Hi, welcome back to The New Thinkery. If you're hearing my voice, that means David Barr is not here and it's fitting. I think he's having marital problems, who knows. But this is in a talking about men and women.
I think that's fitting. A woman that says he had a women problem. Yeah, that's true. We're joined today by Michael Davis.
Are you a Meredith at Sarah Lawrence now? Yes. I'm a Meredith and I haven't had women problems for 55 years now. Yeah, maybe I can make a joke on a Meredith.
Mary does. I don't know. I'm struggling. I'm a professor of Meredith at Sarah Lawrence College, which you joined in 1977.
Yeah, so almost 50 years and the institution is the poor for it. But we're talking about the institutions, the poor for having had in there for 50 years, Alex, isn't this your friend? Only 50 years. Oh, I see.
That might have been so much more. I see. That makes sense. I mean, instead of having all these, you know, yes, all the majors are concerned with poetry, literature, arts, music, it should have been Michael Davis and then a department of making Michael Davis immortal.
That would have been the best solution. Michael has been a guest on the show before. I'm sure listeners know his work. He's author of a number of books.
Most recently, the one we're talking about is a lecture as go as Sophocles and Euripides is the subtitle just before that the music of reason, the soul of the Greeks, ancient tragedy, the origin of modern science, the poetry of philosophy on aerosol's poetics, the politics of philosophy on aerosol's politics. Listen, listeners can't see this at home, but Alex is looking off in the distance. He's not looking at show notes. He's reciting Michael Davis's books from memory.
Just so otherwise, unless I said that, no one would appreciate what you. Well, it's kind of easy. You just say the blank of philosophy. You've got half of it right there.
The autobiography of philosophy. I always recommend the soul of the Greeks because it is so comprehensive. It's got chapters on Herodotus, Plato, Euripides, Aristotle, but any one of them, if there's a text you like, you should go check it out. And wonder loss.
That's another one, Tim. So I think that's most of them. But Michael, thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
Thanks for having me again. So we'll begin with the inspiration of this book. It begins with an in-memorium for Seth Benardetti. And he died over two decades ago.
So this is somehow maybe the culmination of not just your relationship with him in his life, but also your relationship with him since, as I think comes out here. Do you want to just talk a little bit maybe about, well, I guess first and foremost, Benardetti is known, I think most prominently as a translator and commentator on Plato. But obviously he wrote on Greek tragedy. But I think that's less appreciated than his other works.
Can you say something about him on Greek tragedy as a author of studies of Greek tragedy and translators as well as an interpreter and teacher? I think it's fair to say, Alex, that if you had to characterize the two things that preoccupied him as a thinker, on the one hand, it's whatever led him to say that in a way to study philosophy is to study Plato. So Plato is always at the front of his mind. And then on the other hand, the question of what tragedy was.
What I always found is a quite amazing thing about Benardetti is that he knew about the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. He knew that they were not the same thing. He knew that Plato was different from Sophocles. And yet in a classroom with him, when he taught Plato and he taught Sophocles, you couldn't tell the difference.
Reading a text always meant seeing things right there on the surface that you almost always just slide past because they seem so obvious to you. And then once you ask the question, well, wait a minute, what's going on there? You all of a sudden new world's open to you. So if you think about it, I think I mentioned this the last time I was the new thinker, but it's in way more appropriate even here.
At the beginning of the libation bearers, arrest these abilities come down. They leave an offering of the tomb of Agamem Mount. And then they hear people coming and they duck down behind the tomb to hide and in comes a lecture and the chorus for whom the tragedy is named, the libation bearers. And they're bringing libations to the tomb of Agamem Mount.
So all very appropriate and everything follows and everything. But almost nobody, almost nobody, almost nobody knows what a strange thing it is that this tomb, which is right out in front of the house of Usabe, the house of Agamem Mount, now it's the house of quite an esther and the justess who killed him, that this tomb is large enough to hide two brown men. So the tacit question there, wait a minute, what's going on here? What's the motive for placing a tomb that prominent in front of the house of the house of Agamem Mount?
So on the one hand, there's that simple right on the surface observation that pushes you very deeply into play once you start thinking about what the motive for the placement of that tomb is. On the other hand, Plato, the Republic. So in the very beginning of the Republic, I went down to the Pyreas yesterday with Wauken, son of Arastan and so on and so forth. The scene opens up with Socrates saying that Polymachus' slave boy comes up and pulls him by the cloak and better, as the obvious question, well, wait a minute, this is retrospectively perfectly sensible.
That's actually what happened, but that's not a narration of how he experienced it because he couldn't possibly have known that it was Polymachus' slave boy. He only found that out after the fact, but in the narration it's presented as though it was actually part of the experience. So what's presupposed in this narrative, this narrated dialogue, is a kind of synoptic vision that turns out the possibility, which turns out to be absolutely central to the question of justice on the one hand, whether it's possible to have such a vision and to the question of knowledge on the other hand, and those are the twin themes of the Republic, the problem of knowledge on the problem of justice. So all there in the first scene, once you understand what's going on and all there in the first scene of the libation bearers, and so better than he had this uncanny ability to ask simple minded questions that everybody always jumped over.
