Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Ronna Burger, editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
The preeminent scholar of English and American literary ‘modernists’, Hugh Kenner found occasions to deploy his prodigious memory. In class, when he wanted to illustrate a point, he could produce evidence by reciting a complete poem. “When the students get over being impressed,” he told an interviewer, “they see that it’s a useful thing to be able to do.” Seth Benardete also could do that useful thing. When asked if he could call to mind anything in the classical Greek and Roman texts, he allowed that this was so, modestly adding, “Wilamowitz could do it with the Byzantine literature, as well.” Whether in dialogue with students or (one presumes) himself, Benardete thus could produce the apposite quote, the crucial piece of the argument that might otherwise go unthought. What might for other minds serve merely as a gimmick for public display—rather along the lines of Ion the rhapsode—became rather a marker of the daring modesty of a philosopher who knew that others had thought the same thoughts before.
In the early 1990s, Ronna Burger, Michael Davis, and Robert Berman met Benardete in quest of such dialogue, which they had first experienced in and out of classes at the New School for Social Research, some twenty years earlier. By presenting philosophy in the form of dialogues, Plato suggests that philosophizing should never lose sight of the persons philosophizing, and especially of their characters, as manifested in the varieties of eros that lead them to engage in thinking and often to evade it. The dialectical quest of which philosophizing consists, and the noetic glimpses of the truths sought through it, are inflected through the traits of unique, sometimes eccentric human souls. The thoughts and actions of human individuals are not often predictable. (A Baptist preacher who would ask his congregants to “lead us in prayer” once said, “It’s surprising what people come up with.”) In the course of his own dialogues with his dialectical partners, Benardete would recur to what Burger calls “jewel-like vignettes of fascinating characters who belonged to a world of scholars that was disappearing and looked as if it could be forgotten”—many of them European émigrés who had “ended up, through all the turns of history, teaching a generation of American students after the war.” These stories illustrated Benardete’s “understanding of philosophy as the concrete encounter of thought with the unexpected.”
Hence the structure of the book, consisting of “encounters”—stories about and portraits of thinkers Benardete engaged with, always within certain places, settings, ‘regimes,’ if you will—and “reflections”—the thoughts of those thinkers, and the thoughts they elicited from Benardete. The two parts of the book “exhibit the structure Benardete liked to call an ‘indeterminate dyad’—a pair whose members are not independent units that can simply be counted up as two, but rather, parts of a whole, each of which in some way contains the other in itself.” “The duality of each part in itself and of both together is encapsulated in the formula for Greek tragedy, pathei mathos—learning by experience: there is an analogy, our discussions suggested, between the process of acquiring insight from what one undergoes in life, in particular from the mistakes one makes, and the process of interpreting a text, insofar as it involves the uncovering of one’s erroneous starting point, followed by the deeper recognition of the necessity of that starting point.”
Whether of persons or texts (with their arguments, images, and reported actions) memory makes philosophizing present. Memory without philosophy, however, is only rhapsody (at best).
As a student at the University of Chicago in the years following the Second World War, Benardete intuited that the theme of his thought would be death. He said so in response to a routine question from one of his fellow students; “I had no idea that years later it would turn out to be true that that’s what I had been doing.” Without the question, and without remembering his spontaneous answer, he might not have seen that so soon or so clearly, in retrospect. That’s the way philosophy works, moving from opinion to insight, with many careful steps along the way.
Among his young colleagues at the university, he recalls Richard Rorty, Richard Kennington, and Allan Bloom. Rorty was a bit like Young Werther, despairing at the discrepancy between what the world is and what it should be. “When he came to philosophy, it provided the proof of his despair. He now had an argument for his psychological state, which he then expresses in the book,” The Mirror of Nature. There Rorty denies that there is anything for the supposed mirror of the human mind to reflect; “there’s really nothing to know.” This claim was anticipated in his dissertation on Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality; “it was six hundred pages long,” so “actuality would have been very short.” It might be added that Rorty’s pragmatism, derived from the writings of John Dewey, attempts to solve the problem of the mismatch between the real and the ideal. However implausible one considers this solution to be, at least it would lead its proponent away from suicide, the premature experiential acquaintance with Benardete’s theme of death.
