The Newman Rambler

Like a [Bottle] in the [Smoke]

A Talk on the Idea of a University after John Henry Newman

Spring/Summer 1998 ‖ Anne Carson

I have to say I found it hard to write this talk. I make my living as a classical philologist, not an ideologue of institutions. Faced with the title ‘The Idea of a University’ I found I had no idea whatsoever what to say about it. I felt like that anonymous person in the 83rd verse of Psalm 119 who says, “For I am become like a bottle in the smoke.”[1] Now, being a philologist I have to mention in passing that this verse is itself a bottle in the smoke. For the word that the King James version renders as “bottle” is an anachronism for an original Hebrew word meaning some sort of vessel made out of animal skin or leather. And the phrase that says “in the smoke” (which is carried in all the Hebrew manuscripts and all the English and French translations I could find in the library) goes astray somehow in both the Greek of the Septuagint and the Latin of the Vulgate, appearing there as a quite different phrase meaning “in the frost.” Frost and smoke don’t seem to me very easily confusable phenomena, and none of the textual experts I consulted on this problem had any ready explanation of what the discrepancy might mean. That’s the way it goes with philology: the closer you look at a word the more distantly it looks back at you.

I say all this merely by way of warning, because I’m going to begin my talk on “The Idea of a University” by looking at the words of the title. “Idea” is an ancient Greek word, which is a feminine noun cognate with the verb “to see.” Historically, this noun is first used by Pindar to praise an Olympic victor on the grounds that he is beautiful with respect to his idea, i.e., in his visible form.[2] ‘Idea’ is a favourite noun of Plato who uses it famously to designate things like the idea of the good. Demokritos has this word in the phrase “uncut shapes” to mean the indivisible elements of his atomic theory, and St. Matthew chooses idea in the final chapter of his Gospel to describe the look of the angel who descended from heaven, rolled back the door of Christ’s tomb and sat upon it: “The look was like lightning.”[3]

Fortunately or unfortunately, no lightning struck while I was looking for “The Idea of a University.” This venerable and powerful noun, idea, which can support referents as clear and distinct as Olympic victory, Platonic goodness, Demokritean atoms and the face of an angel, remained obscure to me. So I decided to pass on through the noun to what lies behind it. Behind idea is the cognate verb which I translated a moment ago as “to see,” but that was not quite accurate. “To see” in English is a present infinitive; ‘idea’ in Greek is an aorist infinite; it comes from a verb whose present system was obsolete by the time the Greek language came to be written down. If you want to say “I see, I am seeing, I do see” in the present tense in classical Greek you will use a different word. The Greek word for ‘idea’ is aorist and the aorist is an interesting tense. “Aorist” itself means “boundless, unlimited or indeterminate.” As an inflection of the verb, aorist denotes simple occurrence of an action without reference to completeness, duration or repetition. Verbs in the aorist tense can be both punctual and endless—like proverbs. And indeed ancient Greek habitually uses the aorist tense to frame proverbial notions. So, for example, when John Henry Newman says something like “Knowledge is its own end,” he is expressing in an English present tense, something Greek might prefer to say in the aorist, for this is an idea that we can justly call boundless, unlimited and indeterminate. So by looking behind the back of the word idea, we catch sight of something significant. Idea is a word that contains a quotient of boundlessness in its very morphology. Nonetheless, in its place in my title, idea is very firmly bounded by another word, namely “university.”

Let’s consider this one. John Henry Newman took a very close look at the word university in an essay called “On the Scope and Nature of University Education,” and there he tells us that this word reveals itself, first of all, etymologically. I shall quote him: “A university by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge.”[4] What does Newman mean by universal knowledge? Possibly (I thought at first) knowledge that has the universe as its content. But no (I discovered on further research) Newman’s thinking about what a university should teach is not oriented toward content at all. For knowledge that is oriented is knowledge that has a use. In Newman’s view the knowledge that results from a real university education has no use. It is useless. Or what he calls “liberal.” Liberal, from Latin Aber, means “free.” It is the opposite of servus, “servile” and denotes that which refuses to be informed by an end or constrained to necessity. In their ancient context the Latin words liber and servus obviously signify class distinction, free man and slave. But we should note in passing the odd linguistic fact that the Latin adjective liber meaning “free” is exactly the same word as the Latin noun liber meaning “book.” Surely this is no more than a random homonym. Yet free men and books do sort out together in many a pedagogical theory, not least of all Newman’s, whose institutional product is characterized as the state or condition or habit of mind of a gentleman. He emphasizes this:

“Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable bearing in the conduct of life—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a university.”[5]

Questions of class may well be inseparable from an ideal of liberality in education. After all, our English word “school” comes from the Greek [word] meaning “leisure,” and Aristotle reminds us that the mathematical arts were first developed in Egypt because there the priestly caste had so much spare time on its hands. For gentlemen like you and I, however, spare time is limited; let us turn to the word “knowledge” and look at what Newman means by a large knowledge, the knowledge of a gentleman, that universal knowledge which he would make the scope of his university. I quote again:

“When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.”[6]

Knowledge with a capital K is an activity of mind which Newman elsewhere calls Science with a capital S or Philosophy with a capital P and describes as follows:

“Knowledge ts called by the name of Science or Philosophy when it is acted upon, informed, or if I may use a strong figure, impregnated by Reason. Reason is the principle of that intrinsic fecundity of knowledge which, to those who possess it, is its especial value, and which dispenses with the necessity of their looking abroad for any end to rest upon external to itself.”[7]

Newman’s universal knowledge rests upon a principle of reason that frees it to be useless. This reason need look for no end outside itself; its value is intrinsic. Newman’s ideal university is a place where gentlemen may reason for no reason. The debate about whether reason should have a reason, about whether education should be useful or useless, is as old as the profession of reason itself.

The first professional reasoners in the Western tradition, I suppose, were the sophists. As you know, the sophists were intellectual superstars of the fifth century BC who made their living by selling a certain form of higher education to the young men of Periclean Athens. What they sold was the principle of reason packaged as a utility, although various sophists claimed expertise in various subjects—geometry, astronomy, music et. al.—they all founded their pedagogic program on a basic skill, viz. mastery of logos. As a sophistic term, logos meant a fairly specific technique of practical calculation and persuasive speech that would enable anyone who mastered it to succeed in both private and public life. Here is how the sophist Protagoras (in Plato’s dialogue of that name) describes his own educational program to a young man who has come to him with his money in his hand:

“But from me this young man will learn not but what he has come to learn, My subject: care of personal affairs, so that he may best manage his household, and care of political affairs, so he becomes a real power in the city, both a doer and a talker.”[8]

Protagoras’ idea of a university is noteworthy. He imagines a school in which the student will dictate his own syllabus. “The young man will learn not but what he has come to learn,” says Protagoras. This student already knows what he wants to know; he is filled not with questions but with an information deficit. The spaces for the data are ready and waiting inside him. He has only to download whatever he needs from Protagoras’ program and pay the price and carry it off as his own. The price was high: by all accounts, Protagoras made enough money as a sophist to dedicate a life-size solid gold statue of himself at Delphi. But perhaps we should calculate this price not only in gold. For does not an education that is entirely career-oriented, does not a university that defines its mission as that of producing professional competencies, risk closing itself and its students off from an experience of some considerable importance? I mean the experience of error, not error in the sense of getting an incorrect answer, but error in the sense of asking the wrong question, or asking no question at all. Answers, after all, are not hard to come by— computers play chess nowadays. Questions are the hard part. Who decides what questions get asked in a university?