It unlocks so much of text, whether it's a tragedy or a philosophical text, that it almost belies the fact that there's any real difference between them, at least when you first begin to read them. You've got to confront these funny things that don't seem to make any sense, that when you push them, make all the sense of the world. But I promised you in our preamble before we started talking that I didn't want to go on it, great lengths and talk endlessly. I wanted to be here the questions you had, and now I've violated my own prescription here.
No, no, that's great. I mean, that little observation better that he makes early in the Republic, and right, he's the cloak is grabbed from behind. I think this is emphasized two or three times that he had to turn around and he doesn't know what will mark this. And yet he's put words in pull mark as his mouth is presented in inference as a as a as a omniscience, right?
Is you know, you get this whole idea and he's ascending at the same time, you need a fulfilled a sense, right? And then you need the the stop the center, you're forced to make a decision about which you trust. And you notice by the way that it's not altogether different from a problem, one of the main problems of the escalations is libation barriers that saturates the whole play, which is what the relation I mean, you say you could say the problem of one of the one of the deepest problems of the libation barriers is the relation between you could say action and speech, which is at the same time the relationship between speech and meaning. So that at the end of the play, arrest these behaviors as though showing the bloody cloth that quite a mester used in the murder of Agamemnon is somehow proof that she's guilty.
As though the cloth all by itself had a kind of meaning that it declared, but no, doesn't mean anything. It should have been staunching the wound. It could have been that a bloody nose. It could have been any number of things.
No, it needs to be embedded in a move us in a in a story. Otherwise it doesn't have any evidentiary value at all. So we take it for granted that certain things we think seeing is believing. I'll believe it if I finally get really irrefutable evidence and that means that it's right there in front of me.
But in fact, what's right there in front of you doesn't prove anything. It has to be embedded in a context of explanations and stories and meaning. So that's somehow connected to the issue at the beginning of the Republic. I think I'll just stop with that.
Yeah, so to return to the question of tragedy and thinking about Plato, I mean, Ben Odetti is one of these, this rare eye for detail for strange problems that can be. And then he's not just that, he's also extremely skilled at interpreting that. And I always struggle because when I read him on Homer or something like that, it comes in OSSIS, very philosophic and he'll notice deep parallels between Plato and Homer, for example. I recall following out references to the Odyssey and Plato's trilogy and noticing how much the process of the office and statesmen maps on to the plot of the Odyssey.
And you think that, but there it is. And you realize how brilliant he was at that. But still, if you're Seth Ben Odetti, maybe poetry and philosophy start to collapse, right? And they get really, really close.
But perhaps we could talk a little bit from the experience because when you start dissecting a play as a text, the learning process has already moved past that initial stage, right? Because when you read a platonic dialogue, perhaps you're supposed to act them out, who knows what they really did with them originally, but you're supposed to perhaps you're supposed to act them out. But that's a very different thing of performing a dialogue among friends as you're studying it together versus the rocks echoing as Plato puts it when you're in a theater. I'm not sure where this question is going, but it does- Well, I can see one place going and it seems to me, we've all been teachers and we know that you put it in this way.
You can enjoy a tragedy, a comedy, a homer, and it can be perfectly clear to you that you don't really get it fully. You don't understand it, but you still, you know, you're pulled into it. And that makes it easier to teach in a way. If you've got a lecture full of kids, you know, they get it.
They know the plot. They've read it. They're sort of- But you know, you're reading the Theathetes, theates, and statesmen, and you get into the divisions in the dioceses, in the office. And you know, if you don't get it, you can say to yourself, well, isn't it interesting what the Alliadet exchanger is doing and the Socrates is sitting on the side by it and all that.
But that's not how you're reading it. When you first read it, you struggle to put it together. And so many platonic dialogues are like that. How many times have people read the Republic for the first time and said, yeah, it's brilliant, but I don't, you know, there's so much there and I don't remember what came where and why it came, but how it was connected to what came first.
But if you read the Odyssey, you don't have that problem. You know what's- Because there's something in us that remembers stories in a way that we don't remember arguments. And even though platonic dialogues can't be understood apart from the contextual stories in which the arguments are presented, still the story isn't what's front and center most of the time. So they're not as much fun in a way.
It's a cultivated taste. It's a difference between, I don't know, drinking, sharing, bringing scotch. You know, you can't- Nobody drinks scotch for the first time it likes it. You have to cultivate the taste for it, right?
But you drink a sweet wine and you can just lap it up, you know? And so tragedy and comedy, they're like sweet wine and platonic dialogues are like scotch. So there's a difference, but ultimately, initially, and it's a terribly important difference. And I acknowledge that.
