The Classics and Black Folk

Martin Luther King and W. E. B. DuBois

We know of Martin Luther King’s indebtedness to the thought of Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, and of his theological education. He was also steeped in the political philosophy of the West, from Plato to John Stuart Mill. In his graduate work at Boston University and Harvard in the 50s, he read and wrote on Hegel, Kant, Marx, and other philosophers. And as a visiting professor at Morehouse College—one year before his arrest in Birmingham and the composition of his letter—King taught a seminar in “Social Philosophy,” examining the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill.

Here are the thoughts of W. E. B. DuBois:

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

the last paragraph from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois, "Chapter VII".  

Introduction to Freud's Thought

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 
by Sigmund Freud


“With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”   ― Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

In 1916, some twenty years after coining the word psychoanalysis, Freud began a series of lectures entitled Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. This book presents those lectures where Freud describes his theories and techniques directed towards discovering and finding solutions to the mental problems observed in patients.

During the course of the twenty-eight extremely accessible essays, we discover that he came by the idea that there could be unconscious desires from the practice of hypnosis, in which wish suggestions are rooted in the brain and some time after the patient has awakened actuates upon those suggestions without knowing why.  Freud has a way with words and his style makes this and his other books enjoyable to read.

An important aspect of this book is its logical organization.  It is divided into three sections pertaining to parapraxes, dreams, and a general theory of the neuroses. Although mutually related, we find that Freud's discourse throughout follows a similar pattern: hypotheses, research and discovery, and one may wonder whether the research inspired the hypotheses, or if the presuppositions needed to begin questioning and researching led to his very particular and what were at the time revolutionary brand of ideas. 
Parapraxes are introduced as faulty acts, such as memory or speech errors, mishearing, chance actions, forgetting, losing or mislaying something, misreadings and misprints, blunders and slips of the tongue. Upon reading more they turn out to be everyday displays of pathologies: actions assumed to have not been planned but upon inspection the opposite is often the case. 
Before Freud, dreams were generally considered random and meaningless images, but for Freud, the psychoanalyst, nothing is left to chance or indifference; there is not a single psychical phenomenon which does not have some meaning or intention, most notably disguised expressions of unconscious wishes. If you are interested in more details about Freud's views on dreams his earlier Interpretation of Dreams is a great book to read.
The final section of lectures draws the reader into the realm of the neurosis. These type of mental disorders need to be understood as the result of conflict and repression, and hence the neurosis, dream, parapraxes, and unconscious mind are solutions arising from the inherent and universal animosity either between unconscious and conscious mental states, or society and the individual.

This is the best place to start if you have never read Freud. His prose style is felicitous.  He explains the "Oedipus complex", "freudian slip" and other concepts which have become part of our cultural heritage.  In doing so he provides a thorough introduction to his views on psychoanalysis.

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Notes on Paradise Lost, I

Paradise Lost 
by John Milton


"Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells:  hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell 
Receive thy new possessor:  one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n."

-  Satan ( I, 249-255)

The Epic Begins


John Milton was more than fifty years old when he began to concentrate on creating the epic poem Paradise Lost.  He had survived the momentous period when Cromwell led the country and with the death of his second wife and the onset of blindness he was facing what many would consider a bleak future.  Yet he produced a brilliant new version of the story of Adam and Eve, but even beyond that created a poem that would "justify the ways of God to men".  His method would encompass the whole of man's existence from the creation of the Son of God to the eventual expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

Interestingly, the order of the story focuses first on the rebellion of Satan and his rebel angels.  It is not until the fifth of the twelve books of the Epic that God himself relates the creation of his Son:
"Hear all ye angels, progeny of Light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Hearmy decree, which unrevoked shall stand,
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed," (V, 600-605)
This act provokes Satan's rage and his revolt where from he was banished to hell.  It is at this point where the epic had begun.  After some introductory verses wherein Milton calls upon God to aid him as he intones  "Sing Heav'nly Muse" and goes on to:
"Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar 
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or in rhyme." (I, 13-16)

Books I and II tell of Satan and his minions on the burning lake and their arrival at Pandemonium where they have council with Satan anointing himself to destroy Man.  It is exciting stuff and Milton's Satan is an impressive character.  The events of the first two books mirror the world-shaking events that Milton had so recently experienced himself.  Satan plots a revenge on the new world created by the Lord elsewhere in the universe.  He journeys forth and encounters Sin, a sorceress sprung fully formed out of Satan's head at the instant he first conceived envy for the Son of God;  and he encounters Death, the odious offspring of Satan's incest with Sin.  With her "fatal key, / Sad instrument of all our woe," Sin unlocks the Gates of Hell and liberates Satan to pursue his mission (Book II).  Book III narrates how God chose his Son to redeem Man as he communes with his Son about Man's free will.  Satan, in the meantime, is wending his way toward Earth to discover for himself what Man, this creation of God, is all about.
  
