[In the essay below, Cutting-Gray and Swearingen reinterpret An Essay on Man, stating that the poem anticipates modern ideas about human nature.]

Nothing more clearly marks the character of the eighteenth century than the extreme differences with which persons of serious and judicious mind responded to Pope's Essay on Man. The famous contrasting responses from thinkers inclined neither to idolatry or to caviling demonstrate both the enthusiasm and controversy which the poem stirred and point to a duality that lay at the heart of the age itself. Notwithstanding the inevitable controversies over the philosophic content of the poem and in spite of their doctrinal differences, a multitude of disparate groups responded to the poem as though it expressed their own conception of an orthodox view of the creation. English Pietists, Deists, traditional Protestants, French Catholics, as well as German theologians and philosophers apparently found something in the poem that they could share.

Even to this day, the poem draws an unusually wide spectrum of responses and evokes a question raised in its own time. Is the Essay an event of tradition in the sense that it hands over a body of thought—a picture of the world—in an act of preservation, or does it also give up and unwittingly betray what it seeks authoritatively to preserve? When Pope recommends the poem as a more concise argument for commonplace truths than a "dry and tedious" philosophical treatise, in point of doctrine, he makes an uneasy compromise with the past by incorporating the less than orthodox views of Lord Bolingbroke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and biblical interpreter Anthony Collins. Furthermore, the chronological gap between Pope's day and ours makes the unrecognized betrayal of what he most wishes to advocate an important part of the present life of the poem. Only in part, then, can its popularity be attributed to its being [as Maynard Mack has stated] the "poetic definition to the problem of man's nature and God's justice outside the sphere of religious allegory, heroic drama, and scriptural story, where they had for the most part been confined before.

To say, as Pope himself did, that the Essay steers between the extremes of the new rage for mathematical certainty and the older traditions of faith, as though it offered a cautious eclecticism, understates the achievement of the poem in bringing out something historically decisive but concealed in that figure of opposition. In calling upon Heidegger's analysis of the "Age of the World Picture" [in "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1977], we will argue that exactly at the points where the poem is vulnerable to criticism, something subtle, something decisive for the future of thought occurs that is visible only to the retrospection of later readers.

The argument will be that even though the poem appeared to be a catalogue of the familiar, in fact it described something quite new. According to Heidegger, "to be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture," a world enframed by Man, the subjective center who projects it. Pope gave voice to this rift in the early modern mind. To historical retrospection this shift from a world open to one who apprehends to a world pictured by the one who represents is not simply a change in the way one views the world: "The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age." In charting the primary challenge to the way both world and man are changed in essence by a new criterion of knowledge, Heidegger enables us to clarify the double allegiance of a poem that gives voice to an unstable duality not only in Pope's age but in our time as well. Furthermore, such a duality provides the impetus to system and to our modern systematizing mentality.

What the early modern era found unusually appealing was less Pope's use of old ideas than the frame around them—not the form of the Essay but its peculiarly modern way of enframing the familiar which shifts from the immediacy of the given world to the mediation of a theoretical map of nature. Through a process that presupposes an orderly universe, the poem "essays" or tests the value and purity of its ideas, an eighteenth-century meaning of the word "essay" that lifts "mere" poetry into the realm of serious thought and grants it an authority denied it by the new spirit of enlightenment. Pope says that "The gen'ral ORDER … Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man," rendering change according to "laws" and subjecting [What Heidegger calls] chaos to rule. Both Nature and Man are "kept" in place as "objects of a representing that explains."

The well-known contradictions in this tour de force of systemic thinking show that, at times, it is conspicuously weak in simple intellectual orderliness. Not only does the poem describe human nature outside the lexicon and genres of traditional theological discussion; the famous opening metaphor from landscape architecture puts the commonplace truths in an entirely new narrative setting and supplies an important clue to how the poem puts "Man" in the context of nature externalized. Pope invites St. John to join him in wandering over the "scene of Man,"

A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A Wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot,
Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