Let us consider another description offered by Protagoras (in Plato’s dialogue) of how he thinks higher education should work. His model is that of learning the alphabet:

“You know how, when children are not yet good at writing, the writing teacher traces outlines with the pencil before giving them the slate and makes them follow the lines as a guide in their own writing.... Whoever strays outside the lines is punished.”[9]

Protagoras uses the handy Greek word for “paradigms” of the patterns that children trace over and over in learning their letters. Reproducing paradigms is both the end and the means of this kind of education. It reminds me of Michel Foucault’s characterization of the modern university as

“an institutional apparatus through which society ensures its own uneventful reproduction, at least cost to itself”[10]

The fact is for all their performative dash and cutting-edge rhetoric and sensational prices, the sophists were profoundly conservative people. If they were around today they would certainly dominate professorships at major universities, not to say the talk-show circuit. For they perform that important cultural work of distressing and destabilizing the status quo in just such a way as to preserve it. That is, cosmetically, Cosmetic distress appeals to wealthy young men as an educational experience, and in so far as it remains cosmetic, they can usually get their fathers to pay for it. So a sophist’s criterion of what education should be is whatever the market will bear. What sells, they teach, and so their teaching seeks out and confirms a lowest common denominator of opinion on all matters of inquiry, especially the inquiry into what education should inquire into.

Protagoras’ student will find himself in the sad state of the post-Heideggerian tourist who travels the world only to encounter himself everywhere. To encounter oneself is to arrive at an end, a closed place, an answered question. It has been a strong belief of educators from Sokrates through Immanuel Kant, Wilhem von Humboldt, Newman, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that questioned questions, open places, and beginnings should be the locus of education. Sokrates, as Plato depicts him, is always digging behind the answers people give him to find the questions that underlie them, then digging behind those questions to find the prior question on which they rest. There seems to be no end to it. Indeed, for a thinker like Heidegger there is no end to it. Heidegger tells us that behind all the questions we can think up, lies another question, which is an abyss. This abyss he calls the question about being. He thinks it may be the only question worth asking. It lies slightly before the beginning of all other beginnings.

This is (I would imagine) a dark place, we might say an aorist place—boundless, unlimited, and indeterminate—where things become like a bottle in the smoke. It is a place with which Sokrates was very familiar. For he discovers it and rediscovers it in his conversations with people, which often end up in that situation called in Greek an aporia (lit. “waylessness”), i.e. bafflement, puzzlement, impasse, a wrong answer to a wrong question. Sokrates usually claims to be surprised when he and his interlocutor arrive at aporia and often, at that point, he brightly proposes starting the conversation all over again. Almost no one takes him up on this. Nonetheless, to judge from accounts of Plato and Xenophon, it is no accident that Sokratic conversations repeatedly find their way to aporia. Sokrates spent years of his life standing around Athens asking questions of people who gave the wrong answers, indeed asking questions in such a way as fo elicit wrong answers. Plato went out of his way to record the whole history of these questions and wrong answers, rather than simply to summarize the main issues and reduce the ‘problematic’ of Sokrates to a neat Home Page. Both Plato and Sokrates appear to have thought there was something valuable to be got from arriving at aporia, from standing in the place of the wrong answer, from being in an aorist darkness where not only answers but questions become questionable, This is the experience of error. Let’s see what it feels like.

Of course, the best way to experience error would be to engage in an aporetic dialogue with Sokrates. But we live in an Iron Age and will have to make do with an analogy. A brief analogy. Was it not Marilyn Monroe who said “I read poetry to save time”? Here is a poetic example of the state of mind we call error

“made three seasons, summer and winter and autumn third and fourth spring, when there is blooming but to eat enough Is not.”[11]

This is a simple poem and contains a plain arithmetic error. The poet does not appear to know that 3+1=4. Perhaps a few facts about this poet would be helpful. Alkman lived in Sparta in the seventh century BC. Sparta was a poor place and it is unlikely Alkman led a wealthy or well-fed life there. He would have grown his own food and known what it felt like to arrive at that pale green early spring season when “to eat enough is not.” Hunger always feels like a mistake when it happens to you. Alkman makes us experience this mistake with him by an effective use of arithmetical error. For a poor Spartan poet with nothing left in his cupboard at the end of winter, along comes spring like an afterthought of the natural economy, unbalancing his chequebook and enjambing his verse. The poem breaks off unexpectedly, leaving us three beats into an iambic metron, hungry for an explanation of where spring came from and surprised by its intrusion into the poetic account. Surprise at the intrusion of truth is an important constituent of the experience of error. This moment is often marked in the Sokratic dialogues by the appearance of a blush on someone’s cheek. Aristotle describes it, more psychologically, as an event that puts the soul in conversation with itself:

