Table Of ContentE N C O U N T E R S
& R E F L E C T I O N S
Seth Benardete, 1957. Courtesy Jacqueline Gourevitch
E N C O U N T E R S
& R E F L E C T I O N S
C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h
Seth Benardete
WITH ROBERT BERMAN, RONNA BURGER, AND MICHAEL DAVIS
E D I T E D B Y R O N N A B U R G E R
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
SETH BENARDETE (1930–2001) was professor of classics at New York Uni-
versity. He was the author or translator of many books, most recently The Ar-
gument of the Action, Plato’s “Laws,”and Plato’s “Symposium,”all published by the
University of Chicago Press.
ROBERT BERMANteaches philosophy at Xavier University in New Orleans. He
has written on Hegel, ethics, and philosophy of law.
RONNABURGERis professor of philosophy at Tulane University. She has pub-
lished books on Plato’s Phaedrusand Phaedoand is currently at work on a book
on Aristotle’s Ethics.
MICHAEL DAVISis professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. He is
theauthor of books on Aristotle’s Poetics,Aristotle’s Politics,and most recently,
Rousseau’s Reveries.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN (cloth): 0-226-04278-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benardete, Seth.
Encounters and reflections : conversations with Seth Benardete : with
Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis / Seth Benardete ; edited
by Ronna Burger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-04278-2 (alk. paper)
1.Benardete, Seth—Interviews. 2.Classicists—United States—
Interviews. 3.Classical philology—Study and teaching (Higher)
4.Philosophy, Ancient—Study and teaching (Higher) 5.Philosophy
teachers—United States—Interviews. 6.College teachers—United
States—Interviews. I.Burger, Ronna, 1947– . II.Title.
PA85.B43A3 2002
880.9—dc21
2002008276
oThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface vii
Prologue 1
PART ONE: ENCOUNTERS
1 The University of Chicago, 1948–52, 1954–55 5
2 Athens, Rome, and Florence, 1952–54 55
3 St. John’s, 1955–57 71
4 Harvard, 1957–60 85
5 Brandeis, New York University,
and the New School, 1960–2001 101
PART TWO: REFLECTIONS
6 From Pattern to Dynamic 117
7 The “Indeterminate Dyad” 145
8 Erosand the City 163
9 Philosophy and Science 180
10 Christianity and Roman Writers 206
Index 227
Preface
It’s hard—you extraordinary being!—without the use of paradigms to indicate
adequately any of the bigger things, for it’s probable that each of us knows everything
as if in a dream and then again is ignorant of everything as it is in waking.
—Plato’s Statesman277d, translated by Seth Benardete
The roots of this project can be traced to the early 1970s, when a small group
of us would drift out of Seth Benardete’s evening class on Plato or Aristotle
at the New School for Social Research and settle in a few blocks away, up-
stairs at the Cedar Tavern. The venue later shifted to Homer’s Diner, where
we sat in a booth under a portrait of Homer and nobody bothered us for
hours. Conversations started out with questions about the text we were
studying, and ranged over politics and history, classical scholarship and con-
temporary physics, Greek and Roman writers, Judaism and Christianity, the
British and the Germans, circling back to Plato from Homer or Hegel or
Heidegger.
The stream of talk was always punctuated by Benardete’s jewel-like
vignettes of fascinating characters who belonged to a world of scholars that
was disappearing and looked as if it could be forgotten. Much smaller than
the academic world as we know it, it was made up mostly of Europeans,
many of whom ended up, through all the turns of history, teaching a gener-
ation of American students after the war. Upon entering the University of
Chicago in the early 1950s, Benardete found himself a fellow student with
Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and Severn Darden, among
others. He came into contact with visitors like Martin Buber, Arnold Toyn-
bee, and T.S. Eliot, and was taught by professors including David Grene and
Peter von Blanckenhagen; but it was above all his encounter at Chicago with
Leo Strauss that proved decisive for his philosophic development. After pur-
suing his studies abroad, in Athens, Rome, and Florence on a series of fel-
vii
viii Preface
lowships, Benardete went on to his first teaching position at St. John’s, and
from there to the Junior Fellows Program at Harvard. In the course of these
years he was not only honing his philological skills and deepening his un-
derstanding of ancient thought, but also developing an appreciation of
human nature as it revealed itself through the variety of individuals he en-
countered—eccentric, devoted, and complex in their own special ways. It
was not enough, of course, to have had the good fortune to be at certain in-
teresting places in interesting times; Benardete brought to those opportu-
nities a sharp eye and a concrete memory. But the stories he recounts are,
most importantly, the product of a philosophic mind: they illustrate, more
specifically, his own understanding of philosophy as the concrete encounter
of thought with the unexpected.