When Pope tells us ahead of time that he connects his poem with Paradise Lost, the "mighty maze" seems to parallel those puzzles that confounded Milton's pagan Greek thinkers, in "wand'ring mazes lost." However, the old religious and philosophical riddles, representing man's search into the mysteries of life, are safely enclosed within the completely managed figure of landscape architecture. For all its intricate turnings, the maze is arranged in an order, the garden crafted to appear as a labyrinth, and the entire "scene" planned, not by God, the celestial architect, but by Man, the landscape architect. Hence the use of these figures departs from their traditional role in accounting for Nature and the ways of God, thereby creating an initial rift in traditional thought. The description of the scene as a garden, echoes of Eden and the "forbidden fruit," suggests that the scene is problematic and the poem a new theodicy. Set within a landscape design, however, the old moral and theological question of evil—less a question of wickedness than an error in thought—appears rational and solvable. Such a setting forth within a represented design or frame, world become picture, would not have been possible for the Ancient Greeks, for the Middle Ages, or even for Milton. The world is now explicitly "placed in the realm of man's knowing and of his having disposal, and that it is in being only in this way" (Heidegger). The frame of the poem sets up nature to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance.

While the poem seems to situate the traditional mythic account of man within a historically real, rather than artificial or fictional context, it is "natural," that is, free from affectation or artifice, only in the sense that the planned English landscape with its managed surprises, concealed bounds, and crafted contrasts appears as a "Wild," spontaneous and unplanned. The figure of the hunt extends the range of the landscape metaphor and its "map" over a description of the speaker's action. The hunter expresses confidence in his complete knowledge of the quarry he stalks: man who "blindly creeps" and "sightless soars."

Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature's walks, shoot Folly as it flies,
And catch the Manners living as they rise.

Here is man pitted, not against a cosmic question or an unfathomable God, but against himself as "ample field" to beat, eye, try, explore, catch, shoot, vindicate, and naturalize. Man is presented dramatically as problematical and divided, both surveyor and hunter of his own species, quarry and site to be surveyed, and not as harmonious dweller within a seamlessly unfolding "scene." Heidegger observes, "In that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself, i.e., be picture." In such a scene or picture, "the position of man is conceived as a world view."

As many have noted before, the problem here is not the universe within which man exists; but man himself. The Harvard Manuscript contains a marginal note in Pope's hand stressing the thematic and structural importance of these initial figures representing the mind of man: "The 6th, 7th, and 8th lines allude to the Subjects of This Book, the General Order and Design of Providence; the Constitution of the human mind." If the scene is the "constitution" of the mind, then by horticultural arrangement the mind is a human construction which appears unplanned only to the untrained or unstable eye. To those with singular vision, who "see worlds on worlds" and "Observe how system into system runs" the invisible design presupposes the naturally intelligible and visible. Every appearance of surprise, doubt, and half-knowledge confronting the mind in its frailty actually follows the design as when, in the Epistle to Burlington, the architecture of the landscape,

Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now Breaks, or now directs th'intending Lines,
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Man is the self-constructed scene, and what wants justifying is no longer God, but the interior of man-divided into both subject and object of a world projected by him. The world can only become picture when man becomes subjectum at its center: "The more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subiectum rise, up [Heidegger]." The universe and the species now externalized as Nature are actually grounded in this doubled subjectum or "Mind." Thus Pope's new narrative setting completely alters the traditional genre upon which it is based and reverses the narrative of human experience from a God's eye view to that of the plan and context of man. We will ponder what it means to project a blueprint of the world and then move—not into the world—but into the plan.

Two parallel developments help explain this "new" phenomenon: first, the revolutions in biblical hermeneutics and, second, the new science, each seizing upon the methodizing impulse to project the world as a system or picture. Both disciplines, scientific and religious, embraced this theoretical framework that provided a way to analyze and thus "picture" religious revelation with certainty—a duplicity they embraced no matter how they differed in their actual interpretation of the biblical narrative. In order to discover how such a contradictory understanding of the world could be readily accepted, we need briefly to recall the radical shift in biblical hermeneutics.

In The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in 18th and 19th Century Hermeneutics, Hans W. Frei describes the reversal that took place at the end of the seventeenth century between biblical narrative and the new secular narrative of history. Earlier, worldly experience had been interpreted by reference to a veridical biblical story that moved forward in a continuous historical sequence of Old and New Testaments, from creation to apocalypse. According to the conventional understanding, life moved within the biblical story. When the Bible no longer provided access to the world but resided within the world, it had to correspond to secular experience. The real events of history assume their own authority and incorporate their own autonomous temporal framework, though still conceived as being under God's providence. Hence, the historiographical investigation of so-called myth compensated for the loss of faith. In this light we can understand why an age of historiography would make the claim for a literal, historical Jesus in the work of such thinkers as Spinoza, Cocecius, and Bengel. Rending the veil between biblical and historical worlds results in the secular spirit's coming to occupy the sacred Ark of the Covenant. Since the eighteenth century generally held that the Bible could be understood by following empirical principles of interpretation common to all texts, meaning became detachable from the biblical story, and referred no longer to the spiritual world. In the gap of unreliability caused by this disintegration of biblical authority, it became possible for a work like An Essay on Man, which does not pretend to the status of theological dogma, to occupy the space once reserved for Christian tradition as the locus of truth and measure of practice.

