{"id":299,"date":"2016-07-21T17:37:12","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T22:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/?page_id=299"},"modified":"2016-07-29T15:49:12","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T20:49:12","slug":"richard-velkley-memorial-essay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/richard-velkley-memorial-essay","title":{"rendered":"“In Memoriam: Seth Benardete, 1930-2001”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Richard L. Velkley<\/em><\/p>\n

Seth Benardete left behind an astonishing body of writing on the ancient poets, historians, and philosophers: translations of Greek tragedies and Platonic dialogues; five books of commentary on Plato; a book apiece on Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles; a volume of essays; and a long list of articles on many authors and subjects. Anyone having some acquaintance with his work readily produces a string of superlatives: extraordinary depth and subtlety of interpretation, vast erudition, audacious mastery of the most difficult texts and problems. He belongs to the rare company of classical exegetes who will endure as primary sources, since he was more than a scholar. He was a philosopher, one of the most important of the past half-century.<\/p>\n

Born into a Brooklyn academic family of Sephardic origin, Benardete studied at the University of Chicago (1948-52, 1954-55) and wrote a dissertation on the Iliad<\/em> for the Committee on Social Thought. He held fellowships in Athens, Florence, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and taught at St. John\u2019s College, Annapolis, and Brandeis University before joining the classics department of New York University in 1965. At the same time he began giving courses in ancient philosophy at the New School for Social Research, a practice he continued for the rest of his career. He worked seven days a week in his tiny, windowless and book-filled office, a short walk from his home. He was deeply indifferent to most aspects of conventional academic success. Ronna Burger, one of his foremost students, writes: \u201cIn his teaching and writing, but especially vividly in conversation \u2014 where humor, depth of insight, and soaring thought were inextricably intertwined \u2014 Benardete was a model of what it means to live a philosophic life.\u201c<\/p>\n

His philosophical investigations were, of course, decisively formed by his study with Leo Strauss. Strauss made a gift of two volumes to the young Benardete, Aristotle\u2019s Physics<\/em> and Martin Heidegger\u2019s Holzwege<\/em>, whereby, no doubt, the teacher indicated his judgment of the remarkable student\u2019s potential for addressing the questions of first philosophy. In Benardete\u2019s later years, during the completion of his series of great Plato-studies, it was evident that Heidegger was much on his mind. Like Strauss, Benardete liked to frame the questions in terms borrowed from Plato\u2019s famous image, in the Republic<\/em>, of the city or the political association as a cave. Indeed, Benardete\u2019s continuation of Strauss\u2019s recovery of \u201cthe primary phenomena of the cave\u201d was his way of carrying forward Strauss\u2019s central effort to respond to Heidegger’s Destruktion<\/em> of the Western tradition.<\/p>\n

Benardete understood that Strauss\u2019s term \u201cthe natural cave\u201d was paradoxical and ironic, for it refers to how political life appears from the standpoint of nature, once politics has been exposed by philosophy. It cannot connote some actual \u201ccave\u201d \u2014 whether of fifth-century Athens or any other time \u2014 that achieved the highest excellence and should be restored through practical-political efforts. To understand the cave naturally is to grasp the natural disparity between opinion and the search for truth. In Benardete\u2019s words, \u201cpolitical philosophy is the philosopher\u2019s ascent from, not his descent into, the cave. The philosopher always looks back, he never turns back, to the cave.\u201d Hence the natural cave, like the best city, exists only for philosophical thought or speech.<\/p>\n

Our difficulty in grasping what Plato meant by the cave owes much to modern philosophy\u2019s attempt to understand the human things not by nature\u2019s light but by the lights of history. Heidegger brought the latter way of thinking to its highest development. As Strauss liked to say, modern man lived in \u201cthe cave beneath the cave,\u201d in a historical-cultural world of his own even further removed from the world illuminated by the natural sun. To say that the natural cave can be occluded by history is to assert that the very concept of the philosophical ascent from opinion, from the cave, can be forgotten: philosophy is inherently subject to decay. Benardete (following Strauss) saw no inconsistency in speaking this way about nature, for nature is hierarchical; only at its bottom rung does nature mean \u201cwhat prevails necessarily, everywhere and always.\u201d (Strauss argued that the egalitarian nature of modern natural right, with its claim of the necessary actualization of the good, is an indispensable condition for the \u201cturn to history.\u201d) In Benardete\u2019s view, Strauss restored \u201cthe connection between political philosophy and ontology\u201d by showing that Being must be approached as nature in this forgotten, elusive, yet vital sense, since the hiddenness of Being is inseparable from the hiddenness of the philosophic nature. Benardete pursued this undertaking into unexplored terrain, wherein he made countless wonderful finds.<\/p>\n

