be too daunting. He was right. I got it out the other day and read it in anticipation of hearing Elie Wiesel that night who was speaking in Santa Cruz. Now I like it. It is available on my home page. I sent a copy to Mr. Wiesel after he said he would read it.

Why is Bonhoeffer important to you?

Bonhoeffer represents to me the notorious Third Use of the Law in Lutheran dogmatics, thought to be a Calvinist heresy, which I think is odd. It presumably sneaked in under Melancthon when he wasn’t looking. I define the Third Use as “the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed”. That’s a bit much for Lutherans, who, by and large, are a grim lot, willing to knuckle under to authority, in spite of their namesake, who was condemned by the Roman Church for being contumacious. One man’s contumaciousness is another man’s free spontaneous behavior. Nietzsche hit it on the nose when he said: “His disciples should look more redeemed.” However, I’m still Lutheran to the core thanks to my Norwegian-German heritage and these themes mean a lot to me. Bonhoeffer was a breath of fresh air when I was in divinity school. His Letters and Papers From Prison was a revelation for my generation of students. He sketched out a secular Christianity that described our situation.

What about the Two Kingdoms principle of Luther?

The issue of authority and domination versus freedom in the Spirit relates to Luther’s theory of the two kingdoms, his line-up with the nobles against the peasants and his rejection of Thomas Muenzer, who was an example of the free spirited rejection of imposed authority in the peasant revolt during the Reformation. Bonhoeffer notes that the Germans were very good at civil obedience and sacrificing themselves for a larger cause. Where they fell short was in the deed of free responsibility in taking unlawful actions for moral reasons. This is the great theme of the 20th century, announced by William James in his speech at Stanford in 1906: “A Moral Equivalent of War” and picked up by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and everyone involved in civil disobedience in the name of justice. Bonhoeffer writes extensively in great epigrammatic paragraphs about the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed in a world come of age and therefore devoid of God, in his Letters and Papers From Prison. I met Bonhoeffer’s friend and translator–Eberhard Bethge–at Harvard and he summed up Bonhoeffer’s position as “justified godlessness”, a brilliant term, given the tradition of “justification” in Paul, Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard and Tillich. It is a theological understanding of secularism, where God is teaching us how to live in a world without God, as Bonhoeffer put it.

In your play, you have a play within a play, written by Bonhoeffer.

I was astonished to find in his papers from prison that he had written a little play, about a deserter, back from the front, being interrogated by his insolent prison officer, where he has to face the music for his desertion, even though he had won the Iron Cross, a very sour note, indeed. Then there is another episode about a guy who had his face shot off and is returned to duty at the prison and no one can stand looking at him and while I read it I looked up at my Max Beckmann lithograph, hanging on the wall, from his “Hell” series, of Beckmann himself, looking at a soldier in the street with his face shot off. That was a moment! Two different world wars but the same destroyed face.

So you include the Bonhoeffer play as a scene within your play.

It fit perfectly. It is an inspired piece, so I set the context for it in terms of a debate over the need to assassinate Hitler. The play is inspired by the courageous example of Freya Von Moltke, as she writes about the last days of Kreisau, as well as this dramatic episode from Bonhoeffer’s prison experience.

You make me wonder at what people carry into their graves as a result of their death.

You can say that again. Many of us have a lot of balls in the air–it is one great juggling act, and then the balls are put to rest. Tillich has a wonderful sermon on the theme: “Fogetting and Being Forgotten.”

Do you think there is some great collective memory where it is all retained in spite of individual human forgetfulness.

No,I?m afraid not. There are no Jungian collective archetypes as receptacles for these matters, as far as I know. The Collective Unconscious as a kind of memory? Who knows? It is why the anxiety of being forgotten is the sting of death. It makes for great melancholia. The early Greeks were the masters of it, they talked about how it would have been better never to have been born, if one’s fate is to be forgotten.

Do you agree with that?

I sympathize with Greek melancholy. You can hardly be a philosopher and not be bitten by that bug. The Norwegian in me is prone to it. When Norwegians or descendants, relatives of mine, sit in a room they go “yah yah” in that peculiar way of sucking in their breath–it is the eccentric sound of Scandinavian melancholy. A kind of hic without the cup. I prefer another attitude. When the Apostle Paul envisaged the ultimate end of things in his famous ?Confession of Weakness? also known as ?The Thorn in the Flesh?–he refers to the vision of “the Third Heaven”, which no one may dare utter, the final mystery, when “God will be all in all”. He formulated this problem as well as anyone. So maybe our memory is taken up into God’s omniscience.

Another secret.

On pain of death. I heard Robert Thurman speak in Santa Cruz recently about death and dying from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. He is such a consummate performance artist as a professor of religion he set me to thinking. I think “life after death” is a nonsensical combination of words, just as he said he thinks “nothing after death” is nonsensical. He re-translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was a kind of bible of the psychedelic movement, thanks to the edition of Leary and Metzner. He read some passages from it about the “in-between”, which rings a bell because it is a great concept of Plato–methexis. I loved his talk, but I don’t believe it. Christianity is often misunderstood as supporting the immortality of the soul, but this is a mistake. Eternal life is something. else. The symbols are difficult to articulate properly, although Tillich makes a good attempt at it in a lecture he gave on the subject. As with most things theological, I follow him: “Symbols Of Eternal Life”. What a topic. It would take us into my long fascination with “the Myth of Er”, at the end of Plato’s Republic. I recommend it as required reading. I give it an existential reading, with Socrates as the unnamed prophet. There are fine commentaries by Voegelin and Heidegger. And then there is the discussion by Ricoeur in his autobiography about God remembering us.  It is a beautiful reflection.

Can you tell us more about “an economy of gift”. It seems to be related to your other themes, like the Third Use of the Law. and redemptive behavior.

You’re right. Thanks to this interview, I’m beginning to see some new connections myself. I had another strange experience I’ll tell you about. I was on my way to New York to visit friends and I wrote ahead about an economy of gift and how I wanted to discuss this with him. I knew about Marcel Mauss and Levy Strauss. It is a great anthropological theme–the gift–or the potlatch– and my friend, who I was going to visit, is an anthropologist–Edmund Carpenter. He gave me the preface of Levy Strauss to the writings of Mauss. It is a very dense piece. Then Derrida came out with his interpretation–Given Time–and I picked it up at his favorite bookstore in Manhattan, on Madison Avenue. I saw the chair on the second floor where he sits for hours while they feed him books. That I would like to watch. The trouble with reading Derrida is that not much sticks after a reading, even multiple readings, but I have notes, and I can always go back and reread the book. There is usually such a flood of associations it is difficult to sort them out. One is more dazzled than informed. Ricoeur is better for me, much more straightforward and conceptual and the economy of gift is really his theme.

Another chapter and verse. What about redemptive behavior? I never thought of it before, but I can see what you mean.

Sometimes, the concepts get in the way. I’m amazed how I hang on to mental baggage, like so much ballast. This is one way to deliver oneself of it. Here’s a bag full of ideas on the relation of the third use of the law to the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed. I think I need help.

Do you know where to turn?

I can annotate it all.

So Derrida turned his attention to an economy of gift.

His essay is an interpretation of Mauss and Levy-Strauss.. It is more food for thought. I found the inspiration for an economy of gift and the term itself in an essay on “The Golden Rule”, by Paul Ricoeur.

You were a student of his?

Yes, I mentioned how we became friends at Harvard when he was a guest in our home and then he and Madame Ricoeur visited us in Santa Cruz. When he stayed with us in Cambridge, he sat up all night reading our art books. A wonderful, indefatigable man, he is now one of the foremost philosophers in France. He is the true successor to Tillich. I edited the English for his Freud and Philosophy, with Denis Savage, who translated it. I have learned a lot from him We are on the same wave length with thymos and he has written about it astutely as “affective fragility”, which works better in French, in Fallible Man. He knows full well about the middle ground between reason and desire. His Symbolism Of Evil, I might add, is one of my favorite books and a superb introduction to Western thought.

Tell me about the Golden Rule.

Well, I had a snotty attitude toward it, as if it represented grade school ethics, before you learned the good stuff, like Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” and Kierkegaard’s “Teleological Suspension of the Ethical”. It went back to a joke I heard at Harvard that James Luther Adams, my Professor of Social Ethics, told, about riding on a plane and his companion turns out to be a physicist. He asks Adams, after he learns he is a professor at Harvard Divinity School, if religion can’t be summed up by the Golden Rule and Adams says, “sure, if you think physics is just twinkle twinkle little star”.

That fixed the Golden Rule for you?

That did it. Then I met Carol Guyer, the daughter of J. C. Penny, whose, daughter, Cynthia, was a student of mine in Organizational Climate, an innovative class I taught at UCSC. And then I met Mrs. Penny, the great-mother-of-us-all, who turned out to be one of the most vital and high-spirited women I have ever met, the embodiment of female thymos. Mr. Penny was a passionate practitioner of the Golden Rule, as the central principle of his Christian businessman’s ethic. He first called his stores “the Golden Rule Stores”. So the example of the Penny family continuing on through successive generations was a great inspiration on this very theme of generous giving of oneself in service to others.

Didn’t you wind up winning a J.C. Penny “Golden Rule Award”?

We won three in succession–Lynne Basehore Cooper, Paul Pfotenhauer, and me. When Lynne and the Homeless Garden won the J.C. Penny Golden Rule Award for Voluntary Service and we got a free lunch and a check, within the week, I was sent Ricoeur’s essay on “The Golden Rule”, where he very subtly develops his concept of an economy of gift and the whole thing fell into place, as if it was arranged. I am very grateful for it. I haven’t fully worked it out, as yet, but the rudiments, the contours, are clearly in mind. It will be an integral part of Ecotopia because it has been the inspirational source.

What is Ecotopia?

It is an economic development plan I have hatched to make Santa Cruz a point of destination for the eco-tourist in order to make enough money to solve the problem of homelessness for the first time in the country. By “solve”, I mean a definite plan and a design strategy. So the solution is realistic within specific parameters and goals. I have until 2000 to work it out on the Internet as a virtual design strategy and then implement it.

Do you have a web server?

Yes, at the Visual Math Institute in Santa Cruz. You can get http://ecotopia. org. for the asking.

Is Ecotopia a type of utopia?

As an economy of gift it would have to be. I’m happy not to share the cynical or sceptical reaction to utopia as wishful dreaming and a waste of time. I have an interest in the utopian literature which relates to my despair over industrial society–one might as well

dream of a better state of things now that things seem irretrievably bad. Tillich has given some brilliant lectures on utopia now available in Political Expectations and Ricoeur has a book of lectures he gave at the University of Chicago: Ideology and Utopia. There is a good literature on the topic, both primary and secondary. Frank Manuel and his wife did a big reader on the subject. It is definitely food for thought. I know that utopia means nowhere or no place.

Has Ecotopia ever happened?

Formally, it means nowhere. I like the Ecotopia twist because it could happen somewhere, like Santa Cruz. The ‘u’, which is the negative, is dropped in favor of ‘eco’ which means household, after the Greek oikos: what is “inhabited”. So the ‘nowhere’ becomes a possible ‘somewhere’, as far as what is inhabited. But there are cultural approximations to utopia. The Italian Renaissance is as close to utopia as one might get. It was a utopian renewal of Western culture from its roots in ancient Greece. So Classical Athens would be another example of a utopian culture, with Plato’s Republic as the working text. And, remarkably, the Paradise Garden is at the center in the Italian development of great civic botanical gardens in the Renaissance, starting with Padua and Pisa, just as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were located in gardens. This, again, is George Huntston Williams’ theme of wilderness and paradise or garden and desert, the place of retreat for the refreshment and recreation of the soul.

Didn’t Mark Primack inspire you in terms of his botanic architecture?

That was the beginning. It never dawned on me to think of vegetation as habitation, partly because of my own estrangement from nature. I remember when my wife and I lived in Newburyport our first year, on a salt marsh, in a barn apartment. It made me nervous to be out in a natural setting, with the tide bringing in and taking out the ocean every day. I was a city guy. Nature made me nervous. I was living in my head, in my mind, where I was completely taken up. So gardening was my way back, under Chadwick’s influence and I discovered I had a green thumb. I wasn’t nervous any more. And summers in the North Woods of Wisconsin have helped a lot. But nature as habitation has become an important theme. The key is the classic orders–the columns of Ancient Greece. They were once trees. The Corinthian is the most obvious, with the Acanthus leaf. I developed a love for Palladio which I will go into later. I entered a door through him, through his villas, and had to discover why the attraction was so strong. I just trusted the impulse and enjoyed going with it. Show me, I thought. And I was shown. The Palladian columns are emblematic of his restoration of classical architecture. And then the whole sequence opened up for me when a series of books fell into place, beginning with The Architecture of Paradise, with illustrations from Viollet-le-duc and other French writers, showing the goddess of Architecture sitting there and watching the men struggling with the first habitation in a tree, tying some branches together, and then branches cut and tied in a teepee, and then in a rectangle, and then houses. Adam’s House, The Primitive Hut in History, was the next book, with many of the same illustrations, and then the tree into the classic columns, and I had the key and the evolution right up to Palladio. With this came the garden city idea and utopian thought about the ideal city–the history of city planning–from Plato to Frank Lloyd Wright. All of this became grist for my mill for ecotopia and Santa Cruz, which would serve as a perfect garden city. I am reminded how Lisbon became a garden city, with great garden boulevards, after the famous Lisbon earthquake which sent a shock wave through Europe. Plant your garden in this best of all possible worlds is the way Voltaire satirizes Leibniz in Candide in his discussion of the earthquake and then lo and behold it became a reality.  They made Lisbon into a garden.

Bernstein’s great chorus at the end of his Candide is one of your favorite pieces of music: “Let your gardens grow.” Botanic gardens or philosophic gardens are a great interest of yours, aren’t they?

Of course. I want to be the philosopher of gardens, bringing philosophy of nature up to date. It used to be a great enterprise and was given up when nature was taken over by mathematical physics, beginning with Galileo and the mathematization of nature. The very word for nature in Greek is physis, which is the word for physics. In Greek, it meant what grows, or a “plantation”; since Newton and Galileo it means– “dead things in space”. One can hardly take in the reversal–it is so inside-out or upside-down. Husserl is the great commentator on this development in his Crisis. Naturalist used to be a dignified scholarly designation and then under the sway of Physicalism was relegated to the Vitalist garbage pile, but it composted; Rachel Carson made it respectable again, right through to E. O. Wilson at Harvard.

What do you know about botanic gardens?

We went through all this, but I’ll recapitulate. Padua was the first great Italian botanical garden, along with Pisa, and then civic gardens sprang up throughout Europe. The renaissance was expressed and celebrated in a great civic garden, the extension of the medieval herb garden. It was the age of the Plantocrat, a veritable plantocracy, where plant hunters went out worldwide to look for new specimens to be brought back to the civic gardens as collection centers. The initial motive was to look for the Garden of Eden. It was to be the locus for the New Adam and the Brave New World of Shakespeare. Columbus had Eden in mind in his search for the new world. When it wasn’t found, the civic gardens became Edens on their own, the reconstitution of paradise. Then, ironically, the gardens also or subsequently became seedbeds for modern science. Garden academies, which sprang up everywhere as centers of free inquiry, sponsored scientific investigation, beginning with botany. Astronomical observatories were added for the development of physics, as were chemical laboratories. It was only a matter of time before everyone went into the lab and stayed there, to the neglect of the garden. This shift in focus proved critical for the triumph of industrial society and the loss of organic integrity. The plantocracy became technocrats and the plantocracy a technocracy. Attention was re-focused. Modern science was on its way to the triumphant victory of Physicalism, as if they locked themselves in the lab and threw away the key. There is a famous etching depicting life in the lab where everyone is dressed to the nines, some wearing top hats, looking like they are at some great celebration, getting ready for the synthesis of urea on the way to smashing the atom and discovering DNA and cloning sheep. There’s no stopping them now.

You mentioned that Francis Bacon played a role in this?

Yes, a decisive one. He wrote a famous essay on gardens. I happen to have an original edition of his book on nature, a deliciously beautiful book, as though printed for a prince. Bacon saw the garden as an incipient lab. Here are some quotes that perfectly illustrate this line of thought:

“Aware of the botanic garden as a seed-bed of science, young Francis Bacon wished to improve it. He suggested the idea of collecting a library in a house with ‘a spacious and wonderful garden and a huge cabinet, and a still house furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces and vessels.” Bacon rang the bell for the scientific intellectual, of which he is the first major example, it’s very type and form. “Nature cannot be conquered by obeying her. Accordingly these goals, human science and human power, come to an end in action. To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrate in action.” So the “garden academies” sprang up everywhere in Europe, where Bacon’s program was put into effect. “This movement was given a name: ‘technology’. The word, significantly enough, was coined by Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), a former student of theology, who turned to mathematics and the natural sciences.” Armytage in The Rise of the Technocrat.

Here’s a good quote from one of my favorite books: The Garden Of Eden:

“For the first time since the Fall, thanks to the discovery of America, a truly encyclopedic collection of plants could now be made that would offer a complete guide to the many faces of the Creator. Since each family of plants was thought to represent a specific act of creation, that scholar would come to understand God best who found room in a pulvillus for every genus. This, then, was the Garden of re-creation into which the wise man would retire, and shut the door upon the busy, disfigured. world outside. Plants were restful things, free from motion, and, so it was generally imagined, from the perturbations of sex. In this they resembled God himself. Not only that: the leaves of the various plants having been appointed by God for physik (or medicine), a complete collection of plants from all over the world, must, it was supposed, supply a ready remedy for every injury and infection. Thus it was that, in a Botanic Garden, beside the fountain in the middle, a man could enter into communion with what was green and full of sap, recover his innocence, and shed his fear of decay.  Some of the brightest hopes of mankind thus came to lie in principles of recreational gardening associated with the Botanic Gardens and with what was written about them. But these ideals could be adopted by other gardeners, both great and small, with notions of their own as to the many ways in which to recreate a ‘perpetual spring’. After the relative hopelessness of the medieval world view, and the division of Christendom at the Reformation, these attempts to recreate the Garden of Eden, backward-looking as they were, came as a sensitive, and immensely optimistic interlude in Western European history, before the march of modern science and of the industrial revolution began.” p. 10

You recently gave a four hour lecture on the history of gardens.

Yes. To the Master Gardener Class at UCSC Extension. I have a strong interest in the history of gardens and have collected some fine books, along with my herbal collection. I almost bought an original edition of the Padua Garden Book, because it was the first, although this is disputed, and because Goethe visited it and the urplant was identified and enshrined there, but it was too expensive. I do own the Pisa Garden Book, an exquisite folio, which was reasonable. It is a wonderful field of study. My wife and I made a tour of French Formal Gardens with the famous historian of French Gardens, Howard Adams, in October of 1995. It was the trip of a life-time. The four hour lecture gave me time to cover some of the major aspects of garden history.

Say something about the history of gardens.

Well, the first book for beginning one’s studies is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It takes a while to memorize the name, but it’s worth it. It is the source of many of the motifs of formal gardens and it is particularly distinguished as a publication of the Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius in Venice, the most important press of the Italian Renaissance. I can give a good bibliography of the basic books, many of which I have collected, in terms of modern studies. They seem to come out weekly. There is an excellent bookstore in San Francisco devoted to architecture and gardens–Stout’s. I always go there when I go to the City and there is a great restaurant down the alley–Bix’s–which makes a great martini. There are three major national garden traditions in the West–the Italian, the French and the English. They have their respective styles and motifs and reflect their national origin. I was struck by the achievement of the French formal garden as the highest attainment of French culture, if you are sick of steak tartare or foie gras. I’m still stunned. It was a personal pleasure because of working on the Euclidean tradition with Ralph Abraham. I would not have had an appreciation of the relation of geometry to gardening but for that project, just as I developed an appreciation for the geometrical perspective applied to painting and architecture in the Renaissance, especially by Brunelleschi and Palladio. It gave the French an understanding of the metaphysics of infinity which they designed into their gardens. There is a very good book on the subject: The Metaphysics of Infinity: The French Formal Garden. It was a natural progression from Chadwick and herbal studies to take an interest in garden history, a wonderful scholarly field. It set me up for Palladio.

How is that?

I suddenly became a Palladio fanatic, which is the application of geometry to architecture. I fell in love with the sound of his name, which I like to repeat out loud. I bought every book I could find. I dreamt about buying one of his villas–there are some actual Palladian villas for sale, although I have retreated to the project of renting one which I plan to do–Villa Saraceno, owned by the British Trust and restored by them. Palladio is the greatest architect of the Italian Renaissance and his villa is the residence for an accompanying garden. The greatest Italian gardens are on estates other than Palladian but the whole context of Italian villas and gardens is the issue. The same for France and England. It is the architecture of paradise, both residence and garden together. Then I heard about how he got his name and that clinched it.

How did he get his name?

He was a stonemason by the name of Andreas Gondola and he was working for Trissino, a great Renaissance Man, a poet and so on, with a large salon. He recognized Gondola to be the greatest architect-to-be who ever would have lived (how?s that for an example of the perfect tense?) and took him into his salon to begin his training and renamed him Palladio. The name goes back to Pallas Athena, the Patron Saint of Athens who was represented by a large wooden statue of her which Aeneas brought from Troy to Rome to be housed in an underground chapel known as the Palladium. So just as Aeneas brought the goddess, Pallas Athena, representing classical culture, to Rome, so Palladio revived the principles of classical Greek architecture for Renaissance Italy. If anyone says that’s just a myth they should have their head examined.

Palladio aside, continue the history of garden line.

There is too much to tell. And there are any number of excellent books on the subject, as I mentioned. Now that I have toured the French gardens, I want to re-visit them, and take some more time to experience them. I want to plan a trip to Italy and then England, to complete the European experience. I also want to go to Kyoto and visit the Japanese gardens there. Then I would die happy.

You have given the references for some of your main sources such as Williams, Prest and Armytage, are there any others you would like to mention?

There are good bibliographies available in most of the major garden history books, such as Lazzaro, etc. And there is the Journal of Garden History, which is an excellent publication for keeping up to date on current scholarship in the field.

O.K. Malthus.

The enemy of an economy of gift. He is a basis for capitalism, as I look at it, and an economy of greed, because of scarcity of resources, as a presupposition. Dog eat dog. I got the point from George Herbert Mead, in his wonderful book: Movements Of Thought In the 19th century. Mead is so clear and concise, he must have been a superb teacher. He has a lecture on Malthus, the population theorist, who argued that because of the exponential development of human beings and the arithmetical development of jobs and the food supply, there would always be more people than food and more people than jobs. Food and jobs were linked on the short side. Therefore, you could pay a “starvation wage”, talk about a pernicious term, because there would always be more people than jobs; O.K., near starvation, you didn’t want your labor force to die. Thanks to the starvation wage, you could build up enormous profits. It is the guts of capitalism and it is heinous. The economy of greed. Darwin read Malthus and thought up the survival of the fittest, so we have social Darwinism on top of Malthus as the inner rationale of capitalist and industrial society–no wonder it is self-destructing, just as it is self-destructive. I saw a piece on the evening news last night detailing the salaries of some of the top C.E.O.’s in the country, with annual incomes from $10,000,000 to $100,000,000 and the argument that they are worth every penny, which makes you laugh out loud, while the downsizing and laying off of workers continues to increase. It is a major piece of evil. Chadwick showed me the way out of this impasse with an economy of gift through “too much zucchini”. The Chadwick Method could grow more than enough food for everyone–all you have to do is dig it. Now we are proving it with the Homeless Garden Project and our Community Supported Agriculture program, which I would like to see extended throughout the county.

Wasn’t that your inspiration for Ecotopia?

That’s what did it for me. I found out we were recruiting about 150 people to pay $400 for a share in the coming harvest of the garden and they wound up getting more than they paid for– the economy of gift was right there in practice. That’s when I made up the slogan of “too much zucchini”! From there, I started to think of Ecotopia, wanting to extend the spirit to the whole community if I could and have it serve as an example for everyone. I have four more years, having set myself the goal of 2000, to develop this plan. Santa Cruz is perfect for it. The right scale. And we have the momentum mounting to the next millennium. At least I’m counting on it. I’ve been wrong before. Not much seems to happen, and even what happens goes unnoticed, but I’m still hopeful.

So you think you can refute the Malthusian view.

China already has. They lost 100,000,000 people to starvation in the 19th c. That’s a million a year. I don’t know how many starve now, but I do know they grow food on every square inch of land and they utilize the French Intensive method, the raised bed and the double digging, for increased yields. I took a long train ride when I was there in 1982, and watched how the farms and gardens came right up to the tracks, reminiscent of the Schreber Gardens in Germany, which are all along the railroad tracks. I suppose it’s easy for me to talk, living in a sub-tropical climate, with no frost, almost never, and no snow. We can grow salads year round. It can be December 26th and I garden all day with temperatures in the high ’60′s, typical Santa Cruz weather.

Did you see anything similar in France?

Yes, there were allotment gardens in a number of places. Howard Adams, our tour guide, would stretch his neck and point them out–he had a kind of radar for them–as we were driving through the countryside.

How do you see this playing out in Santa Cruz?

It is an organizational problem. I have only thought about it in the most superficial way, playing with numbers, not much else. I need someone to carry it through who has the energy and the ability to work out the details and find the funding. This is how I started thinking about it. Take 10,000 social security recipients in Santa Cruz County and recruit them to the Community Supported Agriculture Program. That would mean about a million dollars @ $100 a share. Start with that. How many gardens would it take at what size, say, an acre or two per garden, plenty of space, with two or more gardeners working a site. There are all kinds of variables and intermediary considerations. Eventually, one could build to a two or three million dollar effort, providing organic, highly nutritious food to people on a fixed budget. County-wide.

How can you manage that?

I’m trying to see how we can extrapolate from our present model–the Homeless Garden Project. You could have asked me that ten years ago–how are you going to take care of the homeless? At that point, I didn’t have a clue, except to give them a place to lie down at night that was warm and dry–minimal shelter. That didn’t seem like a terribly complicated need to meet and yet the forces of opposition were humungous even for a small town like ours. I couldn’t have done it without Page. He took charge and we did it. Now I can point to the Homeless Garden, which is my particular project, and argue the shift in focus from liability to asset. How to see the homeless as an asset, as a contribution to the community, that’s the trick.

In other words, the bottom line of the Ecotopian vision is the resolution of homelessness–about as utopian as you can get.

As long as I have ten years into this effort, I might as well try to make the most of it. I would like to be the first person in the United States who claims the end to homelessness in his community. That’s my goal. I had to think big–Ecotopia–in order to get a handle on a solution, because the problem seems so intractable, so insoluble, and it gets worse every year. I fluctuate between despair and hope. I had to envisage a half billion dollar economy in order to even consider a solution possible. That’s how bad it is.

In other words, turn the economy of homelessness to an advantage.

Exactly. If I had to do it over again, I would issue annual reports of the Citizens Committee for the Homeless in order to show the economics of the effort. I am going to issue a decade report for the Citizens Committee for the Homeless and our projects in order to give an accounting of the economics of the effort. We have already spent millions of dollars over the past ten years. Where did that come from? What contribution did that make to the Santa Cruz economy? Our decade report will focus on our financial statements and our budgets. It’s time to get smart and argue on a level where everyone looks up instead of down.

Would Chadwick have gone along with such a scheme?

Absolutely. What could be an easier solution to homelessness than gardens and garden cottages? And yet in Santa Cruz at this point in time you can’t even pitch a tent because they have passed a law which prohibits sleeping. There is no homeless campground on the entire West Coast.

But there must be plans or design strategies that would meet this need.

I was thinking today of Chadwick’s relation to Frank Lloyd Wright. We could have created Wright’s utopian city here in Santa Cruz and Alan would have scored the garden aspect which was integral to Wright’s design. I mentioned the book: The Architecture of Paradise, which is a kind of design text for my idea of Ecotopia, especially in terms of the illustrations. The Muse of Architecture, watching the first attempt on the part of a man to make a tree house for habitation by tying some branches together is one of the best illustrations. It is a wonderful book and it lead me to Wright’s Garden City plan–Broadacre City, as well as his Usonian houses. Wright is another of my heroes. My grandparents settled in Wisconsin not too far from Taliesen, so it is very close to my roots, near the Kickapoo Valley and the Wisconsin River.

You mentioned the influence of your friend, Mark Primack, who calls himself a botanical architect.

Yes. He knew of the book and the illustrations when I brought it up recently. We did the Greenbelt Initiative together which saved about five thousand acres in Open Space in Santa Cruz. Andrew Morin, whom I recruited as an Environmental Studies student at UCSC, ran the project, which lead to Measure 0. Pogonip, now a city park, comprises 612 acres of the Greenbelt. It is the jewel of the belt. I see a major botanical garden being developed there–it would be a prime tourist draw.

Then you did the Circle Trail?

Yes, with the help of Don Weiss and Sylvia Knapton. It was her idea and she asked me to take it on. We signed it last June (1995). It is a seventeen mile circle walk on the West side of the San Lorenzo River and a 12 mile circle on the East side. The West side unites a series of environmental and recreational and educational attractions and resources–West Cliff Drive, along the ocean, where I walk every morning, the Greenbelt, the University, including the Arboretum, and the Chadwick Farm and Garden, Pogonip, as a City Park, the San Lorenzo River, the Homeless Garden Project, Lighthouse Field, Long Marine Lab, Antonelli’s Pond, and the Seaside Corporation Amusement Park where you can ride on a wooden roller coaster, the very same as featured in a Clint Eastwood film made here.

How did you bring that off?

We had a team, with sponsorship from National Parks and Trails. Without their help it would have been hard. They gave us a staff person who knew exactly how to do it–Susan Harris. And they paid for the brochures and the signs. It was a project of USA, now called United Services Agency, which is my nonprofit umbrella.

Ecotopia is your vision for these projects?

My big economic development scheme. I hope I’m riding a wave into the next millennium. Now we are planning a major event–an EcoThon–to bring attention to the Circle Trail. It turns out both circles are equal to a marathon, so we will have all sorts of athletic events and an EcoFair and hopefully unveil the first stage of the Ecology Hall of Fame. All of this is proceeding nicely and we still have almost three years to go.

Let’s go back to your sketch of the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict in the history of the sciences as you put it. Fill out some of the ideas.

The inclusion of Existentialism as chief mourner for defeated Vitalism was my own insight, a natural and obvious fit. I am astonished at how scholarship operates on discrete lines. I never would have learned about Aristotle’s father being an herbalist from the history of philosophy. I had to find that out when I studied the history of herbalism. It is very difficult to think across fields in a systematic way and yet the gains are enormous. Associative thinking is hard to come by and it’s what I have too much of. Anyhow, the conjunction of Physicalism and Vitalism with Existentialism nailed the thesis for me. It was the key link in the sketch, as far as I was concerned. No one has seen the link because the history of chemistry has almost no overlap with the history of philosophy and therefore the relation of Existentialism to refuted Vitalism as the result of synthetic urea has never been put together.

What was your source for “chief mourner’?

The “chief mourner” metaphor came from “The Ballad of Cock Robin”. Who will be Chief Mourner? I said the Dove (Existentialism) because of my love.

So the ditty summed it up? The Ballad of Cock Robin.

Who killed Cock Robin         (Vitalism)?

“I”, said the Sparrow             (Physicalism).

“With my bow and arrow”    (Artificial synthesis of urea)

Who will be chief mourner?

“I”, said the Dove                 (Existentialism)

“Because of my love”.

And all the birds in the sky fell to sighing and sobbing

When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.

When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.

The ditty summed it up. It is a memory device. Cock Robin is Vitalism and the Sparrow is Physicalism and the Bow and Arrow is the artificial synthesis of urea. Who sang the Ballad of Cock Robin? Rachel Carson, of course, in her Silent Spring, the lament over the death of robins from DDT, where she coined the term “eco-system”. She was my second inductee into the Ecology Hall of Fame, after Chadwick.

And Existentialism came to an end with Earth Day I, in 1970.

Yes, with the celebration of the environmental movement, which Rachel Carson ushered in with her book. Therefore, the environmental movement is seen as Neo-Vitalism, which the Physicalist Establishment, i.e., Modern or Industrial Science and Technology, thought they had laid to rest, once and for all, over a century and a half ago. Dead and buried. The lid was nailed down. I know the name of every nail. And then the coffin came unglued, as I like to put it, much to the surprise of the Physicalists, who thought they ruled the playing field. Until these forces and trends are clarified there is a pervasive confusion over the issues.

So this is your version of what some call Deep Ecology?

It is the underlying text. I was in on the origins of Deep Ecology, because I know Arne Naess, not the guy married to Diana Ross, who is his nephew, but the Norwegian philosopher. He wanted to call it “ecosophy”, but you have to be a native Norwegian to swallow that one.

You said the rest of the sketch fell into place?

I can’t remember how the subsequent steps came to my attention, but it was a logical sequence and a historical sequence. I’m willing to concede it is my construction. There may be better examples of the Physicalist takeover, but I have fixed on the ones that make sense to me. Helmholtz was a big one. The most famous scientist of his time, he wrote a couple of appreciative essays on Goethe, although they are condescending in tone, as if to say, what is a poet and a man of letters doing fooling with hard science where he can only be a softie, i.e., a Vitalist. And the gall of Goethe, to go up against Newton. Please. Aside from that, they attempt to be appreciative. Heisenberg’s essay on Goethe is more penetrating and understanding. Helmholtz is a perfect case for illustrating the attitude of the Physicalist after the victory. Then when I found out about the Oath, it nearly knocked me out. I knew about Brucke from Freud studies–I did my thesis on Freud at Harvard and concentrated on the early periods–the Brucke and Fliess periods–they were very much in the air at the time, because of the discovery of Freud’s letters to Fliess. Erik Erikson, who was my thesis advisor, wrote a very perceptive review of the publication of the Freud/Fliess correspondence, in which the notorious Project For A Scientific Psychology was published.  It was Freud’s effort to make good on his Oath to unveil nature?s mysteries by referring to consciousness as a qualitative leap in the neurone, which sounds like a salto mortalis, a somersault of death. He sent it off to Fliess and there it remained among his papers. Brucke was Freud’s mentor in the experimental lab where Freud dissected the nervous system of a certain order of fish. That would have been fun to watch. Brucke was one of the formulators of the Oath with DuBois-Reymond, a vigorous ideologue in the Physicalist cause, otherwise known as a philosopher of science. Then I read in Julian Jaynes that the Oath was taken in blood. I don’t know how he knows that. I actually tried to call him the other day to ask him but I couldn’t find him. Eventually, everyone will have an e-mail address and information will be more available if not instantaneous. So that was the next step. From Helmholtz through Brucke to Freud.

Yes. And that puts us in Vienna, Freud’s hometown, where the Vienna Circle was forming around Carnap and Neurath–the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, the philosophers of Physicalism.

I would have commissioned Max Beckmann or even better, George Grosz, to draw them. Neurath wrote the manifesto for the group, a kind of mission statement, which, when I found it, gave me the quintessential expression of the philosophy of Physicalism, which is what he calls it. It’s only a few pages long and therefore very succinct. After all, these guys were logicians at heart, so propositions were mathematical in principle. He rejects all “theses devoid of sense”, a rapier-like phrase and that, of course, meant all Vitalist-type statements. It was the death knell for everything incapable of verification through experimental laboratory protocols. Wittgenstein comes out of the Circle and so does Godel, two of the most brilliant cognition beamers of the century. I never understood Wittgenstein, but Godel is my hero.

Because he undermined the Physicalist program?

Precisely. His incompleteness theorem showed that math was incomplete and inconsistent and therefore without foundation so how could it be a foundation for the sciences. The Physicalist empire was undermined in a stroke. In 1931. It has taken a long time to assimilate. Derrida is one of the few philosophers who incorporates Godel, on the way to Chaos Philosophy, as I see it.

The year you were born.

Proudly. A left-handed Virgo with an afflicted Uranus. It is also the year when Dirac postulated the monopole.  I like that.

Why was Physicalism undermined?

It is a long discourse and we can’t do it justice here. Husserl is a key player, for me, especially his Crisis of Western Science. There was an effort to consolidate the gains of Physicalism on a firm mathematical/logical footing or foundation, in order to erect a system of unified science, with the exclusion of Vitalism, which is what they meant by metaphysics. An enormous amount of work was done on the foundations of mathematics. Hilbert comes to mind. It was a concerted effort to bring to fruition the failed effort of Leibniz to develop a universal calculus. Now there is a theme worth pursuing. I would love to take a class from someone who knows the subject matter known as mathesis universalis. Derrida could do it–he is the erasure of the effort and I have read what he has written on it in his Of Grammatology which is very germane. I’ve developed a tendency to formulate what is universally the case, I suppose, to overcome the relativistic and willfully arbitrary.

What do you mean?

I can’t stand it when someone says “well I think that blah blah blab” and doesn’t have a clue. I. F. Stone on Socrates comes to mind, a book I hate as much as anything I have ever read. He took a course in philosophy in college and never got over it and late in life he writes the worst drivel on Socrates anyone has muddled up in print just to fulfill his sophomoric nonsense. I was stupefied by the success of the book and wanted to buy copies just to destroy them. Anyhow, I see universals in Socrates, just as Plato did. Plato has revealed them to me as they were revealed to him. It is a spiritual transmission. Plato talks about it in his Seventh Epistle, where a spark is ignited from teacher to student as a metaphor for philosophical enlightenment. There’s nothing like it when it happens. Socrates is for Plato what Jesus is for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is the axiomatic substance of a spiritual transmission carried in a tradition of those who receive it and pass it on. If you don’t get that, you don’t get it at all. The Platonic Dialogues, the Gospel According to Plato, is practically equivalent to the Four Gospels in the New Testament. Something revelatory happened in both cases and the response is the reception of the revelation. In both cases it has universal significance. With Socrates, it was the appearance of rational self-consciousness, as an historical event, with saving power. He is the carrier and the occasion. There is a line of thought on the universal significance of this event which I have learned from Euclidean geometry, which is obviously true for everyone everywhere no matter what. Nobody argues about the definition of a triangle. It sets the standard for what is axiomatic. Apodictic is another word I like. Well, we would have to spend a long time laying out the material. I start with Husserl’s essay on The Origins of Geometry and Derrida’s Introduction. That opens up the line of thought to Husserl’s Crisis, which is an attack on Physicalism, a gold mine of stuff for me. I’m trying to work this out, as I said, as a prelude to chaos philosophy, so it will have to wait for the completion of that effort.

It sounds like more than anyone can handle.

As long as it is a mapping procedure it is not so difficult. To bring the material up into the right and proper formulations is another matter. Thought takes unexpected and sometimes arbitrary turns which eludes the point. I am prone to tangents. And there is the question of what is defensible and what is simply superseded or no longer the case. Husserl fascinates me in this regard. His lament over the telos of Europe and his very long stride from the Ancient Greeks, through Galileo, to the present period, based, as it is, on European hegemony, is difficult to argue now. There is a move from the global to the local in the context of theory formation. Pluralism is a good word, not hegemony, a very bad word in modern parlance, although I don’t mind it, is de rigeur. I suppose I have to admit I was trained in the old school, where the Western tradition of humanities and science was the light of the world. Well, there are grave reasons for seeing the bankruptcy in terms of the present muddle we’re in, but I don’t fault the tradition as such for this state of affairs. It as more a departure from the true spiritual meaning of the tradition than a negative fulfillment of it. It is a very deep well to draw from. But fewer and fewer seem to be interested. Like George Steiner fears, one day soon people will read the Book of Job the way they read the newspaper–for information.

You must have faced that before.

I remember exactly when. I was teaching in the Humanities program at Harvard and we were reading Augustine’s Confessions which had just clicked for me–the entire text lit up like an illuminated manuscript with the appropriate organ music and every part was related to every other part in one great symphonic whole. I was ecstatic. And a student came up to me after class, very exasperated–I think he was from Detroit–and said: “What do we have to read this crap for?” I was speechless when I should have kicked him and said: “for your edification, you dumb shit!”

