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Authors and Authorities in Ancient Philosophy Jenny Bryan
Ugo Zilioli has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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1 Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine: An exercise in ancient eliminativism
2 Twins and dharmas. Protagoras and Vasubandhu on a two-tier ontology of tropes
3 Gorgias and Nāgārjuna on nihilism
4 On things. The origin and genealogy of Pyrrho’s
5 The Cyrenaics on
Preface and acknowledgements
This book has been long in the making, since I conceived the first initial idea about it a decade ago. It brings together some different, yet converging strands of my research into a unified whole. The book as it stands has been written in the last two years under the auspices of a Leverhulme Grant (Leverhulme Research Grant RPG-2021-204) that has provided me, among many other things, with the freedom to pursue my research with no other academic obligations. I really wish to thank the Trust for its generous support and for the overall stimulus it offers to the Humanities in general.
Over the years, many colleagues and friends have read or commented on some parts of what has now become this book. I thus wish to thank the following people: Diego Zucca, Roberta Ioli, Matthew Duncombe, Voula Tsouna, Joachim Aufderheide, Livio Rossetti, Tim O’Keefe, Richard Bett, Aldo Brancacci, Kurt Lampe, Francesco Verde, Robin Hendry, Matthew Tugby, Pedro Mesquita and Mikolaj Domaradzki. I also thank audiences at Oxford, Lisbon and Ascea for discussions and oral feedback. Amber Carpenter and I started talking about Buddhist philosophy in 2017 in Durham, during a conference on atomism that I organized. Since then, she has been a helpful, supportive and congenial colleague to talk on all things Greek and Buddhist. More than any others, I owe a great debt of gratitude for Jan Westerhoff, with whom I am carrying out the Leverhulme project on Greek and Buddhist philosophers I have mentioned above. His acumen of mind, generosity of spirit and tactful manners make him the ideal colleague any academic dreams of. I thank him for being there all the time, with his help, comments, encouragement and inspiration for further, new paths in my research. Chris Gill has not read this last manuscript but since I met him twenty years ago as my PhD external examiner he has been to me, and still is nowadays, a model of academic mentorship, human integrity and philosophical excellence. I thank him for his constant support.
True to its fame, Oxford University has proven to be the best among academic settings for carrying out my research. The newly established Oxford
Network of Ancient philosophy, under the directorship of Ursula Coope, gathers specialists in the whole spectrum of ancient philosophy, East and West and is thus a congenial venue to discuss comparative philosophy. Thanks to all involved for their support and feedback. The Faculty of Theology and Religion is a great place to work and I wish to thank all the staff there, in particular, Lisa Driver Davidson for her efficiency and professionalism.
Once again, people at Bloomsbury Academic are the best publishing team any scholar or indeed writer can dream of. Colleen Coalter is the best of editors, always patient, encouraging, tolerant and imaginative. Suzie Nash has handled the whole process, from the initial proposal to the final stages of the submission, with care, efficiency and support. Thank you very much to you both. While providing a detailed feedback on the whole manuscript, the Reviewer for the Press has greatly helped me to reshape some of my arguments in a more convincing way as well as to tighten the overall structure of the book and the balance between chapters. I hope this now reflects in the book and s/he is pleased about it. I also wish to thank Benedict O’Hagan at Bloomsbury and Ayyan Ejilane (and his team) at Integra for their work in preparing the manuscript for the publication.
Special thanks are also due to people at Barefoot Cafe in North Parade and at IScream at the Covered Market, both in Oxford, for providing me with excellent coffee and ice cream, and for their interest in my work.
As any writer knows well, writing is an exciting and rewarding experience but also one that is time-consuming and very laborious. I have been greatly helped in the process by the company, affection and devotion of someone who is not a human being: our Persian cat, Eros. Our ‘static’ walks every morning with him on the leash have allowed me to clear my mind before returning afresh to the book (without moving much, he is happy to sniff around and look at trees and birds with me on his side); his calm, yet talking presence next to me all the time when I work from home is a reassuring reminder of how much the emotional balance of human beings owes to affectionate pets. He will not be able to read these words but I am sure he knows how grateful I am to him.
Finally, this book has only been made possible by the love and unwavering support of my family. My daughter Zoe and my son Delio have always followed me in the different directions that my academic career has taken us to go, always putting up a smiling face when the changes and the challenges were
Preface
difficult to handle, always brimming with life, laughter and courage. From afar geographically, but never emotionally, I always felt my best friend of more than forty-five years Michele next to me all the time, supporting, encouraging, understanding, helping in all the ways that only a prolonged friendship such ours can know. My wife Cristiana has been the bedrock of my life since I fell in love with her at first sight more than twenty-three years ago. There has been no day in our emotionally rich and immensely rewarding life together in which our love has been less than magnificent. I get up every morning with the confidence that with her, it will be another day full of happiness, joy, dialogue and new shared plans for our future. To her this book is dedicated, with much love.
Cannon Court/Casa di Margherita Oxford/Colmurano, July 2023
Introduction: Nothing for us?
This book is about eliminativism in ancient philosophy: Greek and Buddhist. To give an initial framework of reference that could help readers navigating the material with some ease, let me say something about eliminativism first, and then about the ancient philosophers who are to be dealt with in the following pages.
Ontological eliminativism
The kind of eliminativism that is the main topic of this book is ontological eliminativism, that is, eliminativism about material objects.1 In the next pages and throughout the whole book, I shall be focusing on some philosophers who for different reasons and scope do away with material objects. In the context of the present monograph, eliminativism is a label that has to be taken in a rather broad sense in so long as it is able to capture under the same conceptual umbrella a variety of cognate views about material objects that were circulating in ancient philosophy. Some Greek philosophers such as Protagoras (at least in the context of the first part of Plato’s Theaetetus) eliminate material objects in so far as they make them wholly replaceable by processes and by an ontology of property-particulars. Other Greek philosophers such as Pyrrho elaborate a metaphysical view of the world as ultimately undifferentiated, unstable and indeterminate. In this way, material objects appear to be still there at first sight, but their nature is such that they are ultimately eliminated as determinate, ontologically stable items of the material world, or indeed eliminated tout court.2 In another case, that of the Cyrenaics, in contrast with much recent scholarship, I aim to show that this important Socratic and post-Socratic school may have endorsed a metaphysical outlook that makes material objects
wholly elusive and ontologically redundant. Lastly, I make a bold case to take Gorgias’ first claim that nothing is in his work What Is Not or On Nature as a profession of ontological nihilism: nothing, including the material objects of our everyday life, is said by Gorgias to truly exist. Eliminativism has thus seemed to me the best metaphysical view, among those available, able to capture the conceptual similarities and theoretical affinities between those ancient doctrines that, although in different ways and with different purposes, aimed at eliminating material objects as stable, determinate and enduring items of the world.
Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho, the Cyrenaics: these are the main Greek philosophers who are going to be dealt with in this book. On the interpretation I shall be offering in the context of the book, they endorse eliminativist ontologies that differ from, and contrast with, other more celebrated mainstream Greek ontologies, such as Plato’s, Aristotle’s or the Stoics’. Both ancient sources and contemporary studies have so far highlighted important philosophical connections between at least some of the Greek philosophers who are the main protagonists of this book. Ancient doxographers such as Diogenes Laertius, or Peripatetic philosophers such as Aristocles of Messene, or Epicurean enthusiasts such as Colotes of Lampsacus (as preserved in Plutarch) variously insisted on analogies and similarities between Protagoras, the Cyrenaics and Pyrrho; yet the nature and scope of their accounts were neither systematic nor free from biases dictated by different philosophical agendas. After all, their main interest in drawing connections between ancient philosophers or in sketching out the genealogy of a line of thought was mainly a critical one, that is, aimed at highlighting weaknesses in those doctrines as well as their implausibility from the standpoint of Aristotle’s or Epicurus’ views.3 At the same time, closer to us in time, while it may be easy to find scholarly articles dealing with this or that aspect of alternative ontologies in ancient Greek thought, it is much harder to get a thorough account that explores the ontology of Greek eliminativism in a more comprehensive way. Despite it is highly plausible to read Protagoras and Pyrrho as committed to certain metaphysical views, despite it is possible to understand Gorgias and the Cyrenaics as committed to radical views about the material world,4 very few scholars approach the question of what sort of metaphysical outlook all these thinkers may have endorsed. This book aims to fill, at least in part, this gap.
