{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

In all your papers, gentlemen, and I'm going to read them; and even if you copy from somebody else, I'm going to find out. The -- I've just to -- to separate three boys into the other course because of dishonesty. So please be careful. They have to leave college. It's really stupid. But a man who -- who I think who -- who thinks that his teacher is so stupid has to be severed for lack of intelligence.

I come back to the one thing which I would like you to learn, which seems to be impossible however for you to understand, that there is at every moment when a man's mind is at work, that is, when he ceases from sleep, we are after all -- all, gentlemen, in several states...

[tape interruption]

...will not understand that while you are in the morning awakening, go -- have breakfast, and then you -- before you go to sleep, all day long, your mind is at work by associating with the living -- preferably with those people who seem to you more alive than yourself, like a beautiful girl, or a wise man, or the opera, or the radio -- or whoever you listen to. That is, you try to find life, you join up with life. And you try to agree in the process of joining others -- peo- -- friends, of looking at the world together, because you are quite sure that it cannot be true if you only think of the world this way. You want to have agreement on all these sta- -- your statements and ideas about the world; before the other people -- your comrades have not agreed, there is no world in which you can trust. That's just your own imagination, wishful thinking, you call it, you see.

So anybody who wakes up and takes breakfast, gentlemen, makes a decision: here are the people in whose judgment he has to trust. I -- we call it -- this "community." You call it your "friends," because you overlook the fact that these friends and you speak American, slang. They speak English, and that's a political order, inside which every word you speak makes sense. Democracy. Nobody in Iran understands "democracy." They think that's a Cadillac, when you say "democracy" in Iran, because that goes together with "America." But you understand democracy because you live in America. So even though you don't speak to all Americans, you still are within the logos of America, here. And you speak to the people who are in this logos ethically, owing each other the truth about the world.

So in every minute, gentlemen, the -- the frontiers between logos, ethos, and physis are changing. You get up, gentlemen, and you shave. As long as this

-- these whiskers are on you, they are part of you. Once they are shaved, they are thrown away. They are dead. Therefore, you have carried, from the living to the dead, something. It has become purely natural, whereas before it is an integral part of your -- the painting, the portrait which the painter paints of you, your own beard.

And so with everything, gentlemen. You throw over Europe and you say, "Ooh, Europe is dead," or you say, "England made a mistake now; Eden is just finished." He's finished. Well, you can only say "finished," you see, of somebody you bury, you declare to belong to the realm of the nether world. You do it all the time. You are very cruel in this respect. There are any number of people whom you declared to have died already long ago. And -- probably in some cases you may be right. But I also think that most of you haven't yet been born, so I also would consider you pure nature, and I have to treat you this way. Any man who copies from another man--is separate from college--is treated as an object of dismay, and dismissed, because he cannot be a member of this community. That's the whole story.

Would you then kindly resume, I mean, our approach now to Plato, to this quandary of every human mind who is honest with himself, and who is not dealing with the -- the trash which most of you use, in -- in your daily -- language. You are not aware, gentlemen, that every word that comes out of your mouth moves the frontiers between the things that are less alive than you, and the people and the forces that are more alive than you. In every moment, you try always to join up with the powers that be, or the powers that you think that are -- that are important. And you are going against those forces of -- of deadness, and boredom, and -- and mere quantity, which you think you can exploit, and which you can cheat, or which you can manipulate.

Ask yourself, gentlemen, you think of course, you can manipulate your professors. You can perhaps also manipulate Dean Mc- -- {MacDonald}. But there are certain people in the -- in the world, I'm sure, where you know very well that if you would try to manipulate them, they would lose their ultimate importance for you. People you love, gentlemen, if you would try to manipulate them, you wouldn't love them. You -- know this very well. You can, of course, rape a girl, or persuade a girl to sleep with you; but you know exactly, too, if you do wrong by her, that you don't love her, and that you have treated her as an object, you have treated her as physis. You have not treated her in the spirit of love.

And therefore it is your own temptation, gentlemen, your own decision how you treat this girl. In any moment, you can treat any girl, God Almighty, too, just as a thing to be manipulated. You can go as a hypocrite to church, and

say, "It's good for my income tax if I go to church, because I can deduct so -- 10 percent of my income for charities." Well, you then know that you have treated God as though He was just a part of the world. And you know very well that you have deprived yourself of the possibility of living with anybody who is a little better off, a little more alive than you yourself.

My whole point today is, gentlemen, that logos, ethos, and physis are your own experiences. This is important for our approach to this book, because in Plato, you see, he officially deals with everything as physis. And he wants to know the physis, the nature of the state, for example. But on the other po- -- hand, he puts this in the form of dialogue. And so, the funny thing is, gentlemen, the content of Plato's philosophy is nature. The form is ethical. A dialogue is an ethical form of thinking, because there are more than one person involved. And you owe each other the truth.

Where is Mandaville? He isn't here today. I'm sorry, he -- because he raised this question yes- -- last time, when we read one sentence -- or one paragraph of Adeimantus, and he said, "Isn't that a real contribution to the dialogue?" And I had to admit it, that this was more than just a stilted form, and that more than one man were needed to know the truth.

Now that's a big recognition, you see, of Plato -- Plato's relation to his -- to the -- humanity comes out in the form of his philosophy. Plato's ideas about the world come out in the content of his philosophy. And most of you do not know, gentlemen, that form is already in itself an act of faith.

If you take your hat off before an old lady, that already is an ethical act, of course. You see, you don't have to say anything, and you -- I -- don't have to give me your creed that old people, you see, deserve to be kept alive, and n- -- don't have to be shot, as in the { }. Or -- or given over to {salvation}. Because you took off your hat before this lady, I know you have some reverence before old age, you have to say nothing. And I have to know of any philosopher how he behaves to his neighbors before I know his full philosophy, don't you see? What he says and writes is only a little part of what he really thinks.

Now in Plato, it should be obvious to you that he is the ideal friend, because his ethical code demands that the truth is conveyed to us by several people bringing it out together. So the cooperative fellowship is constitutional for his -- you see, it's fundamental to his ethics. And though he may not have written, like Aristotle, ever any treaty -- treatise on -- on friendship, that he is a good friend is in -- implicated in the form of his works.

