{"id":366,"date":"2016-07-24T21:35:34","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T02:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/?page_id=366"},"modified":"2016-07-29T15:25:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T20:25:47","slug":"mark-blitz-review-of-encounters-and-reflections","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/mark-blitz-review-of-encounters-and-reflections","title":{"rendered":"Mark Blitz, Review of Encounters and Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Homer\u2019s Diner: Conversations with Seth Benardete<\/strong>
\nBy Mark Blitz
\nThe Weekly Standard<\/em>, 4\/7\/2003, Volume 8, Issue 29<\/p>\n

Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete<\/em>
\nEdited by Ronna Burger
\nUniversity of Chicago Press, 216 pp., $30<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a joke that goes: \u201c\u2018Do you know where we\u2019re supposed to go?\u2019 I said, \u2018No.\u2019 So he said, \u2018Well let\u2019s go together.\u2019 That\u2019s how we met.\u201d<\/p>\n

This joke \u2014 an all-purpose metaphor for youth, love, education, friendship, and thought \u2014 appears in Encounters and Reflections<\/em>. The book is a remarkable collection of accounts of Seth Benardete\u2019s encounters with various people, now mostly obscure, and his reflections on topics, more obscure still. Benardete, the classical scholar and philosopher who died last year [November 2001], sat down in the early 1990s with three of his students to recapture their conversations of twenty years before. The resulting discussions are both spontaneous and well ordered: a lovely achievement brought about by the editor\u2019s skill, Benardete\u2019s wizardry, and the familiarity of friends. Of course, they don\u2019t quite have the unity of one of Plato\u2019s dialogues. But it\u2019s nonetheless presumably no accident that many of them occurred in a place called Homer\u2019s Diner.<\/p>\n

The first part of Encounters and Reflections<\/em> treats the reader to Benardete\u2019s stories about his friends and teachers, occupants of lost worlds of scholarship and intellectual passion, with some of their attendant eccentricities: \u201cDidn\u2019t you once tell us that Strauss didn\u2019t know how to boil water?\u201d \u201cNo, that was Wachs, in the sociology of religion.\u201d Benardete\u2019s anecdotes and descriptions often are punctuated with compressed analyses of his colleagues\u2019 leading traits and their cause. The remarkable Allan Bloom saw the meaning of the 1960s more clearly than Benardete and had extraordinary sensitivity \u201cto people\u2019s defects.\u201d Yet, \u201che got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence,\u201d and the vanity of which he accused others (such as the late philosopher Richard Kennington) might better be attributed to Bloom himself.<\/p>\n

In fact, Kennington\u2019s questions always seemed to Benardete \u201cto be so much deeper than anything I was doing that I couldn\u2019t catch up\u201d (which must make Kennington so deep as to be literally unfathomable). Benedict Einarson, a professor of classics at Chicago, \u201cknew more than anybody else. Absolutely amazing knowledge.\u201d But \u201che looked like the Michelin tire ad,\u201d and \u201ceverything he said was punctuated by a laugh.\u201d Peter von Blanckenhagen, the art historian, understood himself as Goethe understood Winckelmann, \u201cthe notion of the eternal moment being preserved by the work of art,\u201d two things \u201ccompletely at odds.\u201d Yet \u201che was eager to be accepted by people who did not have the same capacity as he did, like those who were at the top of the American archaeological profession, who were unimaginative, or imaginative in a very professional way, not like him at all.\u201d The classical historian Arnaldo Momigliano also knew everything but was never satisfied with the number of his honorary degrees. Renato Poggioli, who studied comparative literature, would always conclude his conversations by saying, \u201cNow you see the point,\u201d more charming if less honest than Jacob Klein\u2019s characteristic \u201cBy Zeus I don\u2019t know.\u201d And that\u2019s not to mention Benardete\u2019s discussions of rats, dogs, deer, and T.S. Eliot.<\/p>\n

There is an untold amount to learn from any of Benardete\u2019s books: works like The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy<\/em>, or Socrates\u2019 Second Sailing: On Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em>, or Herodotean Inquiries<\/em>. But to read them is to be forced to overcome a real denseness and compression that sometimes blocks access to them. Encounters and Reflections<\/em> is attractive because the clear, straightforward, and charming Benardete of its first part makes us confident of the accessibility of the master magician of textual interpretation. In the second part, moreover, Benardete is still answering questions. When he says something dense about Plato\u2019s Phaedrus<\/em> or Republic<\/em>, his friends ask what he means, and they keep on asking until it comes clear. Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis\u2019s own considerable learning and intelligence allow them the luxury here of seeming occasionally to be ignorant \u2014 and thus to ask out loud the question one sometimes mutters when reading Benardete: What could you possibly mean?<\/p>\n

