I.D. Greeks 0011

I should clarify and define my totally inadequate perspective. I am in the process of reading right now GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND POETICS by Gregory Nagy, Cornell University Press, 1990. I have read a great deal of but not completed Nagy’s books THE BEST OF THE ACHAENS: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, John Hopkins University Press, 1979, and PINDAR’S HOMER: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, John Hopkins, 1990. I originally became interested in the oral traditional origins of Greek thought through reading (completely) FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, F. M. Cornford (the great English Plato scholar) Harper Torchbooks (originally Edward Arnold, London), 1957 (originally 1912), PREFACE TO PLATO, Eric A. Havelock, Grosset’s Universal Library (originally Harvard University Press), 1971 (originally 1967), THE ORAL AND WRITTEN GOSPEL, Werner H. Kelber with foreword by Walter J. Ong S. J., authority on oral, written, and other media as well as Marshall McLuhan, Fortress Press, 1983, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA and THE GUTENBERG GALAXY, Marshall McLuhan, and PHILOSOPHY AND ARCHAIC EXPERIENCE: Essays in Honor of Edward G. Ballard, edited by John Sallis, Duquesne University Press, 1982 (which contains a brilliant essay “Heidegger’s Articulation of Falling” by my former teacher Alexander von Schoenborn). I have read most of Eric A. Havelock’s THE LITERATE REVOLUTION IN GREECE AND ITS CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES,Princeton University Press, 1982, and THE MUSE LEARNS TO WRITE, Yale University Press, 1986, DINE BAHANE: The Navajo Creation Story, Paul G. Zolbrod, University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

The second two books of Nagy are extremely, for me anyway, difficult to read. You actually need some acquaintance with Greek (mine is insufficient) and have Greek references on hand. However, the depth of thought and understanding of ‘arcaic’ Greek culture is incredibly impressive to the point that I think it was justified when I said Nagy “in some ways” was more brilliant than Heidegger. Why would I say this about a classical scholar with a very limited perspective compared to a philosopher many say is the greatest thinker since Kant or even Aristotle? Philosophically, it can be summed up by a quotation from Edward G. Ballard John Sallis gives at the very beginning of his “Introduction” to PHILOSOPHY AND ARCHAIC EXPERIENCE: “Philosophy as the interpretation of archaic experience, then, is the art which seeks, in the light of a principle, to disengage the intelligible aspects of the compulsion which has precipitated the more radical transitions in human experience,” PHILOSOPHY AT THE CROSSROADS, Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Sallis says Ballard called this “The subject matter of philosophy,” and in another quotation from PHILOSOPHY AT THE CROSSROADS, page 6, “To be advanced in philosophy is to be at this beginning, or near it.” Sallis summarizes Ballard’s philosophical endeavor: “It is a matter of delimiting ‘the most nearly primary datum’ of philosophical interpretation, of bringing into focus the experience that, archaic in a temporal sense, provided the content for that history of interpretation that constitutes the Western philosophical tradition.” I cannot get hold of any of the books of Edward G. Ballard, but I think Gregory Nagy has the thorough going intellectual sophistication to far more than fulfill this role. He is literally dealing with the guts, the insides, the fundamental motivations and desires of Western thought, “the compulsion which has precipitated the more radical transitions in human experience.” Nagy is more than qualified to fill this role because he began as a scientist specializing in linguistics, something Heidegger certainly never been, and whose first book (which I hope to get soon) is COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN GREEK AND INDIC METER, Harvard, 1974, so he is thoroughly familiar not only with Greek and Sanskrit but a large number of other languages. One of his great resentments toward traditional classical scholars is their ‘distaste’ in dirtying their hands with seriously considering linguistics as a real science, archeology, anthropology, in other words all the scientific disciplines related to the archaic Greek cultural background to Homer and Hesiod. He is rather bitter about their disregard – which came as a surprise to meafter reading Eric A. Havelock – about the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Alfred Bates Lord with Serbian oral epic singers and their relevance to the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY. (This is in HOMERIC QUESTIONS, University of Texas Press-Austin, 1996, which I have barely started)

Now, GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND POETICS is much easier to read (as well as PREFACE TO PLATO and FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY) than many of the other books because his themes are more general. However, in coming from the more difficult books and far more detailed books, I am assured the man knows what he is talking about. With his themes being more general, one can see the down to earth, gutsy, practical, political, and sociological beginnings of intellectual systematization beginning that produced the so-called Pre-Socrates (or Pre-Platonics as Nietzsche, possibly much more accurately, called them – but that is another book I have barely started) that I must re-emphasized still belonged much more to the traditional oral poetic tradition that to the dialectic systematization of Plato and Aristotle. But, on the other hand, considering what Ballard said about archaic experience, might one see that it is much more relevant to approach Plato and Aristotle FUNDAMENTALLY from what preceded them than from what came after them  by hundreds and even thousands of years? After all, some of the Pre-Socratics were still alive when Socrates still breathed, and possibly he even really knew them. Would it not be immensely more rationally valid to interpret Plato and Aristotle in accordance with what they were objectively judging and some extent leaving behind rather than what they were, in pure fantasy on our part, ‘going toward’? This was certainly one of Heidegger’s more valid points, though, as far as I know, Nagy has never read Heidegger