Richard Kennington also knew his Aristotle, and Benardete evidently found him the most impressive of his fellow students. “He was always very profound, very deep, both I think, psychologically and in terms of thought”—so much so that “it always seemed to me to be so much deeper than anything I was doing that I couldn’t catch up.” For example, when Benardete sent him notes on “Aristotle’s triple account of the principle of noncontradiction” in the Metaphysics, Kennington “wrote back with some acute questions about how the three formulations were related to one another, but I was not able to do anything with it.” Fortunately, Kennington left behind his writings, especially his studies on Descartes, which Benardete judges “convincing.” [1]
The student in his cohort who became (briefly) famous was Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind along with pioneering studies of Shakespeare and an excellent translation of Rousseau’s Emile. [2] Bloom seemed to him somewhat too interested in clear answers to philosophic problems than in the full statement of those problems and the dialectical arguments following that statement. “What he wanted was the bottom line—which of these possibilities was the right one.” This inclined him toward edification, which is undoubtedly the intention of The Closing. This concern opened him to charges of covering a philosophy of nihilism with moral uplift, much to the indignation of Harry V. Jaffa, who may be said to have taken morality very seriously, indeed. On the other hand, near the end of his life Bloom told Benardete that he had “just come to recognize how central the question ‘Quid sit deus?‘ is.” As for Bloom’s efforts at edification, Benardete considers them ineffectual, as they addressed a class of gentlemen (much as the Nicomachean Ethics does) at a time when “there aren’t any gentlemen around to address.” More precisely, he was addressing the American liberals of the 1950s, especially those in academia, after the New Left of the 1960s had largely displaced them in the universities. His book may not have been too little, but it was too late. Stanley Rosen saw this, as recounted in another story. Michael Platt, Bloom, and Rosen were at a conference, driving back to the hotel after dinner. Some deer blocked the road. Bloom, a city boy, became agitated. What were these animals going to do? Rosen reassured him: “Don’t worry, Allan. They haven’t read your book.”
Such criticisms notwithstanding, Benardete later concedes that the New Left’s agitation on university campuses in the late 1960s was more serious than he had thought. Bloom’s “experience of it always seemed to me, at the time at least, to be exaggerated. But then it turned out… that he was in fact correct.” “He had understood that the events had in fact this very deep effect,” and that “he had in fact seen correctly what had been going on under the surface of the universities at this time.”
David Grene, Leo Strauss, and Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen were among Benardete’s teachers at Chicago. Grene “was the only person I knew whose character was really formed by the books he admired—of Joyce, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence.” It would have been hard to find anyone who was more truly a literary man—almost literally ‘bookish.’ With Blanckenhagen, it wasn’t a matter of life imitating art or more, being constituted by it, as it was art anticipating his own life. Marcel Proust’s Prince Charlus and the homosexual milieu in which readers meet him, with its aristocratic-coterie atmosphere—he was a von, after all—and discretion or secrecy, “looks like a perfect match” for Blanckenhagen. He idealized male friendship, culminating in “the need for physical beauty and the incarnation of beauty itself”—one is also reminded of John Ruskin and Walter Pater—in “a beautiful human being…beautiful only for one brief moment” but immortalized in that moment in a work of art. As with the Olympian Jupiter, “a god had become man” not in order to redeem man as man but “in order to make man into a god.” Not edification as morality but edification as estheticism becomes the ideal, to equate “the perfect friend” with “the perfect work of art” is evidently to confuse the character of both friendship and art, as a friend reciprocates love and a statue doesn’t.
Strauss was a man of a different order. What Benardete took from Strauss was a way of reading. In the first class Benardete attended, Strauss “was talking about the beginning of book I of the Republic, and listed on the board seven items that occurred in a row, and circled the fourth one, this was the crucial one. No had ever heard that you could do this with at text,” that “you could take the details and in fact make something of it that linked up with a larger argument that was perfectly intelligible.” Strauss could show his students how each element of a philosophic text fit into the whole argument the philosopher is making, rather as the two elements of an “indeterminate dyad” fit together. In this, a philosophic text imitates Being. Benardete’s initial response was to assert, “If Shakespeare had wanted to, he could have written dialogues.” Just so, Strauss said.
