Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections. Ronna Burger, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
From “Encounters,” Benardete’s recollections of the individuals he met in the course of his inquiries, the book moves to the second part of the “indeterminate dyad” of his life, discussions of the philosophic problems he and his dialogic partners considered over the course of years. Writings and readers being yet another such dyad, the talk centers on philosophic books, especially the Platonic dialogues—themselves dyadic, of course.
Michael Davis asks him to elaborate on his account of structure and plot in Homer’s Iliad. Benardete recalls that he had discovered the structure of the poem ‘retroactively,’ having first read Diotima’s description of the “ladder of love” in Plato’s Symposium and then finding a similar pattern in Homer. “But I didn’t ask the question, How come the combat between Paris and Menelaus is replaced by the combat between Hector and Ajax?” That is, what causes men and their actions to move up the ladder? What happens is that Achilles’ challenge to the authority of Agamemnon with respect to Briseis “is then picked up in the third book by Menelaus, who realizes that, in order to justify his claim to Helen, he has to accept the principle Achilles introduced.” That is “the principle of natural right, which is not based on law.” Achilles had challenged the legal, convention-based authority of King Agamemnon on the grounds that he had won Briseis by dint of his own virtues. “When Menelaus accepts the challenge from Paris, it means he gives up his legal right to [Helen], and says ‘I have to earn it.'” The movement to the second rung of the ladder is made not on the foundation of the ladder’s structure but on the action, itself founded on the argument or at least assertion of Achilles. In the remainder of the poem, “Achilles has to learn that he in fact has this principle in himself”; he “needed nine years to grow up at Troy before he comes to know that he is the number one guy.”
In his Herodotean Inquiries Benardete discovered the same thing in the Father of History. Book II, on Egypt, “is the level of dianoia [thought]”; Book III, on Persia, is the level of pistis or trust; Book IV, on Scythia and Libya, is on eikasia or imaging. Pistis is central to the sequence, as Darius teaches the Persians to tell lies “for the sake of some good” and, conversely, to “tell the truth for the sake of some good.” He thus “destroys the nomos,” the law, “for the sake of tyranny” or lawless rule. If the lie is discovered it will ruin trust in the laws, which are said to be divinely inspired. Accordingly, the theme of imaging in the next Book makes much of “likeness and similitude,” inasmuch as a lie told for the sake of some good must be plausible if it’s to work, if it’s to serve that good. The equivalent to the dyad of imagining in Book IV is “the problem of two,” the problem of the dyad, seen in the previous account of Egypt. Egypt is characterized by unusual pairings consisting of “two things that don’t fit together but do belong together”—male and female, water and earth, permanence and change, body and soul. The self-contradictory character of Egyptian conventions, including its laws, is displayed by the practice of mummification, which assumes that the soul is somehow made immortal by preserving the body.
Benardete had uncovered the structure of Herodotus’ History, but as he explains, “Only years later did I see what it means that the pattern is broken at III.38. That’s when the tyranny of Polycrates on Samos comes in right after the burial question come up. It marks the end of the holy law then you begin looking at things in light of the political…. Book IV does represent the level of eikasia [image]; but it belongs to the political which has been introduced in contrast to the sacred,” and must “be understood in terms of Greek freedom,” the principle opposed to Persian tyranny in the great war between the two geopolitical rivals. That is the movement, as distinct from the structure, of Herodotus’ narration or history.
