Ethics and Reasoning V (Kant)

On Kant's approach to ethical reasoning, as previously noted, all our reasoning has to be be grounded on the assumption that moral law is unconditional. One of the implications of this is that it does not depend on human nature. It is thus perhaps not surprising that people sometimes come away with a sense that Kantian ethics is very inhuman. But while Kant does not think moral law depends on human nature or human life, Kant does think that human nature responds to moral law so that we can say that, in at least some ways, human nature is well suited to a moral life. Kant's discussions of these aspects of human nature and life are scattered, but we can roughly divide them into three groups, insofar as they relate primarily to self-cultivation, to aesthetics, or to religion.

I. Self-cultivation

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant suggests that we have four natural predispositions fitting us to follow the moral law that, indeed, are effects of the fact that we can recognize moral law at all. These four predispositions are our moral endowments. They are not the source of our obligations, and if we lacked them, we could not be obligated to get them. But these four are, as it were, the grip of moral law on us. They are moral sentiment, conscience, love of neighbor, and reverence for self.

(1) Moral sentiment. It has commonly been thought that we have a sort of feeling of approval or disapproval that is specifically moral; some people had even thought that this could be the foundation of morality. Kant, of course, doesn't think so, but he does think we really do have such a feeling, a sense that something is consonant or dissonant with moral law. When we feel the necessity of duty, this is moral sentiment. Without it we would still be under moral law but our capacity to act according to it would be deadened; we would be no different in our action from a beast.

(2) Conscience. Conscience is our practical reason not insofar as it considers moral law as such but insofar as it judges our own action under it. This is why it is inevitable that we will tend to think of it as a sort of inner tribunal before which we are judged. Because this judgment is subjective, i.e., about us in particular rather than about the universal and unconditional, moral law does not depend on it. But we could not recognize ourselves as responsible, and especially not morally responsible, for our own actions without it. Our conscience, properly speaking, cannot err because it is practical reason itself; but we do need to cultivate it in the sense that we need to pay close attention to it as the monitor of our particular actions and learn how not to be misled by nonrational factors.

(3) Love of our neighbor, which Kant also calls philanthropy. Love in this sense (unlike, say, benevolent action) is not the sort of thing that Kant thinks we can do by choice, so Kant thinks we have no obligation to love our neighbor. However, we can do good things to our neighbor until a love of them spontaneously arises, and this love consolidates our ability to recognize them as ends in themselves.

(4) Reverence for ourselves. Respect for the law draws out of us a reverence for ourselves as ends in ourselves; this reverence is again not something to which we are obligated, but it is a kind of emotional fortification of our ability to recognize ourselves as having dignity. It is by this reverence, for instance, that we recognize ourselves as the equal of other rational beings.

These four, again, are not the source of moral obligation; but being in a sense the natural response of human nature to moral law, they color our moral duties -- perhaps in a sense we can even say that they humanize them. For instance, we have a duty to benefit the poor, but recognizing that the poor have their own self-reverence, we find ourselves needing to benefit them in a way that would not humiliate them. From love of neighbor we recognize that our duty to do good to others has to involve taking their ends and interests as our own, as long as these are not immoral. And so forth.

Virtue, which is a kind of firmness in the doing of our duty, which we need if we are to follow moral law consistently, according to its very notion has to be cultivated. It is in this sense that ethics needs to be taught. It is taught, first, by ethical catechetics, leading those who are wholly untutored to understand their duties and what is required for them. This cannot, of course, be based on any conveniences or benefits provided by doing one's duty -- that would be to treat morality as if it were not morality -- but rather the point is to make the student see more clearly what he has the natural predisposition to see, namely, that vice is shameful and virtue is honorable.

The actual cultivation of virtue requires ethical ascetics, a self-discipline guided by rules. These rules will need to have a two results if followed: firmness and cheerfulness in the performance of our duties. Kant takes his inspiration on the firmness side from the Stoics and on the cheerfulness side from the Epicureans. The firmness rule derived from the Stoics is summed up in the slogan, bear and forbear; we are to endure misfortune without complaint and abstain from unnecessary enjoyments. He uses the metaphor of a healthy diet: by doing these things we are keeping our minds healthy in a way that makes the vigorous pursuit of our duty possible. The cheerfulness rule derived from the Epicureans is to cultivate a serene frame of mind focused on joy and not (for instance) constant self-criticism and self-punishment. The Epicurean rule Kant regards as differentiating his ethical ascetics from the asceticism of the monasteries, which he regards as immoral and hypocritical.