As one might expect, Bloom’s reaction to Strauss was more dramatic than Benardete’s. Bloom took Strauss’s course on the Politics, he argued with Strauss about the authority of modern science. Strauss contended that Aristotle’s account of ethics and politics needed no revision in light of science, although of course modern science had vastly expanded the “scientific horizon” as it relates to the nature of the universe. Bloom contended that the horizon of human beings had similarly widened, thanks to the application of scientific methods to the problems of society. For example, it took Freud to discover the existence of infantile sexuality. “Oh, I think that any thoughtful nursemaid always knew that,” Strauss countered. For Bloom, this was the beginning of nothing less than a conversion of his soul (like that described in the Republic) from the prevalent opinions of ‘intellectuals’ in his time and place to a passion for philosophizing, for the ascent from such opinions. The ‘ancients’ weren’t merely ancient; they might be right, and they deserved serious study, their arguments both worthy of the reader’s erotic longing to know them better and serving as guides to the thinking about nature, and especially human nature, that those arguments bespeak. For Benardete, already committed to such study and animated by such longing, Strauss “was amazing at giving hints as to how to read books,” at giving guidance for one already embarking on philosophic inquiry.
On a more mundane level, after Chicago Benardete embarked for Europe, meeting James Baldwin on shipboard. Baldwin has published his first novel, but “hadn’t written anything about the race problem.” He was, of course, thinking about it. “He gave an extraordinary impression of fear and uncertainty, and sort of bewilderment, really about things.” In his youth, black Americans living in Harlem couldn’t walk through the tonier neighborhoods of Manhattan “without being immediately picked up by the police.” “Somehow that had remained as the crucial experience” for him, an experience exacerbated by his self-exile in Paris, to which he was now returning. “I thought he didn’t know who he was.” Benardete’s interlocutors intervene to clarify: Burger observes that if the human individual is said to be “an infinite flux and indeterminacy” which fixes itself on an “identity” based (for example) on race, class, and/or gender, this is “inevitably alienating because it’s not an individual, it’s a type”; Davis adds that such identities differ from “family roles,” since the latter identities bestow “a particular relation that disposes you toward a particular human being.” “That would make sense of the Christian martyr,” Benardete remarks, the man or woman who confesses “I am a Christian” to the Roman persecutors. “That looks totally determinate because of the imitation involved,” namely, the imitation of Christ. “It really shows up in Paul, the way it’s described, ‘dead in Christ.'” The Christian splits from his natural family to accept adoption into the family of God. This remain a particular relationship, albeit spiritual instead of natural. It is different from identifying oneself as a member of a particular social group, a move that abstracts the person from personhood.
What, then, of the human type, ‘the philosopher’? To aspire to be a philosopher might be to aspire to become a type instead of a person. It is precisely this danger that Benardete and his interlocutors intend to ward off in putting these “encounters” front and center. Philosophizing is an activity of the mind; ‘the philosopher’ is always an individual philosophizing, encountering the unexpected in real moments and circumstances; a political philosopher, particularly, remains mindful of the circumstances in which the thinks and speaks. By contrast, the charming Oxonians Benardete encountered after he got off the ship, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, struck him as academics far gone in ‘twee’—impressed “by the glories of the Middle Ages, in a very strange child-like manner.” They decried the abstractions of modern thought while abstracting themselves into an idealized world of heroic knights, distressed damsels, and plucky but deferential peasants. (This is a bit harsh, especially with respect to Lewis, but it is true that Lewis himself would not claim to have amounted to much, compared to Homer.)