The same dyadic insight applies to Greek tragedies and to Platonic dialogues. In the dialogues, “there is in fact an argument in the action” and “the discovery of the action is a second sailing.” For example, in the Republic Socrates constructs the pattern, the idea, the form of the best regime. But it emerges step by step in the dialogue, points in which a question arises that ends up undermining the pattern. This is one way in which Socrates’ famous irony works. The issue is still broader than that. “The real question—you might say the Platonic question: Is the trap door in a Platonic writing an imitation of the trap door in nature?” Here is where the eccentricity of Being and the eccentricity of beings comes in, most notably human beings (so memorably displayed in the book’s “Encounters” section). The Platonic dialogue and ancient poetry “always have to do with the oddity of the individual”—club-footed Oedipus, snub-nosed Socrates. “Something is being disclosed in a particular that is incapable of being disclosed in any other way”—not, for example, “by a formula or concept.” Yes, Oedipus is a ‘tragic hero’ and a ‘king’; yes, Socrates is a ‘philosopher.” Yet they are individuals too, not simply ‘types’ or ‘forms.’ This “problem in nature” can only “come up experientially, as it does in the reading of the dialogue,” which imitates the particularity of Being as exhibited by Plato’s drama individual persons arguing with one another. In his own experience, Benardete found this dyadism even in his experience of studying the texts, as he noticed that “teaching a text twice” is “the crucial experience” in understanding it.
Such dyadic clashes make the arguments in dialogue move ahead. In his conversation with Socrates in the Republic, Thrasymachus raises the question of the relation between eidetic analysis, understanding things according to the ideas, and the good. But when frustrated Thrasymachus walks off and Glaucon takes over the argument, his use of the term eidos “with regard to the good” transforms “into a massive problem what had apparently been only a speck on the horizon in Thrasymachus’s account.” Glaucon asks, What is justice? And does it make you happy? Those are two very different questions: the answer to the ‘what is’ question may not tell you what the good is. Maybe being just won’t make you happy. (In the New Testament, it would make you very unhappy, were it enforced with no divine grace on offer.) This is the dialectical movement that impels Socrates to take the next step on the ‘ladder’ of the argument, to introduce the city, the polis, into the discussion, claiming initially that the city is the image of the soul, the soul ‘writ large’ and therefore easier to see and consider. In Socrates’ imagery, the city is a sort of cave, with its idols and shadow-images on the walls. “Glaucon turns out to be looking at the statues, the shadows on the wall of the cave, and asking Socrates, who, if he had these statues, would be happy? And Socrates proves that’s quite impossible.” Glaucon trusted that justice is a reality, which is supposed to make on happy, but justice as he’s been thinking of it is “in fact an idealization of the images in the cave, and therefore doesn’t stand independent of it.”
As for the good, Glaucon opined that “the three highest goods” are “health, sight, and understanding.” “Socrates proves that you can’t have them unless you’re just.” The tyranny at the core of Glaucon’s soul, and of Thrasymachus before him, is doubly mistaken. It takes the city’s conventions for justice, whereas real justice is only discovered outside the cave, via the philosophic ascent into the light of the sun, into nature. Human happiness— the real good—cannot be acquired without natural justice as a virtue in the soul, There is a true form of self-interest that must be distinguished from the self-interest of tyrant’s ruling principle. Because other regimes (warrior aristocracies, oligarchies, democracies) are all based on the compromises necessary when the city is ordered by a class structure and ruled by more than one person, it is the regime of the tyrant that brings out most clearly the question of self-interest—the question of what way of life is truly good. The tyrant is ‘the city’ at its purest, its most uncompromising, its most determinedly ‘idolatrous.’ This is why it ‘must’ kill Socrates, even when its regime is officially a democracy. Socrates seeks the real good, but the city is “dream-like,” shadowy, chaining its denizens in front of unrealities, not wanting them to awaken and get out. The action of the argument of the dialogue represents the attempted ascent from the world of opinion. “One of the first things I remember from Strauss was how you could understand the whole Republic in terms of moving from the moral dimension of the first analysis of poetry to the metaphysical dimension of the second analysis of poetry, and the reason for that is the intervention of philosophy in between.” In this movement, as in the movement from Thrasymachus to Glaucon to Socrates, “you’re really pulling out what was there to begin with though you didn’t know it.”