And therefore the Ethics of Plato can be fathomed in his approach, in his

-- in his -- the form of his writings. And I thought I should try, at least, to convey to you my conviction that Americans think that the ethical things should be stated in blunt sentences: "Be good," and so. I doubt, though, that this form of -- of indicative statements of ethics ever work, because ethics is not something that you can write down as you can write natural science. You can say, "2 and 2 is 4," but what it is to be good is so doubtful. Good is such an abstraction, you see, that if you don't give a living example how you treat your neighbor, I don't know what you're talking about. What's good? Good is what everybody thinks is good. If -- we wouldn't know what Plato calls "the good." We talked about it yesterday, you remember. We wouldn't know what is his good. Somebody else stopped me on the street--who was it? ja--about the absolute good, you see. We wouldn't know about goodness if we wouldn't see this goodness at work. And if -- you don't see goodness at work by abstract statements, gentlemen, by systematic { }. I can only believe that the man knows what is good by seeing him in action. Can you understand?

Now the action of Plato is the style of his works. And the thought is something different again. That's the content. It's very hard for you to understand--and to believe me--that ethics cannot be expressed in abstract statements. It is the curse of America that this is not -- that this is still believed. The result is then in the Orozco fresco of the schoolteacher who makes all these little children sexless, you see, and repeat stock phrases, you see. Have you -- this picture in mind? It's so awful, because you don't see them behave, you see, cordially, or neighborly. But you only see them stand there and being -- filled with these silly doggerels, so to speak, on morality. Morals cannot be stated in the same way as natural facts. You can state, "The rose is a flower." All right. What of it, you see? But you can never say, "Be good." It's -- Mothers say it, and they ruin their children, they get a repress- -- a complex. Yes, a mother who slaps her child in the face and gives her candy the next day can educate a child. But a ch- -- mother who constantly says, "Be good," to a child spoils the child, corrupts the child, ruins the child. We don't know what is good, except concretely in one action. "This is good, and the other thing is bad" is a wanton addition to the act, you see.

Good is the -- if you have A, B, C, and you write around this "good," then you only say it that in your family these three things are done every time. There is breakfast, there is lunch, and there is evening -- evening supper, and then you say, "This is good." But without your having experienced that breakfast is, you see, appetizing, and -- and -- and nourished you, and that luncheon is there, and supper, you wouldn't know what -- good is, as in my paper called "Being," you see, where I tried to tell you -- where Heraclite tries to tell Parmenides that being is only meaningful if you already know what it includes. In the same way, goodness is not meaningful unless you have acted in various ways and you

remember all the positive actions, you see, and say, "This I call good." Otherwise you don't know what -- what goodness is.

Now in Plato, there is this realization that in every moment where he says something about physis, he must act ethically to the people whom he wants to convince of the truth of nat- -- in nature, you see. The truth in nature and the goodness to the people who want to -- share this truth must always be congruous {in him}. And today, I mean -- throw all the books on ethics -- written in America in the last hundred years into the fire, and they wo- -- they won't be missing, because they are all trying to express ethics in terms of natural knowledge. You cannot express ethics in terms of natural knowledge. It isn't natural, because it wells up in you, because you are face to face with a human being. And with this very definite human being. I'm good in my -- behavior towards my parents and I'm good in my behavior towards you, or I'm wicked in my -- { }. But in every moment, I have to behave differently.

Ja?

(Yeah, but this is -- this is okay for the first impression. But what if you and I come from different societies? And you've been taught that this is good, and I that is good. And then we try to generalize, we try to say something that's true for all of us, you see, for both of us? Then don't we have to become abstract? In general?)

I would be very careful in this. I would say if an American and an Englishman meet, or -- I have to go through this proceedings now, gentlemen, of reconciling my American citizenship, and my stay here -- and my feeling of home here, with my German relations. And they know this very well -- very acutely, that I'm balancing. I shall very much avoid to have any generalization for all the world. I must -- it must be concretely between Americans and Germans. And it is this immodesty that Mr. {Malik} tries to sell you a world ethic, instead of -- it should be -- a Syrian-American ethic, which makes me, for example, not trust Mr. {Malik} of Syria, who is a very good man. I mention him because I have great respect for him. But I think -- do you know who he is, {Malik}? Who has heard of him? He is very -- made himself quite popular, but it is an illusion to think, you see, that goodness between two concrete people, you see, can ever be expressed in generalities for the whole of mankind.

I give you two examples, and it's terribly important that we should now keep from Plato, in this discussion just of the state, the difference between the natural aspect of any city -- where people have to eat, and to live, and to get married--that's all natural, after all, because they are animals who have to exist--and goodness. The dialogue of Plato, I say, is his ethical contribution, his

immense friendship. And Aristotle expressed it very beautifully; he said of Plato, "This man was so good, that the wicked ones do not even have the right to praise him." That's a very wonderful saying. You see, he wanted -- he -- he had this impression that on the highest level, not everybody has the right to talk. Not everybody can even judge, you see. And therefore, a man who says, "Plato was a good man," is already taking upon himself to insist that he has a right to judge Plato. And Aristotle says, "Nonsense; the wicked ones have no right to praise him."

The emperor of Austria, the last great monarch of the world, Jo- -- Francis Joseph, used always to say when the -- when the papers praised him for some utterance, or for some act of -- kindness, he said, "An emperor must not be praised, ever, because then also these same people have to -- the right to scold him. And an emperor must be beyond," you see, "good and evil, or he cannot be the emperor of 14 different nations," as he was. And therefore, the praise of a man also includes the right of criticism, and so he ceases to be beyond the parties, you see.

These two sentences -- examples may show you -- Aristotle saying on -- of Plato, and the emperor Francis Joseph's own insight into the dangers of praise, that this presumes that the man who praises has any understanding of the quality which he praises, you see. That would abolish the -- would make every idiot the critic of every highest spirit in the world. It would abolish awe, and reverence, and respect; and it has been, of course, cauterized out of your existence very largely. America perishes because it has no respect. And so it always -- since people cannot live without respect, you distribute your respect always to the idiotic values of Broadway, or DuPont, or rich people, or some such silly asses. They don't deserve your respect and your reverence. There are other people who reserve your -- deserve your reverence, like Helen Keller, or some such -- people.