But you can’t force edification on anyone.

No. But you can lead the horse to water.

But you can’t make her think.

I was stunned a couple of years ago when a former Radcliffe student, who was in the Harvard Humanities class I mentioned, looked me up. I remembered her well. She was as bright and lively as they get and she told me how bitter and resentful she was over her experience of those years and how intimidated and humiliated she felt taking classes at Harvard and how much this was shared by her whole generation of women. I never sensed it at all. So the guilt is painful now that the worm has turned. That’s why Husserl, for instance, reads like a target text for the accusation of white old Western European male hegemony. And yet I still try to extrapolate and re-interpret the truth of it. The substance. What is of worth and value in human self-interpretation.

So this interview can be read as an introduction to a host of themes, some of which we can expect you to deliver on.

God willing. Sim Van der Ryn has urged me to write up the Physicalist/Vitalist theme under the title of Who Killed Cock Robin?, so I may do that next. It is an account that should be given its own due.

Did you ever worry about over-inflating the importance of Chadwick?

Are you kidding? Over-inflating is my middle name. We were talking about Chadwick yesterday at the Penny University. Mary Holmes was cutting him down to size with her sharp tongue. I suppose you could easily make my formulation seem ridiculous–he replanted the vital root of existence in the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, etc., that one, but I don’t care. I was trying to formulate what it meant to me, what the renewal of a garden meant to all of us related to it. It carried a symbolic overload, which I try to express. But I know it sounds inflated. Every once in a while I think– that little piece of land, a couple of acres, and it meant what…? I finally found the word “orotund” and thought it characterized my tendency toward over-inflation. I should have the word tattooed on my forehead, although it is obvious enough.

Orotund isn’t your only problem. I’m surprised by the mix of scholarly and personal and anecdotal and factual, as well as the tangle of ideas from multiple fields of discourse. I can see why you have had a hard time doing a straightforward account.

I could never find my scholarly voice in terms of writing papers and publishing. I never read a lecture in all my years of teaching. I like thinking on my feet and now I can do it without notes. The spontaneous inspiration of the moment is my cup of tea, even though I am clear about the subject matter at hand. It’s not as though I am unprepared. But I know what you mean about the tangled net. It is hard to separate out the mix I have brewed for years–Lee’s stew. With a great big bouquet garni.

I suppose that brings us back to Ecotopia.

Better now than never again.

What is Ecotopia?

Why do you ask again? I gave you an initial response. It is the summation of all my hopes and dreams, no matter how dashed and squashed. I managed to perk up, let the juices flow, and out it came. It just popped into my head one day. I was inspired by the Homeless Garden Community Supported Agriculture Program, but it was a long slide going all the way back to Chadwick and beneficent productivity–the “too much zucchini” syndrome and an economy of gift. I had forgotten I had worked out the rudiments of it when we did University Services Agency. I wrote it up as: How To Become A Spiritual Millionaire Where Money Is No Object. “Spiritual millionaire” is a good way to put it. Ecotopia is a design strategy for the next millennium. I had to take it on the chin when I made a bet on land reform as the theme for the Bicentennial (1976). I was misreading the causative power of certain ideas–the timing was off. I was trading on Page Smith’s first two volumes on the American Revolution, which were written for the Bicentennial. I thought land reform would be the Next Big Theme. I was wrong. I organized a Conference on Land Reform at the Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz, anticipating the Bicentennial and the only people in the audience were the speakers. I had this sequence in my mind of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave and then Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, so I thought land reform was the logical sequel to civil rights and what happened in India could happen here. Riis Tijerina was another major figure at the time. Whatever happened to him? And Fred what’s his name, who ran for President. I was his local campaign organizer and I can’t even remember his last name. Fred Harris! So the conference was an expression of these forces, but I was unable to bring it off. Nobody came. I was embarrassed, but only a little. Fortunately, I invited about thirty speakers, so it wasn’t a complete bust. I knew then that I would have to lay low for a couple of decades and then bet again on the next millennium. So I have one more chance at a big one. It remains to be seen if I can bring it off this time.

Bring what off–your vision of Ecotopia?

Yes, I have initiated a process, basically a design process, to turn Santa Cruz into Ecotopia, as a point of destination for the ecotourist and I have myself in mind. Where would I like to go if I wanted to stay where I am–Santa Cruz–of course! I am shortening the American Express slogan to: “Don’t Leave Home…” period. I always liked coming back here. I go away for the summer to northern Wisconsin and I’m always happy to come back to Santa Cruz. The first thing that hits me is the quality of the air–there is an ozone lift here that is unique to my experience. I’m into coming without leaving or arriving where you started. The point of destination is the take-off point. Come to Santa Cruz without leaving home. It is the fulfillment of those rather  dopey lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Why dopey?

Well, it has a trite and sentimental ring and it is reminiscent of G. K. Chesteron’s book: Orthodoxy.

You don’t mean the orthodox believer, you mean the virtual ecotourist.

When I thought of 2 million ecotourists coming to Santa Cruz at my invitation, I started to worry a little about the infrastructure, but not a lot. I developed the Circle Trail, a seventeen mile walk, with this in mind. That could accommodate a bunch every day. I even had an auxiliary trail of ten or twelve miles for the overflow on the East side of the River. Another major point of destination, the next phase in the design is The Ecology Hall of Fame. That could accommodate a bunch. But the whole problem was solved for me when I asked Ralph Abraham if I could get 2 million to come on the Internet and the World Wide Web and they wouldn’t have to leave home, and he said: “Yes!” The Virtual Ecotourist! That initiated the design frame, not unlike Bucky Fuller’s Design Decade, only this was half the time. Now we’re down to three years. I think it will work. Critical mass is essential. And then like the Lutheran Reformation, it will take care of itself.

While you drink your beer?

Just like Luther said to Melancthon about the Reformation.

So Ecotopia is a design strategy?

Yes, on a big scale for a small community like Santa Cruz, where there is a profound need for a vision of the future. I learned that the hard way with the Greenbelt Initiative. There is enormous environmental sympathy in Santa Cruz. A large ranch had been saved called the Wilder Ranch which became a State Park and then Lighthouse Field was preserved as open space and then the Greenbelt and Pogonip, and now Grey Whale, an additional four great victories for the environment. This helped feed the vision.

Does ecotopia have a theme?

Frank Lloyd Wright gave me some of the slogans. The quote from Tennyson and the one about the idea leading to the plan, but mostly the one about poor people and the Day of Regeneration–no more mitigation, no more postponement. If we can’t use the energy the new millennium should provide to solve some of these problems, then I give up. I’ll be dead eventually anyhow, so the give up is inevitable. But while I live, I hope to see this come to pass. I am inspired by the example of Cosimo de Medici, who was honored by Florence as the greatest private citizen in the history of the human race.

They actually conferred it on him?

They did, indeed.  There is a plaque in his honor in Florence that reads to that effect.

You see homelessness in your community as a problem to be solved?

No, I don’t. I’m glad you picked up on that terminology. I don’t really mean that. I mean design strategy. Turning human misery and human suffering into a problem to be solved is terrible in those terms. I don’t know what to do about that and never will. But as far as providing the basic necessities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for some thousands of people in need, that I can think about and plan for and design and try to implement. There is no solution for human suffering–leave that up to God. I have to consider a reasonable goal, albeit a partial solution, and then try to achieve that. We already have a huge record of accomplishment to refer to if statistics matter at all. After ten years, it adds up. So many nights of shelter for so many people. We are close to half a million shelter nights. I abhor such figures, although I am trying to get over it. I recoiled from the notion of becoming a “shelter provider”. I was reminded of the old FTE terminology of the university which is pernicious through and through. FTE means Full Time Equivalent in terms of a faculty position. Of what? That was the big ha ha. Of what, indeed. It is obtuse bureaucratese. As soon as you capitulate to such jargon, your goose is cooked. You might as well put your member in a

meat grinder. Then, at least, you could get the FTE of pork sausage. Or chopped liver.

So you look to utopia as the rescue point from such bureaucratese?

Utopia, Arcadia, and Gardens. That’s my pot au feu for city planning: The Architecture of Paradise.

You mentioned you found a book with that title?

Yes, it was a confirmation of everything I thought and yearned for. I bought all these books from my favorite mail order bookstore in Philadelphia and it was worth all the rest–that one book. And it was illustrated. It gave me exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t know such a book existed, which is how I felt when I found an earlier book on the history of the great botanic gardens by John Prest: The Garden Of Eden.

So these two books head up your bibliography?

Yes, and Adam’s House in Paradise by Joseph Rykwert. But,

I would give George Huntston Williams the pride of place and then these three.

You mean Wilderness and Paradise?

Yes. Here’s my favorite quote from the book:

“…we know with St. Paul that the whole creation has been in travail together with us until now. Only amidst the cicumambient wilderness of tundra with its musk oxen, of the sea with its whales, the mountain fastness with its condor and its puma, the jungle with its tiger, the woods with its warblers and crows, the

veldt or prairie with its gnu and its bison, can man [and woman] tend the garden …

Unless some believers in every generation can, through that poverty by which we divest ourselves of all lordliness, join with St. Francis in his canticle addressed to the sun and the bears as brethren, to the snow and to the swallows as sisters, then in the present stage of mankind’s awesome capacity for enforcing lordship over nature–whether in ruthless urbanization of the countryside, or in exploitation of natural resources heedless of generations to come, or in any careless experimentation in the realm of life, disease, and death–we shall presently find that we can no longer address even one another as brother and sister and that a utilitarian view of nature will have blasted our human nature. We shall find that the garden of culture, like the garden which is the Church, will wither or bewilder when it is by artifice fenced off from the ground of our creatureliness.” p. 137

You said “Call My Bluff’ was one epitaph for your tombstone. What is the other one?

“The Sap Is Rising.”

Page Smith has the last word?

Here it is:

Alan Chadwick

1909 — 1980

Dylan Thomas wrote to his father: “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Alan Chadwick went greatly into the good night at Green Gulch, surrounded by people who loved and cared for him in a beautiful setting where he had started one of his great gardens. The “dying of the light” that Alan raged against was the light of our twentieth century civilization so heedless of the rich bounty of the earth. More than an inspired horticulturalist, Alan was like a furious Old Testament prophet, warning of the wages of our sinful treatment of the land. A visionary, he looked at a barren plot of ground and saw it bloom; the herbaceous border would go just there, opening to an enchanting view of the mountains or the ocean. The herb garden, the garden’s soul, would be here, in inviting terraces. The arbor would be over there. And magically, and by incredible labors, they appeared in time, or at least anticipations of them–at Santa Cruz, in Saratoga, at Green Gulch, Covelo, New Market, Virginia, wherever he paused in his flight from the unendurable realities of our technological society, or simply the obtuseness of humankind. Every garden contained a penance, concrete like hardpan, often the result of ceaseless tractor tracks, which had to be broken up so that the soul could breathe. This nourished that. That looked like a weed but drew necessary nutriments up from the deeper levels of the ground. Something rested in the shade of something else; and it in turn encouraged another flower or vegetable. It was all a marvelously intricate world of interdependent growing things: nature lovingly domesticated. In an age of “collective leadership,” Alan Chadwick was as imperious as a king. In a day of carefully modulated tempers and self-conscious “interpersonal relations,” he stormed and raged not just at abstractions like laziness or indifference or inattention but at the poor frail flesh of those who were the destined instruments of his terrible, unflinching will. And then suddenly, being the consummate actor for whom all the world was a stage, he would be as sunny, as playful, as irresistable as the prince of a fairy tale. An exotic past lay dimly behind him–British naval officer, Shakespearean actor, painter of pale watercolors, the remnants of Puddleston china and silver brought out for state occasions, reassuring evidence that he had not, after all, come from outer space as one was sometimes inclined to suspect.

Everything about him was remarkable and distinctive. His physique, his height and angularity, his face, his hair, his walk. Those who fell under his spell had generally to put up with a good deal. That so many were willing to do so is the best possible testimony to the power of what he had to teach, which was inseparable from the way he taught it and the person he was. Mystic, seer, creator, lover of fine wines, coffees, caviar, and champagne, man of prodigious energy and prodigious fury–his life taught us that “nothing great is accomplished without passion.” We will find his spirit in the gardens he or his disciples built, exhorting us to do better, to care more, to work harder, to recklessly expend love on an intractable world, to make the world a garden. And we will find his spirit in his vision of gardens never built but only dreamed of.”

Page Smith

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following list of annotated books is a study guide of sorts for the themes discussed in this book. I have read all of them and they have directed me to more than I could possibly read in my lifetime, but I still try, in this unending quest to find the fullest measure of truth vouchsafed to me in this dispensation.

Resources:

UCSC: The Chadwick Archive, Special Collections, Santa Cruz, Ca.

Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, UCSC, Santa Cruz, Ca. They have an alumni directory–1967 to 1997–covering thirty years of organic gardeners and farmers, listing 444 names representing over half of the 700+ to 1996.

The Greenwood Press, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, Ca. Wes Jackson: The Land Institute, Salina, Kansas

Fukuoka: One Straw Revolution

John Jeavons: Ecology Action, Willits, California

Cabrillo College Botanic Garden

Organic Farming and Gardening, Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pennsylvania

Biodynamic Farm and Garden Association, Box 550, Kimberton, Pa. 19442

Community Alliance of Family Farmers, Box 464, Davis, Ca. 95617 Emerson College, Forest Row, England

Findhorn, Scotland

Craig Siska: Verdant Earth

Homeless Garden Project, an affiliate of the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, Box , Santa Cruz, Ca.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) %Indian Line Farms, Box 85, Great Barrington, Ma. 01230

Bibliography

The following books are a sample of the reading I have done in connection with the garden. The list reflects my impulse to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to think through issues. It is impossible to come to terms with the many themes involved in this effort within any given discipline. In fact, one of the shortcomings of modern thought is this inability to cross boundaries, transcending a narrowly defined point of view, the ostensible goal of scientific effort, ever narrower and narrower, ever sharper and sharper. Systems theory tries to overcome this through an integrative approach and I regard this effort as one way to resolve the Physicalist/Vitalist conflict.

I am a voracious reader and enjoy pursuing leads. I almost prefer footnotes and bibliographies to texts. Therefore, I have taken

pains to give the reader a sense of the literature behind this book to peruse at your leisure.

Life Magazine

California Tomorrow Sunset Magazine

Tom Cuthbertson: Alan Chadwick’s Enchanted Garden, Preface by Page Smith,

Let the Crops Rejoice,

Video: The Garden Garden Song

Planting Hope, The Homeless Garden Project, Narrated by Harrison Ford

John Jeavons: How To Grow More Vegetables on Less Space

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Organic Certification

Rodale Press

David Smith:

Smith and Hawken Tool Co. Catalog

Radical Agriculture

Rachel Carson: Silent Spring

Since Silent Spring

Reich: The Greening of America

Charlene Spretnak: The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics

Capra and Spretnak: Green Politics

Theodore Roszak: Where the Wasteland Ends, Vintage Books, New York, 1969

Unfinished Animal, Harpers, New York, 1975

Max Scheler: Man’s Place In Nature, Noonday Press, New York, 1962

Ressentiment, Free Press, Illinois The Courage To Be

Systematic Theology

Theology Of Culture

“How Has Science Changed Man’s View Of Himself, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.

System of the Sciences

Theology of Culture

The Protestant Era, Chap. “The End of the Protestant Era”, U. of Chicago Press,

Erich Voegelin: “The Origins of Scientism”, Social Research, Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge

Ernst Cassirer: The Problem of Knowledge

The Logic of the Humanities

Jacques Elul: The Technological Society

The Technological Order, Wayne State U. P., 1963 Ernst Robert Curtius: European Literature and the Latin

Middle Ages, Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon Books, New York, 1953

Werner Heisenberg: Across the Frontiers

Alan P. Cottrell: Goethe’s View of Evil

Humphrey Trevelyan: Goethe and the Greeks

Wolfgang Leppmann: The German Image of Goethe Evan Thompson: Colour Vision, Routledge, New York, 1995 D. L. Sepper: Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the

Project for a New Science of Color, Cambridge University Press, 1988

Edward Hyams: Great Botanical Gardens of the World Helmholtz: Collected Papers

Julian James: The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Ralph Abraham: Chaos, Gaia, Eros: The Orphic Trinity, Harpers, New York, 1994

Johannes Merz: A History of European Scientific Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Two Vols., Dover, New York, 1904/1965

Journal of Chemical Education

A critical journal for the running discussion of the urea

controversy, culminating with the article by McKie, in Nature, debunking the whole affair: “Wohler’s `Synthetic’ Urea and the Rejection of Vitalism: A Chemical Legend, by Douglas McKie,

May, 1944

Bernard Jaffe: Crucibles: Lives and Achievement of the Great Chemists, Jarrolds, London, 1931

“There is first the groping after causes, and then the struggle to frame laws. There are intellectual revolutions, bitter controversial

conflicts, and the crash and wreck of fallen philosophies.” Francis P. Venable. Quoted by Jaffe.

B. Farrington: Francis Bacon Philosopher of Industrial Science, London, 1951

Charles Webster: The Great Instauration Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660, Holmes and Meier, New York, 1975

Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity

George Herbert Mead: Movements of Thought in the 19th Century, University of Chicago Press,.

G. F. McCleary: The Maithusian Population theory

Augros and Stanciu: The New Biology, Discovering the

Wisdom in Nature, New Science Library, Shambhala, Boston and London, 1987

Erich Heller: The Disinherited Mind

Armytage: The Rise of the Technocrat

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Essential Tension, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill, 197

Hans Jonas: The Phenomenon Of Life, Toward A

Philosophical Biology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966/1982

The first chapter is the best single piece in the literature on the

Physicalist/Vitalist conflict, here understood as the ontology of death and ontology of life.

Jurgen Habermas: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990

Turgid but informative summaries and interpretations of major figures.

Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1973

Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory, 1978

Paul Feyerabend The great anarchist who knew how to throw things without getting into the ring.

Richard Olson: Science Deified & Science Defied, The

Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, Two Vols. U. of California Press, Berkeley, 1990

Godel: Collected Papers, Three Vols.

Who Got Einstein’s Office

Hofstadter’s review of

Derrida: Introduction to Husserl’s: The Origins of Geometry Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, Editors: Philosophy and Technology, Readings in the Philosophical Problems of

Technology, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1983.

A good bibliography. Includes the chapter by Gunther Anders, a

meditation and manifesto on the occasion of the atomic bomb. He understood what had happened.

George Huntston Williams: Wilderness and Paradise

H. Paul Santmire: The Travail of Nature, The Ambiguous

Ecological Promise of Christian Theology, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1985

J. Christian Beker: Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1980

Richard Heinberg: Memories and Visions Of Paradise,

Exploring the Universal Myth Of A Lost Golden Age, Jeremy Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1989

Paul Ricoeur: Freud and Philosophy Metaphor

The Symbolism of Evil Fallible Man

The Voluntary and the Involuntary Conflicts in Interpretation

“The Golden Rule,”

N. A. Dahl: “The Parables of Growth,” Studia Theologica, 5:2 (1951): 132-66.

David Channell: The Vital Machine, A Study Of Technology and Organic Life, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991

Right topic, wrong author. This should have been a good book. It isn’t.

Two Great Scientists of the Nineteenth Century, Correspondence of Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1982

Arthur Koestler: The Case of the Midwife Toad,

Janus, A Summing Up. This is one of my favorites in terms of a good read, which Koestler always is, a very learned account of the problem with terrific metaphors.

Ronald Gray: Goethe the Alchemist; A Study of Alchemical

Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works, Cambridge U. P., 1952

Rudolf Steiner: The Course of My Life

Goethe’s World View

Goethe, the Scientist

Lectures on Agriculture the philosophy lectures

Wolfgang Treher: Hitler, Steiner, Schreber, Ein Beitrag zur Phanomenologie des Kranken Geistes. Emmendingen i. Br. Selbstverlag, 1966. My old pal, Rolf von Eckartsberg referred me to this one. I can’t read German.

Heiner Stachelhaus: Joseph Beuys, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987

I mention Beuys not only because he was one of the weirdest figures of the 20th century but because he thought compost piles were sculptured art objects, which is not weird at all.

Phil Callahan: Ancient Mysteries, Modern Visions–The Magnetic Life of Agriculture, Acres, U.S.A., Kansas City

“The Detection of the Monopole”, Speculations in Science and Technology, vol. 9 (1), pp 51-59,1986.

Nature’s Silent Music, Acres U.S.A., Kansas City,

Bird and Thomkins: The Secret Life of Plants The Secret of the Soils

Marion Shoard: The Theft of the Countryside

Tom Cuthbertson: Alan Chadwick’s Enchanted Garden, Introduction by Page Smith, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1978

Robert Howard and Eric Skjer: What Makes the Crops Rejoice? Contains an appreciative chapter on Chadwick.

Fukuoka: One Straw Revolution

Seigfreid Gideon: Mechanism Takes Command

Werner Heisenberg: Across the Frontiers. Contains his chapter on Goethe.

Lewis Mumford: The Pentagon of Power

One of the best books on the Physicalist hegemony.

Richard Merrill, ed.: Radical Agriculture, Harpers, New York, 1976

Inspired by Chadwick, Merrill has been the seminal force at the Cabrillo College Garden Project.

Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1977

Home Economics, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1987

Wes Jackson, Wendall Berry, and Bruce Coleman: Meeting the Expectations of the Land, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1984

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Harper, San Francisco, 1980

Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis”, Science 155, pp 1203-7 (Mar. 1967). A lopsided view of the role of Christianity in contributing to the crisis with an odd tribute to St. Francis.

Clarence Glacken: Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Nature and Culture in Western Thought From Ancient times to the end of the Eighteenth Century, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967

Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Routledge and Kegan-Paul, London, 1964

The Eighth Day of Creation is a superb account of the discovery of DNA and describes the continuity of experimental laboratory chemistry and molecular biology and immunology from synthetic urea to the secret of life.

The Making Of the Atom Bomb is enough to make your hair stand on end and provided me with the anecdotes about Fermi and the reference to the mathematical equation for the self-destruction of industrial society.

Arthur Holly Compton: Atomic Quest, A Personal Narrative, Oxford University Press, New York, 1956

Karl Jaspers: The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958/1963

Joseph Schwartz, The Creative Moment, How Science Made

Itself Alien To Modern Culture, Harpers, New York, 1992

Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1992

Hegelian concepts swamp the effort but he has a remarkable

account of thymos and adds a new dimension to the word–the ability to say “no”, which he says he got from Joan Didion Dunne, which is fine with me.

Nils Jerne, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech for Immunology, 1988 Edelmann

Everett Spees, “A ThymOs Primer”, Journal of the American Medical Association,

Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind Onions, The Origins of European Thought

The Origins of Psychoanalysis: The Freud/Fleiss Correspondence

Carl Pribram and Merton Gill: Freud’s `Project’ Re-assessed, Basic Books, New York, 1976

Erikson’s review of the Fliess Correspondence

John Prest The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise,

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: I Am An Impure Thinker Out Of Revolution

Planetary Service

CCC Addresses

Jack Preis: Camp William James

Sargent Shriver: `The Peace Corps”, Colliers Encyclopedia Page Smith: A People’s History of the United States Dissenting Opinions

Killing the Spirit,

Von Moltke: Letters To Freya

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers From Prison Paul Lee: A Lullaby For Wittgenstein, A Play in three acts

“Hermeneutics and Vitalism” ReVision, 10 (3) pp. 344 (Winter, 1988)

“On the Wings of Thymos,” in the Supplement to The Phaedrus, Greenwood Press, San Francisco “Vitalism and Hermeneutics” in Revision,

Introduction to Paul Tillich: The Meaning of

Health, The Platonic Academy, Santa Cruz, Ca. 95061, 1981

Metaphors of Consciousness, Von Eckartsberg and Valle,

“Goethe’s Italian Journey”, Festschrift for Frank Barron, edited by Montuori. 1996

“The Wayward Reaction”, Festschrift for Timothy Leary, edited by Robert Forte and Nina Graboi

The Quality of Mercy, Platonic Academy Press, 1983

Florence the Goose, Illustrations by Page Smith, Platonic Academy Press, 1983

Ralph Abraham: Chaos, Gaia, Eros: The Orphic Trinity 226

Dynamics, The Geometry of Behavior, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Ma., 1992

Abraham, McKenna and Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West, Bear, Santa Fe, NM, 1992

James Gleick, Chaos, The Making of a New Science, Viking, New York, 1988

Morris Berman: The Reenchantment of the World, Cornell, Ithaca, NY, 1981

Rupert Sheldrake: A New Science of Life

The Presence of the Past

Trialogues

The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening Of Science and God, Bantam, New York,

1991

Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, Basil Blackwell, Oxford; 1978

David Mamout: Remembering Babylon

Fritjof Capra: The Role of Physics in the Current Change Of Paradigms, 1987

Mark Davidson, Uncommon Sense: the Life and Thought of

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972),

Father of General Systems Theory, J. P.

Tarcher, Los Angeles, Ca., 1983

Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science, U. of Notre Dame, Bloomington, Indiana, 1966

W.H. Leatherdale, The Role of Analogy, Model and Metaphor in Science, North-Holland, Amsterdam,

1974

Hilda Hein, On the Nature and Origin of Life, McGraw-Hill New York, 1971

Hayek: The Counter Revolution of Science

Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth Century Developmental Biology, Yale, New Haven, 1976

Max Horkheimer: The Eclipse of Reason

Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory, 1978

Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution: Self-organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems, Braziller, New York, 1975

The Self-organizing Universe: Scientific and

Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution, Pergamon, New York, 1980

Jantsch was one of the first to understand the need to move from homeostasis (Cannon) to homeolability, introducing a dynamic theme: the ability to self-organize was based on the thermodynamics of the unsteady state–Max Eigen, Ilya Prigogine, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ralph Abraham have pursued their work in this vein, especially in reference to chaos dynamics.

Ernst Schrodinger: What Is Life?

C. H. Waddington: The Nature of Life, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1961

A. N. Whitehead: Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York, 1929

Henri Bergson: Creative Evolution, Macmillan, London, 1911

F. A. Lange: History of Materialism

William Irwin Thompson, ed., Gaia, A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology,

Lindisfarne Press, Great Barrington, Ma (1987)

David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson: Reimagination of

the World, A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture, Bear and Co., Santa Fe, 1992

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of the Living Earth, Bantam Books, New York, 1988

Edward Shils: “Daydreams and Nightmares”, Sewanee Review, reprinted in

Allan Bloom: The Closing Of the American Mind, John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden

Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1992

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards, various articles, such as “Logical Positivism”, and especially “Joseph Popper-Lynkeus”, etc., Macmillan, New York, 1967

Theodore Adorno: Negative Dialectics

Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man

Norman O. Brown: “My Georgics”

Life Against Death

Love’s Body

John Cage: Silence

Kurt Godel: Collected Papers, Three Vols. The argument for the existence of God is in Vol. 3.

Erwin Panofsky: “Et in Arcadia Ego” in Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer: Philosophy and History

Johannes Merz: Scientific Thought in the 19th Century, Two Vols., Dover, New York

Ernst Cassirer: The Problem of Knowledge

An excellent discussion of Goethe and the problem of Physicalism and Vitalism.

Erich Voegelin: Anamnesis, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1990

Polanyi: Personal Knowledge

A. Meyer:

E. O. Wilson: Confessions of a Naturalist

Donald Worster: Nature’s Economy, A History of Ecological Ideas, Cambridge University Press, 1996

He has a nice chapter on Gilbert White under the title “Science In Arcadia”, as well as a discussion of leading American environmentalists.

Frank Barron: An Ecology of Consciousness Knights of the Golden Rule

Alice Waters: Chez Panisse Cookbook Deborah Madison: The Greens Cookbook

Lorenza De’Medici: The Renaissance of Italian Gardens Charles Singer

Nils Jerne Noble Prize Acceptance Speech 1988 Onions:

Erich Havelock: Preface To Plato

Bruno Snell: The Discovery of the Mind Agnes Arber: Herbal

Peter Dawkins: Arcadia, The Francis Bacon Research Trust Journal, Series I, vol. 5, 1988

Act One Scenes 1–5 Act Two Scenes 1–6 Act Three Scenes 1–7

Cast of characters

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous philosopher Helmuth von Moltke, a German aristocrat and officer in the Abwehr, the German intelligence unit Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister and member of the Abwehr Bishop Bergraav, Lutheran Bishop of Norway Naomi, a Jewish [...]]]> PAUL A. LEE
131 SPRING ST.
SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA
831 469 3384
DRPALEE@AOL.COM

Act One Scenes 1–5
Act Two Scenes 1–6
Act Three Scenes 1–7

Cast of characters

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous philosopher
Helmuth von Moltke, a German aristocrat and officer in the Abwehr, the German intelligence unit
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister and member of the Abwehr
Bishop Bergraav, Lutheran Bishop of Norway
Naomi, a Jewish friend of Wittgenstein
Prison Chaplain
Freya von Moltke, wife of Count Von Moltke
Poelchau, a family friend of the Von Moltke’s and Bonhoeffer
A Warder
Hitler
Two Civilians in charge of arresting Bonhoeffer

The Play Begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world’s greatest philosopher, according to some authorities, in Norway living in a hut, next to a lake, reading Kierkegaard. He was near a chapel, what in Norway is called a Stave Church. When the church bells would ring, he would think about Kierkegaard and his father, who cursed God, and who was himself cursed. (Bells).

…”the awful case of a man who once, when he was a little boy out upon a hill top on the Jutland heath, rose up and cursed God because he suffered so much from hunger and exhaustion. And that man could not forget this, even when he was eighty-two years old”. Soren Kierkegaard: The Diaries.

The Curse of Verdun. The Curse of Old Europe.

In his hut, Wittgenstein ponders the curse over Europe, from the Treaty of Verdun, in the 9th century (843), to the trenches of Verdun, in the lst World War (l917). Wittgenstein thinks about the history of Verdun to Verdun, where the experience of the trenches of the lst World War is wept over; it is the holocaust; it is the terror of history. Wittgenstein recoils from being the philosopher of the terror of history.

ACT ONE Scene One

Wittgenstein coming up the mountain path with supplies in his knapsack. Wittgenstein, walks in front of his hut, stopping to get a drink of water from the spout, singing:

W. Come along and listen to the Lullaby of Wittgenstein – the hit parade and ballyhoo, the Lullaby of Wittgenstein – the rumble of the subway train – at Angelo and Maxie’s – (There could be a phonograph record playing in the hut.) Hums. “Until the dawn, goodnight ladies” — Curtain opens. Enters the cabin. “Goodnight, let’s call it a day – Listen to the lullaby of Wittgenstein”–

(Speaks as though to himself, as well as to the audience, as if reciting a tired speech).

My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein. I am the world’s greatest living philosopher. In terms of what counts for knowledge. I determine what counts. And believe me, it’s not much. I gained this reputation for exactitude in philosophy from my TRACTATUS. My teacher, Frege, admitted he did not understand it. Bertrand Russell did not understand it, although he thought he did. He said to my sister when they met: “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.” She saw stars. I carried the manuscript of the TRACTATUS in my knapsack in the trenches of the First World War. Did I understand it? Yes, I understood it.

(Shows audience the knapsack).

Wittgenstein

I have been a school teacher, a soldier, a University Professor, a gardener’s assistant in a monastery; I have had students sitting at my feet and eating out of my hand. I am not a happy man. I am living in this hut in Norway. I came here with this knapsack on my back. Why? (With extreme vehemence) Whereof one cannot speak thereof one ought to remain silent!

(Pause. This is a theme for Wittgenstein: silence. What he doesn’t say is important. It has to be shown. This is an important theme in Wittgenstein’s thought.)

Western civilization ended in the trenches of the First World War and in that trench I lost my sense of human decency. Pause (He sucks in his breath in the Norwegian manner, like a reversed sigh and says ‘ya’ ‘ya’. Melancholic).

Verdun is the symbolic center for the end of our culture. What was the old Treaty of Verdun? 9th century. 843. And the curse, the legend of the curse, pronounced at Verdun, over the future of Europe. What was the curse? For me to lose my sense of human decency! (Now infinitely sad, as though a great sadness enters the room and falls upon Wittgenstein, who is almost crushed by the weight of it, as though he was singled out to have to bear it.) (Lighting}.

The weight of it … … is more than I can bear! Historical consciousness is now a burden more than anyone can bear. So what do I do? I go around without a tie! My shirt open at the collar; my sense of human decency and its loss flaunted in the face of all who pretend to decency. The company of decent men. I lost mine in the trenches of the First World War. I can no longer resume my place among them. So here I sit in Norway pondering my fate. (He shakes his head in bewilderment). The following is said as though he is joking or with an note of self- mockery]

It is my fate to be the bearer of the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness, the anxiety characteristic of our time. I have to take this anxiety upon myself, now that I know myself to be unacceptable. Oh, Ludie, shut up, and listen to the muses. (Wittgenstein’s silence.) Remember the time you went to the British Museum and carried on with the Elgin Marbles. How you asked for the blessing of the fates. You were so happy to see them. And if it hadn’t been for the lecture by the guide, you would not have known that these robed women were in fact the daughters of Necessity (Anangke) –Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. They would have remained as they were, these monuments in stone, along with a horse’s head. My god, the British Empire brought them from Athens, the greatest of all national treasures, these stones from the Parthenon, my three sisters, the Mothers, carrying in the reflection of their robes, and in the figure of their recline, the image of their mother, the mother of us all. Here I sit in a brief moment of nostalgia at the British Museum. They gave me their blessing. They revealed to me my fate.

“Ach, wie gut ist dass niemand weiss

Dass ich Rumpelstilzchen heiss.”

(In a state of hushed silent awe.) My father forced me to go to Technical School. I didn’t mind. Everyone thinks –with his sensitive musical nature, he doesn’t want to become an engineer. But I didn’t mind. Music, engineering, architecture, logic, linguistic analysis. They all go together. So what, if I learned how to whistle Brahms. He was a guest in our home. We had fifteen grand pianos! But Vienna–I should give a lecture on Vienna. Vienna at the end of the century. Fin de siecle. The Viennese Circle. Frege didn’t understand me. Russell didn’t understand me. What did Carnap know! I am sick and tired of arguments against the existence of God. The elimination of metaphysics. The foundations of mathematics. God is always doing mathematics! Do you know what I meant when I said that philosophy is the disease of which it should be the cure? I was talking about my own philosophy. [The prayer of Wittgenstein.]

I wish it were possible for me to pray. (Yawns: sinks into a reverie with his head in his hands).

Oh God. Thou who art beyond everything I can think or say.

Raise my thoughts to Thee,

Give me the words of prayer that can reach Thee,

Pray Thyself in myself,

With sighs too deep for words.

(the sighing of Wittgenstein)

Now follow a series of zen-like tableaus, e.g.: Wittgenstein reading a book, Wittgenstein sleeping, Wittgenstein making a fire, Wittgenstein smoking a pipe, Wittgenstein hanging out the wash. These tableaus serve a number of purposes for theatrical effect: the daily chores and the particular atmosphere of a Norwegian cabin, on a mountain side, next to a lake. Special sounds of the mountains. Norwegian yodel. The sense that everything Wittgenstein does is intrinsically interesting, even fascinating, as everyone thought who knew him. This has to be a dramatic high point of the play in terms of what comes into play. It is up to the Director to make this happen.

Act One Scene Two “The curses of the godless sometimes sound better in God’s ear than the hallelujahs of the pious.” Bonhoeffer, quoting Luther to Karl Barth, on the occasion of their meeting.

There is an interlude here , i.e., a scene with the curtains closed.

Von Moltke and Bonhoeffer on a train or plane on the way to Norway. Sound of the train or plane dies down and they talk about their mission to rescue Bishop Bergraav, who is under house arrest by the Nazis. They get into the issue of the assassination of Hitler, now that they can talk freely. The debate heats up just as the scene ends.

Bonhoeffer.

You wouldn’t have heard about the third use of the law?

Von Moltke.

No. I don’t know what you are talking about. You mean in theology? You mean Lutheran Dogmatics? The forgery problem? Yes. I know what you mean. The identity of law and grace. The free spontaneous action of the redeemed! You are right. It is the key to your position. Remember. I’m not against it in principle. I’m against bungling it and then starting out a new social order on a murder. I don’t care who it is. I am against bungling a murder! You mark my words, when the attempt comes, it will be bungled. Do you know that we can’t get anyone to wear a gun in Hitler’s presence. And then there’s the oath of loyalty. The Generals around him will not violate their loyalty oath.

Bonhoefer

First of all, society was founded on a murder, for which we have the myth of Cain and Abel. But this opens up too wide a discussion. Yes, I mean the third use of the law in Lutheran dogmatics. Some say it is a gloss, some even go so far as to call it a forgery, but I think this scholarly debunking needs to be debunked. I always mistrust the pot calling the kettle black. Whether Lutheran or Calvinist, the third use of the law theme is just as you say–the free spontaneity of the redeemed. It is the exhilaration of risking it! in the name of God. What do I say to God who has commanded me to kill Hitler? Herr Von Moltke has a scruple, so I decline the summons. No. Not if one has confidence. There is a word I have come to love from medieval church terminology–hilaritas! It is the confidence of faith. But the third use of the law is our case. It means I can strangle him on the grounds of tyrannicide. Now, you, of all people, Count Von Moltke, should appreciate the arguments of the Jesuits. We have Marianos to count on.

Von Moltke

Yes, I know the text. I am going to be hanged for hanging out with Jesuits. Now will you go to sleep.

Bonhoeffer

We’re going to have to take this up with Bishop Bergraav.

Von Moltke

Suit yourself, Pastor. Now let me get some sleep, please.

Bonhoeffer

Before you doze off.

Von Moltke

Yes?

Bonhoeffer

Don’t you think we should do everything in our power to kill him?

V M. Yes, only I mean no.

B. Goodnight.

V. M. Goodnight.

After a brief respite, Bonhoeffer stirs, as though unable to sleep.

V. M. Pastor Bonhoeffer. Are you awake?

B. Yes, I am awake and thinking. Here we go to Oslo to save Bishop Bergraav. And then we save a few more. We have got to kill him, Herr Von Moltke. You have got to join in an assassination plot with me. lt is why I came on this trip. I must convince you. We have to commit murder in the name of God. We have to be Hitler’s executioners. I am telling you I am sent from God to recruit you.

V. M. You may be, but I refuse to sign on. I am against it on the grounds of international law. I am against it because it will make Hitler a martyr. We went through that ‘stabbed in the back’ number after the lst World War. Not again. I am against it because it will be bungled. You only have one argument: “in the eyes of the world, it has to be attempted.” I don’t know about that. Isn’t it over-scrupulous of you, Pastor, on your very own third use of the law, to leave no stone unturned? No scruple unobserved? Maybe you can learn something from a relative of Christian Scientists.

Bonhoeffer

Well, we’ll see what Bishop Bergraav has to say. Goodnight again, Count. You’re a good man. It’s a pleasure to travel with you. V. M. Good night, Pastor.

Act One Scene Three The scene takes place at Bishop Berggrav’s residence. Von Moltke and Bonhoeffer are ushered into the Bishop who receives them warmly.

Bonhoeffer You know we are here from the Abwher which shows you that there is still some leeway in acting in your behalf in spite of the evil regime we live under. Thank God for General Oster and Admiral Canaris. Count Von Moltke has the “White Rose” pamphlet to give to you as an example of what can happen if you stick your neck out. The students who wrote this were arrested, tried and executed under the hanging judge— Freisler. Even Hitler calls him a ‘bolshevik’. (He turns aside and mentions to Von Moltke in passing that it will be his fate to come before Freisler.) B. He’s the one who will hang you for hanging out with Jesuits.