I will stop for now, with the epic underway, and separately comment further about Adam and Eve in the Garden and some of the important themes of Milton's audacious poem.

The Peloponnesian War

The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.”

- Thucydides

This is the first history in the modern sense (apologies to Herodotus who invented the genre). Thucydides, and Athenian general, wrote this history of the Peloponnesian Wars; admirable in its objectivity in discussing contemporary events, in its direct and descriptive style, and the author's grasp of cause and effect. It covers the history of the Hellenic race and ends, unfinished, in 411 B.C., seven years before the wars ended. The best-known passages are those relating Pericles' Funeral Oration, the plague at Athens, and the Sicilian expedition. The detailed reporting and acute political analysis vindicate Thucydides claim that the work is a "possession for all time." In fact, the parallels with modern international political history abound making this one classic relevant for our own day.

This edition of the classic is particularly useful as edited by Robert B. Strassler, with a fine introduction by the classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson, and voluminous maps, notes, appendices; and a glossary and index. It uses the Crawley translation which some consider on a par with the more recent translation by David Greene.

The Landmark Thucydides, Robert Strassler, ed. The Free Press, New York. 1996.

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Achilles' War: The True Story of the Illiad

by Caroline Alexander

It is the epic of epics, the most celebrated and enduring of all war stories ever told. - Caroline Alexander, Achilles' War, p 1.

This is an excellent book to read in conjunction with your latest rereading of Homer's Iliad, which is just what I have recently done. Caroline Alexander manages to emphasize the relevance of the Iliad for today by exploring references to other literature and deepening the meanings found within the Iliad by the reader. While Homer's epic stands alone for the serious reader, the addition of these resources widens the breadth of possibilities of understanding for the reader and, in my case, assisted in our discussion of the original text among our study group. What Ms. Alexander has not done is produce a traditional work of Homeric scholarship with commentary on linguistic expressions or the oral tradition. Rather this is more of an extended meditation on war and its meaning as beautifully expressed by Homer through Achilles and his other characters. The result is a successful addition to your reading and enjoyment of Homer but not a replacement for it.

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The Iliad

"Roan Beauty"

"Why, Roan Beauty--why prophesy my doom?
Don't waste your breath. I know, well I know--
I am destined to die here. . ."
(Book 19, 497-99)





Achilles' roar permeates Books 18 and 19 of The Iliad. From the moment we read "Achilles , Zeus' favorite fighter, rose up. . ." to his "enormous cry" and the "fire, relentless, terrible, burst from proud-hearted Achilles' head,"(Book 18, 235 - 260), we and the Argives and even the Trojans, who immediately lose twelve of their fighters, are aware of the presence of Achilles. He has returned and he meets with Agamemnon to receive his due and assume leadership of the troops. His meeting with Agamemnon yields the the prophecy that:

For years to come, I think, they will remember the feud that flared between us both. (Book 19, 72-3)

But it is Roan Beauty who reminds Achilles and us of his ultimate sacrifice in this moving statement,:

The white-armed goddess Hera gave him voice:
"Yes! we will save your life--this time too--
master, mighty Achilles! But the day of death
already hovers near, and we are not to blame
but a great god is and the strong force of fate.
. . .
still you are doomed to die by force, Achilles,
cut down by a death less god and mortal man!"
(Book 19, 482-494)


The Roan Beauty does not speak again.


The Iliad by Homer. Robert Fagles, trans. Viking Penguin, New York. 1990

Cavafy

on the Iliad

The Funeral of Sarpedon

Zeus mourns deeply:
Patroklos has killed Sarpedon.
Now Patroklos and the Achaians rush on
to snatch up the body, to dishonour it.

But Zeus doesn't tolerate that at all.
Though he let his favourite child be killed-
this the Law required-
he'll at least honour him after death.
So he now sends Apollo down to the plain
with instructions about how the body should be tended.

Apollo reverently raises the hero's body
and carries it in sorrow to the river.
He washes the dust and blood away,
heals the terrible wounds so there's no trace left,
pours perfume of ambrosia over it,
and dresses it in radiant Olympian robes.
He bleaches the skin, and with a pearl comb
combs out the jet black hair.
He spreads and arranges the beautiful limbs.

Now he looks like a young king, a royal charioteer-
twenty-five or twenty-six years old-
resting himself after winning
the prize in a famous race,
his chariot all gold and his horses the fastest.

Having finished his task this way,
Apollo calls for the two brothers,
Sleep and Death, and orders them
to take the body to Lykia, the rich country.

So the two brothers, Sleep and Death,
set off on foot toward the rich country, Lykia;
and when they reached the door
of the king's palace,
they handed over the honoured body
and then returned to their other concerns.

And once the body was received in the palace
the sad burial began, with processions and honours and dirges,
with many libations from sacred vessels,
with all pomp and circumstance.
Then skilled workers from the city
and celebrated craftsmen in stone
came to make the tombstone and the tomb.

- Constantine P. Cavafy



C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems trans. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. Princeton Univ. Press. 1975