The center of Benardete\u2019s interpretations of Plato \u2014 from which his thought radiated to other authors \u2014 was Socrates\u2019s account of his \u201ctwo sailings\u201d in the Phaedo<\/em>. Philosophy necessarily begins in error, for the natural way of the human mind is from and toward causes that exist in spurious independence from the wholes they would explain. In this separateness the causes reflect the character of speech as dividing and collecting. Thus before Socrates makes his turn to speeches, he does not see the root of his activity in logos<\/em>, and hence he misses how the soul is crucial for the togetherness of things. This turn, or \u201csecond sailing,\u201d is the turn to political philosophy, for it reflects on the connection between the tendency to posit separate causes and the \u201cidealism\u201d or \u201cvulgar Platonism\u201d of opinion. Such \u201cidealism\u201c is at work in the Republic<\/em>, Book IV, where spiritedness (or thumos<\/em>) dominates the account of the tripartite soul, effecting a \u201cthumoeidetic\u201c division of appetite, spiritedness, and reason as separate eide<\/em>. It can also be seen in the ascription to the city of a class-structure based only on the soul as abstracted from the body.<\/p>\n

In the Republic<\/em> Socrates enacts with full self-awareness a \u201cfirst sailing\u201d with his interlocutors. Indeed, every Socratic dialogue displays a first sailing in which the distorting perspectives of the interlocutors shape the discussion, thus revealing their souls even as their souls are hidden from themselves. Benardete boldly treated the \u201cdoctrine of ideas\u201d as a form of the first sailing and as a vehicle by which Socrates tries to effect the turning of the soul (periagoge<\/em>) toward itself. It is a sign of their not making the periagoge<\/em> that Glaucon and Adeimantus do not see that the true best city is not the imaginary one of their speech, but is in motion before their eyes as the \u201cdialogic city\u201d of their conversation. Similarly they do not see that the true account of philosophic education would be the reflection on their own education with Socrates, and not the ideal account of Books VI-VII, an account as impossible as the imaginary best city. Their self-ignorance is related to the duality of speech as articulation of the beings and as conversation, which duality is mirrored in the concerns of dialectic with eidetic and genetic modes of analysis.<\/p>\n

Since all inquiry must be guided by the Good, or \u201cinterest,\u201d the conduct of inquiry is necessarily informed by the contingencies of persons and circumstances. The action disclosing how these contingencies shape the questions and the answers arising in the conversation unfolds the true argument of a Socratic dialogue. The \u201cabstractions\u201d of the dialogues (for example, the abstractions from eros<\/em> in the Republic<\/em> and in Timaeus\u2019 cosmology) correspond to the blindness of the speakers, and the explicit argument treats an apparently neglected issue through showing (rather than stating) what its absence entails. But through such abstraction the dialogues reflect the nature of the soul and achieve a kind of perfection. Since philosophy is made possible by error, or by the need to start with treating a part as apart from the whole rather than as a part of the whole, the best philosophic writing employs \u201cphantastic\u201d images proportioned to the soul\u2019s limitation. But this is to say that philosophic speech exploits the error intrinsic to political life, since the cave is<\/em>the effort to treat a part (the city) as the whole. It is the error of the city\u2019s \u201cidealism\u201d to think that the best world would be one so well-governed that law, and thus the city itself, would be unnecessary. The myth of the reversed cosmos in the Statesman<\/em> describes a world in which there are no cities and the gods rule men as shepherds. It is a world without eros<\/em> and without philosophy. Benardete spoke of \u201cthe teleology of evil,\u201d and noted that the frustration of the city\u2019s primary aim is the condition for the possibility of philosophy. The self-undermining tendency of opinion allows the soul to look beyond opinion.<\/p>\n