Von Moltke

We would like you to translate it into Norwegian and to memorialize the names of those who died–Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Professor Kurt Huber. We are all in this situation of resisting Hitler at the cost of our lives, so we are grateful that you have resisted here in Norway and have opposed the Hitler Youth effort here. Your solidarity with all the other Lutheran ministers who stood with you on this issue is splendid. How you had the nerve to do this on Easter Sunday is an inspiration to us all. Now we can arrange for your house arrest and forestall your impending trial. This has been taken care of. But do be careful! Your supervision will be lax, but you will have to go about in disguise.

Bonhoeffer

Yes, we have discussed this and we think a policeman or a streetcar conductor would be advisable disguise for a Bishop! Bergraav. I can see the photograph of the Bishop of Norway in the uniform of a streetcar conductor. I love it!

Bergraav

The very image of the world come of age or the “Secular Protestant”….

Is there anything I can do for you while you are in Norway?

Von Moltke

Well, yes, there is. We have been carrying on this debate ever since we began this journey. It is a debate at the heart of the resistance movement — whether or not to assassinate Hitler. Pastor Bonhoeffer is for it and I am against it. We need a referee. Would you do it? Or recommend someone to us? We need to think these positions through with a third party.

Bergraav.

We don’t have much time and there is too much scrutiny regarding your mission here. I would be willing to be your referee – it is the burning question of our time – I have to think of it in terms of Quisling. We may have to assassinate him. So I appreciate the scruples you have to consider. Scruples are important checks on the way to action. I would be willing to go over every one with you. Do you know the meaning of “scruple”- the etymological root? The small sharp stone weighing 1 gram. It must be some archaic foundation for the law. The Pharisees were the masters of scrupulosity. When I found out the meaning of “scruple” as a small sharp stone I imagined that the Pharisees had 612 such stones in their shoes, each one engraved with a prohibition and they developed such sensitive feet they monitored each scruple in every step they took in daily life.

Von Moltke.

Then why did Jesus call them ‘the living dead’? Bergraav. Yes, that is just the tragedy of their encounter. It was because of their self-righteousness. They were the paragons of moral righteousness and it is just this that was the trap. Their virtue was their grave.

Bonhoeffer.

That is my point. Against all scruples one is called upon to act no matter what. This is our situation with Hitler. Bergraav. Can there be anything more difficult for thought than to kill your leader? But my God this Hitler is evil itself and therefore it is our duty to oppose it. As reluctant as Christians are to consider tyrannicide, and it is even harder for Lutherans, there is a point where executing a tyrant is demanded in the name of God. I agree with you Pastor.

Von Moltke.

Well, here we are now debating it anyhow. I have two reasons which have kept me aloof from assassination plans. I don’t think it would be good to begin a new order with murder; the group organized to carry out the plan for tactical reasons has to remain small, so that in case of failure other groups would not be endangered and this precludes their success. It is the reconstruction of the administration that I have assumed as my special task; but I should not shirk my duty if I was needed to kill Hitler. Don’t you see that we are not conspirators? We can’t do it, we haven’t learned how, and we ought not now to try it for the first time; it will go awry and we will do it in a dilettante manner. How many unsuccessful attempts will there be on Hitler’s life? Fifteen? Until he kills himself. That is how it is going to end up. He will be the only one to succeed when he puts his own gun to his head.

[Note:

(Only in the course of a long conversation between Moltke and Gerstenmaier, in which Gerstenmaier emphasized the importance of the attempt in the eyes of the outside world, does Moltke appear to have agreed.) p.276 Van Roon. "The putsch was undertaken in the full knowledge that it stood very small chance of success. To Stauffenberg's question as to whether the coup ought still to be made in view of the invasion of 6 June l944, von Tresckow gave the much-quoted reply: "The attempt must be made whatever the cost. Even if it is not to succeed, action must be taken in Berlin. For now it is no longer the practical purpose that counts, but the fact that before history and the world, the German Resistance has chanced its decisive throw. Nothing else signifies." von Tresckow. quoted in THE GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER, p 233 "The fact that this moral question demanding an individual and practical decision for or against the Hitler regime was not put to the German public on 20 July l944, that it is, as it were, embedded in history and can never be raised again, means that the German people will be branded, as by the mark of Cain, with the symbol of a past with which they will never be able to come to terms. This, at any rate, is how it was seen by the conspirators--Beck, Goerdeler, Stauffenberg, Leber, Tresckow, Moltke, Hassell, Canaris and the rest." Dieter Ehlers, Technik und Moral einer Verschworung. 20 Juli l944, Frankfurt l964, p. l73, quoted in THE GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER, Graml, etc, p. 234.]

Bergraav.

This charmed life of his leads me to think that he is the Antichrist. No. I don’t think we can carry this further. I know who you should see. He is in a rather remote area where he is working on his philosophy, but all the better for security reasons. It is not difficult for you to get there. I can see to that. He is in Skjolden. A lovely lake in the mountains in the north. He is said to be the world’s leading philosopher.

Von Moltke

Who do you mean?

Bergraav

Ludwig Wittgenstein.

When they leave, Bergraav comes to stage left (he could be dressed in his disquise as a bus driver or policeman) and talks directly to the audience about what is at stake and who these men are. It would be his ‘shout of joy in the sadness of the finite’ speech. He knows.

Act One Scene Four. Bishop Bergraav appears in front of the curtain on stage left dressed as a bus driver or a policeman.

Bergraav.

Everyone thinks we don’t know what’s going on up here in Norway. Well, we know enough to stop the Hitler Menace… ya ya. You see, everyone in Scandanavia, after Kierkegaard, understands the church/state problem. This makes it possible for Pastor Bonhoeffer to murder Hitler. I concur. I would murder him myself. But I must be willing to give my own life even for the thought of it! There Count Von Moltke is right. He will die on a finer point. The finer point is that he would not do it! He argues against it. Whether or not he even entertains the thought of assassination, they will kill him anyhow. This legacy of sin of the Nazi regime adds to the mass of perdition which is the history of evil. If you don’t mind my waxing theological, these men are examples of the redeemed “servile will”. (Looks quizzically at the audience to see if there is any understanding and expecting none.) The servile will means self-bondage, self-captivity. Evil is self-enslavement. St. Augustine gives us this definition. Sin is the force of habit and habits are the links in the chain by which we enslave ourselves. Our wills are inclined to evil and self-enslavement; hence, the servile will. These men will understand the meaning of the redeemed servile will when they are imprisoned, that is the irony of it. It is there that they will discover their freedom. Mark my words. Their imprisonment and execution will tell the story of the redemption of evil. The redemption from evil– “deliver us from evil”–is different from the redemption of evil. We want to overcome evil itself. We don’t have Saints in Protestantism. Pity. We would nominate to God the names: von Moltke and Bonhoeffer. Saint Helmuth and Saint Dietrich. Pray for us now and in the hour of our need. They came to help me. God help you.

Bergraav’s Benediction

There is a blessing anyone can give. I am going to give it to you.

[He removes his disguise for his ecclesiastical robes.] Moltke and Bonhoeffer re-enter.

Bergraav prays:

Benediction: “God did not say: you will not be tempted, you will not be troubled, you will not be lead astray, but God does say, “You will not be overcome.” The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

Act One Scene Five Bonhoeffer and Von Moltke enter and drink from the water spout next to Wittgenstein’s cabin. They knock at the door . Wittgenstein is startled out of meditation.

Bonhoeffer and Von Moltke enter.

Von Moltke

Please excuse me for interrupting you like this, without notice; we are both Germans on a mission and we heard you were here and we hoped to find you and bring our concerns before you. This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer and I am Helmuth Von Moltke. Herr Bonhoeffer is a pastor and theologian and I am an international lawyer. And you are Ludwig Wittgenstein. .

Wittgenstein

Yes I am! (With some weariness.) I welcome you to my humble hut. You must have had a tiring journey. (They linger over shaking hands, but Wittgenstein does not smile.)

Bonhoeffer. Not at all. We have just refreshed ourselves with some of your water–some of the best water I have ever had. It is a great pleasure to meet you. Wittgenstein. I know your names from your families: you are from the General and you are from the Psychiatrist.

Bonhoeffer.

Yes, that’s true. What a surprise! You know our names!

Von Moltke.

We have a grave problem to bring before you. Bishop Bergraav told us you were here and that we might come to see you about it. Pastor Bonhoeffer and I have come to Norway to plead in his behalf. I don’t know if you have heard about his case. He is the Bishop of Norway and he was arrested after calling upon all of the pastors in Norway to resign on Easter Sunday to protest the effort of the Quisling regime to recruit Norwegian youth into the Hitler Youth. We were able to avert his trial and to have him placed under house arrest. I’ll get to the point. We are quarreling about the assassination of Hitler and we are both involved in efforts to do it, or efforts to circumvent it, knowing the inevitability of the fall of this regime, anyhow, and therefore, the need to plan for the future of Germany. I am going to be involved in discussions about the future of Germany at my estate, in Silesia, at my home, “Kreisau”. It is the old estate of the General, which I inherited, so I will have a chance to go into these matters with many friends and colleagues, at a number of meetings of the Kreisau Circle, as we call our resistance group.

Wittgenstein.

It has a euphonious sound. How typically German: The Kreisauer Kreis.

Von Moltke. Pastor Bonhoeffer would kill him with his own hands, if he could get them around his neck. He wants to strangle him. I don’t want to dignify his death with the air of martyrdom, lest Germans have a scapegoat. No more victims! We went through that after the First World War. Every one knows that! He will die by his own hand in his own defeat. This is the way it will come to pass. I am against assassination, on principle, as a point of international law. Sanction assassination and it will occur elsewhere. It is the legal issue of precedent. There should be no precedent for the murder of a head of state. There is no justifiable murder, as such, although there are obvious situations where you must kill someone. But, murder, as such, is illegal. How can we denounce the murders going on in concentration camps, if we commit murder ourselves? That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell. Pastor Bonhoeffer can account for his own position. We are torn by this state of affairs and as it is of grave consequence for the future of our country we seek your advice and counsel. We would like to think it through with you. I understand the necessity of stopping this evil, but I am not blind to the consequences of certain actions and these must be taken into account.

Bonhoeffer.

I am writing a book on ethics, so it is strange for me to advocate assassination and even to volunteer myself as an instrument, but it is the position I hold, and I feel rather stupid here, with Count Von Moltke, who is an embodiment of the views I state in my book, I mean, in terms of his character, to stand opposed to him, over the issue of assassination. Yes. I would murder him with my own hands. It must be done quickly, without delay, and I don’t care if I have to sacrifice myself to do it. The only problem is that I have no access to the man nor am I ever likely to find access to him. We have a bomb plot underway and that seems to be the only course. We will blow him up. The whole issue has transformed my theology. I now see that Hitler fills the void left by the absence of God, exactly a void we are being instructed to live with, without permitting idolatrous figures to fill it. Hitler will fail. Nothing fills this void. It is a sacred void. Historically, it means the end of Protestantism, and the triumph of industrial society as a fully realized secular society. I see the self-destructive impulse, or trend, in industrial society. I am not blind to that, but this is tied to the tragedy of culture. My point is that secularism and the neutrality it fosters with respect to religious symbols is what God is teaching us by way of absence.

Wittgenstein.

You know it’s ironic that you should come here. I have spent my life trying to clarify the meaning of language, the truth-value of propositional functions, and all that—-and now you bring before me such an issue. If you were students in one of my seminars talking like this, it would be enough to make me sick. There is so much nonsense lurking here, I don’t see how we can sort it out. ‘N tolerable! (Throws up his hands). But I have to admit it, we are very close in our relation to secularism and what you call a “sacred void”. I would not use such a term, although I understand what you mean. It is close to my thinking about silence. If I were forced to the wall on the Hitler issue, I would make a plea for excuses. The quality of mercy is not strained. You’re right Count Von Moltke, to go to your death, on a principle of truth–the right to have your own ideas–come hell or high water–you will have to die for your thoughts. That will be a greater act than murdering Hitler, as much as we all want to see it, I mean, Hitler dead, but this vindictiveness, even against Hitler, is Nazism itself. And you won’t do that, Count Von Moltke, because you are what I would give my whole soul for: purity–I want to be pure–the purity of heart is to will one thing! I can see that in you–it is immediately evident. I have just been reading Kierkegaard on this very theme. So I would make a plea for excuses. I would accept even Hitler, on the principle of the unstrainable quality of mercy. Therefore, I would not sanction his murder. It is the insight of Gandhi. I think he learned it from Tolstoi–you have to accept the penalty for noncompliance with evil. That is a very profound thought. I have been reading Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses. How I wish there had been one on the quality of mercy. Only Kierkegaard could do justice to it. The quality of mercy is the purity of heart to will one thing…..

Bonhoeffer.

No, St. Augustine could do justice to it. And I could name others.

Wittgenstein. What I was going to say is how Pastor Bonhoeffer’s sense of being the end of an era in reference to Protestantism is also true of me in reference to Positivism and the modern situation in philosophy. You are right to consider these matters within some larger historical perspective. I have been reflecting on the consequences of the 1st World War on European and even world history. The battle of Verdun. Even the curse of Verdun going back to the 9th century, the curse over European history and culture. The curse of the loss of human decency. I have been discussing this with a Jewish friend of mine who is incognito and hiding out over on the next farm. This is all part of a larger trend we are perhaps too close to see clearly. I’m only now beginning to see the symbolic meaning of my own philosophy in the midst of this history. I was supposed to carry through the program of the Vienna Circle and all of those anti- metaphysical hacks: Moritz Schlick. Ernst Mach. Mach Schnell. Otto Neurath. Rudolf Carnap. Even without my willing to play their game they would have been smashed. Thanks to Godel and his Incompleteness Theorem which made it impossible to found a unified science on a mathematical basis. Look! What do you expect? My father was the first steel magnate in Austria. He arranged for the formation of the first cartel. He thought the Engineer was the supreme professional figure. Of course, he was right. But it is the triumph of the obtuse in what counts for knowledge. And it is the engineer and the mechanization of everything that has taken over. I see it now so clearly–it is like a piece of music. The self-destruction of industrial society or the rise and fall of the city- -Mahoganny ! You know the musical by Brecht and Weil? The Logical Positivists thought they were going to organize the system of the sciences on a unified basis. The basis would be logic understood in mathematical terms. It is the triumph of the fields of mathematical physics and logic in determining what counts for knowledge. It is technical knowledge that counts. It is Positivism, the successor of Physicalism, which triumphed in the chemical sciences, in l828, when a German chemist made synthetic urea. You know that one don’t you?

Von Moltke.

Friedrich Woehler! We learned that in our first organic chemistry class. It is like going back to school to talk to you.

Wittgenstein.

Friedrich Woehler, as in “woe-is-me-ler”, artificially synthesized urea, by heating up ammonium cyanate. He said: “Urea! I found it!” He made the inorganic into the organic and undermined the distinction between them. This should interest you, Pastor: spirit, life- force, vital powers, were driven out as devoid of knowledge; they were unquantifiable; they were metaphysical; they were category mistakes. And I fell for all that stuff–the physicalist-positivist take-over! Even Freud fell for it, the very man who rediscovered the psychic realm, even he got caught in this Viennese web. Do you know that one?

They shake their heads, eager for Wittgenstein to go on.

Wittgenstein.

Young man Freud goes to a public lecture and hears Goethe’s “Ode to Nature” read out loud. Goethe’s “Ode to Nature”! Young Freud is so moved he decides in that moment on his life’s career. Now this is fantastic and must be one of those great moments in the history of thought–when Freud decided to become Freud–listening to Goethe’s “Ode to Nature”. (laughs). So he decides to enter the medical sciences to “unveil nature’s mysteries”–doesn’t that sound indelicate!? and he winds up taking the Physicalist Oath in the experimental laboratory of Brucke. Do you know about the Oath?

Bonhoeffer. No. But I know about “Goethe’s Ode”. It wasn’t by Goethe, but an old Orphic Hymn, and late in life Goethe forgot that he hadn’t written it–it was in his style–and he included it in his collected works. Rudolf Steiner did the literary critical analysis of the text.

Von Moltke.

I can match your encounter with an even better one. Do you know that Goethe and Woehler, met in a rock shop in Frankfort, when Woehler was a young man and Goethe was old? My hunch is that Goethe intuited he had met Faust himself, the Faust-to-be, the man who would subvert the organic order and identify it with the synthetic and artificial. Goethe went home and finished Faust. But what about the Oath?

Wittgenstein.

Where would we be without an Oath of Allegience? The scientists’ Loyalty Oath. This is how it went: …….”not to take into account any forces operating in any entity, but the physical, chemical, forces, or other forces equal in dignity….” Obviously, no vital force was “equal in dignity” to a physical or chemical force. So everything having to do with the integrity of the organic was undermined. From Vitalist Ode to Physicalist Oath! How symbolic a move! Now do you see what I mean? I was supposed to play my role in this mechanistic, deterministic, physicalistic, positivistic, empiricistic, behaviouristic, scientistic take-over. I was supposed to be the logician to the human mind gone haywire in its rejection of the spiritual. So I adopted the view that philosophy is the disease of which it should be the cure, and I thought that every proposition in my TRACTATUS was the expression of an illness. The Parable of the Vital Root of Existence. Once upon a time there was a search going on for vital roots. People felt that they could not determine their roots. They had just moved and they had no garden, no roses, no weeds even, to call their own. They were citified even next to a vacant lot. They no longer knew what it meant to grow their own food. They were not survivors. So the word went out. Is there anyone to save us from this program of destruction? Is there anyone who can show us how to replant the vital root of our existence? Pardon the figure of speech. And then along came the little Lance Corporal and everyone saluted him as the Saving Father: Heil Hitler, they screamed, give us back the health we have lost, the health that salvation brings. Generations before, Goethe took a walk. He fell into a life-crisis over just this issue of the vital root of existence. So one day he just left. Where is Goethe? I don’t know; he was here yesterday. Goethe dropped out, as we would say, and walked to Italy and to Sicily. He walked for two years in search of the vital root of existence, what he called his beloved ur-pflanze: the primal plant: the morphological exemplar of all plant development: the vital root! He found it in the old garden in Padua, the oldest botanical garden in Europe. It was a palm he found–”Goethe’s Palm” the Paduans called it and they built a glass tower to encase it and there it stands today. The vital root of existence, squirreled away under glass, in the oldest garden in the world, to wait out the self-destruction of industrial society– this social order it is our fate to endure.

They fall silent for a moment.

Bonhoeffer.

Goethe definitely anticipated our dilemma. He knew that industrial society would be the end of the Western tradition. From Goethe to Nietzsche. Hitler is where the world tried to get away from its own secularization, as it tried to duck back into pagan gods, magic, old Teutonic myths, and the worst possible religious banalities, as though gangsters had learned the trick of appearing as priests of a higher order act, in which to cloak their crimes. It was the Goethean form of the need for roots gone completely haywire in the lust for blood and soil.. Hence, my stand in behalf of secularism and against all “somersaults of death” back to past powers and religious authorities–God is teaching us how to live in a world without God. It is the end of victimization. After this is over, we may be able to recapture everything on a wholly new and fresh basis–the task for everything after the year 2000 A.D. But first we must go through this terrible form-breaking period. I had a vision concerning my death that it would be the date for the end of the Protestant Era. Isn’t that strange? Me? From the night when Luther nailed the theses on the Church door, the Eve of All Saints and All Souls, to that day after……….the Sunday after Easter–Low Sunday, as it is known in the Church Year–Quasimodo Sunday, that was the Sunday in the dream: the beginning and end of the Protestant Era! From start to finish!

Von Moltke.

It’s almost as noteworthy to be a date whereby some great movement in history is ended, as it is to be the occasion for its inception. Congratulations.

Wittgenstein.

I know how you feel! I was the end of Positivism in philosophy. I had this insatiable metaphysical thirst. I couldn’t hide it. First Schopenhauer and then Tolstoi and then, oh, my, here I should make my favorite sound, the sound of Scandinavian melancholy, the ‘ja’ ‘ja’, before I mention the name of Kierkegaard, a thinker uniquely appropriate to my taste: dread, anxiety, the sickness unto death–despair, the inability to get rid of oneself, irony, and on and on. Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obvious nonsense, if it tries to doubt where no question can be asked. Words are like film on deep water. Regarding the assassination of Hitler, do you know that I went to school with him? It was the Realschule in Linz. He was my age but he was a year behind me, which sounds appropriate. I could have garroted the little bugger right there at recess. Now there must be a tradition of church teaching on tyrannicide and some kind of sanction regarding the execution of an unjust ruler. The tyrant is a favorite theme of Plato. What is the point in the Republic in terms of the tyrant as the example of the greatest disorder of the soul? Socrates knew the evil that lurks in the hearts of men as well as the body politic. “Surely some terrible, savage, and lawless form of desires is in every man, even in some of us who seem to be ever so measured,” is how Socrates puts it. He calculates that the suffering of the tyrant is exactly 729 times that of a philosopher’s pleasure. We should look to the ancient teachings on tyrants. I remember how Socrates recounts, in the Myth of Er, at the end of the Republic, how Ardaeius the Great comes up with the souls after their death, to choose a new life, and how in the process, a big mouth, will not receive him. It bellows. And Ardaeius the Great is carted off by men of fearsome aspect and cast into outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. The fate of the tyrant. Consigned to hell. What about Dante and the circle in hell reserved for tyrants? In this case, it is not murder. With Hitler, we have the very image of the Antichrist, don’t we? What provisions are there about removing or killing the Antichrist? But, first of all, do you agree that Hitler is the Antichrist?

Bonhoeffer.

I hate to admit I haven’t made up my mind. You see, if the Antichrist is the Great Deceiver then it is easy to make a mistake. Hitler is too banal and too obvious, that’s what puts me off or makes me pause; the Antichrist is evil in disguise. Hitler is unambiguously evil.

Von Moltke.

Isn’t this just the point. If you are not willing to identify Hitler as the Antichrist, then you cannot remove him for that reason. Are you going to assassinate Hitler because he is not the Antichrist?

Bonhoeffer.

Yes.

Wittgenstein.

You know there is a discussion of radical evil in Kant who says in a striking figure of speech that we are always falling from original goodness into radical evil. But the concept of the banality of evil fits with your theology of secularism and the end of religion as such– homo religiosus had these mythical images within the dimensions of height and depth, but now we suffer a kind of sacred void in such matters of the spirit. That is why I think it is better to remain silent. Even the word spirit is no longer alive or carries meaning, except perhaps when we talk about a spirited woman or a spirited horse, then, at least, there is some biological vitality involved, but the word spirit itself has an archaic and obsolete ring to it. We are now technically rational to the point of displacing or supplanting spirit with the mind itself. There is no room for it. So the Antichrist would have to be a figure appropriate to this flattening. Who better than a corporal to be the embodiment of evil? From the radical evil of Kant to the banality of evil of Hitler. Isn’t the fact that he is hailed as the Saving One–Heil Hitler–and known as the Fuehrer enough evidence to identify him as the Antichrist, albeit a perfectly banal one. There is no question that this is an evil regime. I can imagine a war crimes trial after the war where the Nazi leaders will be tried as criminals and executed accordingly for the whole world to see. This will force the German nation to acknowledge the fact that National Socialism is an evil regime. Look. It’s time for a drink. How about a nip of aquavit!

A knock at the door.

A Jewish woman (it could be a girl) from the next farm has come to borrow a cup of sugar and to visit Wittgenstein. They are friends. She tries to excuse herself, startled by the company. They are German officers and she is in hiding. Wittgenstein invites her to stay and join the conversation.

Naomi:

Ludi. I’m sorry to disturb you. I didn’t know you had guests.

Wittgenstein: Naomi. Please. Join us. We were just about to have a glass of aquavit. These are counter-intelligence officers who have come to save Bishop Bergraav. They are from the Abwehr. They are in a conflict over whether or not to kill Hitler. You can join us. It is a discussion more than we can bear. (As an aside, just to her)–I am up to my asshole in alligators with diesem mensch. (She rolls her eyes as if to ignore the remark.)

Bonhoeffer.

I am Dietrich Bonhoeffer and this is Helmuth von Moltke.

Von Moltke.

How do you do. We would be pleased to have you join us.

Naomi.

I am pleased to meet you. My name is Naomi. I live on the next farm. I am quite startled to meet you, I must confess. The last thing I want is to run into two German officers.

Von Moltke. We are happy to meet you. We have come here on a mission from the Abwehr. You have nothing to fear from us. We are against the Hitler regime. We have come here to discuss the assassination of Hitler with Professor Wittgenstein at the recommendation of Bishop Bergraav. We were in the midst of this discussion when you arrived.

Naomi.

Don’t you know that whether for or against killing Hitler, you will be executed, anyhow. If you resist, you pay with your life whatever your position on assassination. Your name, Herr von Moltke, is a hard name to live down. What an inheritance you have. You must have the estate. He is buried there. Your Great Uncle. At Kreisau. From the 2nd Reich to the 3rd Reich goes through you. You are the border between Poland and Germany. Herr Graf Helmuth von Moltke there are three curses over Europe. I don’t know why but your name prompts me to say this. Ludi and I have been talking about the curses over European history and culture. Curse one: the nationalistic split dating from the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Curse two: the confessional struggle in which the German tribes were converted to Christianity and the conflict which resulted between the Roman and German Church. Curse three: The feudal forms which made for the great class differences. No power is able to overcome these curses.

Wittgenstein.

May I add a fourth? It is the loss of human decency as the outcome of these curses. It is their fulfillment. I, myself, have experienced this loss in the trenches of Verdun.

Von Moltke.

Well, there is no doubt that Hitler is our curse. Number five.

Pastor Bonhoeffer and I are debating the assassination of Hitler. I am against it and Pastor Bonhoeffer is for it. We have weighty reasons either way. I think you will tip the balance against me. You must be for his execution.

Naomi.

No. I am willing to hear what you have to say. I’m safe here in Norway! It is vexing even here to face this evil. What do you think, General von Moltke? What can you tell a poor Jewish girl about Hitler?

Von Moltke.

This debate I am having with Pastor Bonhoeffer is as urgent as existence itself. We are on the front line, he and I, and we represent these views. It is as though Germany finds its expression in our debate. We are like a Kantian antinomy. If not that, we are the horns of a dilemma and we are going to get caught on those horns. Please, Naomi, don’t tell me we are already dead just by the mere fact of our talking about it. We know that! That’s why we came to save Bergraav! This side-trip to visit Professor Wittgenstein is a luxury for us. We are free here. We can speak our minds.

Bonhoeffer.

A luxury to him. I’m ready to strangle Herr Hitler with my own hands. I’m for tyrannicide and Herr von Moltke is against it. We may both go to our deaths. But I do think we must assassinate him. It is his death I seek. General von Moltke: you have the floor.

Von Moltke.

Here is my four step program for not doing it: you can sum it up in four words: Gandhi, Kant, murder, and bungle. I agree with Professor Wittgenstein that Gandhi is a key in his insight that if you resist evil you have to accept the penalty and you have to pay the penalty, the penalty of noncompliance! Kant teaches all of us that in our behavior we must consider “the categorical imperative” or the moral law and that we must apply the imperative to our behavior so that what we do can be universalized. It would be of interest to discuss this issue with Kant in line with his understanding of duty. I wonder if he had a position on tryrannicide. In any event, I don’t want to see a new order for Germany based on murder. It has unforeseen consequences besides the obvious one of making Hitler a martyr which I find insupportable. And my weightiest reason is that it will be bungled. It is predictable. Perhaps that is the key to viewing Hitler as the Antichrist. You can’t kill him. He leads a charmed life. All such efforts will fail because no one knows how to do it successfully. Bungling it is worse than not attempting it. We may be hung up on meat hooks, we may be guillotined, you know that Hitler uses the guillotine, we may be garroted. I am against killing him. He may kill me but I am not going to take part in a plot against him. Let him kill me for not wanting to kill him. That’s my point.

Bonhoeffer.

My point is not so different. I am in this strange place, Herr Von Moltke, I have to save him for wanting to kill him. Listen. We both will die. We have to go back to face the music. It doesn’t matter what we think according to our fate. Let our fate tell us who we are. Let our fate reveal us to ourselves. Naomi. We are here to bear witness to you and all the Jews of the world that we have failed you. We are agents of a crucified messiah, the messiah, who, to the Jews, is no messiah at all. The tragedy of our respective religions comes to the surface here. I wish I could settle the issue in my view of the “world come of age”, but I know I can’t solve this with a phrase. Herr von Moltke will stand on his scruple. I would pick up an axe.

Naomi.

I have tried to think about evil during my exile here in Norway. I have talked to Professor Wittgenstein about evil. It resists my thoughts. The French have a word for it–ineluctable. There are some things that cannot be said. Women seem to know that better than men. You don’t have to reason it out. There is a reason we don’t know. If you only held to despair there would be nothing more to say–it may be true that you will save him by dying because of him. And now I will read from a scrap of paper that has found its way to me. It was sewn into the pocket of a relative of mine who was gassed at Treblinka. “Peace to all men and women of evil will! Let there be an end to all vengeance, to all demands for punishment and retribution…. Crimes have surpassed all measure, they can no longer be grasped by human understanding. There are too many martyrs…. And so, weigh not their sufferings on the scales of thy justice, Lord, and lay not these sufferings to the torturers’ charge to exact a terrible reckoning from them. Pay them back in a different way! Put down in favour of the executioners, the informers, the traitors and all men and women of evil will, the courage, the spiritual strength of the others, their humility, their lofty dignity, their constant inner striving and invincible hope, the smile that staunched the tears, their love, their ravaged, broken hearts that remained steadfast and confident in the face of death itself, yes, even at moments of the utmost weakness… Let all this, O Lord, be laid before thee for the forgiveness of sins, as a ransom for the triumph of righteousness, let the good and not the evil be taken into account! And may we remain in our enemies’ memory not as their victims, not as a nightmare, not as haunting spectres, but as helpers in their striving to destroy the fury of their criminal passions. There is nothing more that we want of them. And when it is all over, grant us to live among men as men and women as women, and may peace come again to our poor earth–peace for men and women of goodwill and for all the others…..”

They pause for a moment in the grip of the words.

Von Moltke.

“Pay them back in a different way!” Thank you. We must take our leave now, Naomi and Professor Wittgenstein. You have been very kind to receive us in this unexpected way. Pastor Bonhoeffer and I are about to self-destruct we are so weary. We must retire to our beds. Goodnight. Goodnight.

Bonhoeffer.

When my twin sister and I went to bed we played a game over who would be the last to say “goodnight”.

Naomi.

It is like waving goodbye from shore to someone leaving by ship… Who gets the last wave as the ship slowly sails out of sight?

They depart for bed.

Naomi.

Ludi. These are remarkable men. We are all caught on the horn of their dilemma.

Wittgenstein.

Naomi. It is more than I can bear that they should seek me out for this discussion. I am not worthy of it. I lost my sense of human decency in the trench. No one can find solace in my views. I am the fulfillment of the curse of the tragedy of Verdun.

Naomi.

Oh, Ludi!

Wittgenstein.

I have never worn a tie. Since! Never!

Naomi.

Oh, Ludi!

Wittgenstein.

All my life I have wanted to be pure. I have been despicable. I want to tell you, Naomi, I have to confess this to you. I have hidden my Jewish identity. I have not stood next to my brothers and sisters.

Naomi.

What else, Ludi?

Wittgenstein. I slapped a young girl who was a student of mine when I taught school in Trattenback and then I lied about it to her parents and the Principal.

Naomi.

Oh, Ludi. She takes him in her arms.

Curtain

ACT TWO, SCENE ONE

The place of Von Moltke’s trial was Berlin in Jan. l945. The People’s Court. It met in a substitute building, the court having been destroyed by bombing. The trial was about treason. Helmuth writes to Freya: This affair is really somewhat better than the celebrated Huber case. For even less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a leaflet. (The students of the White Rose and their Professor Huber were arrested and convicted and executed for distributing leaflets critical of the Nazis. These are the pamphlets they brought to Bergraav.) Von Moltke was charged with knowledge of a plot to overthrow the government, even though he declined to join it and warned his friends against it; he did not report it to the authorities. He, on his own part, formed a circle to seize power in the event of German defeat with people who were not Nazis. They march in. Von Moltke brought in. Two guards at his side. The others are brought in.

Freisler:

[There are video tapes on YouTube of Freisler conducting trials. He has the ability to scream in an hysterical rant without changing a rather composed facial demeanor.]

The accused is administrator and owner of the family estate in Silesia–Kreisau. You are a lawyer, specializing in International Law and admitted to the British Bar. Your membership in the Nazi Party is minimal, just enough to allow you to carry on your farming and legal practice. You are employed as a legal advisor to the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. You always take an interest in religious and ecclesiastical questions, in the relationship between church and state and the question of “rechristianization”, probably the influence of your professor–Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, the converted Jew. Around l941, you began to think about the future in case the war was lost and started discussing this with friends and acquaintances, none of whom were Nazis and some of whom have been convicted as traitors. In l942 and l943, you had two long meetings at Kreisau, the first dealing with “rechristianization” and the relations of church and state. You had a Jesuit–Alfred Delp–speak about the Catholic view on social policy, with special reference to the Papal Encyclical–Quadragesimo Anno. The second meeting dealt with questions of administration and the relationship of the states and the Reich. You conspired with Carl Goerdeler, the Mayor of Leipzig. Summary: All Count Moltke did constitutes treason: high treason in the midst of war. He cannot lessen its gravity by saying that he was only thinking and did not proceed to carry out plans. He did more than think: he also gathered a circle of friends for the discussion and development of plans; and finally he looked for men to carry them out… Your treason is a particularly grave one: you spread defeatism and helped the enemy. Count Moltke you are guilty as charged of Penal Codes 83 and 91b and in addition 5 of the Special Penal Ordinance for War. Nor is this all. From l940 onwards, you and members of your circle were in contact with the Ludwig Beck group and of Carl Goerdeler. This group plotted to overthrow the government. You argued against them, we know, but you failed to report their plot to the authorities, which is a violation of l39 of the Penal Code. By your own efforts, you have made yourself a servant of the enemy of the Third Reich.

At this point, Von Moltke objects that the police and the security authorities had known all about it. Freisler has paroxyism No. 1. A hurricane is let loose, he bangs on the table, goes the color of his robe and roars out:

Freisler

I won’t stand that; I won’t listen to that sort of thing.”

Von Moltke stares him down and then slowly smiles.

Freisler goes on about Kreisau: a.) defeatism, and b.) the selection of Land Commisioners. Both give rise to fresh paroxyisms as violent as before, and, when Helmuth submits in defence that it all had come about as an offshoot of my official duties, a third paroxysm.

Freisler

All Adolf Hitler’s officials set about their work on the assumption of victory, and that applies just as much in the High Command as anywhere else. I simply won’t listen to that kind of thing–and even were it not the case, it’s clearly the duty of every single man for his own part to promote confidence in victory.

Act Two Scene Two Von Moltke is back in his prison cell and writing a letter about the trial to his wife, Freya. He can read what he writes or through voice over.

Von Moltke.

And who was present? A Jesuit father! Of all people a Jesuit father! And a Protestant minister, and three others who were later sentenced to death for complicity in the July 20 plot! And not a single National Socialist! No, not one. I must say: that does remove the figleaf! A Jesuit father, and with him, of all people, you discuss questions of civil disobedience! And you also knew the Provincial Head of the Jesuits! He too came to Kreisau once! A Jesuit Provincial, once of the highest officials of Germany’s most dangerous enemies, he visits Count Moltke at Kreisau! And you are not ashamed of it, even though no decent German would touch a Jesuit with a barge-pole! People who have been excluded from all military service because of their attitude! If I know there is a Provincial of the Jesuits in a town, it is almost enough to keep me out of that town altogether! And the other reverend gentlemen. What was he after there? Such people should confine their attentions to the hereafter and leave us here in peace! And you went visiting Bishops! Looking for something you had lost, I suppose! Where do you get your orders from? You get your orders from the Fuehrer and the National Socialist Party! That goes for you as much as for any other German; and anyone who takes his orders, no matter under what camouflage, from the guardians of the other world, is taking them from the enemy, and will be dealt with accordingly. This concentration on the church aspect of the case corresponds with the intrinsic nature of the matter and shows that Freisler is a good political judge after all. It gives us the inestimable advantage of being killed for something which (a) we really have done and which (b) is worthwhile. The best thing about a judgment on such lines is this: It is established that we did not wish to use force; it is further established that we did not take a single step towards setting up any sort of organization, nor question anyone as to his readiness to take over any particular post– though the indictment stated otherwise. We merely thought….and in face of the thoughts of…. three isolated men, their mere thoughts, National Socialism gets in such a panic that it wants to root out everything they may have infected. There’s a compliment for you. …We are to be hanged for thinking together. Freisler is right, a thousand times right; and if we are to die, I am in favour of dying on this issue. I am of the opinion–and now I am coming to what has got to be done–that this affair, properly presented, is really somewhat better than the celebrated Huber case. For even less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a leaflet. It is only a question of men’s thoughts without even the intention to resort to violence… All that is left is a single idea: how Christianity can prove a sheet-anchor in time of chaos. And just for this idea five heads…look like being forfeited tomorrow….Because he made it clear that I was opposed in principle to large estates, that I had no class interests at heart, no personal interest at all, not even those of my outfit, but stood for the cause of all mankind, for all these reasons Freisler has unwittingly done us a great service, insofar as it may prove possible to spread the story and make full use of it. And indeed, in my view, this should be done both at home and abroad. For our case histories provide documentary proof that it is neither plots nor plans but the very spirit of humanity that is to be hunted down… In one of his tirades Freisler said to me: “Only in one respect does National Socialism resemble Christianity: we demand the whole man.” I don’t know if the others sitting there took it all in, for it was a sort of dialogue between Freisler and me– a dialogue of the spirit, since I did not get the chance actually to say much–in the course of which we got to know one another through and through. Freisler was the only one of the whole gang who thoroughly understood me, and the only one of them who realized why he must do away with me. There was no more talk of me as a “complex character” or of “complicated thinking” or of “ideology,” but: “the figleaf is off.” But only so far as Freisler was concerned. It was as though we were talking to each other in a vacuum. He made not a single joke at my expense, as he did against Delp and Eugen. No, in my case it was all grimmest earnest. “From whom do you take your orders, from the other world or from Adolf Hitler? Where lie your loyalty and your faith?” Rhetorical questions, of course. At any rate Freisler is the first National Socialist who has grasped who I am.

At this point the Catholic prison chaplain visits Von Moltke and he is shaved and given some coffee and something to eat and then he resumes the letter.

The decisive phrase in the proceedings was: Christianity has one thing in common with us National Socialists, and one thing only: we claim the whole person. And so finally I am selected as a Protestant, am attacked and condemned primarily because of my friendship with Catholics, which means that I stood before Freisler not as a Protestant, not as a big landowner, not as an aristocrat, not as a Prussian, not as a German–all that was definitely eliminated earlier in the trial…No, I stood there as a Christian and as nothing else. “The figleaf is off,” says Freisler. Yes, every other category had been removed. And then he asked “Have you anything more to say?” Von Moltke. No.

Act Two Scene Three Back in his cell.

Von Moltke.

My dear, first and foremost I must say that obviously the last twenty-four hours of one’s life are no different from any others. I had always imagined that one would have no feeling but shock, that one would tell oneself, “this is your last sunset, now the clock will only go round twice more, now you’re going to bed of the last time.’ But there’s no question of any of that. Am I really a little intoxicated? I certainly can’t deny that at present I’m in the best of spirits. Only I beg our Heavenly Father that he will keep me in them, for so to die is surely easier for the flesh. How good God has been to me! Even at the risk of sounding hysterical I’m so full of gratitude that there’s really room for nothing else. He guided me so surely and clearly through those two days. The whole assembly could have bellowed, like Herr Freisler, and all the walls have rocked and it would have made no odds to me. It was exactly as it says in Isaiah 43, verse 2: ‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overthrow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee’…that is to say upon thy soul. When I was called on to make my final statement I was in such spirits that I almost said, I have only this to say in my own justification, Nehmen Sie den Leib Gut, Ehr, Kind und Weib, Lass fahren dahin, Sie haben’s kein Gewinn, Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben! Slay my body, take my property and my honour, wreak your will on my wife and child, do your worst, you still have no victory, the City of God remaineth. Luther. But that would only have been damaging for the others; so I only said, “I have nothing I wish to say, Herr President.” So then, my dear, I have only one thing to say: may God be as good to you as to me, then even your husband’s death will not matter. He can demonstrate His omnipotence at any time, perhaps when you are making pancakes for the boys or cleaning them up. I ought to take leave of you–I can’t do it. I ought to deplore and lament your daily toil–I can’t do it. I ought to think of the burdens which now fall on you–I can’t do it. I can only tell you one thing: if you get the feeling of absolute security, should the Lord vouchsafe it to you, which you would not have had without this time and its outcome, then I am bequeathing you a treasure which no man can take away, against which even my life cannot weigh in the balance.

