The Consolation of Philosophy

Alpha Chapter Initiation Address

April 22, 1999

Ralph J. Hexter

Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature

Dean of Humanities

University of California, Berkeley

(hexter@socrates.berkeley.edu)

It is a great honor for me, in my first year as Dean of Humanities, to have been invited to speak to you tonight. Such events put one in mind of one’s own personal history, brought home to me readily this year, as I receive multiple mailings urging me to return for my own twenty-fifth college reunion. I must admit that over the years one does not – or at least I have not – thought often of the sodality represented by Phi Beta Kappa. I recall enough to say that I greet you, members and inductees of “Alpha of California,” as myself a member of “Alpha of Massachusetts.” More practically, and more astonishingly, when wondering if I still had my Phi Beta Kappa key, I groped in the drawer in the bedstand, and in a box I may not have opened in twenty-five years, lay my Phi Beta Kappa key still there after at least eight moves, including three transatlantic flights and one crossing by ship.

Many of the questions one might have when confronted by these letters and symbols are answered in the handsome booklet created last November on the occasion of this Chapter’s 1998 centennial. Our year, 1999, is at once the first of Alpha of California’s second century and the last of everyone’s century, indeed of an entire millennium. Overwhelmed, perhaps, by the momentousness of these milestones, my mind latched on those three letters on my key – Phi, Beta, Kappa. There I can take my beginning, I thought, inveterate textualist that I am. What more inevitable than a classicist explicating a Greek text? Philosophia Biou Kybernêtês, often rendered, “Philosophy, the guide of life,” which was in fact the title of George Howison’s lecture on this occasion in 1914. And Howison was himself a professor in our Philosophy department.

Our word “philosophy” is borrowed directly from Greek Philosophia, where so much of our philosophical discourse is rooted. The easy familiarity can be misleading. This “philosophia” is not the academic discipline merely, but literally “the love of wisdom.” As for Biou, “of life” or “way of life,” this is a word we know in many compounds – biological, bioethics, biodegradable. I was prepared to admit the unfamiliarity of kybernetes, “ship’s pilot”, “helmsman” or “guide,” thinking that the linguistic observation that the verb from which it is derived is cognate with English “govern” was much too pedantic for the occasion, when it struck me that this is, in fact, a very current word. “Cybernetics” was derived from Greek “kybernêtikê,” the proper term for “the pilot’s art.” A rare word, but used by no less a writer than Plato, and revived in our century to describe a science of guiding, governing, controlling by certain machines that would soon come universally to be known as computers. Does the motto of our society now accordingly demand the translation “Philosophy: life’s computer”?

As we interface increasingly with machines we indeed become cyborgs, cybernetic organisms – I think of the rage which just last Friday I unjustly directed at the first human being I encountered after and long and frustrating journey through a corporate voicemail labyrinth. “Philosophy a computer.” Even without thinking of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL, this makes for a quite different and much more alienating a metaphor than philosophy personified as ship’s guide or captain. Language, or at least “natural” language contains, in even so brief a phrase as ours, a universe of associations across time. Thinking of the history of the metaphor of steersman as guide carries me back to a time when sea travel was fraught with unknown dangers – before weather forecasts, long before global positioning satellites and radar. From just about the time those Greeks were inventing their “philosophia,” we have texts in which the steersman or captain is a figure for the wise and stern, if beneficent, leader. In various religious schemes of the ancient world, the term was applied to God the Father, to Jesus, to Isis. As recently as the nineteenth century Walt Whitman could make the figure bear all the ancient weight: “O Captain! My Captain!” he sang, of a captain dead the very moment the ship of state came into port.

My Captain does not answer, his lips

are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has

no pulse or will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its

voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with

object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen old and dead.

The “captain,” “the father,” the “fallen leader” is, of course, Abraham Lincoln.

At the close of the last century, Melville’s Captain Vere is powerless, trapped in his own role as judging father figure, but tellingly, the reigning image of the ship’s captain at the end of the twentieth century is the captain of the Exxon Valdez, or, in a film about a headline-catching event from the beginning of the century, the arrogant builders and sailors of the Titanic. Already these captains are cyborgs, cogs in a technology of profit. These are not the captains our philosophy is to be, or was conceived of being by the framers of our motto. For me, and I am no Luddite, the rendering “Philosophy, life’s cybernetic” conjures up a science fiction dystopia.

