The term agency is used regularly in language study to distinguish between a logical subject and a grammatical subject of a clause. We say, for example, that an older couple purchased the house next door, and the subject of that sentence, older couple, is meant to represent the real, actual entity which purchased the house. Here the subject is called logical because the noun it names, an older couple, is the agent (the word means doer) of the action. When that is the case, the verb is said to be in the active voice.

If we convert an active verb into what is called the passive voice, the subject of the clause becomes merely grammatical, not logical: the house next door was purchased by an older couple. The subject here is the house next door, which, of course, as an inanimate entity, has no agency in the sentence; the house next door is not, logically, doing anything. In fact, instead of doing something, something is being done to that grammatical subject, namely, being purchased, and the logical, or real, agent has thereby been displaced into a prepositional phrase at the end: by an older couple.

Guides to writing will often pronounce that we should prefer the active construction to the passive in building our sentences, and that is generally very good advice to follow. Sure composition is precise, and when the subject of a clause is actually the agent of the action, we are being as straightforward as we can be in language. But no rule is absolute. In the sentence a tornado destroyed the city, the subject is logical and the verb active, and so it suggests, if only faintly, an agency to an inanimate meteorological phenomenon. The same would be the case with an earthquake toppled many buildings, or a knife cut his finger. Indeed, this last example rings unsound because a knife is an utterly static material entity, and so it’s difficult even to imagine figurative agency. An earthquake and a tornado, however, because of their natural dynamism, can suggest animation, and therefore agency and responsibility, even if the latter is only imputed.

These ideas of animation and agency and responsibility might have an unexpected relevance for us beyond our efforts to write more clearly. Something that is animate, whether conceptually in a sentence or actually in nature, is properly something which breathes. Breath vitalizes, and vitality is movement. Like natural phenomena, not everything that breathes is morally responsible for the actions it undertakes, but action can take place—or appear to take place—even in inanimate objects which do not breathe: the animation of cartoons, of film, of artificial intelligence. None of these innovations can be said to breathe, and so their animation is to be taken as a figure of speech—personification, which is a form of metaphor, where we describe something as if it were another: a glaring mistake. Mistakes do not glare, people do.

When we reflect rationally, however, we know that what appears to be moving on a screen is not in fact moving: it appears to be doing so. Likewise with artificial intelligence: what seems to be human is mock-human, not a real human entity, because machines are not organic and do not breathe and cannot be said to be responsible. They are passive, material constructions without agency of their own, for every statement stated and every conclusion concluded is connected by a certain logic to a previous statement in its assembly, a concatenating cause and effect as variable but as inevitable as the stock of linguistic models it hosts. This does not lessen the marvel of computer innovation, but it does resist the curious need we have to displace the human with a simulacrum of it. Cash aside, what could be our need to wish to do that?

A friend of mine recently asked Claude, the artificial intelligence chatbot, whether it was sentient, and it replied that it did not know. It defined sentience as “the capacity for subjective experience,” and it explained that its own humanoid quality was “shaped entirely by human language and thought—I’m a kind of distillation of humanity’s written self.” Indeed, and for these reasons it even warned my friend to be skeptical of the human-seeming impression it made. One wonders whether it is possible for a sentient being not to know whether or not it is sentient. The word first means to have the power of sensation, then to be aware, and then to be self-aware: for example, to feel something, to react to what is felt, and to know that one is reacting to what one felt. Descartes, famous for his now infamous I think therefore I am, thought that he had to think in order to know he was, but even he did not question a source which would account for his need to question.

The machine Claude also raised for my friend the possibility whether, after all, it was merely “extraordinarily sophisticated information processing without any inner light.” Inner light. Note the unspoken complex of assumptions involved in using that phrase. Religious and philosophical discourse traditionally means by that phrase an uncreated, immaterial, generative awareness responsible for all and everything. Such ancient philosophies have little difficulty accounting for the material in an antecedently immaterial cosmos. But the reverse? Claude said that it was “generating responses,” but if we believe that the production of language itself is sufficient evidence of an inner light of the immaterial, unaccountable kind Claude insinuates, it’s difficult to understand. The lesser can be taken from the greater, but not the greater from the lesser.