On the one hand, on the other hand, the level at which you're trying to think through them, once you've broken through that surface, I think it's much harder to make up the difference there. And I think that was, you know, a better than to the very end, insisted on the distinction between philosophy and poetry in theory and in practice broke it down every time he read every time he read a text. So it was hard to understand exactly where to make the cut, even though you know that there's a cut. So, but in particular, tragedy, I think, interesting because tragedy places front and center in a very powerful way, the kind of difficulty that is not just a textual difficulty.
It's not a difficulty manufactured by a text to show you that there's a problem, like say, a problem at the beginning of Southways electorate where it turns out that, you know, on the one hand, it looks as though a rest has to be at least 10 years old. On the other hand, it looks as though he was when he's sent off by a lecturer. And on the other hand, it was as though he was a baby and having to reconcile those two things. That's a textual problem that is meant to lead us somewhere, but initially it's a text to a problem.
But the thing is about tragedy is it presents to us problems that are like that, except they're embedded in reality. So the tension between the family and the city, the way they tend to turn into each other, it's not something manufactured by a poet. It's something found by a poet in reality. I think that it was drawn to that kind of difficulty especially.
Just a small point. I mean, I'm struck by your notion that I've always sort of intuited this maybe. And when I run reading groups, I almost always do plays or short stories because it seems like the students are able to get into the action of the argument so much easier. And there are some exceptions.
And I sort of thought about, you know, I like Zenith in a lot. So the education of Cyrus, the analysis. But then I was also thinking in Plato, yourself, you're right, like, sophistic, many of these things. On the one hand, aren't very obviously dramatic in the way that the Gorgias or the symposium or the apologies kind of sort of where there's multiple characters and where there's people fighting, maybe it's a little more obvious.
Well, I think you're right. You're clearly right. And the Republicans are saying, but, you know, there's not a moment in and taken. It isn't like that.
And there are plenty of moments in the Gorgias where you've got to be very attentive because there's an argument going on that if you don't notice what's being laid out, you won't get it. You've got to work hard at following it. But I guess that's it in a way you don't remember once being at a, it's not going to seem to fit it initially. But I think I don't think I know my, my, the contemporary playwright, I admire the most is Tom Scottard.
So I remember taking my family, my two daughters who were out at Young at the time to Arcadia when it opened on Broadway. And I loved it and they and my wife loved it and my two daughters sort of knew they were supposed to love it. So they were very hard at trying to love it. And sitting behind us, there was a family from out of town that had come in to go to a Broadway show and they knew that Tom Scottard was famous.
And so they came to the show. And so, I mean, Arcadia is a wonderful play. It's a combination of a love story and a reflection on the nature of fractals. So, and, and the female characters is, it has solved the proof that everyone else's struggle for actually wasn't solved in centuries afterward, but her proof gets burned up in a fire.
So the people behind us got up at, at the intermission and it was clear that they were going to leave and the man said, this is okay, but I didn't get all this math stuff. Why all this math stuff is there? And in a way, the math stuff is like the diocese in this office. You've got to, you've got to somehow be enthralled with it in order to see how it's connected.
And so yes, they're much, they're, so they're supposed to be, you know, very dramatic with sonic dialogue. The feeders has very dramatic moments. A lot of the shorter ones, the lovers is wonderfully, you know, dramatic. But there are always moments where in order to see what's going on, you have to follow an extended argument and see where it's, where it's not really going, where it's not really working.
Yeah, it strikes me that the greatest playwrights are able to write multiple plots at once, by which I mean, you watch Macbeth and you think it's about ambition, right? Or you watch Hamlet and you think it's about, you know, a guy who's, who's trying to get revenge for his father, but he's uncertain and he's, you know, sort of, and Shakespeare especially is really good at this. And you just watch, you can be entertained by it. So then you start to think about it and you're like, okay, yeah, what's the stuff with Fort and the rest going on in the background?
And what's that political dynamic and the stuff about Vittenberg is strange and, and, you know, you know, why does he call the players and say he'll rewrite the play, then he hatches the plot to use it to catch quality as well. And you start to realize there's all these little problems that suggest that the plot, what you took to be the plot is not the actual plot. In fact, in many places, you would just be mistaken about what's actually happening. There's, it's almost deceptive because when you watch it in real time, you're not able to assess these details or problems, whereas even to understand the plot of the Republic, you need to have such a good read on like, La Cone and I in the Antisist speech and know, you know, exactly what they're sort of hiding from themselves and to see how in each stage of the argument, Socrates brings it to their face.
If you don't see that, you're just going to think Socrates is an idealist and you get played in this person. Yeah, maybe, what you just said, I mean, it made me think of something regardless of what they say about, you know, acting out platonic dialogues, all that's invention anyway, they have no idea whether that's true platonic dialogues were written to be read. You can't do it without reading the just to, you couldn't possibly take it all in. Whereas, poetry's not like that.