Act Two Scene Four Freya is at Poelchau’s home (the prison chaplain) where she is hiding out and receives Helmuth’s letters delivered by Poelchau. She is reading a letter, the last one.

Freya.

My love, I just feel like chatting with you a litte, I have really nothing to say. I chatting, my love, just as things come into my head; therefore here is something quite different. Ultimately what was dramatic about the trial was this: The trial proved all concrete accusations to be untenable, and they were dropped accordingly. Nothing remains of them. But what the Third Reich is so terrified of that it must kill 5, later it will be 7, people, is ultimately the following: a private individual, your husband, of whom it is established that he discussed with a clergyman of both denominations, with a Jesuit Provincial, and with a few bishops, without the intention of doing anything concrete, and this was established, things “which are the exclusive concern of the Fuhrer.” Discussed what: not by any means questions of organization, not the structure of the Reich–all this dropped away in the course of the trial, and Schulze said so explicitly in his speech for the prosecution. (“differs completely from all other cases, because there was no mention of any violence or any organization”), but discussion dealt with questions of the practical, ethical demands of Christianity. Nothing else; for that alone we are condemned. And now, dear heart, I come to you. I have not mentioned you anywhere, because you, my love, occupy a wholly different place from all the others. For you are not a means God employed to make me who I am, rather you are myself. You are my l3th chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. Without this chapter no human being is human. Without you I would have accepted love as a gift, as I accepted it from Mami, for instance, thankful, happy grateful as one is for the sun that warms one. But without you, my love, I would have “had not charity.” I don’t even say that I love you; that wouldn’t be right. Rather, you are the part of me that, alone, I would lack. It is good that I lack it; for if I had it as you have it, this greatest of all gifts, my love, I could not have done a lot of things, I would have found it impossible to maintain consistency in some things, I could not have watched the suffering I had to see, and much else. Only together do we constitute a human being. We are, as I wrote a few days ago, symbolically, created as one. That is true, literally true. Therefore, my love, I am certain that you will not lose me on this earth, not for a moment. And we were allowed finally to symbolize this fact by our shared Holy Communion, which will have been my last. I just wept a little, not because I was sad or melancholy, not because I want to return, but because I am thankful and moved by this proof of God’s presence. It is not given to us to see him face to face, but we must needs be moved intensely when we suddenly see that all our life he has gone before us as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and that he permits us to see it suddenly in a flash. Now nothing more can happen.

Act Two Scene Five On 23 Jan., Poelchau went to see Helmuth as usual at about eleven o’clock and effected an exchange of letters. But when he glanced into the cell at one o’clock, it was empty, for Helmuth had been taken off to Plotzensee, two and a half miles away. Poelchau immediately called up Buchholz, but learnt that Helmuth, although expected at any moment, had not arrived. He went immediately to the death cell and witnessed Helmuth’s death. Just as in the communion service, where all are gathered, so here, all are hanged together. Helmuth Von Moltke to his sons: “Throughout my life from my schooldays onwards I have fought against a spirit of narrowness and subservience, of arrogance and intolerance, against the absolutely merciless consistency which is deeply ingrained in the Germans and has found its expression in the National Socialist state. I have made it my aim to get this spirit overcome with its evil accompaniments, such as excessive nationalism, racial persecution, lack of faith and materialism. In this sense and seen from their own standpoint the National Socialists are right in putting me to death.”

In the full text of the letter to Freya, Helmuth mentions that Freisler spoke about the catholics and tyrannicide: >>>>>>”but a hail of brickbats assailed the Catholic clergy and the Jesuits: assent to tyrannicide –Mariano– illegitimate children, anti-German attitude, etc. etc.”

Mariano, Juan (l536–l624) Jesuit author of De rege et regis institutiore where he defended the killing of tyrants.]

Poelchau’s Address . Dear Friends: I had to minister to a thousand men who were sent to their death by the Hitler regime. Helmuth Von Moltke and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were among them. I want to tell you about their attitude to their self-imposed ordeal on the part of the prisoners condemned to death: “The course we have taken that has led us to death was not mistaken or false; on the contrary it was right and necessary, for the revival in Germany of justice and of esteem for man’s dignity is more important than our lives.”

Act Two Scene Six This last scene depicts Freya Von Moltke taking her children up to a mountain hut—similar to the one of Wittgenstein–only now in Silesia, to wait out the Russian advance. Germany has fallen. Her husband has been executed. She rides a bicycle down a mountain road to see if the Russians have passed and the coast is clear so she and her children and her servants can escape.

Her bicycle ride is shown on film with voice over. The screen is transparent to the great hall at Kreisau, her destination. There she sits in her moment of affirmation at the end of her ride. (Voice over as a depiction of the ride is shown on film.) We include the full text of her account here to be edited as necessary for performance purposes.

Freya.

On 25 January l945 Marion and I travelled from Berlin to Kreisau. Edith and Henssel took us to the train. They brought some delicious bread and butter for us and Marion had a bottle of old Malaga. The bottle was wrapped in a paper napkin; it looked as though it were coffee with milk. Marion and I sat close together on a double seat in the 3rd class. We travelled on and on endlessly, and got no rest. We were travelling against the tide of refugees and therefore needed exactly twenty-four hours to get to Kreisau, but in memory it remains a good journey. I think we were reasonably cheerful. So far nobody in Kreisau knew of Helmuth’s death. Asta had Wend there and with him were eight or nine soldiers, a complete anti-aircraft unit. Frau Pick was in her element cooking for all these men. Marion went straight on to Nimptsch where Muto was in practice, though just then she was in bed with diptheria. Telling Caspar was very hard for me. He was lying in my bed, where he had been sleeping; I sat on the edge. But we got through it, and when next morning he found me sorrowful he said, ‘About Pa? Still?’ This was really a great relief. Everything was in confusion. The Russians were pressing westwards at high speed. For several weeks we had had the Berghaus and the Schloss and the whole village full of refugees from across the Oder. In the Berghaus some were living in the sitting-rooms. Their cart stood unloaded in our little yard and down the hill the whole farmyard was full of other people’s vehicles. Something had to be done, but everyone was undecided. Snow was lying and we drove in two sleighs to Schweidnitz to see off the travellers who were to go by ambulance-train. Asta was sitting in the first sleigh ‘back to the engine’, and I was in the second ‘facing the engine’ and even now I can see her still, sad face. All the time it kept reappearing, filled with silent sorrow. What was going to become of us all? Then the first sleigh drew ahead; Asta’s face vanished. Ten minutes later we caught them up, and there was her face again with the same expression. Then they all departed. Later, in April when post once more came through from the West, I suddenly got a postcard from Asta. She had gone first to some Wendland relations in Mecklenburg and was just going on from there to Holstein, so as to have her baby with Aunt Leno. A few days later, after this batch of women and children had gone, Zeumer rang me up early one morning in the Berghaus from the Hof. ‘Now it’s come to the crunch,’ he said, ‘we must evacuate our village.’ Women and children and old people were to cross into Czechoslovakia, orders from the Party! From the start I was determined to stay. What would become of us on country roads in the middle of winter? Nor were the Russians there yet; also Helmuth had advised me to stay as long as possible. In Ravensbruck he had discussed our situation through the ventilator with General Halder, who was confined to the next cell. They both considered our mountain country safe, believing that the Russians would leave it ‘on their left’ in their drive to reach Berlin. We were constantly tormented by the question ‘Ought we to leave as well?’ The Russian front was just over six miles away. The Russians were firing cannon and by day the noise was disturbing and seemed to be coming nearer. We re-buried the Field-Marshal in Helmuth’s and my empty grave, him and his wife. His poor sister had to remain by herself in the chapel, where all three coffins had stood side by side. We tried to let down her coffin on top of Papi’s, but it wouldn’t fit in. Eight NCO’s in steel helmets were drafted to carry the coffins down the slope. It was quite dignified and at the same time so hopeless. Next came several severe warnings from the local Party leadership in Graditz that I must leave Kreisau directly, and finally the order to leave Kreisau within two days, otherwise we should be escorted from place to place by the police. I cycled to Graditz to the Party office. It was situated next door to our butcher’s, where once Herr Suhr, and later a young butcher, had sold us meat, until they were both condemned to long terms of imprisonment for slaughtering for the black market–neither of them was Nazi. It was opposite the brickworks which ultimately became a camp for Jews. The whole place was in chaos and the local Party boss wasn’t a bit pleased to see me. The whole Moltke case was extremely disagreeable to him. He assured me in a really friendly way that to have six children in his ‘territory’ was quite impossible, but Wierischau was not part of his territory, so he didn’t mind what happened there, and was quite ready to allow me a week’s grace. So a week later all the children and Romai moved into two rooms in the grange at Wierischau which was standing empty. This really didn’t go badly. They lived there very contentedly, often coming to see me at the Burghaus, where also we celebrated Easter. Marion and Muto wanted to see their family again, who meanwhile had moved to Mecklenburg. Then I lost my nerve and decided after all to take the children away. Romai had a short time before discovered an empty cottage in Pommerndorf above Hohenelbe in the Riesengebirge about 3,000 feet above sea-level. But it stood on the Czech side of the range. Thither we decided to go, and after Easter really went. Two cartloads of things, the six children, Fraulein Hirsch–the forester’s daughter–Aunt Leno’s Bertha, Frau Pick, Romai and I. Two of our Poles were the coachmen. All the time I had the feeling that this effort was unnecessary, but hadn’t the nerve to stay put. I remember that I said to Marion and Muto, before they went off, that I must ‘bite the apple’, and bite we did. The first day we got as far as Michelsdorf, the second to Friedland, the third to Trautenau. The children stayed there with Frau Pick and Romai in the hotel, and followed me, the Poles, Fraulein Hirsch and Bertha by train to Hohenelbe next day. Here everything was still running in orderly fashion, and this region lying in Czechoslovakia, protected by mountains, had in all respects been spared the onslaught of war. The trek was lovely. Spring had come, the weather was dry and sunny. Slowly and steadily our two heavily laden carts rolled up hill and down dale. I remember a particularly beautiful stretch between Friedland and Schonberg, a lovely road over a pass. The children remained at the inn below and had potato soup. Fraulein Hirsch and I in one cart with the four horses went on ahead. Then the horses went back anad fetched the children and the other cart to which a trailer had been attached for any child who might be tired. Frauleiln Hirsch and I waited in the wood at the top. That hour in the wood while Fraulein Hirsch slept is unforgettable to me. Away beyond the pass spread the view of the Riesengebirge. It empraced the very heart of the Silesian mountains and had the whole beauty of this landscape, a special combination of gentleness and strength in colour and form, of great distances and charming foreground. As usual the children were quite unaffected and enjoyed the whole thing as an exciting adventure. We had great difficulty in getting the heavy carts up the steep hill above Hohenelbe. We found the little house high up in the mountains, one of a group of about ten on a great grassy slope. We lived split up between three cottages; Fraulein Hirsch and Bertha rather nearer civilization in the house of the mayor of Pommerndorf, separate from us by twenty minutes’ walk along a lovely woodland track. The elder children were soon going to the local school under a Nazi teacher. He had, however, by this time seen the light sufficiently to treat our children well. We added to our stores because there was still plenty to eat in Bohemia, although we had brought provisions with us. After three weeks I left the children so as to have a look at Kreisau. I set off by bicycle. Actually I had only intended to cycle as far as Trautenau, that is to say out of the mountains and then parallel with them north- eastwards, about three hours’ ride. One has the mountain-range on the left in full splendour. I rode through the landscape in all its spring greenery, well farmed, looking like Austria. Arriving in Trautenau between midday and one o’clock, I discovered that the next train was not due to leave until the following morning. It was still early and I was full of beans. So I decided to see how far in the direction of Kreisau I could get. I now knew the whole area well and its perfect spring beauty delighted me. After Friedland I began to tire, and Helmuth’s bicycle, on which so far I had ridden very comfortably, suddenly became uncomfortable. But I knew that from the top of the Reinsbach valley, the so-called Valley of Silesia, it was downhill all the way to Kreisau. So on I went, on and on, saw my friend the Eule from behind, then passed into its shadow, rode down the long Wustewaltersdorf valley, skirted Kynau and the Weistritz dam, and coasted down the beautiful lakeside road to Oberweistritz. The daylight now began slowly to fade, but my joy that I should soon see the Muhlberg and the Kapellenberg on the skyline, the growing joy at coming home lent me wings. The spring evening was heavenly. I left the hills and rode towards Ludwigsdorf. The Kappellenberg surfaced with its spruce trees, the Muhlberg with its fuzz of acacias, and once I had breasted the little ridge at Ludwigsdorf there lay Wierischau, there lay Kreisau before me, there the Berghaus beckoned under its big accacia. It was simply lovely to get home. Muto and Marion were back from Mecklenburg, hadn’t expected to see me and received me with joy. There was the house, my room, my bed. It was about 7:30, I’d started at 9:30 and it must be over sixty miles through the mountains. That evening I felt that on this journey home all the happiness and all the riches of our life in Kreisau once more came together in me.”

As Freya sits alone in the Great Hall, the lights dim. The Lullaby–”Sleep my child and peace attend thee, all through the night” –is sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Victoria De Los Angeles. This is the “Lullaby For Wittgenstein”.

ACT THREE Scene One Tegel: The prison in the north-western suburb of Berlin, in a beautiful park with Schinkel’s Little Palais for the Humboldt brothers. Bounded by the south by the Borsig automotive factories it was subject to bombing attacks. There is the question here of the trial of Bonhoeffer. Was he ever tried? The answer is no. He was arrested and imprisoned with nothing decided except his eventual execution. He was interrogated until the July 20th coup, the Officers Bomb Plot, and then everything changed. This is known in terms of the Bethge account of his removal from the concentration camp to the schoolhouse to Flossenburg, corroborated by Fabian von Schlabrendorff in THE SECRET WAR AGAINST HITLER, p. 319ff.

The night of 6th April l943 was cold in the reception cell at Tegel. Bonhoeffer could not bring himself to use the blankets of the plank-bed, as he could not stand the stench that rose from them. There was someone crying loudly in the next cell. In the morning, dry bread was thrown through a crack in the door. The staff had been instructed not to speak to the new arrival. The warder called him a ‘blackguard’ (‘Strolch’) or scoundrel. Bonhoeffer’s response to this was that the patriot has to perform what in normal times is the action of a scoundrel. In other words, treason was true patriotism. When it became known that Bonhoeffer was the nephew of the city commandant of Berlin, who made a phone call to the prison, he was given preferential treatment. The phone call.

Act Three Scene Two “What is worse than doing evil is being evil. It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.” Ethics, p. 64f. (the quote about Hitler being spared from the July 20 assassination attempt, is in Bethke,p.730. Bonhoeffer heard the news over the radio in prison in the sickbay where he was brought for people to meet with him and receive his support.)

Bonhoeffer is in the sickbay listening to the radio along with a few others. A report comes over the radio: July 20, l944: “The frightful day. While our brave armies, courageous unto death, are struggling manfully to protect their country and to achieve final victory, a handful of infamous officers, driven by their own ambition, ventured on a frightful course and made an attempt to murder the Fuhrer. The Fuhrer was saved and thus unspeakable disaster averted from our people. For this we give thanks to God with all our hearts and pray, with all our church congregations, for God’s assistance and help in the grave tasks that the Fuhrer has to perform in these most difficult times.”

(The import of the radio report: it spells Bohoeffer’s death warrant. Indicated in lighting and mood.) Bonhoeffer returns to his cell. Bonhoeffer’s cell: a room seven by ten with a plank bed, a bench along the wall, a stool and a bucket, a plank door with an observation hole and a garret window.

Bonhoeffer reading.

On Feb. 4th, l944 a warder placed in his cell a birthday bouquet of early spring flowers from the prison greenhouse. When the sirens howled and the bomber squadrons seemed to take their course directly over Tegel, those in the section got as close as possible to Bonhoeffer, who seemed to remain calm. Was asked to pray for quiet. They come to him for a bit of comfort. A warder who had to lock him in again after his exercise in the yard asked his pardon:

Warder:

Pastor Bonhoeffer?

Bonhoeffer.

Yes, Warder.

Warder.

Please forgive me for locking you up.

Bonhoeffer.

I forgive you.

Warder.

Please pardon me.

Bonhoeffer.

I pardon you.

The photo of Bonhoeffer in the prison yard of Tegel is shown, nearly life size and the actors assume the same position before it as the picture is being taken.

Act Three Scene Three Bonhoeffer writing his letters from prison Tegel February l, l944

Bonhoeffer. Dear Eberhardt: And since one day you will be called to write my biography, I want to put the most complete material possible at your disposal! So!

Tegel March 9, l944

Bonhoeffer.

Dear Eberhardt: I’ve heard through my parents again today that you’re at least finding things tolerable, and although that’s not very much (for we want life to be more than just ‘tolerable’, it is some comfort, as long as we look on our present condition as only a kind of status intermedius. “…n’tolerable” was the favorite expletive of Wittgenstein, by the way. If only we knew how long this purgatory is going to last! I shall have to wait till May. Isn’t this dawdling shameful? I haven’t yet answered your remarks about Michelangelo, Burckhardt, and hilaritas. I found them illuminating–at any rate. what you say about Burckhardt’s theses. But surely hilaritas means not only serenity, in the classical sense of the word (Raphael and Mozart); Walther v.d. Vogelweide, the Knight of Bamberg, Luther, Lessing, Rubens, Hugo Wolf, Karl Barth — to mention only a few– also have a kind of hilaritas , which I might describe as confidence in their own work, boldness and defiance of the world and of popular opinion, a steadfast certainty that in their own work they are showing the world something good (even if the world doesn’t like it), and a high-spirited self-confidence. The Greeks had an old word for it–”thymos”. You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to; and this is where I miss you most of all, because I don’t know anyone else with whom I could so well discuss them to have my thinking clarified. What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience–and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious’. Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the ‘religious a priori’ of mankind. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of ‘religion’. But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless, and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any ‘religious’ reaction?)–what does that mean for Christianity? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our ‘Christianity’, and that there remain only a few ‘last survivors of the age of chivalry’, or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as ‘religious’. Are they to be the chosen few ? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgement must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity–and even this garment has looked very different at different times–then what is a religionless Christianity? The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God–without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless – secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ek-klesia , those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here? {As there were often bombing raids, we could have one here.}

Act Three Scene Five

Bonhoeffer.

Just as Luther had Table Talks, so I have Tegel Talks. It horrified me when I read about how the French passed a law that allowed women to get a divorce from their husbands if they came back from the front with their faces shot off, because, legally, they had lost their identity. No one should be forced to live with someone without an identity, against their will, not even wives, so goes the French sense of justice. I’m glad I’m not a lawyer. Lawyers decide cases like that. I wouldn’t know where to begin. We have had a guard here who has had his face shot off–Lance-Corporal Berg. He is terribly disfigured. If he were French and married his wife would divorce him. He is back from the Front, without a face, and he has been assigned guard duty here at Tegel. All someone has to say is that they can’t stand his looks: they will transfer him! I once saw an etching by Max Beckmann from his “Hell Series”. What was the title: Nachhauseweg. Beckmann, himself, meets “The Lance- Corporal” on a street, looking at the shattered face, points to his soul: “I, too,” Beckmann says to “The Lance- Corporal”, “I, too, have been shattered in the depths of my soul; your face is my soul.” My. My. And now that (!) “Lance-Corporal” returns, the second time, the 2nd World War: Corporal Hitler. The revenge of the Corporal in the German Army. It is the Curse of Verdun: a Corporal will destroy you. A Corporal will smash your culture to pieces. A Corporal will divide you for generations. A corporal will make you lose your sense of human decency.

Act Three Scene Six

At this point Adolf Hitler enters the stage. He is in full uniform. He is spotlighted.

[A Quote: "In this disjointed world there can be no conversation between individuals; no dialogue exists, for each one talks to himself after the fashion of monologists. Monology, which even in discussion addresses primarily the self, signifies that one knows nothing of the partner, that one attaches no importance to his presence; it signifies lack of love. Monology and deficiency of love correspond to one another. By noisiness and shoutings, pretense is made that one is talking to others and not to one's self. Long before Hitler, genuine discussion between persons no longer existed, either in the field of politics or in the meetings of scientists and artists. the speeches in parliament were monologues; anybody who made a speech strangely resembled a pupil who all by himself recites aloud some piece he wants to memorize; nobody listened to him but himself; it was a monologue. And it was the same with the speeches of scientists and artists. This monology was still more augmented through Hitler. Never did any of his speeches call for an answer. His speeches were nothing but monologues, enormous accumulations of monologic cries; those colossal cry-monuments of Hitlerian speeches towered over the people and overwhelmed them in the same manner that a colossal stone monument overwhelms, no matter whether it be beautiful or ugly; for the colossal, as it towers in isolation over a plain, is effective as such. "That is the most miserable manner by which nations decay in their civic life: the people fall into the bestial habit of thinking of nothing but their own specific needs; they fall into extreme touchiness or rather into extreme arrogance like wild beasts which jump and go crazy at the mere touch of one hair. And as in numbers they increase and in body are heaped together, they live as horrible beasts in utter desolation of soul and everyone by his own will, since not two are of the same mind because each pursues but his own pleasures and whims." (Vico, Scienza Nuova.) Hitler In Ourselves, by Max Picard, p. l25-126 ]

Hitler’s Soliloquy:

My name is Adolf Hitler. People know me by Schikelgruber, the man who grabbed at fate. I was a Corporal in the German army; that gave me my raison d’etre ! My father was a minor official in a small Austrian village; I did poorly in school; I slept until noon and had bad study habits. I was wounded in the war and won the Iron Cross. Then came l9l9 and the German Socialist Workers Party–the Nazi Party. I was one of the speakers. I was arrested and convicted of treason and given a prison sentence of five years, although I only served nine months. It was just enough time to write Mein Kampf. I represent the revolt of the Corporal. It is a revolt from below. It is appropriate that we meet in beer halls, where, under the tables, old men piss down their canes in order to avoid detection. I love the sound of the word “putsch.” It is true: I have read Nietzsche. I am the revolt of the Superman, but understood as a Corporal in the army. I am the Corporal of the Higher Order Act, albeit the Superman from below. My being fills the void in every German. When men came back from the front after the lst World War with their faces shot off, when these men became a common sight in downtown Berlin, with their crutches and bandages, when corpses were carried through the streets, like large loaves of bread, and old people averted their faces, or acted as if they did not see, it was then that I decided to pull rank. The Corporal will triumph: the one who takes orders will give them! I am Germany’s revenge for being stabbed in the back; I am the redemption of that betrayal. Obedience, Honor, Greatness–these are the mottos of the mass communicator, the substitute emperor. I reach people over the radio in their kitchen–the seven million unemployed. Call my bluff? My response is: blitzkrieg! I want your sympathy; your empathy. If you were all Germans, you would be good at summoning these moods. To summon your moods and always have them obey, that was a goal of mine. Do you know how I succeeded? I overcame the ‘imp’ in impulse. I identified with it. This ‘imp’ is the Corporal of the psyche! If you really want to know: I am the Unknown Soldier of the rank and file. I come from nowhere! I have no history, certainly not in terms of German history, certainly not in terms of the German Reformation. I know nothing of the struggle of Peter and Paul. I am pope, bishop, monk, and council, through the immediacy of my divine inspiration. To understand my basis for action, the source of my struggle, go back to the biblical period of the Judges, when inspiration came upon individual men, raised up by God, in the power of their own authority. I am a throwback to such times. I am such a mighty warrior–it is the blessing of my charisma to be so. This charisma is my license to be cruel. Cruelty. You want to talk about cruelty. I’ll tell you about cruelty. Go to China one hundred years ago. One hundred million Chinese died of starvation in the l9th century. Before that, whole families were executed, through as many generations as were alive at the time. Women, children, infants, cousins, uncles, aunts, and relatives of whatever distance, just so you were related, in the same family tree of a given author. The whole tree was exterminated. And this was over a book the author wrote and the emperor thought was disrespectful. I have this cruelty in me. I understand the question is asked: “Can Hitler be saved?” What is meant by such nonsense? I am the one who saves. I am the bringer of salvation. Everyone recognizes this when they salute me with “Heil Hitler!” “Heil” means the health of salvation. The whole man healed. We are the saviours of the whole man! Salvation is an act of cosmic healing. This is what I mean to Germany. Nature, the social order, and humanity are all united in the healing power I have mastered according to my will. So don’t talk to me about salvation. We will go down in history as those who stormed heaven. We have taken salvation by force. Everything is pardoned in advance. Heil Hitler!

Act Three Scene Seven After the soliloquy of Hitler, Bonhoeffer prepares in his cell for his last communion. Low Sunday. Quasimodo Sunday. April 8, l945.

Bonhoeffer’s sermon: “As newborn babes…” The Sunday: Quasi Modo Geniti Texts: Old Testament Genesis 32: 22–30 Jacob/Israel Wrestling with the angel: Peniel who touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh. It is the place of the proper name. Isaiah 6.5 New Testament 1 John 5:4–l2 John 20: l9–31 Thomas Didymus. Bethge gives the following texts: Isa. 53.5 With his stripes we are healed. l Pet. l:3.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!

Bonhoeffer’s Sermon:

Dearly Beloved: Grace and glory be to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. May the blessings of the Holy Spirit be upon you. Sursum corda! We lift our hearts up unto God. We are asked to think about Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is wrestling for the proper name. The outcome of this wrestling is for Jacob to be named Israel. Israel means ‘history’. It is the moment where we enter history as we know it. This is the gift the Jews share with us. They created the historical consciousness of our Western tradition. Abraham was called out of Ur of Chaldees into history. The God who called him is the God of history. Then the Children of Abraham went down into Egypt. How long did they go down? What was the time of their sojourn and their exile? The angel touched Jacob in the thigh. Pythagoras had a golden thigh. He must have wrestled with an angel. There is more to this than meets the eye. What is a golden thigh? It is angelic alchemy. It is reconciling the swine in ourself, as some would call it, with our angel. It is to become whole. It is the meaning of salvation, our ultimate health, when we are called into being by our proper name. Save and whole and heal are all the same word. This is the basis for the proper name. Our proper name is the name of our salvation. For this reason we are given a new name or let’s say that those who have been saved for us have been given a new name and have entered history in order to save us, in order to pass on their name to us, the name of their salvation. This is the tradition of the proper name. The new name. The saving name. It is the name in the depths of things, the name of the ultimate presence, the name we long to say when we speak at all, the longing in our speech, what our speech longs for. This spiritual wrestling for the proper name overcomes our duplicated self-consciousness, the splits and gaps in our soul. This is the meaning of the symbol of the golden thigh. It means overcoming the imp in impulse, our wayward and arbitrary wilfullness, the spontaneity that is self-destructive. It makes our spontaneity pure, like mountain water, like the mountain water of Norway. I have tasted this water. I know pure water like I know the meaning of the golden thigh. The purity of heart is to will one thing. This is the golden thigh of Pythagoras. The Angel’s touch. The healing of our ancient wound. The scar of sin, the stigma of finitude is turned to gold. The impulse to self- destruction in this body of death is purified. How wonderfully ironic that the sign for this healing is a limp, because we are dislocated, after the angel has touched us and has given us our proper name. Our golden thigh makes us limp. When I think of Jacob wrestling with the angel, I think of Paul wrestling with his thorn in the flesh. He, too, went through a name change. He, too, wrestled with himself over his identity. He threw stones at the Christians when his name was Saul. Was that his proper name? He thought they were a heretical sect and that they should be wiped out. Then he became Paul. Like Jacob/Israel, he was a man with a new proper name, a new identity. He wrestled with his thorn in the flesh, his version of the limp. What was it? A lack of self-confidence? Despair over his calling and his work? Despair over his new name? Three times he asked that the thorn be removed and he gets an answer that is good enough for you and good enough for me: “My grace is sufficient for you, because my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Paul accepts this answer and knows from then on that when he is weak, he is strong, because of the sufficiency of grace. Did Jacob prevail because of his weakness, because he was too weak to let go? This is the answer to Jesus falling on the ground and sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he also wrestled with what? God? Jacob’s angel? He calls it his cup of suffering. He does not want to drink his own blood from this cup. He bleeds from his forehead. It is the thorn of Paul in his crown. He wants to be delivered from his work, from his calling as the Christ. He suffers a stupendous lack of self-confidence. He does not want to be crucified. He does not want to submit to being the victim of another cultural murder, as with the founding murder, the murder of the brother–when Cain murdered Abel–where the ground cries out with the blood that is spilled of all the prophets of old. The message is the same for him. My grace is sufficient for you, as well, my son. In the weakness of your death, my strength is made perfect. The thorn that Paul is given is to keep him from being unduly elated by revelations that had taken him into the third heaven; he doesn’t know if it is in the body or out of the body. He saw things there that no one may dare utter. What he saw is that God will be all in all. It is the transfiguration of Paul. He saw what Jesus saw when he said: “It is finished.” This means that all of you are welcome to commune. All of you may drink of it. Drink ye, all, of it, that God may be all in all. Amen.

Bonhoeffer’s Communion.

["In the Mass, every member is invited to be sacrificed or to be ready to be sacrificed for the salvation and the renovation of the world. In the Mass, the first victim invites the others, the partakers, to a service in which they themselves are the offerings." Rosenstock-Huessy.]

At the communion rail: Bonhoeffer officiating: Bergraav, Hitler, Von Moltke, Wittgenstein, Naomi, Freisler, Poelchau, Freya and others. There is even the thought here that just as ‘open communion’ allows for anyone to come to the altar and receive the bread and wine, so, here, as well, the entire audience, in principle, is invited to take part. It is an altar call in order to carry through the meaning of ‘all’, the theme of Bonhoeffer’s Sermon. It raises an interesting question about the relation of worship to theatre, of church services to ‘plays’, and the possibility that God is present in both, in spite of the religious affiliation, whether religious symbols, as well as dramatic performance, can transcend themselves in their intended meaning so as to include everyone.

At the conclusion of the service, two civilians call out from an opened door. “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us!

In the early hours of April 9th, l945 Dietrich was hanged by the Gestapo at Flossenburg. Admiral Canaris, Major-General Oster, Dr. Sack, the advocate Strunck and Captain Gehre were executed together with him. The hanging of Bonhoeffer. The hanging place can be the same as that of Helmuth. He waits for Von Moltke. They will hang together.

FINIS

Note to the reader. I am painfully aware of the awkwardness of the Bonhoeffer play interpolated in my play but I am so struck by its dramatic effect I would like to figure out how to use it even though this may turn out to be impractical due to length. It is included for the edification of the reader.

Freya Von Moltke’s account of her bicycle ride back to Kreisau is unedited because I would have to tailor it accordingly as the play is to be performed. I again include the entire text for the edification of the reader. Freya is alive and well in Vermont at the age of 98.

I spoke to her yesterday.

My former colleague at M.I.T., A. R. Gurney, was asked by me if he would read the play and give me his critical response. He said he would if I followed a practise of his. Cast the play with friends and have them read it; listen to it; and then re-write it. On the occasion of Freya visiting Santa Cruz, I did just that and had her read her part. There was only one line I liked. I never sent it to Gurney. This section is for historical interest and not to be considered as part of the play. It is Bonhoeffer’s experience in prison where he wrote a play about his experience. It is an uncanny example of the situation he found himself in waiting to be executed.

Lance-Corporal Berg The Play within the Play. A one-act by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer wrote a short story about “Lance-Corporal Berg” that is like a small play. It is incorporated directly as a scene here. p. 253 ff., from his LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON.

A slide of Beckmann’s lithograph from his Hell Series–On the Way Home– is shown here.

Act Three Scene Four Bonhoeffer in his prison cell. Bonhoeffer reads as he writes up to the point of Meier speaking.

Bonhoeffer. With a smug and self-satisfied smile, Sergeant-Major Meier takes delivery of a green parcel and hides it away in his brief-case, which he then carefully puts away in his desk. Then he puts on his official face and asks:

Meier

. …and your heart-trouble, Muller?

Muller springs to attention and stutters.

Muller.

Sergeant-Major, my wife…

Meier.

I’m asking about your heart trouble, Muller. It’s –no better? worse?

Muller.

Yes, Sergeant-Major, worse, decidedly worse,’ asserts Muller quickly and in a rather flustered way.

Meier:

But, Muller, perhaps in three months…?

Muller:

‘Yes, Sergeant-Major, of course, certainly, that is, perhaps, yes perhaps, Sergeant-Major, in three months. Three months is a long…’

He breaks off. Muller follows with curious glances the movements of the Sergeant-Major, who takes out a list, makes a brief note after one name and puts the list back in the file. Lance-Corporal Muller takes a deep breath. He wants to say thank you, but feels that this is not permissible.

Meier.

That’s good, Muller, you can go.

Just as Muller has the door-knob in his hand, the Sergeant-Major says almost in passing, without looking at Muller…

Meier.

.and, Muller, you won’t forget…!

Muller.

But, Sergeant-Major…

Muller makes a bow, as though he were standing behind the counter in a shop. Compulsively smiling and bowing again, he goes out. The telephone rings.

Meier.

Wehrmacht Interrogation Prison here, Sergeant-Major Meier speaking–who’s there?–I can’t hear — ah, Major!

Meier comes to attention, his face fixed as a deferential, smiling mask.

Meier.

Pardon me, Major, I had not…about a posting?’

Meier’s voice goes husky.

Meier.

Ah, I understand, Major you want to post a man to us.’ Meier’s voice is quite clear again.

Meier. Of course, Major, naturally, we have a place here– excellent man–comes from the front–badly wounded–quite capable of duty–understanding treatment–comradely handling–but of course, Major–tremendous comradeship here–of course–the man can come immediately –pardon–understanding treatment? But Major, that goes without saying–fighter at the front–thank you, Major.’

He bows, laughs.

Your obedient servant, Major–the Major can rely on me completely — yours to command, Major.

Meier puts down the receiver quickly and in some disquiet.

A new man? I cannot use him. A front-line fighter? These people often introduce such an unattractive tone — they don’t fit here — they see everything differently from us — yes, if one had been out there oneself — yes, perhaps not completely fit for duty — badly wounded? Understanding treatment? Comradeship? The same question twice?

Meier hesitates, shakes his head.

No, in the end I have to make the decisions here.

He murmurs to himself complacently. He reaches for the key of the desk and is just about to open the closed packet when there is a knock at the door. The packet vanishes again immediately. Vexed, Meier calls, ‘Come in!’

The duty sergeant enters, pushing before him a soldier with handcuffs and chains on his legs, so that he stumbles into the office.

Sargeant.

Today’s intake, Sergeant-Major. Deserter. Cell l217.

The prisoner looks round in confusion. He seems overcome with weariness and looks hungry.

Meier.

Would you mind taking up a military attitude, you tramp, roars the Sergeant-Major. Have you never seen a parade ground? The prisoner pulls himself together.

Meier. How old?

Prisoner.

Eighteen years,

Sergeant-Major, Meier.

Occupation?

Prisoner.

School-leaver,

Sergeant-Major. Meier.

Where from?

Prisoner.

The front, Sergeant-Major, Meier. From the front, you swine? Do you know what the consequences of that are?’

Prisoner.

Yes, Sergeant-Major.’ A slight tremor goes through his body.

Meier.

From the front, you cowardly lump? So you’re leaving your comrades in the lurch? You’re undermining discipline and order? You want to put your personal satisfaction first in the middle of a war? You stuff yourself full and go around with whores while every decent man is sacrificing his blood and his life for the fatherland? You’d run after anything with a skirt on?’

Prisoner.

No, Sargeant-Major.’

Meier.

No, you say? are you a liar as well, you gutttersnipe? Why did you desert?’

Prisoner.

I don’t know, Sergeant-Major. It just happened.’

Meier.

You don’t know? It just happened? Don’t you know that the German has a will with which he can overcome the swine within himself? It just happened! That’s a new one! You don’t know why you pulled out? Well, I’ll tell you. I know. Because you’re a miserable piece of scum, who trembles at every shot and who will now get the shot that he deserves on the sand-bags. How many hours were you up at the front, then, you mother’s son, you cut above the rest, you school-leaver, you?

Prisoner.

All the winter,

Meier

Where?

Prisoner.

In Russia.

Meier.

All the winter? Why were you called up, then?

Prisoner.

I volunteered a year ago,

Meier .

..to hang about out there? Did you ever see a Russian?

Prisoner.

I have the Iron Cross, class I, Sergeant-Major.

The gaze of the young prisoner involuntarily shifts to the left breast of the Sergeant-Major, which displays only the unspotted, well-pressed, green cloth of a new uniform. Then he looks the Sergeant-Major straight in the face and is amazed that he looks so strikingly young, healthy, and well-fed. The Sergeant-Major senses this and becomes uncomfortable.

Meier.

The Iron Cross, class I?, he blusters. Then why aren’t you wearing it?

The Sergeant-Major looks with contempt at the faded, torn uniform of the prisoner.

Prisoner.

I took it off myself after I was arrested.

Meier.

Iron Cross Class I? Took it off yourself?

The Sergeant-Major roars with laughter. The sergeant intervenes.

Sergeant.

Sergeant-Major, the Iron Cross class I is entered in his paybooks.

Meier.

In his paybook? You fool, screams the Sergeant-Major, beside himself. ‘Don’t you know that these jokers forge their paybooks, too? Serious falsification of documents. That, too. You wait, my boy, we’ll show you.’ The prisoner is silent. He looks dreadfully tired and

tormented, but his flickering eyes bore deep into the smug face of the Sergeant-Major.

Meier

Where were you arrested?

Prisoner.

I don’t know, Sergeant-Major. I was lying unconscious in the snow.

Meier.

How long were you on the way?

Prisoner.

About twelve hours; then I couldn’t do any more.

Meier.

Where did you want to go?’

Prisoner.

I don’t know. Only away from the front. I simply ran away. I was out of my senses. The others had all run away too. Meier. Then how did those who found you know that you were a deserter?

Prisoner.

Because I told them.

Meier.

Why did you do that, you idiot? Why didn’t you say that your unit was on the retreat?

Prisoner.

Because I had left the post in which I had been placed without orders. Anyone who runs away from the front is cowardly in the face of the enemy and a deserter.

The Sergeant-Major is taken aback.

Meier.

What is your father?

Prisoner.

An officer.

The Sergeant-Major gives the sergeant a sly glance.

Meier.

Take the prisoner back to his cell.

The chains clank as the prisoner comes to attention. The door closes. Sergeant-Major Meier is ill at ease after this conversation. He wants to forget it. He quickly reaches for the packet again, opens it hastily, cuts off a large slice of sausage and bites into it greedily. Involuntarily he touches the left side of his uniform with his hand, as though the gaze of the young soldier prisoner were still burning there.

Meier.

Cursed people, these soldiers from the front, he mutters to himself. Heavy knocking. Sergeant-Major Meier jumps. He has become nervous. The door is opened quickly, as Meier is still gulping down his bite.

Berg.

Lance-Corporal Berg reporting for duty under the Major’s orders.