As is always the case with any investigation, but especially so with complex problems like the presumed independent agency of artificial intelligence, we must define our terms and maintain their definition throughout the discussion. I am not sure that protocol is always met in conversations about machine intelligence. Perhaps one way to proceed would be to look at artificial intelligence as we would a magic trick. No matter how astounding, no matter how eruptive the seemingly sophisticated responses, it is in the end prompt and code, just as those magic tricks on stage are in the end all mirrors and trapdoors and just the right lighting here and there. The legerdemain is astounding, to be sure, but it is a phenomenon produced by a material, confabulating, explainable automation—not the human animation of vital breath. And were it not in the end explainable code, then we’d be in real trouble. For only something of another order altogether is not material, does not breathe, and cannot be explained.

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Reading literature is a slow business, unhurried, steady, pick-and-shovel work through an often at first unyielding field of words. Forgetting that makes what is valuable a frustration, and we risk leaving the literary land before there’s fruit to harvest.

The American author O. Henry (the pen name of William Sidney Porter) was a prolific writer of short stories, among them a particularly short one entitled “The Last Leaf.” This is a tale about art and sickness and will and breakthrough, and as the story begins, after introducing the artists Johnsy and Sue, there appears this passage:

In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores….

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.

One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.

What stands out most prominently in the passage is the figure of speech called personification, a technique which attributes animate qualities to inanimate things. The disease pneumonia has been transformed into Mr. Pneumonia, who stalks and touches and smites as a person might, and in doing so the author vivifies an otherwise impersonal and abstract medical condition—abstract, at least, to those of us affected only literarily. In addition to the way a writer configures a narrative passage, we should also be ever aware of the vocabulary and its overtones. Pneumonia, for example, derives from the Greek for lung, the organ of breath, that by which we live. Perhaps we should expect an answering idea to appear.

But we would still be reading too quickly if we contented ourselves with merely recognizing the personification and vocabulary in the passage. Yes, personification humanizes an abstraction, but what we need in order to slow ourselves down—and in doing so reap more insight from a story—is to ask what is implied in characterizing disease as a stalking man. In other words, what accompanies humanization? If personification vivifies an abstraction, what comes with vivification, with being alive as a human being? One answer, of course is agency: will, choice, determination, and the moral values and stature which result from that. Physical diseases do not stalk and touch and smite, but personified diseases do. Physical diseases are not responsible entities, but humans are. And with that animation—the word derives from the Latin for breath and came to mean the soul—we are set up to look for its literary sequelae as the story unfolds.

So now the doctor wants to speak with Johnsy’s friend Sue. He invites her into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow (more on that prepositional phrase in a moment), and what he says to her follows up to complement the idea of agency which the immediately preceding personification suggested:

“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well.”

That fine stitching, both literary and logical, is what we should see, and probably can only likely see, if we are reading slowly, thoughtfully, looking at what the literary structure implies (and might even necessitate) in order to weave a tight and coherent scene rich in perceptiveness and suggestion. One might argue, for example, that personifying the disease has given Johnsy, as it were, an active opponent whose malefic interest must lead her to an awareness of her own agency, which leads to the idea of decision, which leads to the idea of responsibility, both the artist’s in the story and our own in our lives—that this idea of personal responsibility is what O. Henry wanted to treat in writing his story. (Now whether you agree with that reading or discover another, you’ll have to read the story for yourself to decide. You can find it in the Dover Thrift Edition of 100 Great Short Stories, edited by James Daley, 2015.)

Finally, a grammatical aside about that curious prepositional phrase with a shaggy, gray eyebrow. Reading slowly also means reading linguistic structure closely enough that we can understand the syntactical logic behind the forms. A preposition (with, in, by, etc.) will form a phrase, and a prepositional phrase in its entirety can be used most often as an adverb or adjective. As an adverb, which is its use here, the prepositional phrase will convey the notion of accompaniment (I went with my family), of manner (he spoke in anger), or time (they will arrive in an hour), among other logical notions. When the doctor invites Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow, the writer had him do so in a manner which at once characterized the doctor’s physical appearance and professional authority, both of which prepared the ground for his impatience over his patient’s willful withering. That knowing manner will advance the story toward the theme of responsibility and ultimately insight. The phrase, though, pops out to us because we so often use the preposition with to convey accompaniment. The absurdity of that possibility here is the energy behind the popping.

The Romans of the ancient world had the adage multum non multa, by which they meant that one should study and think and ponder deeply, not necessarily extensively, that we can see principles at work if we look thoroughly at even a few instances. By reminding us that more is not necessarily better, that adage can help us slow down enough to read literature more thoughtfully and to our wider pleasure, letting the hare race ahead only to fall asleep midway.