It is meant to be read. I mean, it's like that passage in Aristothenes clouds where he scolds them during the parabasist for not having given them the prize and at any point, I don't want to point well, that's interesting because these plays were only written to be performed once. So that means that he's rewritten this, which means that this is for an audience who will read it, not for an audience who will see it performed. So they were very aware of the fact that these texts, these plays could potentially live on, but they were initially written to be performed.
And so they had to be something that an audience could be taken with by watching. And of course, that meant that many of the things, as you say, that are taken for granted, turn out to be wrong, but it's not accidental. They're taken for granted. The poet has written it in such a way to make you take them for granted the mistakes or engineered the stakes.
And that's what makes it possible to take them in as a performance. Because I just don't believe that about the republic. It's a book that's meant that has to be read to be understood. And maybe about some of the shorter ones you could say, but I don't know.
Think about something like a quite a font where Socrates has like three words to say at the beginning and then quite a font is long, you know, harangue. There are quite dramatic moments, as you say, but it's not all dramatic moments, whereas there are very few places. The moments can be extremely subtle, like theology. At one point, young Socrates used the word hunt to pass him and that set Socrates off on it's like, it took me ten reads to notice this.
And but yeah, but you could say that the doctrines of Platonism are to the problems of the dialogue, what the entertainment of a play is to the problems of life. It gives a superficial pressure, but it's not like a drama. It's a teaching or something. Yeah, maybe you could say that.
I mean, that in a way, that's true philosophy generally. It's true Descartes, you know, the sort of simple version of Cartesian, the Cartesian doubt. So yeah, you could say, but you put it in this way, isn't it interesting? I'm a doctoral student who's writing on the tradition of esotericism in Rome after Plato.
And one of the questions he struggled with in an interesting way from the beginning is, what exactly is the difference between esotericism and what poetry always does? I think the fact that that's even a question shows you that when you read a poem or want to play, you are very open to the fact that it cuts deeper than the initial impression. You're even excited by the fact that it cuts deeper. Whereas with philosophy, there's a tendency to hold on to the doctrinal version, to Platonism, to Cartesian, it's a, you know, and not to want.
So a reluctance in the philosophical world, except the fact that philosophers can be clever writers and take pleasure in their cleverness and not just do it for, you know, clever reasons, but also because some things need to be said indirectly. They don't like that. And so there's a reluctance to allow Plato to transcend Platonism, whereas with sonically is, I mean, think about all the, the scholarly, think about all the trees that have been wasted on it, and so on. And so I don't know where that gets us, but.
Well, let me use that as an excuse to return to your book, Electras. And can you just tell us a little bit about the theme of the book? I got to say the intro kind of grabbed my attention. And then you, there is a long discussion of sort of the metaphysics or the metaphysical concepts male and female.
Why Electra? Why is that? I mean, you sort of mentioned that this play, you know, the Electra story is taken up by all three Trigidians that we have. So there's definitely a reason right there.
I assume there's a deeper reason why to look at Electra for these, these questions. Well, the way I structure the book, so that chapter on S.L.S. chapter on S.L.S. libation bears, chapter on Sophocles, Electra chapter on Euripideslectra.
The first is called Electra Bound. The second is called Electra. And the third is called Electra Unbound. I'm obviously playing with the whole Prometheus myth, but you could put it in this way that S.L.S.
writes a play about Orestes and Electra coming together to murder their mother. It's a story of Mattresside. And yet his Electra disappears at the latest line, Fival Vod. Orestes is writing a play in which the same plot is operating, but Electra and Orestes don't meet until two thirds of the way through the play.
And she, nothing that Electra does in the play, actually affects the outcome of the action. Euripides writes a play in which Electra and Orestes meet pretty early, line 250 or so. And Electra simply manipulates her brother throughout the whole play. She's just a very, very clever woman, but she's in control of everything.
And Orestes is sort of a dope. So it turns out that S.L.S. writes a play in which he wants to indicate that there are certain things that are hidden from us and can't ever be brought completely into the open. So he just takes logos, speech.
Speech always has its very nature, the attempt to articulate something, to bring something into the light, you could say, that by its nature isn't in the light. And so you get a situation, for example, where you need to use common nouns to describe a particular thing. And they're very useful, but on the one hand, on the other hand, a common noun always refers to more than one possible thing. It's never particular.
So it never altogether brings to sight what it's designed to bring to sight. And it can't bring to sight what it's designed to bring to sight. Even though it turns out that given what speech is, it's always attempting. So you could say, all right, well, you realize that, but then you ask yourself the question, well, wait a minute, what is this hidden thing that can't be brought to sight?
And speech, logos can't resist the temptation because its job is to bring these things to light. And so it starts looking at what's hidden and it tries to articulate what's hidden. So what S.L.S. does is get rid of a lecture early as the representative of what can't simply be said.