II. Aesthetics

Another way in which our natures can be seen to be responsive to moral law is in the field of aesthetics, because our aesthetic judgments, while they must be sharply distinguished from our moral judgments, nonetheless have a sort of relation to them. Kant takes aesthetics in the broad sense to be the way we combine the particular and the universal, and the most obvious aesthetic judgments are perhaps judgments of taste, by which we judge things as beautiful or ugly. These judgments have four common features:

(1) They arise from a satisfaction that is immediate in our reflective experience.

(2) This satisfaction is disinterested, not dependent on what is useful or beneficial to us.

(3) They relate the freedom of our imagination to a sort of law.

(4) They are put forward as valid for everyone on the basis of experience; to judge something beautiful is to go beyond judging that you yourself like it, and implies that you think other human beings could judge similarly.

Moral judgments, Kant thinks, also have four common features, which have similarities to the features of aesthetic judgment, despite in each case there being some difference:

(1) They arise from a satisfaction that is immediate in understanding its concept.

(2) This satisfaction is disinterested, in that moral judgment has a sort of priority over any interest.

(3) They relate the freedom of will to the universal laws of reason.

(4) They are put forward as absolutely universal for all rational beings.

Thus even though the beautiful and the morally good are very different, the cast of mind, the shape of our thought, the process of thinking, when we judge something to be beautiful is analogous to the same cast of mind when we judge something to be morally good. On the basis of this Kant argues that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.

The significance of this is at least twofold. First, it explains why our aesthetic and moral vocabularies blur into each other. Second, it means that at least a judicious cultivation of our sense of beauty can serve an indirect moral purpose by breaking us out of a selfish regard for what is only in our own interest. As he puts it in The Critique of Judgment:

A reference to this analogy is usual even with the common Understanding [of men], and we often describe beautiful objects of nature or art by names that seem to put a moral appreciation at their basis. We call buildings or trees majestic and magnificent, landscapes laughing and gay; even colours are called innocent, modest, tender, because they excite sensations which have something analogous to the consciousness of the state of mind brought about by moral judgements. Taste makes possible the transition, without any violent leap, from the charm of Sense to habitual moral interest; for it represents the Imagination in its freedom as capable of purposive determination for the Understanding, and so teaches us to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction apart from any charm of sense.

There is, however, another kind of aesthetic judgment that in some ways has an even closer relationship with moral judgment, and this is the judgment that something is sublime.


Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist

The sublime is what inspires awe, and its nature was a big puzzle that early modern philosophers devoted a fair amount of time trying to clarify. It seems very paradoxical; the awe we have in experiencing the sublime seems related to fear, dread, and humiliation, giving us a sense of our own insignificance, but it is not a negative emotion, being instead often energizing and exhilarating. The sublime pleases us even while it overwhelms us. It is associated with beauty, but paradigmatic cases of beauty are all of things that have clear boundaries and structure, whereas the sublime seems boundless. And the contrast with beauty makes the paradoxical character of sublimity even greater: beauty has the pleasantness that goes with a nice 'fit' between our minds and the world, but the sublime is pleasant despite the fact that it almost seems to do violence to our imaginations, as being too much for them. Kant would take several previous lines of thought and weave them into one of the most influential theories of the sublime that has ever been proposed. The key idea in his account is that the paradoxes of sublimity arise because the experience contrasts two aspects of our own mind: our limited, sensible, animal self and our rational self. In the experience we are recognizing the insignificance of our limited animal lives but this recognition itself shows the significance of our reason, which can surpass our animal limits even to the point of thinking about infinity and universality. The sublime is that which is such that merely being able to think it shows we have a mental capability that exceeds the limitations of sense.

