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    Frost and Oliver: Poets of Nature

    by

    Why garden? Why poeticize?
    Robert Frost and his much younger contemporary, Mary Oliver, both distinguished themselves as poets of nature, and also as poets whose audiences have far exceeded college classrooms and highbrow bookstores. This 1993 essay compares two of their best-known poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Oliver’s “Writing Poems.”

     

    Gardening, human beings govern nature with art. Human art mediates between the gardener and nature. Poetry mediates among the poet, nature, and readers.

    Robert Frost knows this. His neighbor tells him, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is Frost’s neighbor’s father’s saying, a specimen of traditional or folk wisdom. “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” Frost says of him, who repeats himself, and his father. Were Frost’s neighbor a scientist, he would study cloning, an art of exact replication. Frost’s neighbor’s soul finds its deepest satisfaction in remembering. Memory can have the drawback of mischaracterization. Frost’s neighbor calls a wall a fence, and pronounces it good.

    Frost’s deepest satisfaction lies elsewhere. Frost wants the exact word, the one that fits the nature of the thing. Frost wants to go behind the sayings of the father. Frost knows of something older than fathers, and the conventions or traditions of fathers. Nature is older than the oldest human father, even older than the oldest remembered human father.

    “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Nature is what doesn’t love a wall. Nature in its entropy acts beyond human seeing and hearing, undoing the work of even the most vigilant and industrious men. Nature is somewhat mysterious, and behind it might be some greater mystery.

    Nature’s entropy does not so threaten human works as to force men into a grim struggle for survival. Mending walls is “just another kind of outdoor game.” Together, men and nature play the outdoor version of Penelope’s indoor game of weaving and unweaving. But in Frost’s outdoor game there are no threatening suitors, no need for a rescuing hero.

    Frost wants to know, Why play? He wants to know the reason for the game—what he’s walling in or out, and whether someone will take offense at his handiwork. His neighbor, “like an old-stone savage armed,” divides the world into his own and yours, us and them. He respects ancient divisions of politics and property. Frost is not so respectful, seeing the nature shared by all.

    A poem, as much an artifact as a wall, another sort of line built on another form of sand, traditionally marking out the wisdom of fathers, limning the spiritedness of political men. In the Iliad the Muse sings of the high-hearted rage of Achilles, indignant at an instance of unjust, conventional rule in a war sparked by erotic disappointment, that is, by both the frustration of erotic nature and an affront to convention. Is there also something that doesn’t love a poem?

    As a poet, Frost must wonder at the playful entropy of nature. Will it undo his artifacts? He approaches nature lightly, shrewdly, circumlocutiously, even as he questions human artifice and convention. He takes care not to question too blatantly. He lets his neighbor have the last word, lest a good neighbor become a savage and not merely resemble one, on occasion. The poet-gamesman plays the game in order to moderate the latent savagery of the convention—therefore ordinary, therefore natural—man.

    Mary Oliver takes a less prudent tone. She does not question convention. She dismisses it in two sentences, each a kind of negative command. “You do not have to be good” and “You do not have to walk on your knees” are thou-shalt-nots disputing efforts founded on another set of thou-shalt-nots. Eros replaces spiritedness or thumos, and does so directly, without conventional guides. Let “the soft animal of your body love what it loves”; “the world offers itself to your imagination” as a complaisant lover does. You are part of “the family of things,” a nature unmediated by the wisdom of fathers. This unusual family has no parents, only siblings. It is as pliable to desires as one’s imaginings are. Olivier assumes imaginings to be benign. She does not see that if all things constitute a family, all corporeal eroticism is incest. Or if she does, she regards that as just another taboo to be negated.

    Oliver’s optimism comes from her replacement of Frost’s natural law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of dissociation, with the law of love, the law of association. Bees go to rhododendron flowers in Eros’ “invisible line”; “otherwise death is everywhere.” It’s as if she’s taken Neoplatonism and made it corporeal, in the way Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and made it material. Her problem is even more acute than Marx’s, and idealism of corporeality being even less plausible than a materialist dialectic.

    The bees are like poets, Oliver supposes; they appear in a poem titled “Writing Poems.” Oliver wants poetry to be natural or erotic, not a wall against death but a beeline or a lifeline through it.

    Of these two poets, Frost is older, tougher, probably wiser. He knows that poems are artifacts, no matter how natural the impulse urging poets on. If nature is the deepest human satisfaction, and human beings can apprehend nature directly, what need is there for poems? Oliver’s left hand does not know what her writing hand is doing.

    Oliver wants to say, nature associates as well as it dissociates, lives as a precondition of dying. Poems are on the side of spontaneous life, the eros that always says yes. But she says this in a poem, not in a spontaneous outpouring. Idealism of the body leads to a didacticism of the erotic.

    The canny gamesman Frost smiles at Oliver, the earnest erotic. Eroticism is no substitute for moralism, he tells her; trying to make it that will only confuse the poet. Poetry must never go in a beeline. A one-liner isn’t a poem, and one-line poems teach aphoristically, with an indirectness resembling the dialogues composed by Plato, the wisest erotic. A poet who tries to make a poem go in a beeline will remove the reasons for poetry’s existence.

    This is also why gardeners exclude most animals from gardens. This goes for animal bodies soft and hard. Who rules? If not human beings, then it’s no longer a garden. (A garden governed by God would be another matter, and is another story.)

    The question, then, is: On what terms will human beings, whether poets or gardeners, govern nature?

     

    Ideology and Literary Studies: PMLA 1930-1990

    by

    Originally published in altered form in Academic Questions, Volume 6, Number 1, winter 1992-93.

     

    The Controversy

    In 1970 the New Left’s critique of American literary studies reached the pages of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association. Professor Frederick Crews of the University of California at Berkeley charged that literary studies in the United States had been “significantly affected by an ideological bias” (Volume 85, Number 3, p. 423). ‘Cold War’ American was “comfortable” and “corrupt.” Its universities tolerated the “perversion of scholarly research to purposes of exploitation and conquest” (423). This was occurring because capitalism had perfected “a socially manipulative style of thinking” whereby social evils were concealed from perpetrators and victims alike (423).

    This “style” of thinking, Crews argued, was exemplified by PMLA. Literary scholars did not usually bend their labor to overt service in ‘Cold War’ projects, as many university scientists did. Instead, members of the Modern Language Association drifted through life in a state of “remarkable political innocence,” ignoring “racism, imperialism, and monopoly” in favor of “myths, motifs, and morals” (424). This lack of political ‘consciousness’ exacted “an ideological cost” seen “less in what [scholars] say than in what they refuse to consider” (424). The dominant political liberalism mistook “ideological consensus for neutrality” and failed to “question capitalism itself” (426). Liberalism is at most merely reformist. It is not radical; it does not get to the root of capitalist evils. Liberalism misses the “true and important” insight that “literature conveys class meaning” (426).

    Crews wanted a literary criticism that would acknowledge socioeconomic causes of literary production, a criticism regarding literary works as “contingent, imperfect expressions of social and mental forces” (428). “[J]ustice and passion” deserve precedence over “order and sophistication” (427). Crews insisted that he did not want the “socialist” style of criticism seen in such places as the Soviet Union. Despite his obvious Marxist leanings, Crews dismissed Soviet literary criticism as “simpleminded and venal” work which made “political correctness the touchstone of esthetic value” (426). With other New-Left opponents of Soviet-style communism, Crews evidently viewed the Soviet regime as the ossified corpse of a Marxism gone wrong.

    Today, Crews’ warning resonates ironically. Appropriated not by those who heeded his call but by their critics, the phrase ‘politically correct’ has become the staple taunt of those who claim that literary studies in the United States have become ‘politicized.’ These critics charge that a leftist academic agenda, associated with such movements as multiculturalism, radical feminism, and socialism determine the articles selected for publication in PMLA. This is so, it is alleged, despite the language of PMLA‘s “Statement of Editorial Policy,” reprinted in every issue, describing PMLA as “receptive” to “all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches.” [1] Other scholars dispute these charges and defend PMLA, saying that critics exaggerate the degree to which the journal conforms to a ‘politically correct’ line. [2]

    In order to determine whether or not there is substance to the critics’ accusations, I examined the complete contents of each of nine volumes of PMLA from 1930 to 1990, selecting volumes in ten-year intervals from 1930 to 1970 and at five-year intervals thereafter. There were 457 articles in all. I classified each article in these volumes, first according to the type of critical approach it represents and also according to its ideological orientation, if any. Before presenting the results of this research, I shall briefly discuss the criteria of classification I employed.

