I’ve just uploaded a draft of my paper, “ὁ ἑρμηνεύς in Herodotus,” a discussion of the figure of the translator or interpreter in Herodotus’ Histories. This figure provides, I argue, a small form glimpse into the nature of Herodotean inquiry or ἱστορίη. The goal of the paper is to articulate how Seth Benardete’s interest in Herodotus reflects a unique approach to the crisis of modernity, that is, the need for a higher but non-metaphysical ground to man’s theoretical aspirations and his existence as a whole.
I’ll be presenting this paper on January 15th, from 4–7pm EST, at the 2021 meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA).
Below, you’ll find the first paragraph of the paper (sans footnotes). But you can read the whole paper here.
Excerpt from the Introduction:
Starting with Machiavelli, modern philosophers have tended to malign the ideal as imaginary, preferring instead to study the reality of material things, the effective truth of their mechanistic nature. Accompanying this move was a deep skepticism about the possibility of metaphysics. This skepticism left man’s striving without any basis higher than man himself, to which injury was added the insult of self-abasement, the reduction of that striving to mere fear and greed.
This crisis led many late modern philosophers to reassess modernity and to return to the pre-modern world in search of a basis for man’s theoretical aspirations and his existence as a whole. But not just any part of the pre-modern world would do. The modern critique of metaphysics, powerful as it was, required a return to the pre-metaphysical worldview, so as to understand man’s theoretical strivings prior to its metaphysical perversion. The most powerful advocate of this return was Friedrich Nietzsche, who identified Plato as the culprit of this millennia-long metaphysical fool’s errand and who sought, in turn, to revive the spirit of the Pre-Platonic, as opposed to Pre-Socratic, philosophers. Nietzsche’s distinction of Plato from the historical Socrates subsequently guided Leo Strauss, first, to a renewed appreciation of the Xenophontic and Aristophanic Socrates; second, to evaluating Plato’s apparent metaphysics in light of his art of writing, rather than the other way around; and, third, to an appreciation of the theoretical aspects of Thucydides, to say nothing of where else it may have led him.
It seems to me that his student Seth Benardete continued this trend, especially in his first major works on Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Herodotus’ Histories. The first examines the relationship between the heroic and the tragic, the second that between the sacred and the arts, and the third that between inquiry and speech or λόγος. Whereas the first two works are concerned with the pre-theoretical or even pre-political, the last is most evidently concerned with a pre-metaphysical understanding of man’s theoretical aspirations. It is his contribution, or at least an early contribution, to the above trend. But since what Benardete accomplished here has not been adequately appreciated, I’d like to offer a brief glance, a glimpse really, at the theoretical aspect in Herodotus.