This is important in that sublimity is a way in which the moral law enters into our sensible experience. The moral law itself is purely intellectual and thus has no necessarily associated aesthetic experience. However, in certain moral experiences we have feelings that suggest the unconditional character of moral law to our minds, and this creates precisely the contrast required for experience of the moral law as sublime. The experience Kant particularly has in mind is that of moral sacrifice, in which out of our freedom we experience a deep feeling of deprivation of some sensible good; this simultaneously expresses our sensible insignificance and intelligible dignity, and thus the natural human response to a clear recognition of moral law is awe, or respect, or reverence, toward the moral law as sublime. The moral law, again, is the moral law regardless of whether we ever experience its sublimity; but experience of its sublimity helps us to maintain its priority over every sensible interest and benefit.

III. Religion

Even granted that there is something in human nature that is responsive to moral law, one may still worry about our ability to live a moral life. The moral law itself is something pure and constant and unconditional; human beings are quite limited and wavering. Whether our maxims are moral may not depend on whatever other ends we have in view, but it is nonetheless true that as human beings we have to have other ends in view. We are not simply acting on moral law, like pure rational beings; we have to coordinate being animals in the world with the absolute primacy of moral law, and that continually raises the possibility of our failing to act morally. Can we really do what moral law requires? We can press the matter by considering three obvious obstacles that we as human beings, both animal and rational, have in our attempt to live according to moral law.

(1) It's clear that our own experience of our choices recognizes a significant influence from the world around us -- we don't act in a void, but are influenced by other things. And it is very easy for us to conclude that the world around us is a world of strict cause and effect, in which everything happens according to laws of nature. But if this is true of ourselves as well, then we will in fact often not be able to act morally, because external causes will come together in such a way as to make us fail. Kant doesn't think we can know with certainty that this is not the case.

(2) Moral law is absolutely perfect. But human beings cannot jump to a state of absolute perfection; moral action is something we have to cultivate and in which we have to grow. We live morally by working constantly to become more moral. As we do so, the moral law holds out for our goal the completely moral life. But this is a goal we cannot achieve in a lifetime. If death is the end, it is an end that will inevitably come before we have achieved what moral law requires of us, and so is an end that guarantees our moral failure. Again, Kant thinks that as far as we certainly know, this may well be the case.

(3) Moral law requires us to work toward the most complete good for the whole community of rational beings, which he calls the highest good. The complete good is, of course, a society in conformity with moral law, but moral law requires us to work for the happiness of those who are worthy of happiness. But, says Kant, there is no necessary connection, as far as we can see, between morality and happiness. Moral law does not in any way depend on happiness and happiness is not distributed according to desert (that is, moral law) but according to natural causes. We do not have control over the entire frame of nature. If this is the case, we may be doomed from the beginning to fail to do what moral law requires. And again, Kant thinks we can't know certainly that this is not true.

This seems a pretty miserable state in which to be, one in which we are constantly required to do things at which we will inevitably fail. However, Kant sees a way out. He doesn't (unlike some people) think we can know that our three problematic scenarios are false, but practical action doesn't depend on knowledge alone. In practical action it can also be reasonable to act on hope, if the hope is an adequate ground. We don't have certain principles in these cases, but we can have postulates for practical purposes. A postulate is something we assume not necessarily because it is true but because it simplifies a problem so that it can be solved. Moral law tells us we always have to choose what is moral, no matter what. Now, moral law is reason itself legislating for itself, so by definition what moral law requires of us is rational, and an assumption that we have to make in order to do what is rational is also rational. So even though we don't know, we can postulate that we have free will that enables us always to choose what is right. Maybe this is true, maybe it is not, but moral law itself gives us reason to hope that it is true, and even if we didn't think we had free will, acting morally would still involve acting as if we had something like free will. This deals with our first problematic scenario. Likewise, we can postulate that we have immortality -- that death is not the end of our moral progress. We can also postulate that there is a cause capable of weaving our actions into a world in which morality and nature, virtue and happiness, eventually work as one, namely, God. The moral law, again, doesn't depend on any of these three postulates. But Kant does insist that the moral law licenses hoping that something like them is true, and, further, that life according to moral law will be a life that works very much as if they are true.