     

    Classification
    The more important of the two kinds of classification is ‘ideology.’ For this I needed a definition of ‘ideology’ that would not predetermine the results of the study. For example, the assumption that ‘everything is political’ would lead to the result that all of the articles must be ideological, directly or indirectly—a conclusion one may all too conveniently draw without bothering with any evidence. The claim that everything is political rests on the prior claim that ostensibly apolitical scholarship in fact supports the social, political, and economic status quo by doing nothing to change the status quo. Literary scholars who write on myths, motifs, and morals—so Crews’s argument goes—ignore racism, imperialism, and monopoly, thereby leaving those evils unchallenged. Scholars who suppose themselves to be engaging in innocent study unknowingly reinforce injustice. Many are well-meaning liberals whose mildly reformist politics never get to the roots of the capitalist overgrowth. Radical scholarship, by contrast, can save the study of literature from an unintendedly reactionary irrelevance, first of all by being openly and honestly political.

    The argument fails even on its own political terms. An ‘irrelevant’ article need not support the status quo at all. ‘Objectively’—as Marxists used to say—such scholarship supports the most active, well-organized faction within the university. This may not be the faction that wields power today. It may be the one that will wield power tomorrow. The man who warned that the triumph of evil in the world will be assured if good men do nothing was no leftist radical. As a slogan, Burke’s words can be used to ‘mobilize’ support against any putative evil—’Left,’ ‘Right,’ or ‘center.’ Faculty withdrawal from campus politics or from politics generally can as easily contribute to the successes of the radical ‘Left’ as to the liberal-reformist inertia deplored by the ‘Left.’ The criticism of traditional scholarship as reactionary requires the accuser to know whether a given act of scholarship will make the success of a certain ideology more or less likely. This puts an extraordinary demand on the accuser’s powers to discern causal connections between scholarship and its practical consequences. Nor does it offer much guidance on how to find and apply such scientific and/or prophetic principles as are needed for the tasks, particularly in view of doubts concerning the predictive power of such constructs as ‘scientific socialism.’ Absent such guidance, there is nothing to prevent different people from coming to different, arbitrary conclusions about the political meaning of any particular scholarly work.

    While avoiding this or any other excessively broad definition of ‘ideology,’ I also wanted to avoid any definition that is too narrow. One such definition limits ‘ideology’ to explicit statements of political affiliation or overt arguments for a political agenda. This would exclude all writers who possess even a minimal degree of perspicacity and tact. No scholarly article in PMLA to date has called for a lettuce boycott or a vote for Angela Davis for President. It is nonetheless fair to look for subtler clues . Whereas the excessively broad definition of ideology would be unable to aid in the detection of change (by saying that everything is and always was political), the excessively narrow definition would guarantee in advance that no article likely to appear in a scholarly journal could be called ideological. This too would prevent the perception of change, as it were ‘on principle’ or ‘by definition.’

    According to the leftist critics of modern language scholarship in the late 1960 and the ‘neoconservative’ critics today, there is something happening here. In order to be able to see if they are right, this Mr. Jones has done something that takes much less intelligence than the prophetic approach required by the broad definition of ideology, and somewhat less obtuseness than is required by the narrow definition. I have availed myself of a conventional definition of ideology, classifying PMLA articles according to the well-known ideological categories of the times in which they were written. Resisting the temptation of pornography critics who can’t define the stuff but insist they know it when they see it, I glanced first at the history of the term ‘ideology,’ which dates from the late eighteenth century. As used by such writers as Condillac and Destutt de Tracy, ideology means the department of philosophy or psychology dealing with the origin and nature of ideas. As used by Napoleon (and cited by John Adams), the term soon took on a pejorative cast, meaning an airy, abstract speculation of the sot that (according to critics) prevailed in French politics since 1792 or thereabouts. Eschewing the pejorative but retaining the political connotation, recent political scientists define ideology as any system of sociopolitical convictions and aims, as distinguished from the occasional, more or less random political animadversion. [3]

    I classify as ‘ideological’ those articles that, first, allow me reasonably to infer the author’s system of sociological opinions (‘reasonable’ meaning, at least in part, with reference to all such systems then current). Second, I classify as ‘ideological’ articles whose plausibility in some way depends upon one’s assent to a system of such opinions. That is, a random comment matters much less than a discernible (even if unstated) political opinion that determines the content of an article. [4] I do not classify as ‘ideological’ articles that take a moral as distinguished from a sociopolitical stance, inasmuch as a moral system may fit any number of ideologies—e.g., one might be a Christian and a political conservative, a liberal, a socialist, or even (if sufficiently vexed) an anarchist. Instead, I classify such articles as ‘borderline-ideological,’ inasmuch they often do suggest an ideological orientation; a critique of capitalist greed frequently if not invariably registers a ‘progressive’/socialist ideological leaning, for example.

    On the level of ‘theory’ any set of criteria can of course be subjected to the most exquisite dialectical wrangles. In practice, however, the criteria I employ are easy to apply and lead to results that at least in principle earn the concurrence of those not predisposed to disagree. For example, it isn’t hard to classify Edith Philips’ article, “French Interest in Quakers Before Voltaire”—a historical account of French literary opinion on the “Trembleurs,” as they were called, as non-ideological (Volume 45, Number 1). Similarly, no one could seriously (i.e., nonpolemically) dispute the ideological character of Suvir Kaul’s article, “Why Selina Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Idea”—a description and critique of the “mechanisms of social and ideological consolidation” deployed by “mercantile capitalism” (Volume 105, Number 2). Philips could be just about anything, politically. Kaul could not. He is indisputably ‘a man of the Left.’ To be sure, there are borderline cases, and I have taken these into account.

    The other, less important, system of classification is a typology of critical approaches. These I divided into historical, thematic (including ‘history of ideas’), esthetic/formal, linguistic, editorial, and theoretical—categories that suggested themselves to me as I read the journal. By a ‘historical’ article I mean one that describes events surrounding a literary work or works, including biographical, social, religious, and political events, as seen in Sanford Brown Meech’s “Chaucer and an Italian Translation of the Heroides” (Volume 45, Number 1), which shows hat Chaucer had the opportunity to read Filippo’s translation during a 1378 visit to Italy and reports textual echoes of Filippo’s work in Chaucer’s writings. By ‘thematic’ I mean he description, with or without evaluation, of the ideas of an author, as in Walter Clyde Curry’s “Destiny in Chaucer’s Troilus” (Volume 45, Number 1), which discusses “Nature-as-destiny” in Troilus and Criseyde and criticizes Chaucer’s epilogue as advancing contradictory expressions of Christian piety and heavenly mercy for a pagan hero.

    ‘Esthetic/formal’ refers to studies such as George Pope Shannon’s “Nicholas Grimald’s Heroic Couplet and the Latin Elegiac Distych” (Volume 45, Number 2), which describes the poet’s pioneering use of the heroic couplet in English and his poetry’s stylistic affinities to the poetry of neoclassicism. An esthetic/formal approach concentrates on diction, genre, metaphor, and other stylistic devices in order to show how these produce a given effect.

    ‘Linguistic’ studies focus on grammar—as seen in Charles Barret Brown’s “The Passive-Reflexive as Applied to Persons in the Primera Crónica General (Volume 45, Number 2). ‘Editorial’ studies present an edited version of a work previously unpublished or corrects an error of some previous editor—e.g., Charles Caroll Marden’s “Berceo’s Martirio de San Lorenzo from and Unpublished Manuscript (Volume 45, Number 2).

    Articles on ‘theory’ present and argue for some general understanding of literature itself. An early example is Charles Edward Whitmore’s “Some Comments on ‘Literary Theory'” (Volume 45, Number 2), with its refreshing diffidence concerning the question of whether literary theory is possible. A recent example is Susan Winnet’s “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure” (Volume 105, Number 3), which criticizes an “erotics of reading” based exclusively upon the model provided by male sexuality.

    As even these short descriptions suggest, the categories usually overlap in practice. It would be a dubious effort indeed to discuss Chaucer’s ideas without engaging in description and interpretation of contemporary historical events and without showing considerable sensitivity to his literary style. The fact that many articles mix these various critical approaches in nearly equal proportions complicates matters still further. The classifications are, then, only attempts to identify the predominant approach seen in each article.

     

    Results of the Study

    The survey resulted in three sets of statistics. One set measures the frequency of appearance in each volume of the various critical genres or approaches. The second set measures the frequency of ideological or borderline-ideological articles. The third set measures the political orientation of the ideological articles.

     

    TABLE 1: Types of Critical Approaches

    1930: 48% historical; 23% thematic/’history of ideas’; 10% linguistic; 8.5% editorial; 7.25% esthetic/formal; 1.5% theoretical.

    1940: 42% historical; 29% thematic; 14.5% esthetic/formal; 8.5% editorial; 0% theoretical.

    1950: 41% historical; 26% thematic; 18.5% esthetic/formal; 13% editorial; 1.5% linguistic; 0% theoretical.