Not only did biblical narrative suffer a loss of authority in the wake of the Copernican revolution, but accounts of ordinary sensory experience also came under suspicion and, even among empiricists, needed vindication. In empiricism, the meaning of common-sense experience tends to dissolve into the elementary thinking of sense data as when Locke derives all mental functions from "ideas" of sensation. Because empiricism lacks confidence in the truth of experience, even systematic observation is insufficient to confirm elementary sensation. Observation depends on faith in method. The effort to reduce experience to the presumed literalism of the senses, to dissolve in scepticism the commonplace narratives of communal experience, displaces faith in traditional narratives to a new faith in systems of explanation. The goal is no longer to order human experience; it is to discover what lies behind the commonplace. Under the compulsion of projecting a system of explanation, perception and the common sense based on it prove weak and coarse. In two contradictory but related moves hermeneutics sacrificed the revelatory power of a narrative of faith for the sake of an empirical method of interpretation, while the new science weakened its observation of the sensory and particular for the sake of faith in a method of intellectual certainty. Thus, the confident tone of Pope's speaker-hunter, as when he promises to "Laugh where we must, be candid where we can," begins to waver, and he must "wrangle" with the question, whether "God has plac'd him [Man] wrong?" Repetition of "must" suggests that the beast of suspicion may be lurking in the "coverts" of man. In other words, the coherent and commanded hinges upon the hypothetical and uncertain:

Of Systems possible, if 'tis confest
That Wisdom infinite must form the best,
Where all must full, or not coherent be,

…..

Then, in the scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain
There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man.

Only if it is "confest," i.e. agreed upon and assumed ahead of time, that "Wisdom infinite must form the best" system, can there be, and even must there be, "somewhere, such a rank as Man." Trying to shake off a sense of dread, Pope argues that man cannot comprehend the intelligible universe in its complexity: "Tis but a part we see, and not a whole." Yet the remainder of the poem explains these things more or less fully, even though, as Maynard Mack claims, "Pope's subject is not the visible universe but the intelligible manifested in the invisible." The rest of the poem attempts to make verisimilar what it dividedly assumes and pleads must, or at least, ought to be so.

What most seriously betrays the tradition is not simply the new narrative setting for old truths, nor the substitution of secular narrative for biblical revelation, not even the weakened observation of the sensory based on empirical faith, but rather the system which projects these divisions in thought. Instead of a representative picture of the world or even an empirical description, the poem offers a world picture. Nature is no longer rendered in its particularity. Even where Pope writes most movingly, we are not simply immersed in the immediacy of the created order. Dr. Johnson clearly defines [in A Dictionary of The English Language, 1755] the modern phenomenon of system and systemic thinking that Pope adds and presupposes: "1. Any complexure or combination of many things acting together. 2. A scheme which reduces many things to regular dependence or co-operation. 3. A scheme which unites many things in order." The Essay offers a system, "strong connections, nice dependencies, / Gradations just," which stands between us and a concrete world. Only in our own day are we gaining sufficient distance from the anthropocentric mind to see that this eloquent announcement of the world as the scene of man requires one to distinguish between the systematic and the orderly. Here is a new and important idea of mimesis as a representational scheme presumed to be nature itself. This, surely, is nature methodized.

This frame of reference makes the plan of the poem striking. The human becomes the primary sub-ject: the being and truth of all that is, appears grounded on man as the relational center of the world. The chain of being should "vindicate the ways of God to Man" by outlining what belongs to and what properly happens in the sphere of nature. Instead, it becomes a picture of nature fixed by a projection, as when the landscape blueprint displaces nature itself. When "Nature deviates"—"Th' exceptions few; some change since all began"—it constitutes a problem and calls for "vindication" of the whole scheme. The picture, no mere copy, encloses the world in a frame and sets it before an observer who "reveal[s] the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve" (Heidegger). The observer sees the world only as his own projection, an entirely new belief based upon a duplicity of system.