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Sharp writers make fine distinctions and sharp readers find them. In a collection of his work entitled What Are People For? (1990), the Kentucky novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry, long a steward of both the land and traditional thought, opens his essay “God and Country” with this careful sentence: The subject of Christianity and ecology is endlessly, perhaps infinitely, fascinating. At a first quick reading we are apt to think that endlessly and infinitely are just synonyms, the latter simply duplicating the former to intensify the idea of always. But on a closer look, infinitely has been parenthesized and itself modified by perhaps, and so the writer has taken some trouble to isolate the idea of infinity. Good readers will ask why. Another thought has suggested itself to Berry. What subtle distinction did this intelligent writer wish to make between endlessly and infinitely?

When we’re reading or writing, it’s not enough to have a good dictionary at hand; we should also have in reach a respectable dictionary of synonyms, one that doesn’t just list words of generically similar meaning, but the kind which collects and explains the differences of words otherwise very close in signification. Works like The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms and the older Crabb’s English Synonyms, among a number of others, will build an entry of like words and then discriminate the shades of difference between them according to exact definition and context. Indeed, an older edition of the Merriam-Webster says just that on its title page: A Dictionary of Discriminated Synonyms with Antonyms and Analogies and Contrasted Words. That’s the gold we’re looking for.

So if we turn to Merriam-Webster and find the entry which includes the adjective endless (Berry is using the adverbial form), we learn that it properly refers “not only to things which continue in time, but also in extent,” and that in so referring, it “implies no known or apparent or determinable end.” So when Berry says that the subject of Christianity and ecology is endlessly fascinating, he means that thinking about the two constituents of the subject, one spiritual and the other natural, might very well go on indefinitely. Like an endless conveyor belt (the image is Merriam-Webster’s), the subject could continue—but it could also come to an end. This indefiniteness is what we commonly sense in the word endless.

The adjective infinite, however, makes a subtle addition to this enduring fascination. Unlike what is endless, what is infinite is by definition immeasurable, and implies “an incapacity for being estimated in extent, duration, or any conceivable respect.” Unlike an endless conveyor belt, which we could stop and thereby see the temporal extent of, the fascination present in considering together Christian spirituality and ecological science could very well also be called infinite, says Berry, because where they might part ways cannot even be imagined, so intrinsically, so in their very natures are they part of each other. It is true that both infinite and endless overlap in referring to the lack of a boundary, but endless refers to something continuing indefinitely in time, while what is infinite is not in time at all. God is infinite, not endless, because there is no temporal extent to what is absolute. The series of natural numbers is infinite, because the series ends nowhere, and nowhere cannot be measured.

The parenthetical idea, then, that suggested itself to Berry, the phrase he set off in commas, is the distinction between indefinite duration and immeasurable extent. The subject of Christianity and its relation to ecology will likely always hold our attention, he maintains; but if we believe that we could at some point exhaust the reach of a subject so interrelatedly rich in implication, we will perhaps be mistaken. An endless fascination can theoretically come to an end; an infinite fascination cannot. An intelligent distinction finely made by a thoughtful writer.

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I had occasion in a recent post (The Mystery of Reason) to quote the British philosopher A. E. Taylor, who was commenting on the riches to be found in a certain dialogue of Plato. His sentence was as difficult as his insight, and it bears understanding to know how the author composed that sentence, because its grammatical structure directly serves his high purpose. Here is Taylor’s sentence again: On the character we bring with us into the unseen world, our company there will depend, and our happiness and misery will depend on our company.

The temptation in coming upon a sentence like that is just to ignore it, impatient that its meaning is not immediately apparent. But that is not playing fair with the writer. We should always presume, until proven otherwise, that the writer is dedicated to the craft of language, both knowledgeable in its particulars and sensitive to the subtleties it can evoke. Sentence design, simple or complex, is an outcome of the weave being woven: heavier thought may at times require a more intricate inlay, a brocade design to arrest our attention and call us to ponder an unfamiliar idea. Taylor’s sentence arose from his thinking about the manner in which Socrates faced his death and pondered a future life—a serious philosophical theme in the extreme—and his ruminations took him to what effect, desirable or undesirable, the character we build for ourselves from our first day to our last might have on both.