A quiet, firm voice. Meier puts his jacket straight, strokes his careful parting, looks up and remains speechless for a moment. What he sees can hardly be called a human face. Severe burning, as though caused by a flame thrower, has completely destroyed his face. Pieces of strange flesh have been stuck on; the nose is in shreds, the mouth has no lips, only half the ears are there. The Sergeant-Major tries to pull himself together, but he still stares speechlessly at the face of the man standing before him, upright and youthful.

Meier.

Did the Major send you to us?

Berg.

Yes,

Meier.

Are you still having hospital treatment?

Berg.

No, Sergeant-Major, I’ve been released as cured.

Meier struggles for words.

Meier.

So you think…?, he falters.

Berg.

Yes, Sergeant-Major, I think that I will do my duty here as well as at the front.

The Sergeant-Major shrugs his shoulders.

Meier.

Of course, of course, my friend–the Major–are you married?

Berg.

No, not yet, Sergeant-Major.

Meier.

Not yet. What can this man be hoping for? How old are you?

Berg.

Twenty-eight.

Meier.

As old as I am. He shudders at the thought.

Meier.

What’s your job?

Berg.

Schoolteacher,

Meier.

That life’s finished. Wouldn’t it have been better for such a person if …? The Sergeant-Major does not pursue this thought to its conclusion.

That’s good, you can go. The duty sergeant will give you your orders.

Meier walks up and down his office for a long time without knowing what he is really thinking. He feels an oppressive weight on his heart and stomach as though before some imminent evil. He opens the window and takes a deep breath. He walks up and down again. That comforts him. He finds himself looking neat and good. His new high boots and the close fit of his uniform which he has recently had made give his figure a trim, officer-like look with which he is extremely satisfied. He is at once reminded of the last ladies’ social evening at which he made a strong impression on some of the younger women. He sees himself at the head of the table–but as he tries to conjure up the face of a particularly attractive woman the gruesome mask of the wounded soldier appears to him. Then some adventures of the last weeks go through his head. He had arranged Sekt and an attractive cold dinner. The amazement of his companion.–Again the face. The face–the woman–the dinner–all follow one after the other. He goes to the telephone and asks for the kitchens.

Meier.

Send me Muller immediately.

An hour later, Muller leaves the Sergeant-Major’s office. His last words are…

Muller.

You can rely on me completely, Sergeant-Major. I quite understand. It is really quite impossible.

In front of the door he comes across Lance-corporal Berg, who is returning from his first round of the cells. Muller quickly composes himself and asks with a compulsive laugh, just to say something.

Muller.

Well, how are our scoundrels?

Berg.

Scoundrels?’ I’ve just seen a young man in cell l217–I would be happy if all soldiers were like him. But it’s a shame about him–deserter. If only they would give him one last chance; he would wipe out the disgrace. A shame.

Muller.

No, there’s nothing at all to be done, with a coarse laugh, and makes a gesture to describe the impending fate of the young soldier.

Berg shakes his head.

Berg.

Comrade, were you out there in Russia?

Muller is confused.

Muller.

No, unfortunately not–I have heart trouble–nervous heart trouble. But in the end we also make our sacrifices here, air attacks, the exhausting work with these scoundrels…

Berg.

Hm’– shakes his head again, as far as I’ve seen, those who are sitting here are for the most part comrades who once did a silly thing, but scoundrels–I don’t know, I’m afraid that they’re to be found elsewhere. I don’t want to keep you. I expect you’re on your way to the kitchens. See you later!

Berg turns away and leaves Muller standing.

Muller stammers, wants to say something, but doesn’t know what, thinks for a minute and then says to himself…

Muller.

Well, a young man like that, one like you. Instead of going to the kitchens he goes straight into the sick-bay. There he brings the conversation incidentally round to Berg: excellent man, soldier from the front–understanding treatment–certainly, but one cannot ask too much of a man like that. It’s not really his concern that he had this hard service, etc., etc. He gets a smooth rebuff; Berg is quite fit for duty. Anyway, they can’t understand what it has to do with Muller. Does he have a personal interest? Muller stammers that he only wanted to help; he was a comrade from the front and the Sergeant-Major had had hesitations. He is told that he can report to the Sergeant-Major that his hesitations are groundless. Lunch time. Muller sits by Berg and begins to talk to him with a mellow, amiable smile. He asks about the front. Berg’s injury. Berg is monosyllabic. The Sergeant-Major sits opposite. Berg has to use a straw to drink as there is no feeling to his lips. He does it as unobtrusively as possible. The Sergeant-Major stares at this procedure appalled; Muller turns away. Both think of the next ladies’ social evening. It is simply impossible. During the meal Berg praises the food and says that it is unusually good; now he wants to taste the prisoners’ food immediately afterwards, as in the end they themselves are simply troops at home, whereas the prisoners for the most part have to go back to the front. This remark meets with an icy silence all round. After the meal, when everyone has left the mess, the Sergeant-Major exchanges a few words more with Muller. The next day Muller greets Lance-corporal Berg with special warmth and presses a small packet into his hand.

Muller.

You’ll need this after all you’ve been through! Berg opens it.

Berg.

How have I come to deserve a pound of butter?

At the same moment another NCO goes by.

Berg.

If it’s left over–and I rather wonder about that–I’ll share it among the prisoners in my section. By the way, what the prisoners had was muck. Shame on you!

Muller bites his lips and goes. Berg cannot be won over that way. But Muller is tireless. He knows what it means for himself to put the Sergeant-Major at ease. The next day–breaking a standing rule (but he has the Sergeant-Major behind him!) — he enters into conversation with some of the prisoners from Berg’s section. Doesn’t the fearful disfigurement of his face have an oppressive effect on the prisoners in a situation which is already so grim? Astonished shaking of the head, incomprehending and even explicitly hostile denials are the answer to the question. Muller has to hasten to wipe out the bad impression of his question again with all sorts of gossip. At lunch, Berg, whose mouth muscles do not function properly drops the straw while he is drinking and spills the drink on the table. Indignant head-shaking by the Sergeant-Major and cowardly smirking from Muller. The following day Berg is assigned to supervising visits to the prisoners by their next-of-kin. The Sergeant-Major entertains one of the visiting women in his room afterwards. Later he makes it known through Muller that a visitor has asked him if it is possible to appoint another NCO to supervise the visiting next time; it is impossible for her to utter a word while looking at such a fearfully ravaged face. Berg feels that people are talking about him. He begins to suspect why. At meal time Muller sits next to him.

Berg.

These month-long stretches of imprisonment are nonsense for people who have played foolish pranks. It only corrupts them. A short sharp punishment would be much better.

Muller.

And then what would become of us? I mean…

He now tries in vain to gloss over his previous words.

Muller.

I mean–in the end the people must have committed some offence, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, and in that case it does them no harm to stew for a couple of months.

Berg.

On the contrary, I think that you’re wrong in every respect, shouts Berg, aroused.

Muller.

Be careful, Berg, be careful. You criticize here, and if the Sergeant-Major hears…

Berg.

Quite different people from the Sergeant-Major will hear what is going on here, I can assure you.

Muller goes pale.

The next day, Berg is summoned to the Sergeant-Major.

Meier.

Unfortunately, I have to tell you, Berg, that you have been called away with immediate effect. I’m very sorry. I would very much have liked to keep a soldier from the front like you here. ‘

Berg.

May I ask on what grounds I’ve been posted away, Sergeant-Major?’

Meier.

There is no reason why I should answer that question.’

Berg.

But I insist on an answer, Sergeant-Major!

Meier.

Now take it easy, my dear Berg, I’ll make an exception and tell you. It was an official order.

Berg goes pale. He does not believe what the Sergeant-Major is saying, indeed he is convinced that the Sergeant-Major is lying, but he has no chance of proving it. Berg comes to attention and leaves the office. When the formalities have been settled, he opens the cell of the school- leaver once more and sees the traces of tears in his eyes. However, the face of the young deserter lights up when he sees Berg.

Berg.

What’s the matter, lad?

Prisoner.

I want to go back to the front, Tears spring from his eyes.

Berg.

So do I. Keep your chin up, lad, I’ll go to the General for you. You’ll get out again. But I have to say good-bye to you now. I’m going.

Prisoner.

You’re going? aghast and in dismay. You’re going? Why? Why only you? You were the only one here…..

Berg.

I’ll tell you: the Sergeant-Major didn’t like my face.

Shaken, both are silent. Berg goes to the door.

Berg.

Good-bye, comrade!

Prisoner.

Good-bye, comrade.

An excursus on faith in the mode of negative or apophatic theology, faith without content, leaving it to the Spirit to blow where it listeth.

Grace and peace to you.

St. Paul reading the Letter to the Athenians Georges DeLatour

For it is in him that all the fullness of [...]]]> Paul’s Letter to the Athenians

An excursus on faith in the mode of negative or apophatic theology, faith without content, leaving it to the Spirit to blow where it listeth.

Grace and peace to you.

St. Paul reading the Letter to the Athenians Georges DeLatour

For it is in him that all the fullness of God’s nature lives embodied
and in union with him you too are filled with it.

Colossians 2.9

The Martyrdom of St. Denis also known as Dionysius the Areopagite

Le Retable de saint Denis

Henri Bellechose 1415

The Beheading of St. Denis

Paul’s Letter to the Athenians

A Heretofore Unknown Letter by the Apostle Paul to the Church at Athens

Addressed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Bishop of the Athenian Church,

Paul’s Convert, who, according to legend, became the Patron Saint of France, St. Denis, and also, according to legend, the pseudonymous author, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Taken together they constitute the Dionysian Tradition.

St. Paul
Masaccio 1426

Tempera on wood

Museo Nazionale, Pisa

Responsible for publication:

Paul Lee
The Platonic Academy Press
Santa Cruz, California 95060
2009

Raphael cl513-1514. Mixed media on paper, mounted on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Paul on the Areopagus preaching to the Athenians

with Dionysius in prayerful response.

Preface

This letter of Paul to the Church at Athens was inspired by my interest in Dionysius the Areopagite, the Greek convert of St. Paul, also known as St. Denis, the patron saint of France. (Denis is French for Dionysius.) I utilize the material in Acts, which tells of Paul’s trip to Athens and his sermon at the altar inscribed to An Unknown God, on the Areopagus, where Dionysius is in attendance and is converted.

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there. Some also of the Epicureans and Stoic philosophers met him. And some said, “What would this babbler say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. And they took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is which you present? For you bring some strange things to our ears; we wish to know therefore what these things mean.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.

So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for

‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your poets have said,
‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.”

Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” So Paul went out from among them. But some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

Acts 17: l6–34

Saint Denis. Museum of Art and History. Pierre XVle s.

Introduction

Dionysius’ legend is remarkable, all the more so, because in our time it is relatively unknown, in spite of his profound importance throughout the early medieval period as the link to Neoplatonism and the development of Apophatic or Negative theology. [1] Negative theology is based on a logic of negation through a cancellation of what is posited on the form of “not this”…“not that”…and, through negation of what is posited, moving to higher and higher states of comprehension and understanding, as though mounting a ladder. It is an exercise in self-renunciation and self-surrender, an exercise in repentance understood as the confession of self-delusion. It is an emptying of the mind with the goal of setting reason aside. In this way, Dionysius/St. Denis represents the mystical motif in Christianity.

It may be that adding the third Dionysius in the set, the pseudonymous author of the mystical writings that bear the name of Dionysius, usually referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius, accounts for the unfamiliarity. Three figures under the same name in the course of some hundreds of years may make a tradition but one hard to comprehend after it is buried in the historical past. What? In three different graves? What is separated according to factual history is united in legend. My point is that the three filiations of the legend did it in. It was too much to sustain. And then Luther poured scorn on the tradition. He was against mysticism in the hierarchical tradition of the Roman church and so Dionysius was forgotten, all three of them.

2.

I was introduced to Dionysius in a seminar on mysticism I took with Paul Tillich at Harvard. I reported on St. Bonaventure. Tillich thought I was talking about a bone that went on a venture looking for a dog. I grew self-conscious about my nasal Midwestern twang, especially when he became increasingly agitated; he didn’t know what I was talking about. I felt the same way. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was getting increasingly agitated, as well. I thought my cover was being blown, until he thought of the Latin pronunciation, and then he got it: oh, you mean Bon-a-ven-tura!

I breathed a small sigh of relief and went on. My bluff had not been called.

I can’t remember what sparked my interest later in life in the tradition of Dionysius and his three-fold place in early Medieval Christianity but my interest has grown over the years and has led to this effort.

My interest in the Dionysian tradition and legend prompted me to make a pilgrimage of sorts to France, where I searched out what I could find about his legacy. The first encounter was with a magnificent medieval painting of St. Denis in the Louvre, a very large canvas, depicting, apparently without intending to, the three Denis: the Athenian (Dionysius), the French saint (Denis), and the author of the pseudonymous treatises, as mentioned, who appears some centuries later, (most often referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite), an unknown author, who assumes the name of Dionysius and is the occasion for Neoplatonism entering Christianity. These three, as mentioned, one anonymous, constitute the Dionysian tradition.

I made this threefold association when I looked at the painting in the Louvre because of the depiction of the three stages in the martyrdom of St. Denis. The painting depicts St. Denis in three figures: walking to his execution, his head cut off en route, and falling to the ground. I thought there they are, the three of them: Dionysius, walking to his beheading; St. Denis, beheaded, the martyr; and Pseudo-Dionysius, his head cut off, the Negative Theologian, having lost his mind to Plato.

I attended a service at the Royal Abbaye of St. Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, where Denis is buried, the burial place, as well, of many of the Kings and Queens of France, the first gothic church of Europe. The organ was particularly memorable and made me think I had straddled a jet plane during takeoff. It rumbled my soul.

The priest, in a movingly humble voice, preached a sermon I could barely make out, on the Beatitudes. It was very close to the festival day of St. Denis: October 6^th. The stained glass windows, the history of the place, the Museum close by I eventually was able to visit, the Moslem bazaar just over there, a block away, encroaching on the place with all of its immigrant pressure, the façade of the cathedral, all of it so beautiful and evocative of its meaning, the very place where Joan of Arc stood and hung up her arms on the altar, I knew I was at the source of the legend of their Patron Saint, transplanted to France from Greece. After all, Paris is named after the Paris of Troy, who brought Greek civilization to France, just as Aeneas brought it to Rome. Dionysius/Denis was to follow, bringing Christianity.

I found a St. Denis in Saintes, France, where I stayed in a remodeled nunnery with spectacular vaulted brick corridors. I walked outside and in the clear light of day, there he was, standing in a niche, in a courtyard, on the wall of the adjoining church, holding his head in his hands. I went into the church and high on one wall was a severed head on a plinth. Who else? I saw other sculptings of St. Denis at the Cluny Museum in Paris, magnificent examples, among a collection of overwhelming beauty of the Kings of Israel, unearthed during the construction of the Paris subway, where the revolutionaries had thrown them, just as they had scattered the remains of the Kings and Queens of France from their tombs at the Royal Abbaye, where they wound up in the nearby ditches. The revolutionaries moved a cannon in place to blow it up and were persuaded not to because it would make a good weather station thanks to the tall spires; rational enlightenment at work. They put up a statue of Athena on the altar.

A few blocks from our apartment, in the 7^th Arrondisement, near the Seine, on my way to my favorite cheese shop, Barthelemy’s, I caught an image in the corner of my eye, as I passed an antique store and did a quick doubletake. There was a four foot St. Denis, a granite sculpting, holding his head in his hands, standing at the back of the showcase window. I went in to inquire, stunned that it might be for sale and found out it was from the l4th century. It was for sale. One thing led to another and I bought it for my 70^th birthday and had it shipped to Santa Cruz, where it stands outside my front door as the patron saint of my home and my life. Identifying with it, I thought that instead of wearing my heart on my sleeve, I would hold my head in my hands.

I read what I could about St. Denis and about the Athenian Dionysius and Pseudo-Dionysius. It occurred to me that the mysterious “man” about whom Paul boasts, the “man” who was carried into the Third Heaven and who saw things there that no one may dare utter, could have been Dionysius, although most think Paul is referring to himself. Why in the third person?

I wrote to Jaroslav Pelikan, the famous historian of Church History. He shrugged and wrote back: maybe. I wrote to Krister Stendhal, my old New Testament professor at Harvard Divinity School. He neglected to answer.

I thought about “The Third Man” as a principle of Christian self-interpretation, pointing away from oneself, to another, transcending the ego-self.

I thought about the consistency of Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, referring to the Son of Man, rather than to himself, always pointing away from himself, except for one variant that is probably misleadingly translated.

The high priest, before whom Jesus is brought, asks: “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the chief priest tears his mantle and charges Jesus with blasphemy and they all condemn him to death, spit on him, cover his face, and strike him, saying “Prophesy!”

A variant translation could read: “You say that I am.” [2] It is of interest that even though it is translated “I am,” Jesus then refers to the Son of Man in the third person as though speaking of another. [3] He may have acknowledged that he was the Christ, but he speaks of the Son of Man, as another, as he consistently does in the rest of the Gospel, where it is not clear what his relationship is to the one of whom he speaks, as though he is not clear, either. It slowly dawns on him, maybe as late as the agony in the Garden, that he himself is to suffer the fate of the Son of Man and that he has been speaking of a figure he himself must assume and become: The Son of Man/Suffering Servant.

Now that it dawns on him, he asks to be delivered from this fate. He prays three times to be delivered. He falls on the ground in agony and sweats until he bleeds, calling upon his Father, for whom all things are possible, those remarkably poignant words, and asks to have the cup of suffering taken from him. He doesn’t want to drink his own blood.

How utterly different, to the point of a complete and radical contrast, is the Jesus of Mark from the Jesus of John, for whom the “I am” sayings are paramount, the Logos made flesh, full of grace and truth. Not so in Mark. Jesus contradicts the disciples’ expectations with his Son of Man sayings, conflated with the Suffering Servant songs of the Second Isaiah. This is the critical point. Jesus infuses the content of the Son of Man sayings, the conquering Man From Above, the Heavenly Conqueror, with the fate of the Suffering Servant, who will be delivered over into the hands of the enemy and put to death on a cross. The Son of Man will assume the role of the Suffering Servant, an apparent contradiction.

It must be emphasized that the favored title in Mark’s Gospel is the Son of Man and this title is in conflict with the title: the Christ or Messiah, because the Son of Man is the Suffering Servant, expressing the Paradox with more force than the title, the Christ. It is to the disadvantage of the Son of Man/Suffering Servant title that the Christ becomes a second name for Jesus, as though absorbing the meaning of the former titles.

There is a catalogue of titles in the Gospels that are used to speak of the Christ, or the Messiah, or the Anointed One: Son of God, Son of David, Lord, Son of Man, Good Shepherd, Logos, the “I am” sayings in John, etc. Each title indicates some aspect of Jesus’ vocation. The generic title, to the point of becoming a last name, is the Christ. It is important to recognize that the revelatory breakthrough in the event that comes to be called the Christ-Event is expressed in the various titles that attempt to capture the meaning. They are revelatory responses to the revelatory event and althogether constitute a complex of meaning, a symbolic filiation.

The third person Son of Man sayings in Mark refer to the one who is expected. Jesus points to the one who is to come, as though he speaks of another, making himself a forerunner, not unlike John the Baptist, with whom he is confused. It turns out he is a forerunner to himself which he slowly comes to comprehend. I have no idea why the Son of Man title seems to fade into the background in the later tradition after its prominence in Mark, although there are an equal number of references in Mark and John—fourteen.

Given their selfish ambitions for following Jesus, the disciples think they are associated with someone who has political ambitions just like they do. Jesus, as the Messiah, as the conquering hero, will overthrow the Romans and usher in the Kingdom of God in which they hope to occupy top positions as his erstwhile companions, who have sacrificed everything to follow him. Even if they understood the Son of Man theme as that of a heavenly conqueror who will overthrow the enemy, they balk at the notion that the Son of Man will be put to death by the enemy. This is not their understanding of the Christ with whom they have thrown in their lot. The Son of Man/Messiah/Christ is to carry their political ambitions into the transcendent vision of the Kingdom of God about to be ushered in. The disciples in the Gospel of Mark are the early examples of fundamentalists and literalists—they are obtuse. They don’t get it and their misunderstanding gets in the way of comprehension and understanding. They are self-deluded, worse than obtuse. They have been contaminated, as it were, by the mental climate of the time, where the Kingdom of God is confused with the overthrow of the powers that be in two versions—the immanent-political and the transcendent-universal meaning of the New Age, to be ushered in on the wings of angels from on high. The cosmic outcome supersedes the historical.

In commenting on the change in emphasis from the immanent-political to the transcendent-universal side in the idea of the Kingdom of God, Tillich states: “This was most impressive in the so-called apocalyptic literature of the intertestamental period, with some predecessors in the latest parts of the Old Testament. The historical vision is enlarged upon and superseded by a cosmic vision. The earth has become old, and demonic powers have taken possession of it. Wars, disease, and natural catastrophes of a cosmic character will precede the rebirth of all things and the new eon in which God will finally become the ruler of the nations and in which the prophetic hopes will be fulfilled. This will not happen through historical developments but through divine interference and a new creation, leading to a new heaven and a new earth. Such visions are independent of any historical situation and are not conditioned by human activities. The divine mediator is no longer the historical Messiah, but the Son of Man, the Heavenly Man. This interpretation of history was decisive for the New Testament.” [4]

3.

Jesus is confused about the Son of Man in speaking of another, one who is to come and who will suffer a fate the opposite of what is expected; the Heavenly Conqueror is not the one who triumphs over the enemy but the Crucified Suffering Servant. Is this a retrospective correction of the failure of his Messianic ministry put into his mouth as the consequence of the Crucifixion? An after- the- fact redaction now that the disciples eyes are opened and the messianic mystery (the Suffering Servant/Son of Man) is revealed? His uneasy references to the Son of Man/Suffering Servant sound like a retrospective reading and the carrier of the disciples’ repentance. This is the crux of the hermeneutical puzzle—how to understand the interpolation of an awareness of the outcome, a future point of view, into the biblical narrative, as if narrating events as they happen in the present tense. The narrative and narrator know already the outcome of the story they tell and they are influenced at every step by this knowledge of the outcome. The conflict between the misunderstanding of the disciples and the Son of Man/Suffering Servant sayings of Jesus illustrate this double awareness. It is as if you can hear Mark saying we know now what we did not know then and we are going to relive the conflict even though it drove us to the extremities of suicide and despair.

A careful reading of Mark makes it clear that this is the case, thrown into relief by the rejection of the Son of Man sayings by the disciples, who expect a Messiah that will overthrow the enemies and lead them into glory, not ignominy, defeat and despair. They were not able to accept the Son of Man as the Suffering Servant, they cannot tolerate a Paradox in their fundamentalist/literalist relation to Jesus. No wonder they don’t understand the parables. Wait a minute! We need to untangle this point. If the Gospels are retroactive accounts of what happened and not to be read as a simple straightforward narrative like a newspaper, then how are they to be read? Remember they come after Paul’s Letters. There is a gap between event and the account of the event. The account is a retrospective account. We are now in a situation of telling you, proclaiming, what happened and we are going to introduce our interpretation of what happened into the account. How could we not? Look at our plight. We were grasped by him. He called us and we followed. And we desperately betrayed him at every turn and misunderstood what he was about. We projected on to him our own idolatrous fixations and wanted to fulfill ourselves and our ambitions by identifying with him. Little did we know that this was going to end in ignomy and crucifixion. This is the last thing we expected in spite of what he told us. We were deaf and blind. We were self-deluded. We fell asleep in his hour of agony. We forsook him and fled. We denounced and denied him. Peter swore about it when he was asked if he even knew him. And then the cock crowed three times as though to echo the agony of the one he denies, when he asked three times that the cup of suffering be taken from him.

Mark could be thought of asking: what saved us from suicide or insanity, given the stakes? The Resurrection is his answer even though there is no reference to the Resurrection in his Gospel, only an empty tomb. This is the hidden text in the narrative of the Gospels altogether. The Resurrection is hidden but presupposed. It doesn’t come at the end. It is the beginning—the always already given, the gift of grace. We recount the life and death of our Lord from the point of view of the always already given gift of grace. This is what gives us the strength to tell our story of weakness and misunderstanding and betrayal and false ambitions and failure as disciples. It is the confession of weakness because where we are weak there we are strong. We became transparent to ourselves and glory be to God we have nothing to hide. I, Mark, am the spokesperson for Paul, as you will see.

4.

I have Paul instruct Mark in these matters, Paul who hardly mentions Jesus as such, but refers to the Resurrected Christ, who takes little or no interest in the Jesus according to the flesh, the historical figure, the subject of the Gospels. It is important to remember that the Gospels were written decades after the Epistles of Paul.

I do not find it difficult to think of Mark’s Gospel as the Gospel according to Paul, even though tradition has it that Mark was influenced by St. Peter. I allow for this in my interpretation of the theme of the confession of misunderstanding of the disciples. The Third Person trope serves this purpose of thinking of Mark’s Gospel as Paul’s Gospel. Not I, but the Other. Not I, but the One of whom I speak. Jesus consistently points beyond himself to the Son of Man. Look to him and don’t make me an object of your idolatrous fixation as is the wont of the disciples who think he is going to fulfill their expectations not contradict them. It could be said that the misunderstanding of the disciples drives Jesus to his crucifixion in order to smash their idolatrous fixation. Again we refer to the fact that the prophetic Jesus is primary in Mark and utterly unlike the sacramental Jesus of John who repeatedly points to himself.

Paul Tillich makes the following point on this very issue: “From this follows the inner religious struggle of ….God against religion. In every man there is a tendency toward idolatry; in every religion, a stronger one.”[5]

Make the point about the retrospective understanding as the point of the conflict. Jesus’ self-understanding is the retrospective understanding of the disciples’ confession of self-delusion.

Now consider the immensity of the theme of the misunderstanding of the disciples in Mark, what in the scholarly literature is known as the Messianic Secret, first adumbrated by Wrede, the German New Testament theologian. The disciples don’t get it even though it is given to them to know. They betray their confusion, misunderstanding, self-deception and self-delusion in story after story, culminating in the aweful climax when Mark’s Gospel almost shatters itself: “And they all forsook him, and fled.” And then, as if to add profound insult to ultimate misery, we have the image of a nude youth, his garment torn from him, running out of the Garden of Gethsemene, into the dead of night.

How are we to understand this theme of misunderstanding, self-delusion, abandonment and betrayal? Why are the disciples depicted as being so obtuse to the point of delusion, after their own ambitious gain, and utterly unmindful of Jesus’ sayings about the Son of Man, quick to reject them and rebuke Jesus? They think he doesn’t understand what he is saying. They think Jesus has got it wrong and needs to be corrected. The crisis in this conflict comes to a head in that moment of pure encounter when Jesus asks them who people think he is, bringing up the question of his identity in the most direct way. They answer that the response of the people varies between John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the prophets. Jesus asks them who they think he is, and Peter says: “You are the Christ!”

You would think that Jesus would say something about the meaning of the Christ and his relation to the term, but instead he speaks not of the Christ but of the Son of Man and voices the contradiction.

“And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.”

Jesus judges Peter’s response as Satanic when Peter rejects the prediction that the Son of Man will suffer death at the hands of the enemy rather than overthrow them. The point of the misunderstanding is the conflict between two titles: Christ and the Son of Man. Peter, along with the rest of the disciples, does not know what is meant by the Son of Man and his fate and never asks. Moreover, they reject the title and never use it themselves even though Jesus repeatedly and consistently does, without identifying himself with it. It is obviously an explicit theme of Mark to illustrate and dramatize the conflict. The Son of Man of Jesus is not their Christ.

This is the crux of the long process of misunderstanding between Jesus and the disciples. From this point on the road to Caesarea Philippi it only gets worse. We will document the episodes where the disciples grow increasingly alienated to the point where they don’t even want to talk to Jesus anymore so confused and perplexed are they. They get stuck in their self-delusion.

The conflict is opened at Mark 4:10, when Jesus announces that the secret of the Kingdom of God is given to the disciples, who are inside, whereas others who are outside are told parables, so that they will look and look and see nothing, hear and hear, but understand nothing… It is clear from the text that this includes the disciples who don’t get the parable even though “the secret” is given to them.

Finally, at 4:34, it reads: “He never spoke to them except in parables; but privately to his disciples he explained everything.”

Even so, they don’t get it.

They’re in a boat during a storm and are sinking and they are afraid and Jesus hushes the storm to a dead calm and the disciples are awestruck and ask who is this man? Jesus calls them cowards, lacking in faith. After a few more episodes, we read: “After this he allowed no one to accompany him except Peter and James and James’s brother John.”

Another episode with the disciples again in a boat in a storm, after the feeding of the multitude with loaves and fishes, depicts Jesus walking out on the lake. In what reads like a humorous touch, Mark mentions that Jesus is going to walk past them. The disciples think it is a ghost and are terrified. Jesus tells them to calm down, gets in the boat and the wind is stilled and the disciples, according to various renderings, are “completely dumbfounded,” “perfectly beside themselves,” “sore amazed in themselves beyond measure,” and then Mark introduces an odd line to account for their perplexity: “for they had not understood the incident of the loaves”, and then he says why: “their minds were closed.” As the reader wonders why this is the case, because it has been given to them to know, the episode at 7:17 provokes Jesus to ask them if they are as dull as the rest in their lack of comprehension of the parable about the inside and outside of defilement.

“Now they had forgotten to take bread with them; they had no more than one loaf in the boat. He began to warn them: ‘Beware,’ he said, ‘be on your guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.’ They said among themselves, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ Knowing what was in their minds, he asked them, ‘Why do you talk about having no bread? Have you no inkling yet? Do you still not understand? Are your minds closed? You have eyes: can you not see? You have ears: can you not hear? Have you forgotten? When I broke the five loaves among five thousand, how many basketfuls of scraps did you pick up?’ ‘Twelve’, they said. ‘And how many when I broke the seven loaves among four thousand?’ They answered, ‘Seven.’ He said, ‘Do you still not understand?’

Put yourself in their place. Understand what? What does the feeding of the multitude have to do with the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod? And what has bread got to do with it, let alone the number of loaves?

Then comes the encounter on the road to Caesarea Philippi and the rebuke of Peter; as he looks at the disciples, he knows they all misunderstand.

Then comes the Transfiguration, an episode of great complexity, a prefiguration of the Resurrection. Again, as before, the enjoinment to secrecy is urged by Jesus, not to tell anyone until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. They don’t know what he is talking about and discuss this among themselves making reference also to the coming of Elijah. And now Jesus asks: “Yet how is it that the scriptures say of the Son of Man that he is to endure great sufferings and to be treated with contempt?”

What scriptures? Is he referring to Isaiah? Is the Son of Man the new term for the Suffering Servant? Does Jesus conflate the two? Has anyone before Jesus referred to the Son of Man as the Suffering Servant? Does he refer to Ezekiel, IVth Esdras and the Man from Above, the Heavenly Man, the Son of Man of the apocalypse? [6] What has prompted him to identify the Son of Man with the Suffering Servant?

It is difficult to untangle these passages. The disciples are not the only ones who are confused.

“They now left that district and made a journey through Galilee. Jesus wished it to be kept secret; for he was teaching his disciples, and telling them, ‘The Son of Man is now to be given up into the power of men, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’ But they did not understand what he said, and were afraid to ask.”

Incomprehension turns into alienation.

What should happen next but their arguing among themselves who is the greatest With respect to what? Misunderstanding? Incomprehension? Lack of faith?

Another blooper follows: they see a man driving out devils in Jesus’ name but he doesn’t belong to the union, he is not one of them, and they try to stop him. Jesus is very patient with them. He has already put a child in front of them as though they were the children in question but the point is lost on them. He tells them that whoever receives a child in his name receives him and the One who sent him; soon thereafter, when children are brought to him, the disciples scold them for it. Jesus is indignant.

Then comes the stranger who is otherwise identified as the Rich Young Ruler and asks Jesus what he has to do to win eternal life. Jesus recites the commandments. The stranger says he has kept them, so Jesus tells him to sell everything and give it to the poor and follow him and the stranger’s face fell and he went away with a heavy heart; for he was a man of great wealth.

The disciples are amazed. Then he addresses them as children and tells them about how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven; easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. More astonished than ever they ask: ‘Then who can be saved?’ And Jesus answers with his key theme: For men it is impossible, but for God everything is possible.

Peter reminds Jesus that they have fulfilled the condition, the ‘impossible’ condition that the Rich Stranger could not fulfill; they have left everything to become his followers. Peter gets the point without realizing it’s meaning. There is no condition to be met; with men it is impossible. They stand to gain nothing. They do not have a favored position just because they left behind everything they had to follow Jesus, exactly what the Rich Young Ruler could not do. His impossible condition is not their possible one. Jesus says many who are first will be last and the last first. Does this mean the Rich Young Ruler will be first and the disciples last? Is this an aphorism meant to express the ‘impossible’?

Mark l0 announces the approach to Jerusalem and Jesus repeats what will happen to him as though the identification with the Son of Man has been made even though Jesus again speaks of the Son of Man as another in the third person.

The Sons of Zebedee, those Sons of Thunder, act as though they have not been listening, because they put in their bids for the positions of power and glory on his right and on his left, not knowing they are reserved for two thieves, on either side of the Cross. It is a pathetic request and an illustration of their obtuse misunderstanding. Would they be willing to be crucified on his right and left hand to share in the power and glory of his weakness and humiliation?

Jesus admonishes them to wake up: keep awake! As though anticipating their sleeping during his agony in the garden. Evening or midnight, cock-crow or early dawn… How can one not associate this remark with Peter’s impending betrayal as the cock crowed.

Again they rebuke the woman who anoints him, like they rebuked those who brought children to him. They think the ointment with which he is anointed could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus says she has anointed his body beforehand for burial. This is an amazing moment. He turns the act of adoration and devotion, his anointing, into the ignominy of his death and burial. And Judas leaves to betray him.

At the Last Supper he predicts that one of them will betray him and that they will all fall away from their faith. One by one they said to him, ‘Not I, surely?’ Peter answers, ‘Everyone else may fall away, but I will not. Even if I must die with you, I will never disown you.’ And they all said the same.

And then the end comes where the empty tomb is a hollow echo in an abyss.

Why do I like Mark? It is bare bones. Raw. The earliest testimony, after Paul. I like the misunderstanding theme because it functions as an extended narrative on repentance. I have had recourse to the perfect tense to account for the fact that Mark knows the outcome at the beginning. The narrative is retrospective in principle and therefore a double vision prevails—the telling of the events as though they are happening as reported and the awareness shot through the narrative that the outcome is known in advance. Fundamentalist literalism shuts down this double perspective and leaves the reader in the same position as the disciples before the Crucifixion. The reader doesn’t get it because the reader can’t get it on a literalist reading. The text is already interpreted from the double point of view, which is why we invoke the perfect tense to express the doubling: it is a retrospective recall told from the position of knowing it all already. This is the loop of grace where the end is in the beginning contained in the always already given!

Mark knows that Jesus is the Son of Man, the one of whom he speaks, the Messiah, the Christ. Why does he depict Jesus in such a way that Jesus has to learn this; he has to have it disclosed to him as a slowly dawning and inevitable confrontation with the terrible truth? Jesus, in Mark, is the most human of all the gospels. And the disciples are so human they are the epitome of what we call existential, which is a step up from dumb bunnies.

The confession of misunderstanding informs the gospel from start to finish. This is the crux of the double vision. The revelation is hidden, it is a secret, even though it is known at every point, but it is concealed in order to expose the disciples for what they are—ordinary men who failed and who were weak and subject to the most common human frailties. And they were crucified with him and they were raised from the dead with him.

Does Mark insert the Son of Man sayings as the key to this double vision and this concealment? The disciples act like they never hear what Jesus says about the Son of Man and if they get an inkling they reject it and try to correct him. Is this prophecy about the fate of the Son of Man, the insertion of the outcome of the ministry of Jesus, read out throughout the narrative, as a secret to be revealed, a secret no one can comprehend, not even Jesus, until he realizes he has been speaking about a fate he must fulfill, when it becomes his destiny, when he says, not my will but Thy will?

The rush to get to these words—not my will, but thy will, in reading the narrative, needs to be checked, in favor of the agony in the garden where he asks to have the cup of suffering taken from him. His will is transparently clear. We need to pause here and hold this thought. He does not want to be the one of whom he has spoken. He does not want to suffer the fate of the Son of Man if that fate involves crucifixion as he has repeatedly said. He thought he spoke of another and now he knows he is the one. He wants out of the messianic defeat, as though he knows in his heart that a crucified messiah is no messiah at all, even though he has stated repeatedly that it is the fate of the Son of Man.

And so the word of Paul comes to Jesus, when Paul prays to have his thorn taken from him, his very own cup of suffering, Paul’s own version of his agony in the garden; the word to Paul is the word to Jesus, as well, about the sufficiency of grace made perfect in weakness.

Doesn’t Paul say that he asks three times to have the thorn removed, just as Jesus asks three times to have the cup removed? In the background for both is the transfiguration, although Paul refers to ecstatic revelations.

From transfiguration to the agony in the garden, from the cup of suffering for Jesus and from being too elated over ecstatic revelations to the thorn in the flesh for Paul, the tropes or experiential figures are comparable. What is so amazing is the word that comes to Paul that interprets or answers his suffering, just as it answers the suffering of Jesus. The Cross is the answer. God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, the weakness of the Cross. This is the sufficiency of grace. It is a tough message to comprehend. One has to sit with it in silence for a long time.

This is what Paul means by being in Christ, identifying with his suffering, participating in his saving grace. The triumph of Paul in these lines is his ability to make sense of his having the mind of Christ and his participation in his suffering.

These words from God to Paul in his agony are among the greatest words of Paul and equal to the passage about the meaning of prayer, where Paul says we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit bears witness to our spirit, with sighs too deep for words. The strange image is given that prayer is God praying to God, through us, as our witness, sigh unto sigh. Paul asks you to silence yourself in the mystery of its meaning.

In the wordless silence of his communion with the Spirit, the words are given to Paul: my grace is sufficient for you for my strength is made perfect in weakness. The weakness in the Garden leading to the weakness of the Cross is strength to those who perceive it. Paul, then, boasts of weaknesses, because where he is weak, there he is strong. He has figured out the paradox of the crucified Son of Man in his ordeal and struggle with his thorn in the flesh.

Can we attribute the confession of weakness of the disciples in the Gospel of Mark to this insight of Paul? Is this insight the interpretive key? Does Mark’s indictment of the disciples constitute a confession so that he knows all along of the outcome when they will all be saved?

So remember the perfect tense as the retrospective affirmation of the narrative as though told for the first time with the outcome already known: it is an epic in a new sense of the word, an epic that overturns the antique tropes and stands them on their head, through the reversal of themes, where the lowly and the despised and the rejected and the weak are turned inside out and exalted as on high and esteemed and accepted in spite of being unacceptable. [7] The Paradox, the Offense, the Scandal, the Impossible, reign supreme. This is the gist of the Gospel. The perfect past is the ‘already’ of the perfect present on the way to the perfect future. All three tenses of ordinary time are intertwined and interdependent in the Perfect Tense. Therefore, a bifocal vision is needed in reading the Gospels, a bifocal vision of the retrospective timeframe in the structure of the Perfect Tense. It is not a straightforward story told in a matter of fact sort of way; it is a retrospective confession told from the point of view of the outcome with the realization and fulfillment firmly in mind. This is what happens when eternity enters time. We might as well say it: the Resurrection precedes the Crucifixion and informs the Gospels accordingly.

The Crucifixion anticipates the Resurrection and do you know what this is called in the Gospel narrative: the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration, in the account of the Gospel narrative, is the outburst of the Resurrection, as a presupposition of the narrative’s outcome. It is its mirror image. We might as well celebrate Easter at Christmas. It is all one concurrent occurrence, piled up, one upon the other, all transparent to one another. The Church Year is the exemplar of this Perfect Tense schematic where every Sunday is transparent to every other Sunday in the unveiling of the drama.