Not that philosophy imagines life is a utopia. On the contrary. Here we come to the personification of Philosophy that came first to my mind, the title character in one of my favorite books. I am not alone in admiration this book, for it was wildly popular – on the best-seller list you might say – for most of the millennium after its composition. At least as wildly popular as a Latin book completed in 524 could be through a millennium that saw the invention of printing only at its end. By the time, however, that the mechanical means of reproducing the original Latin text had come into being, Latin was replaced in everyday life, and increasingly in letters, by vernaculars. Of course, any work is translatable, and this one has had a long and truly royal history of translation; in English alone I name King Alfred of Wessex, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I.

So unread is this work now that any group other than Phi Beta Kappa scholars still would not have guessed its title, though I had borrowed it for the title of my own address. It is, of course, The Consolation of Philosophy, Consolatio Philosophiae, by Boethius, written from the prison in which Theodoric had cast this former Roman consul and trusted advisor, scion of a senatorial family, a prison from which only death released him. The alleged crimes of which Boethius had been accused and for which he was executed, aged only 44 or 45, involved plotting against Theodoric, probably not much more of a tyrant than other late Roman emperors but neither Roman in heritage – he was an Ostrogoth (an East Goth) – nor among the orthodox in religious maters, for he was an Arian with an “i,” that is, heretical from Boethius’s perspective, the perspective of the tradition we now call Roman Catholic.

Whether the charges were true is of no matter, certainly not now. Boethius may well have conspired with Constantinople in the hope that an East Roman, non-Arian force would reconquer Italy, or the evidence against him may have been forged. The loss his early death represented the western European intellectual tradition is incalculable. At a time when deep knowledge of Greek philosophy had faded in Latin-speaking areas along with familiarity with the language itself, Boethius had embarked on a project of translating all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, commenting upon them in Latin, and -- so he thought – harmonizing them. Perhaps that last attempt would have sown a thousand years of confusion, but who can say what the medieval period would have been like had the complete works of the great Greek philosophers themselves been available all along? “What if” games are intriguing but by definition speculative, and perhaps the preconditions for learning and study were so poor that such intellectual riches could not have been exploited. This is a more realistic, if less splashy likelihood than the kind of fanatical destruction Umberto Eco imagines for the sole remaining copy of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, his treatise on comedy, in The Name of the Rose.

What we do have of Boethius’ unrealized project are a few scraps, a few other tractates from his pen, and one book of inestimable value, The Consolation of Philosophy, which he not only wrote but set in his prison in Pavia, a city not far south of Milan, and at the time the imperial capital. Boethius presents himself in prison, sunk in gloom. Who appears to him but Philosophy herself, gorgeously attired, the woman of his dreams even if he does not at first realize it. Only half in jest do I suggest Manuel Puig’s “Spider Woman” as one of her most recent descendants, whom Molina’s imagination brings into the cell he shares in prison as surely as Boethius’ does Philosophy into his own solitary cell fourteen and a half centuries earlier, and a world away.

Boethius invents a five-book-long dialogue over the course of which Philosophy first convinces him, or rather, leads him, to recollect what he already knew: namely, that the strokes of bad luck he had been moaning about are matters of no real concern. Fortune can take nothing from him that he truly possessed, and anything that is Fortune’s power either to take away or bestow is by definition a thing of no real value.

I do not aim to convince you of this, much less of the other doctrines by means of which Philosophy consoles Boethius. But whatever the particular content of the teaching, this is the kind of Philosophy that is meant to be a captain through the perilous seas of life, an image that crops up more than once in the Consolation.

Isn’t this an odd course that I’ve got us on at this celebratory occasion? What business have I injecting so serious a note, as if I were giving a funeral oration? You, graduates and inductees, are all quite young. You have no need to be serious, and in indeed, our culture is one that has universalized the expectation of non-stop fun for kids of all ages, graying boomers and gray panthers included. We not only have our entertainment industry, we have entertainment news and entertainment law.