“The difference between the pattern and the argument might have become most manifest to me in working on the Gorgias.” The structure is determined by Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, who represent the three parts of the soul in Republic IV—reason or calculation, spiritedness, and desire. They engage in discussion of the beautiful, the just, and the good, but the development of the discussion in sequence is driven by the different errors each makes. At the root is “the problem of eidetic analysis,” namely, that “on the surface, you start with a fully articulated Platonic realm of concepts that either do not overlap at all”—the beautiful, the good, and the just are clear and distinct ideas, having nothing to do with one another—or “they are identical”—all mere instantiations of ‘the ideal.’ But as the argument goes on, one sees “these funny overlaps, which makes it impossible for them to be understood as separate” or identical. To overcome this perplexing structural dilemma, one must follow the unfolding of the argument as it puts the ideas into dialectical movement.
This dialectical movement can be seen once again in Plato’s most obviously ‘cosmological’ dialogue, the Timaeus, where one finds a “double account of space.” “Timaeus first gives an account of the transformation of matter through the elements” (that is, earth, air, fire, and water), an account which shows that when I point to ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing, I am pointing to a thing located in space. But “then he gives a second account which is not understood that way, but is in fact a dialogue.” These two accounts display the difference “between scientific discourse and dialogic discourse.” Scientific discourse reduces to numbers, explaining things we perceive in space on the grounds of the radically un-spatial character of temporal abstraction, which is the subject of mathematics, (one is followed by two, then by three, and on ad infinitum) Dialogue occurs in space: it “involves the facing of the other in which there is reversal of left and right.” That is, when you and I engage in dialogue, my left is your right and vice-versa. This can’t “be reduced from mere number,” as Burger observes, nor, Benardete adds, can it be understood “in terms of mere relations of body” but in terms of two souls and their minds, two individuals, eccentric, contradicting one another, engaging in dialectic.
Timaeus seems to assume initially that the “city in speech,” the polis Socrates builds with his words in the Republic, could be realized, put into time and space. But the cosmology he proposes to support this claim “turns out to be a likely story, and not about the realization, because it’s not a real cosmology.” While his first cosmology claimed that the four elements “transform into each other perfectly,” he later “says he’s made a terrible mistake,” and “in fact only three of the elements do this, but earth does not.” But the realization of the city in speech would require it precisely to ‘come down to earth,’ the element that stubbornly resists transformation. Earth occupies space, solidly, and in that space “you are not the other,” since your right is his left. If each of you is eccentric to the other, neither of you can be pushed into an ‘ideal’ regime, a city in speech in which all the elements are fully harmonized. The city in speech must remain a utopia, a nowhere-ville.
In the Phaedrus Benardete saw how the indeterminate dyad effects the philosophic quest; the dialogue provided him with an important model of how interpretation of a dialogue should be guided by the action of the argument. Attention to the structure of the dialogue, consisting of two parts, shows that “Plato was proposing the Platonic dialogues as the new Olympian gods to replace the old ones.” “They would be the new dispensation.” Upon further consideration—a second teaching of the dialogue—he traced “the motion of the argument” and saw how each speech emerges out of the previous one, but with “an inversion of the prior section when it’s absorbed in a subsequent section.” Socrates’ final account is of the beloved “seeing himself in the image held up by the lover and falling in love with that without knowing what it is.” The discovery of oneself, self-knowledge, is the Platonic second sailing. Benardete proposes that this is “in fact the paradigm of all understanding.”
This is related to the teaching of the Sophist. From his conversation the day before, Theaetetus has apparently concluded that Socrates is a sophist, and Socrates fears that the Eleatic Stranger, who now takes his place, has come to refute him. But precisely through “a systematic series of errors on the part of the speaker,” the Stranger discovers the sophist as “the phantasma of a philosopher,” while setting out to vindicate Socrates from that charge. The hunt for the sophist shows how eidetic analysis “necessarily breaks down” under dialectical scrutiny, if reality is analogous to the ever-changing sophist, then “the elusiveness of the sophist turns out to be the elusiveness of being.” In their failure to recognize that, holding on to the assumption of a fixed realm of ideas, “everybody was a Platonist before Plato.” Pre-Socratic philosophers, who attempted to describe nature with scientific precision, were all terribles simplificateurs.