    1960: 62% thematic; 20% historical; 10% esthetic/formal; 4.3% editorial; 1.5% linguistic; 1.5% theoretical.

    1970: 62% thematic; 16% esthetic/formal; 14% historical; 4% theoretical; 2% linguistic; 0% editorial.

    1975: 59.5% thematic; 16% historical; 13.5% esthetic/formal; 8% theoretical; 3% linguistic; 0% editorial.

    1980: 50% thematic; 29% esthetic/formal; 16.5% historical; 4% theoretical; 0% linguistic; 0% editorial.

    1985: 50% thematic; 37.5% esthetic/formal; 4% historical; 4% theoretical; 4% editorial; 0% linguistic.

    1990: 69.5% thematic; 16.5% esthetic/formal; 8% historical; 5.5% theoretical; 0% linguistic; 0% editorial.

     

    As mentioned above, few articles are ‘pure’ specimens of any one genre, and most are a mixture of genres. The above classifications merely represent judgments respecting the predominant approach taken in each article. There are articles in which two or more critical approaches are so evenly mixed that the classification is arbitrary. Still, this is not the case so often as to invalidate the overall trends shown.

    There was a marked shift from historical to thematic and esthetic/forma studies in the 1950s and 1960s, probably reflecting the increasing popularity of ‘New Critical’ methods and concerns. Theoretical studies have become more numerous in the past twenty years, but the percentages do not fully show the nature of their influence—the inevitable consequence of a ‘quantitative’ survey. Theories have become more elaborate, and literary scholars have become more self-conscious about theories. This is best illustrated by statistics cited by 1980 PMLA editor John Canarroe, who reported that Derrida, Barthes, J. Hillis Miller, and de Man were the four most frequently-cited authors in 35 papers submitted to the 1979 editorial board (Volume 95, Number 1).

     

    TABLE 2: Percentages of Ideological Articles

    1930: 0% ideological; 4% borderline-ideological.

    1940: 1.5% ideological; 1.5% borderline-ideological = 3%.

    1950: 3% ideological; 1.5% borderline-ideological = 4.5%.

    1960: 1.5% ideological; 15.5% borderline-ideological = 17%.

    1970: 10% ideological; 10% borderline-ideological = 20%.

    1975: 5.5% ideological; 11% borderline-ideological = 16.5%.

    1980: 41.5% ideological; 12.5% borderline-ideological = 54%.

    1985: 50% ideological; 12.5% borderline-ideological = 62.5%.

    1990: 52.5% ideological; 19.5% borderline-ideological = 72%.

     

    The designation ‘borderline-ideological’ refers to articles whose content was significantly determined by moral concerns but without discernible political content. (Thus a writer might show approval of a poem because it celebrates married love, but this would not tell us if the critics were an oligarch or a democrat.)

    The trend toward ideology gathered in the 1960s and achieved a decided ‘breakout’ by 1980. Comparing Table 2 with Table 1, it is notable that the ideological acceleration was preceded by the decline of the number of historical articles and, more immediately, by an increase in ‘borderline-ideological’ or moralizing articles.

     

    TABLE 3: Left-Right-Center

    1930: No ideological articles.

    1940: 1 ideological article, centrist.

    1950: 2 ideological articles, centrist.

    1960: 1 ideological article, center-rightist.

    1970: 5 ideological articles, 2 center-leftist, 3 leftist.

    1975: 2 ideological articles, leftist.

    1980: 10 ideological articles, 1 center-leftist, 9 leftist.

    1985: 12 ideological articles, leftist.

    1990: 19 ideological articles, 3 centrist, 16 leftist.

     

    The categories are conventional. “Centrist” means pro-democratic-republican; “center-rightist” means conservative; “center-leftist” means liberal. The shift to the left side of the spectrum from 1970 through 1990 is marked.

     

    From Scholarship on Ideology to Ideological Scholarship

    The earlier numbers of PMLA feature many non-ideological discussions of ideological issues in literature. PMLA writers have never neglected political issues. One difference between the scholars of 1930 (and for that matter, the vast majority of scholars before 1980) and many scholars publishing in the past twenty years is the tendency to move political/ideological opinions to the foreground of scholarship. When reading Professor Donald C. Dorian of the New Jersey College for Women on the “two-handed engine” in Milton’s Lycidas—the engine symbolizing “Christian liberty” as vindicated by Parliament against men Milton regarded as self-seeking clergy (Volume 45, Number 1, p. 207), one can find no hint of Dorian’s opinion of Milton’s opinions. The same is true of Professor Chanon Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin, writing on how Mesonero and Jouy both deplored “the respect for social distinction” that results in a denigration of native culture and the imitation of foreign cultures (Volume 45, Number 2, p. 562), and of Sister Eugenie of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, discussing Coleridge’s dreams of “Pantisocracy” in America (Volume 45, Number 4), and of Professor William Wister Comfort of Haverford College on the political and cultural struggle between the French and the “Saracens” as depicted in French epics (Volume 55, Number 3), of Professor W. Gordon Zeeveld of the University of Maryland on Tudor propagandists (Volume 55, Nos. 2, 4), of Professor Judith H. Anderson of Cornell University on the Knight of Justice in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Volume 85, Number 1), and of literally dozens more. There were even a few scholars publishing in PMLA as late as 1990, for example Andrew Galloway, a Ph.D candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote on choice and fate in Beowulf with impressive learning and no discernible ideological slant (Volume 105, Number 2).

    This scholarly approach contrasts markedly with the well-articulated ideology or constellation of ideologies dominating recent issues of PMLA. Current PMLA writers almost uniformly condemn hierarchy and authority in whatever form. The use of the word ‘subversive’ and its variants evidently gives PMLA writers a frisson they find hard to resist, as when Professor Joseph Litvak of Bowdoin College argues that Jane Austen’s “most subversive” insight is that all society is a fiction, a game (Volume 100, No. 5, p. 769). The well-known techniques of ‘deconstruction’ serve PMLA writers as tools in the advancement of this project, and ‘deconstructionism’ provides useful ideological materials as well. If, as 1974 MLA President John H. Fisher contended, “Reality is communication” (Volume 90, Number 3, p. 361), and communication refers to nothing ‘out there’ but only to the human will, then reality, including social reality, may be deconstructed and reconstructed ‘as you like it.’ Condemnation of physical punishment and other techniques of social ‘discipline’ goes with this, as these are inconvenient reminders of phenomena both nonverbal and hierarchic. Because their condemnation issues from an antipathy for hierarchy in any form, PMLA writers cannot distinguish tyranny from (for example) the practices of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. [5]  (That there might be important political distinctions between the Tudors and the Stuarts lies even farther beyond the PMLA perspective.)

    The incapacity to make certain real-world political distinctions serves PMLA writers when they turn their hostilities toward the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, you will understand, are a very bad lot. They are the sort of people described by Dickens in Little Dorrit as constructed by Professor Dianne F. Sadoff of Antioch College: “Orphanage and bastardy,” she explains, constitute “the central motivation that unites social patronage, exploitation, petit-bourgeois capitalism, and murder” (Volume 95, Number 3, p. 238). ‘Patriarchalism’ also comes in for frequent, predictable bruisings, and is explicitly linked to the imperialist bourgeoisie by Professor Suvir Kaul of the University of Delhi, who unmasks the sinister ideology of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (Volume 105, Number 2). As a rule, PMLA writers can be depended upon to know nothing about the Filmer-Locke controversy, of the opposition of real patriarchy to commercial republicanism.

    Dovetailing with the attack on hierarchy is the rejection of the concept of trans-‘cultural’ human nature and of reason, which makes knowledge of human nature possible. PMLA writers, usually alert to the ‘contradictions’ of their political enemies, give themselves much more latitude. They dismiss the principle of non-contradiction in favor of a conflation of rhetoric, ‘epistemology,’ and historicism, as in Professor Thomas Mermall’s article on Unamuno (Volume 105, Number 2). Imagination fueled by eros or desires (themselves confused with the will) replaces reason. Perhaps there is no better proof of these writers’ willfulness or arbitrariness than their conscription of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a left-communalist ideological army. [6] The most striking evidence of this ‘transvaluation’ may be seen in the appropriation of what were once the rightist obsessions with race, class, and ‘gender’ for a leftist political agenda of ‘multiculturalism.’