The existence of God raises the question of the relationship between morality and religion, and Kant thinks that in fact religion has a role to play in the moral life. The moral law, being unconditional, does not depend on divine commands in the way a divine command theorist would claim. However, Kant holds that if you accept the moral law on its own terms you can recognize the duties required by moral law as also commanded by God; they can be seen as commands of the God we have postulated to exist, the one who is unifying virtue and happiness in the long run. This is what Kant always means when he talks about religion: morality taken as commanded by God making possible the highest good. Moral law inevitably leads to religion in this sense because moral law requires of us what is only actually attainable if something like a divine agent is organizing the world, in the long run, as a moral system. The moral law likewise requires us to work for a moral society, the ethical commonwealth, a community based wholly on moral laws; but such a commonwealth could only be constituted as a people, rather than a mere fiction, if it has a governing power establishing a public regime based wholly on moral law. Since moral law does not confine itself to external behavior, but governs internal thought, this governing power would have to have jurisdiction over the heart as well as the body, and that quite clearly starts sounding like God. The ethical commonwealth towards which moral law requires us to work can only be fully conceived if it is a people living under divine commands, namely, a Kingdom of God, in which the laws are moral laws, and only moral laws.

Such an ethical commonwealth does not fully exist, although moral law requires us to work toward it. However, we can form actual societies that are our best approximations to it. Only God could guarantee that the ethical commonwealth will eventually come about. The sublime idea of the ethical commonwealth dwindles, Kant says, when fallible human beings try to fulfill their obligation to work toward it; the best we can do at any given moment is not an ethical commonwealth but what Kant calls a church. The true church is the community that most harmonizes with the idea of the ethical commonwealth, and will have four characteristics:

(1) It will be based on the universal laws of morality and therefore one.

(2) It will be pure, recognizing no legitimate motivations except those that are moral, and thus will reject all superstition and fanaticism.

(3) It will be free, involving neither a hierarchy nor a community governed by special inspirations.

(4) It will have an immutable constitution; its purely administrative guidelines may change, but its fundamental laws, being the laws of morality, cannot.

It's quite blatantly obvious that this is Kant's proposal for replacing the traditionally understood Notes of the Church in Christianity (One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic). And Kant is quite straightforward about it, rejecting all church structures as those of the true and universal church except those that see the church as a sort of family under an invisible divine Head, with no popes or patriarchs, no bishops, and no prophets. However, in practice all churches, i.e., actual representations of the ethical commonwealth, are colored by some historical origin or other; what we normally call churches are non-universal communities that water down the principles of the true church, and in particular, they try to add laws and rites that are not purely moral. All human beings are capable of being part of the universal church to the extent that they purely devote themselves to moral laws as divine commands, a life of pure religious faith; this is true regardless of whatever religious tradition they may be a part. Despite the watered-down character of religious traditions, Kant thinks it can be fine to be a part of a religious tradition as long as you take the pure religious faith that makes you a member of the universal church as the standard for interpreting the customs of your religious tradition, and not vice versa. Over time, a religious tradition interpreted this way brings the community belonging to it closer and closer to the ethical commonwealth.

Thus Kant's conception of religion and of a church actually plays a considerable role in his ethics; insofar as we are participating in the church, as long as we are doing it in a proper way, we are engaging and improving in our moral lives, not merely as individuals but as an entire community growing closer and closer to the true moral community of the ethical commonwealth -- by way of the church, the merely possible kingdom of ends comes closer and closer to actuality (although only if we postulate something like God can we hope that it will actually be achieved). This is an aspect of Kantian ethics that is often missed. It is very easy to interpret Kantianism as an ethics wholly concerned with isolated individuals, because the choices we make are expressed in maxims that are governed directly by a moral law we each can know by our individual reason. But while the moral law applies directly and immediately to each rational being without the intermediation of any other rational beings, Kant thinks of the moral law itself as something that can only be conceived adequately if it is understood as something uniting an at-least-possible community (a kingdom of ends), which the moral law itself requires us to work to make more than merely possible. Religion, in his very specific sense, is how Kant thinks this works in practice. The possible kingdom of ends, conceived as something we can hope to achieve, is conceived as Kingdom of God, which we approximate by way of the church, interpreted as subject to moral law rather than a source of it. Many Kantians today simply drop all of Kant's discussion of religion, but in so doing they are dropping the part of Kant's ethics that makes the moral life an actual communal and cooperative effort.

In any case, Kant's full moral interpretation of religion is somewhat difficult (and shifts about a bit throughout his career); this is just enough to give a sense of how it serves as yet another way in which Kant recognizes that the human pursuit of moral law must in practice go beyond mere rational recognition of one's duty.