One may want to ask why ontological eliminativism in the first place. It is true that in the last decades, ontological eliminativism, again taken in a broad sense, has become a fashionable topic in contemporary metaphysics. Let us just think of the various attempts by Peter Unger, Peter Van Inwagen, Trenton Merricks and, more recently, by Jiri Benovsky to argue for different kinds of eliminativism about material objects (with Unger more back in time and Benovsky more recently endorsing an all-encompassing eliminativism about material objects and people).5 At the same time, contemporary philosophers such as Jan Westerhoff, while drawing from the richness of Buddhist philosophy, have provided elaborate accounts of what it really means to be eliminativist or nihilist in metaphysics.6
My interest in eliminativism in ancient philosophy has however only been sparked by this more recent trend in contemporary debates. Such a recent trend has simply confirmed an idea that firstly came to my mind more than a decade ago, an idea that while working as an hermeneutical intuition, has pushed me to carry out a sort of a fairly systematic research on Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho and the Cyrenaics under the hypothesis of ontological eliminativism. It is my claim in fact that a truly new understanding of ancient metaphysics is to be gained once we look at it under a new perspective.
We shall discover that in ancient Greek metaphysics there is a subterranean line of thought that challenges more orthodox ontologies by providing us with an alternative, eliminativist ontology. I say ‘subterranean’ not because we need to excavate deeply to see this line of thought emerging but simply because for a variety of reasons, we have so far not wanted to see it as we should have done if we really had aimed to depict the full richness of ancient Greek metaphysics in its extraordinary complexity. In Greek philosophy we have Plato and Aristotle, with an extended, literally captivating and philosophically developed evidence on their views (however disputable and disputed these views turn out to be when we try to reconstruct them). In addition, we have the great Hellenistic schools of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, with much less structured direct evidence, yet with a lot of indirect sources to rely on. This disparity in textual evidence gives all these well-known philosophers a great advantage point since it is somehow easier to get a firmer grip on their doctrines or views. On the contrary, when we deal with Protagoras, Gorgias, the Cyrenaics and Pyrrho, the situation changes drastically. Limited evidence and few sources
push the scholar interested in their theories to work on a muddy and uneasy ground. Furthermore, the doctrines that these philosophers appear to hold (either Protagoras’ relativism, or Gorgias’ ‘nihilist’ views, or the Cyrenaics’ subjectivism or Pyrrho’s metaphysical indeterminacy) attracted a large amount of criticism already in the ancient world, so that these unorthodox doctrines seem already doomed to succumb under the strength of more powerful, more coherently reconstructed positions.
The combination of scanty evidence and unorthodoxy thus becomes lethal, relegating all these ‘minor’ philosophers into an area that is far from mainstream research. This is still the case nowadays, despite the really illuminating studies on these philosophers and their views that you will find quoted or referred to in the following pages. Yet, these are very original thinkers who were not only criticized in antiquity but also widely respected.7 If one approaches them with care and patience, much is to be gained. More in particular, I claim that a synoptic analysis of Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho and the Cyrenaics can reveal a line of eliminativist ontology that is truly worth looking at for its richness and diversity.
Partiality 1: Democritus and Heraclitus
The actual appreciation of the eliminativist ontologies of Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho and the Cyrenaics is the first important step in a story that still needs to be told in full. This is still the case not only because no systematic attempt to deal with the ontologies of those philosophers has been so far fully carried out but also because there are other ancient Greek philosophers who can, at least on some reasonable interpretations, be inscribed into the line of ontological eliminativism that this book aims to reconstruct. On this respect, two names impose themselves: Heraclitus and Democritus. The former is the philosopher who famously insisted that the world is (in) flux, with nothing enduring in the vast array of processes that make up the thread of reality. In the Heraclitean world of processes, then, material objects do not seem to play a role at all. This is for instance clearly illustrated in the section of the Theaetetus that is under scrutiny in Chapters 1 and 2, where in conjunction and parallel with Protagoras’ views, the Heracliteans are brought into discussion.
On his part, Democritus postulated atoms as the ultimate ontological elements of the material world.8 This in itself makes composite material objects as wholly reducible to something more ontologically fundamental (that is, the atoms), again eliminating (macroscopic) things as we usually conceive of them from the world out there. Eliminativism is indeed one of the possible readings that the ancients gave to Democritean atomism, since Colotes’ handling of Democritus does seem to point in that direction.9 And if we share Plutarch’s criticism of Colotes’ handling of Democritus, it will be possible to argue that, despite the usual attribution to the Epicureans of a commonsensical view of the material world, Epicurean atomism too may be read as intrinsically linked to eliminativism.10
Partiality 2: Selfhood and personal identity
This book thus aims to be the first fairly systematic dealing with some unexplored ontologies in ancient philosophy, while especially focussing on ontological eliminativism. Yet, despite its novel approach, the book only remains a partial exploration of the richness and sophistication of ancient Greek eliminativism for two main reasons. First, however wide-ranging it could be, the book is not an exhaustive treatment of ancient eliminativism since it leaves out some relevant figures, such as Democritus and Heraclitus, who will make the appeal and diffusion of unorthodox ontologies in the context of ancient Greek philosophy more widespread than ever.11
There is also a second reason for which this book remains a partial attempt to deal with ancient eliminativism. In the following pages I am going to talk about material objects in general, with no distinction made for human beings. This is a distinction that needs to be carefully considered: human beings can well claim to have a different, special status among material objects. Human beings are equipped with a capacity to endure successive modifications, both physical and psychological, something that is completely lacking in other material objects. As briefly mentioned, contemporary attempts to defend eliminativism, such as Van Inwagen’s and Merricks’, offer an ontology of material objects where human beings and, more generally, living organisms are preserved as the only items admitted of.
In the scholarship on ancient Greek philosophy, there have recently been illuminating studies, such as those authored by Christopher Gill and Richard Sorabji, which have enormously advanced our understating of selfhood in Stoicism and, more in general, in ancient Greek philosophy.12 Yet, once again, little has been done with reference to selfhood and personal identity in preHellenistic thought, even less so regarding philosophers such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho and the Cyrenaics (as well as Heraclitus and Democritus). This is due again to the problems about scanty evidence and philosophical minority I have referred to earlier. However, much can be done in this area, especially if we treat the topic of selfhood under the light of ontological eliminativism.
On the understanding I shall be offering in this book, Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho and the Cyrenaics all endorse different forms of eliminativism about material objects. Some of these philosophers (such as Pyrrho) seem to make no exceptions for human beings; some others such as the Cyrenaics appear to make human beings as an exception to their eliminativism. Yet, the Cyrenaics can be claimed to endorse, at least on some interpretations, a conception of selfhood and personal identity that is not only similar to Parfit’ reductionist view, but also one that has striking similarities with some positions to be found in the sophisticated debate on selfhood in Buddhist philosophy.13
In part III of Reasons and Persons, Parfit claims that what matters in the life of persons is not identity through time, but a sort of reduced psychological connectedness or continuity between different phases of what is (wrongly and traditionally) taken as one continuous self.14 However revisionary his views on personal identity still are in contemporary Western philosophy,15 Parfit is well aware that there are strong analogies between his view and the Buddha’s view on persons. At one point, Parfit writes: ‘As Appendix J shows, Buddha would have agreed [with Parfit’s Reductionist View]. The Reductionist View is not merely part of one cultural tradition. It may be, as I have claimed, the true view about all people at all times’ (Parfit 1987, p. 273).
While Parfit’s claim may well be true, the Buddhist debate on selfhood and personal identity can claim with good reasons to be the most thorough and systematic attempt to understand personhood in the history of thought, both Western and Eastern. There are two important treatises on the
refutation of personhood in Buddhism. One is Vasubandhu’s Refutation of the Theory of the Self, which challenges the philosophical positions of a rival group of Buddhist thinkers, the Personalists. Another important refutation of traditional conceptions of selfhood in Buddhism is the one developed by Chandrakīrti, one of Nāgārjuna’s finest commentators.16 The Buddhist debate on personhood also produced the most sophisticated discussion on solipsism to be found in philosophy. In light of the conceptually rich discussion on selves and persons that dominated Buddhist debates on selfhood, two great Buddhist philosophers of the later generations, Dharmakīrti and Ratnakīrti, wrote two treatises discussing otherness and solipsism.17
This is an enormously exciting field to discover. There is much scope in exploring reductionist conceptions of selfhood and personal identity in ancient Greek and Buddhist philosophies in the context of eliminativist ontologies. Yet, a systematic account of reductionist views on selfhood in ancient philosophy, both Greek and Buddhist, is an ambitious project in itself and one that, it is hoped, will follow the present one. As far as persons are concerned, however, in this book I have to confine myself to dealing with the possible extent to which the Cyrenaics may have endorsed solipsism. Their eliminativism about material objects clashes with the importance they do recognize to the subject in both epistemological and ontological terms. It is worth asking whether, in contrast to the ontological elusiveness they attach to material objects, the Cyrenaics make the person (the subject) as the only truly existing items of their world.18 It is be thus illuminating to discuss their views on material objects in parallel with their position on selfhood and subjectivity. I do so in Chapter 6, when I deal with the possibility of solipsism in Cyrenaic thinking.