When the poem insists on human subordination and dependency in the grand scheme, it mocks the pride that makes itself "the God of God" and judge of the universe: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man." And yet the satire derives its power from a dual allegiance, for the thoroughly anthropocentric representation designates the human as the privileged center of reference who explains and evaluates everything. In responding to the double allegiances that we have traced in hermeneutics and science, the satirist in a sense belongs to both parties. However central man's position on the presumed chain, he is diminished by his elevation—"Created half to rise, and half to fall; / Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all." Paradoxically, the one who falls prey is also the one who projects the map in which he resides. For all the discussion of reason, the passions, and happiness, the represented being is of necessity an entity alongside others on the objective scale.

It would be a serious misunderstanding to regard this rift in thought as a weakness in the poem or the poet. Rather, when in Epistle 1 he refutes the notion that man is the center, Pope eloquently articulates this conflict:

Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, "Tis for mine:
"For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow'r,
"Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flower."

He pours scorn on the head of Pride as it concludes the speech in unrestrained self-absorption:

"For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
"For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
"Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
"My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies."

By contrast with this voice of pride, "To reason right," he says, "is to submit." The poem at once denies that the ether of human understanding extends to the boundaries of the cosmos, and it devotes most of its lines to filling out the picture of that cosmos.

In a subtle departure from a long tradition that interprets nature hierarchically, Pope projects his theoretical model upon nature and divides systemic thought from the tradition. For the Greeks the term "theory" referred to clearsightedness in ordinary intercourse with things; but in the intellectual economy of the modern age, theory has become an abstract framework under the dominion of "man."

Again the poet mocks what he cannot but share:

Go, wond'rous creature! mount where Science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;

…..

Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

As a useful point of contrast, we may remember that Aristotle attended to the actual behavior of natural phenomena without deciding in advance on what terms he would observe them. He let things address him without commanding them. But Newton's famous phrase, hypothesis non fingo, says that a hypothetical basis of procedure is not arbitrary. The new science requires a procedure based on a prior framework of representation so that intellectual calculation frames even the constancy of change. In spite of his opposition to the new science, Pope will deal with the "unruly" passions in Epistle 2 by assimilating them to their place in an overall representation of reality, bringing them under a rule. The importance of Pope's announcement of the age of anthropology, surely a new science, cannot be over-emphasized. The more the world becomes picture the more does observation of the world change into a doctrine of man, an anthropology.

Well might the Essay strike a sympathetic chord in an era that instinctively decides in advance on what terms and under what conditions phenomena are to be observed. The more we regard the world as an object at our disposal, as an object of desire, the more observation turns into anthropological dogma: "Anthropology is that interpretation of man that already knows fundamentally what man is and hence can never ask who he may be" (Heidegger). Where world is picture, every detail of the picture points back to the being who projects it, as the book of nature had once pointed to its Author. Instead of our being an idea in the mind of God, as Bishop Berkeley says, God becomes a creature of our picture. The new god who must be vindicated and upon whom everything else is grounded, is man. Where everything reveals itself causally to Man, "God can, for representational thinking, lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance" (Heidegger). The divine becomes the familiar, personalized deity of those who define the concealed and ineffable in terms of full knowledge.

Once we have realized how the systematizing impulse makes man the creator, something else stands out that makes An Essay on Man a new event in its age and an important one in ours. The poem subtly proclaims a new faith and attempts to mediate the rift that puts revelation and even the revelatory capacity of the senses in doubt.

In grafting together two conflicting allegiances—the ageold Christian vision and the theory of scientific experiment—it begins to ponder whether the human subject is indeed the sole possibility for truth as the new doctrine of knowledge proclaims. Hence, the being who confidently yields from "covert" and "giddy heights" the "Manners living as they rise" undergoes a surprising change that can no longer be concealed by the projected plan. Plagued by doubt—"Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd"—man becomes the oxymoronic being of the famous opening thirty lines of Epistle 2, "darkly wise, and rudely great," with "too much knowledge" and "too much weakness."

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.

Here uneasily side by side are the systematizing mentality and the old sense of wonder. The challenge is to see the difference between projecting blueprints of the "mighty maze" of a changing world and celebrating the ineffability of things, with a willingness to live in ignorance, to surrender to the risks inherent in the flux of the world.