Conversations with Benardete over the years recreated a world that
enriched the books we were studying; our own students would stand at a
further degree of remove. A record of such conversations, I began to think,
might provide some access to that world: it would be a way, as Socrates puts
it in the Phaedrus,to store up a treasure of reminders for ourselves against
forgetfulness, and for others who follow the same path. With that aim in
mind, and tape recorder in hand, three of us—Robert Berman, Michael
Davis, and I—met with Benardete in his oªce for several hours on six oc-
casions in 1992 and ’93. We began by asking him about the teachers and
scholars he met up with in the various institutions through which he passed.
In the course of his recollections, questions began to emerge about what one
can be taught by another and what it means to learn by experience. Ben-
ardete was struck, more than once, by how long a time it seems to take until
one really understands what one was somehow aware of long before: we
have to come to know in a waking state what we knew as if in a dream. Look-
ing back on his dissertation on Homer, his book on Herodotus, his early
essays on Greek tragedy and the Platonic dialogues, after forty years of re-
peatedly returning to the study of these works, Benardete recounted a series
of errors he thought he had made, in which he now began to discern more
clearly a common form. As we explored its character and significance, the
recurrent themes of Benardete’s work—erosand punishment, the beautiful
and the just, the city, the soul, and the gods—came up in the flow of con-
versation and spilled over into discussions about natural science, poetry, re-
ligion, and their relation to philosophy.
The pages that follow represent the conversations we shared, recorded,
and later transcribed. The transcriptions were edited with the aim of omit-
ting repetitions and making the discussions coherent while sacrificing as
little as possible of the spontaneity of the original occasions. Although the
Preface ix
sequence of our conversations followed more or less the order presented
here, we did not initially conceive of it as a whole divided into two parts. The
title of the volume, Encounters and Reflections,is meant to apply to those two
parts, as they 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. While part 1 consists of Benardete’s reflections
on his formative encounters with people and places, the theme that runs
through part 2 concerns the nature of reflection as it arises in the encounter
with a work of poetry or philosophy. 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 sug-
gested, between the process of acquiring insight from what one undergoes
in life, in particular from the mistakes one makes, and the process of inter-
preting a text, insofar as it involves the uncovering of one’s erroneous start-
ing point, followed by the deeper recognition of the necessity of that starting
point. Plato provides a paradigm in Socrates’ description of his “second sail-
ing”—the discovery of his own path through recognition of the mistaken
one he initially shared with his predecessors. This way of proceeding is
vividly exemplified, as these conversations confirm, by the activity of philo-
sophic interpretation as Benardete practiced it.
However serious its aim to capture something of Benardete’s unique
voice, this project was at its inception and throughout a playful one. It takes
on a di¤erent tone now: just at the time we received the news that this book
was approved for publication, Benardete became ill. He had read an earlier
version of the manuscript; but when he died, on 14 November 2001, the last
draft was sitting on his desk waiting to be examined. We hope our own edi-
torial judgments coincide closely enough with those he would have made,
but of course we cannot be sure.
In the course of editing these conversations, and seeing a kind of whole
emerge, we thought of one theme in particular that seemed to be conspicu-
ously absent, or at least insuªciently highlighted, which we hoped to take
up in one more conversation. The question of what the law is, and what its
role is in making human beings human, is central to Benardete’s interpre-
tations of Greek tragedy, and he had long thought about it in connection with
the Hebrew bible; he taught various courses on ancient law, and especially
enjoyed reading David Daube on Greek, Roman, and biblical law; his last
book was a masterly reading of Plato’s Laws,a long and complex work, and
we thought about how helpful it would be to speak with him more casually
about its fundamental intention as he understood it. But the one further dis-