Boethius’ Philosophy would have plenty to remark on were she to drop in on our world today. Of course she’d be an even bigger spoilsport than I am being this evening, so out of date. Perhaps that is her value. The little slogan denoted by the Phi, the Beta and the Kappa, “Philosophy, the guide of life,” whether you wear it on your watch fob – as if! - or never even buy the key, marks you forever, or can. It is a talisman from a different era, a different world, in fact a world eternally out of step with this world, for Boethius’ contemporaries would have found Philosophy’s condemnation of riches, honors, and fame as strange as we do. Or almost as strange, for now, I believe, such discordant notes, such counter discourses are rarely, if ever, heard. It seems to go without saying that we are all united in the pursuit of things, more things, better things, and even “fame” has been commodified. You can now pay to be celebrated at a fake awards ceremony styled after “Oscar” night! I’ll guess that most of us have lesser, if more realistic aspirations. A survey I read in last Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle analyzed the job prospects of graduating seniors by major. No surprise, the average starting salaries for engineers are considerably higher than those being offered graduates of so-called “liberal arts” departments. Among those at the bottom of the list, arranged as it was by salary, were English and –inexplicably even lower – Psychology. What I find so telling is the unquestioned assumption that starting salary is the single measure of value. My argument is not that English graduates should be paid more. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t. Certainly, salaries express pretty accurately the value society places on these various job tracks. Look at the average salaries of all teachers – not just starting salaries. Doing so will tell you fairly quickly how genuine are the expressions of concern for education on the part of our various “education governors,” “education legislators” and “education presidents.”

Salary may indicate value in the eyes of any given society; it’s almost an economic axiom that it does. It certainly cannot indicate true value, inherent worth, the kind of value and worth that constitutes the sort of possession Philosophy explains Fortune can neither bestow nor take away.

Many texts of diverse traditions, and Boethius’s is no exception, set up a particular scale of values. Even as I argue that the phrase “Philosophy Guide of Life” has roots in the specific tradition to which those Greek letters so clearly point, a tradition it is not without interest to study, I would argue that there is no essential superiority to the scale of values it lays out or even to the specific good it sets atop that scale. Rather, I think its value for us inheres simply in the way that, speaking in so radically different a voice, it insists that we seek our values within ourselves, by reflection, reading, dialogue and thought, rather than merely absorbing the values of the world around us. Following standard Platonic doctrine, Boethius’s Philosophy also argues that Boethius needs to recover the values and wisdom he always had within him. Though we would put it rather differently today, the first steps of the life Philosophy guides us on is to think for ourselves. That is a possession worth having, whether our job is well paying or not, our life “fortunate” in the eyes of the world or not. For with the ability to think on our own, we are always free to value highly that which the world may value not at all, or value at naught what the world acclaims. Self-possession is most certainly the sort of possession that, as Philosophy would argue, can never be taken from you. At the risk of making it sound all too simple, you have been given the “key” to this treasure tonight.

From time to time, think about those three letters. You might even look at them – those Greek letters, at once strange and familiar. Let it be a talisman of difference and individuality. Even oddity. Find what matters to you and be passionate about it, a bit the way I “found” Boethius and seek to introduce him to others. I even indulge in a bit of cultlike behavior. Each time I go to Pavia – and I’ve been twice – I walk to the church of San Pietro in Cielo d’Oro and visit the crypt which houses the remains of not only St. Augustine but of Boethius. I don’t know what has inspired me to make this confession to you all, but I admit I take a perverse pleasure in this pilgrimage, so out of step is it with what is normally done by most people today, even with what I normally do. Somehow, though, it just seems right, and helps me remain committed to the ideals I draw from every reading and rereading of Philosophy’s Consolation itself.

I conclude in a very different register with the one precept I recall from the speech at my own induction. It has nothing to do with anything I’ve said so far, and might even contradict it in part. But I shall say it anyhow, since ever since hearing it, I vowed to repeat it if ever I had the chance. See to it, the speaker told us fresh Phi Betes, that this is the first, not the last honor you receive. I thought it good advice then, and hope you do too. Congratulations.