We have to this point considered consequentialism and deontology. There is a third approach that needs to be considered, which is usually called virtue ethics, and that is what the next post will begin to discuss.

Lent V

Christ willed to be born in Bethlehem for two reasons. First, because "He was made . . . of the seed of David according to the flesh," as it is written (Romans 1:3); to whom also was a special promise made concerning Christ; according to 2 Samuel 23:1: "The man to whom it was appointed concerning the Christ of the God of Jacob . . . said." Therefore He willed to be born at Bethlehem, where David was born, in order that by the very birthplace the promise made to David might be shown to be fulfilled. The Evangelist points this out by saying: "Because He was of the house and of the family of David." Secondly, because, as Gregory says (Hom. viii in Evang.): "Bethlehem is interpreted 'the house of bread.' It is Christ Himself who said, 'I am the living Bread which came down from heaven.'"

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.35.7.

Fortnightly Book, March 1

In 1373 in Norwich, a woman about thirty years of age came down so sick that she had good reason to think that she was going to die. After the priest performed the last rites, she began to have a series of visions -- fifteen distinguishable ones over the course of a few hours, and then another the next day. Within a few days, she was completely recovered. And the result was (in two different versions) one of the most remarkable English texts of the day.

We do not know if it was her original name, but she is known to the world as Julian of Norwich. She was an anchorite -- we don't know if she was already an anchorite when she had her visions, or if she become one in response to them. An anchorite lives a particular kind of religious life which can be thought of as half-way between a cenobitic life and an eremitic life; that is, an anchorite is something like a monk or nun and something like a hermit. Standardly, an anchorite would live permanently in a small cell adjoined to a church or chapel, able to participate in the sacraments of the church and talk with those who came by to do so, but otherwise completely cut off from the world; in fact, standardly, the beginning of the anchoritic life was a funeral service in which the anchorite was 'buried' in their anchorhold, and from then on they could never leave it. In Julian's day it was a very popular form of religous life in England, both to join and to support; anchorites were often the spiritual center of their local community, available at all times to give advice or to pray for you. Julian's anchorhold is usually thought to be that of St. Julian's Church, which was named either after St. Julian the Hospitaller or St. Julian of Le Mans; she may have chosen the church because she shared its name, or she may have taken the name by which we know her from the church. We don't know. While Norwich by the end of the Middle Ages had a lot of anchoritic cells, Julian seems to be the first anchorite in Norwich of which we have any knowledge. Not counting her own works, she is mentioned in several wills and was visited by Margery Kempe.

Sometime shortly after her discovery she wrote down her visions in a book known as the Shewings (or later, as the Revelations of Divine Love), which is often called today the Short Text. Later, having had extensive time to reflect on the visions and come to understand things she might not have originally considered significant, she rewrote the work into the from known as the Long Text. The Short Text largely languished in libraries until it was published in 1911; the Long Text was copied and preserved, largely by Benedictine nuns, and was translated into French in the seventeenth century, where it stayed popular enough eventually to lead to republication of the English version in the nineteenth century. Wikipedia has a really nice graphic of the manuscript history of both versions. The book is often considered one of the great works of fourteenth-century English literature.

So Julian's Revelations is the next fortnightly book. I'll be reading it in the Norton Critical Edition, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, edited by Denise Baker; it is a Long Text version, derived from the Paris Manuscript, the scribe of which modernized some of the vocabulary and grammar into sixteenth century English, without making any massive changes to the main text.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet; The Sign of the Four

Introduction

Opening Passages: From A Study in Scarlet:

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

From The Sign of the Four:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Summary: Both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four have the same generic structure, only adjusted to take into the account that the latter is a sequel presupposing the former in several key ways. Both are framed by the Baker Street flat and Watson's incredulity; in both Watson's coming along as an observer is a relatively new thing. Both have a detour into dangerous locales with strange customs, Utah in the former and India in the latter, although the locale in each case is really literary locale, a set of tropes from sensational fiction, more than a geographical one. (One of the things that this does in both cases is that it lets Doyle embed an exotic travel-adventure story in his detective fiction, which is narratively useful not only for variety but also because it means he doesn't have to work very hard to explain why Holmes in particular is necessary to the case -- it's just completely different from ordinary crime in the big city, so it's not anything the local police could have seen before.) In both it is a significant part of the investigation to find someone in the big city. The Sign of the Four gives us a more polished version of the structure, although it also doesn't labor under the burden of having to start the whole thing off.