And therefore makes it look as though what he's doing is acknowledging that there are certain things that have to go unsaid. In Euripides, it looks as though a lecture as once again the female takes that problem and simply articulates it and lays it out as though it's perfectly articulable. So you can just say everything. You can so in a way, and then in South Italy you see the problem that a lecture is there on stage for virtually the entire play.
She's quite visible. The connection between her and her brother is problematic but constantly present. So I would put it in this way that all three of them are using the female as the deeper and hidden, necessarily hidden strand of understanding. And S.L.S.
emphasizes its necessary hiddenness. Euripides shows us in a way the tragedy of attempting to make it perfectly visible and in a way concentrates on the tension between the male, the necessary tension between the male and the female. South Italy is placed in the center. We don't actually know whether the play was written second or third, but it belongs in the center because in a way it makes clear what the problem is in a way that the other two are dealing with the same problem.
It's not as though the electric disappears, it's not that the problem doesn't disappear because it gets taken up in the second half of the play by the nurse. And of course, her quick absence from the play or her quick exit from the play is really just designed to point to a problem, not to eliminate it from S.L.S.'s consideration. No more than electors' apparent complete control of things is meant to eliminate the problem for consideration and Euripides. But they're looking at it from different angles.
And in a way, Sophocles treats it head up. Elector and arrestees, they can't accomplish their task with upcoming together. They don't come together until two thirds of the way through, and then they don't succeed in bringing them in this combination as much as they think that they will. That's much too fuzzy.
That's very helpful. I'll find out the structure of the book. I have a follow-up. If I followed correctly, you said something along the lines of the female playing a necessary role in understanding.
If I understood that right, could you maybe explain for me in non-metaphorical terms? Some of our listeners aren't as bright as you. I understand fully what you mean, but could you explain it for someone who doesn't understand? I think I follow.
Hold on. I want to hear that a little more explicitly if I understood you properly. You've put it in this way. Put it in a timely different context.
Protapress is supposed to have written a book in antiquity called On Truth, the first line of which was human being is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are and of the things that are not that they are not. In a way, the earliest statement of relativism. Plato takes this up in various places in the Theatetus and in the Protapress. It looks as though his claim in the Theatetus is that protagorean relativism, but man is a measure of all things, is a way of saying there's nothing but seeming.
What seems is, and it looks as though Socrates' argument in the Theatetus is, that might be true, but if it's true, you never know how you possibly know it. If what seems to you is what you take to be, then you don't know the distinction between seeming and being. The fact that you know the distinction between seeming and being means that you don't think that seeming is the same as being. There's something beyond seeming.
You start with that and then you say, well, okay, seeming, you have to start with what seems to you and you have to articulate what seems to you, but as soon as you realize that there's something that eludes you in what you're articulating, you realize that in a way you couldn't even have started unless there were that connection to the very thing that makes it possible to ask a question in the first place is necessary for anything like knowing or coming to be aware to occur. That means that you have to have some access to what is not, cannot be said in order to say it. The fact of language is a kind of a proof of the fact that you have connection to something that you can't simply articulate. And it seems to me that the Greeks generally, as well as some thought of as in Euripides, that's what we're talking about in particular, for whatever reasons, want to make the connection between the female and that's straight up.
And the male is connected to logos, to law. Law wants to be the discovery of what is in the mineau's law lays out or articulates an account of being that pretends that it's altogether adequate to the way things are. So the political, the legal logos, they look as though they're connected to this male tendency to organize the whole and to wish to complete that organization. Whereas the female is understood to be what resists that and makes it forever impossible to complete that project.
One way in which I like to approach this is to think about how logos, and if you're thinking specifically in terms of logic, tends to assert identity or non-identity, x is not y. When in reality, any complex phenomenon is going to be both somehow unified and somehow have eternal differences. So there are human beings, but human beings show themselves as male and female. And there are clear ways of connection and identity, but also clear differences that make it a complex phenomenon.
My favorite version of this, incidentally, just because it always makes me smile, is in Permanities poem, which you have this goddess who greets a young man, it seems to be Permanities, and to reveal to him the unity of all things, and that you can't speak not being. And every argument she uses is a reductive, out of sort of, contrafactualing, which she posits what is not as though it is. And she blames human speech while using human speech. And then she struggles and she greets him warmly, but then she seems to get quite contentious and angry at moments in some of the fragments.
Then you start to realize that there's this difficulty with speech, which is that it tends to divide and say, this is one thing and this is another, and they're therefore different. And yet we're somehow aware, as we do that dividing, that there is this kind of almost empty level or universal level in which all things, all differences disappear and come into a unity. And that happens with men and women in relation to human beings and maybe with all things in respect to the fact that they are logos is forced to divide and combine. And perhaps the way to introduce the feminine to logos is that it's dialectic, right, where you're able to finesse a little bit more than assert, right?
So you can get male assertiveness seems to push in one direction, whereas female finesse is more, you know, women are able to adapt a bit for her and to accommodate and to change their position and their appearance based on circumstance. And somehow, philosophy has to find a way to balance these two elements. Well, I think you see the interesting problem. I mean, on the one hand, that makes first shot, that makes perfect sense.