 

“For it becomes quite clear that one has learned something, because of the contradiction, and the soul seems to say, ‘How true, yet I mistook it!’” [12]

 

A mistake for Aristotle is a moment of dramatic recognition and reversal, when the soul turns to look at its own reasoning process. If we glance again at Alkman’s poem we can see where this look is directed: it goes back to the beginning of the four seasons that started out to be three seasons and there we find, before the first word of the first verse of the poem, standing as the agent of the act of creation, a question mark: [?]. At least in the English translation it is a question mark—in the Greek text source there is nothing at all. Alkman’s main verb has no subject. Now it is unusual in Greek for a main verb to have no subject; in fact, you could call it a grammatical mistake. Strict philologists will tell you this mistake is not interesting, just a sign that Alkman’s poem is a fragment broken off a longer text; and they will assure you that Alkman almost certainly did name the agent of relation in some verse now lost to us that came before the beginning of what we have here.

On the other Plato hand, it is, as you know, a principle aim of strict philology to reduce all textual delight to an accident of transmission, and I am personally uneasy with any claim to know exactly what a poet means to say or how a poem came to be. So I prefer to leave the question mark there at the start of verse one and admire Alkman’s nerve in confronting the aporia that it brackets. The fact remains, it is very hard to see what came before the beginning. But I can appreciate Heidegger’s suggestion that this is the question worth asking. It is a question that John Henry Newman asked in connection with his idea of a university. A university is something that begins before it be gins, or so he proposes in a passage where he traces the rise and progress of universities in ancient Greece and Rome:

 

“While these ancient instances teach us that a University is founded on principles sui generis and proper to itself so do they coincidentally suggest that it may boldly appeal to those principles before they are yet brought into exercise, and may or rather must take the initiative in its own success. It must be set up before it can be sought; and it must offer a supply in order to create a demand.... Therefore I say let us set up our University.”[13]

This exhortation comes from a lecture Newman gave to the Catholic community of Dublin in 1851, on the eve of founding in their midst a university that he hoped would put a little bit of Oxford into Ireland. As he wrote in his diary, on the day he was appointed rector of the new Catholic University of Dublin,

 

“Curious it will be if Oxford is imported into [Ireland, not in members only but in its principles, methods, ways and arguments....It willbe very wonderful.”[14]

The idea of an Irish Oxford struck many Dubliners as something less than very wonderful. Within seven years, in a motion of fate perhaps significant for McGill, the university failed (except for its medical school) and Newman returned to England to work on other ideas, His other ideas were philosophical and theological, but here too he showed himself concerned with the mystery of beginnings. His forays into philosophy of mind emphasize notions like the importance of antecedent probability in reasoning and conviction; his theological work revolves around matters of doubt and faith and conversion. And here we arrive at the question of Newman’s own beginnings. He began as an Anglican. Midway through life, he decided Anglican was a mistake and changed to Catholic. This action provoked the amazement of his friends, the dismay of his family, moved him to write two novels and an Apologia, had a profound effect on a whole generation of Oxford believers, and won him the label of “the most dangerous man in England.” Part of what makes a convert dangerous and conversion amazing is their relation to reasoning. For a long time Newman refused to give the reasoning behind his conversion. Somewhat impatiently in a letter in 1845 he says:

 

“I do not know how to do Justice to my reasons in so many words....This I will not do. You cannot get [my reasons] except at the cost of some portion of the trouble I have been at myself. You cannot buy them for a crown piece—you cannot take them in your hand and toss them about. You must consent to think....”[15]

When you consent to think the reasoning of a conversion you move through a very particular action of mind. For a conversion is a recognition of error. Or rather, a convert is someone who recognizes that he is now in the truth, because he stands looking back at what was not the truth. It is a bright and complicated moment. St. Augustine compares it to live coals. But where is the beginning of this moment? As recognition it seems to begin slightly before it begins, for you have to be already turned to look if you are going to see what is not there. As St. Augustine says:

 

