“That, actually, is all I have to say, but I shall not desist on that account. Indeed, I shall commence anew.
“The geometer”—he gestured—“cannot demonstrate that a line is beautiful. The beauty of lines is not his concern. We do not chide him when he fails to observe uprightness in his verticals, when he discovers no passions between sinuosities. We would not judge it otherwise than foolish to berate him for neglecting to employ the methods successful in biology or botany merely because those methods deal fairly with lichens and fishes. Nor do we despair of him because he cannot give us reasons for doing geometry which will equally well justify our drilling holes in teeth. There is a limit, as ancient philosophers have said, to the questions which we may sensibly put to each man of science; and however much we may desire to find unity in the purposes, methods, and results of every fruitful sort of inquiry, we must not allow that desire to make mush of their necessary differences.
“I need not prove to you by lengthy obs and sols, I hope, that no ethical system conceived by man can explain what is wrong in my treatment of the obliging stranger. It should be sufficient to observe how comic all ethical explanations must sound.
“Consider:” (Here he gestured with both hands.)
“My act produced more pain than pleasure.
“Baking this fellow did not serve the greatest good to the greatest number.
“I acted wrongly because I could not consistently will that the maxim of my action become a universal law.
“God forbade me, but I paid no heed.
“Anyone can apprehend the property of wrongness sticking plainly to the whole affair.
“Decent men remark it and are moved to tears.”
(Everyone was laughing.)
“But surely what I’ve done is just as evil if, for instance, the man I have wronged was tickled to laughter the whole time he cooked.” Koprophoros looked puzzled, slightly panicked in fact. “Yet it cannot be that my baking the stranger is wrong for no reason at all. It would then be inexplicable. I cannot believe this is so, however.”
He pretended to be startled by illumination.
“It is not inexplicable, in fact. It’s transparent!”
He paused and formally shifted his weight as a writer shifts paragraphs. With a gesture, he said: “All this, I confess, must seem an intolerably roundabout approach to the point I would like to make to you. The point is simply this. Our hyperborean friend has put forward two simple assertions: that cities are by nature evil, and that the feelings of men — the feelings responsible for the creation of cities — are to be rejected in favor of the noble attitudes of gods — attitudes we cannot experience, as human beings, except as we are informed of them by visionaries like Paidoboron, men who are, for mysterious reasons, infinitely our superiors.” He bowed solemnly, with an appropriate gesture, in Paidoboron’s direction, then looked straight at me and, for no fathomable reason, winked. He continued:
“You can see, I’m sure, gentlemen, what troubles me — or rather, the many things troubling me. I’ll gladly trust an algorist like Paidoboron to tell me most minutely and precisely of sidereal eclipses, 19-year cycles, storms on the surface of Helios, or the lunar wobble. But even if I could grant in theory (as I’m reluctant to do) that the stars send moral advice to me, I wonder, being a stubborn sort of person, what the stars’ apogees and perigees — stiff and invariable tracings of geometry, if I’m not mistaken — can have to do with my moral behavior. How, that is, does an astral apogee come to know more about upright action than a vertical line or the loudest physically possible thump? Again, I’m puzzled about the mathematics of why I should turn against human nature when every man here in this room condemns me for my manner of dealing with the stranger— whom you hardly knew!” Gesture. “Indeed, I can think of no one who would settle down soberly to cook a man, discounting the benighted anthropophagi, but a zealot of religion.
“I suggest that we may have been somewhat maligned — that cities, in fact, are a complex expression of the very attitudes involved in your hearty condemnation of me for the way I employ my oven. I suggest that the faults in city life, which Paidoboron points out, are the sad, accidental side-effects of a noble attempt — indeed, a magnificent achievement — which ought not to be washed down the gutter with the unwanted baby in impulsive haste.” He slid his eyes up, ironically pious, and delicately tapped his fingertips together.
“Let me assume you agree with me in this. Then our question becomes, ‘What kind of rule is most likely to make man’s noble and social attempt successful, keeping unfortunate side-effects to the barest possible minimum?’ Jason has given us some pointers in this matter. He argues, if I’ve rightly understood him, that the first principle is simply this: Balance a steadfast concern for justice with unfailing common sense, an intelligent use of alliances, a capacity to change as situations change. And his second principle would seem to be: Sternly reject all emotional urges, let the abstract, calcifying mind wrap the wicked blood in chains — if it can. If it can! For all man’s nature, save only his god-given mind, is a fetid and camarine thing, unfit to fish or swim in. So he tells us. Is he right? Is a Philosopher King conceivable who is not an old madman like Amykos?
“Let me ask you to join me for a minute or two in pondering these opinions. Begin with the second.
“No decent man, no man of sober judgment, I venture to say, can fail to be moved to tears of profoundest sympathy by the process which led to Jason’s rejection of physical desires. We might of course argue, if we wished to be abusive, that from start to finish the problem revealed in Jason’s story is not physical desire but unsound assessment. Which of us here — I do not mean to be unduly critical — would stake all he had on a priestess of Hekate, that is, a witch? — even promising marriage and everlasting praise of her virtue! Which of us, seeing his beloved wife in a very crucible of fiery pain, would creep unfeelingly into a slavegirl’s bed? And which of us here would entertain for a moment the notion that revealing his deepest hostilities to a woman for whom murder is as easy as mumbling six words of Sumerian at midnight, or thirty seconds with a few venene herbs, a sorceress for whom all grammary begins with the abrogation of commoners’ morals, embrace of the deep’s hyphalic causes — which of us, I say, would imagine that such revelations could be wholly innocuous? But to focus on trifles of this kind obscures the darker issue.” He gestured all trivialities away.
“Lord Jason’s theory — an extremely popular one these days, it seems to me — is that mind and body are by nature, and in principle ought to be, totally divorced, an opinion we may trace in Jason’s thought to the punch-addled king of the Bebrykes — not that it matters. An opinion that existence precedes essence. — Don’t laugh too quickly! The most outlandish cacodoxy can take on the seeming solidity of stone if its argument is given with sufficient flourish — a proper appeal to our delight in symmetry, with pedal tone notice of our universal dissatisfactions, cut off from Nature by our conscious choice to eat Mother Nature’s bears and apples (King Oidipus’ problem in its noblest disguise), cut off till we doubt that we’re anything at all but our hearts’ sad swoons and deliquiums. ‘I think, therefore I am not,’ is the gist of the argument. If I can think about a thing, I am not that thing, the argument goes, if only because subject is one word and object is another and therefore there must be two things involved, not one. And since I can in solemnly spectable fact stand back and think about even my mind, it must be the case, however befuddling, that I-who-think am not even my mind: I am emptiness! My consciousness is a firmly established prison wall between myself and all Nature, even my own. A terribly depressing thought, I grant you. But the cave to which we’ve wandered has even darker places. Since my consciousness depends upon words, formal structures, the reality outside me is what it is because of the words I frame it in — in other words, there’s no possibility whatsoever of perceiving the objective truth of anything, there is only my truth: my understanding of what words and the objects they grope toward mean. The tiger’s rays are my mind’s illations, his tectonics the hum of my braincells.” He gestured.