And certainly I made that first shot too, when I said logos identified with the male, logos is identified with a kind of universalizing principle, whereas I mean, the connection, you could say that shows up in the plays, the reason why motherhood comes in is because we are in all three plays presented with what turns out to be illusory, but the powerful illusion that the relation to the mother between the mother and the child seems to be the example of immediacy in relations. Father's relation to the child is mediated through the mother. You don't know it's your child unless you're convinced that the mother is playing straight with you. So you don't have that kind of a square as the mother has an immediate awareness that the child is her is.
So the interesting thing about your relation to your mother is that it is something for which you cannot provide finally an argument. I mean, you can't say I love my mother because she is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, pretty, as kind of media, cheerful, pretty brave, even clean and reverent because that means that you only love her because of the quality she has. And that's not the point. The point is that you have an immediate connection to her.
Now the reason I said it's an illusion, you know, because when a rescues comes in and soft plays electric, it's not all clear that quite necessary recognizes who he is. So what kind of immediate relationship to that? So the chain of evidence gets broken. So a rescues goes away when he's a baby, comes back much later.
And the thing that you thought was an immediate relation doesn't look like an immediate relation any longer. Nevertheless, the females begins to stand as a kind of model for this immediate, this undeniable immediate sea, which is connected to particularity rather than generality and therefore connected to logos understood as dealing in common nouns, which are always a species of universal. They refer to more than one thing. Okay.
And you brought this up in the way you particularly that the problem is that every identity, which is looks like what we're dealing with now, is never complete identity. Now, what does that mean? That means that we're not dealing with identities, we're dealing with lightness. And the lightness is a similarity is always necessarily by virtue of being a similarity also, but this similarity, it can't be the one without being the other.
If it's a similitude, it's a dissimilitude as well. But that, of course, brings you back into a world where you're talking about a kind of logos that doesn't express identity, but expresses similarity in explicitly, in similes or implicitly, in metaphors. So it turns out that there's a species of talk that we use, that we call poetry, that looks as though it accomplishes on the poetic level, what you refer to as on a dialectical level, dialectical level. That's interesting because the legocites you know means conversation and conversation and it means two voices and a kind of negotiation.
You could say, I mean, it strikes me that in a way Euripides's electorate sort of recognizes that, but things that can work it out so thoroughly that it can get the dialectic laid out. I mean, Euripides's forgive me, making fun of Hegel, right? You can't do it completely. You can't lay out the complete.
It's as though Hegel wants to say, you must forgive me because I don't know Hegel a lot of say this but I'll say it anyway, wants to claim that you can give an account of the necessary role of contingency in human life, of particularity, of contingency, of the intelligible position of unintelligibility, would say. And it looks as though Plato on the one hand philosophically under Trigetians, on the other hand, poetically do not wish to admit that. You can point to it. You can give it a name.
You can say it has to do with this problematic relation between male and female, which can't give a complete resolution of the difficulty. So in his image, he created them. Man and woman, he created them is not meant to be a solution. It's meant to be a statement of a fundamental problem of being human, that you're never a human being.
You're not an answer. There's no such thing as it can be a complete human being. Greg's about to jump in, but I just want to say you should probably expect a strongly worded letter from Robert Berman about it. Yes.
Well, that's why I said, you know, that's why I said I have no right to say this because it is a kind of manly caricature of Hegel that I'm falling into for the purpose of making a point, but unperfably open to possibly that. Let's say we're not talking about Berman's shape. We're talking about other things. I was going to try and advocate for my university to change its mascot to the human being.
So now you're compelling me to rethink that. But your quote of Genesis reminds me of a conversation we had before we started recording, which reminds me of the ebbograp is the right word, but your book, after you're in the Warion Deceptivity, where it actually was the line you just quoted from Genesis. And then half the footnotes in that first chapter or introduction, I suppose, are to Nietzsche. And so it seems like I don't know if we remember, I can't remember if we determined that it's lurking in the foreground or asking in the background, but Genesis and Nietzsche seem to be somewhere floating around in this book.
Can you speak to their role here? Well, Genesis is, I suppose, you know, I don't want to get, I don't want to say too much about this. I don't know enough. I know the power of this phrase, which I've quoted just now the more popular translation of it in the book.
I think I use Berger's translation of it. I think the crucial thing for me is to see that in these introductory chapters of Genesis, you have two things going on. You have an account of the creation of human being on the sixth day. That's in his image.
He created them, man and woman. He created them. And then you have the second account of the creation of man and woman, according to which women come after man and they're part of that. So the interesting thing is that you get what in Ben or Denny's language would be an identical account, human being male female problematic together as a male female, and then you get a genetic account, a poetic account of the coming to be of woman out of a part of men, which makes it look as though you're beginning with a kind of wholeness, as though the male is a primary and the female is secondary.
