Allow me to invite you to my reading of Homer’s Iliad, which will take place on
Wednesday May 20 from 3pm to 6pm in front of Balliol College at Oxford.
If nobody comes, I shall enjoy reciting the Iliad just for myself. It will be a new experience. When I record
Homer for my website I make mistakes. I read a dual ending (phȏnêsante, bante) when Homer speaks of two fighters or horses (autȏ, Pandaros and Aineias, book V. l. 236), but he uses
the plural (phȏnêsantes, bantes, l. 239); I scan two long
syllables (ê ouch, V. 349) as a
spondee when these two syllables must be scanned as one (by synizesis); sometimes
I make eight or nine abortive recordings; then I begin to cough badly just as I
am approaching the end of a perfect take. I always end by simply listening to
what I have just recorded; I put it on my website only if I feel happy with
it; enjoying it is a perfect reward for all this work. I must choose passages
of manageable length, 50 lines on average, for the longer the passage I
choose, the more mistakes I am prone to make. At Balliol I shall have the
luxury of immersing myself in Homer for three hours, correcting my mistakes,
but going on reciting. It will be the nearest I can get to re-living the
experience of the rhapsodes reciting Homer to their audiences.
But the event could take an even more rewarding course. Oxford classical
philosophers and classicists might come to question my approach to Homer and to
Ancient Greek, or my views on Ancient Philosophy, as I questioned Oxford dons
who visited my seminar in Prague thirty-odd years ago. I
have chosen Wednesday for my afternoon at Balliol, for my philosophy seminars
were held on Wednesdays and they lasted on average about three hours.
The contention between me and my Oxford colleagues concerns Ancient
Greek. For my colleagues, reading Greek texts in the original amounts to translating
them into English. I do not translate texts I read; I understand them in Greek.
In the ‘good old days’, one became a true expert in Ancient Greek by
virtue of translating English into Greek. Kenneth Dover speaks of his student
years: ‘A very important ingredient of our work was “composition”, which meant
the translation of sophisticated literary English into Greek or Latin prose and
of passages of English poetry into Greek or Latin verse (Marginal Comment, p. 37). Speaking of his work at Oxford
University, he says: ‘My tutorial work in the first two terms of the year was
much the kind of thing I had experienced as an undergraduate in Mods:
translation from sophisticated English, prose and verse, into Greek and Latin …
I myself had always found that six hours or more spent on a composition (and I
sometimes spent twelve) taught me more about the language than the same amount
of time spent on reading texts (p. 67).’ ‘Reading texts’ does not mean
understanding texts in Greek, but understanding Greek texts in English. Consider
what he says on p. 128: ‘When we look something up in a Greek or Latin text, we do not translate the whole page, but
home in on the words which tell us what we want to know.’
Dover says: ‘It is now more than a hundred years since classicists
began to lament the decline in the part played by Greek and Latin in our
educational system’. Willcock published his Commentary
to the Iliad in 1978; by then the
decline of classics was in full sway. Instead of directing his readers towards
understanding Homer in Greek, he instructs them to translate Homer. In the
first book of the Iliad Zeus addresses
Hera as daimoniê (l. 561); Willcock remarks:
“Translate ‘my dear’”. In the second book Odysseus addresses each king as daimonie (l. 190); Willcock says: “Translate
‘my friend’”. A few lines later Odysseus addresses a common soldier as daimonie, where neither ‘my dear’ nor
‘my friend’ is appropriate, for he commands the man to sit quietly, to listen
to those, who are better than him, calls him unwarlike (aptolemos), impotent (analkis),
of no account in battle (oute pot’ en
polemȏi enarithmios) or in counsel (out’
eni boulêi, ll. 200-201). This daimonie
Willcock leaves without comment, yet this is just the moment when he should draw
the attention of the reader to the different shades of meaning of daimonie in different contexts. Explaining
laisêia te pteroenta in Bk V. l. 453,
Willcock says: ‘laisêia are clearly
smaller and lighter shields than aspides
or sakea. Most probably the laisêion had a fringe, or tassels, which
would wave about in the air as it was moved. Thus “fluttering” will do as a
translation for pteroenta.’
Willcock elucidates Odysseus’ daimoni’,
ou se eoike kakon hȏs deidissesthai in Bk II. l 190 very perceptively:
“The meaning of this line is ‘It is not right that I should try to frighten you
as if you were a coward.’” His explanation of pteroenta I quoted is unobjectionable; those who aim at
understanding Homer in Greek can derive great benefit from his Commentary. The decline of classical
studies can be turned around, if our aim becomes enjoying the classics in the
original instead of torturing the students with the task of translating them.
I should like to discuss with Oxford students and teachers the
best ways of acquiring the ability to understand Ancient Greek. In the 1980’s, when
I was permitted to give lectures and seminars at the Sub-faculty of Philosophy
of Oxford University, I advised students to use translations as a help: ‘Read a
sentence in Greek. Don’t translate it, read it in a translation, and if
possible, in more than one translation. Then read the sentence again in Greek;
don’t desist, until you understand it in Greek. Use French and German
translations, if you can; for these translations will elucidate the Greek text,
and after doing so ‘fall away’ without becoming attached to Greek. Read as much
as you can, for you can’t learn Greek by virtue of reading one or two dialogues
of Plato, one or two tragedies of Sophocles.’
Since the demise of Ancient Greek as a living language, it never
has been so easy to enjoy Greek authors, as at present, when we can derive all
the help we need from good dictionaries, commentaries, and translations, which past
generations of scholars have prepared for us. But even with all this help, learning
Ancient Greek is an arduous and a life-long task. Is it worth the trouble,
worth the expenditure of energy it requires? I should like to discuss this
question with Oxford neurophysiologists.