But you have been told, "Be independent," "Every man is as good as everybody -- other man. I am critical. I cannot be taken in." But you cannot live without awe. You cannot live without authority. So officially in this country, the most terrible people receive celebrity. If you read the book, The Power Elite, who has seen this book? Power Elite? Haven't seen it? It's quite an interesting book, because it -- it shows how the abolition of true superiority, gentlemen, has led to the necessary substitute of false values. Nobody can live, gentlemen, without ethics, that is, without recognizing that you have people who are better than you. That's what we call ethics. And the people who are less good than you. The scale of values is in ethics always necessary.

So we put this, this way, gentlemen. All physical facts can be expressed in

the form of indicatives. But all ethical facts can only be expressed in emotional form of "yes" or "no," in the sense of -- of "Let us do this," or "Let us avoid it." If you get a murderer, your reaction is: "God forbid that I should ever be found in this situation." So a crime creates an ethical reaction in every healthy person, that you don't want to be found in the same predicament. And any glorious action--like the Hungarian people now--gentlemen, that cannot be stated in the form of report, that they -- that they -- this happened. You have to say, "I'm proud of them," you see, "I admire them."

You'll remember what we said of admiration, that it is the fundamental fact that human beings are either to be admired or to be despised. Therefore, I call this not an indicative sentence. But that's a -- always a subjective sentence. All ethical problems are problems of "Let me be this way," or "Let me not thi- -- be this way." That is, they are always movements back and from -- away or towards. That's perhaps the best expression. All ethical statements, gentlemen, are movements away from this feature, this event, or towards this event.

As long, however, as you live in your -- under your physical cloud -- your physicist's cloud, you don't believe this. You think that ethics is a science, which of course, it isn't. Ethics is the decision on who is on your side -- or on whose side you are on, you see, and against whom you are. -- Against, not in any inim- -- hostile sense, but what is less important, so that it can be manipulated. All the means, for example, all automobiles are just means. If a child is born, you must forget about the sale of your automobile at that moment. The child comes first. You can express it in a very simple way. First things come first. You have heard this at home, probably. Your mother may have told you that first things come first. I hope she has.

If she has, gentlemen, it means that in all ethical decisions, there is a hierarchy. There is something more alive, and something less alive. And it is true in every minute, gentlemen, that you have to decide who is more alive, so that you have to serve him, and help him. If you find a great genius, or a poet in your community--like Robert Frost, who's going to speak to us on Thursday--obviously you go there. You flock there, I hope, because it will be your last opportunity of seeing this very great man. If you go there, you act ethically, because you acknowledge that the higher attracts the lower. You see, you don't say anything about it. You don't make a statement. And you don't say much. You say, "Robert Frost is -- is a great poet." The only thing I will believe in your judgment if it -- he makes you go. Because you take -- you see, your heart and -- and allow your heart to speak. That's ethics. That's all it is.

I want to give you two more examples, because that's the terrible misunderstanding around Plato. Plato has said in his Seventh Letter that he never said

the deepest secrets of his life in any of his books. And so I have to, at this moment, what do I do? I draw your attention to the fact that his life was his ethics, his life with his friends, and that he impressed people as a saint, as the greatest spirit of antiquity, because of this sincerity of his dealing with his friends, or with his people. And we know from his Seventh Letter that the best is not expressed in his dialogues.

And I would therefore say the best, however, appears in the form of these dialogues, at least. We have an idea how smiling, how cheerful, how merciful, how ironical, how edu- -- how -- how sympathetic, how sharp, how he could be when he was speaking with his friends, you see. In the dialogue, he gives away his dramatic secret of being a person acting out his role in life within a comp- -- godly company of men.

Gentlemen, I once was in a difficult position in the army in the First World War. I -- it was in the Battle of the Somme. And I was -- suddenly got the report that my youngest officer -- was only 18 years old and u- -- an ensign -- had been found sleeping on guard. You know you are spelled every two hours on military guard. It was -- battle was raging, and so of course it was a very terrible crime. And in normal -- under the code of -- penal code of any army, a man who is found sleeping on guard has to be shot. At least he has to be courtmartialed. And he wa- -- certainly would, as an officer, be immediately degraded, lose his qualities. So life and honor both were at stake with this man.

And he came before me to report his case, because he had been reported before, with a helmet on, and all the bandoleer, and everything -- as we say, in full -- in full glory -- battle dress -- glory. Dirty, it was. It was very -- it was November. It was a very hard time for everybody. And here was this boy. And his whole future was at stake. And if I had acted out my simple military duty, he would have been ruined for life. On the other hand, gentlemen, it was serious business, and something very drastic had to happen. I couldn't let this pass. And I couldn't say, "I shall use" -- I shouldn't -- couldn't say an indicative sentence, as you would think, you see, from the morality of your little schoolhouse teacher: a sermon would do. No sermon could make up for his crime, because he had let down, after all, the army in a battle.

And I want to repeat, gentlemen, ethics is never to be stated in the form of a proposition. Wake up to this fact, and you suddenly cease to be so superstitious, as you all are. And you think that ethics is a part of your worldly knowledge. It is the knowledge of your -- the community, the polis, this com- -- in which you really think to live. And in the community one does move and is moved but -- never makes reasoned statements and judgments, because "Judge not, lest ye be judged." It is not my business to judge such a man, gentlemen, but

to do something with him. If you could only understand this. You are all judges of the whole rest of the world all the time, because you are so frightened that you might be shaken out of your li- -- intellectual security. As long as you think that I am under your judgment, gentlemen, you treat me as a piece of nature, you see. Because you put me in -- outside of you, somewhere. I'm not then a part of your own life.

