Suárez, Faulkner and Gould: three refusals of the given order

Francisco Suárez died in Lisbon on 25 September 1617, a little over three months short of his seventieth birthday, after a fortnight's convalescence from what the Stanford Encyclopedia cautiously describes as possibly dysentery. He had come down from Coimbra, where Philip II had installed him in the principal chair of theology twenty years earlier to lend the university some lustre. His contemporaries called him Doctor Eximius, the Exceptional Doctor. The Society of Jesus, which he had served for fifty-three years, had very nearly not admitted him: when he applied at sixteen his was, of fifty applications that year, the only one refused, on the grounds of weak health and an unpromising mind. He appealed and was let in at the lowest grade, with his status to be settled later.

Two hundred and eighty years afterwards, on 25 September 1897, William Faulkner was born at New Albany, Mississippi. Thirty-five years after that, on 25 September 1932, Glenn Gould was born at 32 Southwood Drive in the Beaches district of Toronto. Neither was a philosopher, and this series has a rule that a novelist or a pianist earns a place only if the argument can be made rather than gestured at. It can, in both cases, and it is the same argument that puts Suárez at the head of the page.

Each of the three took a thing that arrived in a fixed order, Aristotle's text, the calendar, the unrepeatable evening in a hall, and insisted that the order of arrival was not the order of truth. Suárez wrote the first metaphysics arranged by its own logic rather than by the sequence of the Metaphysics it had always been a commentary on. Faulkner told a story four times in the wrong order and was accused by Sartre of having abolished the future. Gould walked off a stage in Los Angeles in April 1964 and spent the rest of his life arguing that a performance made from spliced tape was not a lesser thing than a performance heard once, but a truer one. The coincidence of the date is only a coincidence. The pattern is worth the space.

Suárez writes metaphysics in its own order#

The Disputationes metaphysicae came out at Salamanca in 1597, in two folio volumes, the year Suárez went to Coimbra. For three and a half centuries metaphysics had been taught as commentary: one took Aristotle's fourteen books in turn and disputed the questions each raised. Suárez abandoned the commentarium and wrote a treatise, fifty-four disputations in two parts of twenty-seven, beginning from the concept of being as such and proceeding through its properties, its causes, the division into infinite and finite being, substance and accident, and finally the beings of reason that have no existence outside the mind. Aristotle is everywhere in it and organises none of it. That change of form was itself a philosophical claim: that the science of being has a structure of its own which the order of an old book had been concealing.

The book's fortune was extraordinary and, for a Jesuit, ironic. It became the metaphysics textbook of Protestant Germany as much as of Catholic Spain and Portugal, and the vocabulary it fixed, on the analogy of being, on the distinction between essence and existence, on the individuation of each thing by its own entity rather than by matter, became the vocabulary in which the seventeenth century learned to think before it decided what to think. Heidegger, in the lecture course of 1927 published as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, put it more strongly than any Thomist would: "Suárez is the thinker who had the strongest influence on modern philosophy. Descartes is directly dependent on him, using his terminology almost everywhere." Grotius, Leibniz, Pufendorf and Schopenhauer all found reason to cite him, and Grotius said he had scarcely met his equal. Those who prefer their history of philosophy to run from Descartes forward, with the scholastics as a dark interval, have to explain why the man who wanted to begin again from nothing borrowed his word for the "objective reality" of an idea from a Jesuit manual. The full story of that borrowing, and of what Leibniz then did with it, is more than a calendar entry can hold; the reader who wants Leibniz as something other than Voltaire's caricature can start here.

The political Suárez is less read and, in one respect, more surprising. De legibus (1612) argued that although all authority is ultimately from God, political power is given first to the community and only then transferred, by its consent, to a ruler; and it drew a line between the natural law and the law of nations, which he treated as resting on custom. That is a good deal closer to Locke than to the divine right of kings, and King James I noticed. Defensio fidei (1613), written at the Pope's request against James's oath of allegiance, argued that a king who turns tyrant has forfeited what the people conferred. James had it burned by the common hangman in London at the end of 1613, and the Parlement of Paris, which disliked Rome as much as it disliked tyrannicide, burned it again in its own courtyard the following year. Two days from now this series reaches Bossuet, who was educated by Jesuits and spent his life arguing the opposite case with equal learning.

Suárez's death, then, closes a chapter that the textbooks usually pretend had ended a century earlier. The last great scholastic system was written not in the fourteenth century but in the year Descartes turned one, and the modern philosophy that congratulated itself on starting fresh was, for a generation, taught out of it.

Faulkner, Sartre and the man in the open car#

The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929 and gives the collapse of the Compson family four times: through Benjy, who has no sense of time at all; through Quentin, who breaks his watch on the morning of his suicide so as to be rid of it; through Jason, who counts everything; and finally through an omniscient narrator who declines to explain. The chronology is scrambled within sections as well as between them. Faulkner's habit of doing this, in As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! as well, is what the calendar has to defend, and the defence is best conducted by the man who attacked it.