    PMLA writers praise oral as distinguished from written culture a vehicle for ‘multiculturalism.’ This allows them to praise non-Western, pre-modern ‘cultures’ while firmly channeling them into the correct ideological stream. Orality, they maintain, is egalitarian (you can talk back), fluid, communal; writing is legalistic, rigid, tending toward hierarchy—according to Cynthia Ward of Stanford University in her article on the African novelist Buchi Emcheta (Volume 105, Number 1). The preference for orality comports with the interest of some writers in a politics of consensus without force, in Habermas’s neo-Marxism. If this strikes some readers as utopian, PMLA writers would not blink. A politics of the imagination, a sort of poetic politics (the counterpart of Heidegger’s poetic philosophy) can ‘work’ in the ‘real’ world because the ‘real’ world is the stuff of fable. Physical power is real but brittle, depending upon mystification. What the bourgeoisie has done can be undone. Social realities are only relative to whatever mental constructs are currently believed. ‘The personal is the political,’ and what is more personal and (if you want) communal that the imagination? [7]  Imaginative (de)construction serves as almost exactly the same function as much-abominated Cartesian rationalism. It is a means of conquering sociopolitical conventions and even biology, as seen in Ann E. Hostetler’s “The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (Volume 105, Number 1). Human life, one learns here, is truly free only if self-created, resistant to any ‘alien’ or externally-imposed structures. At the same time (one must notice) because the personal is the political, individual freedom is assumed to be consistent with a soft form of totalitarianism or egalitarian communalism, a totalitarianism conflating politics and culture not in the manner of Leni Riefenstahl but more along the lines of Woodstock.

    The PMLA ideology can produce the most delicious combinations of rhetoric and reality, as when Professor Carolyn G. Heilbrun reached for an applause line in her 1984 Presidential Address: “If we lift our eyes beyond our profession, the sight of Geraldine Ferraro still dazzles” (Volume 100, Number. 3, p. 282). But for a more comprehensive example nothing excels the work of Professor Melba Cuddy-Keane of the University of Toronto. Her article, “The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” (Volume 105, Number 2) serves as a veritable compendium of PMLA assertins and assumptions. Cuddy-Keane begins by reaffirming that “the personal is the political” (272). By “political” she means “the dynamic of power relations in society” (273). This conception of politics is identical to that of Hobbes, and Cuddy-Keane shares Hobbes’s egalitarianism. Her recommended means of obtaining maximum social equality differ, however, from Hobbesian despotism. Virginia Woolf’s “revolutions in narrative form,” Cuddy-Keane writes, “demonstrate a continuing protest against hierarchical power structures” (273), even structures designed to promote equality.

    She explains. In Woolf’s novel, “politics and genre are fully integrated in her use of comic modes to subvert and overthrow prevailing assumptions about the role of leaders and the nature of groups” in “Western patriarchal society” (274). In this society groups are centered on the ‘leader’ or primal father; they are animated by beliefs supporting that structure. Patriarchy culminates in Hitler. Woolf’s alternative is a “decentering of authority” (274). She uses narrative to suggest that “fragmentation permits a new and fluid sense of community” (274). The title refers to the chorus (representing the community, not the individual) ‘between the acts’ of Greek tragedies. To redirect readers’ attention to the chorus “subverts the habitual dominance of the leader figure” and erases “the insider-outsider dichotomy,” both of which cause conflict (275).

    Not tragedy but comedy “provides the chorus with its true identity,” and comedy is Woolf’s genre (275). She avoids satire in this novel because satire is exclusive, aiming at the destruction of the other. Woolf writes “amiable comedy” (277), restorative not disciplinary. Women generally should be “outsiders in opposition to society’s competitive hierarchy”; Woolf’s protagonist participates in society without “changing her nature as an outsider” (279). Woolf thus “redefines inclusiveness,” rejecting social homogeneity for a “social dynamics of heterogeneity,” “celebrat[ing] an irreversible dismantling of order and actually advocat[ing] permanent instability” (279-280). Woolf’s envisioned community is a “fragmented, questioning, contradictory, but fully collective voice” (280). “The resulting ‘chaos’ is not apocalyptic but revolutionary, and in a fully political sense”—”an undifferentiated and participatory communal form” (283). The “collective voice” that is the new community is “communal without being coercive,” hence “more individualist than the voice of the spokesperson” or ‘leader’ (283). The community is “not an identity but a process” (283). It all reminds me of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, maybe without the money exchanged.

    In a journal governed by a set of principles that attempt to square the circle of heterogeneity or personal freedom and egalitarian communalism, the most telling practical test will come in the way dissenters are treated. In the PMLA ‘community’ a few dissenters are permitted. Most of them are old, distinguished, middle-of-the-road. They merely react to the actions of the ‘Left.’ In a recent volume, Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, condemned the murder of cultured Africans by African tyrants, erstwhile anti-colonialists (“the catalog of betrayal by our own kind is lengthy,” often longer than that of colonial oppression [Volume 105, Number 1, p. 117]); the distinguished novelist Mario Varga Llosa attacked historicism and tried to rehabilitate Popper’s concept of verification (Volume 105, Number 4); Professor Victor Brombert of Princeton University delivered a Presidential Address criticizing the rejection of epistemologies of apprehension for epistemologies of assertion, noticing that a politics based upon the latter foundations will never remain pluralistic for long, whatever its intentions or protestations (Volume 105, Number 3).

    Two other dissenting articles were noteworthy. The Shakespeare scholar Richard Levin attacked the Marxist-Deconstructionist nexus and added a few criticisms of “feminist Neo-Freudian critics” for good measure (Volme 105, Number 4). Both neo-Marxists and feminists use deconstructionist techniques to make Shakespeare into a mouthpiece for themselves. What was remarkable was not so much the article itself as the reaction it provoked. Discipline swift and sure followed in PMLA’s letters section. Professor Daniel Boyarin of the University of California called Levin’s article (“to speak generously”) “disingenuous in the extreme,” characterized by “demagoguery” and “sophistry” (Volume 106, Number 2, pp. 314-315). Critics of Levin’s “ilk” “serve only the continued dominance of a particular gender [male], class [the bourgeoisie], and culture [Western]” by appealing to pleasure in literary study (315). Professor Jeffrey Williams of East Carolina University scored Levin’s “tone of condescension,” his “disturbing and disempowering” argument (Volume 106, Number 3, p. 531-532). And Professor Margot FitzGerald condemned “Levin’s sneering and nastiness,” so typical of “capitalist boosters” (Volume 106, No. 5, p. 1173). [8]

     

    Conclusion

    In a 1990 article introducing an issue of PMLA devoted to the issues surrounding literary criticism, Professor Herbert Lindenberger of Stanford University called “ideological analysis” a “particular generational style of thought” (Volume 105, Number 3, p. 406). This “style,” he opined, amounted to a reaction to “the unusually conservative regimes that reigned”—”reigned,” yes, one must admire the mastery of the rhetorical turn—”throughout the 1980s in Great Britain and the United States” (p. 406). Notwithstanding the putatively devastating effect of conservative governments on sensitive literary academics, the contemporary PMLA New Left began its project well before then. The decade of leveraged buyouts and Adolfo fashions may have thrust much grit into professorial oysters, inducing such pearls of scholarship as I have reviewed, but the oysters themselves hatched twenty years earlier in beds provided by unusually liberal governments in the United States.

    To be sure, ideological influences on PMLA writers go back even further than Crews and New-Left neo-Marxism. A 1940 article by Professor John Blankenagel of Wesleyan University summarized the principal sentiments and aims of German Romanticism. He cited Friedrich Schlegel, who wanted to blend poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric, “creative genius and criticism” (Volume 55, No. 1, p. 3). This synthetic effort, this “effacing of border lines,” reminded Blankenhagel of a secularized form of medieval Catholicism, and no wonder, given the Romantics’ admiration for the medieval romans, and their distaste for Enlightenment rationalism.

    The German Romantic synthesis (to use a word they popularized) went beyond a synthesis of forms. “Poetry becomes a symbol of the infinite,” and “life is poetry” (3-4). Ergo, life is infinite: “The very soul of romanticism was infinite longing without goal, limit, or object” (6). Unlike medieval Catholicism, German Romanticism did not restrict the object of this longing to another, better world than this one. “To become God, to be man, to develop one’s faculties, are one and the same thing” to the German Romantics (6). In religion these impulses led to immanentism, as distinguished from Christian creationism. In politics, they led to nationalism; in Fichte and Kleist “the idea of totality and of organic development held by early romanticists was now applied in a new and more realistic manner to the state, society, and history” (9). In literary matters, the German Romantics held that “One of the finest flowers of creative imagination was the fairy tale”—’folkish’ and oral, not sophisticated and written-down (9). So much of this resembles the preoccupations of the PMLA today that it is likely that German Romanticism, as filtered through Heidegger and ‘synthesized’ with Marxism, deserves credit as a wellspring of PMLA sentiment. The nationalism is of course out of favor, but it has been replaced by what is effectively a democratized plethora of nationalisms called ‘multiculturalism.’