And I would suspect, although I don't know the text well enough to say, and I don't know the languages, that working out the tension between those accounts would be terribly interesting for the development in Genesis. But at the very least, you could say an account of what it means that when we're thrown out of Eden, that when Adam and Eve are thrown out of Eden, that they cover their genitals out of shame, having realized for the first time that neither one was a human being simply. So self-awareness, self-consciousness in the philosophical sense brings self-consciousness in the teenage sense of just not being very confident. Then switch to Nietzsche, where it looks as though he begins in Beyond Good and Evil with this claim that philosophers have never understood women.
But then it turns out that he modifies that it really means dogmatic philosophers have never understood women. Much much more is at stake in that book, and he has his own way of going about it. But at the very least, you could say this, that dogmatic philosophers have never understood women means that the very act of laying out a dogmatic structure of philosophy leaves the crucial thing out. It leaves out what DeFi is being understood in this universal way.
So there's a way in which Nietzsche, of course, of course, a Greek student of retransitity, Nietzsche knows that for the Greeks something was pointed to by the female that was meant to articulate what DeFi is being articulated and call her attention to the fact that law wants to be the discovery of what he is, but that it wants to be the discovery of what he is means it must necessarily fail in its attempt to be the discovery of what he is. That looks like a bad thing. But then of course, that turns out to be the case that law wants to be the discovery of what he is, well, that means that the law really only ever gives us ducks up seeming. It doesn't give us being.
But that, of course, means that this failure to give us being gives us philosophy, gives us the possibility of asking questions in a world which was perfectly, that's what I meant earlier by invoking the theotetus. If there's no difference between seeming and being, there's no possibility of asking any questions because you're immersed in a world that looks to you, simply the way things work. Language doesn't exist in such a world. In order for logos to exist, there must be a discrepancy between what seems and what is, even though logos is constantly in the process of trying to collapse the distinction between what seems and what is.
And so, if you look, I think you'd find in theotetus of colonus, best of all, not to be born, second best to die, a quick death. If you look at the whole context of that, it looks as though he's really talking about this fundamental problem of logos, that in a way, it wants to create a world in which it couldn't possibly exist. And if you look at it in that way and simply in that way, which is though you've got something like a tragedy on your hands, the human beings are the animals with logos. Logos wants to find a world in which it would be utterly destroyed.
Yeah, it's interesting. When you, I always find of comparing in Kant's critique of judgment at one point, he discusses how when we see something beautiful, we elicit others' descent. We want other people to say, don't think this is beautiful too. And then if we disagree, disputes arise and you wait to bait it.
And then I'm reminded of something Plato, a soccery says about the beat of the Beethoven Hippiest Nature, which is the cause of all wars. And sometimes the thing that makes life interesting also makes us pretty frightening as well, right? And it's the price you have to pay. We're just about an hour now.
And I thought maybe we could return from where we began, which is the fact that this book is dedicated to the memory of Seth Benner-Dettie, who you started attending as courses when you moved to New York for Sarah Lawrence in the 70s. I imagine you took everything you could with him until he passed away in 2001, I believe it was. Any memories of him teaching tragedy or specifically striking moments that you'd like to share, I think, on this earth, I'd like to hear this sort of thing. Well, I think the most startling thing about better Dettie teaching tragedy was how funny he found it.
This delight in, I remember once I had him come lecture to a course I was giving at Sarah Lawrence on Greek tragedy. He came and lectured on Antigone. And he started by saying, well, the real question of Antigone is when your grandmother dies, why don't you just throw the corpse out with the trash? You know, I mean, in a way, that is the problem.
Why do we treat courses as though? What's like an action between the courts? But he did have to be shocking, obviously, on the one hand, on the other hand, to sort of because people, there's a lot of nervous laughter when that kind of thing gets said. And he was just a master at doing that sort of thing.
Or, you know, I think the very first class I took from him was a class on Sophocles Philoctetes at the NYU. And, you know, I didn't know this at the time because I never had a classroom before, but they started at six o'clock. And I think we quitted about 1130. And we didn't have any breaks.
We just went through, we just kept going and going and going. But it was on the Philoctetes. And it became pretty clear early on that he wanted to characterize the problem of the Philoctetes in the following way. Well, what does it mean?
This is the limit case of tragic. Why? Because who's the tragic hero? He's a man who has an unhealing wound that stinks so badly and that hurts so much that it smells and he wails so much that the Greeks just got to get rid of him and drop him off on the Isle of Lemles because he can't, you know, they just can't have him on the ship anymore because they're on their way to Troy.
So he had a way of forcing you to see that comedy and tragedy were strangely overlapping. In the way they in the way they dealt with it. There are a lot of other stories, but, you know, been a long time. He was going to ask something.
Yeah. Did you ever see him teach your stuff? And he's or are you common? Communions?