Comes to my -- well, I first finish -- no, I may interrupt this by -- by a kind of excursus -- on last Thursday we had the installation of a minister. And the charge -- such an installation is given by another minister, trying him -- telling him what to do. The other minister had -- been his co-pastor in Keene, New Hampshire, and -- for the last three years. And he said, "Thank you, Roy, for the kindness which you have shown to me. You were asked to pass judgment on me to the board of -- ministers -- appointments for the ministry in Boston. And they asked you -- gave you a questionnaire. And you wrote back, `This man is an integral part of myself at this moment. We are brothers here in arms. And as long as we are together, I shall not pass any judgment on him. I shall not answer any of your questionnaires. It would be a break of the unity inside of us, where I must not even try to reason what qualifications he has. He's just part of me, and I am a part of him. And just as little as I know really to judge myself, I shall not give you any such qualifications.'"

And that -- then the minister also mentioned that his comrade in Keene had done this after some consultation of myself, that we had been cahoots and had been thinking, could a man in moral -- in honesty serve the con- -- congregation as a minister, with another man, and at the same time, sit down and say, "He is -- such-and-such," you see? "He's good and he's bad." And the -- and the result was that he cannot. If you pass such a judgment, the man is outside you. And then he is a part -- has become a part of nature.

So it's morally very important, gentlemen, that you understand this. Then you wouldn't answer such questionnaires as Mr. {Bender} here used to put out: Whom do you love more, your father or your mother? That's -- you see, that's the devil's question. In the moment you answer this question, you have ceased to love either your father or your mother, or both. If you cannot understand this, you see, you are lost to philosophy, because philosophy knows of this separation of the ethical attitude and the worldly, the physical attitude. And if you think that your father and your mother are part of the physical world, then you can say whom you love more. But then you neither know what a father is, nor do you know what a mother is, nor do you know what love is. You think love is a fact. Love is something that at this moment you have to battle for. You have to pray that your love doesn't give out. And how can you pray -- continue to love if you dissect it and try to know who is deader. One of the two you put on the

dum- -- dump, by making this decision. And I hope you will never know whom you love more, your father or your mother. I couldn't tell to this day whom I have loved more. They are both dead. But do you think I know? And I don't want to know. There are things that you must not know, in generalizations, Sir. This is what, you see, tried to think, that there could be general statements of this nature. They must not be. They must not be tried. But you must move back and forth, towards and away from things.

Well, what did I do in the battle -- on the battlefield of the Somme in 1916? Gentlemen, I slapped this man as heartily as I could into his -- in his face. And there was the staff sergeant, and there were several men. And they saw it. And that was his redemption. And I decided that by slapping him in the face, I could get him -- I treated him as a boy. He was 18, after all, and you can treat such a man as a boy. And therefore I declared him -- simply not to have been of age at that moment, of his action. And everybody was very happy. Seven years later, the boy brought me his wife and said, "Here is the man who saved my life," to her.

And that is -- may have been -- may be qualified as a -- ethical truth, which I discovered at that moment, that I had to create a new relation to this man. In treating him as a child, as a boy, I could get him out of his position as an officer. It was of course, in a way, a momentary degradation, because you don't slap an officer in the face. But should I wait until he was degraded in -- in actu by the authorities, by the mar- -- the martial court? Would this has been wiser? You would, of course, done this, because you think it is unethical to spank a person. Now I assure you, gentlemen, it is much more ethical to slap a man in the face than to have him degraded and put for 10 years into prison. But you don't understand me, and that's why you don't understand the Suez Canal.

Yes, you can't. You have ethical statements that it is always bad to hit a man. It is not always bad to hit a man. It is sometimes bad. I don't say that you always have to hit a man when he has slept on guard. I claim, gentlemen, that any ethical act is unique, singular, and can never be repeated. And -- you must never recommend an act because it has happened before, you see. It's no reason to repeat any such action. But that doesn't abolish the fact that it was necessary to do it at that moment.

If you can begin to understand it, you see why an ethical act cannot be generalized, Sir. It loses it character of a -- ethical action when it is repeatable. Then it is a legal action. And the law, you see, is the first naturalization of a unique action. If you say, "I can write something into a law," and it becomes repetitive, then I treat it already as an external thing, of outside nature, you see. The way from the act into the law, gentlemen, is the way from ethics into physis.

Would you take this down? The way into the unique act into the law is the way from ethics into physis.

And so we get quite a series of things, you see. Here is the spirit, the logos. He says to me, "Save this man," you see. And I try to s- -- find a way out, and I treat him as a child. I slap him in the face. If this could for me -- found out to be an excellent way of saving people's lives by a momentary act, as in school, for example, that I haven't to dismiss the man from college, because I have -- justice has been done and he can stay, then I would make it a -- a habit. And then I would make it a law. So you have the act, you have the habit--or the "precedent," is perhaps better--and you have the law. And finally you have the natural law. And you see how important it is -- then is, that you see the connection between the ethical world, and the -- world of nature. By the concept of the law, ethics are always transformed into physis. Law is experienced act, respected as precedent, transformed into rule and regulation, you see, and finally applied to outside -- the world outside as always having this implication, you see.

For example, you say, "Of course, the people reacted in Hungary." Now, there you take it as a -- as a natural phenomenon, you see. But of course, if people none -- not -- hadn't once rebelled with this glory -- in this glorious way, as they do now, you see, you wouldn't know this. They -- first had to happen in an ethical context, you see, that you could admire it.

You think the other way around. You think, first there are laws in the universe and then there are acts. And that's why you are not -- no longer free men. The -- my slapping this boy in the face is such an example of freedom, because it was nowhere in the context of any natural -- or mar- -- martial law, or civil law, that there was this response possible to such a serious action.

If you cannot see this, gentlemen, that all actions in the New Testament are invented by Jesus on the spot, you don't understand the New Testament. When the adulteress is brought before Him, what does He do? He says -- what did He do? How is He -- has He judged the adulteress?

(He { }.)

Yes, and what happens?

(They go away.)

They all go away. They all go away. He creates an absolutely new situation. Nobody accuses her anymore. Don't you understand? So the -- she -- He creates suddenly a sphere of peace and protection for her, because all the other

people withhold, you see, and withdraw. You must just see this -- lively, that He creates this new dimension which hasn't existed before, the dimension in which people see suddenly that they themselves, you see, have tried to judge, instead of knowing that they also are judged. It's always the same thing in ethics, you see. As soon as you say that you are under judgment, you stop judging.