So what are we to make of this conflict, this theme of misunderstanding? Is it Paul’s influence on Mark to the point of badmouthing the Jerusalem Church, with whom Paul is in conflict, under the leadership of James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter, a community that still doesn’t get it, a Jewish sect, stuck in their continuing misunderstanding, trying to make the best of it, but who have not understood the gospel of freedom? Is Mark’s indictment of the disciples instigated by Paul as an indictment of the Jerusalem church under James and Peter, who continue the line as a messianic dynasty? It is not the point I favor although it is a plausible line of interpretation.

Neither Jew nor Greek, Paul is sui generis, a thorn in their flesh, the church at Jerusalem, where they have not seen beyond the Law to the Gospel per se and would probably reject the vision of Paul’s universalism. I don’t want to pursue this line of thought even though it would illuminate a number of themes unique to Paul, although it is important to appreciate that it is the breaking open of the Gospel to the world. [8]

I prefer the notion that Mark’s Gospel is the confession of the disciples themselves; that was how it was, when we were his companions, then we didn’t get it even though it was given, we misunderstood, we imposed our own views and ambitions on Him, we grew distant and alienated and more and more confused and then we abandoned him and fled, betraying him; but now we understand; our eyes have been opened. The Crucifixion and Resurrection have opened our eyes and our hearts and given us a new life. We have been given the freedom to acknowledge how we betrayed him, misunderstood him, forsook him, misused him. We were deluded, caught in the trap of our own ambitions and expectations. The Crucifixion gave us the choice, to the extent that we drove him to it: our choice was either suicide or insanity. We gave him our all and we were undone; we had everything to lose and we thought we had lost it all. It could not have been worse. We are the sacrificial lambs of the Crucified and we were destroyed in ourselves in order to be made new. We paid the price for this atonement.

And then, after our betrayal and abandonment, the Event: he was resurrected! The impossible possibility! As he said: with God all things are possible! The New Being appeared to us and vouchsafed unto us life eternal and the communion of saints. The impossible possibility contradicted our contradiction. Grace has been given for us to confess ourselves; for us to tell the most horrible stories of misunderstanding, making us look like fools, as well as stories of betrayal and abandonment, stories about ourselves in which we confess our guilt and our shame, because this is the measure of the Resurrection: our transparency regarding ourselves and the new life given to us when all was lost. The sufficiency of grace is made manifest in our confession of our weakness; this is the meaning of Spirit-driven repentance.

So have it either way: indictment or self-confession. They still don’t get it or now they see what they failed to perceive and they have the grace to confess it. Either way their blindness is restored to sight, their weakness to strength, their delusion confessed, their misunderstanding understood, their betrayal forgiven, their abandonment overcome, their fellowship intact. They themselves undergo this transformation or Mark does it for them. He is the point of the disciples’ confession—it goes through him. Paul is the background for this transparency and this luminosity. He is the theologian of the Spirit that Jesus promised and that was poured out at Pentecost in the constitution of the church and the communion of saints.

A word needs to be said about the meaning of time in reference to our remarks about the Perfect Tense. Greek has a special word for qualitative time, the full time, the pregnant time, the time of meaningfulness—kairos. It is juxtaposed to chronos, or chronological time, ordinary time, the sequential flow, second after second, minute after minute, clock time. Kairotic time is ‘now’ time, it is eternity intersecting chronological time and elevating it above itself; hence, perfect tense time. It encompasses past, present, and future, in the now. Think of a vertical line intersecting a horizontal line, a break in the sequential flow. The Gospel message occurs in this time. It is the time of ecstatic self-transcendence.

Only those who have experienced grace know the meaning of this spiritual somersault. “Grace is given without prior merit and makes graceful those to whom it is given. Graces are divine gifts, independent of human merits, but dependent on the human readiness to receive them. And the readiness itself is the first gift of grace, which can be either preserved or lost.” [9] This is the critical insight. It is already given even in the readiness, because the readiness is given, as well.

This reflexive principle is the absolute key point of our axiomatics and although I don’t know exactly how to put it, it is a consequence of the intersection of time and eternity. Eternity is the point of reflexivity because it is the point of ecstatic self-transcendence. Now. The temporal flow is elevated above itself and we with it. Our theme of the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed stems from this spiritual acrobatics.

“Where there is grace there is no command and no struggle to obey the command. As a gift of grace, it is not produced by one’s will and one’s endeavor. One simply receives it.” [10]

And the key point here as it always has to be stated: the reception is also given. There is no end to this reflexive flourish in the understanding of grace and faith. It is the ultimate corrective always doubling back to take oneself back to the gift as it is given. There is no point where this is not the case.

“It is the quality of “preceding” that characterizes the Spiritual impact as grace.” [11]

In other words, one has received it already so that even the receiving is given. It is prevenient.

“It is the quality of “preceding” that characterizes the Spiritual impact as grace: and nothing establishes the moral personality and community but the transcendent union which manifests itself in the Spiritual Community as grace. The self-establishment of a person as person without grace leaves the person to the ambiguities of the law. Morality in the Spiritual Community is determined by grace.” [12]

Although grace has been juxtaposed to eros as in the famous book by Nygren: Eros and Agape, according to Plato and Tillich, and a host of others, eros is a divine-human power. One of the definitions of thymos, the word Tillich gave me (which has become my favorite word) is the eros dimension of thymos, the upward striving toward what is noble, our reaching out in longing for the transcendent. It is the most difficult aspect of thymos to understand, especially for those who have little or no understanding of nobility or striving for what is noble. There is a perplexity here that needs elucidation. The loss of thymos in the history of Western thought is a record of the loss of spirit and the dumbfounding of spiritual life. [13]

There are so many problems tied up in this they are difficult to untangle.

Plato was the theoretician of thymos, making it the middle part in his construction of the self, one of the first such constructions in the Western philosophical tradition. Thymos means courage, vitality and spirit, but in the sense of biological spirit, vigour, spiritedness, think of a horse. Power of being might be the best abstract definition. We catch the meaning in the phrase “vital spirit”, even though it is redundant. It is the region of the upper chest, what Erikson called “the manly chestiness of conviction” when he referred to Luther’s thymos or courageous confidence in his calling. Think of a small fist in the region below the neck, the actual region of the thymus gland, cognate with the Greek root, even though the gland is no larger than one’s little finger. The thymus is the root of consciousness just as it is the master organ of the immune system.

The erasure of this region, with its glandular reference, from models of consciousness, has eventuated in the loss of spirit, as bodily based, thereby accounting for the mind-body split or the subject-object split.[14] Thymos is hidden in the hyphen indicated in the split. This is why it is so difficult to discuss matters of the spirit as if one were speculating on clouds floating away over one’s head, what Kant called “the mass of flighty seemings” and denigrated in his diatribe against Swedenborg in his Dreams of A Spirit-Seer.

Devoid of spirit is the watchword currently. So to speak of eros in relation to grace is perplexing for those who have no understanding of thymos or the seat of the spirit, just as they have no understanding of the meaning of grace that grasps the spirit and creates the faith that receives it.

A recovery of classical anthropology is necessary for this to be understood, which I have tried to carry through in what I call the Thymos Doctrine, following the line of thought Tillich developed in The Courage To Be.

“Theology has distinguished between “common” grace that works in all realms of life and in all human relations, and the special grace bestowed upon those who are grasped by the new reality that has appeared in the Christ. In both respects, the problem of moral motivation is decisive. What common and special grace accomplish is to create a state of reunion in which the cleavage between our true and our actual being is fragmentarily overcome, and the rule of the commanding law is broken.” [15]

This point is difficult because so many theological issues come into play. We will focus on just one of them: the third use of the law.

I enter a personal confession at this point. When I was a student at a Lutheran seminary I picked up the notion of the Third Use of the Law without knowing what it meant. It was a concept devoid of a definition as far as I was concerned. Little did I know at the time, as I struggled anyhow with the first two uses, which were hard enough to comprehend, that the Third Use was the conflict between Luther and Calvin on the issue of justification and sanctification. Decades later, I came to define the Third Use as the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed, a definition I liked, in opposition to dogmatic Lutheranism, where spontaneity was the last thing anyone expected to encounter anywhere. It is now clear to me that I was caught in the conflict between vitality and the type of spirituality represented by dogmatic Lutheranism, which meant the suppression of vitality understood as the consequence of distorting the definition of faith in the slogan “justification by faith”, where faith supersedes grace and gets mis-defined and misunderstood as belief. Instead of free spontaneous behavior we get willful subjection to dogmatic authorities. Pure doctrine!

Later in life, the theme of the Third Use came back to me, as though it was an unfulfilled theme, when I wrote a play about the argument over the assassination of Hitler, A Lullaby For Wittgenstein, and mulled over the Third Use to justify Bonhoeffer’s affirmation of assassination and the issue of tyrannicide. I had taken an interest in the collaboration of Bonhoeffer and Von Moltke and their conflict over the assassination of Hitler: Bonhoeffer for and Von Moltke against. I thought Bonhoeffer’s view was an example of being above the law and an application of the old argument sanctioning tyrannicide.

I argued my understanding of the Third Use with two Lutheran minister friends and colleagues in Santa Cruz and they tried to persuade me I had it wrong, that my understanding was a misunderstanding. I thought they were old fogeys, just like my seminary colleagues, and were stuck on justification. I thought I sided with Calvin, especially when I found out that the Third Use had sneaked into Lutheranism under Melancthon, who was influenced by Calvin.

Tillich seemed to confirm my view and then one day I re-read the issue and found out I did have it wrong. I had misread Tillich. Luther was the representative of free spontaneity, not Calvin, and for that very reason did not want to add a Third Use to the adumbrated Two.

Here is what is involved. Nothing less than the meaning of Christian life. Another quote from Tillich can help us here: “The act of faith and the act of accepting the moral imperative’s unconditional character are one and the same act.” [16] Tillich refers to the “motivating power” of the moral imperative and whether the paradox of grace (accepted though unacceptable) diminishes the power of moral motivation. “It is a very old question, used against Paul as well as against Augustine, against Luther as well as against Calvin, and against the Reformation as a whole by the humanists and the evangelical radicals. It is a justified question insofar as it points to the possibility of converting the paradox of grace into a cover for lawlessness.” [17] This issue is expressed in Luther’s famous “sin boldly but believe more boldly still.”

I am guilty of the conversion in the following sense. I confused freedom in the Spirit (free spontaneity of the redeemed) with arbitrary willfulness. Under the cloak of acceptance I did the unacceptable. I liked sinning, God liked forgiving; really, the world was admirably arranged, as in the words of a poem by Auden. I perceived the lack of motivating power in the intellectualistic distortion of the Pauline formula, shortened to “justification by faith.” And so I thought I would remedy the matter in myself in defiance of Orthodoxy, misunderstanding this ‘remedy’ as Calvinist Third Use.

“…Calvin spoke of a third function of the law, namely, the function of guiding the Christian who is grasped by the divine Spirit but who is not yet free from the power of the negative in knowledge and action. Luther rejected this solution, asserting that the Spirit itself leads to decisions in which the ambiguity of life is conquered. The Spirit, by liberating a person from the letter of the law, gives both insight into the concrete situation and the power to act in this situation according to the call of agape.” [18]

This conflict between Luther and Calvin has meant downplaying or neglecting sanctification in Lutheranism, which, by the way, prompted the Pietistic reaction in the name of carrying through the experience of justification to a life of sanctification. This reaction is best represented by Kierkegaard, whose attack on Christendom, and Lutheran orthodoxy was inspired by pietistic influences.

Tillich points out that “Calvin’s solution is more realistic, more able to support an ethical theory and a disciplined life of sanctification. Luther’s solution is more ecstatic, unable to support a “Protestant ethics” but full of creative possibilities in the personal life.” [19] Hence, the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed.

“In Lutheranism the emphasis on the paradoxical element in the experience of the New Being was so predominant that sanctification could not be interpreted in terms of a line moving upward toward perfection. It was seen instead as an up-and-down of ecstasy and anxiety, of being grasped by agape and being thrown back into estrangement and ambiguity. This oscillation between up and down was experienced radically by Luther himself, in the change between moments of courage and joy and moments of demonic attacks, as he interpreted his states of doubt and profound despair.” [20]

I suppose this sounds odd to one’s secular ear inasmuch as the interest in what it means to live a Christian life in a secular world is diminishing under the impact of the criticism of such a life. Secularism favors neutrality in matters of the spirit. Debates over the Law and the Gospel and the uses of the law tend to fall on deaf ears. But starting from the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius an affinity with the neutrality of secularism regarding spiritual life is shared. This means that there is an affinity for clearing the decks. All bets are off. Start again from a neutral position.

Here is the crux of the matter in a single paragraph from Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Vol. III, and if I had to find a single quote that summarizes Tillich’s thought this would be it:

The preceding discussion of faith and the mental function has shown two things: first, that faith can neither be identified with nor derived from any of the mental functions. Faith cannot be created by the procedures of the intellect, or by the endeavors of the will, or by emotional movements. But, second, faith comprehends all this within itself, uniting and subjecting it to the Spiritual Presence’s transforming power. This implies and confirms the basic theological truth that in relation to God everything is by God. Man’s spirit cannot reach the ultimate, that toward which it transcends itself, through any of its functions. But the ultimate can grasp all of these functions and raise them beyond themselves by the creation of faith.” (p. 133.)

Tillich struggles to describe the marks of sanctification when he points to four principles of sanctification: increasing awareness, increasing freedom, increasing relatedness, and increasing transcendence. It is the second principle that I saw at work in Bonhoeffer, although the others were present, as well. It was the issue of being above the law in advocating the assassination of Hitler. In Kierkegaard’s terms it meant the teleological suspension of the ethical and in Paulinian words it meant freedom from the law. This is what made the debate with von Moltke, who was against assassination in principle, so profound. The ambiguity of the situation was irresolvable. One had to act or not. The tragic irony is that they were both martyred for their views.

As Tillich puts it: “Freedom from the law in the process of sanctification is the increasing freedom from the commanding form of the law. But it is also freedom from its particular content. Specific laws, expressing the experience and wisdom of the past, are not only helpful, they are also oppressive, because they cannot meet the ever concrete, ever new, ever unique situation. Freedom from the law is the power to judge the given situation in the light of the Spiritual Presence and to decide upon adequate action, which is often in seeming contradiction to the law.” [21]

The debate over the Law and the Gospel is endless; they are dialectically intertwined and no matter how much one strives for the freedom in and of the Spirit, the law continuously reminds one of the existential predicament and holds a mirror up to it, a mirror where we can hardly sustain our gaze. “Freedom in chains” is not a bad metaphor for this dilemma and we sing in our chains like the sea (Dylan Thomas).

St. Paul had his ecstatic experiences where he was unduly elated, as he put it, and he was checked with his thorn in the flesh. It kept him from boasting. He will boast of another as though he is that other, that man who was caught up into the Third Heaven, from whom he distances himself in the third person by referring to knowing a man who…, and maybe it was Dionysius the Areopagite to whom he refers; I like to think that. In any event, he knows better than to boast of his own elevation, his own mystical experiences. He knows that God’s grace is made perfect in weakness and that is good enough for him as it is good enough for us.

Of our weaknesses we are prepared to boast in the freedom of the Spirit.

I don’t think I would have had the nerve to touch it but for the article on Chapter Seven of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, a philosophical meditation by my mentor, Hans Jonas. I can do no more than make reference to it and make a few comments about what it reveals about reflexivity.

What I find remarkable about Jonas’ meditation is how comparable it is to the famous opening lines of The Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard and his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, one of the metaphysical crochets, that inimitable Kierkegaardian term, of all time. In wondering how to introduce what Jonas says and remembering the complexity of the Kierkegaardian text on the same issue, I realized I never thought of the will as cognitive. The notion of a thinking will startles me. The will appears to me as blind without the intellect directing it. When I tell myself to do something it is my intellect speaking to my will. The mail has come. Go get it. It’s time to go to bed. Go. I hardly notice myself doing something that is not directed by my mind. I suppose this is why I had a hard time with the notion of nonverbal behavior. I couldn’t imagine doing anything without the accompaniment of my thought processes. How would you know it was behavior if you couldn’t verbalize it? The notion of pure intuition, as with women, was beyond me. I always had to think or talk about it. It was as though my mind was never at rest. I actually went through a period when I thought about nonverbal behavior, but then I relapsed and forgot about it.

I don’t know what this has to do with the problem of the will and the relation of the will to the mind but I can assume that there are problems here I can’t begin to entertain, beginning with the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness, which is reflexive.

Let’s give it a try in the formulations of Jonas and see where it leads. I can also refer to one of the great efforts to think through the dynamics of the will in Paul Ricoeur’s writings, especially The Voluntary and the Involuntary, following in the tradition of Aristotle and Kant, and his book: The Symbolism of Evil, where he works out the theme of the servile will.

Jonas writes: …”it is the will in which the reflexive process relevant for freedom is performed. …the willing …says, not only ‘I will’, but at the same time also ‘I will that I will this’.

Every willing wills itself and has at each moment already chosen itself. The will thus has in itself its own inherent reflexiveness in whose performance it primarily constitutes itself as what it is, and by which it is radically distinguished from any mere desire or impulse.”

This answers my query about how to get beyond the notion of impulse or desire in the operation of grace. I did not see how the will opened the way to this prior state before anything we can think or say.

Jonas goes on: “Thus understood the will is not just another and particular psychical function among others, classifiable under wishing, desiring, striving, impulse and the like. Nor is it the same as explicit resolve or, in general, anything that appears and disappears, is sometimes present and sometimes absent. The ‘will’ is a priori always there, underlying all single acts of the soul, making it possible for things like ‘willing’ as well as its opposite—lack or renunciation of will—to occur as special mental phenomena. It precedes any explicit resolve, any particular decision, although it is in itself, in its essential nature, nothing but continuously operative decision about itself—that permanent self-determination from which the subject cannot withdraw into the alibi of any neutral, indifferent, ‘will-free’ state: for the primal decision of will is itself the condition for the possibility of any such state, be it indifference or its opposite.”

Maybe you can see where this might lead. It could lead to the old debate between Luther and Erasmus on the freedom and bondage of the will. It could take us back to the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary in Aristotle and acting in and out of ignorance, which, I confess, I still don’t understand. It would entangle us in a discussion we are ill-prepared to conduct. Maybe at some future point. I am aware here of biting off more than I can chew.

Nicholas Poussin: “Ecstasy of St. Paul,” l650, the Louvre, Paris.

In the stunning painting by Poussin, of Paul in ecstasy, the angels are not taking his pulse as though he was on a treadmill too long. St. Paul has not passed out from over-exertion; these are not personal health trainers with wings. St. Paul is not falling off his horse, either, although, as a trope, it is worth thinking about. Think of a horse nearby, confused over his dismounted rider, who has been knocked off and is now flying with the angels. They have picked him up as he fell. Saul or St. Paul has been taken off. He is blind for three days. He is given a new name. Now angels, as then, bear him up. It is the exemplary moment of self-transcendence. Paul in ecstasy, with flights of angels carrying him aloft.

There is no worry about this event—the conversion of Saul to the Apostle Paul. The Saint. The first theologian of Christianity. A visionary equal to St. John. The proposed teacher of St. Mark; the opponent of Peter; the inspiration of St. Augustine and of Luther and the Reformation. The prophet of Christian foolishness against Greek wisdom. The one who tipped the balance between reason and revelation. The advocate of the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed. Look at him. He wants you to know his ecstasy. The tenderness of angels gently touching hands and feet; to be carried, as though upon a cloud, so tenderly and delicately, as in a ballet of the spirit. Everything conspires to tell you of his state of mind. He is being carried into the Third Heaven, where he communes with St. Dionysius the Areopagite. Dare we call him Paul’s teacher, in this mystic moment of ecstatic self-transcendence? St. Denis! I know a man who…

Are they the same man in the mind of Christ? Is this an instance of the communion of saints?

Isn’t Poussin, in this painting, re-enacting in Paul, the ecstatic self-transcendence of Dionysius, when he was carried into the Third Heaven, at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, where he saw things no one may dare utter? Because if you say it, the words can become objects in space, sounds to be heard or letters on a page, to be read. And misunderstood, argued about, resisted.

Words no one may dare utter. For that very reason. The prohibition to protect the luminosity of the vision, the tension of the experience. The unspoken yet spoken vision that God will be all in all. The deepest intuition of the Areopagite was given to Paul and he knew enough to dare not utter it, although he repeated it. So there he goes into the Third Heaven to meet his master, his Greek teacher, his Platonic Christian, his convert, his great witness to the gentiles and his reference for the freedom of the spirit when it is convulsed in luminous disclosure. Neither Jew nor Greek, they are both transformed in the unity of the Spirit.

Note:

There is hardly a word in the religious language, both theological and popular, which is subject to more misunderstandings, distortions and questionable definitions than the word “faith.” It belongs to those terms which need healing before they can be used for the healing of men [and women]. Today the term ‘faith’ is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender, rejection of genuine religion and subjection to substitutes.

Paul Tillich: The Dynamics of Faith

There is an assumed identity in the composition of this letter: Paul with Paul. I am named after the Saint and Apostle, as I am named after my father, also a Paul. And I am a student of another Paul, who proudly continued in the theological tradition of Paul: Paul Tillich. And dare I mention another Paul, another teacher and friend, whose influence also has been incalculable—Paul Ricoeur.

There is a point of identity in having the mind of Paul as Paul tells us to have the mind of Christ. Being in Christ, participating in the New Being who is the Christ, is this same point of identity. It is a spiritual participation and it is in this sense and in this attitude that this letter is written. It is an attempt to work out what one thinks about matters of faith.

I have done this elsewhere, also letters, in my Letters To Bonhoeffer, to be published, whenever, under the title: Justified Godlessness. This effort was the beginning of the work-out, not unlike its exercise or athletic analogy. There is even a study of Dionysius called: Athlete for God.

There is a compunction on my part to work out an axiomatics, a kind of meta-dogmatics, regarding propositions that have to be understood in order to disentangle the rampant confusions that eventuate if they are not understood. The pre-eminent axiomatic proposition is the definition of faith: grace creates the faith that receives it.

If you don’t get that one, go ahead and mess it up by identifying faith with belief. It is tantamount to giving up the show and collapsing into distortion and error. This is the fate of fundamentalists and literalists who just mouth biblical quotes in a contentious tone which are thrown at your head like stones. I can hear the babble of quotes about believe this, believe that, believe, believe, believe, alright already. Go ahead, ignore the axioms, carry your confusion through to admitting that faith is believing without evidence, faith is believing without the admission of doubts, faith is believing in the neurotic defense of the castle of one’s deluded convictions, all performed, mistakenly, to the glory of God.

Join the vainglorious camp of Billy Graham and all the other evangelists who wrongly preach that some condition has to be met before grace operates, that you have to believe in God, or something about Jesus, whatever the sentence, or you have to get up and come to the altar, in order to be saved. Some condition has to be met to get it on. On your knees.

I can imagine St. Peter, shaking his head at Billy Graham, when his time comes, and saying, “It’s a pity you got it wrong, Billy; you had the best intentions, but you got it wrong. You never understood the axioms and you never understood the unconditional and you consistently misunderstood faith as belief. What are we going to do with you?” Billy starts to justify himself and Peter says, “Billy, Billy, I wouldn’t start. You even confused salvation as an act of cosmic healing with the pathetic little egocentric decision of an isolated soul in some big sports arena or walking on the beach with some President.” Billy suddenly sees that repentance is emptying the mind and not filling it up with words about Jesus. St. Peter sees that Billy can make amends now that he is beginning to get it. “What can I do to make amends,” Billy asks. St. Peter answers: “Let’s start with the theme: faith without content! How about that?”

We have focused on one of the central axioms, as far as the tradition is concerned, the Pauline axiom regarding justification through faith by grace. But not without some reluctance. The reason for this is that justification is almost devoid of meaning as a religious term; it is associated with measurement when you justify something with something else, as in ‘lined up.’ It is also juridical as in being justified in a court of law, proven innocent or confirmed in one’s claim. Nevertheless, it is the central principle of Luther and the central axiom of the Reformation in his reliance on Paul.

But it has become subverted in the most unfortunate way by contemporary Lutherans who have shortened it to a formula that falsifies the meaning in principle: justification by faith. This means, of course, that you have to believe this and that, dependent on Lutheran dogmatics, what they have the unmitigated gall to call pure doctrine, and by this you are justified as the content of your faith. It is the Lutheran creed which begins, like the Nicene and the Apostles, with “I believe….” So you are justified by what you believe and you have the classic instance of the intellectualistic distortion of the meaning of faith, just as you have one of the classic instances of self-salvation. Do you see what a relief it was to read in Kierkegaard: set reason aside; like St. Denis, holding his head in his hands.

After I had begun writing the Letter, I began the Introduction. I saw how difficult it was to disentangle my thoughts from the thoughts of Paul. In the Introduction I take up themes and pursue them in my own voice without thinking of Paul per se. I knew, for instance, that Paul never speaks of the Son of Man in his Letters. How or why would he try to influence Mark with the Son of Man/Suffering Servant theme? Because I wanted him to didn’t seem sufficient as an explanation even though I leave open the option that Mark is following Paul’s condemnation of the disciples, re-gathered in Jerusalem under James and Peter (they still don’t get it), or, on the other hand, Peter’s possible influence on Mark, according to the tradition that links them, so that Mark’s Gospel can be read as a confession of the delusion of the disciples and a witness to their participation in the Resurrection, now that their eyes are open and they can see and hear what they were blind and deaf to. The conflict between Paul and the Jerusalem church seems to cast doubt on the theme of the confession of self-delusion as a way of understanding Mark’s Gospel and his use of the theme of misunderstanding, alienation and betrayal, in the sequence of stories that indict and condemn the disciples. Does this indictment account for Paul’s self-legitimation based on his independent call to become an Apostle?

The theme of the First and Second Adam, I have Paul reconsider from the point of view of the Two Adams in the Genesis account, represented by the dual creation of man in the image of God and the dust of the ground. I try to clear up the confusion between the Two Adams of the creation account and the First and Second Adam of Paul’s account. The figurative symbols become even more complicated when you consider the sequence Adam/Noah/Abraham, especially in the light of the famous essay by Erich Auerbach: Figura. Auerbach’s discussion of figural prophecy raises the issue of the promise and fulfillment schematism and how subsequent figures add to the interpreted matrix and how they come to fulfillment in Jesus as the Christ. Paul Ricoeur refers to this multi-layered meaning structure as “phenomenological filiation.” This concept is meant in the spirit of hermeneutical devotion to the principle of the bible interpreting itself as an interdependent symbol system with a resonating dynamic when symbols are compared to symbols. It is like an overlay in graphic design, one image over another, but transparent to one another.

Eric Voegelin probably has the best understanding of this approach to the biblical symbol system in his discussion of the primary figures in the Old Testament narrative and their symbolic inter-relations. [22] The term occultation comes to mind as a hermeneutical technique, when one figure passes before another, obscuring and superseding, but not removing what comes before, referring to heavenly bodies passing in front of one another. Palimpsest is another metaphor that could be used for this accumulation of figures and meanings that add, rather than subtract, to the meaning, as a text upon a text. This is the filiation effect, as Ricoeur formulates it. Think of the generations of your ancestors who have preceded you and the generations to come, who are all related to you, even to the point of your genetic code and even though it is difficult to move back even two generations in the memory of our ancestors, the notion of impact and influence is obvious as it shows up in our personality and talents and character.

Now consider a symbol system that took thousands of years to come into formation. No wonder it was closed when the canon was established and no more texts were allowed to be included. The closing of the canon is the great decision to announce that the symbol system had come to fruition.

We are told to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, as Kierkegaard, as well, admonishes us to do. I include here the word of Kierkegaard which everyone who reads this should take to heart, as forbiddingly formidable as it is to acknowledge:

…“according to the [Christian view], eternal life is attended by the bone-and-marrow-piercing consciousness of every idle word that is spoken.” [23]

“I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words will you be justified and by your words will you be condemned.”
Matthew 12:36

On entering God’s Sabbath rest: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Hebrews 4:12

St. Paul reading his Letter to the Athenians

Paul’s Letter To the Athenians

On the occasion of his return to Rome and addressed expressly to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Bishop of Athens, and leader of the Athenian Church, the convert of Paul.

You have eternal life already. If you don’t have it now, you are never going to get it.

Luther

You have to get it in order to get it and it is always already given.

Paul Lee

Paul’s Letter to the Athenians

Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, the Son of Man and Suffering Servant, and mindful of our brother Dionysius the Areopagite, to the church at Athens, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, who in his great mercy has already saved us, before anything we can think or say and I mean already. And not just us but the whole creation: salvation is an act of cosmic healing. When the Spirit is given to us we are made whole, along with all of creation sighing with eager longing to be redeemed with us. Nature, too, mourns for a lost good.

I rejoice in you always as recipients of the grace of God, given to you, to create the faith that receives it, all glory be to God who accomplishes everything for us and our salvation. I repeat for your edification: grace creates the faith that receives it! Therefore, empty your minds, you have nothing to lose but false beliefs. Let the Spirit of God enter and know that your letting this happen, whatever attention you can summon, is the Spirit’s work, not your own. You can cooperate as long as you realize that the Spirit takes precedence. Think of a twinkling of an eye or a step before any step you can take, a step already taken in your behalf.

I look back with some reservations regarding my stay with you even though I consider it to have been profitable. I had more than ample time to converse with your philosophers, some of whom dismissively laughed at me and called me a ragpicker, or a bird pecker, someone who goes after crumbs. Their word for it was spermologos: an ignorant plagiarist. Let them laugh. They perfectly demonstrated the foolishness of the wisdom of the wise.

I don’t mean to speak contemptuously of them, these seekers after wisdom, but they reminded me of the Pharisees whom many take to be the most righteous of men. I should know. I was one of them. Pharisees are exemplars of scrupulosity; they follow 613 scruples in every step they take in daily life, their moral consciousness is so highly refined. Hardly anyone can claim more or go further in the refinement of ethical behavior. But our Lord called them the living dead, benighted sepulchers, because they counted their scrupulosity as righteousness; it was their trap.

Like the Rich Young Ruler, when they encountered our Lord, they went away in despair because he made an infinite demand upon them, more radical than x number of scruples, however refined one’s moral consciousness. “Love your enemies.” That’s one. And “lend without expecting anything in return.” That’s another. The Golden Rule transcended. The Pharisees hardened their hearts against this infinite and unconditional demand: the law of love—love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. It is a law that is given and not demanded. One is never finished with it. So I tend to think of the philosophers of Greece, especially the Sophists, in the same sense as the Pharisees of Israel, with Socrates and Jesus as their great critics.

It helps to know the definition of scruple. It is a small stone used by jewelers, of almost no weight at all. When I found this out I thought that the Pharisee has 613 of these tiny stones in his shoe, each inscribed with a prohibition regarding daily behavior. So with every step the Pharisee takes he monitors 613 checks, as it were, to his activity, his feet are so sensitively tuned to the scruples in his shoes, shaping and refining his moral consciousness. Pharisaic scrupulosity is unarguably one of the great achievements of man’s effort to be moral and to do what is good, an effort in the category of self-salvation.

But it hit the wall when Jesus appeared and unmasked it as the most subtle form of self-salvation and the most refined.

Socrates had his famous daemon, the guardian angel that checked his behavior and told him “no” when he was about to do something wrong. The daemon was his scruple. Scruples are important for the formation of human conscience but they can also be a trap for the self-righteous. Socrates escaped this temptation. He confessed his self-delusion, trusting in his daemon to defend him against the impulse to self-destruction or rash deeds that contradict one’s self. The daemon was his reward for his confession.

When I was among you and made a study of your wisdom tradition, it was difficult to distinguish the various schools of philosophy, there are so many points of view represented: Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Sceptics, Aristotelians. You Greeks have a great appetite for the love of wisdom, your word for philosophy.

Socrates is revered in varying degrees as the signal moment when philosophy came into its own preceded by a succession of philosophers who are named and known for their contribution to what is called the rise of rational self-consciousness. I was surprised to learn that Socrates is credited with the discovery of the soul. It has something to do with spiritual inwardness. The term “centered self” comes to mind as the seat of the moral subject who is responsible and they mean ultimately responsible for the deeds one does. It seems that an evolution had to occur in the understanding of God, from Homer on.

There is a long poem called the Theogony, by Hesiod, detailing the evolution of the gods, from generation to generation. It is the Greek equivalent of Genesis but very garbled with multiple divine figures, in generational succession. As the image and images of the gods evolve so does human consciousness as the subject of one’s acts. Until this evolution comes to fulfillment, before you get to Socrates and Plato, the gods are blamed or credited with human behavior; the person in question is too ill-formed to assume responsibility for what occurs. Every important action is attributed to the gods.

It was brought to my attention that Plato coined the word “theology,” partly in order to express the meaning of what could be called the Socratic Event, an historic moment that in some ways is comparable to the Event of Our Lord. I think it is instructive to consider this development as preparatory for the Christ.

The Delphic Oracle was consulted about who was the wisest of men and she answered– Socrates. This was because he confessed his self-delusion, a new theme for my consideration in which I took a great interest, because it reminded me of repentance. The confession of self-delusion was a topic of sustained discussion between us, Dionysius, you and I, you who introduced me to a form of logic of negation that fits very nicely with my paradoxical logic (weakness/strength; humbled/exalted; freedom/bondage; etc.). The confession of self-delusion can be misunderstood as the confession of ignorance where it loses its force and is hardly worth discussing. It is not that one doesn’t know something and could be told; rather, it is that one thinks one knows and can’t be told! Delusion is to be trapped within one’s mind, almost a form of blindness or self-enslavement. It is the height of Greek drama for Oedipus to blind himself when he sees. Delusion is thinking you see when you are blind.

In our tradition, we would say that Satan is the Father of the Lie, because he deludes us and leads us astray into self-destruction. There is an old myth from Homer’s Iliad about the eldest daughter of Zeus, whose name is Ate and who is known as the goddess of delusion, the personification of the infatuation that leads to ruin, who can be seen as the figure for the impulse to self-destruction. She is the imp! in impulse. She is mentioned in the Iliad in the confession of Agamemnon in his effort to reconcile with Achilles and she is blamed for the break between them as though Agamemnon is without fault because his personality is too ill-formed to assume responsibility for his actions. He lacks a centered self and thinks the gods are the responsible decision makers prompting him to do what he does. He blames Ate for their falling out. This seems to be the pattern before Socrates—blaming the gods. In fact, it is the lament of the gods at the beginning of the Odyssey: “Lo, how men blame the gods.”

In the story he tells, Agamemnon mentions how Ate once deluded Zeus himself, the father of the gods, and for this Zeus threw her out of Olympus and now she walks lightly over the heads of men and women and leads all astray, a striking figure of speech. Someone told me about the legend that when she was thrown out of Olympus, she landed on the site that was to become Troy, an inspired mythical image. Why? Because Troy is in the grip of Ate, or self-delusion, as Troy harbors Helen, over whom the war is fought, a figure for the self-destructive forces that lead to the breakdown of the culture, of which the war is the symptomatic expression, also mirrored in the disordered psyche of Achilles who is singled out to be informed by his mother, a goddess, that it is his fate to die at Troy. His famous rage or wrath is a symbolic symptom of this disorder.

The tragic collapse of Troy is the work of Ate as the goddess of delusion and ruin. Ate also figures in the tragedies, along with other powers of delusion and entrapment, such as the Erinyes and Moira (fate), symbols for the evil god (or force) who drives to self-destruction. We speak of the wrath of God but we mean God turning his wrath against everything that is against love.

I have thought of God’s wrath as vitality directed against itself, as the impulse to self-destruction, the law in my members, the heritage of sin, self-enslavement, or the servile will. The will that enslaves itself is an insupportable thought but that is just the point. These Greek philosophers seem to think this impulse to self-destruction can also be applied to the intellect, to reason, something like the servile mind, as another aspect of self-enslavement in the dynamics of sin. Like the will, the mind enslaves itself through thinking it knows, when it is deluded. It is self-deception carried to an extreme.

So the confession of self-delusion is like repentance, the word for which is metanoia, but not just a change of mind, a turning of the whole person is implied, a conversion, such as I experienced in my encounter with the risen Lord, even to the point of getting a new name to go with my new identity. My being was renewed in a sea-change, from Persecutor to Apostle.

We have much to learn from these Greeks and I am glad I could speak their language, a possession they are proud of and that they use to distinguish themselves from the barbarians, namely all those who do not speak Greek.

A central word for them is Logos, which means both speaking, as far as the Greek language is concerned, and the rational structure of reality, which the human mind can grasp through language. Socrates is regarded as the Logos in the flesh, embodied in a human being. It is not that Socrates is regarded as a god; he is considered to be transparent to the divine depth that was revealed through him, where the mind is the logos incarnate and revelatory of its own origin, its own depth. The Greek word for such transparency is theonomy. And even though Socrates was not a messiah in the sense of our Lord, he is considered to be a savior by a number of schools who hold him in such high esteem where he is honored and revered for overcoming the anxiety of having to die. Practice dying is a central theme, and Socrates, I was told, defined philosophy as having one foot in the grave, which again is a very striking figure of speech, as though, through philosophy, you can comprehend your life from birth to death and take it up as a whole. This transcendent self is the centered self that comes to expression in Socrates.

The Greeks have this exquisitely sensitive understanding of mortality as though they give birth astride a grave. Their word for this is ephemeros: creatures of a day. It sounds a deep chord in the Greek psyche. Their poets give voice to it. They call themselves mortals, deathly, in contrast to the immortal gods, the deathless ones. The Greek is thanatos and athanatos.

Their use of privatives is interesting, almost a key to their self-transcendence. A-thanatos: beyond death. Their word for truth is a-letheia, namely, overcoming Lethe, the name of the territory one crosses over at death; Lethe, the Plain of Demonic Forgetfullness is associated with ‘Amelas, the River known as Carefree, so truth is remembrance of what was forgotten. Re-covering. Un-veiling. Dis-closing. They preserve the mystery in the meaning of truth with this privative. It reminds me of “hide and seek” or “lost and found,” understood as linked, or together. What is sought and found, or disclosed, is still hidden; what is found is still lost. The concealed would be revealed but for the veil. They have a remarkable sense of not fully getting what they get. Something is withheld, the mystery intact, even though glimpsed and partially perceived. They see through the glass darkly as I am fond of putting it. They long to see face to face but they fall short. They reach after it but they do not grasp it. Another privative word is agnoia, meaning delusion or reason against itself: a-gnosis.

To this unfulfilled longing, this desire, this need for an imperishable bliss, we proclaim the event of the Christ and him crucified, a stumbling block and folly, but our hope against hope. The Logos has appeared and was made manifest in Christ, Jesus, and we beheld his greatness, full of grace and truth. To proclaim this is the task of my apostleship. Just as I made it clear before the altar of the unknown god, on the Areopagus, so I preach Christ crucified, wherever I go. The Logos has appeared in the fullness of time.

Even the timely character of Socrates’ appearance, as is said, is like the appearance of the Christ, because the thinkers who preceded Socrates are known collectively as the Presocratics, comparable to the Prophets, who prepared the way for the incarnation of the Logos, the Logos made flesh.

History has to be ready for the appearance of these life-transforming figures and the time has to be right, so I can see Plato thinking that Socrates was given at the right moment as the bearer of the Logos. Logos and Kairos are aligned in the right time. It bursts forth in a breakthrough.

Socrates is seen as a lesser Logos in his appearance as a savior and a preparation for the Logos to come who is the full revelation of grace and truth. What we cannot say about Socrates, that the fullness of God’s nature lives embodied in him, we say about the Christ.