How does eidetic analysis break down? For that, Benardete turns to the Philebus, where he discovered “the importance of the apeiron [the unlimited].” “There is an internal tension within an eidos,” which Benardete called the “indeterminate dyad,” following the language of Aristotle in Metaphysics XIII.7. [1] The absolute separation of limitedness and the unlimited, with which the Philebus seems to begin, “cannot be maintained, but in fact they intrude on one another because each has another split in it, which shows that it has the other within itself.” Take the limited (pera]. It has two parts: “the limited that is connected with the measured,” with more and less; and numbers, which in themselves have no more or less, but also “no connection to the real,” being pure ‘abstractions,’ as later thinkers would say. Insofar as it can be measured, the limited has within it the unlimitedness of more and less. As Robert Berman puts it, “the indeterminate dyad is this symmetry-breaking element that reveals the dynamic of the argument,” the movement that otherwise could not occur, given the apparently but not really static and limited character of the ideas.
To illustrate the internal tension within the idea, which opens up an internal structure, Benardete sails back to the philosopher’s definition of justice in the Republic: “‘minding one’s own business’ and ‘minding own business well’ is an indeterminate dyad, and the whole Republic turns on that. The city is just when each class in it minds its own business. But the philosopher minds his own business well: his justice is the consequence of “his own ordered soul,” in which reason rules spiritedness, which rules the appetites; he does indeed mind his own business, and he does it well, in accordance with human nature. But the class system of the city in speech can never be instituted on the solid element of earth. The city is composed of individual persons, which are not parts of the order of the city in the same way that the parts of the human soul are parts of the soul. There is a naturalness, a ‘givenness,’ of a soul which the city’s parts can never fully have. “When the city tries to be just on its own principle you necessarily get tyranny, because you’re not able to separate the individual from the principle of the city, whereas in every other regime, there’s always a difference and that’s what makes you free,” enabling your soul to make rational choices that best bring out its nature, not merely following the roles the city assigns to it. “Any attempt to make the city conform to” Socrates’ model of the soul “would in fact destroy the city,” as Aristotle observes in the Politics. And, Benardete adds, given the fact that reason rules the philosophic soul, the justice of his soul is identical to wisdom, or at least to the reasoning inquiry after it. Cities don’t do that, however much they may seek ‘enlightenment.’ The enlightenment they seek in modern times is scientific, but science (that is, precise knowledge), however worthwhile, isn’t the same as wisdom. If being is an elusive sophist, the scientific attempt to pin it down will never suffice to rule human beings, humanly.
Sailing still again, back to the Symposium, Benardete returns to Diotima’s ladder. It is an image of philo-sophia, not wisdom but the love of wisdom. “The beautiful, the just, and the good constantly come up as a triad in Plato.” Philosophic eros is a desire for the good, for happiness. The unphilosophic lover loves the beautiful and the city loves what it takes to be justice. The indeterminate dyad here is the reality of philosophic eros as a particular case of eros generally, just as poetry is a particular case of artistry or making. With regard to love, “the truth is that what is understood to be the lover is the perpetuation” of the poet who writes a love poem to his beloved—the “perpetuation of the poet in the form of beautiful images of the other,” rather as the beloved as described in the Phaedrus turns out to be the reflection of the lover. “The poet preserves himself in the poem totally disguised in his praise of the beautiful, which is ether reality or the law or heroes or whatever.” The poem he makes is “his product in a way that the child is not, and can never be, yours. In the Phaedrus, where love leads up to philosophy, the philosopher produces speeches, an activity ‘which looks on the surface to be very similar to what the poet is doing, but in fact contains within it this pointing to being, rather than to fiction.” Therefore, in the Symposium, eros has three dimensions: love of wisdom or philosophy, love of the good, and love of the beautiful or poiēsis. And in the Phaedrus the third kind of love, seen in “the rhetoric of poetry,” is brought back into dialectics, into philosophy or the love of wisdom, especially as it culminates in happiness, the good. That brings the life of the mind back to the indeterminate dyad, back from three-ness. Plato and the classics generally resist Hegelianism, which insists on a dialectic culminating in a third term, a synthesis, which claims that Being ultimately will become a determinate triad, which is really a monad, the ‘end of history,’ the end of dialectic, the end of ‘History,’ the end of freedom.