Gentlemen, the gist of the matter is this: the only ethical com- -- law which is adamant, is that a man who is of age has to listen to the experience of the ages. Before you elope with a girl, you are not competent to cope with the problem, if you cannot hear the voices that contradict your move, that warn you against it, you see. If you are just in a frenzy, you -- you must expect the full fury of the law, and of wisdom, and of precedent coming upon you, because you have acted, you see, without listening.

So gentlemen, the logos is the ruler of the ethos, because to listen means to let the intellect, the spirit enter your mind. You must be willing to bring your ethical action under the word. And that's why the whole Bible is written around the word of God, gentlemen. The word precedes the act. And the act begets the law.

The words of the past, the words of wisdom, the words of experience, the words of suffering, the words of love and sympathy a man must listen to. "Listen"--or "hearken Israel," it's called in the Old Testament--"listen" or "hearken" is the one ethical command that is true, that is permanent. I had at that moment to consider, had I not, that it wasn't an action of -- of mine of mere rashness that I slapped this boy. It was an act by which I tried to contradict the authorities who said, "He has to be court-martialed." This -- I mean, if you can think this through, is an -- intellectual act on my part, is it not? I had to face up to the rules of the game as they had existed so long and so far. This is intellectual. This is logos. Can you see this?

Before I have made my own original contribution, I had first to weigh whether any of the precedents would have done the trick, the same trick, you see. Perhaps -- then I would have had to fulfill it, you see. If court-martialing would not have entailed his utter ruin, I would have -- and in other cases, it does, you see. Think of the Marine sergeant. There was not way out. You had to go to court with the man, you see. But then it could be pardoned.

So it is the hardest thing for you to understand the relation of logos, ethos -- ethos, and physis. And I tried to do it today, because I think if you could see this, you understand Greek philosophy. The Greeks had always this relation between the knowledge of what is good by precedent, by what already was known to be wise men's acts. The problem of friendship, that is, what to do to a

person you are in sympathy with at this moment.

Now just take Prohibition era, and a man who gets drunk. And you are for Prohibition. That doesn't -- make -- help you at all when the man is drunk. You have to take care of him, have you not? Take in 1922 or 1923. You are against drinking, you see, but your best friend gets drunk. What do you do? Can you simply say he shouldn't have got drunk? Doesn't help you at all. There you are. You have to treat him as your friend. So ethics, you see, must say, "Too bad. Prohibition really should have been followed." He must -- "You must listen to the law." But you can also create for this friend, you see, a refuge from the law.

You must -- so all the time, gentlemen, the word in the sense of already intellectual preparation, of foreknowledge, of anticipation, is with us. Everything has already been thought through in some form with regard either --. The existing so- -- social order tells you about any action: this you can do, or this you cannot do. It does not however help you at all, because you must know: when do we have to break the law? And when do we have to follow it, you see? Any minute you have to create actions which -- which are far beyond anything that could have been foreseen before. But you have to have listened to the words of the wise. You have to be a law-abiding citizen in the sense that you must know what the law is.

I once challenged oth- -- another student in a -- in the University of Heidelberg to a duel. I went to a very fine man. His father was prime minister of one of the German states, and he -- so he was quite high up in the ranks of authority, and loyalty, and good behavior. And he had just received their -- been made baronet, and was quite proud of the new title of "Baron," or "Freiherr." And I asked him to be my second. You know, you have to send to the other fellow whom you ch- -- you challenge a man, and he is in your stead, can't see him yourself, and he has to organize the conditions of the battle. And so he said, "Well," -- I said, "Would you do this?"

And he said, "Yes." And then after everything was -- was settled, he said to me -- before leaving the room, he said, "Well, you have studied the law. I" -- he was a medical student. "So you tell me, that's punishable under the law, is it not? It's an infraction," because duels were forbidden, you see, officially in the penal code.

And I said, "Yes, it is punishable."

And he said, "It doesn't make any difference to me, but I still wanted to know." And I think that was a very good and sober statement. He wanted to know that he was breaking the law, and then he decided to do it, just the same,

you see. So he has never been rash in his life. It was a very -- still alive and a very, very slow, meditative, and important man. He's the greatest doctor -- considered to be the greatest doctor of Germany at this moment. And he said this very wonderful saying, "It is punishable, is it not?" you see. "I'm going through with it just the same." That's ethics, gentlemen.

So please take this down, gentlemen. The relation of ethics to logos is that the logos comes first. It must be -- you must listen; before, you -- otherwise you are a wild animal. If you then feel co- -- urged to act to the existing code, you are -- acts in -- of freedom, you see, you have not broken the law, you see, in the same sense as an animal, which has to be punished, because he didn't -- it -- just was out of bounds. It's very strangely unknown in this country. You see, you think the ethical command is both: intellectual, truthful, you see, and good. The true, and the good, and the beautiful aren't so simply -- unified. Old -- the -- the stream of consciousness reaches you through what is said, as order. Then your neighbor suddenly impresses you with the necessity of sympathetic -- or antithetic action, whatever it is. And that provokes you to your new response. And that is up to you. And you never know whether you should follow the law, or should not follow the law. In 99 cases, you may be perfectly safe just to do what the law requires. I don't say at all that in many cases you will never feel any conflict between what the law requires that you do and what you have to do. But the one case is important, which explains what is ethics. Ethics is when it is upon your conscience.

Here, where is this man {Forrester} -- {Forrester}?

(Foster?)

No, you are the wrong one. Well, he isn't -- he has left? Well, I just had a discussion with a man who called -- spoke -- called the conscience a dynamic thing. A dynamic conscious. I said -- well, here you are. Wie?

(Porter.)

Oh, pardon me. Porter. I should say. So Mr. Porter, you see? Now you know why there is no dynamic conscience. There is conscience against sci- -- knowledge, you see. Your conscience, you see, must be informed, you see, about the existing law. And then your conscience is creative at that moment, you see. Under the impact of what has been said, and the conflict with what is there, you see, to make your decision. Can you see the difference?

Let's go back now to the text after a little break. Five minutes.

[tape interruption]

(...{ }.)