“Notice why they are called coals: because those who turn themselves to God are coming back from death to life. But when coals are set on fire, they are things that before they were lighted were extinguished. Now an extinguished coal is a dead foremost a business coal, It is ‘alive’ when it is burning.”[16]

Conversion is a moment of burning that recognizes prior extinction, an action that begins slightly before itself, a bit of a mystery. Theologians have applied themselves to this mystery and conquered it by dividing it into two states: conversio transitive and conversio intransitive is the cause of intransitive  conversion—the white heat already present in the coal that allows it to come to life when fire is brought near. It is a reason before the reason. A beginning before the beginning. Conversion seems to me a useful model for the mental experience we call education, not only because both the word conversion and the word university are derived from the same Latin verb—verto, vertere, “to turn”—but also because conversion is an event of recognition and reversal, in which the mind confronts its own possibility of error and is brought up against the limits of reason. Let’s turn once again to classical poetry and refresh ourselves with a poetic analogy for this mental event, conversion:

 

“Being man don’t ever say what will happen tomorrow, nor (when you see someone happy) how long it will last, for swift—not even of a long winged fly so! The change.”[17]

In this poem, conversion is designated by the last word of the Greek text—petaotacio— “change.” Itis figured in the shift of position of a longwinded fly. Pointedly the poet contrives that you recognize this shift only after it has—or rather after it has not—occurred. For this is a poem that vanishes as you read it, not only into the past but into nonexistence. This vanishing is prepared by a series of contractions. As you proceed from verse one through verse four, each line is shorter than the one before; the syntactical units progressively simplify; the metrical units reduce themselves; the concepts diminish—from the universal “Man” of verse one, to a certain happy “someone” in verse two, who dwindles to a fly in verse three, which is erased in verse four. And time itself seems to shrink from big words like “ever” and “tomorrow” of verse one, to a measurement of “how long” in verse two, which contracts to a mere attribute of swiftness in verse three, and even that disappears in verse four into change. Change is where you end up. But by the time you get there the change to which the word refers is not only retrospective, it is retrospectively negated. As you glance back from the final word “change” to the negative adverb “not even” looming above it, you realize that the fly in this poem has not only shifted its wings, it has flown right out of the argument, relegated to the category of a negative exemplum. Like the error from which a convert turns in conversion, the fly is present only as an absence. I admire the shift of distance that occurs in this poem and the motion it sets up—of turning to look at a fly who is not there. I like the rustle of wings reminding me that, whenever I arrive at the beginning of a piece of reasoning, something has already occurred there —a reason before the reason, which brings us to reason and its beginning.

Now the principle of reason is the core and focus of Newman’s idea of a university, and indeed of every liberal theory of education from Aristotle onward. Upon the principle of reason, the traditional university has rested its claim to be concerned with something it calls pure thought, its need to consecrate useless knowledge, its mandate to give gentlemen a place where they may pursue reasoning for its own sake. Newman implies but does not formulate this principle in his writings, so let’s look at a classic statement of the principle of reason, from Leibniz: “Of every truth reason can be rendered.” For people interested in studying bottles in the smoke, this is a very good sentence. Its goodness flows especially from the verb Leibniz chooses to describe what we do with reason. We “render” it. “Render” is a somewhat precious translation of Aristotle the Latin reddi which is a passive infinitive of the verb reddo, reddere: “to give or put back, to return, restore, repay.” Indeed there is a classical Latin idiom (on which for all I know Leibniz is making a small pun rationem reddere, usually translated “to render account” or “pay back a debt.”

Why would Leibniz refer to reason as if it were the paying back of a debt? As if every time we enter into reasoning we are taking part in an exchange that was already in motion before we began? Who set up this exchange? What sort of obligation is in it? How does it keep going? The closer we look at the Latin verb reddere the more distantly it looks ginning back at us. The word contains a motion of exchange and has an economic reference. But what kind of economy is this? It appears to have begun before we did and to have started with a free gift. How does this gift give itself? And why does it not stop giving itself? Remember Newman’s felicitous phrase “the intrinsic fecundity of Knowledge:” how does intrinsic fecundity sustain itself?