Buddhist philosophy
The partiality of my effort in the reconstruction of ontological eliminativism in ancient philosophy is hopefully counterbalanced not only by the fact that it is the first, fairly systematic attempt into that direction, but also by the other fact that some relevant discussions from Buddhist philosophy are well brought into the picture. It remains true that the main focus of the book is ancient
Greek philosophy, but it is also the case that two chapters of the book (that is, Chapters 2 and 3) offer what I hope will be an illuminating parallel between ancient Greek and Buddhist doctrines. I do so with reference to two Buddhist philosophers whose importance in the history of Buddhist thought is similar to that of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greek philosophy: Vasubandhu and Nāgārjuna. In another chapter (Chapter 4), I tackle the issue of the origin and genealogy of Pyrrho’s views, arguing that close analogies between his views and early Buddhism are there for us to appreciate. In the Conclusion I make further comments on the conceptual connections between eliminativism, indeterminacy and nihilism in both Greek and Buddhist philosophies. That three chapters of the book out of six deal also with Buddhist philosophy is, I hope, enough to justify the title of the book as an exploration of material objects in ancient philosophy, both Greek and Buddhist.
Why Buddhist philosophy, one may well ask. There is still much to do in scholarly terms in order to discover analogies and diversities between Greek and Buddhist philosophies. Both philosophies have attracted the interest of analytic philosophers who have been looking for inspiration in ancient philosophy, both Eastern and Western, to find compelling arguments in favour or against the theories they have been developing. But a comparative effort between Greek and Buddhist philosophies was limited, both in scope and diffusion, until the publication of Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought, more than twenty years ago.19 The book showed that it is indeed possible to gain a much deeper understanding of the ancient world if we approach ancient and Buddhist philosophers comparatively. The cultural temptation to take the two worlds of India and Greece as apart entities, with little in common, is somehow still dominant nowadays. But this is a wrong approach to take, and one that is being counterbalanced by a more positive outlook. The historical interchanges between Greece and India in pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic times were much wider than one may initially expect;20 it is these interchanges that are responsible for connections also at a broader, both cultural and philosophical level. In the context of human thought, the philosophical centrality of the West is an external, cultural superimposition, not something that is rooted in the history of both Greek and Buddhist societies. It is the actual removal of such a cultural superimposition that is opening up a new, exciting trend in comparative philosophy. After McEvilley’s monumental effort, in more recent
years there have been some important attempts to read Greek and Buddhist philosophies in a comparative way.21 It is to this fairly new path in scholarship that this book too belongs.
This book
Let us have a brief look at the structure of this book. The first two chapters deal with Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine as this is illustrated in Plato’s Theaetetus. In the first part of the dialogue, that is, Tht. 151e–186a, after equating Theaetetus’ first definition of knowledge as perception with Protagoras’ man is the measure maxim, Socrates refers to a Secret Doctrine of Protagoras, something that he taught in secret to some well-chosen disciples. The first chapter, ‘Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine: An exercise in ancient eliminativism’, sets off the ground for an exploration of the main tenets of ancient Greek eliminativism by focusing on the main philosophical views and stages around which Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is centred and developed. This is an important first step in the appreciation of ancient eliminativism, since the philosophical views that are discussed in Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine constitute an excellent introduction to the main doctrinal features of ancient eliminativism.
Once we are more familiar with the philosophical views and stages upon which Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is built, we can try to make good philosophical sense of it. This is done in chapter two, ‘Twins and dharmas.
Protagoras and Vasubandhu on a two-tier ontology of tropes’. In this chapter Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is interpreted as a theory of tropes. In doing so, I challenge a recent interpretation by Christopher Buckels, who, while recognizing the plausibility of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine as a theory of tropes, maintains that it does not ultimately work because it fails to address the problem of fundamental/derivate tropes.
Chapter 3, ‘Gorgias and Nāgārjuna on nihilism’, offers a comparative attempt to understand some of the arguments Gorgias and Nāgārjuna put forward in their works as nihilist arguments. In contrast with traditional scholarship that takes Gorgias’ moves in On What Is Not as an exercise in rhetorical art, I provide a careful analysis of Gorgias’ arguments that nothing is, claiming that they can be taken as aimed at ontological nihilism. This point is strengthened once it
is realized that the nihilist arguments Gorgias puts forward have strikingly close analogies with a set of very similar nihilist arguments that Nāgārjuna offers in some of his works. While I stop short of claiming that both Gorgias and Nāgārjuna are nihilist philosophers tout court, I submit that a nihilist interpretation of their thought could help reassess the full meaning of their philosophies as well as showing us that there was a common nihilist trend in both Greek and Buddhist philosophies.
Chapter 4, ‘On things. The origin and genealogy of Pyrrho’s metaphysics’, is about the genealogy and origin of Pyrrho’s metaphysics. In this chapter I return to the Aristocles passage, to argue for a metaphysical reading of it; here it is. Shown that Pyrrho held a radical metaphysical thesis about things, that is, that they are undifferentiated, unstable and indeterminate. It is also shown that Pyrrho’s radical views are not fully novel in ancient Greek philosophy, since a close parallelism between Pyrrho’s indeterminacy thesis and Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is drawn. This parallelism does not exclude the fact that Pyrrho’s views have also close analogies with similar doctrines held in early Buddhism. Instead of arguing for historical influence in way or another, in this chapter I claim that in his encounter with Indian philosophy Pyrrho is likely to have been the actual witness of a similarity of views between East and West.
The last two chapters deal with the Cyrenaics. In Chapter 5, ‘The Cyrenaics on indeterminacy’, I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy is a view that can consistently and coherently attributed to the Cyrenaics. Relying on my previous work in this area,22 I challenge the traditional sceptical interpretation of the Cyrenaics, on the basis of which they, as sceptics, did not hold any metaphysical thesis about the material world. I examine much of the available evidence to show that it can be read as pointing towards indeterminacy. The main thesis this chapter argues for is that the kind of indeterminacy abut material things the Cyrenaics may have been committed to is something very similar to the metaphysical positions about things held by Pyrrho and Protagoras. In this way, the elusiveness that material objects seem to display in the context of Cyrenaic philosophy cannot be explained in light of our epistemological deficiencies but on the assumption that things in the world are indeterminate ontologically.
The sixth chapter, ‘The Cyrenaics on solipsism and privacy’, deals with the problem of solipsism in the Cyrenaics. In Chapter 5 it is shown that the
material world for the Cyrenaics is ontologically indeterminate and elusive. For the Cyrenaics on the other hand, we are always infallible aware of what we feel and perceive. In Cyrenaic thinking, the elusiveness of material objects is thus contrasted with the untransferable privacy of our affections. On the basis of this picture, one may thus wonder whether the subject is the only truly existing item for the Cyrenaics. In this chapter, I first assess the evidence on Cyrenaic solipsism to show why some views endorsed by the Cyrenaics appear to commit them to solipsism. I then deal with an underestimated argument on language attributed to the Cyrenaics, whose logic implies that after all the Cyrenaics cannot have endorsed a radical solipsism. Yet, by drawing an illuminating parallel with Wittgenstein’s argument on private language and inner sensations, I make a case for the Cyrenaics to have subscribed to a sort of residual solipsism, which in turn helps us to understand the notion of Cyrenaic privacy to a fuller extent.
Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine: An exercise in
ancient eliminativism
We start off our journey into ancient kinds of eliminativism by looking in close detail at an incredibly philosophically rich section of one of Plato’s most read dialogue, the Theaetetus. In that dialogue, which has attracted the attention of contemporary philosophers for ages, Socrates develops a lengthy discussion with the mathematicians Theaetetus and Theodorus of Cyrene. Under Socrates’ guidance and Theodorus’ support, the brilliant Theaetetus is questioned as to try to understand what knowledge actually is. In the context of the dialogue, Theaetetus comes up with three accounts of knowledge (in addition to an initial list of items that is quickly discharged by Socrates as inappropriate but that may help to find out actual instances of knowledge):1 (1) knowledge as perception; (2) knowledge as true belief; (3) knowledge as true belief with an explanatory logos. All these definitions of knowledge are heavily scrutinized and, at the end, all rejected as being wrong, ill-suited or incomplete. Yet the arrays of philosophical arguments of deep sophistication that are presented throughout the discussion are such to impress each and every philosopher. Since the dialogue is so rich and philosophically intricate, the majority of the commentators or readers have focused on the main thread of the argument, often leaving aside some other minor sections that I think Plato constructed with the same sophistication and in-depth approach of the major ones.