("But really, I should not have thought the true lawgiver ought to have the trouble of working out things of that sort in laws or constitution, either in a badly or in a well-governed city. In the one, because they are useless and do no good; in the other, because sometimes they follow naturally from former conduct. For it's not anyone {to} find out what to do.")

("Then what more could they {want for} in their legislation?")

("For us, nothing. But for Apollo and Delphi, the greatest, and finest, and { }.")

Now, just to show you the absolute indifference. This we have read already, and nobody told me this. Terrible.

("The founding of temples, and sacrifices, and the worship of God, and spirits and heroes besides. { } began. And whatever services are due to those in the next world to keep them gracious, for these are matters we do not know ourselves. And in founding our city, we will obey no man {if we have sense}, and we will use no interpreter except the god of our fathers, for this god, I take it, is the ancestral interpreter of such matters for all mankind. And he sits in the middle of the earth, upon the navel, and interprets.")

Well. There's an old saying, gentlemen, which you just as well may retain: "{Repetitio mater studiorum}." Repetition is the mother of studies. So we have read this last time, so we read it here again. I told you something about the center of the universe.

Gentlemen, in the Bible, and in Christianity, the middle of the universe is in time. Christ is the center of history. In Greek thinking, since time is cyclical, and just moving in cycles--and in circles I'm afraid, too--the problem is to find the cen- -- the navel of the universe, the center, you see. And that's why you know that we have a Greek book which is called the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which means the knowledge in a circle. "Encyclo" -- that's "encyclopedia," you see, to be educated -- { } means -- with the Greek word here, of Plato, education. And this is then, gentlemen, the seat -- the center paragraph, in the heart of The Republic, by which you can get hold of the Greek -- organ- -- mentality. The idea is to be in the center of the universe; in Boston they call it how?

("Hub.")

The hub of the universe, you see, as -- is considered a wheel. But the whole problem is always thinking in terms of space. You are in the middle of something you can mentally overlook.

This is important, gentlemen. You must get hold of the fact: what is the Greek? what is mind?, what is humanism? You are all thinking that humanism is something that can stand on its own legs. Humanism is the arbitrary half of reality. It's time to organize the world as space. You are sitting in the middle of the universe, and you look at it -- into -- out into the -- out to the periphery. And you buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as though this was the periphery of all your knowledge; and inside of this you sit in your museum, or however you call it. And anybody who -- who ha- -- looks through this Greek thing, knows of course that this is a strange abstraction, that it is much more important to have the Book of Books, which is written in 15- -- through 1500 or 2,000 years, and can be continued to the -- backwards to the beginning of the -- history and down to the last days of judgment. The title of the Bible, gentlemen, is Book of Books, as you know. The Bible is not a book, but "biblion" in Greek means "book," and it is -- means "the book of books." That is, all the books written -- ever written have their meaning in this. That is the anti- -- the antithesis to the Greek mind. And you and I, gentlemen, we are condemned to deal with two ment- -- possible mentalities. One thinking in terms of time, and one thinking in terms of space. And Plato is only, I'm afraid, one-half of the -- approach to reality which you always try. Oh, Mr. {Batchelder}? Oh, pardon me. Please, by all means.

That's why -- at this point here, we may stop and -- because we have reached the center -- na‹ve -- very na‹ve statement of Plato. He thinks that this is not ridiculous. To you, to speak of the navel of Delphi as the center of the orb, it's just -- we have no approach anymore. But in this sublimation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we still all believe in it. And here you can see the difference, gentlemen, between the conditions of the philosophical mind -- first impressions, where there is -- Apollo in Delphi sitting on the -- or the priest is sitting on the {tripod} and it's called the navel of the earth. The Greeks made out of this an ideal world. The very word "ideal" is -- comes in here, you see, and says to you and me, "Let's have an encyclopedic knowledge."

Gentlemen, an encyclopedic knowledge of the universe makes -- does paralyze us. You take a man who knows the -- a -- Encyclopaedia Britannica by heart, what about his ethics? Can he act? Can he be a statesman? You see, he cannot, because he knows so many things that he cannot possibly know what to do next. It's impossible for him, you see, because he knows too many things. The problem of a statesman is to do -- to know what next. In other words, to rule a state, you have to know the timing. The problem of timing is the essential political quality. And therefore, philosophers must never be kings. And as you know,

Plato has put in The Republic before us the -- the -- the -- s- -- solution, that if philosophers could be kings, then the state would be in the best of shape.

This is the ultimate in space-thinking that has ever been thought of, and -- and whenever this comes true, gentlemen, you get the cruelty of the Bolsheviks. The -- in -- in Bolshevism, the philosopher is king. And you cannot breathe. There is no {freedom}. You are just a part of the system, of his system, you see. He has thought out every law. And the natural relation of logos, ethos, and physis is destroyed. As soon as a philosopher is king, I'm afraid ethos and physis coincide. In for- -- one form or other, you see, the physical law and the mental law of your own mind crush any freedom of -- between friends. This you must see. And it is -- the strange thing is that on Page 225, which is usually overread by most of you, gentlemen, and in America--nobody pays any attention to this sentence about Apollo, it looks so perfectly silly, and who is interested in Plato -- in the navel of -- at Delphi?--yet you have the heart of the matter. To think that a philosopher can be king is exactly the same as thinking that you can know the center of the universe, because then you construe a world inside of which, by total knowledge, you know everything potentially, what has to be done.

The only thing, gentlemen, that a man in life must know is what next. You -- you will -- be very happy if you know what to do next. I assure you, nobody knows what to do after next. Nobody, you see. Even the wisest one doesn't. And -- so it is much more difficult to do -- to know what is next, you see, than to know everything, because next is not everything, and everything is not next. Next does not exist in Plato's philosophy, because all philosophy cuts up the reality into space. An outer world of nature, an inner world of ethical conjunction, you see, and in a -- a world from above, of inspiration from logos, which tells you what you are up against with regard to your comrades in arms, or your co-citizens, or your family, and with regard to the plants, and stones, and mountains, and enemies outside. But it never tells you of history.