And it was Homer that Benardete wanted to spend his time with. With a fellowship to study in Italy he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Iliad. What he discovered was that the Iliad is structured along the same lines as “Diotima’s account of the structure of eros” in the Symposium. “The Iliad has the first two layers” of Diotima’s ladder of love, going from sexual love, the love of a woman, to the love of glory, through Achilles’ defeat of Hector. Plato’s Socrates’ Diotima then adds the love of wisdom or philosophy. “Once I realized that, I was able to write the dissertation in a month.” That was good enough for academic work, but Benardete kept thinking. “I had seen a pattern through the model of Diotima’s ladder of love” but he hadn’t accounted for the action of the poem, the plot. How does the hero get from one step on the ladder to the next? The answer cannot be found in the ladder, in the structure, in what Aristotle calls formal causality but in “narrative causality.” Strauss himself wrote a book titled The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws. In keeping with the experience of “encounters,” one must keep an ear on what people say but also an eye on what they do. “What I hadn’t yet discovered is what you might call the logos of the logos.” If I understand him correctly, Benardete is saying that it is one thing to see the structure of a philosophic argument, another to see how it unfolds. This is analogous to understanding the plot of an epic poem both in terms of its structure and in terms of its movement, its development. This again is the notion of the indeterminate dyad—indeterminate, in the case of epics and tragedies, because the characters do make choices even as they navigate amongst the rocks of fatality. A study of death, indeed, and of what it means for life.
By 1955, Benardete had a job teaching at St. John’s College (its name itself a reminder of soul-turning and of a dyad first indeterminate and then determinate). Then as now, St. John’s required students to read a determinate set of great books of the Western tradition in a set order, from ancient to modern. The leading spirit of St. John’s in those days was Jacob Klein, Strauss’ friend from pre-Nazi Germany. Benardete saw that Klein differed from Strauss, beginning with the question of morality. “I remember Strauss saying to me, ‘You know, I think I’m as moral as Klein. But not theoretically.” He meant that, unlike Klein, he was interested in vice; he was a careful reader of Machiavelli. He could look at vice, and at viciousness, without averting his eyes or covering it up. As a philosopher, he wanted first and foremost to understand both. He made himself into an exegete of Machiavelli without becoming a Machiavellian. In the Garden of Eden he would have studied both the humans and the serpent, wanting very much what they actually said to one another. Burger calls this being “amoral theoretically,” and I suppose it means that noetic perception itself is ‘beyond good and evil,’ even if the beholder (if only to be able to perceive good and evil noetically) must have some considerable strength of character—this, in view of the human tendency to think wishfully or fearfully. Klein, Burger remarks, “had a strange combination of mathematics and morality, without the political”—as seen in Plato’s Republic, Benardete adds. Whereas Strauss took the argument and the action of the Republic to be an ironic treatment of that combination, Klein was too much the embodiment of it. “I think Klein never understood the fact that there is always a double argument in Plato.” He didn’t fully ‘get the joke’ because he extended morality too far, into the act of intellection.
This Straussian insight is, crucially, not limited to the text written by the philosopher. There is not only “a hidden argument based on what [is] being said,” but the Platonic dialogues themselves “are constructed in such a way as to show the very nature of what is being discussed.” “The dialogue is an imitation of reality because it shows that reality has this double character to it with two strands not necessarily leading in the same direction, though attached to each other.” For example, in the Republic Socrates presents the the liberation of prisoners chained inside a cave, having seen nothing but the shadows of idols illuminated by a fire in the cave, which represents the political regime of the city. This liberation is an image of the philosophic periagoge, the “turning around” of the soul toward nature, represented by the light of the sun, which shines on the other natural objects outside the cave. Klein understood this turning around “very much like a conversion, in which you’re turning away from obscurity toward the light.” What Strauss saw was that Socrates wants the philosopher then to turn back to the cave, “seeing there wasn’t as much light as [he] thought there was.” Klein stopped at “the first level of the argument” but never got to the second, political part.
What was Klein’s strength? Burger asks. “I thought he had some kind of insight into soul.” For example, he could draw a perfect circle on the blackboard. “He was able to turn his arm like a compass. Everybody else’s breaks at the bottom, but he would stand exactly right, so he could draw perfect circles.” That is, if I take Benardete’s playful observation rightly, Klein’s soul governed his body more fully than almost all other souls have learned to do. This suggests that he knew himself as a person if not as a citizen. It also comports with his moral sobriety, as morality requires the rule of the body and the soul’s appetites by something like l’esprit de géométrie (along with, Strauss would insist, l’esprit de finesse).I would only add, in further defense of Klein, that he also understood something of the political implication of mathematics, as seen in his outstanding book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra, where he distinguishes a mathematics of form from a mathematics of motion. If the ‘moderns’ interest themselves in discovering laws of motion, of change, such a mathematics will have affinities with that combination of abstract thought and revolutionary action which has characterized so much of modern politics—though one hastens to add that the mathematicians did not likely have any such thing in mind.