Plato explores the meaning of friendship in the Lysis, which on Benardete’s reading recalls a major theme of the Republic. the analysis of the central part of the soul. This part of the soul, spiritedness, thumos, resists “accepting the good,” whether it is defined in terms of reason or in terms of the desires. Spiritedness wants to preserve the self, and even to exalt it in victory and honor; it gets angry when either reason or the desires try to tug it away from such things. As Burger puts it, “there is an attachment to the self” which does not want “the reception of the good” because the reception of the good “would transform the self.” Philosophy itself, Benardete says, “has the same split in it.” Socrates is “moved by the desire for his own understanding,” a subordination of himself to “his own good”; however, in order to preserve philosophy itself, Socrates sees that he must consent to his own destruction at the hands of the city, to drink the hemlock it thrusts upon him. Benardete concludes: “All philosophic understanding, as Socrates represents it, has to be in the category of crisis, because it always involves a problem that comes up as a crisis.” This is the dyad of the philosophic life—on “the one hand, philosophical, on the other, political.” “So the Lysis seems to be the key dialogue for understanding the character of Socratic philosophy.” Burger interjects, “you always say that about whatever you just finished working on!” And rightly so, since, as we’ve seen, each dialogue examines an aspect of the indeterminate dyad.
The dyad of philosophy is always indeterminate because it is “accidental,” meaning an encounter with a question. Pre-Socratic philosophy, “which goes back before the Bible,” rests on wonder at the cosmos, which “is always present.” “It can take profound or not profound expression, but it’s not in crisis.” Because Socratic political philosophy is “always concerned with itself,” its good “always in question” by the city, by citizens, it “has to face the problem of whether its objectivity is sullied by the fact that it’s for your good” in a way that pre-Socratic philosophy, losing itself in wonder at the cosmos, does not wonder about. “The concealed question between the being question,” which pre-Socratics address, “and the intelligibility question has to do with the skewed way in which the question arises, through our interests,” a point pre-Socratics don’t address. Since the interests of the philosopher are eccentric in relation to the interests of the city, Socrates must consider the possibility that he might be killed, that “philosophy of his type will come to an end.” He must reproduce himself by finding youths fit to philosophize. That search itself intensifies the city’s suspicions of his activity. In saying he knows only that he does not know, that he knows the elusiveness of being, he puts himself in contradiction with the city, which requires obedience and therefore certainty, trusting certainty, among its citizens. The city can’t live on inquiry into questions. The philosopher may achieve only knowledge of ignorance. But that includes knowledge of the city, the cave with its idols and their shadows, while the city doesn’t know as much as it must claim to know, in particular how to make human beings happy.
It is Odysseus during his sailings, not Odysseus at home, who exemplifies this point. “Within the notion of human shape the whole teleological problem is contained.” A being shaped in a certain way has a design fit for some things and not for others; for some things it is good, and those things good for it, for other things it is good for nothing. When Burger asks Benardete about Circe “turn[s] human beings into pigs who still have their minds.” What is the significance of a human mind in a pig shape? Benardete recalls that there is a sequence of three stories. There is Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclopes, which he effects, famously, by giving himself the name, “No One,” and blinding the cannibal, who when he calls out to his fellow Cyclopes will have to shout “No one is slaying me.” In their confusion, Odysseus takes off, having used his mind to save his body. “Odysseus begins with a pun on ‘outis’ and “mētis,’ ‘no one’ and ‘mind.’ He escapes because of this pun, which expresses his anonymity, the nonparticularization of mind.” In the story of his encounter with the goddess Circe, Odysseus rescues his men after having been shown the moly root, and particularly its physis, its nature. Nature is “the ultimate pharmakon against enchantment.” Finally, Odyseus sees Hades, which represents “body without mind,” from which condition no human being can save you. A human being’s natural shape goes with his mind; to separate them is disastrous.