I think the reputation of A Study in Scarlet suffers in part because it's difficult for most modern readers to think of Mormons in Utah as exotic. But pretty much everyone (who wasn't themselves Mormon) thought of them as such at the time. It wasn't just the polygamy; we forget the active hostilities that broke out occasionally between Mormons and non-Mormons, or the times when portions of the Latter-Day Saint community were involved in a sort of low-key guerilla war with federal agents. To be sure, the Mormons were never as crazily sensationalized as rumor made them, but they took some getting used to, and had to make a number of compromises over the years to make it possible for people to get used to them. In any case, I don't really have a problem with this; I think one of the charms of reading nineteenth-century European literature about America is the chance to see the United States as a dangerous, exotic, foreign realm. Even though The Sign of the Four is a better story in almost every way, A Study in Scarlet stands up well.

In reading The Sign of the Four, I was particularly struck this time around with how the sheer quantity of Romanticism in it. This is particularly ironic given Holmes's complaint about A Study in Scarlet at the beginning:

He shook his head sadly. "I glanced over it," said he. "Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid."

"But the romance was there," I remonstrated. "I could not tamper with the facts."

"Some facts should be suppressed, or at least a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes by which I succeeded in unraveling it."

Almost everybody takes Holmes at his word here, and his self-presentation as a purely rational creature as accurate. But after having made this complaint about there being too much romanticism in the previous work, he quotes Goethe twice, refers to Jean Paul, has a mini-discourse on sublimity in the middle of all of his analysis and investigation. He keeps bringing it in himself.

The mini-discourse on sublimity is particularly interesting, and worth quoting in full:

"Ah, well, there is no great mystery in that. But you will know all about it soon enough. How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature! Are you well up in your Jean Paul?"

"Fairly so. I worked back to him through Carlyle."

"That was like following the brook to the parent lake. He makes one curious but profound remark. It is that the chief proof of man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in Richter. You have not a pistol, have you?"

So here we have more Romanticism brought into the discussion by Holmes himself, in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, which leads him to touch on a point associated with sublimity -- our smallness in comparison to the vastness of nature. This naturally leads him to bring up Jean Paul, with whom he is obviously familiar (despite Watson's claim in A Study in Scarlet that he knew almost nothing about literature). Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, better known by his pen name, Jean Paul, is not much read today in English, but he was a noted comic writer who was also a significant contributor to the theory of the sublime, and was an influence on a number of people at the time, including Carlyle. Holmes gives a simple but entirely accurate summary of post-Kantian theory of the sublime by way of his allusion to Jean Paul. The essential idea is that in the experience of the sublime, we have the paradox that we recognize our sensible insignificance in comparison with some great thing suggestive of the infinite, but are exalted rather than humiliated by it because our ability to recognize the disparity between the two shows the significance of reason.

Jean Paul's own major contribution to the theory of the sublime was his argument that the humorous, which he also calls the romantically comic, is the inverted sublime; roughly, in the sublime we recognize our infinitude through our finitude, whereas in the comic we recognize our finitude through our infinitude. In the sublime we focus on the positive relation between the two, recognizing through insignificance of the senses the greatness of reason, whereas in the comic we focus on the disparity, recognizing through the greatness of reason the insignificance of our sensible selves. The sublime exalts, the comic annihilates, on the same ground. The fact that in the story the discussion of this is sandwiched between Holmes's poetic remarks on the sublimity of the world and one of the most comic episodes in the Holmes corpus, Toby's mistake, cannot possibly be accidental, and it's built up so carefully that the irony of this occurring given that Holmes has disparaged Watson's introduction of romanticism, cannot be accidental, either.

There are few possibilities here:

(1) Holmes himself is something of a Romantic to begin with, despite his objection. He is well read on Romantic authors like Goethe and Jean Paul, and he himself has a romantic aesthetic sense.