Among these minor sections (with the understanding that ‘minor’ is here to be read as ‘attracting less scholarly attention’), there is one that deals with Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine. It is a section of the Theaetetus where very original philosophical views are introduced and discussed. It grows out from a preceding section where Protagoras’ view that Man is the Measure of All things is debated. For the time being, let us focus on the key-features of Protagoras’
Secret Doctrine, since it represents an excellent philosophical introduction to the topic of ancient eliminativism, which we shall be dealing with in this book.
Protagoras’ relativism and the Secret Doctrine
In the Theaetetus we find the first important affirmation of relativism in the history of Western thought. Theaetetus’ initial definition that knowledge is perception is immediately equated by Socrates with Protagoras’ doctrine that Man is the Measure of All Things: ‘Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not’ (Tht. 152a3–5).2 Protagoras’ Maxim, which is said to have been the opening statement of Protagoras’ Truth, has so far received many alternative readings.3 Plato’s Socrates gives his own interpretation of it at the very beginning of the first section of the Theaetetus (151e–186a), namely the section where Theaetetus’ first definition of knowledge as perception is put under intense scrutiny. According to Socrates, with his almost oracular wording Protagoras’ Maxim alludes to a form of relativism that is mainly perceptual but that also has an ontological commitment. In Socrates’ opinion, with his maxim that Man is the Measure of All Things Protagoras aims to suggest that all perceptions are legitimate, in so far as they are all relative to the single percipient. If two people feel a blowing wind and one of them feels it as cold and the other as not cold, Protagoras will be happy to say that ‘the wind is cold for the person who is shivering, and not for the person who isn’t’ (Tht. 152b8–9). If each thing is as each of us perceives it to be, all perceptions will be true for each of us, individually taken.
Among the conflicting appearances arising when different people perceive an object, there is no perception that is uniquely correct, against all the others being mistaken: for Protagoras each perception is true because each perception is relative to a perceiver. It cannot be otherwise, since there is no reality out there independently of how we perceive it. This being the case, Theaetetus’ definition that knowledge is perception is indeed true for Protagoras. As Socrates sums up: ‘A thing’s appearing to someone, then, is the same as his perceiving it, in the case of hot things and of everything like that. For how each of us perceives a thing is likely also to be how it is for each of us’
(Tht. 152c1–3); ‘as befits knowledge, then, perception is always of what is, and never plays us false’ (c5–6).
I am not concerned here whether the way Socrates takes Protagoras’ Maxim in the Theaetetus is the actual way in which Protagoras intended his Maxim to be taken (myself thinking that in dealing with Protagoras, despite some inevitable intrusions on his part, Plato displays a quite respectable level of historical accuracy).4 Whether he is trustworthy or not as a Protagorean exegete, Plato’s Socrates is in any case well aware that his reading of Protagoras’ Maxim as a form of relativism raises a vast array of philosophical questions that soon need to be addressed, since his very first handling of Protagoras’ relativism, while being illuminating, leaves out more than what it actually reveals.
Socrates remarks that, in order to get its full meaning, Protagoras’ relativism is to be read in conjunction with a Secret Doctrine of his, more literally a doctrine that Protagoras ‘revealed to his disciples in secret’.5 As we have briefly seen, Socrates’ reading of Protagoras Maxim provides us with a form of relativism that closely links perceptions to ontology, that is, to the actual way material things are supposed to be. Ontological concerns are central in Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine too, this doctrine being initially built upon two interrelated views, one metaphysical, and the other semantic:
I will tell you a theory that certainly ought not to be written off. It’s to the effect that actually nothing is just one thing, itself by itself, and that you cannot refer to a thing correctly by any description whatever. If you call something big, it will appear as small as well, and if you call it heavy, it will appear as light too; and similarly with everything, just because – so the theory says – nothing is one, whether a one something or a one any sort of thing. (Tht. 152d2–8)
The metaphysical view at the kernel of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is that nothing is just one thing, itself by itself. That is, ‘nothing is one, whether a one something or one any sort of thing’. These are actually two distinct metaphysical views, closely interrelated but also distinct views. The first, stronger view is that no material item is one determinate thing. I shall label this view as ‘strong indeterminacy’: things in the material world are ontologically indeterminate, in so far as no material item is one determinate thing. The second, milder metaphysical view central to Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is that no material
item is attributed a determinate secondary quality. I shall label this view as ‘mild indeterminacy’, since it attaches indeterminacy to specific properties of material items, not to things in themselves. Mild indeterminacy simply prescribes that no one thing is determinately one way or the other: the wind in Socrates’ example is in itself neither cold nor hot (at 152b4–5). On the other hand, strong indeterminacy proposes a rather challenging, more radical view: nothing is one determinate thing in itself. Obviously enough, if the existencepredicate is understood as a standard predicate, from mild indeterminacy we shall easily get strong indeterminacy; in detailing the metaphysical core of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine, however, Socrates often conflates strong and mild indeterminacy.6
In addition to these quite original metaphysical views, Protagoras’ Secret doctrine contains a semantic view, which, as I take it, grows out – and builds upon – the metaphysical views just illustrated: if nothing is one thing or is determinately qualified in one way or the other, you cannot refer to such a thing correctly by any description whatsoever. As Socrates says: ‘If you call something big, it will appear as small as well, and if you call it heavy, it will appear as light too; and similarly with everything’. As far as the semantic thesis is concerned, the emphasis in Socrates’ words is put at first on the actual linkage between semantic interchangeability and mild indeterminacy: that is, what is going to be termed as ‘large’ now will be attributed the property of smallness at a later stage and, hence, will be called as ‘small’ by then. On the other hand, it will be soon obvious that Plato intends semantic ineffability to be applied to thing in themselves too, not only to properties of things.7 Proper names will not be able to name the very thing that naturally they are supposed to name. What is going to be threatened, in the very context of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is the semantic linkage between a thing and its proper name, that is, the very same linkage that ultimately provides meaningfulness to the words we use.8
The two metaphysical views about indeterminacy and the related semantic view of ineffability would already constitute a quite original family of doctrines, but Plato is not fully satisfied and adds a fourth important element in Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine, namely flux. On the basis of the story Socrates tells Theaetetus, the metaphysical view and its semantic counterpart have a deeper origin in the theory of flux: nothing is one thing and cannot properly be referred to with any description whatsoever because
All things are in the process of coming to be through motion, and change in general, and mixture with each other; nothing ever is, it’s always coming to be. (Tht. 152d8–e1)
As far as I can see, then, Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is a quite elaborated theory. Its core are two interrelated metaphysical theses about indeterminacy, which have a semantic consequence: the ineffability of things and of the properties we usually attach to things. The origin of indeterminacy is flux. Things cannot be determinate entities and cannot have determinate properties because everything is in flux. Nothing is because everything is coming to be.
A new theory of perception: Stage One (Tht. 153d8–154b9)
In dealing with Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine, we are thus confronted with a rather original mix of philosophical views. What sort of philosophical gain is one expected to get when Protagoras’ initial profession of relativism is conjoined with his Secret Doctrine? We have seen that Protagoras’ relativism, as Socrates interprets it, is mainly an epistemological thesis that also has a quite clear ontological commitment: things are as we perceive them to be. In Protagoras’ view, there is no real wind, but a family of blowing winds relative to each perceiver. On the other hand, Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine is made up by metaphysical and semantic views, while it lacks, at least prima facie, any epistemological concern. What is, after all, the epistemological gain for Protagoras’ relativism when his Secret Doctrine is brought into the picture?
In order to help answer the question, Socrates is keen to offer Theaetetus a further explanation aimed to show how Protagoras’ relativistic epistemology is actually enriched by the contribution of his Secret Doctrine. Socrates splits this explanation in two parts, one preliminary at Tht. 153d8–154b9, the other more informative at Tht. 156a3–157c5 (when the doctrine of the subtler thinkers makes its appearance). Let us label these two parts of Socrates’ further explanation as, respectively, ‘Stage One’ and ‘Stage Two’ explanation.