Behind the beginning of the principle of reason there seems to lie a question mark. Of course this could be just an accident of transmission. Or it could be an idea, both punctual and endless. So far as I can tell, nobody is much concerned anymore with studying the kind of exchange that is really going on at a university, let alone the question mark prior to it. If we consider a modem university like McGill, what sane person can fail to see that it is first and foremost a business. Like any business it is securely oriented towards the future and towards profit. This is no gift exchange economy; knowledge belongs to use in our culture. There is no incident or product of reasoning that cannot be made to pay off. I propose an example from recent experience. I spent last semester at Berkeley, and here witnessed the installation of a new professorship. With a one million-dollar grant from the Xerox Corporation and its Japanese affiliate, Berkeley created The Chair of Distinguished Professor of Knowledge. To this chair, which is held by the Business School, was appointed a certain Ikujiro Nonaka (whom his colleagues refer to as Dr. Know), former graduate of the Berkeley School of Business, whose fame rests on a book he co-wrote called The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, A colleague of Dr. Nonaka’s, interviewed by the NY Times, commented on the appointment by saying: “Behind this is the recognition that the wealth of nations comes from utilization of technical know-how, not capital.”[18] I myself was interested to hear what those people more commonly entrusted with defining and describing knowledge (often called philosophers) might have to say about this appointment. I quote Fred Dretske, chairman of philosophy at Stanford: “I don’t understand what he is a professor of. I’m sort of baffled by what kind of truth it involves.” And Bruce Vermazen, chairman of philosophy at Berkeley:

“The idea of a knowledge producing society, I don’t really understand what that can mean. It makes me a little frightened about the future. I liked it better when we made steel. Knowledge seems like kind of a shaky industry.”

Shaky indeed. When we compare this scenario with a sentence from the pages of John Henry Newman, like,

“Useful knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, liberal knowledge is the possession of truth as beautiful...”[19]

We can only wince at the wide gulf that separates such a gentlemanly idea from our business here. I find I have small faith that the university as we know it will continue much beyond our lifetime, except for the medical schools. Already in the six-and-a-half years I’ve been at McGill, the Classics Department in which I was hired to teach here has faltered and disappeared into History. Other things have disappeared. I do not see what the future of all this disappearance will be. It is no bottle in the smoke. And in the end, I have to say I feel like a sophist lecturing you on “The Idea of a University.” Not only because I have tried to seduce you with dazzling forays into etymology and examples from the antique poets. Not only because I have rounded off my remarks by disposing of the principle of reason in a stylish and cynical way. Not only because I have offered you such perfectly cosmetic distress, But also because I have failed to address—what sophists never do address—the truth of our existence in the moment. Why do most of us feel on a daily basis like we are floating through that children’s story called “The Emperor Has No Clothes”? There is a hollowness to our lives in this institution that no amount of etymologizing, poetic reference, or cosmetic deconstruction can even face up to, let alone change. Change means risk. When Sokrates suggested to the judges at his trial that instead of putting him to death they give him a free dinner every night in the town hall of Athens, he was offering them the possibility of total error and the likelihood of complete loss of profit. He was offering an Idea.

I think I agree with John Henry Newman that the presence or absence of an idea is what makes the difference between sophistry and a university. I wish, therefore, that I had an idea to give you. But there it is. I don’t. So instead, I'll offer a philological observation. Given the amount of time, thought, research, energy, and sheer anxiety that I have expended since last March on efforts to come to grips with my own Idea of a University—all of which came up zero—I can only conclude that this title I was given, “The Idea of a University,” is an oxymoron.

Ideas do not arise in places like universities. And if they do arise there they cannot long survive. As St. Matthew implies in his description of the angel who sat on Christ’s tomb, a real idea has about the longevity of a bolt of lightning and may be equally difficult to come to grips with. But maybe coming to grips is not the point. After all, the effectiveness of an oxymoron lies in the fact that it cannot be grasped, its components cancel each other out—or would do so if they had to meet in the phenomenal world. Sweet & sour sauce is an exception; generally speaking oxymora do not survive translation to reality.