    Much nearer to home was the 1962 Port Huron Statement, that seminal document of the New Left. The Statement excoriated “the hypocrisy of American ideals.” The American Founders’ declaration that all men are created equal “rang hollow” in a country where civil rights were denied to a racial minority; America’s “proclaimed peaceful intentions” were belied by “economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.” Americans’ “contentment amidst prosperity” was really “a glaze above deeply felt anxieties,” anxieties that could only be removed by “truly democratic” ways of life. “Participatory democracy,” unlike representative democracy or republicanism, could end the various existential maladies afflicting our “human relationships,” including “loneliness, estrangement, and isolation.” The authors of the Statement simultaneously insisted that their society could “be organized to encourage independence” and the “creative spirit” in individuals. Because “the university is located in a permanent place of social influence,” because it is “a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes,” the “new left” should recruit “younger people” there, while working toward a “political synthesis” of socialism and liberalism. The New Left “must import major public issues into the curriculum—research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example.” Then, “from its schools and colleges across the nation a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter” (emphasis added). Frederick Crews transferred these sentiments to the pages of PMLA, and they continue to fuel the agenda of today’s academic ‘Left.’

    The New Left’s attempt to maximize liberty, equality, and fraternity all at the same time never made much sense, but neither did the even grander syntheses proposed by the German Romantics. Put in American terms, the professors love Whitman, the all-inclusive individual, but they resemble Emerson. Professors are of a priestly not a prophetic nature. Modern bourgeois life has been hard on priests because it tolerates them, neither fearing nor hating them. Seeing comedy in this is perhaps too easy. Surely there is also a certain poignancy in seeing persons so thoroughly unfitted for the modern world, bravely insisting that they can yet be unacknowledged or even acknowledged legislators of humanity. Be this as it may, it is fair to conclude that behind PMLA’s pluralism with respect to race, class, and gender resides a variegated but nonetheless thoroughgoing political monism, firmly left-wing. [9]

     

    NOTES

    1. For a recent, representative statement against “the multiculturalist imperative” among MLA members, see Roger Kimball, “The MLA in Chicago,” The New Criterion, Volume 9, Number 6, 8-17.
    2. See Michael Abramowitz, “Literature Professors Look Inward and Find Scant Evidence of ‘PC,'” The Washington Post, January 3, 1992.
    3. See John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and American Experience: Essays on Theory and Practice in the United States (Washington: The Washington Institute Press, 1986), p. 6.
    4. For example, in the 1930 volume, Walter Clyde Curry suggests that Criseyde’s attempts to defy Fortune may be an expression of “feminine childishness” (Volume 45, Number 1, p. 149). (He less-than-evenhandedly refers to Troilus’ “childish railings”—but not ‘masculine childishness,’ a few pages later (p. 153). Forty years later, John I. Ades slights “middle-class morality” (Volume 85, Number 4, p. 526). Such passing remarks raise suspicions that ideology may be present, but in neither case does ideology govern the article as a whole.
    5. See for example Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death” (Volume 105, Number 2) and Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson” (Volume 105, Number 5). Boehrer’s article is an especially flagrant example of the conflation of monarchism, the bourgeoisie, and “totalitarian politics” (p. 1078).
    6. See for example Victoria Kahn on Habermas (Volume 105, Number 3). For a critique of Heidegger’s attempt to meld poetry and philosophy for political purposes see Nicholas Rand, “The Political Truth of Heidegger’s ‘Logos’: Hiding in Translation” (Volume 105, Number 3).
    7. See Morris Eaves on William Blake and the Romantics’ “society of the imagination” (Volume 95, Number 5, p. 795). See also Elissa S. Guralnik on radio and the imagination (Volume 105, Number 2) and C. Christopher Soufas on Calderon’s La vida es sueño; the latter article opposes imagination, sensuality, and sociopolitical ‘participation’ to rationality (Volume 100, Number 4).
    8. In an earlier article, Levin had criticized a particular strain of feminist critics he called “gender thematists,” who hold the view that women as such are healthy but men as such are sick (Volume 103, No. 1, pp. 125-137). He was chastised in a letter signed by 24 professors accusing him of committing “pseudohistory,” paternalism, and “crude Aristotelianism” (Volume 104, Number 1, p. 77). Among other points,  Levin noted in response that he was a member of the National Association of Women. The whole spectacle impelled Professor Ward Parks of Louisiana State University to write that Levin, “as an established academic and an unusually courageous man, maybe be able to survive such treatment, but new scholars who need to get published and to find jobs very probably could not” (Volume 108, Number 2, p. 353).
    9. The 280-page study upon which this article is based is on file at the offices of the National Association of Scholars, Princeton, New Jersey.

     

    2018 Note

    After this article was published in a heavily-edited version by Academic Questions, the editor of PMLA, Domna C. Stanton, was quoted in a brief piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as calling it “pitiful,” a term egalitarians deploy when they really mean “contemptible” but, being egalitarians, prefer not to appear to enforce a social hierarchy. The Chronicle kindly published my reply in its April 7, 1993 issue:

    To the Editor:

    Thank you for publishing a report (‘In’ Box, March 3) on my article, “Ideology and Literary studies: PMLA 1930-1990,” which appeared in the most recent issue of Academic Questions. 

    In the report, PMLA editor Domna C. Stanton was quoted as describing my article as “pitiful,” on the grounds that “Everyone from Euripides to Eudora Welty is ideological.” She added that PMLA employs more than 500 scholars in its peer-review process.

    I am always grateful for any expression of human sympathy directed at my work, Mrs. Stanton’s pity included. I tenderly return the sentiment with respect to her comprehension of my article. I never claimed that prominent authors are not “ideological.” I claimed that articles about them need not be, and that most recent PMLA articles are.

    To say “Euripides was a Socratic,” or “Eudora Welty was influenced by Southern Agrarianism,” is to make a non-ideological statement concerning ideology. Writers in PMLA once put perception and description ahead of ideological gesticulation. In increasing numbers they no longer do.

    As for that demi-legion of peer reviewers, the demonstrable results of their efforts show just how ideologically motivated many in the profession have become.

    So far, no one has made the really damning case against my article: that it betrays an inordinate expense of time and effort in attempting to prove the obvious.

    Will Morrisey

     

     

    Locke Questions the Law of Nature

    by

    John Locke: Questions Concerning the Law of Nature. Robert H. Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 19, Number 2, Winter 1991-92. Republished with permission; revised February 2018.

     

    Locke begins this work by restating the argument the Apostle Paul makes for the existence of God: “Since god shows himself everywhere present to us and, as it were, forces himself upon men’s eyes, as much now in the constant course of nature as in the once frequent testimony of miracles, I believe there will be no one, who recognizes that either some rational account of our life is necessary or that there exists something deserving the name of either virtue or vice, who will not conclude for himself that god exists” (95). Locke ends the work in an equally firm moral tone: “the rightness of an action does not depend upon interest, but interest follows from rectitude” (251). The beginning and the end of the Questions dovetail with the teachings of Christian natural law, a fact many scholars today will take to confirm their belief that Locke reflected the reigning orthodoxy of his time and place. In his substantial introduction to this new edition of the Questions, the late Robert H. Horwitz observes that Locke deals systematically with the issue of natural law nowhere in his published writings (1). The Questions shows how carefully Locke thought about natural law during his tenure as senior censor of moral philosophy at Christ Church College, Oxford, in the 1663-64 term. Locke evidently prepared his manuscript around that time, prior to his participation in formal scholarly disputations with his advanced students (29-30); hence the format of question-and-response. Locke did not put his unpublished manuscript aside and forget it. As late as 1681-82 he had it copied by hand and corrected it. But he still refrained from publishing it, resisting the importunities of at least one friend who kept an studied it during Locke’s exile in Holland. Upon his return Locke took pains to conceal the manuscript among his papers, succeeding so well that it was not discovered and published for some two and a half centuries.

    Locke’s supreme self-possession and prudence come out very clearly in Horwitz’s introduction, an exemplary specimen of biographical criticism. While urging readers “to concentrate their attention solely on the difficult task of understanding Locke’s reflections on the law of nature in precisely the form in which Locke has left them to us,” Horwitz makes this easier to do by providing not only an account of the circumstances surrounding the manuscript’s composition and subsequent history, but also a picture of Locke’s habits of mind as reflected in actions. The philosopher actively participated in the political events of late seventeenth-century England, in which Protestants and Catholics struggled for control of the monarchy. Locke, “a man who never took lightly, either in theory or in practice, the indispensable goods of life, liberty, and property (40), and who may have witnessed “the last major public book burning” at Oxford shortly before his six-year exile (the heretical works of Thomas Hobbes were consigned to the flames), survived even as other prominent Whigs such as Algernon Sydney served prison sentences and even died for their convictions (9, 29). Locke “took great pains to conceal authorship of many of his most important—and potentially most controversial—works from the time they were written and published [anonymously] until a few weeks before his death” (2, n.2). Even in his own library catalogue he did not classify his Two Treatises or his Letters concerning Toleration under his own name.

