{"id":236,"date":"2016-07-20T00:49:20","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T05:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/?page_id=236"},"modified":"2016-08-16T16:42:23","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T21:42:23","slug":"davis","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/davis","title":{"rendered":"Michael Davis \u2013 Memorial Tribute"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remarks by Michael Davis
\nSeth Benardete Memorial Service, February 1, 2002<\/em><\/p>\n

There were certain times in Seth\u2019s classes when questions would uncharacteristically break out. On one particular evening in a course on the Phaedo<\/em> in the spring of 1980 (it seems so much more recent than that), David O\u2019Brien first asked Benardete what we were going to do when he died, to which Seth gave a silent but expressive shrug. In a follow\u2013up Mr. O\u2019Brien asked whether it didn\u2019t make Seth angry that he would die. To this he replied, \u201cNo, I have always considered it a privilege to have lived.\u201d Now, as with many of the things Seth said, this beautiful remark is both striking and illusive, especially in light of something else he once said. Having begun a sentence with \u201cIt has always seemed to me…,\u201d Seth stopped abruptly and added, \u201cMy brother, Jos\u00e9, has noticed that whenever someone says, \u2018It has always seemed to me,\u2019 about something, it invariably means that he has just thought of it.\u201d Perhaps this was true of his view of life as a privilege for which one ought to be grateful, not a right violated by the uncanny certainty of death; still this view is consistent with his much later \u201cPlatonic reading\u201d of the Odyssey,<\/em> and especially with his interpretation of the passage read a moment ago. Odysseus the man of mind refuses immortality because he understands that there is no mind without soul, and no soul without death. This is perhaps the deepest version of what Seth called the teleology of evil. To learn one must experience or suffer \u2014 pathei mathos. This suffering must remain hard, but knowledge of its necessity somehow transforms it. Because to be alive means to die; to be angry about the fact of death means to hate life. Seth was a lover of life, which was for him the love of learning \u2014 philosophy.<\/p>\n

Seth was first a figure of gossip for me. During a year at Heidelberg, I read Plato\u2019s Philebus<\/em> with Tom Schmid and Richard Velkley. Schmid, who I think had heard Seth lecture at Yale, gave an elaborate description of what he called his \u201cmagnificent head.\u201d Later I would always put this together with the dark brooding photograph at the beginning of Seth\u2019s essay on Greek tragedy. The outside does not always reflect the inside, but Seth\u2019s looks reflected his eidos<\/em> \u2014 at once daunting and seductive. When I decided to do my dissertation on the Philebus,<\/em> Richard Kennington, my advisor, made available to me Seth\u2019s course notes on the dialogue. I had looked at most of the literature and had just finished a seminar on the Philebus<\/em> with Hans\u2013Georg Gadamer, but all that was nothing compared to Benardete. He had an uncanny ability to see the profundity lying concealed on the surface of things. Once one understood that the Greek expression kata noun<\/em> (to my mind) meant \u201cpleasing,\u201d it was clear that in the very first sentence of the Philebus<\/em> Plato had already denied the separation of mind and pleasure which is the dialogue\u2019s putative theme. The truth of kata noun<\/em> is that there is no mind without desire, without soul.<\/p>\n

At Kennington\u2019s urging, I sent Seth a copy of my finished dissertation. He wrote back within the fortnight \u2014 he had \u201cread it with pleasure, for it [was] very well written,\u201d and then \u201cindeed, too well written given the matter discussed.\u201d There followed pages of intricate criticism which I had the humbling experience of simply not understanding. Rereading it many years later, I began to see what he had had in mind when he spoke of the relation between eros<\/em> and mind. But at the time I was perplexed, disappointed, and a little angry \u2014 superficially at him, really at myself. Over the years I saw others respond as I had. It is difficult to discover someone who knows what you are supposed to know so much better than you know it. And Seth didn\u2019t make it easier, for it was a point of principle with him to converse with others as though they shared his unconditional devotion to getting at the truth of things. He always treated interlocutors as equals, and it was always a lie, for he was the intellectual superior of everyone with whom I ever heard him converse. But by way of this noble lie he made us better than ourselves.<\/p>\n

For years I sat in on his classes at the New School and at NYU \u2014 the first a seminar on Sophocles\u2019 Philoctetes<\/em> in the fall of 1979. It started at 6:10 and usually lasted until 10:30. Then we would go out afterward, to the Cedar Tavern, or in later years to Homer\u2019s. Sometimes there were several of us; sometimes he and I were alone. The conversation was like nothing I had before experienced. It would usually start with unresolved puzzles generated in the class, then turn to politics or the newest problem in cosmology. We might talk about Heidegger and Strauss. Or we might discuss whatever he was reading \u2014 the memoirs of Babur, the Great Mogul of the 16th century, or of Mildred Cable, a Christian missionary to Mongolia. Or we might talk about Tibetan grammar, or Priscilla Cornwell, or his interpretation of Star Wars,<\/em> The Wizard of Oz,<\/em> Rome, Christianity, Judaism, Cervantes, the Arabian Nights, Hades, and at one point or another every figure in the history of philosophy. And of course there was Plato, for Seth the measure of everyone else, and tragedy, the question to which he always returned. His conversation danced with ease over an enormous range but was somehow never superficial. It was most exhilarating when we circled back to put together these odd pieces into a single whole. Seth and I used to joke about how strange it was that in any given semester the different books we were teaching ended up being about the same thing. One day during that first year I was walking to my office with one of my students. Intelligent and yet a little presumptuous (as Sarah Lawrence students are wont to be), she asked me what had happened. I didn\u2019t know what she meant. Well, she said, I had been a pretty good teacher the previous year, but something had changed, something in the way I looked at things, I was somehow more alive. She couldn\u2019t quite put her finger on it, but she assured me that I had somehow \u2014 well \u2014 changed. I could put my finger on it; I had met Seth Benardete.<\/p>\n