(2) Holmes is teasing Watson, by deliberately bringing romanticism into the story whenever he can. This fits with the fact that some of Holmes's comments seem to be hinting at various elements in the solution to the problem, a solution he has already figured out but that Watson has not. This possibility requires that (1) also be true, because Holmes can't do this unless he in fact knows Romantic literature quite well.

(3) Watson is teasing Holmes. Watson makes clear that he was very annoyed by the egotism of Holmes's objection, so one way to read all this is that he is getting back at Holmes by increasing or at least explicitly highlighting the amount of romanticism in the story, with Holmes himself depicted as a major culprit. This perhaps also fits with the fact that, despite Holmes's complaint about working a love-story into Euclid, the entire structure of The Sign of the Four (and part of what makes it more relatable than the first book, I think) is a love-story, the elements of which Watson depicts at considerable (even if understandable) length. It would be very easy to see this as a second prong of Watson's revenge in writing this book that is filled to the brim with romanticism.

Of the possibilities, (3) seems to be the one that fits the textual facts best, although it is perhaps less in the spirit of the Great Game; that is to say, I suspect that Conan Doyle himself is deliberately building the ironic contrast as an essential part of the story.

[ADDED LATER: I forgot to say something about the radio adaptations I listened to for both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, from CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Both can be found online at Internet Archive. Both are competent, and reasonably faithful. I thought the narrative work for "The Sign of the Four" was especially good; they both, and especially "A Study in Scarlet" have the problem a lot of Holmes radio adaptations have, namely, that Watson sometimes slips out of sounding like the bluff British military man type into sounding like the nearly falling down into the grave from decrepit old age type, despite the fact that, at most, he can't be more than very early thirties in these stories. ]

Favorite Passages: From A Study in Scarlet:

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

From The Sign of the Four:

Our course now ran down Nine Elms until we came to Broderick and Nelson’s large timber-yard, just past the White Eagle tavern. Here the dog, frantic with excitement, turned down through the side-gate into the enclosure, where the sawyers were already at work. On the dog raced through sawdust and shavings, down an alley, round a passage, between two wood-piles, and finally, with a triumphant yelp, sprang upon a large barrel which still stood upon the hand-trolley on which it had been brought. With lolling tongue and blinking eyes, Toby stood upon the cask, looking from one to the other of us for some sign of appreciation. The staves of the barrel and the wheels of the trolley were smeared with a dark liquid, and the whole air was heavy with the smell of creasote.

Sherlock Holmes and I looked blankly at each other, and then burst simultaneously into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Recommendation: A Study in Scarlet is Recommended, and The Sign of the Four is Highly Recommended. The latter is indeed one of the best works of detective fiction of all time, a fact which I think is sometimes hidden by its sitting in the shadow of the exceptionally memorable The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Lent IV

On the sixth day the power and wisdom of the divine Hand created man out of clay. Similarly, it was at the beginning of the sixth age of mankind--when came the fullness of time--that the archangel Gabriel was sent to the Virgin. After she consented to his word, the Holy Spirit descended upon her in the form of a divine fire that inflamed her soul and sanctified her body in perfect purity, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, to enable her to bear such fire. Instantly, by the operation of that power, a body was formed, a soul created, and both were united to the Godhead in the Person of the Son; that this same Person was God and man, with the properties of each nature unimpaired.

Bonaventure, The Tree of Life I.3.

[Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure I: Mystical Opuscula, José de Vinck, tr., Martino Pulbishing (Mansfield Centre, CT: 2016), p. 105.]

Lent III

...[M]ay Christ help us, the Son of a virgin, and the Spouse of virgins, born after the flesh of a virgin womb, and wedded after the Spirit in virgin marriage. Whereas, therefore, the whole Church itself is a virgin espoused unto one Husband Christ, as the Apostle says, of how great honor are its members worthy, who guard this even in the flesh itself, which the whole Church guards in the faith? Which imitates the mother of her husband, and her Lord. For the Church also is both a mother and a virgin. For whose virgin purity consult we for, if she is not a virgin? Or whose children address we, if she is not a mother? Mary bare the Head of This Body after the flesh, the Church bears the members of that Body after the Spirit. In both virginity hinders not fruitfulness: in both fruitfulness takes not away virginity.

Augustine, On Holy Virginity, sect. 2.

Music on My Mind

Mean Mary, "Friend I Never Had"