    This caution extended to the manner in which Locke wrote his manuscripts. After the publication of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Locke’s contemporaries, immersed as they were in every aspect of the Christian natural law teaching, perceived an important and critical ambiguity in Locke’s position on these matters,” particularly a reluctance to “identify the Bible simply as the revealed word of God” (21-22). Some contemporaries found this reluctance profoundly unsettling; others, whom Horwitz calls “Locke’s helpers,” eagerly supplied, or urged Locke to supply, the decisively pious supplements. He never quite did so. These contemporary disputes have continued into our own time, as Horwitz shows in his discussion of the editorial work done by Wolfgang von Leyden, the scholar who discovered Locke’s manuscript in the 1940s and published it in 1954 under the title Essays on the Law of Nature. This title misidentifies the genre. These are not essays; some sections consist only of a question and a one-word answer. Just as important, von Leyden invariably ascribes a pious meaning to Locke’s answers, overlooking the “pervasive tension between two or more opposed understandings of the law of nature” found in the text (61), as well as the “manifold contradictions” that force attentive readers to think the problems through for themselves (61, n.138). As co-editor Diskin Clay observes, Locke speaks in a “Christian” voice, a “pagan” voice and, sotto voce, in the accents of Hobbes, Grotius, and Descartes (80). The Christian and pagan voices speak of natural law but must express different conceptions of the natural law. The ‘modern’ voices do not speak of nature in the same sense at all. One might say that in this ‘disputation’ Locke has brought several voices into dialogue with one another.

    The Questions consists of eleven questions and answers. In the first answer Locke affirms the existence of “a rule of conduct or law of nature,” whereby “all creatures in their obedience to [god’s] will have their own proper laws governing their birth and life” (95). The law of nature differs from natural right, which does not command but rather authorizes “a free use of something”; the law of nature is “the command of the divine will, knowable by the light of nature” (101). The light of nature, human reason, interprets but does not make the law of nature—”unless we are willing to diminish the dignity of the supreme lawmaker” (101) and make man a self-legislator. This Locke professes reluctance to do, inasmuch as reason “is only a faculty of the mind and a part of use,” and so cannot give us laws, “the formal definition of the law seem[ing] to consist” in “the declaration of a superior will” (103). Unlike Aristotle, who describes man as a political animal, and accordingly divides political justice into natural and conventional kinds, Locke divides not political justice but “law” into natural and civil kinds; the law of nature exists ‘outside’ civil or political society, perhaps as its foundation but not as an essential part of human life itself. Indeed, Locke follows Grotius in saying that whereas natural things can be brought together in a science, conventional things differ as it were chaotically; where there is no order there can be no science. As evidence of these assertions Locke argues that some “principles of conduct” are recognized universally, and universality points to nature, some law of nature, as distinguished from the heterogeneous, even contradictory realm of conventional laws. Locke concedes that most people do not recognize ‘universally recognized’ laws of nature. The many are governed by “the onrush of their feelings and bad habits”; the many have reason but they don’t use it to ‘read’ the law of nature, even though that law is ‘posted’ everywhere (111). We must therefore turn for guidance to “the sounder and more perceptive part” of mankind (111). Unfortunately, these sound and perceptive thinkers do not agree, either. Locke doesn’t bat an eye: This disagreement only “strengthens [the conclusion] that a law of this kind exists, since concerning this very law all contend so fiercely” (111). Thus “all recognize that vice and virtue exist by nature”; they ‘merely’ disagree about what they (and it) are! As further evidence of the existence of the law of nature, Locke also sites conscience, the argument from design (the central of the five ‘evidences’ he offers), and what might be termed the argument from society: Society “seems to rest” upon a fixed political regime and the keeping of covenants; these “foundations” would “collapse” absent a law of nature, with supreme power enjoying supreme license (as in Hobbes) and citizens observing no deference (115). Finally, “without the law of nature there would be no virtue or vice”; “man [would be] the supreme and absolute free judge of his own actions” (117), evidently in violation of the rule ‘the party to a dispute must not be the judge’ and explicitly making men’s interest or pleasure the (im)moral standard of conduct. The discovery of conventionality of the law of nature would result in the concept of man as his own judge, legislator, and executioner.

    The thirteen paragraphs of the second section, affirming that the law of nature is knowable by the “light of nature,” define the light of nature not as something “inscribed on tablets in our breasts” to be read by an “inner light”—conscience, in short—but as the “right use” of our natural faculties, unaided by “the help of another” (117, 119). Mind, reason, and sense are the “principles and foundations of knowing” (121); the means of knowing via these faculties are “inscription,” tradition, and (again) sense; sense is both a foundation and a means of knowing, inasmuch as our senses exist in us by nature and they also provide us with impressions (called “simple ideas” in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) such as ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Revelation “can be added as a fourth” means of knowledge (emphasis added), but Locke puts it aside because this investigation treats natural knowledge, not knowledge given to us by God. Our first impressions or ideas and the foundation of knowledge do not enter our mind by reason, which “does nothing unless something has been established and agreed to beforehand” (by inscription, tradition, or sense); reason does not establish knowledge of foundational truths, being capable of discovering such truths but not of constituting it (as it can, for example, in Kant’s moral philosophy). Inscription, the claim that the human mind has the law of nature “graven upon it (123), was rejected earlier as a source of knowledge of that law and will be rejected again in the answer to Question IV. Tradition is a form of knowledge we learn through our senses but believe through “faith” (125); Locke deems it useful in educating the young concerning “god.” But it is “not a primary and certain means of knowing the law of nature” because there are many and contradictory traditions (Locke mentions those propounded by Jews, “Romanists,’ and Turks) “warring among themselves,” sometimes even within the same state (127). To judge among these contradictory claims, we must “judge of things themselves” by “evidence which can be known by the light of nature” (129), whereas faith rests upon authority, “a derivative rather than an innate law” (131). He concedes that the founder of a tradition must have either “discovered this law inscribed in his heart or reached a knowledge of it by arguing from the evidence derived from his sense experience” (131), but observes that the rest of us can only take his word for it if we do not attain the knowledge directly, as well. This leaves sense. All of our knowledge of the law of nature “is derived from those things we perceive by our senses” (133). Reason then argues from the things perceived, concluding with “a certainty that there is some god who is the author of all these things” (133).
    “[W]hatever possesses the force of law among men, necessarily recognizes as its source either god or nature or man” (133); man-given and God-given law are positive law; any other kind of law is the law of nature.

    Why, then, do men disregard the law of nature? They fail to “make right use” of their “intellectual faculties”; that is to say, they fail to reason rightly from their sense perceptions (135). This should not surprise us. After all, not all who are of sound mind can master geometry or arithmetic, after having learned their numbers; for more advanced work, for discovering “the hidden nature” of geometry and arithmetic, one needs “concentrated meditation of the mind, thought, and care” (135). “Good, rich veins of gold and silver lie hidden in the bowels of the earth,” requiring hard work to “dig them out”; even then, “some we see toil to no avail” (135). “Only a few… are guided by reasons in the concerns of their daily life,” let alone in these more abstruse matters; “rarely do men probe deeply into themselves to discover there the cause of their life, its proper mode, and purpose” (135). Such knowledge may come to a Descartes, but “it does not offer itself up to the idle and indolent” (135). On the other hand, from the difficulty of this work one cannot conclude that there is nothing to be extracted. Locke challenges his young scholars to exercise their natural powers, and only their natural powers, to investigate the claims mad for the law of nature. In his essay on the Questions in What Is Political Philosophy? Leo Strauss remarks that the fact that the law of nature ‘makes itself scarce,’ ‘plays hard to get,’ parallels in intellectual life the material scarcity that characterizes Locke’s ‘state of nature.’ For the succor of both mind and body, men must (as Locke observes in the Essay on Civil Government) mix their labor with nature or starve. ‘Black is not white’ may be a self-evident truth, but the laws of nature and of nature’s God are not.