Plato is anti-historical, gentlemen. Plato is utopian. And therefore today, gentlemen, The Republic I think is a very dangerous book. If you would take The Republic literally, you would become slave drivers. You would become administers of -- forced-labor camps, et cetera. And all the Russians--Mr. Lenin and -- more than anybody else--are Platonists. But it is a tremendous temptation. I think most of you are under this spell.

Shall we now go onto the Fifth Book, please? Please. Page 246.

("Then with good enough right, I call such a city {an institution} in such -- in such a man. { } blundering the others. If this one is right both in the managing the cities and their manner of furnishing the -- the soul of individual citizens that are classical

-- four conditions of wickedness.")

("What are these?")

("I was going one -- to give a list of them in order as they appear to follow one after another when Polemarchus, who sat a little way from Adeimantus, stretched out a hand and caught hold of the upper part of his brother's wrap near the shoulder, pulled him towards himself, and leaning forward, whispered something in his ear. I did not catch what it was, except this. Shall we put them off, then, or what shall we do?")

You take Adeimantus.

("Let him off? No.")

Ja?

("Exactly why don't you two let off?")

Ja?

(You.)

("Why -- but why, exactly? You are -- you are shirking, we think. You are cheating us out of a whole chapter of discussion, and by no means the smallest, because you don't want to discuss it. Do you imagine you will get away with remarks you dropped in that like way? What was it about women and children { } anyone did you say, that friends will have all in common?")

("Well, wasn't that quite right, Adeimantus?")

("Yes, but just that. "Quite right" warrants explaining, like the rest of it warrants. How they shall be in common, there might be many ways, so don't fail to tell us which way you mean. We have been waiting ever so long, hoping to hear what you have to say about child getting. How will they get children? How will they train them when they come? And all this community of wives and children of which you speak, we think it will have a great and capital effect on the state, according as it is rightly or wrongly done. You are putting your hand to another constitution before you have proper- -- properly finished this, and so you have heard, we are now resolved not to let you go before you have discussed all these things like the rest.")

Now, somebody playing the Glaucon. Here.

("Put me down as voting likewise for that.")

And Thrasymachus said, "Oh yes, we are all decided on this, Socrates. Take that for granted."

("Oh, dear me. What a thing you have done, challenging me like this. What a debate you are stirring up. It looks like doing the constitution again from the beginning. I thought I had finished now, and glad indeed I was. Quite happy if I could just be accepted, and left alone as described. And now you demand all this, too. You can't imagine what a hornet's nest of words you are waking. But I saw it and passed it by to prevent trouble.")

"My dear man. That's what these people have come for. They left all to come and hear words. Do you suppose they are looking for a gold mine?"

("Words, yes. But not words without end. We must draw the line somewhere.")

("Draw the line at the end of life, Socrates. For a man having sense, when words can be heard such as these. But never mind us. Just get on and answer our questions. Tell a story in your own way, only don't give up. What will be this community --")

Just stop here. Gentlemen, here, this is an example of the best ethics of Plato. You remember that I said the dialogue is the ethics of Plato, the form of the dialogue. Now here are four men coming in. Two first, and then Glaucon and -- Thrasymachus and Polemarchus joining him, isn't it right? Yes. And there are the first expressions of timing. If you look at the paragraph -- sentence I had to read -- of course, no -- today it's always overread -- these are the problems of waiting, of expectation. And he says the -- this may go on -- "draw the line at the end of life." These are all temporary notions. Ethics has always to do with timing. The whole problem of moral -- moral life between citizens, gentlemen, between good people, is when to tell your mother that you are going to marry this girl, you see. You can break the confidence and trust of your good girl if you say it too early. You can lose the confidence of your mother if you say it too late. The whole problem of say- -- telling your parents where -- whom you are going to marry--it is always tragic news to them--is to know when it has to be said. Never too early, gentlemen. Don't rush. When you have seen a girl once and tell your mother at home, "This is the girl I'm going to marry." Because you aren't going to marry the girl if you have to tell it too early. I assure you. Premature saying is just immature saying. And immature love shouldn't get married. So wait long enough until you -- your se- -- you have proven to yourself that you can keep a secret. And tell people so that you can show to yourself that you have the stamina to -- confess to the world what your -- opinion is. It has to -- be -- weighed both ways.

All the time, gentlemen, ethics have to do with timing. And in this dialogue, every good, ethical statement comes from the relation of the speakers. Here, these men say, "You aren't through. You made it -- too -- too much in a hurry. Dwell on this." He says, "Well, I didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest." These are profound, moral quar- -- quandaries. These are the real problems in life, gentlemen. Ethics is the problem of timing. Physics is the problem of spacing. We have to posit -- posit -- to place the thing is -- makes you -- makes you the expert on a thing, where to put things. Then you know how -- what things are. But when to say things, and when to silence -- be silent, shows that you are a human being.

A man who cannot keep a secret doesn't know what ethics is. You see, in this country, where everything is publicized -- when Mr. -- Mr. Hoover, Jr., lost his parents and had to be woken up at 2 o'clock or at 4 o'clock at night because of the Suez issue, and was trembling -- found trembling, Drew Pearson could write it up the next day in the -- his terrible letter. And we knew that there was panic in Washington. Gentlemen, a great nation cannot afford to appear as panicky in the eyes of the rest of the world. That's high treason. I would have said, "This is high treason." Because if the government was panicky -- I don't want to believe it -- then it should not be told. It is terrible that -- the Russians could then laugh at us and say, "We -- we have driven the -- the Americans," you see, "into a panic." Then of course, they can say, "We send volunteers to Egypt." That's what they said next day. If they hadn't known that we had lost our -- our good -- our courage, they wouldn't have said that.

So gentlemen, this is very difficult for you to understand, because it brings up the whole question of knowledge. If you have only physis and logos, then all knowledge is good. If you have any ethical situation, gentlemen, then knowledge has to be timed. And certain things must not be known, you see, by everybody. Knowledge, too, has its history. And knowledge has its timing. And if -- if -- we wouldn't have this terrible publicity stunt in this country, and the quiz kids and all this nonsense, if you hadn't the dogma that knowledge can be made known to all people at all times. Well, the result is that you can't have any foreign policy. And that we always lose the initiative, that we always are licked, because in a democracy, you have to tell everything to everybody, so you can only talk about unimportant things. What you can tell all the people, gentlemen, isn't worth telling.