Just as Descartes and the biblical interpreters who followed his method needed both certainty and mystery to reconcile unlimited knowledge with an inscrutable God, so the poem maintains an ancient sense of ineffability as a brake against the pride of the new rationality: "See! and confess, one comfort still must rise, / 'Tis this, Tho' Man's a fool, yet GOD IS WISE." With man as both theological center, proud system maker, and empirical doubter, the plan of providence must be rationally discernible yet partially inscrutable, and therefore irreducible to a full explanation that would fuel human pride and crush religious faith: "Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide; / First strip off all her equipage of Pride." The striking paradox is that the more the poem "confesses," i.e. acknowledges faith or belief, the more it encounters doubt and expresses anxiety. Presupposing the world as picture deploys the very tension it is designed to circumvent. The system-maker not only needs mystery in order to preserve the wonder that total explanation would expunge; he needs mystery as the impetus for his systematizing. Hence, the uncertainty of faith destabilizes the poem, and in effect, the whole system.

If what we have described in Epistles 1 and 2 is true, we must ask how systemic thinking relates to the remaining epistles. Do they return from the abstraction of the projected plan to the phenomenological world? Or do they continue the illusion of direct access to experience when in fact the poem substitues a map for phenomena? In other words we need to ask about the practical consequences of what we have described as systemic thinking and its contradictory impulses upon the configuration of the human (Epistle 2), on political life (Epistle 3), and on human happiness (Epistle 4). Under the rule of system, and the figure of the landscape maze in Epistle 1, practical life remains theoretical, an imposition of conceptual categories on experience. As Pope draws closer to the concrete in Epistles 2-4 however, he reveals how particular conceptual categories intrude between him and the world he seeks to describe.

When, for example, Epistle 2 documents the "Well accorded strife" of the passions, it portends the collapse of system: "Two Principles in human nature reign; / Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain." These lines describe Reason and Passion as though they were simply inner facts. In other words, when Pope treats theoretically derived categories as though they were phenomenological (spirit, faculties, wit, nature, habit, virtue), any attempt to maintain the exclusivity of the elements collapses before what is inextricable in "our chaos." The positing of reason and passion as "original" features of experience prevents asking about the constitution of these inner events in a way that would alleviate the tension in the poem. Thus, the "ruling" entity, passion, exercises rule over its opposite reason yet is essentially "unruly."

The poem adheres to reason while departing from it. Only when passion already belongs to rational comportment can it be conceptualized in opposition to reason. Thus Pope both excludes and includes passion in the field of rational activity. Fixed meanings gradually dissolve into a relativism of perspective as when he questions the categories of vice and virtue: "But where th' Extreme of Vice, was ne'er agreed: / Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed."

The well-known inconsistencies of Epistle 3 serve an unexpected end. We may either describe Pope's thought as inconsistent or recognize that the system casts a shadow, hints at something inevitably concealed in its revealing as when he posits in advance what he subsequently purports to be unable to know. He can assert that self-fulfillment serves the good of Society, that God "bade Self-love and Social be the same." At the same time he suggests that "jarring int'rests of themselves create / Th' according music of a well-mix'd State" (Locke's mixed constitution). The conceptual formulation misses the contingencies of "jarring int'rests." Whenever he resituates a mode of experience in the system, contingency gets displaced, excluded. But when he turns to face phenomena themselves, we get a glimpse of what representation cannot catch, something that remains inevitably concealed.

The poem that articulates the passion for a new rationality, reducing mystery to a maze and the maze to a map, finally over-reaches that conceptual project by bringing out something unexpected and hidden in systemic thinking itself. The transformation of an unverifiable Christian faith into an equally unverifiable faith in system produces a profound distrust of experience, the very legacy of suspicion inherent in the new model of biblical interpretation. But where system reaches its limit, poetic thinking itself extends beyond system and acknowledges the need for faith and hope as "Nature plants in Man alone / Hope of known bliss, and Faith in bliss unknown."

In the very act of advocacy, An Essay on Man overturns an ancient experience of man and nature making the poem the voice of its age and giving unforgettable form to its divided mind. The eloquence of these memorable couplets sets the Essay alongside Descartes's Meditations and Rousseau's Confessions as spiritual exercises for a secular age. Where Descartes had transformed the believer into a sceptic, where Rousseau later requires sincerity in a priest-hood of secular believers, Pope offers a testament of a new faith in system that casts a fleeting shadow of doubt, in Heidegger's phrase, a "saving power" of questionableness, over systemic thinking.