This leads to the complication Benardete already described when discussing Plato. The philosopher’s quest to understand the nature of something might seem to require the mind discovering the idea by an act of noetic perception. But the ‘theoretical’ wisdom so gained “loses its power below the noetic level,” given the physical reality of the body he needs to be human, a body that is “male or female, and not pure human being.” As the Book of Genesis implies, “there’s a noetic human shape,” that of Adam before Eve, but divine surgery changes that, introducing bodily eros, and therefore imperfection, into humanity. The same goes for the prior separation of the heavens from the earth. In the Book of Genesis, of course, God pronounces both of these separations good, but philosophers find problems in them, at least for the new human beings from then on existent. The theme of ‘Athens and Jerusalem,’ the demands for beauty and for justice, symbolize this dyad. Political philosophy is the dyad that addresses this dyad, begins to make sense of it. Strauss argued for “the crucial importance of political philosophy” because the radical historicism of Heidegger on the ‘Right,’ Kojève on the ‘Left,’ and others, an attempt to bring the “speculative philosophy” of the pre-Socratics into the twentieth century while leaving physis behind, proved philosophically and politically catastrophic. Strauss emphasized “how important it was not to go beyond preparing the ground for the possibility of philosophy,” a monition Burger calls “a kind of philosophic sōphrosunē” or moderation, and Benardete responds by contrasting Strauss’s self-understanding with Heidegger, who represented “speculative philosophy in the twentieth century.” Berman asks: “If preparing the ground for philosophy is doing something other than philosophizing, what is philosophizing?” What Strauss had in mind, Benardete surmises, concerned “the way the questions now come to us,” “so deeply infected by the tradition…that you don’t even know where the categories we use are coming from.”
Benardete remarks that Hegel’s Phenomenology marks the beginning of this ill-conceived wedding between the Machiavellian-Baconian project of conquering nature and ‘fortune’ with the ambition of pre-Socratic speculative philosophy. Hegel says that the ancient Greeks “begin with things and we begin with concepts.” ‘Concepts’ are attempts not merely to understand but to master nature and the course of events. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, playing out dialectically over time, makes of nature the concretization of its own unfolding, and unfolding that ends in a final, grand synthesis, the ‘end’ of History—the fulfillment of its telos. In Hegel’s fully articulated system of thought, all Being has reached its conclusion and stands fully revealed, fully known. There is no need for philosophy, the love of wisdom, since wisdom now has been achieved. A meta-physics, a beyond-nature, has been achieved. All dyads are now part of one vast monad. Marx is a historicist who makes Hegelian historicism into a materialism, “dialectical materialism.”
In whatever form it takes, historicism opposes a Socratic understanding of the beings as ‘sophists,’ as things that are “hidden and don’t like to be caught.” There is not and cannot be a science of wisdom. What you might be able to have, what Socrates says he has, is knowledge or ‘science’ of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance means that you can know a lot about politics, inasmuch as the city, the cave with its idols and their shadows, doesn’t know as much as it supposes it does, and in particular doesn’t know how to make human beings happy. Benardete remarks that “the Jews are an unassimilable element that reveals that the city cannot possibly fulfill what it claims it can fulfill.” As he knows, Strauss began his intellectual life engaged with ‘the Jewish question’ in 1920s Germany, with Zionism. His attempt to recover political life for his unassimilable people led him to political philosophy. This led him to offer his critique of the historicist politics of radical transformation, joined with his critique of historicist philosophy-to-end-all-philosophy.