In Stage One, Socrates shows Theaetetus how to locate Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine in the context of Protagorean relativism. He does so by detailing the first rudiments of a quite peculiar theory of perception:
Socrates: The best way to think of that theory [sc. The Secret Doctrine], my friend, is this. In the case of the eyes, first of all, you shouldn’t think of what you call white colour as some other thing outside your eyes, or within the eyes, and neither should you assign it some particular location; if you do, it will surely then be fixed and resting, and come to be no longer in the process of coming to be. (Tht. 153d8–e-3)
Let us follow out what we were saying just now, and posit nothing that is just one thing, itself by itself. That way we’ll find that black or white or any colour you like must have been generated from the eyes’ meeting the relevant motion, and that we actually call colour in each case won’t be either what is doing the striking or what is being struck, but rather something that has come to be in between the two, peculiar to each. Or would you prefer to insist that as each colour appears to you, so it appears to a dog or whatever other living creature too? (Tht. 153e4–154a4)
What about another human being? Does the way anything appears to someone else match the way it appears to you? Are you sure about that? Aren’t you much surer that it won’t appear the same to you because you yourself won’t ever be the same as yourself? (Tht. 154a6–9)
Protagoras’ relativism appears to get a new meaning when it is interpreted under the constraints of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine. We have seen that the core metaphysical view of the Secret Doctrine is that nothing is one thing, itself by itself. On the basis of Socrates’ own words, I have given two different versions of this view: either no material item is one determinate thing (strong indeterminacy) or no material item is attributed a determinate secondary property (mild indeterminacy).
Both versions of indeterminacy are well present in the development of the theory of perception Socrates illustrates Theaetetus at Stage One. As for mild indeterminacy, no material item is attributed a determinate property, such as a colour, because, in the actual context of the perceptual theory Socrates is developing out of the Secret Doctrine, any given colour is understood as the result of the eyes meeting the relevant motion of perception. More precisely, in the world of perennial flux that is the ultimate rasion d’etre of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine, the perceived colour is to be taken as the result of the process of interaction between what is being struck on the one hand and what does
the striking on the other. This being the case, each colour becomes relative to a single act of perceiving and, consequently, relative to a sole and unique percipient. Only when it is correctly linked with the main metaphysical views illustrated in the Secret Doctrine, Protagoras’ relativism is given a wider application and, consequently, a stronger philosophical appeal. It is only in the context of the Secret Doctrine that Protagoras’ relativism will show its full potential by sketching a quite peculiar theory of relative perception. For Protagoras, perceptions are relative to the single percipient exactly because the individual percipient, at the very moment when perception takes place, gets involved with the perceived object. In the temporary contact between what is being perceived and who does the perceiving, perception arises as something peculiar to each of them, that is, to the individual percipient as well as to the perceived object.9
Perception is thus relative in so far as it provides a temporary epistemological linkage between the two poles interacting in the perceptual process, namely the perceived object on the one hand, and the individual percipient on the other. Although Socrates’ wider understanding of Protagoras’ relativism offers us a quite peculiar theory of perception, the story is not yet complete because strong indeterminacy is now fully back in the picture: the two poles of the perceptual processes are no one thing in themselves. Socrates asks Theaetetus:
What about another human being? Does the way anything appears to someone else match the way it appears to you? Are you sure about that? Aren’t you much surer that it won’t appear the same to you because you yourself won’t ever be the same as yourself? (Tht. 154a6–9)
On the ground of strong indeterminacy, the individual percipient is thus no one thing, ontologically stable and determinate. His identity keeps changing over time. This is a further reason that makes Protagoras’ relativism even more radical: since the individual percipient is not the same person over time, the way things appear to him are not only relative to him but also relative to him at the very moment when perception takes place. What appears white to him now may appear grey to him within an hour because within an hour he will not be the same person he is now.
A new theory of perception: Stage Two (the Subtler Thinkers: Tht. 156a–157c)
By means of Socrates’ midwifery, we have learned that, in order to be fully appreciated, Protagoras’ relativism is to be read in conjunction with his Secret doctrine. We have also learned how Protagoras’ relativism is to be developed into a peculiar theory of perception to show its full philosophical implications. Socrates has illustrated the new interpretation of Protagoras’ relativism in one preliminary stage, that is, at Stage One. There are, however, other aspects to be clarified, and other questions to be asked, as far as Protagorean theories are concerned. What has happened to the semantic aspect of Protagoras’ Secret Doctrine? There is no mention of it in Socrates’ Stage One explanation. At the same time, while it tells us very clearly the metaphysical status of perceiving subjects, as well as showing how perceptions arise in the perceptual process, Socrates’ Stage One explanation does not spell out the metaphysical status of material things in that very process. We have just seen that the perceiving subject is not one determinate thing: what about perceived objects? Are they ontologically unstable/indeterminate as well? If so, how unstable/ indeterminate are they?
In order to clarify these important aspects of Protagoras’ theories, Socrates gives us what I have labelled a Stage Two explanation. Socrates provides the second, wider explanation at Tht. 156a3–157c5, where he illustrates a theory of perception whose paternity is to be attributed to some subtler thinkers.10 For our own purposes in the present chapter the question of the identity of the subtler thinkers is not important. The natural way to take the theory of perception of the subtler thinkers is to understand it as a more elaborate version of the theory of perception that Socrates has already illustrated at Tht. 153d8–154a9, that is, at Stage One. If this is the case, the more refined –perhaps the ‘subtler’ (to use Plato’s own word) – theory of perception we are just about to read will be understood as a further development of Protagoras’ relativism. What does the more refined version of the subtler thinkers’ theory of perception add to Protagoras’ theory of perception as this is illustrated at Tht. 153d8–154a9? In other words, how is Stage Two related to Stage One? Does the new, more refined version fill in the philosophical gaps already noted,
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confession of circuit rider and the woman to having killed Doomdorf. He storms the reader’s stronghold of unbelief, the wall is breached, and no Trojan Horse is necessary later to bring his secret into the city. In fiction, there is no plausibility of cause and effect outside human behavior. The implausible (because unmeaning) manner of Doomdorf’s death is superbly supported by two flanks, the behavior of the evangelist and the behavior of a terrified, superstitious and altogether childlike woman.
Art’s demand for meaning requires much more than a certain plausibility of occurrence. The manner of Doomdorf’s death need not have been dependent on his evildoing; it must be made to seem so. The glass water bottle standing on the great oak table in the chamber where he slumbered and died could as easily have held water as his own raw and fiery liquor. There are two kinds of chance or coincidence in the world. One kind is meaningless; our minds perceive no cause and effect. The other kind is that in which we see a desired cause and effect. The writer of fiction must avoid or overcome the first kind if he is to write plausibly and acceptably; but upon his ability or inability to discern and employ the second kind depends his fortune as an artist.
In other particulars “The Doomdorf Mystery” exemplifies the artistry of the author. If I have not emphasized them, it is because they are cunning of hand and brain, craftsmanship, things to be learned, technical excellences which embellish but do not disclose the secret of inspiring art. The story is compactly told; tension is established at once and is drawn more tightly with every sentence; and the element of drama is much enhanced by the forward movement. Doomdorf is dead, but “Randolph,” says Abner, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. He is on the way here.” Not what has happened but what is to happen constitutes the true suspense. The prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat Biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of impending justice, of a divine retribution upon the evildoer. But it is also a prose that lends itself to little pictures, as of the circuit rider, sitting his big red-roan horse, bare-headed, in the court before the stone house; or of the woman, half a child, who thought that with Doomdorf’s death
evil must have passed out of the world; or of Doomdorf in his coffin with the red firelight from the fireplace “shining on the dead man’s narrow, everlasting house.” The comparative loneliness, the wildness, and the smiling beauty of these mountains of western Virginia are used subtly in the creation of that thing in a story which we call “atmosphere” and the effect of which is to fix our mood. The tale is most economically told; the simplest and fewest means are made to produce an overwhelming effect. I have dwelt on it at length because it so perfectly illustrates the art of Melville Davisson Post, so arrestingly different from that of any of his contemporaries— different, perhaps, from anyone’s who has ever written.
iii
Mr. Post is one of the few who believe the plot’s the thing. He has said: “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader If, while it entertains, it also ennobles him this fiction becomes a work of art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or instruct him. The writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery to be untangled will be offering those qualities in his fiction which are of the most nearly universal appeal. A story should be clean-cut and with a single dominating germinal incident upon which it turns as a door upon a hinge, and not built up on a scaffolding of criss-cross stuff. Under the scheme of the universe it is the tragic things that seem the most real. ‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life ... the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy.’[6] The short story, like any work of art, is produced only by painstaking labor and according to certain structural rules. The laws that apply to mechanics and architecture are no more certain or established than those that apply to the construction of the short story. ‘All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’[7] And the short story is to our age what the drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.”[8]
Mr Post takes his stand thus definitely against what is probably the prevailing literary opinion. For there is a creed, cardinal with many if not most of the best living writers, which says that the best art springs from characterization and not from a series of organized incidents, the plot;—which says, further, that if the characters of a story be chosen with care and presented with conviction, they will make all the plot that is necessary or desirable by their interaction on each other. An excellent example of this is such a novel as Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne or Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. Yet it is not possible to refute Mr Post by citing such books for he could easily point to other novels and stories if modesty forbade him to name his own work. Though there cannot and should not be any decision in this matter, for both the novel of character and the novel of incident are proper vehicles, it is interesting to consider plot as a means to an end.