Benardete’s own interest in the logic of motion, of plot, led him to consider historians and the histories they write—specifically, the ‘Father of History,’ Herodotus, in the study titled Herodotean Inquiries. What did Herodotus intend to father? In conversations with the distinguished scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, Benardete learned that Momigliano “wanted to understand Herodotus as the father of history, meaning history as we do it now.” That is, Momigliano was attempting to define Herodotus’ task as a sort of prelude to a symphony of thought that was only now culminating in careful, detailed, empirical research, in what Nietzsche calls “scientific history.” “His argument was that the really impressive thing about Herodotus was that he was the first to devise historical narrative.” The problem is that this insufficiently distinguishes history from epic poetry. As Davis puts it (and Benardete agrees), the real distinction begins with the fact that “Herodotus presents his story as though it’s an account of the real, and Homer doesn’t do that.”
What does he do? Once again, Strauss provided a guiding hint. “Strauss had made this crucial observation about the interpretation of the story of Gyges, that Herodotus was not Gyges.” He refers to one of the stories about how the the seventh-century BC Lydian monarch Gyges seized power. In the Republic, Socrates recounts the version in which the shepherd Gyges found a ring which gave him the power to become invisible, which he used to murder the seduce the queen and murder the reigning king. But Herodotus tells a different story: King Candaules, boastful of his wife’s beauty, required the reluctant Gyges to spy on her when she was naked; the queen discovered Gyges and forced him to kill her husband, in revenge for this humiliation. In protesting his forced spying, Gyges says that “the beautiful things were found long ago, of which one of them is: only look at your own.” That is, the law prohibiting gazing on another man’s beautiful wife is itself a beautiful thing; put another way, and more broadly, the city insists that to love beauty is to look at your own. This contradictory pull between two forms of beauty leads Herodotus to distinguish law from nature: by law, one ought not, and ought not to be compelled to, gaze upon another’s man’s beautiful wife; by nature, one should gaze at and appreciate beautiful things. Herodotus “was making use in a coherent argument, of what [pre-Socratic] philosophers had discovered.” In his own ‘looking,’ he has no shame, does not restrict himself to looking at his own but considers the nature of the things he sees. What Plato’s Socrates adds is the political-philosophic dimension to the argument, showing that once the distinction has been made, the light of nature, now glimpsed, can be contrasted with the lesser light within the cave. To deploy another of Platonic Socrates’ images, Socrates first ‘sailing,’ his first voyage of inquiry resulted in understanding the distinction between physis and nomos discovered by his philosophic predecessors and introduced to narrative, to ‘history,’ by Herodotus; in Socrates’ second ‘sailing’ he brought the ship of inquiry back to his home port.
In the Republic, Socrates describes those who have undertaken the first sailing and returned to port as needing to recover their ‘land legs’ after months at sea; more precisely, having seen by the light of the sun their eyes are unaccustomed to the weaker light in the cave. They stumble, laughably. Even slave girls deride the disoriented philosopher who trips over a stone, a natural object, while thinking about nature as a whole. In the final section of the “Encounters” part of the book, Benardete recalls several of the most notable crackpots he ran into while teaching in New York City, where the occasional crackpot may still be found to this day. Political philosophy enables one better to distinguish kinds of eccentrics, those who deviate from the conventions of the city—crackpots from philosophers—precisely by its capacity to judge both the conventional and the unconventional by the natural standard. That standard is natural right, the first topic Benardete and his philosophic friends take up in Part Two, “Reflections.”
Note
- See Richard Kennington: On Modern origins: Essayhs in Early Modern Political Philosophy. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt, editors. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.
- See Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Reviewed on this website. Bloom was also a pioneer of the study of Shakespeare as a political thinker; see Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa: Shakespeare’s Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). His translation of Plato’s Republic was published by Basic Books (revised edition, 1991); his translation of the Emile was published by Basic Books in 1979.
Recent Comments