But that doesn’t mean they are pointless. As a figure of thought an oxymoron serves two functions: it causes contradiction in the mind and discomfort to the senses. Take, for example, an oxymoron that tums up in the scholia to the manuscripts of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Peirar apeiron means literally “limitless limit” or “endless end.” The phrase is composed of a noun and an adjective; the adjective apeiron is cognate with the noun peirar—in fact, is a negative version of it. The noun is thought to derive from a very old word meaning “rope end,” that is, the knot tied in the end of a rope to keep it from unravelling. The plural form of this noun means a whole lot of rope ends and therefore a net or woven mesh. This oxymoron occurs in a scholiastic paraphrase of the death scene of Agamemnon; here the scholiast is describing the famous net in which Clytemnestra envelops Agamemnon so that she can stab him to death. Obviously the phrase is a bad pun as well as an oxymoron (not to say ill omened in its context), and I hesitate to commend it as poetic invention. But it may provide us with a usefully intricate image of our situation as a university. Think of the university as a network of rope ends, each of them holding tight to its place in the mesh so as to prevent the unraveling of the whole. Each rope end is a point of finitude and the university is a sum of these finitudes. Yet oddly enough this summary finitude has infinity as its attribute, because you can never stop trying to put an end to infinity, just as you can never stop trying to come to grips with “The Idea of a University.” That is the net in which we are caught. To keep trying to have this idea is why we are here. But it is important to remember that the object of our creativity is an oxymoron. Both the sweet and the sour, the finite and the infinite, parts of the compound are real and necessary. They guarantee one another, somehow. Not even a sophist can take the rope out of a rope end the two things are not identical. Our university can never become its own idea. No one but a sophist would claim that a business school can appropriate infinitude. Universities and Ideas of Universities seem to exist in a strife that is real and necessary.

So far as I can see, our task is to maintain this strife as stubbornly as possible—not to collapse it, not to blur it, not to pretend it isn’t there, not to decorate it with alibis like creative restructuring. But to acknowledge it as strife and keep it where it is—in the space between us and them, the space between the way things are and the way they could be, that space with brackets around it containing not quite a bottle, not quite smoke—that space which some ancient Greeks called daimonic. Speaking of daimonic, I suppose you know the story of the two devils on Tuesday afternoon? One Tuesday afternoon in hell, two devils were sitting around debating with one an-other how best they might discourage human beings from seeking after God. One devil said, “It’s easy. All we have to do is tell them there is no heaven.” The other devil said, “No that won’t work. In fact, I think we should tell them there is no hell.” So they argued back and forth for some time, and at last, unable to resolve the question, they went to consult an expert. Satan was in his office. He let them in and listened to their problem, then sat pulling on his beard for a few moments. Finally he looked up.

“Actually you’re both wrong,” he said. “If you really want to stop human beings from seeking after God, it’s no use telling them there is no heaven. No use telling them there is no hell. Just tell them there is no difference.”

*This lecture was delivered as the Newman Lecture at the Newman Centre of McGill University and subsequently published in The Newman Rambler (Fall/Spring 1988). A similar version was published a year later in The Threepenny Review as Anne Carson, "The idea of a university (after John Henry Newman)." The Threepenny Review 78 (1999): 6-8.

Notes:

[1] KJV 119.83

[2] Olympians 10.103

[3] 28.3

[4] On the Scope and Nature of University Education, 9

[5] The Idea, 107.

[6] The Idea, 100.

[7] The Idea, 99.

[8] Plato, Protagoras, 318.

[9] Plato, Protagoras, 326c-d.

[10] Language, Counter Memory, Practice, 224.

[11] Alkman, Poetae Melici Gracci, fragment 20.

[12] Aristotle, Rhetoric 1412a6.

[13] Historical Sketches, 58.

[14] M. Trevor, The Pillar of the Cloud, 561.

[15] Letters and Diaries, xi. 109-110.

[16] Enarratio in Psalmum, CXIX.

[17] Simonides, Poetae Melici Graeci, fragment 521.

 [18] NY Times, June 1, 1997.

 [19] The Idea, 192.