    Locke answers his third question, “Does the Law of nature become known to us by tradition?” succinctly—”It does not”—before turning to his fourth question, “Is the Law of Nature inscribed in the minds of men?” He evidently thinks he has refuted the claim that tradition provides an adequate source of such knowledge, but wants to address the question of “inscription” more thoroughly. He boldly declares that the existence of a law of nature has been “proved” (139). A careful reader might conclude that the existence of a law of nature has not been disproved. Returning now to the “light” of nature by which we might come to know such a law, he observes that this light illuminates the law of nature but its own “nature remains obscure and hidden” (139). And so he begins again. That which is known, he asserts, must be either imprinted in the soul at its birth, an inscription within us, or it must be perceived “through the sense” (139), something outside us. Are our minds ready-made with law of nature already inside them, or “clean slates” filled later by “observation and reasoning” (139)? Locke denies that there is a law “inscribed by nature in our hearts” (141). If there were, and given the fact that “in her working nature is the same and uniform” (143), how is it that we find no universal agreement about or obedience to it? And if one argues, with the Apostle Paul, that the wicked, “sin nature” of humanity since the Fall of Adam and Eve prevents such agreement and obedience, the very doctrine of original sin itself remains “completely unknown to the greatest part of mankind” (143). If one were to reply that this only proves the point, how is it that we know anything at all about the law of nature, as the Apostle Paul asserts even pagans do? “The very young, the uneducated, and those barbarian natures, which are said to live according to nature,” do not know the law of nature (145), and barbarians (also the young, according to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education) are often fickle, perfidious, and cruel. Civilized peoples have piety, including the belief in a future life, ‘inscribed’ in them not by nature but by parents, teachers, and “others” (clergy?) (147), but not nature. It is from this human teaching in the earliest childhood that “we” conclude that our opinions are “inscribed in our heart by god and nature” (149); the claim of “inscription” actually amounts to the claim of knowledge by tradition, but its proponents fail to see this. “No principles, either practical or speculative, are inscribed in the souls of men by nature” (151). Axioms are established by observations of particulars and by induction from them, not by inscription. Decades before the publication of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke had already concluded that the human mind is a tabula rasa.

    In his treatment of the fifth question, Locke affirms that reason arrives at a knowledge of the law of nature through “sense experience” (153). He begins his discussion with apparent optimism: “The gods beckon us and our nature tends” toward “the summit of virtue and happiness” (153). A problem quickly arises, however. The light of nature consists of reason and sense—more precisely, as he’s written, of sense and rational deduction and induction from sense-impressions or ‘simple ideas.’ Sense provides reason with “the ideas of particular things” and reason then “directs sense, and arranges and orders the images of things derived from the senses, and forms [and derives from this source other new images”; reason is not a set of principles of action or of “propositions laid up in the mind” (155), but rather “the discursive faculty of the soul” (157). Locke then calls the knowledge so achieved discoveries. But which are these more complex ideas? Rationally ‘constructed’ arrangements and orders of images derived from the senses, themselves directed by the mind? Or discoveries? Locke illustrates his point, again, with geometry, which has physical bodies as its foundation but itself consists of ‘abstractions.’ Do geometers amount to creators, constructing their ideas if not out of nothing then out of chaotic sense-impressions, or are they discoverers of patterns inherent in the objects of those sense impressions? Although it is tempting to assume that the latter explanation makes more (as it were) sense, one is reminded of nature’s epistemological and physical niggardliness, the scarcity of the state of nature, which might make it necessary for the human mind not merely to discover but to order the matter of which nature consists. For Locke makes one thing clear: “Every conception of the mind, as of the body, always comes from some preexistent matter,” deriving its premises from that (157). This materialism puts him at odds not only with Christianity but also with Platonism as it is usually understood, namely, as claiming an independent, non-materialist and even superior or prior status for ideas.

    How does this relate to the law of nature as law? Law, Locke reminds us, presupposes a legislator, a “superior power” to which or to whom one is “rightfully subject”; further, we must know “there is some will of that superior power as regards the things we must do” (159, emphasis added). Our senses show us that there are “sensible things,” and that the “visible world” is “framed with wonderful art and order” (159), like a “machine” (161). “It is certain that it could not have been formed by chance and accident”; on the contrary, “it is a certain inference that there must exist some powerful and wise creator of all these things” (161). This creator could not be man, who cannot “produce himself” because “man does not find in himself all those perfections of which his mind could conceive”; for example, had man created himself he would have done a better job—making himself immortal, for example (161). To have created itself and yet to have botched the job so badly would mean that humanity was “hostile and inimical to itself” (161-163). Reason dictates that there must have been “a superior authority,” “god,” who created us. (As Horwitz remarks, Locke consistently, not to say persistently, puts “deus” in the lower case, with a few exceptions.) Does this mean that “god” was hostile and inimical to us? Locke answers with apparent piety, averring, “Who, indeed, will say, that clay is not subject to the potter’s will and that the pot cannot be destroyed by the same hand that shaped it” (167); “god,” too, has property rights. This does not quite deny that “god” is not hostile and inimical to man, as indeed Descartes’ “Evil Genius” is. But of course it might be that “god” only destroys man when man disobeys “god,” as seen in the Biblical God’s dealings with man from the Garden of Eden, on. A “wise creator” must have created humanity for some purpose (167); “god wills [man] to do something,” namely, “what [man] is naturally equipped to do,” “inclined and ready to perform the works of god” (169). The “function of man” is to honor “god” (169). Although one might expect Locke now to outline precepts of worshipful obedience, he describes man as “driven by a certain natural propensity to enter society,” so driven “not only by the needs and necessities of life”—by the scarcity he finds in the state of nature—but also by his capacity for speech, which implies a degree of sociality (169). Self-preservation is thus “part of his duty” to “god” and his neighbor (following Jesus’ Law of Love, that summary of Torah law) but also to himself, a point unmentioned in that law, although perhaps implied by the Biblical injunction against suicide.

    Strauss remarks that a “propensity” is not necessarily a natural inclination, however. Locke backs away from Aristotelian teleology (and therefore also from Thomism) in his two-word answer to the sixth and central of the eleven questions, “Can the law of Nature be known from the natural inclination of mankind?” “It cannot.” Nor can the law of nature be known from “the consensus of mankind,” the topic addressed in the seventh and longest section (173). By the consensus of mankind, Locke refers to the claim that a universal effect requires a universal cause; that human agreement on a fundamental set of commands (for example, the Noahide commandments) points to the existence of such a set of commands or law of nature. Locke denies that there is any such effect. The voices of the peoples of the earth are not the voice of “god” or, if they are, then god’s voice contradicts itself, so much so that “were we willing to harken to this voice as if it were the herald of divine law, we should finally hardly believe in the existence of any god at all” (173). Consensus comes in two forms, positive and natural. A positive consensus is a compact, tacit or expressed, “no principle of nature whatsoever” (175). For example, the law of nations should not be confused with the law of nature, as the latter “neither supposes nor permits men to be inflamed by mutual enmity, or to be divided into hostile states” to begin with; the law of nations is strictly a European custom, seen neither in Asia nor America—a matter of “common advantage,” not natural law (177). A natural consensus, by contrast, is (or would be) “an agreement to which men are brought by a kind of instinct” (177). It would be a consensus respecting conduct, opinions, and principles and would “exact the ready assent of any sane mind” (179). As Locke shows, enthusiastically and with many examples, no such universal consensus exists. Even self-preservation is overridden in some societies, as for example in India, where the practice of suttee claims the lives of so many widows (191). To find laws of nature in a universal consensus of mankind, one “should not examine men’s lives, but their souls” (181); yet in fact the most vicious actions have been practiced by men who nonetheless do not suffer “the lashes of conscience” (185). Drawing upon a breadth of anthropological knowledge that is noteworthy even today, and must have been nearly unique in his own day, Locke observes that human societies “disagree on even the most fundamental principles, and god and the immortality of the soul are called into doubt. These, although they are not practical propositions or laws of nature, must, nevertheless, be assumed for the existence of the law of nature, for there can exist no law without a legislator and law will have no force if without punishment.” (193)  Further, agreement about the gods (polytheism) “was of no help whatsoever in the proper formation of morals,” as polytheists are “atheists under another name” (195). (As Strauss remarks, Locke himself more than once refers to “the gods” in this work.) Further, monotheism is not necessarily morally sound, as seen in the example (telling for Locke’s Christian audience) of Judaism. Further still, philosophers also disagree about the highest good (197), as Locke subjects Socrates and Cato to some slightly captious criticism. Even Christian monotheists disagree; Locke reminds his largely Protestant audience of Catholicism (197). Finally, mere agreement, even universal agreement, cannot prove the soundness of a moral principle, opinion, or action (199). This section devastates any claim to base natural law on its putative universal recognition; ultimately, the appeal to consensus amounts to a mere deduction from human authority, not from nature. The seventh section stands as the one rigorously empirical and logical section of the work, i.e., the one most thoroughly consistent with Locke’s definition of “the light of nature.”