The Greeks used plot in a manner very different from our use today. At a certain stage toward the close of a Greek tragedy the heavens theoretically opened and a god or goddess intervened, to rescue some, to doom others of the human actors. The purpose was to show man’s impotence before heaven, but also to show his courage, rashness, dignity and other qualities in the face and under the spell of overwhelming odds. The effect aimed at by the spectacle of Greek tragedy was one of emotional purification, a purging away in the minds of the beholders of all petty and little things, the celebrated katharsis as it was called.[9] To the extent that modern fiction aims to show man’s impotence in the hands of destiny or fate, his valiance or his weak cowering or his pitiful but ineffectual struggle, the use of plot in our day is identical with that of the Greeks. One may easily think of examples in the work of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others. The trend has been toward pessimism as an inscrutable destiny has replaced a set of scrutable, jealous, all-too-human deities in the Olympian pantheon.
With Edgar Allan Poe the attempt was begun—indeed, was successfully made, for the time being, at least—to replace the divine with a human agency. Although the Greek drama had perished, all through the Middle Ages and afterward the effort had kept up to
preserve the essence of miracle as an invaluable element in human drama. There were both miracles and miracle plays. In place of the Greek deus ex machina, “the god from the machine” with his interventions in human affairs, the world had its Francis of Assisi and its Joan of France. But for whatever reason the divine agency was gradually discredited, the force called Providence or destiny came increasingly to be ignored, and even so great a dramatist-poet as Shakespeare, unable or unwilling to open the heavens to defeat Shylock, could only open a lawbook instead.
What men do not feel as a force in their lives cannot safely be invoked in an appeal to their feelings, and Poe, a genius, knew it. In some of his stories he used in place of the Greek deus ex machina the vaguely supernatural, impressive because vague. In other stories he took the human intelligence, sharpened it, and in the person of Monsieur Dupin made it serve his purpose. M. Dupin, not being a god, could not be omniscient; as the next best thing, Poe made his detective omniscient after the event. If the emotional effect of a Dupin remorselessly exposing the criminal is not as ennobling as retributive justice administered by a god from Olympus, or wrought by Christian miracle, the fault is not Poe’s. It is we who limit the terms of an appeal.
MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
Copyright by The Amon Studio, Clarksburg, W Va
Mr. Post has himself commented on the flood of detective stories that followed Poe’s “until the stomach of the reader failed.” Disregarding merely imitative work, let us have a look at such substitutes as have been managed for divinity and fate. We commonly call one type of story a detective story simply because the solution of the mystery is assigned to some one person. He may be amateur or professional; from the standpoint of fictional plausibility
he had, in most cases, better be a professional. Poe had his M. Dupin, Gaboriau, his M. Lecoq; Conan Doyle, his Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Post has Abner, his M. Jonquelle, prefect of police of Paris; his Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard; his Captain Walker, chief of the United States Secret Service. If we are looking for Mr. Post’s difference from Poe and others we shall not find it here. The use of a detective is not inevitable; when there is none we call the tale a mystery story. The method of telling is not fixed; and it is doubtful if anyone will surpass the extreme ingenuity and plausibility of Wilkie Collins in a book like The Moonstone, where successive contributed accounts by the actors unfold the mystery at last. One of the few American writers whose economy of words suggests a comparison with Mr. Post was O. Henry. And O. Henry was also a believer in plots, even if the plot consisted, as sometimes it did, in little more than a few minutes of mystification.
Poe had replaced the god from the machine with the man from the detective bureau, but further progress seemed for some time to be blocked. All that anyone was able to do was to produce a crime and then solve it, to build up a mystery and then explain it. This inevitably caused repetition. The weakness was so marked that many writers tried to withhold the solution or explanation until the very end, even at the cost of making it confused, hurried, improbable. Even so, no real quality of drama characterized the period between the crime at the commencement and the disclosure at the finish of the tale. I do not know who was the first to discover that the way to achieve drama was to have the crime going on, to make the tale a race between the detective and the criminal. The method can, however, be very well observed in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first novel, The Circular Staircase (1908); and of course it is somewhat implied in the operations of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, many years earlier. But this discovery constituted the only technical advance of any importance since Poe. As a noticeable refinement upon this discovery Melville Davisson Post has invented the type of mystery or detective-mystery tale in which the mysteriousness and the solution are developed together Not suitable for the novel, which must have action, this formula of Mr. Post’s is admirable for the short
story, in which there is no room for a race with crime but only for a few moments of breathlessness before a dénouement.
This refinement of Mr Post’s whereby repetition is avoided, the development of the mystery and its solution side by side, is usually hailed as his greatest achievement. I happen to think that he has in certain of his tales achieved something very much greater. It seems to me that in some of his work Mr. Post has put the deus ex machina back in place, has by a little lifted the mere detective story to the dignity of something like the old Greek tragedy, and in so doing has at least partially restored to the people the purge of pity and the cleansing of a reverent terror.
ivFor whatever tribute one may pay him on the technical side, and every book of his increases the tribute that is his due, the thing that has remained unsaid is his use of plot for ennobling the heart and mind of the reader He is right, of course, when he says that the primary business of the writer must be to entertain; but more rightly right when he adds that it is possible to do the something more in a work which may aspire to be called a work of art. Anna Katharine Green once wrote: “Crime must touch our imagination by showing people like ourselves but incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive.” The author of The Leavenworth Case and all those other novels which have entertained their hundreds of thousands, despite appalling technical shortcomings which she never ceased to struggle with but was never able to overcome, was one of the terribly few to command our respect and our admiration in this crucial affair. She was one of the few with whom plot was never anything but a means to an end, and that end, the highest. Of others, it is easy to think at once of O. Henry; it is in this that I would compare him with Mr. Post, and not in any lesser detail such as the power to tell a story with the fewest possible words. All the emphasis that has been put on short story construction in America, all the trumpeting that has proclaimed American writers as the masters of the short story on the technical side will ultimately go for nothing if
the fact is lost sight of that a short story is a cup to be brimmed with feeling. And as to the feelings poured into these slender chalices, by their effects shall ye know them.
There is a curious parallel between Mr. Post and another contemporary American writer, Arthur Train. Both began as lawyers, and both showed unusual ability in the practice of the law. Both are the authors of books in which the underlying attitude toward the law is one of that peculiar disdain which, perhaps, only an experienced lawyer can feel. Mr. Train’s stories of Ephraim Tutt display an indignation that is hot enough under their surface of weathered philosophy and levity and spirit of farce. But as long ago as 1896 Mr. Post had published The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, his first book of all and one that must detain us a moment.
His career up to that time may be dealt with briefly. Born in Harrison County, West Virginia, 19 April 1871, the son of Ira Carper Post and Florence May Davisson Post, he was graduated (A.B.) from West Virginia University in 1891 and received his LL.B. from the same institution the year following. He was very shortly admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of West Virginia, of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served as a Presidential elector and secretary of the Electoral College in 1892. A young man not yet twenty-five, he conceived that “the high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The book stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the detective or ferreting power of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! No writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.” And he reflected that the true drama would lie in a duel with the law. He thereupon created the figure of Randolph Mason, a skilled, unscrupulous lawyer who uses the law to defeat the ends of justice. Of these stories the masterpiece is probably “The Corpus Delicti.” Well-constructed, powerful, immensely entertaining, surely these dramas are of the essence of tragedy, surely they replace Poe’s detective with somebody far more nearly approaching the Greek god from the machine. In considering the effects of these
remarkable tales we can hardly lose sight of their moral purge of pity and terror, their sense of the law man makes as a web which man may slip through or break or brush aside. Why, a true god from the machine, Mr. Post implies, is not necessary to us; we can destroy ourselves; heaven has only to leave us alone. This, in its turn, produces the much stronger secondary effect: the cry for a true god to order and reward and punish us.