After the Cedar Tavern, when Seth walked me to the subway; the conversation would return to what he had talked about in class. I don\u2019t know how many times I had to race through Grand Central Station to catch the last train of the night back to White Plains. I would get home at 2:30 or so, get to bed by three, and the telephone would ring. Without so much as a hello, Benardete\u2019s voice would say \u201cI\u2019ve just discovered this beautiful thing\u201d and the conversation would continue from where we had left off. In later years we would walk from Homer\u2019s to my car; then I would drive him home. On one bitterly cold night we sat for two hours on 12th St. The conversation had gone back and forth all evening on Republic<\/em> Book 3. Seth interrupted himself in midsentence and in that excited breathy tone said, \u201cWait, wait, wait…. Could it possibly be…?\u201d He had discovered the connection between the kalon,<\/em> the beautiful, and thumos,<\/em> spiritedness, that would prove so crucial for his book, Socrates\u2019 Second Sailing.<\/em> I thought about what he had said all the way home \u2014 somehow it was now \u201cour\u201d discovery. That night too I got a call. While I had been delighting in \u201cour\u201d discovery, Seth had already reformulated it and pushed it to another level. The following week in class, I had expected to see it triumphantly hauled out for display, but he had transformed it still further so that it was no longer altogether recognizable to me. His books too read like this; most authors pause to sum up what they have accomplished. Seth\u2019s writings are so difficult not because any sentence is particularly opaque, but because of the collective weight that must be borne when every sentence adds something important. He so delighted in discovery because it enabled him to discover still more. The entire world was the object of his wonder \u2014 himself only insofar as he was an example of the most peculiar part of it.<\/p>\n

I first saw Benardete at a memorial for Leo Strauss, and the first words I heard him utter were \u201cLeo Strauss was a philosopher.\u201d Seth never claimed to be a philosopher; he knew the danger of supplanting love of wisdom by love of self. But honesty requires us now to call him that. Drew Keller once asked him if he still thought about Strauss to which he responded, \u201cevery day.\u201d Benardete used to tell a story about the public presentation of his Master\u2019s thesis on the Theages<\/em> at the University of Chicago. As he was reading it, he periodically heard giggling from behind him \u2014 where the members of his committee were seated. Afterward Strauss came up to him and said, \u201cI didn\u2019t know you were such a funny man.\u201c No one else had got the joke. Benardete was the most playful and the most profound man I ever met; in him the two were one. It must surely have been difficult for him that even those of us who admired him most had only a glimmer of their togetherness.<\/p>\n

For twenty-two years it was my privilege to share in a conversation that, however staggeringly broad its range, was still one conversation \u2014 an on\u2013going attempt (in which nothing was too petty to be considered) to glimpse the true pieces of the world in their mutual connection. Having tasted the sweetness of this conversation, it is hard to imagine life without it, and yet hard as well to imagine it without him, so thoroughly have thinking and talking to Benardete come to mean the same thing for me. Knowing him \u2014 being his student and later his friend \u2014 has been the great gift of my life.<\/p>\n

Seth generally indulged but did not share my admiration for certain contemporary authors \u2014 Saul Bellow, Tom Stoppard, and others. I would like to conclude by reading a passage from one of them \u2014 a poet whom Seth thought interesting, but not that<\/em> interesting, Wallace Stevens. Nevertheless, as this part of a poem called \u201cThe Sail of Ulysses\u201d seems to me particularly appropriate, I will ask his indulgence this one last time.<\/p>\n

If knowledge and the thing known are one
\nSo that to know a man is to be
\nThat man, to know a place is to be
\nThat place, and it seems to come to that;
\nAnd if to know one man is to know all
\nAnd if one\u2019s sense of a single spot
\nIs what one knows of the universe,
\nThen knowledge is the only life,
\nThe only sun of the only day,
\nThe only access to true ease,
\nThe deep comfort of the world and fate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back<\/a> to other memorial tributes<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remarks by Michael Davis Seth Benardete Memorial Service, February 1, 2002 There were certain times in Seth\u2019s classes when questions would uncharacteristically break out. On one particular evening in a course on the Phaedo in the spring of 1980 (it seems so much more recent than that), David O\u2019Brien first asked Benardete what we were going to do when he died, to which Seth gave a silent but expressive shrug. In a follow\u2013up Mr. … Read more Michael Davis \u2013 Memorial Tribute<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/236\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}