Michael Davis follows up on “this funny connection” between “radical politics and metaphysics” which comes up in various ways throughout these conversations. That connection “seems to be necessary when something flies in the face of what’s so obviously real that you have to have a very powerful theory to undermine the reality.” Benardete wonders if Christianity might be understood as an example of such a “theory,” although one fraught with difficulty. Christianity makes “a double move with regard to carnality—on the one hand, the incarnation, on the other, the total spiritualization of everything. It contains within itself its own enemy.” He interprets Paul’s (and Jeremiah’s) notion of “the circumcision of the heart” (Romans 2:25-39, cf. Jeremiah 4:4) as “something like self-contempt” or “self-abasement” It is an attack on pride, which a revealed religion sees as a sin against the God compared to whom all humans are lowly and defective. By taking the prophets, including Jeremiah, and “us[ing] them to replace the law,” as Benardete puts it, Christians effected what Burger calls “a second sailing within Judaism.” Benardete understands circumcision as “part of a general practice of denying the body, leading to the tension that you have a totally carnal religion”—Jesus being God incarnate—that nonetheless decarnalizes the body. This “goes with death being so central,” Burger suggests, to Benardete’s concurrence. Death, after all, is his theme. And decarnalization extends to Heaven as understood in Christianity, where “there is no marriage” because “there is no body.” Without the body, without the human shape, will Christians still be human? Not transformed into pigs, obviously, but into what, exactly? And where does this leave politics in Heaven, in the Kingdom of God?
Between the Jerusalem of Israel and the Jerusalem of Jesus there was the Roman Empire. Paul understands “the history of the world” to begin with “the introduction of sin and death through Adam and Eve.” But given man’s self-consciousness of his own sinfulness, a self-consciousness made acute among the Israelites by Moses and his bringing of the divine law, why has Jesus only arrived now, so long afterwards? “Why is this the appropriate moment?” Benardete proposes, “I think it means the death of Augustus and his divinization, where everybody knows that he’s dead and a corpse but he’s made a god anyway.” That is, the world-ruling Roman Empire has “reach[ed] the point of complete false consciousness, which is the ultimate consequence of sin. But at the other end of the Mediterranean, there is the true God, who in fact became a corpse and then a god.” Well, not exactly, He was always God, but for Benardete that claim is precisely what makes Christianity analogous to ‘Augustanism’: “faith is crucial, because it’s really the consciousness of something you know is untrue.” Christianity is reverse ‘Augustanism’: Jesus starts out as a man born of woman, a woman of lowly standing who gives birth in a manger, not a world-ruling emperor at birth but the world-ruling emperor in death. But with Augustus, too, “there’s no longer either imperial expansion or aspiration, along with the collapse of the political entirely”; “everyone has become a slave,” with no eros and no kalon, no nobility, either. With Augustus, “a man on earth” had already allegedly “become a god.” In Christianity, too, the Christian is properly a slave to the incarnate God, but in an entirely spiritualized universal empire. Virgil’s account of Aeneas and of the end of the republican regime in Rome shows that political life is now gone.
To become human, again, the Romans would need to do as Psyche or ‘Soul’ does in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass—itself a re-write of the Phaedrus. Separated from her beloved, Cupid, she acquires spiritedness, thumos. Spiritedness characterizes politics. The soul begins to philosophize “when she is away from Cupid,” when she discovers the political within herself. She thus “becomes fully human,” ready to redirect the Love she has lost, this time in a better way. [2]
Note
- In that section, Aristotle discusses numbers and ideas or forms. What do ideas contribute to the things that are sensible? Not movement or change, since the ideas are stable. “To say that they are patterns and the other things share in them is to use empty words and poetical metaphors,” as “things do not come into being, unless there is something to originate movement (1080a3-4), as Platonists who don’t really follow Plato say. Nor do numbers originate movement, as Pythagoreans claim. There are two ways to look at numbers. In one way, they are “inassociable”; one is one, in and of itself, two is two, and nothing else, and so on. In another sense, numbers are “associable”; they form a sequence, two following one, three following two, on into infinity, the unlimited, the apeiron. The inassociable numbers resemble Platonic ideas; they are unique unto themselves. Each idea is a form, a delineation, a self-limited entity. The associable numbers are undifferentiated in the sense that they are equally part of the infinite sequence. Benardete sees that the ideas themselves, and not only the associable numbers, have a certain indeterminate quality, despite their formal or limited character.
- I am grateful to Ronna Burger, who graciously read these two reviews of Encounters and Reflections, making many cogent and substantive suggestions for their improvement. Since I adopted most but not all of her suggestions, all remaining flaws are my fault.
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