The Crucifixion is another point of comparison in terms of a martyr’s death, where, in the case of our Lord, the fullness is emptied out; both suffer as scapegoats, or wounded healers (pharmakon). The picture of the dying Socrates has had an enormous appeal for subsequent generations in the serenity of his acceptance of an unjust punishment and the equanimity with which he accepts it. But he is surrounded by his friends and suffered no agony as our Lord on the Cross. There was a rumor circulating in Athens that Socrates, in fact, did not die when the authorities thought, but was given a minute amount of the famous hemlock along with an antidote and herbal preparations that induced a deep trance state, to simulate death, so the authorities were fooled and surrendered his body for burial. A secret dialogue of Plato tells of his being squirreled away and sequestered in private where he revived and lived for sometime and continued in conversations with his followers. It is called The Long Lost Last Dialogues of Socrates.

Socrates would agree with me in my denunciation of the wisdom peddlers, the Sophists, as the exemplars of the foolishness of the wise. He denounced them in the same manner that Jesus denounced the Pharisees, but with irony instead of righteous anger.

I greet Dionysius, especially, and want you to know I remember you in my prayers, as I do all of you. You made my visit a memorable one, not only because of standing before the altar of the Unknown God and making known to all who were gathered there what could now be announced as the Good News of our Lord’s death and resurrection. It amazes me to this day to remember the story you told me about the occasion for erecting the altar, namely your tumultuous experience when our Lord was crucified and not knowing the content.

You were in Egypt, in Heliopolis, when there was an eclipse of the sun, when you were carried into the Third Heaven and saw things you could not utter because you did not not know what they meant or how to express your ecstatic state. To commemorate this experience, without content, you erected an altar on the Areopagus and dedicated it “To An Unknown God”. When you heard me preach you ran to get your notes to confirm that your vision occurred on the precise day and time when our Lord was crucified. This vision without content is now filled with the Gospel, the Good News, and you, Dionysius, received this news in the Spirit when you were transformed and made new.

I give thanks to the Spirit directing me to this place where I stood to address the assembled Athenians, you, Dionysius, included among them. I rejoice in your astonishment as you were given to know the content of your revelation and received the Spirit into your heart and underwent the transformation we all know who are of one mind in the Lord. Your faith was not your faith but your reception of grace that creates the faith that receives it. This reception is also a creation of grace. God does it all. It is unconditional and it has happened already, when it is received, because God has already given it and the reception of it! Think of entering it backwards: step back to the already given and step forward in sanctification.

This unconditional character of grace is not well understood, I have come to realize, where faith is confused with belief. There is too much evidence of the unfortunate tendency toward self-salvation where people think that some condition has to be met, like believing in God, which is ridiculous, as what could be the content of that belief but vain and superstitious opinions and a distortion of the true God, an example of idolatry. What does God care about what anyone thinks? Be of one mind in Christ Jesus.

This is why the lack of content in Dionysius’ mystical vision is important to understand. Nothing was demanded of him, nothing was needed. He experienced grace in its pure form and only had to be told of its content after the fact. So it is with all of us. So it is with me who was blinded for three days when the Lord encountered me and knocked me from my horse, because I was kicking against the pricks in my self-destructive behavior.

There is a grammatical tense I like to refer to—the Perfect Tense: the tense of the epic, the tense of the ‘already’. I have come to love the ‘already’ of grace and the gift that precedes anything we can think or say or do. It is given and the reception of it is also given. Please take this point into your hearts and minds. Praise be to God who delivers us, who turns us so we are turned and who demands nothing from us but makes us His own. Grace is reflexive in the ‘already’ character of the having-happened. It occurs in the Perfect Tense when the Eternal Now gathers up the past and the future and all things are new. The present is a present in the gift of the Now.

As I said to the Church in Corinth: Already you are filled! Already you have become rich! Think spiritually, transcend yourselves, and you will have the mind of Christ.

I should correct a misunderstanding that can occur from other letters where I have mentioned the Second Adam. I could have referred to the Son of Man, the title our Lord used when he referred to the Man From Above who would come down from heaven to deliver the people from their enemies and liberate them from bondage. The disciples were confused about the Son of Man sayings and even took our Lord to task and tried to correct him because they did not understand that our Lord identified the Son of Man with the Suffering Servant after the prophecies of the Prophet Isaiah. Our Lord chastised Peter and called his misunderstanding Satanic when he rebuked him over his speaking of the fate of the Son of Man. This is known as the Messianic Secret. It is given to the disciples to know but they don’t get it. Not until it is fulfilled. It is a problem in communicating the Gospel from the point of view of its fulfillment. How do you tell the story, before it has been fulfilled, when you know the ending? The Messianic Secret is a theme to be utilized for this purpose. From the point of view of it having come to pass, in the telling of it, the secret is implied, even the knowledge of it. The secret is known to those who tell it, even in the telling of it. It is retrospective. Like my fascination for the “already’. Retrospectively, the secret is known, in the telling of it. The truth will out…

Here is the theme of the Messianic Secret: the Suffering Servant is the Son of Man. The Son of Man will not fulfill his destiny as the conqueror from above but will undergo the fate of the Suffering Servant and be delivered into the hands of the enemy and suffer death on the cross, just the opposite of what is expected. Even our Lord resists becoming the one of whom he speaks. He resists suffering the fate of the Son of Man when he speaks of another than himself who is to come.

{Think of putting here Paul’s third man issue and the theme of pointing beyond oneself.}

And then in the agony of the Garden it becomes clear to him that he is the one of whom he speaks and he prays to have the messianic task taken from him—the Cup of Suffering. He does not want to drink his own blood, in being offered up as a sacrifice, the very cup that he passed in the night he was betrayed and told his disciples to drink of it. His cup is my thorn. I, too, prayed three times to have the thorn removed and the word that came to me is the same word to our Lord in his agony: my grace is sufficient for you for my strength is made perfect in weakness. The weakness of the Cross is God’s strength made perfect. So I boast of my weaknesses as I preach the Crucified in his weakness and death just as the disciples were given to confess their weaknesses while they were his companions.

In re-thinking this, I re-read Genesis and realized that there are two Adams, the Adam of the image of God and the Adam of the dust of the ground. These two Adams make up the Son of Man (image) and the Suffering Servant (dust). Just as the first two Adams are a unity in the dual nature of man, created and fallen, spirit and flesh, so the Second Adam, per se, is the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant together. Both sets are to be seen as united in their tension, one with the other even though they appear in Genesis and Isaiah (Suffering Servant) and Ezekiel (Son of Man). They belong to one another and interpret one another.

Thus an ambiguity or possible misunderstanding is resolved in thinking of the two Adams as two sets of two figures. The Second Adam, then, is not to be confused with the second Adam of the Genesis account, the Adam of the Fall, but is identified as the Second Adam of the second set, found in Isaiah and Ezekiel—the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant. They make up the paradox in their union in our Lord. The Son of Man/Suffering Servant is the composite figure of the Second Adam.

Our Lord assumed our fallen nature and restored us to our created nature. He is the Image of God and he took upon Himself the sins of us all and reunited us with God. It is all done for us and to us and we even receive it with the reception given as well. It is unconditional: the free gift of grace. I lie awake at night mulling this over in my mind even to the point of thinking it happens when we sleep, like a thief in the night; the Spirit, like the wind, blows where it listeth, and all we have to do and even this is done for us, is get out of the way.

We are the biggest obstacles to our salvation because we want to save ourselves or play some part and count it as righteousness. No! Give it up and know that this surrender is also given! God not only will be all in all; God is all in all when it comes to the grace that creates the faith that receives it. Always make the corrective move, as I have indicated, so the credit is given where the credit is due. Even the reception of grace is an act of grace.

Glory be to God for giving me the grace to figure this out and to communicate to you the truth, for this is the truth. I admonished the church at Corinth that we do not know how to pray as we ought but that the Spirit of God bears witness to our spirit that we are God’s adopted, sons and daughters, taken up in the Spirit.

The Spirit bears witness to our spirit, in prayer, with sighs too deep for words, because God is praying to God on our behalf, bringing us before God, God bringing us before God. God does it all. Listen to your sighing in your moment of prayer and listen to the Spirit of God bearing witness. I must confess that I came to my understanding of faith through my thinking about prayer and how we do not know how to pray as we ought, thinking that words are primary and our effort foremost.

No, it is God praying in us, through us, for us. To God! God offers us up to Himself through the operation of the Spirit and only the Spirit searches the deep things of God as the Spirit searches us. In your quiet moments, then, or in the tumult of your most anguished moments, listen to the Spirit of God bearing witness to your spirit, in your sighing. Breathe, then, in the Spirit, and breathe deeply, and know that you are God’s own.

Like Dionysius, I have had elating revelations; like Dionysius, I have been carried into the Third Heaven. But to keep me from being unduly elated, from reveling in my exaltations, my thorn was given to me to reveal to me the suffering of our Lord and the sufficiency of grace, where weakness is strength, when one confesses, knowing the confession is from God. God confesses us to Himself. Do you see how it works? Lo, I am revealing to you a mystery.

Therefore, repent, my dear ones, and know that the Spirit of God is the one who brings us before God in repentance. The Spirit is our witness and our advocate and gives us the means of grace. For by grace you have been saved through faith, not by your own doing, as I tirelessly repeat, but through the gift of God. Not our works; but we are God’s works.

I have been in close conversation with John Mark, especially on the issue of his Gospel. He has gathered the Sayings of Jesus and the events of his life and wants to compose these fragments into a narrative for the edification of the church. I have been discussing the theme of the Suffering Servant, identified as the Son of Man; many of the sayings of Jesus refer to the Son of Man as another. It reminds me of my mentioning the one who was carried into the Third Heaven, the man, of whom I was prepared to boast. I was speaking in the third person. Likewise, Jesus, with his Son of Man sayings. You get the distinct impression that he is speaking of another and that he slowly has to accept the fact that he is speaking of himself. He is the one of whom he speaks. When does this realization come to him? In the confession of Peter that he is the Christ? He regards this confession as satanic when Peter rejects the response that the Christ is the Son of Man/Suffering Servant: the one who is to come, as the conqueror of the enemies, is the one to be crucified by the enemy. The cross sticks in Peter’s gullet, so to speak, and the cock crows in the night our Lord is betrayed, on the stroke of Peter’s denial.

It slowly dawns on Jesus that the one of whom he speaks is himself. He is the Son of Man. He is going to suffer the fate of the Suffering Servant; the Son of Man, the paradox, the stumbling block, the offense, is where it all turns upside down.

So my advice to John Mark has been to make the slowly developing realization that Jesus is the one of whom he speaks, the Son of Man as the Suffering Servant, the fulfillment of the prophesies of the Second Isaiah, the Servant Songs, where it is said that the Messiah will be a leper, upon whom no one will look, ugly, despised and rejected, the scapegoat, the one who carries the sins of us all, to make this the key to his Gospel and the content of the Messianic Secret.

I told John Mark to read the Servant Songs of Isaiah and write his Gospel accordingly, where the Son of Man sayings of our Lord should be interpreted as they were meant. The paradox of the heavenly redeemer, the Man from Above, the original Adam, now the Crucified, was not lost on Mark and he agreed to make it the content of the messianic secret. This is what Jesus meant when he said it is to be revealed to you…whereas to others it is hidden.

The Messianic Secret is just this: the Son of Man is the Suffering Servant. It is of the order of a parable of the highest magnitude. No, probably more; it is an Event.

This Event is our justification. We are justified through faith by grace, where grace is the cause of faith, not the other way around, because it is given before anything we can say or do. Already given.

The Spirit bears witness to this gift as the bearer of it. As the Spirit bears witness to our spirit, so the Spirit bears witness to God. We are Spirit driven because the Spirit is given as our witness.

I am reluctant to use the word cause, lest the cause/effect scheme be understood in a mundane way instead of in the mode of transcendence, or spiritually. The cause/effect scheme is one way to misunderstand the meaning of prayer even though we are told to ask and it shall be given, when, what is meant, is that it is already given, as is the asking. In a way, effect precedes cause when you think about it spiritually. Even the sense of serial time is transcended, one thing after another.

I can see that some insight is needed in the issue of inclination and motivation and impulse. The whole sphere of human volition is at stake in God taking action in our behalf before anything we can think or say or do…

I am worried that my theme of justification through faith by grace will be subject to distortion if the theme is made a dogmatizing slogan and shortened to justification by faith, something even I may be guilty of. But I would not have you misunderstand me and therefore I take pains to correct this from happening. This would be unfortunate in the extreme as it would make faith a matter of belief as though a receptacle for every kind of incidental content other than the Spirit, the bearer of grace, and the reception it creates, which is faith. Don’t allow this distortion to happen. By grace through faith is the critical formulation, not by faith, but through faith. The content of faith is grace. Justifying grace. Just though unjust is the paradox. We meet ourselves coming back to ourselves. Our reconciliation is in this paradox just as love is the reunion of opposites.

We are no longer opposed to ourselves when grace gives us the realization that God loves us because God is love. Faith is the mirror the Spirit holds up to reflect the grace that is given. We get to see ourselves in that reflection. The more clearly we can see the more the contours of love are discernible. For God is love and to love forth is to build up. But to love forth love means precisely to presuppose that it is present at the base.

Imagine St. Paul, St. Denis, and me in a conversation about faith and whether I got it right in my effort to define it.

Paul: What do you think? Am I right about the axiomatics issue and the necessity for a normative definition of faith?

St. Paul: I am in favor of the axiomatics, namely a first premise or first principle that directs the logic of the discussion. If you give up to the current notion that faith is believing in the unbelievable or faith is belief in whatever for which there is no evidence then the issue is lost and practically irretrievable and yet this is the definition most people, I would imagine, have in their minds. So an axiomatics is essential to begin on a proper footing.

St. D: The only worry I have is that axiomatics is borrowed from mathematics and therefore seems inflexible rather like the word absolute.

Paul: Well, I wanted something carved in stone, so inflexible is all right with me.

St. Paul: One problem I see is your tendency to wipe the slate clean as indicated in your theme of faith without content. Belief, then, becomes the content of faith, if you want to go on to fill it up as if faith is the form of belief.

Paul: O.K. by me as long as belief does not engulf the form and spill over it and obscure it; hence, the axiomatic, as a protection against this.

Faith is clear because you can’t grasp it; it grasps you. You trust in it and this is given with it. I am engrossed with the reflexivity of the dynamics of faith. It refers back to itself. After the fact it is always already before the fact. There are no limits to the reflexivity of faith as a corrective—the past tense rules, in the perfect tense, interacting with the present and the future, because in the perfect tense they are simultaneous. “Already” is the sign of reflexivity. Before anything we can think or say….. It is the prius of impulse. I wish there was a word that expresses the moment before impulse, a moment before intention, a word, as it were, that catches the will by surprise. The old spiritual: “Leaning on the everlasting arms,” comes close. We are already carried.

I can understand the voluntaristic motif and the interest in making the decisive move for which the leap of faith is a good phrase. But, again, the reflexive comes into play, in the sense that one has already leaped and the leaping is induced and not a voluntary act, referring, as it does, to the risk involved. The leap of faith by reason of the absurd is a pseudonymous formulation and not one of Kierkegaard’s; it is the mentality of the pseudonym, as a neo-Kantian, to be perplexed by Abraham’s faith as a teleological suspension of the ethical, a transgression of the categorical imperative. The pseudonym thinks this through as a thought experiment in a brilliant tour de force. But it is important to see it for what it is and not take it at face value and attribute it to Kierkegaard. The leap of faith is not a somersault in the dark.

We’re agreed on that. It is a misleading metaphor and the reference to the absurd only makes it worse, echoing Tertullian.

As it stands, according to your axiomatics, you only formulate one: grace creates the faith that receives it. Are there other axioms?

I was thinking about that. One other axiom is not to objectify or hypostatize. This is done when God is considered an object of thought in the sense of a highest being or as a being at all and worse still whether such a being exists. People do not think at all about the language they use when it comes to talking about God. Just the other day I thought there are two contexts for this, one is to think about God within a tradition, that is, within a particular religion. Then you have a context for talking about God, as, the Father of Jesus Christ, or the lst Person of the Trinity, and so on, whatever religious tradition you represent. And then there is secular talk about God, such as dinner table conversation, in mixed company, when someone, for instance, announces they are an atheist and do not believe in God and they haven’t even had too much to drink, thinking this is a conversation stopper. Whatever could they possibly mean and why would anyone, and I mean anyone in the world, believe in the God that is rejected or not believed in? It is foolish babble. It is a perverse instance of unbelief without content! There is no possibility that the term could be defined except to fall back on absurdities such as a highest being or even any of the arguments for God’s existence, in the classic sense of arguments, such as the ontological or cosmological or axiological, etc., all of which being ruled out in advance as intelligible discourse.

What is not understood is that existence implies the conditions of time and space. Therefore, it is senseless to say that God exists. You would think that would be obvious to anyone. I remember the head of a Lutheran seminary, when I was called on the carpet, belligerently asking me if I believed in God. It was of the order of one’s high school principal bullying one into submission. I made the mistake of saying: “I think so”. And he said don’t you know? The word “know” was hurled at my head like a projectile. I think I ducked, and then I ducked out altogether, and went to Harvard.

I remember walking in the town of Zermat, with the Matterhorn, in its awesome majesty overhead in the background and listening to two Swiss businessmen thoughtfully conversing as they took an evening stroll and one asking the other if he believed in God. The juxtaposition of the question to the mountain looming over them made me laugh out loud. All they had to do was look up.

God cannot be brought down to the subject-object scheme, that’s axiom number two. God transcends subject and object. That’s one service Negative Theology provides. Negations protect God’s transcendence.

Let’s return to secular neutrality and the mixed company at the dinner table. We are all secularized in varying degrees. Fundamentalist literalists defend against this neutralization. They ought to give it up. This was the message of Bonhoeffer to my generation of students: the world has come of age; God is teaching us to live in a world without God. My faith without content is a consequence of this teaching. I don’t know if I should make it an axiom even though it sounds like one.

I think clearing the decks and erasing the blackboard is a relief. Start from zero. Start from the realization that grace creates faith and stay with that. Let be to do its work. Grace may or may not import the content. It doesn’t matter; you can leave it up to God, in this case the Spirit. I’m certain that the confusion over faith is due to the neglect of the meaning of the Holy Spirit and not knowing how to commune with the Spirit bearing witness to our spirit in silent prayer and meditation.

Look at Pentecost. It is hardly celebrated as anything but another Sunday and yet that was when the Spirit was poured out with all of its attendant signs. We are so devoid of the signs that we draw a blank when the issue of the Spirit of God is raised. Trinitarian monotheism is lacking its third leg.

Another axiom although more of the character of an aphorism is the following: you have to get it in order to get it and it is always already given. Get it?

A bibliographical note on the sources.

The literature is vast and so has been my reading in it. But certain key influences have been clear. While I was working on the Letter I was inspired by the study of Paul by the French philosopher, Badiou. His is a penetrating analysis of Paul by an avowed atheist, which, in his case, is a bit of unnecessary posturing, he is so proud to be one. Atheism is a tricky position. One could say that everyone ought to confess to being an atheist in order to admit that no one has an adequate knowledge of God. Can you define the word? Do you think you can capture God in the word God?

Theism risks objectifying God as the highest being among beings and needs to be corrected even though arguments for the existence of God have a long and distinguished history within philosophy and theology. So Badiou’s avowed atheism is a breath of fresh air, one that even Paul would have appreciated. I was much impressed by his account. If his avowed atheism has given him the vigour and verve of his insightful interpretation, more power to him.

Once the true meaning of faith sinks in and the reflexive response becomes conditioned it is a natural reaction to statements where faith is misunderstood as something one has and therefore can lose. I remember Basil Willey telling the story of someone famous whose father walked down the steps one day and before he reached the bottom of the stairs had ‘lost his faith’. I remember a former Lutheran who became a biologist, whose minister, when he was an impressionable young man, told him Darwin was anathema and so he ‘lost his faith’ and rejected Lutheranism in favor of Darwin and would be bitter about it until he died. Faith is no more obtained than lost, once one understands the working of the Spirit that creates it. It is not at one’s disposal, although grace can be given and can be taken away, according to Tillich, a point I don’t quite understand, although we repeat the prayer: take not thy Spirit from me.

While working on the Letter, I returned to one of my favorite works by my old friend, Paul Ricoeur: The Symbolism of Evil. It is a very dense text and a very textured interpretation of symbols by a master of hermeneutics. I owe him a particular debt. Paul Tillich has sharpened my ear and eye for the nuances of the meaning of faith even to the point of a critical response to his own ‘lapses’. His apologetic, as differentiated from a kerygmatic, approach, overwhelms him in his understanding of faith as ultimate concern, a strategy for those who doubt and for whom conventional content is un-understandable. Tillich was a master at this sort of tease and he knew full well that his ultimate concern theme was characterized by Kierkegaard’s ‘religion A’, namely, this side of the paradoxical meaning of faith. But Tillich knew the ‘religion B’ side as well, and has some of the sharpest formulations for defending it and illustrating it. I draw from that side.

Kierkegaard, of course, is a major source. I re-read him after beginning this effort and found he had worked out the meaning of faith better than anyone, even though the pseudonymous diffraction is disconcerting. You never quite know where you are at with him as he hides behind the hypothetically imagined mentality who is the author of the work. But who can beat the following definition of faith: the happy passion in which the Paradox bestows itself while Reason sets itself aside.

I have never forgotten the words of Austin Farrer when I read them man years ago (l953) and thought of them as words of truth:

“When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God. The crucifixion of the images in which God is first shown to us is a necessity of prayer because it is a necessity of life. The promise of God’s dealing with us through grace can be set before us in nothing but images, for we have not yet experienced the reality. When we proceed to live the promises out, the images are crucified by the reality, slowly and progressively, never completely, and not always without pain: yet the reality is better than the images. Jesus Christ clothed himself in all the images of messianic promise, and in living them out, crucified them: but the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is very God and life eternal, whereby the children of God are delivered from idols.”

Austin Farrer: Kerygma and Myth by Rudolf Bultmann and Five Critics, S.P.C.K., London, 1953.

I read Caputo’s: The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Religion without Religion. It is like overspreading cream cheese on a bagel and winding up without the bagel, having spread the cheese on your hand, and then trying to eat that. But this is typical of the Derrida literature, to vary the figure, like blowing whipped cream through a saxophone, in the course of frenetic jazz riffs. Derrida is as stoned as you want to get in the annals of scholarship. Someone told me his favorite dessert was whipped cream on ice cream which of course comes as no surprise. But I must admit I lined up when I read his essay in Disseminations: “Plato’s Pharmacy.” It was like cracking a code. I had to read it three times before I began to understand it. What do you expect with a beginning that reads: “This, therefore, would not have been a book.”

When I was in Paris some years ago, I tried to organize a public discussion of the significance of St. Denis and the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition of apophatic theology with Paul Ricoeur and Derrida and found out, much to my surprise, that Derrida had been Ricoeur’s assistant as a student. But it didn’t come off. And now they are both deceased.

When I re-read Paul’s Letters for inspiration and guidance I almost gave up the effort. He was too hard to emulate. His language is so infused with the Spirit and so close so often to ecstatic speech I knew my own effort would pale by comparison. Why bother? I overcame the reaction and pressed on.

The literature on Dionysius is easily available. Google is a good place to start for general information. The Pseudo-Dionysian texts are in print. There is no good single review of the three-fold figures and their significance.

Klibansky gives an excellent survey of the transmission of the Pseudo-Dionysian texts in the Medieval Period in his classic monograph: The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition.

In Homer the Theologian, Robert Lamberton refers to Hathaway: Hierarchy and the Definition of Order “for the suggestion that the Dionysian corpus might represent a deliberate masquerade—a Christianization (or more properly a depaganization) of the teachings of the Athenian Platonists accomplished near 529, when the future of this philosophical tradition could be seen to depend on dissociating it from the pagan ideology so central to its development down through the great synthesis of Proclus. The complete elimination of all references to pagan thinkers and poets from this corpus, which otherwise shares so much with the works of Proclus, might be considered another piece of circumstantial evidence pointing toward such a genesis for the Dionysian corpus.

I feel the need to say a critical word about my reading of Mark. It is obvious that anyone can read Mark in a straightforward way, namely, purely receptively, play it as it lays. No questions need to be asked of the narrative; it is the Word of God.

But eventually even for the pious questions begin to be asked and for me the main question is the use of the Son of Man by Jesus to refer to someone other than himself. And, moreover, to refer to the Son of Man in the opposite way the title implies by having the Son Man suffer defeat and death as the Suffering Servant. Why didn’t Jesus refer to the Suffering Servant directly as expressed in the Servant Songs of Second Isaiah?

Why does the Son of Man undergo the fate of the Suffering Servant?

The disciples are baffled by this contradiction in titles. They seem tone deaf to the Son of Man title and never refer to it themselves. They see Jesus as the Christ and the one who will realize their ambitions as a result of their following him.

At most they want a Son of Man in the mode of their understanding of the messiah without the Suffering Servant motif. Forget that. They don’t want to go down in ignominy, defeat, and despair and partake in his death any more than Jesus wants to drink his own blood.

So what is happening here? Are the Son of Man/Suffering Servant sayings in Mark an interpolation after the fact, a means of dramatizing the disciples’ misunderstanding, confusion, self-delusion, and eventual alienation and flight?

Are the Son of Man/Suffering Servant sayings the Paradox in a nutshell, the stumbling block, the offense, where everyone is shipwrecked and founders, including Jesus himself.

This is the pill that is difficult to swallow. Why does Jesus not identify himself as the Son of Man as he does in the other gospels but speaks consistently in the third person as though of another. Why does it seem to dawn on him so slowly that he is the one of whom he speaks, a realization that finally throws him to the ground in despair in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asks that the cup of suffering be taken from him, a cup into which he bleeds in the agony of his prayer.

…”faith itself demands to be freed of all world views (Weltanschauungen), be they mythological or scientific”… Bultmann

“Profanization is always rationalization, i.e., comprehension of things through resolution into their elements and combination under the law. This attitude, which is in accord with the nature of things and suited to the relationship of subject and object, is demonically distorted through the will to control, which master it and robs the things of their essential character and independent power. It is the attitude to reality meant by the concept of intellectualism, which is not to be thought of as too much of intellect or rationality, but as a violation on the part of the rational subject…. The demonic quality of intellectualism is that it contains the rational comprehension of things and essentially must contain the consequence of infinite progress, but that, on the other hand, with every step forward it destroys the living, independently powerful quality in the things and therewith the inner community between the knowing and the known.” Tillich: Das Daemonische. 1936

Not faith (understood as distorted as the intellectual work of accepting a doctrine) but grace is the cause of justification, because God alone is the cause. Faith is the receiving act, and this act is itself a gift of grace.

The servant songs of Deutero-Isaiah are the source for the content of the Son of Man sayings of Jesus in Mark. Here are the main passages from the Songs.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom I delight. I have put my spirit upon him, he will bring forth truth to the nations. He does not cry, or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street. The bruised reed he will not break and the dimly wick he will not quench. Faithfully does he bring forth justice, he is not extinguished nor broken, till he has established truth in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching

Is. XLLII, 1-4

Behold my servant shall prosper,

He is lifted up and will be highly exalted;

Even as many were shocked at him,

his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance,

and his form not like that of men,

so he will make expiation for many nations,

kings shall shut their mouths before him.

For that which has never been told them they shall see,

that which they have never heard they shall understand.

Who believes what we have heard?

And to whom is the arm of Jahweh revealed?

He grew up before us like a young plant,

And like a root out of dry ground.

He had no form, no majesty,

We saw him, but there was no beauty that we should love him.

He was despised, forsaken by men,

A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

As one from whom men hide their faces

–he was despised—we esteemed him not.

Yet it was our sicknesses he bore,

And our pains he carried,

And we reckoned him as stricken,

Smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was wounded four transgressions,

Bruised for our iniquities.

Chastisement that makes us whole lies on him,

And with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray,

We looked every one to his own way,

But Jahweh laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Racked, he suffered meekly,

And opened not his mouth;

Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

And like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb…

He was taken from prison and judgment,

and his state, who still thinks of it?

For he was cut off out of the land of the living,

for our transgressions he was put to death.

And they made his grave with the wicked,

and his place with evildoers,

Although he had done no violence

and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the purpose of Jahweh to smite him.

When he makes his life an offering for sin,

he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days.

And the purpose of Jahweh shall prosper in his hand.

After the travail of his life he shall cause him to see light,

And satisfy him with his knowledge.

Is. :II. 13—LIII.12

[1] The tradition has been revived of late, partly around Jacques Derrida.

[2] This is the reading given in Luke and Matthew.

[3] “The disciples’ attempt to use Jesus idolatrically, and Jesus’rejection of this attempt, is one of the main themes of the gospel stories. Jesus rejected the temptation to let himself be idolized; and this gives Christianity, in principle, the position of criterion not only against itself, but against all other religions.” Paul Tillich: My Search for Absolutes, p. 140,

[4] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p. 360. Tillich gives a superb characterization of this cosmic understanding of salvation as healing in his essay: The Meaning of Health.

[5] Paul Tillich: My Search For Absolutes, Simon and Schuster, l967, p. 140. The temptations Jesus undergoes in the desert by Satan is the locus classicus of this issue.

[6] Cf. Vincent Taylor: The Gospel According To St. Mark, London, l955, “The teaching (concerning Messianic suffering and death) is based on a unique combination of the idea of the Suffering Servant of Isa. LIII with that of the Son of Man…”, p. 378.

[7] Erich Auerbach in his essay, “Figura”, in Scenes From the Drama of European Literature, interprets this mixture of styles, the tragic and comic, which in ancient literature were kept separate, as a distinctive feature of the Christian message. It was this essay that prompted me to apply the perfect tense, the tense of transcendence, to the biblical narrative.

[8] The French philosopher, Alain Badiou, has developed this theme in his book: Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford University Press, 2003. It is a brilliant reading of the significance of Paul’s ministry and understanding of the Gospel.

[9] Paul Tillich: Morality and Beyond, p. 61

[10] ibid, p. 63

[11] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p.

[12] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p. 159.

[13] Philip Rieff: Charisma. The Gift of Grace, and How It has Been Taken Away from Us.

[14] A restoration has occurred in the relatively new science known as psycho-neuro-immunology which links mental stress to the immune system.

[15] Paul Tillich: Morality and Beyond, p. 61.

[16] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p.159.

[17] Paul Tillich: Morality and Beyond, p. 63.

[18] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p. 229

[19] ibid. p.229.

[20] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, p.230.

[21] Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, III, p. 232.

[22] Eric Voegelin: Israel and Revelation, p. 172f. He discusses the epochal symbolism of the Old Testament narrative: (l) the first mankind of Adam; (2) the second mankind of Noah; (3) the first exodus of Abraham; (4) the second exodus of Moses.

[23] Soren Kierkegaard: The Concept of Irony, Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 10. The full quote deserves notice as it is such an uncanny juxtaposition to Plato’s “Myth of Er”, at the end of the Republic, one of my favorite texts: “Philosophy relates itself in this respect to history—in its truth, as eternal life to the temporal according to the Christian view—in its untruth, as eternal life to the temporal according to the Greek and the antique view in general. According to the latter view, eternal life began when one drank of the river Lethe in order to forget the past, according to the former, eternal life is attended by the bone-and-marrow-piercing consciousness of every idle word that is spoken.”

A woman called this morning and said, Oh, Dr. Lee, I would love to hear you tonight, but there’s a demonstration at the Town Clock against Bush’s talk last night, so could you postpone your talk?  I’ve been waking up every morning at about 3 or 4 a.m. and lying in bed and rehearsing this– for [...]]]> l.

A woman called this morning and said, Oh, Dr. Lee, I would love to hear you tonight, but there’s a demonstration at the Town Clock against Bush’s talk last night, so could you postpone your talk?  I’ve been waking up every morning at about 3 or 4 a.m. and lying in bed and rehearsing this– for the last three weeks!  The first week it was kind of fun.   I got a big kick out of listening to myself.  Second week, ehhh.  The third week I thought: will this hour never come? I told her no we were going on as scheduled. I’m very pleased to be here and to welcome you to the Dinner Theater Of the Mind, the first in a series of humanities talks at The Attic that we call One Night University.  I got the term from a fellow on the East Coast, who started the Saturday University.  It’s a sequence of classes that he books and it’s a huge success, as an adult education program.  He’s going to franchise it.  So I’ve got the dibs on One Night University.

2.

What would we do without Homer?  We’d slide back into Egypt.  As you know, the Jews made an exodus from Egypt.  Egypt represents institutional bondage to a cosmological empire.  Homer is another kind of exodus.  Both Israel and Greece supersede Egyptian culture and are represented as a gain.  I would go so far as to say that Israel makes history possible and Greece makes rationality possible as cultural contributions.  The Olympian gods of Homer represent a kind of enlightenment and a gain in terms of the development of  rational self-consciousness; it’s the beginning of Humanism in the best sense of the word.  So tonight I’m going to pick up from where I started when I first began to teach.  I cut my teeth teaching Homer at Harvard in a humanities course called Hum 2, The Epic and the Novel.  There’s nothing like learning something when you have to teach it.  The professor who was the main lecturer for the course was John Finley, Jr., a Classics professor—a wonderful lecturer.  I was a teaching fellow and there were about fifteen of us—it was a very big course and we had a discussion group that we ran every week.  It was a wonderful experience to begin my teaching career with the Iliad and the Odyssey.

3.

Harvard was the center for the study of oral culture, which is the culture of Homer.  Millman Parry was a Harvard professor of Classics who somehow—I’m not sure how—had the notion that he could go to remote areas of Yugoslavia and find a Homer: the tradition beginning with Homer was transmitted intact to modern Yugoslavia.  There would be bards and minstrels who would still carry the Homeric tradition.  In 1933 he went to Yugoslavia.  He had a very early form of recorder—I think he recorded on an aluminum drum.  And he recorded something like 12,500 songs.  He went to a remote village in Yugoslavia and he said, I’d like to meet a hero.  So a guy stepped forward and said, I’m a hero.  Parry said, Well, I’m really glad to meet you.  He was six foot eight and he had those cute, pointy shoes on and the Yugoslav regalia and a long, waxed mustache and a scimitar in his belt.  And Parry said, “Well, tell me something about yourself.”  And the hero spontaneously broke into song and in effect became his own Homer and sang of his deeds in battle.

4.

Parry began collecting these songs and brought them all back to Harvard where they were analyzed, and thus began the school of oral poetry and oral culture.  The most important thing to register about Homer, which is news to people, is that Homer was pre-literate and pre-rational.  The songs were sung; there were no texts.  We are not used to that, because we read the Iliad and the Odyssey as a text, but there was no writing and no reading in the general public in the Homeric period.  They had a rudimentary alphabet—Linear A, Linear B—and writing was done by scribes for court purposes, but there was no general literacy and no general rationality.  I think they go hand in hand.  You don’t really achieve rational self-consciousness until literacy occurs as its accompaniment.  This is a large statement but it is central to our theme of the rise of rational self-consciousness in Ancient Greece, an all-determining event for the direction of Western culture.  Nothing is the same after literacy and rationality occur as an historic event and we can trace this development from Homer to Socrates/Plato where it comes into full realization.

5.

The understanding of an oral culture, which was also a tribal culture, broke upon the academic world, given the work of Millman Parry.  At the same time that I was at Harvard– the same time I was teaching, a book came out called The Discovery of the Mind.  It followed upon Parry’s work on the unique significance of an oral culture and oral poetry, epic poetry, and it was by a German Classical philologist name Bruno Snell. The first chapter was on Homeric anthropology.  You could call it the Snell corrective, because if you have an oral culture that’s pre-literate and pre-rational, you can’t read back into it what has developed and evolved in the subsequent culture.  You can’t read back what happens by the time of Socrates and Plato into Homer, especially if you’re reading it as a text. It would be like treating a child as an adult. And so to run this corrective home, he said, take the word for consciousness.  The word is psyche.  We’re familiar with that: psychology, psychic.  In Homer, according to Snell, the word psyche is only used at the point of death.  It’s the only time the word psyche appears as “the last gasp.”  I thought whoa, that’s amazing.  Here you go from the last gasp of Homer, to Socrates, saying that philosophy is having one foot in the grave.  And this “last gasp” as it were, through the development of the tradition, becomes philosophical reflection on having to die.  Snell says there’s not really a word for “body” in the Homeric poems; it’s a kind of surface of the skin.  So I thought, Oh, I get it: Homeric heroes are bags of blood. And when you puncture it, it goes [last gasp sound], and that’s consciousness flying off to the underworld like a bat, where it becomes a shade or a shadow.  A “shade,” think of pulling down a shade.   Snell says the word for “mind” in Homer is derived from smelling.  The word is nous. Smelling!  We still have a residue of it when we say, “It doesn’t smell right.”  Or, “Smell it out.”  And nous is close to “nose.”  So the etymological derivation for the word for “mind” is smelling.

6.

What Snell wanted to make clear was that the Homeric terms for what we would consider to be psychological concepts are quasi-organs, or quasi-bodily functions.  As if to say they haven’t been abstracted off to become the kind of psychological concepts they become by the time they get to Plato, where Plato has a structure of human consciousness that is conceptually devised.  And I’ve given you a grid for it on your handout sheet.

7.

Homer is more like a field of forces.  There’s no centered self that enables one to be rationally self-conscious.  One is at the mercy of this field of forces, and in fact, one has recourse to the gods to account for why one acts the way one does.  The god made me do it.  The gods become the locus for what makes one do things, as if the motive force of one’s behavior has as yet to be integrated as the tradition continues.  And you finally—by the time you’ve reached Socrates and Plato, internalize and supersede the gods in order to get a unified self.  The world of polytheism begins to disappear by the time you get to Plato, in favor of an incipient monotheism, which for Plato means that god is the Good.  Monotheism, as it were, parallels the unification of the human self, in the realm of the divine.

8.

Homer was interesting to learn about in terms of the remnants of a primitive, native, tribal culture that wasn’t rational and wasn’t self-conscious.  Homeric heroes couldn’t think, in the sense of how we think of thinking.  They are on the way but they have not arrived.  I’ve played this out at the Penny University that meets ever Monday at Calvary Episcopal Church. Page Smith and I started it in 1973, and it still meets every Monday.  And I’ve pushed this line of thought.  I have found that it’s difficult to have people take it in.  What do you mean they don’t “think?”  Well, they don’t think conceptually.  They wouldn’t know what a definition is.  They wouldn’t know what a concept is.  It’s all image.  It’s all imagination.  There’s no cognition, as such.  They do not display rational self-consciousness as far as being aware of what they are thinking.  The separation of the knower from known has not as yet taken place.  Logical thought has as yet to occur although there is an early form of logic, of course, or the poems would be incoherent.  The role of comparison in Homer is an early form of logic.  The Homeric heroes are proto-thinkers, very rudimentary, like children.

9.

This is what characterizes the terrific discrepancy between the Homeric state of mind and the Platonic state of mind.  And that’s why they come into such rude conflict.  That’s why Plato banishes Homer from the republic; because he doesn’t want you to persist in the Homeric state of mind.  Why?  Because it’s basically a trance state.  It’s actually a pathological state, according to Plato.  Once you’ve reached Socrates, it’s time to wake up, and it’s time to think for yourself and take responsibility for yourself and your behavior.  It’s time to achieve an autonomous, centered self with a moral imperative.  That is not the case with Homer.  So the famous quarrel between poetry and philosophy as it’s called is the quarrel between two states of mind.  And that’s one of the things that I’m keen about elaborating for you tonight and two weeks from tonight.

10.

The Snell corrective was a big eye-opener in the sense of these quasi-psychological terms, still functioning as quasi-organs or quasi-bodily functions.  My favorite one is thumos.  That’s another aspect of Homeric consciousness.  What’s thumos?  Thumos is this rattling in the chest.  The Greek meaning of thumos is courage, vitality or spirit, in the sense of biological spiritedness, as when we talk about a spirited horse or a spirited woman.  I don’t know why we don’t talk about spirited men, but we do talk about spirited women—in the sense of a woman who has high spirits, who is very vital.  And so thumos is this kind of radiant center, right here in the chest, referenced to the thymus gland. Snell doesn’t say that; I say that.  I made the move from thumos to the thymus gland, because of what Snell says about quasi-organs.  It’s made to order.  He simply missed it because the thymus has as yet to be discovered in terms of modern immunology.  The thymus gland is the center of your immunity, so it’s in effect your organ of courage, it’s the center of your vitality because it protects you against illness and disease by programming your T-cells. The thymus, because of thumos, suddenly became of immense interest to me, and I thought, well, Achilles, of all people, has this enormous thymus gland, because he’s the most courageous of all the Homeric heroes.