Uncle Abner (1918) has been well contrasted with The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason. “He has demonstrated that wrong may triumph over man-made laws, which are imperfect after all the centuries; but that right must win under the timeless Providence of God.”[10] In Uncle Abner the deus ex machina is fully restored. When it was known how Doomdorf had died, “Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended. ‘It is a world,’ he said, ‘filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!’ ‘It is a world,’ replied Abner, ‘filled with the mysterious justice of God!’”
vMr. Post married, in 1903, Ann Bloomfield Gamble, of Roanoke, Virginia. Mrs. Post died in 1919. The political career which seemed possibly to be opening before him in his twenties has been neglected for one more fascinating as an author; although he has served as a member of the board of regents of State Normal schools, as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Committee for West Virginia in 1898, and as a member of the advisory committee of the National Economic League on the question of efficiency in the administration of justice (1914-15). He lives at The Chalet, Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2, West Virginia, rides horseback and enjoys the company of his dog, and reads the classics. He is the author of other books besides Uncle Abner which reveal his love for the West Virginia countryside and his power to make his stories take root and grow in that setting. Of his Dwellers in the Hills (1901) Blanche Colton Williams says, in Our Short Story Writers: “To read it is to ride in memory along a country road bordered by sedge and ragweed; to note the hickories trembling in their yellow leaves; to hear the
partridges’ call, the woodpecker’s tap, and the ‘golden belted bee booming past’; to cross the stream fringed with bulrushes; to hear men’s voices ‘reaching half a mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs’; to meet a neighbor’s boy astride a bag of corn, on his way to the grist mill; to stop at the blacksmith’s, there to watch the forging of a horseshoe; or at the wagoner’s to assist in the making of a wheel; to taste sweet corn pone and the striped bacon, and to roast potatoes in the ashes....”
With the exchange of West Virginia for Kentucky, this is also the background and the mood of The Mountain School-Teacher (1922), but this short novel is an allegory of the life of Christ. A young schoolteacher appears in a mountain village. We first see him striding up a trail on the mountain, helping a little boy who is having trouble with an ox laden with a bag of corn. In the village the schoolteacher finds men and women of varied character. Some welcome him, and they are for the most part the poor and lowly; some regard him with suspicion and hate. The action parallels the life of Christ and is lived among people who are, despite nineteen centuries, singularly like the people of Christ’s time. In the end comes the trial of the schoolteacher on trumped-up charges. “If He came again,” the author seems to say, “it would happen as before.”
Such fiction does not come from a man who is primarily interested in railroads and coal, education and politics, nor from one whose final interest is to provide entertaining fiction.
viIn recent books Mr. Post has allowed his fiction to follow him on his travels about the earth. The Mystery at the Blue Villa (1919) has settings in Paris, Nice, Cairo, Ostend, London, New York and Washington; the war of 1914-18 is used with discretion as an occasional background. Mr. Poe’s mysticism can be quickly perceived in certain stories; the tragic quality is ascendant in such tales as “The Stolen Life” and “The Baron Starkheim”; and humor is not absent from “Lord Winton’s Adventure” and “The Witch of Lecca.” A story of retributive justice will be found in “The New
Administration.” The scenes of most of the episodes in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square (1920) are in America; the central figure about whom all the cases turn is Sir Henry Marquis, chief of the investigation department of Scotland Yard. The material is extremely colorful—from all over the world, in fact. Monsieur Jonguelle, Prefect of Police of Paris (1923) has the same characteristics with the difference of the central figure and with various settings. The reader will observe in these books that the narrative standpoint is altered from story to story; to take Monsieur Jonquelle, some of the tales are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author. The reason for the selection inheres in each affair and is worth some contemplation as you go on. Walker of the Secret Service (1924) is pivoted upon a character who appears in “The Reward” in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square.
This new book of Mr. Post’s is a brilliant example of his technical skill throughout; it has also a special interest in the fact that the first six chapters are really a compressed novel. Walker, of the U. S. Secret Service, is introduced as a mere boy of vigorous physique who falls under the influence of two expert train robbers. The several exploits he had a share in are related with a steady crescendo of interest. At the end of the sixth chapter we have a clear picture of the fate of the two chiefs he served. The peculiar circumstances in which young Walker was taken into the Secret Service are shown; and the rest of the book records some of the famous cases he figured in. The motivation is that of Uncle Abner. “‘Crime always fails. There never was any man able to get away with it... Sooner or later something turns up against which he is wholly unable to protect himself ... as though there were a power in the universe determined on the maintenance of justice.’”
Two of the most striking stories, “The Expert Detective” and “The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ Defense,” are developed from courtroom scenes—indeed, “The Expert Detective” is a single crossexamination of a witness. Probably this tale and one called “The Inspiration” must be added to the shorter roll of Mr. Post’s finest work, along with “The Corpus Delicti” and “The Doomdorf Mystery.”
The general method has been said, correctly, to combine the ratiocination of Poe’s stories with the dramatic method of the best French tellers of tales. The details of technique will bear and repay the closest scrutiny. But in certain stories Melville Davisson Post has put his high skill to a larger use than skill can accomplish; for those of his accomplishments an endowment and not an acquisition was requisite. When one says that of the relatively few American writers with that endowment in mind and heart he was able to bring to the enterprise in hand a skill greater than any of the others, one has indeed said all.
BOOKS BY MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
1896 The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason
1897 The Man of Last Resort
1901 Dwellers in the Hills
1909 The Corrector of Destinies
1910 The Gilded Chair
1912 The Nameless Thing
1918 Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries
1919 The Mystery at the Blue Villa
1920 The Sleuth of St. James’s Square
1922 The Mountain School-Teacher
1923 Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris
1924 Walker of the Secret Service
SOURCES ON MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
Mr. Post’s own two articles on the short story are of the highest value, not only to an understanding of his method, but as a contribution to the theory of literary structure—a contribution, unlike most, allied to and realized in practice.
His first article appeared under the title, “The Blight,” in the Saturday Evening Post for 26 December 1914. A shorter article on
“The Mystery Story” appeared in the same magazine, 27 February 1915.
In April, 1924, while in New York for a short time Mr Post dictated the following notes which amplify a little his written articles:
“The modern plan for the mystery or detective story can no longer follow the old formula invented by Poe and adopted by Gaboriau, Conan Doyle, etc. All life has grown quicker, the mind of the reader acts more quickly, our civilization is impatient at delays. In literature, and especially literature of this type, the reader will not wait for explanations. All explanations must be given to him in advance of the solution of the mystery.
“It became apparent upon a very careful study of the mystery story that something must be done to eliminate the obvious and to get rid of the delay in action and the detailed and tiresome explanation in the closing part. It occurred to me that these defects could be eliminated by folding together the arms of the Poe formula. Instead of giving the reader the mystery and then going over the same ground with the solution, the mystery and its solution might be given together. The developing of the mystery and the development toward the solution would go forward side by side; and when all the details of the mystery were uncovered the solution also would be uncovered and the end of the story arrived at. This is the plan which I followed in my later mystery-detective stories—the Uncle Abner series, Monsieur Jonquelle, and Walker of the Secret Service. This new formula, as will at once be seen, very markedly increases the rapidity of action in a story, holds the reader’s interest throughout, and eliminates any impression of moving at any time over ground previously covered.
“It requires a greater care and more careful technique, for every explanation which the reader must receive in order to understand either the mystery or the solution must be slipped into the story as it proceeds without any delay in its action. There can be no pause for explanation. Each explanation must be a natural sequence and a part of the action and movement. The reader must never be conscious that he is being delayed for an explanation, and the
elements of explanation must be so subtly suggested that one receives them as he receives the details of a landscape in an adventure scene, without being conscious of it.
“In undertaking to build up a story on this modern formula, one must first have a germinal or inciting incident upon which the whole story may turn as upon a hinge. Out of this controlling incident, the writer must develop both the mystery and its solution and must present them side by side to the reader in the direct movement of the story to the end. When the mystery is finally explained, the story is ended. There can be no further word or paragraph; there can be no added explanation. If a sufficient explanation has not preceded this point, the story has failed. If the reader has been compelled to pause at any point in the story long enough to realize that he is receiving an explanation, the story has failed.