Through such reflections Benardete revealed with unsurpassed depth and precision the meaning of the marriage of philosophy and poetry in Plato. Moreover, he arrived at the conclusion that \u201cthe Socratic revolution in philosophy seems to be coeval with Greek poetry,\u201d and that Homer and Hesiod already grasped the philosophic truth about error and insight, argument and action. Benardete also saw in the Aristotelian treatises a poetic action correcting their explicit arguments: by seeming to found separate disciplines, Aristotle quietly shows what needs to be combined. On Benardete\u2019s reading, Heidegger might well have discovered in Plato and Aristotle an account of Being as that which is never present, as hidden by the beings and the sciences of them. But Heidegger, while seeing that Being cannot be caught in the net of \u201cmethod,\u201d did not reflect adequately on how the quality of the soul of the thinker \u2014 and thus the political realm \u2014 conditions the access to Being. His profound efforts to renew the question of Being therefore fell into the error of conflating philosophic insights with demotic or popular revelations. On Benardete\u2019s reading he failed to complete the \u201csecond sailing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The above comments offer only a glimpse of the vast range of Benardete\u2019s accomplishment. Perhaps the best path of entry into the cosmos of his thought is the collection of essays, The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy<\/em>, edited by Ronna Burger and Michael Davis (University of Chicago, 2000), to which the editors\u2019 introduction is a superb guide. The final essay (\u201cStrauss on Plato\u201d) illuminates the principles of reading Platonic dialogues, as does more expansively The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato\u2019s \u201cGorgias\u201d and \u201cPhaedrus<\/em>\u201d (Chicago, 1991). Socrates\u2019 \u201ctwo sailings\u201d are discussed in the essay \u201cOn Plato\u2019s Phaedo<\/em>\u201d in The Argument<\/em>, and are the central theme of Socrates\u2019 Second Sailing: On Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em> (Chicago, 1989). The Socratic analysis of the problem of causality in terms of the eidetic\/genetic<\/em> distinction figures in many of Benardete\u2019s studies, and notably in his accounts of what are commonly considered non-Socratic dialogues; for this see \u201cOn the Timaeus<\/em>\u201d in The Argument<\/em>, and Plato\u2019s \u201cLaws\u201d: The Discovery of Being<\/em> (Chicago, 2000). Benardete treats the Socratic replacement of ideas as separate from soul and body with an account of eidos<\/em> as the hidden thread of being \u201cthat always shows itself as other than it is\u201d in The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato\u2019s \u201cPhilebus\u201d<\/em> (Chicago, 1993). For the distinction between \u201ceikastic\u201d and \u201cphantastic\u201d image-making, and for the tendency of political life toward an absolutizing of law that is disastrous for eros and philosophy, see the commentary on the Platonic trilogy, The Being of the Beautiful: Plato\u2019s \u201cTheatetus,\u201d \u201cSophist,\u201d and \u201cStatesman\u201d<\/em> (Chicago, 1984). For Benardete\u2019s Socratic way of reading Greek poetry see the essay \u201cOn Greek Tragedy\u201d in The Argument<\/em>, and The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the \u201cOdyssey\u201d<\/em> (Lanham, MD, 1997). For his related approach to Aristotle see \u201cOn Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle\u2019s Metaphysics<\/em> A\u201d in The Argument<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Richard L. Velkley is associate professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, and associate editor of <\/em>The Review of Metaphysics. His latest book is <\/em>Being After Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (University of Chicago Press)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Reprinted with the kind permission of The Claremont Review of Books,\u00a0<\/em>Winter 2002<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Richard L. Velkley Seth Benardete left behind an astonishing body of writing on the ancient poets, historians, and philosophers: translations of Greek tragedies and Platonic dialogues; five books of commentary on Plato; a book apiece on Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles; a volume of essays; and a long list of articles on many authors and subjects. Anyone having some acquaintance with his work readily produces a string of superlatives: extraordinary depth and subtlety of interpretation, … Read more “In Memoriam: Seth Benardete, 1930-2001”<\/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-299","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/299","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=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/299\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}