    In answer to the eighth question, Locke affirms that the law of nature binds men. He refers to “God” instead of “god” or “the gods” only in this section. He begins by reprobating the claim that self-preservation could be “the fountain and beginning” of the law of nature; if it were, “law, virtue would appear to be not so much man’s duty as his interest, and nothing would be right for man were it not useful,” a matter of seeking “our own advantage”—the stance often imputed to Machiavelli and Hobbes before him, to Bentham and utilitarianism after him (203). But law entails obligation, and an obligation is a bond, a discharge of a debt; an obligation to “a superior power” derives first from “the divine wisdom of the legislator” and “that right which the creator has over his creation” (205), since “we have received both our being [and our continued preservation] and our proper function from him” (207). In addition to the debt we owe to God as creator and legislator, those who disobey God’s law also owe him “the debt of punishment,” not out of “fear of punishment” but out of “our determination of what is right” (207); to obey a king out of fear (as per Hobbes) “would be to establish the power of tyrants, thieves, and pirates” (213). “[W]e are bound by God, who is best and greatest, because he wills” as our creator and preserver, the One who authored and published the law of nature. To deny this would be to “overturn at one blow all government among men, [all] authority, rank, and society” (213). “[T]he law of nature is binding on all men, before any other law,” for several reasons: God authored it and duly promulgated it, “publish[ing] it sufficiently that anyone could know it, if he were willing to devote the time and energy, and turn his mind to its understanding”; “god [notice the shift to the lower case] is superior to all things”; we know this by “the light and principles of nature”; if the law of nature is not binding, neither is “god’s” divine, positive law; and neither is human, positive law, because kings, princes, and legislators obtain their rule by right, that is, “at the command of the law of nature” (215). The true ‘divine right of kings,’ the true ‘vox populi, vox dei’ are natural.

    The tendency of Locke’s argument tempts one to consider whether the law of nature derives, then, not from some sort of universal opinion, and not from ‘conscience,’ but from the necessities of society itself. Insofar as men need society, they have the duty to uphold the law of society’s ‘nature.’ The law of nature conceived as the law of human society’s nature may be identical to the “propensity,” as distinguished from the “inclination,” of human nature. This law, Locke now confesses in the two-line Question IX (and in contradiction to his own assertion in Question I) is not binding on brutes. Locke can say this now because he has arrived at a human-social definition of the law of nature in this very section in which he most visibly affirms its ‘divine’ origin. Man’s obligation to obey this law seems perpetual and universal, even if his recognition is perpetually clouded and partial. But perhaps not: “[O]ne can rightly doubt that the law of nature is binding upon the human race as a whole” (217), for to assert the rightfully binding character of the law of nature would be to exercise a sort of tyranny: “What cruelty, even that of Sicily, was so great that it would will its subjects to observe a law which it would at the same time conceal from them and to show themselves obedient to a will that they could not know?” (219). Locke speaks of nature, but makes the reader think of God and God’s priests.

    Such objections, Locke hastens to claim, are “not decisive” (219). The “bonds” of the law of nature are “eternal and coeval with the human race; they are born with it and they die with it” (219); “the obligation of this law never changes, although the times and circumstances of the actions by which our obedience is defined might change” (221). By bonds eternal and coeval with the human race, Locke has in mind actions involving force or fraud, dispositions such as reverence for and fear of divinity, a sense of duty towards one’s parents, and love of neighbor, and such public actions as worship of divinity, comforting afflicted neighbors, relieving those in trouble, and feeding the hungry (although “to these we are not bound forever but only at a certain time and in a certain manner” (223). The bonds of the law of nature also entail proper conduct in non-obligatory undertakings, such as candor and friendliness in manner if you choose to speak about another person. Generally speaking, the law of nature obliges us universally and perpetually, even if conditions do alter cases; one doesn’t greet children with the ceremony and humility we owe to princes. As “a fixed and eternal rule of conduct, dictated by reason itself” and “inherent in human nature,” and therefore “equal among all men” because they are men, by nature, by “god,” “it would be necessary for human nature to change before this law could either change or be abrogated” (227-229). The law of nature “depends not on a will that is fluid and changeable”—human or divine—”but on the eternal order of things” (229). That is, “there follows from the constitution of man at birth some definite duties he must perform” (229). Locke compares human nature with “the nature of a triangle,” which by definition must have three angles equal to two right angles, whether or not “many men [are] so indolent, so dense,” so inattentive, that they “are ignorant” of “truths which are so clear, so certain, that nothing can be more [obvious]” (229). While this is not a “self-evident” truth in the sense Locke uses the word in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it will remind his readers of his later claim in the Essay on Civil Government, that there is “nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection,” absent the “manifest Declaration” of their “Lord and Master” dictates otherwise (II. ii). And even if “God” may sometimes suspend the law of nature through miraculous intervention, “god” never has and never will change the nature of man himself; miracles do not suspend the law of nature’s moral content.

    The light of nature illuminates the law of nature by logical deduction from observations of humanity’s natural condition and inherent qualities. Conflicting opinions with respect to such obligations arise either from men’s seduction “by long established habits or the examples [they discover] at home” or from passions (229). The Pauline argument from design cited at the beginning of the Questions as evidence of “god’s” existence thus gradually metamorphoses into an argument for a law of nature as evidenced in man’s existence and constitution and the necessities derived therefrom. This constitution has a degree of malleability, as seen in the rarity of those who deduce their duties rationally from human nature, from the latitudinarian character of the duties Locke deduces rationally from human nature, as well as from the nearly chaotic diversity of human societies.

    In the final section Locke returns to the claim that “private interest”—apparently similar or identical to “advantage”—constitutes the foundation of the law of nature, a claim he again denies. First propounded by the Cynic Carneades, this opinion of “great iniquity” denies natural right, defining liberty as self-interest (237). Locke permits himself an ad hominem argument: the proponents of this doctrine lacked the virtues and mental endowments that would bring them success in life, so they claimed that the human race had been treated unfairly and that republics were ruled unjustly. Locke immediately notes that private interest does not oppose “the common right of man” (237). Indeed “the law of nature is the greatest defense of the private property of the individual” (239). Locke denies only that the individual is “free to judge by himself what would be of advantage to himself as the occasion arises”; then again, “no one can be a fair and just assessor of what is good for another” (239). Where does that leave us? Locke distinguishes narrow, immediate advantage and the primary or foundational law of nature. If immediate advantage were our only guide, “those great examples of virtue which have been consecrated in the monuments of literature”—the labors of Hercules, for example, and of self-sacrificing patriots—”should be relegated to oblivion that the memory of such madness and vice should perish utterly” (241). This would have the effect of “throwing the window open to all kinds of vice” (245). For readers who might be so bold as to look calmly upon this prospect, Locke continues: “if the interest of each individual is the foundation of [the law of nature], it must necessarily be overthrown since it would be impossible to take into account the interest of all at one and the same time” (245). For such adamantine readers who might shrug, ‘So what?’ Locke continues further: nature’s “abundance” is “fixed,” and does not “increase with the need or avarice of men”; under such conditions of scarcity, it is impossible “for anyone to grow wealthy except through someone else’s loss” (245); by contrast, the virtues “kindle and mutually foster one another,” and do not drive men into conflict (as per Hobbes), fighting in a grim, ‘zero-sum’ war of all against all (247). While Hobbes is right to contend that property, private ownership, brings about justice (cf. Leviathan I. 15), obedience to the law of nature conceived as a set of deductions from the human propensity to civil society brings “happiness,” whose elements are peace, concord, friendship, freedom from fear of unjust punishments, security, and possession of our own property. Not present but long-term interest, not present but long-term advantage, is the consequence, not the foundation, of obedience to the law of nature. “So the rightness of an action does not depend upon interest”—interest narrowly understood—”but interest follows from rectitude” (251). Rectitude comes from “god” or from the social necessity that arises from human natural necessity.

    The Questions leaves readers with questions. Locke affirms the Pauline argument from design, except that Locke’s “god” is not necessarily Paul’s God. As Strauss observes, Locke never attempts to prove the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and of rewards and punishments awaiting that soul after death, upon which the law of nature (Locke says) stands or falls. Locke observes that another Pauline doctrine, original sin, remains unrecognized by much of mankind but, then again, much of mankind lacks the diligence to discover the law of nature itself. There is an ambiguity about whether the “light of nature” whereby one may discover the law of nature amounts to a real discovery, a ‘construction,’ or some combination of both. The law of nature registers a human propensity, but this propensity isn’t a natural inclination or instinct; man’s propensity for society seems to arise from the human capacity for speech interacting with the scarcity of nature. This evidently means that atheism is ‘false’ because it injures human society by shaking its foundation in the minds of the majority of men, who lack diligence in their investigations of the law of nature, or indeed never undertake any such investigation at all.

    This edition of the Questions should prove a permanent contribution to Locke scholarship. In addition to Horwitz’s valuable introduction, it includes a succinct, useful discussion of the manuscripts by Jenny Strauss Clay, the complete Latin text, and Diskin Clay’s facing-page translation in English with helpful notes that build on von Leyden’s earlier work. Because any outstanding work of Locke scholarship simultaneously contributes to the study of political philosophy, we are doubly in the editors’ debt.