“But it will not be enough if the writer of the mystery-detective story is able cleverly to work out his story according to this formula. He must be able to give this type of story the same literary distinction that can be given to any type of story. To do this he has only to realize a few of the primary rules of all literary structure. He must remember that everything, every form of character, has a certain dignity. This dignity the writer must realize and respect. Flaubert told Maupassant that in order to be original he had only to look at the thing which he wished to describe long enough and with such care that he saw in it something which no one had seen in it before. That rule ought to be amended to require the writer to look at every character and every situation long enough and with sufficient care to realize the dignity in it—that element of distinction which it invariably possesses in some direction—and when he has grasped that, to respect and convey it in his story.
“It may as well be said that no one form of literary structure is superior to another. The story dealing with the life and action of our highest types does not in itself result in any better literature than the story dealing with the lowest or most abandoned types; nor are physical adventures to be graded below metaphysical adventures. The mystery-detective story may be structurally so excellent and its workmanship so good that it is the equal of any form of literature.
“The obvious is at the base of all boredom. The thing that provides our perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next hour, the next day that we live to solve. If by any mental process we could ascertain the arrival of events ahead, no human being could endure the boredom of life. Something of this mystery, this uncertainty, must be caught up for the reader in the short story if his interest is to abide to the end. The skill of the author in preserving this uncertainty and mystery in events—in this imitation of life—will indicate the place to be assigned to him in the art he has undertaken.”
To an interviewer (by letter) who asked for the principal events of his life, Mr. Post once made a suitably whimsical answer:
“I was born like the sons of Atreus in the pasture land of horses. I was reared by a black woman who remembered her grandmother boiling a warrior’s head in a pot. I was given a degree by a college of unbeautiful nonsense. I have eaten dinner with a god. And I have kissed a princess in a land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”
4. Jeffery Farnol’s Gestes
i
A geste is a great exploit or an heroic achievement; the thing that has today pretty generally dwindled to a gesture. But although the fiction of Jeffery Farnol is full of gestures—of ladies who cry, “La!” and of ladies who swoon; of gentlemen who draw swords as naturally as they draw breath, or even more so—the succession of his work is a series of gestes. For one point, he followed his bent in the teeth of literary fashion and scored, at the outset, an enormous popular success. For another point, he kept his head when success was upon him. Although a favorite scene in his stories is one full of lightning fence, swifter guard and dexterous riposte, the true portrait of the author is decidedly different: It shows him in the patient and laborious attitudes of his own Black George, in the toil the young Farnol was himself committed to for a period in his youth, the heavy work of the forge and the foundry, the slow heating to malleability and the shape hammered out before cooling. After The Broad Highway had captured the fancy of England and America, in an incautious moment Farnol the smith, Farnol the patient artificer, contracted to furnish his next tale as a serial in an American magazine. The editor blithely began publication with only part of the manuscript in hand. Dissatisfied with his work, the author at one stage tore up ten completed chapters. For several months he worked under pressure. In the end he kept the editor supplied. The experience did not lead him into the misconception that his smithy was a Ford factory. Nor has the fact that he can write one kind of tale ever led him to suppose that he ought to succeed with another variety; he followed The Definite Object with Our Admirable Betty. It is surprising to reflect that he made his first hit by reviving a species of romance when romance of that species, and of pretty nearly every species, was justly considered to have breathed its last; but it is
vastly more surprising to realize that he has continued to succeed by the same tactics. Almost ten years later another young man, similarly self-willed, was to score an equal success in America (though not in England) by the same sort of reckless behavior, only the title of the book was to be Main Street and not The Broad Highway. But Sinclair Lewis, although unaware of his advantage, was setting a fashion, not defying one. Both Mr. Lewis’s novel and Mr. Farnol’s were the products of that kind of saturation which, while it cannot be relied upon to produce enduring literature, can nearly always be counted upon to produce literary phenomena. Such a phenomenon, certainly, was the Kentish tale of Peter Vibart, Charmian, the Tinker, Black George, and the Ancient, appearing as a book early in 1911 and rolling rapidly up to a sale of 500,000 copies in England and America. And though perhaps not a portent, as Main Street has been a portent, it was a sign of far more significance than the appearance on the scene of a new individual writer. But let us tell the story of that story in orderly fashion.
ii
It begins with two little boys in their nightshirts listening furtively but eagerly outside the door of a room in which their father was reading aloud to their mother, whose eyes were on her needle. The book was The Count of Monte Cristo. The name of the older boy— he was eight—was John Jeffery Farnol; of the younger, who was to fall in the Boer War, Ewart Farnol. The family had removed from Birmingham, where Jeffery was born, to Lee, in Kent. The reading proceeded until a sneeze betrayed the boys. But after that they were admitted for an extra hour to the evening readings. The senior Farnol read excellently, varying his voice to suit the characters. He made the stories live, for Jeffery at least. From Cooper, Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray and Stevenson heard at home, Jeffery became a schoolboy who invented tales to entertain his fellows; in particular he started a story which he carried on for three months, winding it up with the close of term. When he had finished school he wanted to become a writer, but as there was not money to send him to one of
the universities, his father thought the ambition foolish, and at 17 the boy was set to work in Birmingham with a firm of engineers and brassfounders. Manual labor at the forge was varied by a great deal of fighting with fists. He was short and thickset; he spent the lunch hour either telling stories to the other men, “stories from the classics,” as he says, “vividly touched up, no doubt, or making a rough drawing of some scowling diffident sitter.” As he sat drawing one noon, a man of the crowd looking over his shoulder remarked: “Ah, that’s all very well, but drawing ain’t manliness.” A test of manliness, inquiry developed, was the feat of a chap who had climbed up the inside of the big chimney. Farnol laid five shillings to half a crown that he could duplicate the deed. Says one account: “The chimney towered up, one hundred and twenty feet of blackness, choked with the soot of four years and with insecure stanchions, several of them broken.” He fastened his handkerchief at the top for all to see; it is easy to believe that the worst of the thing was the climb down with soot tumbling in his eyes. The men refused to pay their bets, he had to fight one of them, though sick and giddy, and was beaten. But a climax was near at hand. Farnol kept a notebook in which he was forever jotting down ideas and impressions. The foreman most reasonably objected to these interruptions of work. There were blows. Leaving the foreman “reclining in a daze against an anvil”—the words aren’t Farnol’s—the last Farnol saw of the place was his handkerchief fluttering from the chimney top.
“No good for work, always writing.” How singularly right the foreman’s verdict had been, some years were required to prove. For a time Farnol stayed at home and wrote stories, poems, whatnot. A few stories got printed. His father was unimpressed, except by the unanimity of family relatives in declaring that he was encouraging Jeffery to grow into an idle fellow. It seemed as if something might be constructed from his son’s natural aptitude for drawing. Jeffery began the study of line and figure drawing under Loudon at the Westminster Art School. He found everybody else at the school so much more clever that he became discouraged.
“I think I’ll write.”
“You can’t write,” said his father “You’ve not had a University education.”
He went into his father’s business, but as he continued to write stories, and as some of them continued to get accepted, this arrangement was a failure. At this time his favorite recreation was cycling. “All the highroads and byroads of Kent, Surrey and Sussex became familiar to me. I wheeled between the flowery hedgerows and quenched my thirst at the wayside taverns. It was then, while watching villagers wending their way to church, that I first saw the Ancient. There he was, tall hat, smock-frock, shrewd, wrinkled face, and gnarled hands grasping his knobbly staff just as I have described him in The Broad Highway. And that was the first inception of the book, though it was not until several years afterward that it came to be written.” Black George was fashioned out of his own time spent at the Birmingham forge.
Farnol wasn’t yet twenty-one when he married Blanche Hawley, daughter of F. Hughson Hawley, a New York artist. The pair set out for America. The bride of seventeen had been sent to England on a visit. It was hoped that Mr Hawley would take the news well. It was also hoped that Jeffery might sell stories more successfully in the United States. He had a negligible amount of money. The seven, and more than seven, lean years were beginning.
iii
Mr. Hawley received them well. In an interview a year ago[11] Mr. Farnol, recalling the New York period, is quoted as saying:
“I hadn’t a cent in the world. My wife had paid for the wedding ring and the honeymoon, and it seemed to me that after that it was up to me to do something. It has been said that her father remained adamant when we arrived, but that isn’t true. I’m expecting a knock on the bean from him when he reads that. On the contrary, I found him a delightful old cove, and we were forgiven.
JEFFERY FARNOL
“After that I went to work, living alone in a room at Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue. One night, about 3 o’clock in the morning, I came across a man down by the river whose face was all covered with blood.