Theodore Roosevelt had a postmaster general who wrote his memoirs. And he said that they -- when the Russians went to war against the Japanese in 1904 and '05, there was a famous battle of Tsushima -- you may have heard of this -- in which Togo, Japanese admiral, defeated Mr. Rozhdestvenski and his Russian fleet when they came into the straits between Korea and Japan. And Mr.

{von der L„nger} -- I think is his name, or something like that -- {L„ng-} -- {L„ngacke} -- ja, {von der L„ngacke}, German descent he was -- writes in his memoirs: "We were all agreed in Washington, that in our case, in such a war, we couldn't have delivered this fatal blow to the Russian fleet, because the Japanese fleet had to be in the straits of Tsushima for six weeks in advance, because it was so uncertain when the Russians would finally get there. Now it is impossible in America to keep a secret--where the whole American fleet is for six weeks--from the public. Our democratic way of life just wouldn't -- make a victory, as in Tsushima, utterly impossible."

That is a good example, I think, of, you see, the problem of -- of ethics. Ethics always will divide the world of knowledge into silence, or secret and revelation, opening, you see. Knowledge about nature doesn't know this distinction. There is no distinction about what you know of plants today and tomorrow. Let's know all the facts, because they are dead. But the battle of Tsushima is a secret. And you can see how -- how the tragedy of the last 20 years -- Mr. McCarthy -- has been this na‹vet‚ that all the facts can always be known, and that the atom bomb can be given to the Russians, you see. Because why not? Everybody -- must know everything. From a scientific point about natural science, it's perfectly logical, you see, that everything can be known by everybody at all times. From the point of security of the United States, you see, it's high treason if you do so. The whole problem of the trial of the Rosenbergs is here involved, you see. From a purely knowledgeable point of view, what is knowledge, you can har- -- never say "Why not?" This is physics, you see. And in physics, there is no distinction between secret and -- and open -- publicity. And you try to treat politics as publicity stunts, and therefore senators have to -- to debate with quiz kids.

Well, if this is so, then the senator is an unimportant person, because we are -- I'm only interested in my good senator from Vermont -- Senator Aiken, and Senator Flanders, because I think these two men can keep a secret. And therefore I trust them. A representative government is impossible if you don't trust people that they can keep a secret, and that I can rely on their doing a good thing without my knowing it. If you have to tell everything to your -- to your constituency, you are unnecessary. You are just a mail carrier. And we have today, as you know, the system of mail carriers -- that they -- boy -- these poor boys in Washington have to count the letters they receive from the public. How can I know what these people know in Washington. I hope they know a little more than I, because they have their secrets. In their committees, they know facts I do not know. And they cannot tell me everything at once, why they have to vote in this manner or in this manner. I can of course show them my trend of thought, but if they do otherwise, I have to feel they had good reasons for doing this. Don't you under- -- understand that you can't have representative govern-

ment unless you assume that people going to Washington have a little more insight than you have?

But you don't believe this, and that's why you -- we practically -- the Congress has nothing to say anymore. As soon as you -- as the representative in Washington is only reporting that 1500 letters were in favor, and 200 letters were against it, he's absolutely superfluous, because if he then has to decide by the 1500 letters, why did you send him to Washington? You can have a referendum on this. And you don't have to have any representative government.

So ethics, gentlemen, have to do with these two things: timing, secret, and divulging secrets. And without secrets, there is no -- without pri- -- there is no life. Any life needs secrets. And people are so dead in the modern world because they have no secrets. They don't know what a secret is. A secret is -- something that has still to grow into public life, because it is immature. And it is as any bud before the bl- -- leaves open. Gentlemen, nothing can bud after all into -- into a flower that hasn't gone through this process of ripening.

A diplomat visited me a fortnight ago. And he said to me, "Nothing can grow anymore. We had it"--it was just after the Suez incident--"it all was growing up a nice, peaceful understanding between the various nations, but this damn publicity has destroyed everything." He didn't go into the details. He just came form Europe, after a number of interviews with -- or not interviews, I mean, conversations with statesmen there. And he said, "It is simply terrible. The general public has to be taken so much into confidence all the time, prematurely." You know treaties arrived at in public discussion and open agreements, this famous phrase of Wilson -- have you -- what -- what's the phrase? You remember?

("Open treaties openly arrived at.")

Yes. "Openly arrived at." Well, what can you openly arrive at, you see? You cannot propose to your girl on Times Square with all the lights blaring, and the floodlights playing on you. But all life is like proposing to somebody and being -- being accepted.

I only may -- wanted to make you see an example of what I call "ethics." The first two pages of the Book Five of the -- of Plato's state is, of course, they are always -- omitted, so to speak, from the picture. They se- -- don't seem to be important. Yet they give you the tact, the artistry of Plato, as a dramatist, as a former -- playwright, and poet. Plato had to have, of course, a de- -- a very deep understanding into the process of timing, when to say something. And here, this is one of the most famous places of retardation.

As you know -- all great art is retardation. That's why the movies are not interesting in -- as art, because they don't know how to retard. They always think they must promise you quick communication. Say everything at once, far too much, you see. Rush. Quick, quick, quick, quick. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Don't bore people. Don't stop them. Well, all great art begins, gentlemen, in such a way that you know the whole story in advance. In the first verse of Homer -- of The Iliad, you know the whole end of the Iliad. And then it goes on for 24 hours. And that's great art. There you are treated as an ethical comrade who goes -- undergoes the tension, and the expectation, and the disappointments. Although you know the whole outcome, you read it breathlessly. In a -- in a movie, as you know, you don't know -- detective story -- that's the most stupid kind of literature there is, mystery stories; only for idiots and mathematicians. And -- yes. You see, because in a mystery story, you are kept -- that's not -- no art. You see, you are -- in the last line, you finally know who murdered the child. I won't -- don't want to know that. I'm not interested. The murder shouldn't have been committed, that's all. And that's interesting. But who murdered the child? Heavens!

[tape interruption]