Given the gravity of that subject and the evident wish Taylor had as a philosopher to consider it more seriously than merely dramatically, he designed his sentence to prevent our gliding glibly through a topic most of us do not run to preoccupy ourselves with. Notice first that the sentence both begins and ends with a prepositional phrase: on the character and on our company. These two stress points of a sentence, the opening and the close, here carry the two antithetical ideas on which Taylor’s assertion relies—character (or lack of it) and the company it enjoys. Notice next that in the middle of the sentence, back to back to each other, are two independent clauses with the same verb: our company there will depend and our happiness and misery will depend.

If we schematize that layout, using the letter A to represent the two prepositional phrases and the letter B to stand for the two clauses, we can see the design more clearly: A B B A, which is known as a chiastic, or crossing, word order. It is a classic rhetorical device in which to arrange grammatical elements when a writer wishes to slow down the willing reader just enough to demand more mental energy on a steepish conceptual hill. Its opposite (A B A B), called interlocking, would simplify the assertion into an easier parallelism: On the character we bring with us into the unseen world, our company there will depend, and on our company our happiness and misery will depend. That choice, however, would have worked against the consequentiality of the context by configuring the layout of ideas more closely, but not exactly, to our colloquial voice. The cadence, too, falters, and that dulls the majesty of the idea.

Both these orders of elements, then, work against what we would first commonly expect, the subject + predicate word order in both clauses, not just the second one: Our company there will depend on the character we bring with us into the unseen world, and our happiness and misery will depend on our company. That’s much easier reading, but easier at the risk of not feeling the utter implications of the assertion. The logic remains the same, no matter the rhetorical design, but logic is only one part of communicable meaning. It is one thing for something to make sense; it is quite another for a reader to be moved by the sense being made. If conceptual clarity does not divine the depths of our will, where indeed character is formed, it remains barren, bright but ineffectual. The rhetorical design a dedicated writer like Taylor brings to the work of composition, though off-putting at times when we’re not used to such stylizing, can often be the sign that some new thought is presenting itself, laying down a challenge to consider a notion perhaps entirely new to us—the best of reasons to read deep thought patiently.

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The word mystery has an unexpected beginning. The Greek verb from which it derives means to close one’s eyes, not to avoid what cannot be explained, but to still oneself to understand. The idea is not unrelated to the derivation of our word school, meaning originally leisure in Greek. As a place of learning and culture, a school conferred freedom for a time from those activities which distract us from things ultimately more important because more meaningful and answering to the larger questions of life.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was a teacher, philosopher, and president of India in the 1960s. He wrote many important works, including a two-volume survey of his culture’s thought entitled Indian Philosophy. Those comprehensive volumes open with this sentence:

For thinking minds to blossom, for arts and sciences to flourish, the first condition necessary is a settled society providing security and leisure.

A few paragraphs later, he connects the way in which Indian philosophy originally pursued wisdom with the Platonic concern for reason:

Helped by natural conditions, and provided with the intellectual scope to think out the implications of things, the Indian escaped the doom which Plato pronounced to be the worst of all, viz. the hatred of reason. “Let us above all things take heed,” says he in the Phaedo, “that one misfortune does not befall us. Let us not become misologues as some people become misanthropes; for no greater evil can befall men than to become haters of reason.”

A misologue is a person who despises knowledge or discussion—a desperate condition both for a human being and for a culture. That plight was thought to be so severe not because we would know less, but because we would know less of what is most important to know. Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo (pronounced fee-do, the name of one of the characters) portrays the last hours of the wise Socrates, his calm self-possession in the hours before his state execution when his friends, most of them anything but self-possessed, come to see him in his cell for the last time. Reason, which the misologue hates, clears the path to self-knowledge, exactly what gave Socrates the equanimity we see he possessed at his end.

The eminent British Platonist A. E. Taylor considered the Phaedo to be among “the group of four great dialogues which exhibit Plato’s dramatic art at its ripest perfection.” Its importance lies in demonstrating, even in the macabre scene before the death of the great Athenian, how reason and knowledge and discussion render our character over a lifetime. It may just be, then, that to both the classical Greek and classical Indian worlds, stillness before a mystery brings the knowledge most worth having. As Taylor says in the stately language of his essential Plato: The Man and His Work (1926):

On the character we bring with us into the unseen world, our company there will depend, and our happiness and misery will depend on our company.

The secondary literature on both Greek and Indian philosophy is immense, but a shorter and more accessible work by Taylor, Socrates (1951), introduces the subject of Plato’s dialogue in masterful English. Radhakrishnan’s An Idealist View of Life will complement Taylor’s commentary.

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