Jean-Paul Sartre's essay on the novel appeared in 1939, in the Nouvelle Revue Française, under the title "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner". It is a philosopher's reading, and a hostile one. "In Faulkner's work," Sartre wrote, "there is never any progression, never anything which comes from the future." He compared Faulkner's vision of the world "to that of a man sitting in an open car and looking backwards": the past acquires "a sort of super-reality, its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable", and the present is only what it becomes as it slips behind. Against this he set the account of temporality he had taken from Heidegger and would make his own in Being and Nothingness four years later. Consciousness, he insisted, projects itself forward; one cannot "arrest man at each present and define him as the sum of what he has". The essay ends with a sentence that has been quoted ever since, sometimes as praise and sometimes not: "I like his art, but I do not believe in his metaphysics. A closed future is still a future."

Two things need saying about that verdict. The first is that Sartre took the temporality of Quentin Compson, a suicide's, for Faulkner's own, and later critics, Carl Rollyson among them, have pointed out that Absalom, Absalom! is a novel in which the past changes every time someone tells it, which is not the metaphysics of the man in the open car. The second is that the line everyone attributes to Faulkner on this subject, "The past is never dead. It's not even past", is spoken by a character, the lawyer Gavin Stevens, in Requiem for a Nun (1951), and carries whatever authority a fictional lawyer carries. Faulkner's argument, if he had one, is in the form: the story told out of order is not a puzzle to be reassembled into the right order; it is the shape of a mind for which the order was never given. The Nobel Prize came in 1949 and the Pulitzers, for the lesser books, in 1955 and 1963. He died in 1962. Heidegger, whose account of time Sartre was borrowing, turns up on this page tomorrow.

Gould leaves the hall#

Gould's Columbia recording of the Goldberg Variations, made in 1955 and released the following year, was among the best-selling classical records of its decade and made a twenty-three-year-old from Toronto famous on two continents. Nine years later, on 10 April 1964, he played a recital at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, left the stage, and never gave a public concert again. He was thirty-one. The remaining eighteen years were spent in studios, in radio, and in print, explaining why.

The explanation that matters is "The Prospects of Recording", which High Fidelity published in April 1966, in volume 16, number 4, across pages 46 to 63, adapted from a ninety-minute programme Gould had made for the CBC. It is, as the Library and Archives Canada catalogue drily notes, "a lengthy and occasionally difficult essay". Its claims are three. The concert is a competitive ritual whose audience attends, in part, for the possibility of the performer's failure; the studio replaces that with what Gould called a more direct means of communication. Second, editing is not cheating but composition: Gould describes recording two complete takes of the A minor fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, finding both "monotonous", and discovering that take six suited the opening and close while take eight was better in the middle. The spliced result, he wrote, was a performance far superior to anything he could have done in one pass. Third, and most far-reaching, the listener at the controls of a playback system, adjusting balance and, one day, choosing between takes, becomes a participant in the work rather than its recipient.

Set that beside Faulkner. A performance that arrives once, in the hall, in the order it is played, has the same claim on us that Sartre wanted the future to have: it is what happens, and cannot be revised. Gould's reply was that the order of happening was never the point. The fugue is not truer for having been played straight through on a Tuesday; the best opening and the best middle, whenever they were played, make the best fugue. Walter Benjamin, who dies on this page tomorrow, had argued in 1936 that mechanical reproduction strips the work of its aura, its unique presence in time and space. Gould read the same fact from the other side and welcomed it. Our survey of what the philosophers of art have to say about machine-made images puts the two positions next to each other; the dispute they opened, about whether a work assembled from parts is the work, has not been settled by anyone since, and generative systems have made it a live question again.

There is a complication that Gould's admirers tend to skip. The performer who withdraws from the audience into the studio is also the performer who acquires, for the first time, total control over what the audience hears. Liberation of the listener and consolidation of the artist's authority are the same act, and Gould, who edited his own tapes and wrote his own liner notes, knew it. He re-recorded the Goldberg Variations in 1981, slower and, in his own account, to treat the aria and its thirty variations as one whole rather than thirty-two pieces. It was among the last records he made. On 27 September 1982, two days after his fiftieth birthday, he suffered a stroke that paralysed his left side; he died in Toronto on 4 October, when his father agreed to the withdrawal of life support.

What the three have in common, and what they do not#

Suárez broke with the commentary because he believed being had an order that Aristotle's book obscured. Faulkner broke chronology because he did not believe a mind had one. Gould broke with the concert because he believed the work had an order that a single evening could only approximate. These are not the same position. The first and third are realists about the structure of the thing, and rearrange the presentation to fit it; the second is a sceptic about structure altogether, or at least about the kind that comes with a clock. Sartre's objection to Faulkner would not touch Suárez or Gould, and Benjamin's objection to Gould would not touch Faulkner.

What they share is narrower and more useful. Each was told, in his own century, that the given order was the order, that the text, the calendar, the concert were not merely conventions of presentation but constitutive of the thing presented, and each answered that this was a confusion of the vehicle with the cargo. Each was also, in his way, punished for it: Suárez by two bonfires, Faulkner by a decade of neglect before the Nobel, Gould by a critical establishment that treated his exit as a nervous complaint. The calendar cannot adjudicate. It can only note that on one day it produced three of them.

Also on the day#

At nine o'clock this evening, in the Lechwelten at Lech am Arlberg, the Philosophicum Lech presents its Tractatus essay prize, worth 25,000 euros, to Maria-Sibylla Lotter for Opfer. Über Verwundbarkeit als Selbstbild (Hanser). Our account of the book and the jury's reasoning is here, and the wider Lech programme, which runs to Sunday, is in the late-September conference diary. Yesterday's entry in this series, on Cardano and Paracelsus, is here.