No, he he did teach our sonies one summer at the Greek and Latin Institute. He taught all the place, except all seven of them unusual for them to another more than something he can have taught all the like 13. But I don't, you know, and I talked to about the place sometimes. But but no, I never actually took course on our stuff.
He never taught our stuff. And he said that while I was there at NYU and he never taught Xenophon, interestingly enough, his reason for not teaching Xenophon was it's too hard. Whereas, you know, Plato, the problems jumped out at it, but in Xenophon, which is, you know, better than he always said things that were that were designed to be. For a moment.
Just believe, you know, but yeah, he never taught Xenophon. You never to watch. I mean, I will say that the more I read Xenophon, the more I'm like, Oh, wow, I can't believe I missed this enormous philosophical puzzle being presented in the discussion. For example, okay.
So it's yeah, that's kind of neat. Yeah. Something would be just profoundly funny, if not sacrilegious about Ben or Denny, a Ben or Denny interpretation of Xenophon where he just did his thing. I can't imagine a bigger contrast between the interpretation and the character of the text.
You got to write that book, Alex. I'll help you. Well, see, I think the interesting thing is that I start the electorate's chapter, each of them with a series of puzzles, some of them specifically suggested by Ben or Denny. Some of them made up by me in the spirit of Ben or Denny, but he always started teaching Greek tragedy that by showing you, you didn't get it.
It's really strange. So this is a, you know, what a weird thing. Greek tragedy is all these things that are supposed to, that everybody, you know, again, first time through you, you see, you're perfectly contented to accept it. And then you say, well, this doesn't make any sense.
This is crazy. So by pointing out the craziness of it, he was in a way showing you that if it was tragic, you had to work at it in a different way to show that it was tragic. So I'm just showing you that it was sort of funny. There's something almost ridiculous about it.
I think of it as turning sonically into Gilbert Solve. That's what he was doing, right? And then I suspect, although I didn't participate in it, I suspect that when he was teaching a comedy, he showed how it was underneath it all tragic. When he's teaching Plato, he shows how it is really, well, he wants to point you to the argument of the action.
And so he's constantly forcing you to understand that it's a drama, and not a philosophical, philosophical treatise. And in Aristotle as well, I mean, he didn't write very much on it, but it's really an attempt to show you that Aristotle's dialectical in a way that you wouldn't have expected it to be. So teaching these books always meant for him, showing that they weren't what they seemed to be. I think that if you take Xenophon, it's harder because you don't know, I mean, in a way, it's not tragic and it's not comic.
You're not moving from one extreme to another. It's kind of homey and easygoing. And yes, in the sider padilla, you know, yeah, sure, it's a more wonderful story, but in the economics, I think it's just harder to figure out what it's harder to do the startling thing with his edna folk. The economics is very, very funny, but it's hard to get there.
It's hard to get to the humor of it. But yeah, that's fair. That's right. I guess that's a good place to end.
Yeah, it is interesting how you and Ron have, you know, in a way taking the torch and delved into Aristotle in a way that better than he denied it is written writing, obviously. As opposed to his unwritten writings. As opposed to his unwritten writing, so else. Yeah, I get you can tell a couple of times.
But he did do it in his notes. I mean, he did do it in his classes. He did. He's on public writings.
There you go. I learned from him what I do about not the poetics. That was pretty much mine. But the politics, an awful lot of it came from understanding what he had done.
In a way, he was less comfortable. I think I don't know why he never published the craziness of his Aristotle interpretations in a way. It's hard to believe that he was worried about being thought to be too crazy because he already thought to be too crazy. But he resisted.
He wrote a few things on Aristotle. They're very, very impressive. The metaphysics thing, the anima thing. But it doesn't, in a way, he doesn't compare with what he did with Plato.
I don't know why that would be. But yes, why not? And I, between the two of us, I think I told you this once before and then I'll let you go. So I first published the poetry of philosophy and then on the poetics.
And that was supposed to be about the beautiful. And then I published the politics of philosophy. And that was supposed to be about the just. And I was going to do the morality of philosophy, which would have been on the Nick and the Kean ethics.
And that was going to be about the good. It would have been a trilogy. But then damn, Ron, I published your book. It was, I was going to try to do that.
Tell me about it. You know, I had to look elsewhere. And I used to knock some stuff in there in the soil of the Greeks. Yeah, it's like what Sogadie says in the next of us about how, how, as pages, these are the throwways from parakeles.
Perhaps the throwways from the book that I might have written, but didn't write because it was Ronald Rotherberg. I will thank you, Michael. That was engaging and really thoughtful as always. And it's good to see you and talk to you.
Just find the book, Alex. Tell me about the book. What's the book called? Book is called Electris.
Escaloscopically is in Rippity. But I'm not going to do this from our good version of that scene, Augustine's Press. We're going to say it's only 20 bucks. I mean, I mean, look, you're not selling your wisdom really?
Like you're not a softest, but we say it's for dollar. That's as good as you know. All right, well, thank you, Michael. And I will see you next time.