Still, the discussions in Encounters and Reflections<\/em> are difficult. They cover many poets and thinkers, chiefly Plato. We see remarkable reflections on the connection between the gods and the ideas, the political-theological problem, love and spiritedness, existence, and the good. The major theme is Benardete\u2019s view that, in ancient poetry and Plato\u2019s dialogues, the plot embodies its own logic. It cannot be explained simply as exemplifying or modifying in detailed action a formal structure or list of topics. \u201cWell, if the Platonic dialogue and ancient poetry always have to do with the oddity of the individual, what is being reflected in these imitations is the fact that something is being disclosed in a particular that is incapable of being disclosed in any other way. It looks as if the Platonic enterprise is based on a thesis about the nature of the world \u2014 that there is something I would call the encounter with the question, which can\u2019t be determined by formula or concept.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bulk of the book discusses this point, in various guises. The inevitable duality in things, their being what they are but not only that, is the major issue. Benardete\u2019s students press him, trying to work this problem out in specific cases. He makes clear how his initial formal analyses of books (for example, that Herodotus follows the pattern laid out in the Divided Line of Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em>) is modified by his new understanding. Needless to say, we can clarify this understanding more completely only by reading Benardete\u2019s other works, and the books he is discussing.<\/p>\n

A second theme of Encounters and Reflections<\/em> is the idea of \u201cbeginning\u201d \u2014 beginning to think and to learn. Benardete sketches throughout his remarks a notion of how original questions, perplexities, or crises launch inquiries that when pursued uncover the deeper cause of what has launched them. The Greek discovery of the singularity of nature over the multiplicity of laws, conventions, and cultures is the necessary condition for the philosophical quest. Yet, the individuality of one\u2019s beginning retains a certain independence. The particular is not wholly subsumed in the general, practice not wholly subsumed in theory, the lover not wholly subsumed in what is loved. Socrates\u2019 political philosophy puts philosophy in crisis by involving it with political risk and desire for what is best for oneself. This seeking of what is good here and now, and not just what is good generally, keeps philosophy alive.<\/p>\n

Encounters and Reflections<\/em> not only discusses the importance of the individual, it exemplifies it. In fact, the occasional and accidental element in things may make us despair over our own condition. We apparently have nothing with which to replace the marvelous combination of accidents \u2014 academic parents, undergraduate friends such as Stanley Rosen and Bloom, attention to the great books, and the presence of Leo Strauss \u2014 that helped make Benardete what he was. Indeed, given the state of the academy today, we may well wonder whether the passion of the scholar that he exemplified will ever revive. Intense and brilliant thought may still exist, but will it again be as significant individually or as dominant generally as once it was? One by one our intellectual giants disappear, and their memories seem to shrivel in the gloomy and endless cave of our mediocrity.<\/p>\n

It is more hopeful to say instead that in books like this they continue to glow. The humor and intelligence in Seth Benardete\u2019s Encounters and Reflections<\/em> make us long for the world it remembers.<\/p>\n

This world can be recovered because none of the elements that constitutes it is simply an accident. Each reflects or exemplifies things more lasting: love, friendship, natural wonder, intellect, and courage.<\/p>\n

Mark Blitz is Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Reprinted from The Weekly Standard<\/em>, Vol. 8, Issue 29 (April 7, 2003),\u00a0with the kind permission of Mark Blitz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Homer\u2019s Diner: Conversations with Seth Benardete By Mark Blitz The Weekly Standard, 4\/7\/2003, Volume 8, Issue 29 Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete Edited by Ronna Burger University of Chicago Press, 216 pp., $30 There\u2019s a joke that goes: \u201c\u2018Do you know where we\u2019re supposed to go?\u2019 I said, \u2018No.\u2019 So he said, \u2018Well let\u2019s go together.\u2019 That\u2019s how we met.\u201d This joke \u2014 an all-purpose metaphor for youth, love, education, friendship, … Read more Mark Blitz, Review of Encounters and Reflections<\/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-366","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/366","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=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/366\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benardetearchive.org\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}