11.

Okay, it wasn’t all that big.  But let’s abstract from it a little bit—the gland itself—and talk about a thymic field.  This region in the upper chest is the thymic field, and this is immensely dynamic in the Homeric poems.  It’s the center of consciousness in the Platonic construction of the self (psyche), between reason (nous) and desire (epithymia).  And unfortunately it begins to fade and fall away after Descartes.   We are all now somehow victims of the loss of this thymic center and the affective field it entails.  One of the reasons why people struggle about empowerment and self-esteem, is because of the emptiness of this area that should really be full of vigor and vitality.  “We are the hollow men”, as T. S. Eliot puts it.  Head piece filled with straw.

12.

I learned about thumos from a book that my teacher at Harvard—Paul Tillich—called, The Courage to Be.  This is the center of the courage to be—vital self-affirmation.  There are no figures in literature that are greater expressions of vital self-affirmation than the Homeric heroes, even though they have a very rudimentary self.  By the time you go from Homer to Socrates and Plato, the center moves from here, in the upper chest, to here, in the head.  This is the root of consciousness, this is the dark ground of consciousness—the vital ground of consciousness. The more rationality develops, the less this vital center functions.  It’s as if rational self-consciousness is purchased at the price of vitality. Especially when literacy occurs.  The teacher says:  “Johnny, sit still and read and don’t squeak your seat.”

13.

So thumos is my favorite word.  If I had to pick a word out of all the words I know, it would be thumos. And it’s thanks to this book by Tillich, The Courage to Be, which I recommend to all of you.  He begins with Homer and gives it an analysis of this thymic vigor in Homer, he carries it through Plato, where it’s the middle ground between reason and desire, vital self-affirmation, the bridge between reason and desire, the unreflective striving toward what is noble.  That’s thumos. Fabulous word.  Cognate, the thymus gland, and believe it or not, the herb, thyme—Thymus vulgaris. I opened a restaurant in Santa Cruz after I left the University.  Page Smith was the Maitre D. Joanne LeBoeuf was in the kitchen with my wife, Charlene, and Eloise Smith.  I called it The Wild Thyme.  And I had a sheet on thumos that I handed out to everybody that came there to dine, designed by my friend, the great typographer of the Greenwood Press, Jack Stauffacher.  The specialty of the house was thymus glands.  How’s that for carrying through your favorite word.  Riz de veau—it’s really the triumph of French cuisine.  I was on my thumos kick.

14.

So I press upon you– I  want you to focus on this term thumos and the deep meaning of the Greek word for courage and vitality and spiritedness in the biological sense, because we need it so badly.  It has been a vanishing point in Western thought since Descartes, because of the subject-object split.  I’ll go into that when we get to Socrates two weeks from tonight.  I hold in my hand the key to vital self-affirmation.

15.

What is the main theme of the Iliad?  There was a period where the Iliad was thought to be a composition—a pastiche of all kinds of poems that circulated after the Trojan war, and they were all gathered together and stitched up and there were many singers of these multiple songs.  The Homeric poems were dissected and taken apart, beginning with the catalog of ships.  Oh, that got placed there.  And so on.  And the joke around Harvard was the Homeric poems are not by Homer, but by somebody else with the same name.  That’s as funny as it got at Harvard, alluding to the multiple sources.

16.

The same scholarly tradition occurred with the Bible.  The Bible was subjected to intense literary criticism with scientific standards, and the five books of Moses—the Pentateuch—were regarded as compositions by multiple authors—J, E, P, and D.  It’s called the Documentary hypothesis.  The Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly writer and the Deuteronomist.  The five books of the Bible were not by Moses, but they were a mosaic.  Get it?  Well, it’s just as funny.

17.

There is a unitary theme in the Iliad that I think argues for a single author, composer, singer.  Notice I didn’t say writer.  Homer didn’t write.  And the theme is the fact that Achilles is singled out to be told a prophesy that he’s going to die at Troy at the hands of Hector.  The unitary theme of the Iliad is the fate of Achilles to die at Troy.  It’s a prospect for everybody fighting there, but Achilles is singled out to be told that at Troy you’re going to die.  Whenever his mother appears to him, she laments his death.  Alas, my child, that I should have given birth to you.  Shortest lived of all mortals.  And she repeats it again and again.  It’s the lament of Thetis, the goddess who is Achilles’ mother.  What does Achilles do?  He tries to cheat his fate; he’s got a chip on his shoulder.  So when he has his quarrel with Agamemnon in the opening of the Iliad, Agamemnon knocks the chip off.  He threatens to take Achilles’ bride, because he’s got to give his up.  And Achilles says, Okay.  He is going to kill Agamemnon as a consequence of just being threatened the loss of his bride.  And Athena comes and pulls at his hair.  I’ll show you a slide of it in a minute.  And says, nuh-u-u-u—uh-uh—Don’t—no, no, don’t do that; you may want me to listen to you when you want something from me,  so come on, Achilles.  It’s unseemly to kill the king— put your sword up.

18.

This amazing thing happens in the Iliad.  This black fluid starts up from Achilles’ feet, almost like a thermometer with the mercury rising.  This black fluid overcomes Achilles, and this black fluid is his wrath. I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you.  It’s happened to me, maybe four or five times, where—when the fluid rises and hits here, at the top of your head, there’s a cork that pops. It’s called losing your temper, but I mean big time.  Big time. We even refer to it as popping your cork.  What’s happening with Achilles is that he’s forced to internalize his aggression because Athena will not let him carry out his aggressive intention.  He has to eat his heart out.  He wants to kill Agamemnon but Athena intervenes and stops it.  So he says, Okay, I’m out of here, I may go back to my kingdom and live out my life as a king, forget about immortal song and the deeds that are sung about—hey, I’m going to quit fighting and longing for Achilles—l o n g i n g for Achilles, will come over the Achaean forces when they drop and die at the hands of the Trojans.  I have this line:  longing for Achilles, ingrained in my brain.  It is a hard ‘g’.  Like a hard six in craps.  Longing for Achilles…   Oh, my, the desire this phrase contains.

19.

So Achilles sits brooding by his ships, thinking that he’s somehow going to cheat his fate. He’s not going to die at Troy, he’s going home.  He sits by his ships and  sings songs of war;  he becomes his own Homer, like that Balkan hero who sang to Parry.  The same thing happens in the Odyssey.  Odysseus comes back to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and he sits next to Penelope, disguised, singing songs about Odysseus.  So there sits Achilles.  The Trojans encroach upon the Achaean ships and start burning them and Patroclus says, give me your armor and I’ll go in and beat them back.  And Achilles says, Okay, and Patroclus goes in and he’s killed by Hector and uh-oh…Achilles realizes the jig is up, he’s got to go in and avenge the death of Patroclus, his dear alter-ego friend, and with that, fulfill his fate to die at Troy.

20.

That’s the theme of the Iliad— this coming to terms with fate as in the case with Achilles.  It makes him a kind of proto-Socrates for me.  I mean: he meditates on having to die. That’s his fate.  He’s a proto-philosopher.  Socrates makes that the main theme of philosophy, having one foot in the grave and reflecting on one’s mortality.  That’s the major thematic of philosophy.  So let’s go through some of the slides.

21.

Isn’t this terrific?  That’s Homer.  One of the great images.  I was thinking, if I ever had a tattoo, I’d have that one, not on my back, but maybe a small one on my right arm—I’m left handed.  What’s a wonderful image: the minstrel.

22.

I read an article in the New Yorker about two months ago about how the tradition of the minstrel singing epic poetry—the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-Gita is still extant in India.  And they have a festival every year, where minstrels, like Homer, with these enormous memories are able to recite from memory epic poems of India.  And 15 to 20 thousand people gather for days to sit in rapt, ecstatic attention, listening to the epics of their culture.  That goes on today.  They draw a parallel to Millman Parry going to Yugoslavia—that’s mentioned in the article—and they talk about how India is worried that this tradition is dying out as I’m probably sure that it has died out in Yugoslavia.

23.

There’s the man that is the hero of recovering ancient civilization:  Heinrich Schliemann.  He’s a really funny guy.  I refer you to a book to read if you want:  Lost and Found.  It’s a wonderful story about Schliemann, written in a beautiful prose style.  It’s a delight to read.  The author tells the whole story of how Schliemann set about to go up against the entire learned tradition of his time, over 150 years ago.  It was thought that there were no historical figures involved—this is all poetry; it’s all imagination, there was no Troy, there was no Ithaca, there was no Agamemnon, Achilles.  It’s made up; poets make up stuff.; poets tell many a lie.  And Schliemann said No, uh-uh.  I don’t believe that; I believe that they really existed.  I’m going to find them.  I’m going to go dig them up.

24.

He realized he had to make a lot of money to be able to do that.  So he set about to make millions of dollars.  And where would he go to make the money he needed to dig up the gold of Troy, but to the Gold Rush in California.  So he comes to California in the—what— ‘49ers.  There’s Schliemann.  He opens a bank and he’s an expert at assaying gold and he makes a million dollars and he fulfills his ambition to have the  financial resources to go to  Greece to accomplish what he has set out to do.  He marries a Greek girl, Sophie.  She comes next. There she is.  She was sixteen when he married her.  He had a lot of money, so the family said, —Okay.  And first night they were in bed, Heinrich, who is this kind of stuffy German-looking guy says, Listen my dear, there will come a time when I will put around your neck the ornaments of Helen of Troy.  There she is wearing them.  It was a wonderful marriage.  They actually devotedly loved one another, and she was a perfect companion to him in his excavations and his exploratory work.  This stuffy German, going against the established knowledge of the time—that there were no historical figures to be found or  historical places to be found—went and dug them up. He took Homer literally. He  read the Iliad so carefully that he could discern from the Iliad where Troy was. And there was a guy already there, near Hissarlik—that was the name of the town near the site of Troy— named Frank Calvert, who owned part of the actual site and who was an archaeologist and who was a big help to Schliemann in locating Troy.

25.

First Schliemann went to Mycenae.  I think he dug up Mycenae first—the kingdom of Agamemnon, where they had these shaft graves. And he dug through the shaft grave and looked down and this is what he saw:  he saw Agamemnon. Ha!  He was lying at the bottom of the grave with his gold mask on his face.  And the body—the corpse of Agamemnon was partly preserved.  The skeletal structure was there, there were hair and teeth.  And over the face or the head of Agamemnon was this gold mask—one of the greatest artifacts in the history of human culture.  Now scholars say, No, no, come on, now that’s not really Agamemnon—I mean, come on, Schliemann thought it was, but it’s probably somebody else—yeah, with the same name?  No kidding.  I mean, I’m willing to give him this.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s Agamemnon’s; that’s his mask.  Because it’s too good to be true!

26.

Schliemann went ahead and dug up Troy and so the whole ancient world was discovered in its archaeological foundation.   He is to be praised in spite of all the criticism.  They say he dug past Troy. Troy was at 7A or B and he went down to 8, 9, 10, or 11.  Oh, whoa!  Schliemann!  You just dug past it!  Okay, he was an amateur.  But for him, it wouldn’t have been found. I suppose eventually, archaeology would have located these sites, but it was Schliemann who did the pioneer work.

27.

These are the lion gates of Mycenae that Schliemann uncovered—the kingdom of Agamemnon—incredible.  Nigel put on Aeschylus’ Orestia, which is Agamemnon coming back from the Trojan wars and being assassinated by Clytemnestra, so it always reminds me of that when I look at these lion gates that Agamemnon walked through upon his return to his terrible fate.

28.

These are the shaft graves at Mycenae that Schliemann unearthed and where he found the mask of Agamemnon.

29.

The Archaic smile in the period of Homer is a vexing smile; you wonder, what are they smiling about? It’s characteristic of the Greek sculptings of this period—the Archaic period.  I finally decided why Meryl Streep is so beautiful.  She’s got the Archaic Smile.  So maybe we could get in touch with Meryl Streep and ask what are they smiling about, Meryl?  Do you have a clue?  Because it’s the Archaic period, I thought, well, are they smiling because it’s a period of dreaming innocence before the rise of rational self-consciousness, and the separation of the knower from the known, and the split between subject and object—Ah?  The smile of dreaming innocence.  Like infancy?  The smiling response in an infant?  That’s an enigma, too.  There’s been work done on that by John Bowlby. Why do infants smile?  As though it’s some kind of strange instinct.  So here you have this archaic smile so characteristic of these archaic sculptings.  Add an “i”, and you get simile.  I’d like you to think of Homeric similes, which we’ll get to, in reference to the archaic smile.  I’ll tell you why present

30.

These are all archaic figures.  What you can do with Greek sculpting from the archaic period up to the classical period is practically trace the evolution of rational self-consciousness as it comes into expression through the sculptings.  The early sculptings are stiff like this—arms straight at the side, the archaic smile— dreaming innocence.  They haven’t  entered the  centered self in correlation with a structured world.  It’s a great way to register the evolution that’s occurs.  By the time you get to Classical Greece, you have the most fully formed, exquisitely detailed, rationally self-conscious heads and faces, like of the philosophers and even of the gods than anybody could ask for.  Now, here’s three of them.  They’re kores, they call them.  And you see the one on the left, where she’s holding a pomegranate.  It’s a very, you know, awesome figure, and all three are characteristically bearing the archaic smile.  30.

Now three other figures, just to give you the sense—you know, the right one, maybe you can begin to see a little dynamic movement, but not quite yet.  Not until the period evolves further.  Here’s Homer.  This is a beautiful sculpting.  It’s a very early head.  And very early image of Homer.  The blind seer.  Think of the kind of existential motif of blindness and sight.  The Greeks were good at such couplets.  They had these—I think of them as existentials; they’re  structures of existence.  Blindness and sight, Soberness and drunkenness, the fall of the soul into the prison body, sleeping and waking, creatures that live for a day— these become symbolic metaphors for existential states.  So here’s Homer, who’s blind and therefore is a seer.  The most dramatic example of it would be Oedipus, who when he finally sees, blinds himself.  This is the reverse of Homer who is blinded in order to see.  It’s a way of understanding that the Homeric minstrels didn’t think of themselves as composing the poems.  They prayed to the muses to be given the words of the poems that the muses hold.  The muses were the daughters of Memory.  They’re the ones who remembered the poems.  And so the opening line of the Iliad is, Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, as though the minstrel says, Sing through me—I’m the vehicle for the song of the muses. It’s a transcendent song one is inspired to sing. I like that.

31.

This is the Arundel Homer, a famous bronze in the British Museum.

And that gives you a very good image of the blind Homer.  The story is that he went blind when he looked at the shield of Achilles, when Achilles was buried.  And the sight of the shield of Achilles that Hephaestus forged after Achilles lost his armor when Patroclus went into the fighting and is killed, the shield of Achilles made by Hephaestus to replace the lost shield was so—Hephaestus kind of like figured the whole world on it, and when Homer looked upon it at Achilles f unreal he was blinded.

32.

And that’s Apollo.  Okay.  I said that the Homeric gods are kind of enlightenment—the Olympian gods are the beginning of humanism. Homer is revered in reference to the Olympian gods because the Olympians superseded the Erinyes, the elemental deities of wrath and blood and curse—the elemental forces that are summoned when blood is spilled.  It’s all blood.  And you get it in Aeschylus in the Orestia, when the Erinyes rise up from the spilled blood of Clytemnestra, murdered by her son Orestes.  And they want Orestes’ blood as revenge.  And they’re transformed from the Erinyes, the wrathful deities of spilled blood only thirsting for revenge into the kindly ones, the Eumenides, which is the subject matter of Aeschylus’ trilogy celebrating the institution of courts of law in Athens and the triumph of the Olympian order over the Uranian.

33.

So the Olympian regime supersedes the prior regime when the demonic forces crawled up your pant-leg and bit you in the ‘huh.’  I mean, it was fear—all fear.  Think voodoo.  And the transformation that was wrought by the Olympians, these fabulous figures of Olympus is what Homer is credited with.  And it had an enormous impact on the Greek state of mind to worship such gods, as opposed to the prior order of elemental, demonic forces thirsting for blood.  Apollo is the primary example of the Olympians.  His epithet is “he who shoots from afar,” which means he’s the god of distance, of measure, of rationality.  You know, you have to be detached, as it were, in order to get a line on things.  And that’s Apollo—that’s  [Apolline?].  Apollonian.  And so he’s one of the primary gods of the Olympian order.

34.

And this is Athena, the great female goddess, the goddess of Athens.  And I’ll tell you now, because I want to—I could save it for next time—but, you know, it knocked me out when I found out that Athena was born from the forehead of Zeus.  You know, what greater symbol could you want for the expression of rational self-consciousness occurring in Athens, than for Athena, the goddess of reason to be born from the forehead of Zeus?  And Socrates can then be said to be born from the forehead of Athena.  So it’s a stunning metaphor for me.  Next.

35.

So here’s Achilles being grabbed by Athena, by the hair, to prevent him from stabbing Agamemnon.  Now, what happens here—there’s another example which I’ll give you—and it’s when Hector is about to be killed by Achilles, and he manages to grab Achilles by the knees. Now, the knees were thought to be a seat of life, because there was fluid in the knees.  And so if you could get somebody by the knees before he killed you, you could make an entreaty.  It’s a moment where there’s a pause between impulse and act.  It’s intercepted.  I think that’s a beginning of rational self-consciousness.  You know, we deliberate and weigh a course of action and decide what to do and you become responsible for it—well, that hasn’t really happened yet with the figures of the Iliad, but there is this moment that’s the moment of entreaty that intercepts the dynamic of the impulse to act.  And it’s happening here with Athena being the agent for the interception, to get Achilles not to run through Agamemnon.  Next.

36

So there he is.  This is one of the most beautiful vase paintings.  That’s Achilles.  See how beautiful he was, even though he was a man-slaughterer, and harried them when they died, and could kill more than everybody at Troy probably put together.  You wouldn’t know it from looking at him there.  Next.

That’s Achilles bandaging somebody.  It could be Patroclus—I forget who it is.  Maybe it’s Ajax .  Next.

Achilles playing dice.  It’s a wonderful vase painting.   Next.

Here’s Death of Sarpedon.  It’s a beautiful vase painting and it sets up the death of Patroclus, which comes next.

Well, the death of Hector.  I guess I don’t have one of Patroclus.

So, as I said, Achilles retrieves the body of Patroclus, having been killed by Hector, and he prepares the body for burial.  Now listen to his, ‘cause this is to give you a line on Homeric similes.  There’s kind of the simile at large—you know, where the poem resonates one part with another. They’re not similes writ small, where there’s always a “just,” “so,” or “as,” “so.”  You know, As a swarm of bees yada-yada-yada-yada, so the army yada-yada-yada. That’s a simile in a nutshell.  But there are resonances across the board, probably because of Homeric formulae.  And I’m going to give you an example of it, because it makes the poem so beautiful and practically symphonic.

Achilles is going to prepare the body of Patroclus for burial.  He calls out to his long-haired henchman to set great cauldrons over the fire, so that there would be water for the bathing of Patroclus.  And when the hot water is prepared, Achilles bathes the body of Patroclus, puts healing ointments into the wounds made up of yarrow.  He had an herb teacher named Chiron the Centaur who gave him yarrow when he graduated from his herbal class and said, This herb will be called Achillea millifolium after you.  And you’ll be able to use it to heal the wounds of your comrades at Troy.  So he puts Patroclus then on a bed and covers him with a white sheet and a white linen mantel.  I mean, it’s such an image, and goes out to kill Hector.

He finally gets Hector around the battlements of  Troy, and he’s about to run him through, and Hector manages to grab Achilles’ knees and make his entreaty: We’ll give you all this ransom—I mean, you have no idea how much we’re going to give you if you spare me.  And it’s a kind of ridiculous amount.  And Achilles says, Hey, I’d rather hack away your meat and eat it raw.  Die, dog, and I’ll take my own death whenever the gods decree it.  The greatest words of the poem.  And he runs Hector through.  He then punctures at the Achilles tendon and puts thongs through and ties Hector up to his chariot, ‘cause he’s going to do shameful treatment to Hector’s body, and he drives him around the battlements of Troy.  And all that head that was once so handsome was tumbled in the dust.

Andromache, the wife of Hector had not heard.  She called out to her lovely-haired handmaiden to set great cauldrons over the fire so that there would be hot water for Hector’s bathing when he came out of the fighting.  Poor innocent, nor knew how, far from waters for bathing.  Pallas Athena had cut him down at the hands of Achilles.  That’s Homer at his best.  Just to juxtapose those two scenes through the formulae.  Next.

There he is being dragged and all that head tumbled in the dust.  Next.

This is the charioteer of Delphi.  This takes us into the Odyssey.  And I’m going to speed up now.  Let’s say we have ten more minutes, and then we’ll have some time for some questions.  Telemachus sets out on a chariot ride to find out about his father.  And there’s a funny line that is uttered in his doing so.  He said, I don’t really know if he is my father.  He expresses a doubt about his paternity.  I thought, Oh, I get it, that’s the beginning of philosophy.  You know, to kind of ask where’d you come from and who’s responsible for you.  It begins with questioning whether your parents are your parents.  It’s the shock of non-being.  Why is there anything?  Why not nothing?  That’s what the doubt about one’s paternity leads to.  That’s called the beginning of philosophy—the shock of non-being.

So this charioteer of Delphi reminds me of the chariot ride taken by Patroclus and the chariot ride that Parmenides, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers takes to the vision of being.  And we’ll go into that to some degree next time.  Next.

Here’s [laughs]—this is sailing by the Sirens.  Now I gave you a kind of keepsake, namely Kafka’s parable about the silence of the Siren.  It’s, to me, fabulous.  You almost can’t interpret it; you just have to reread it.  But I ask you to, you know, read it again and again, and let the meaning of it express itself to you.  Because in a way, Odysseus sailing past the sirens is a kind of symbolic expression of incipient rational self-consciousness going past the old powers that have lost their power.  And here’s another parable about Kafka, called just The Sirens.

“These are the seductive voices of the night.  The sirens, too, sang that way.  You would be doing them an injustice if you thought they had any desire to allure. They knew they had claws and sterile wounds, and they lamented this aloud.  They couldn’t help it sounded so beautiful.”  Next.

This is another vase painting of Odysseus sailing by the Sirens.  Next.

This is by Max Beckmann, one of my favorite artists –great German Expressionist.  And it’s his rendition of Odysseus sailing past the Sirens.

This is the cave of the Nymphs.  I mean, this is almost as good as Schliemann digging up  Agamemnon’s mask.  There’s an episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus encounters this cave, and they found it.  Now, this is an actual place.  You can go there and go into the cave.  And I’ll bring it u p next time when we talk about the Myth of Er because in a sense, this cave is the entrance into the Myth of Er, which is the great Platonic myth about what happens to souls after they die.  Next.

Okay, now, this to me is the triumphant expression of Homeric similes.  And this all opened up for me when I read a paper called Homer’s Contribution to the Meaning of Truth.  Great title.  And it’s by a guy that used to teach at the New School, a German émigré named Kurt Riezler and he does an analysis of this moment in the Odyssey, where Odysseus disguised as a beggar has come back and maintains his disguise in order to get a sense of the lay of the land and how he’s going to kill all the suitors and finally reveal himself as the King of Ithaca and Penelope’s husband.  But while he’s still disguised as a beggar, he sits with Penelope and sings songs of Odysseus.  Now, Riezler in this article uses a translation of William Cowper, who was an 18^th century British poet.  This is his 1791 translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey—he did both.  And this is how it reads:

“She, melting at the sound, with drops of tenderest grief her cheeks bedewed, and as the snow by the fibers diffused melts on the mountain top, when [Uris?] breathes and fills the channels of the running streams, so melted she, and down her lovely cheeks poured fast the tears, him mourning as remote who sat beside her.”

You can put the words up, Nigel.  I think they’re on the next.  I mean, this knocked me out, because Riezler says the following:  “The comparison encompasses the whole of Penelope’s fate, past and future, in one visible picture.  Our very eyes looking at mountains, snow and brooks see her becoming numb and rigid in long and dreary years, see the hardness, coldness, darkness in her soul soften, warm and brighten, anticipate even by a silent motion in the picture itself the future when the ice will fully break, life flower again, and Penelope will come to know that the beggar is Odysseus himself.  Thus the image of the approaching spring entwines and relates to one another the implicit features of Penelope’s inner life and makes their impact visible.”

And he goes into a exact, detailed explanation of the simile and how the terms of the simile are held together by an implied third thing—you know, snow and skin are white, tears and streams flow, and it was just through reading his analysis of this Homeric simile and its unique translation by Cowper, I can’t find anything equal to it in Lattimore or Fagles or Fitzgerald.  It’s it—you know, and he makes it clear that in this simile the entire fate of Penelope is expressed.    And I wish we had more time to devote to this to really unlock the beauty and wonder of Homeric similes.  But that’s that.

So now Odysseus and Penelope are reunited.  It’s as if she’s a little annoyed with him dissembling and pretending to be a beggar and not revealing himself to her.  So when he finally does, she goes, Oh, wait a minute now, I’m not going to just jump into your arms; you could be a god in disguise.  And I’ve learned to arm myself against such stratagems.  So let’s wait until tomorrow.  Eurycleia, make up the bed, bring it out in the hallway here and we’ll pi ck it up from there. And Odysseus goes, Hey wait a minute.  Who can move my bed?  See they’ve got a secret sign and it’s their bed.  And Odysseus tells this story about how he made his bed.  He took an olive tree and he staked out his bedroom around this growing olive tree and he lopped off all the branches, left the tree growing, got three other trees that he cut off and used as the other posts of the bed and built his bedroom around this living olive tree—and you know, Who could move my bed?  And Penelope goes, It’s you; it’s the secret sign.  And she knows it is indeed Odysseus come back.  And she sinks into his arm, and Homer has a simile that flashes back to when Odysseus was in the ocean for days, if not weeks.  And finally wins shore on the island of [Ithaca], the land of [...?...] and he just manages to miss the rocks and so on and he crawls on shore, clotted with brine, and he looks behind at the abyss that he’s left and has been spared from, and he looks for a place to sleep at night and he beds down under a fall of leaves, and then Homer does another simile: as a farmer far out in his field can’t make it home, he keeps some coals that could be a fire the next day, and so Odysseus hid himself under these leaves so that he would win home and soon, soon.  And so when they’re reunited and he’s in an embrace with Penelope, the simile goes, As a swimmer who has finally won shore and looks back at the abyss behind, so they were reunited and saved from one another and he has won home.

It’s a fabulous encounter.  And so they’re in bed and Odysseus says, Hey, Penelope, when I went to the underworld, I met Tyresias the blind prophet and he told me I had to set sail again.  I’ve gotta do one more voyage and then I’m done; I’ll fulfill my destiny.  What are you talking about?  I’ve gotta do another voyage.  Tyresias said I have to sail west beyond the sun and finally win land and walk inland carrying an oar over my shoulder until somebody says, Why are you carrying that winnowing fan?—because they won’t have known of the sea.  And then I can plant the oar and I’ll be released and have fulfilled my destiny.  I can come home and live out the rest of my life over my people.  Well, she says, Okay.  Hurry up.

So one piece of this that I want to give you is that when Odysseus was young, just like Achilles, he was apprenticed to Chiron the Centaur to learn about herbs.  And when he came up for his graduation ceremony, Chiron said, I’m not going to give you an herb that will be named after you for the rest of your life like I did Achilles; I’m going to give you an herb as a task.  And with that, he hands Odysseus a handful of garlic—little bag of garlic.  And he said, Now wherever you go on your many voyages, I want you to plant this garlic.  That’s your task.  And remember that the word “garlic” means spear-shape, because of the leaves.  And Odysseus says, Yeah, yeah, okay.  And Chiron says, And moreover, when you get to Circes Island, Hermes will come with a special yellow flowering garlic called Holy Moly.  And that will enable you to overcome Circes’ snares.  And Odysseus says, Okay.  So he takes off, puts his bag of garlic in his pocket, gets on his ship, sales west beyond the sun, comes around the cape, comes up the coast and by god, if he doesn’t land, you know, in the area of Watsonville!  And he gets out of his ship and he says, You know, I’ll be back in a while, you guys, just wait here for me, and he puts his oar over his shoulder and he walks inland over Mount Madonna into Gilroy until a Gilroy Indian says to him, Why are you carrying that winnowing fan?  And Odysseus goes, Oh, thank god!  And he plants his oar in the ground and he steps back and goes, Oar, winnowing fan, spear, garlic!  And that’s how Odysseus discovered America and planted garlic in Gilroy.

Whoo!  That wasn’t too bad.  I wanted to go for an hour and I think I just about made it. I’m only about 2 or 3 minutes over.  That’s about the amount of time an audience can bear.  So we can take some questions for maybe another ten minutes, and then we’ll break until two weeks from tonight when I carry on with Socrates.

So what do you want to ask?

Question:   26 suitors weren’t just hanging around for no reason.  Was there a party going on?

Oh, big party.  They just about ate him up.  And that’s why he wants to kill them all.   He’s  mad, because they’ve depleted his whole kingdom over 20 years of feasting there.  But the first question you asked is the big one.  We didn’t really get into it.  You know, the Minoan civilization of Minos, which was located on Crete precedes Mycenaean civilization.  And the earth goddess holds sway in the Minoan realm. And when the Aryan migrations come down from Europe that bring the male sky gods with their female consorts, there’s a whole revolution from the earth goddess to the  male sky gods, with Zeus finally triumphant.  And so, you have kind of two streams.  You can go back to the Erinyes prior to the Olympians as the elemental spirits of blood and so on, or you can go back to Crete and the earth goddess.  Now, that’s become a big theme for women’s lib, partly thanks to Riana Eisler who lives in Carmel and wrote—what—the Chalice and the Blade.  Isn’t that it?  and she picks up this whole theme—that, you know, prior to the Achaeans and their male sky gods the Olympians with Zeus in charge and the female consorts, you had the primacy of the earth goddess and it was a peaceful kind of partnership society, according to her.  And that was all located on Crete and that got superseded by the Olympians.  And that’s the beginning of male domination, beginning with the symbols of the divine and finally eventuating in rational self-consciousness.

I should have said—I taught a course at Harvard my last two years there with Paul Tillich. It was called the “Self-interpretation of Man.”  You couldn’t do that again!  And it was a four-semester course.  I got to give every third lecture, and it was a sweep from early Greece up to Existentialism.  A fantastic course—probably one of the best courses and surveys of western culture ever given in this country.  Well, in four semesters, not a single woman was mentioned.  Not one!  You know, it was 1960 to 62. And the women’s movement hadn’t happened as yet until what—the later ‘60s.  Yeah.  ’65.  So we were like the last gasp of the old tired white male Europeans.  And what made it even more remarkable is that half the class were Radcliff students and they never said a word.  And I met one later on in life, and she expressed resentment over that, and that nobody spoke up and that there was not a single woman included and, you know, what can you say?  I mean, it’s the case.  I mean, women haven’t really entered into cultural history, and certainly into philosophy until, you know, like 50 years ago.  So this whole male-domination number is come under, you know, intense scrutiny, largely to the disadvantage of the teaching of the humanities altogether.  You know,  the core curriculum  has eroded at almost every institution.  And you just don’t read Homer any more.  You read Black Elk Speaks.  I asked my nephew, who went to Santa Cruz—Harrison Ford’s son, Willard Ford, and when he was a senior, I said, What’s the best course you’ve had here at Santa Cruz?  He said, oh, the American Indian in film.  Yeah, okay.  I mean, I didn’t want to say anything.  The American Indian in film.  Well, there it is.  Next.

Question:  Did Odysseus ever get together with Penelope—

Oh, yeah.  I mean, there is this legend that he had to sail again, and there’s actually a wonderful little essay by Herman Broch, I think on this voyage of Odysseus.  That’s where I picked it up that he discovered American and planted Garlic in Gilroy.  But they reunited and it’s a glorious reunion.  It’s so tender, I mean, you should read it.  It’s a fabulous account.  I mean, their actual reunion.

Question:  And they lived happily ever after?

Yeah, they did live happily ever after—very much so.

Question:  There’s a book about the 12 steps of healing—I’ve forgotten the name of the fellow who wrote that, and it goes through the different centers of the body and then back down again.  In other words, he talks about us going through these different levels of healing and then returning and starting over again.  And the question that comes to my mind—the emergence of rational self-consciousness seems to me has led us to situations where we our separateness from all that is and the unity of all consciousness and the field of unified consciousness is that I think you’re saying that Homer was kind of tuned into—certainly the native people were and in some places still are—that this has led us to being on the brink of destroying the planet, so it seems like it’s time to go around again and come back up again and so that this—you know, the tribal consciousness has something to offer us in reconnecting with all life and the dynamic unity of all life.

No question about it.

Question (cont’d):  To go there now after having done the rational self-consciousness, it seems it’s not exactly the same as it was before, but it has tremendous gifts to give us now.

You can call it immediacy at second hand.  It’s a term that Kierkegaard uses. I agree with you.   I had to go through a big corrective, and I did it by virtue of my friendship with Ted Carpenter who is a famous anthropologist who’s done a lot of work with the Inuit or the Eskimos.  He’s published photographic albums of Inuit or Eskimo peoples from, oh, let’s say 50 to 75, to a hundred years ago.  He thinks they’re all gone.  I mean, they’ve pretty much died out.  And to look at these faces…   Nanook of the North would be a good example.  You’re trying to tell me that they’re not intelligent?  No, I had to give it up.  Rational self-consciousness is the contribution of the Greeks to western culture.  Hey, but it ain’t all that good.  Literacy isn’t even all that good.  If I were an American Indian, I’d run.  You have to give up your tribal consciousness if you want to become rationally self-conscious and literate.  That’s the tragedy of this western hegemony that’s inflicted on all native peoples everywhere, to their disadvantage.  So how do you account for that kind of tragedy?  I don’t know.  The Greeks were the first colonialists.  In a way that’s what made them rationally self-conscious.  They were able to leave their place. Education in the Greek mode is defined as overcoming the narrow confines of one’s birth.  And the migratory impulse of the Greeks had some bearing on their mental abilities.  The mind has an affinity for migration.  So when you try to answer the question, Why did this all happen in Greece?  The colonizing enterprising spirit of the Greeks is part of their self-transcendence; they weren’t rooted to given places.  The migratory impulse is what begins this terrific enterprise, but to see the impact that rational self-consciousness and collaboration with literacy has on native peoples and tribal peoples world wide is a huge tragedy and conflict that we’re not over with yet.  To return to an appreciation of native consciousness and the self-nature correlation, the notion of immediacy at second hand, is something to be prized.

Question:  What is the prescription for a literate rational civilization or individual to recapture the best of the pre-rational consciousness and not lose what advantages do come from the Socratic development?

Well, Homeric similes and the Archaic Smile are a big antidote for me.  Whenever I want to renew my appreciation for archaic culture, I go back to that.  When I turned 50, I sat down at my typewriter and wrote the Long Lost Last Dialogues of Socrates.  I had this  inspirational fit on my 50^th birthday.  Socrates didn’t really die; he was given some kind of a poison formula, but it only put him into a deep trance state.  It simulated death; the authorities proclaimed him dead; they released his body for burial and he revived.  He was kept quiet in seclusion for about 2 or 3 years before he finally died, and this is what he said.

I have Socrates revise everything.  He’s gone through a death experience and he thinks anew about the Homeric state of mind and reviews everything and thinks differently about it, so it was my effort to offset, as it were, the Platonic emphasis on rationality.  You can play it any way you like.  I did it by looking at photographs of Eskimos and it had an enormous impact on me.  I made a vow that every year I’d watch Nanook of the North.  You can’t believe it!  This guy in a constant blizzard with snow as high as this room, builds an igloo and gets along. I think I’ve got it tough ‘cause I have to walk outside to pick up the New York Times?  Couldn’t I have a dog that does it for me?  The subject-object split really is so pronounced for us–the differentiation between knower and known– that we can’t put it together again.

Subject-object sat on a wall, subject-object had a big fall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put subject-object together again.  The Humpty-dumpty predicament is the outcome of rational self-consciousness.

Question:  But you could say that Kierkegaard and those guys saw consciousness as a curse.

I’m sorry?

Question:  Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard—those guys saw consciousness as a curse.

Yes, it’s the burden of rational self-consciousness with Kierkegaard, that’s for sure.  And that’s why I like him, because he really makes it clear that this is a very, very heavy load.  And he’s instructive to read for that very reason.  His whole pseudonymous authorship is an expression of the burden of rational self-consciousness.  He assumes these fictitious mentalities to write a book to play out a line of thought.  And it’s just unbelievably clever and wonderful.  There was a German trend to think of rational self-consciousness as a curse which includes a number of figures, Nietzsche among them.  They got Hitler as a result.

Question:  Do you see a difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey?  I mean, there are some people who’ve actually suggested different authors.

Yes, I know.

Question:  And they do seem to have slightly different takes on exactly what you’re talking about.

I can see that, but I still like to think of a unitary authorship.  And to me there are enough parallels between the Odyssey and the Iliad not make me worry about it.  You can argue either way.

Question: Maybe the greatest essay ever written on the Iliad of all the essays is Simone Weil on The Iliad and the Use of Force, and it’s all about the Iliad.

I had it on the bibliography, but somehow it didn’t get printed in this version.  It’s Simone Weil.  Fantastic French philosopher who died during the 2^nd World War.  And she wrote an essay called The Iliad as a Poem of Force.  She drives home the notion that force in the Iliad is what turns a living hero into a dead thing on the ground.  And that’s another simile that:  “As the luxuriant olive, by a swain reared in some solitude where rills abound, puts forth her buds, and fanned by genial airs on all sides, hangs her bows with whitest flowers, but by a sudden whirlwind from its trench uptorn, it lies extended on the field.  Such was Euphorbus of the ash spear when he was struck down.”  So Simone Weil is one of the great commentators on the Iliad and that essay came out when I was teaching the Iliad at Harvard.

Question:  What do you think about the theme of death in the Odyssey?

I would have loved to have talked some more about Odysseus’ descent into the underworld.  I can probably bring it up when we talk about the Myth of Er, which is Plato’s “update” of the Odyssean descent.  They have to give the ghosts, the shades, blood, in order to give them some kind of presence, and they have to slaughter an animal so that the ghosts can drink of the blood and then they can converse and have some interaction.  And Odysseus’ mother steps up–he didn’t know she had died.  And he tries to embrace her, and she goes through his arms like smoke and he’s so undone, he turns away and she says:  “Odysseus, all mortals meet this judgment when they die.”   He’s very shaken and shattered by it.  And then he sees Achilles, and he calls him Old Knife.  Hey, Old Knife—I mean, every time I think of that, it just knocks me out—“Old Knife?!”  Odysseus says, Achilles, you know, we honored you as a god when you were alive and you’ve become the subject of immortal song; surely you can say something reassuring about being dead.  And Achilles says, I’d rather be the slave to some farmer on iron rations than the lord over all these flibberty-gibbets—the after-images of used-up men!  It’s such a moment in Homer, because here’s Homer, who sings the memory of the heroic deeds in immortal song, and he has Achilles saying, Hey, forget about it, it doesn’t mean anything.  It’s an amazing critical stop-point in the Odyssey.

Okay, you guys. I want to thank you.  I’m glad I stuck my neck out.  [applause]  I want to thank you all for coming, because I did stick my neck out.  I had no idea whether anybody would come out for Homer, and then the dopey Metro weekly said I was going to talk about Homer Simpson.  Maybe that’s why you all came.  I hope you weren’t disappointed.  So thanks again for coming, and I’ll see you here in two weeks.