Carpenter and Reddi in their Neurophysiology
define the fundamental problem of neuroscience as that of tracing the
relationship between molecular and cellular mechanisms in the brain ‘all the
way to what was going on in Michelangelo’s head as he painted the Sistine
Chapel … The trick is to force yourself to think of the brain as a machine that carries out a well-defined
job. The job is to turn patterns of stimulation, S, into patterns of response,
R: the sight of dinner into attack and jaw-opening; a page of music into finger
movements. How it does this is clear, in principle at least. The brain is a
sequence of neuronal levels, successive layers of nerve cells that project on
to one another. At each level, a pattern of activity in one layer gets
transformed into a different pattern in the next. Thus the incoming sensory
pattern S is transmitted from level to level, modified at each stage until it
becomes an entirely different pattern of response R at the output.’ (5th
edition, Hodder Arnold, 2012, p. 9)
There is a fundamental flaw in the S (stimulus) → R (response)
scheme presented by the authors, for they define S as ‘the incoming sensory
pattern’. On p. 10 of their Neurophysiology
they write: ‘Receptors in the eye convey information about only a miniscule
part of the retinal image, in effect a single pixel; but after a few levels
have been passed, in the visual cortex, we find units that are able to respond
to a specific type of stimulus, such as a moving edge, over wide areas of the
visual field.’ – The sight of dinner is a response
to the information conveyed to the brain and processed on the way, beginning
with the receptors in the eye, chemical transmitters on synapses, and electric
currents in neurons. What happens in the visual cortex? The information that
reached the visual cortex is coded there by the interaction of chemical
transmitters on synapses with electric currents in neurons. Whatever may be the
shape of the vast network of neurons involved in the coding, it is completely
different from the shape of the dinner we see it in front of us on the table.
There must therefore be something, which receives the information coded in the
brain and transforms it into the sight of dinner. This ‘something’ is the
subconscious part of our human spiritual nature, HSN.
Carpenter and Reddi maintain that ‘it is now simply superfluous
to invoke anything other than neural circuits to explain every aspect of Man’s
overt behaviour’ (p. 294).’ But they propose to view consciousness as ‘a spectator, watching from its seat in the
brainstem the play of activity on the cortex above it, perhaps able in some way
to direct its attention from one area of interest to another, but not able to
influence what is going on.’ (p. 296) But a spectator watching from its seat in
the brainstem the play of activity on the cortex above it would be unable to
watch anything but a bewildering network of neurons with their axons and
dendrites, chemical transmitters moving in and out of neurons, opening and
closing ligand channels, action potentials propagated in neurons. None of all this
enters our consciousness. Our consciousness is inseparably linked to the
subconscious part of HSN, which transforms the brain activities into the world
in which we live. HSN is as real and factual as are the scientific data
provided by physics and by neurophysiology. When we realize this, our view of
ourselves as human beings changes dramatically.
The ability to produce the world of our consciousness, the ability
we all have as human beings, could not be acquired by our individual activities
in our early childhood. Think just how long it takes a child to learn its
mother tongue. This ability must be the result of the evolutionary process that
started with the first living organisms acquiring the capability of sensing and
avoiding external danger, of sensing sources of sustenance outside of themselves and
moving towards them. Only spiritual nature, however primitive it may have been
in its initial stage, could produce within itself what was outside these organisms,
doing so on the basis of the effects that the environment had on those
primitive organisms. Space and time, which Kant rightly views as a priori representations (a priori
Vorstellungen), which precede and make possible all our sense perceptions
(Empfindungen), are in fact the result of all this development, are its a posteriori. It is within the framework
of this evolutionary development that we should view and appreciate human
cultural development and the benefits that can be derived from Ancient Greek.
***
In the Phaedrus Plato’s
Socrates introduces the theory of Forms, such as justice (dikaiosunê), self-control (sȏphrosunê),
knowledge (epistêmê), wisdom (phronêsis), and beauty (kallos), these are true beings
accessible only to intellect. He maintains that prior to their incarnation, all
human souls had seen the Forms, for speech is communicated by a flow of
perceptions, which must be gathered together by reason and understood according
to Form (249b-c). The philosophic affinity between Plato’s Forms and Kant’s a priori concepts is obvious. In the
last brief section of his Critique of
Pure Reason Kant proposes the history of pure reason (Die Geschichte der
reinen Vernunft) as the task that remains to be done; it is to be the history
of philosophy as it culminated in the discovery of truth. A German philosopher
W. G. Tennemann undertook this task, and he began to fulfil it with his System of Platonic Philosophy (System der Platonischen Philosophie,
published in 1792). On the assumption that the more truth a philosophic system
contains, the more it approximates Kant, he rejected the ancient dating of
Plato’s Phaedrus as his first
dialogue. In his view, Plato’s philosophy developed towards the theory of Forms
in the Phaedrus, as all the
subsequent philosophy developed towards Kant’s idea of a priori.
Paradoxically, Socrates’ idea that human speech is possible only
on the basis of the Recollection of Forms, and that therefore all human beings
saw the Forms prior to their incarnation, provided me with the main philosophic
argument for taking seriously the ancient dating of the Phaedrus. For in the Republic
Plato’s Socrates maintains that only those who can see the Forms should be allowed
to study philosophy (496a), and in the Timaeus
Plato’s sage from Italy, Timaeus, tells his listeners, Socrates among them, that
only a tiny race of human beings (anthrȏpȏn
genos brachu ti) can see the Forms (51e).
***
After our discussion on the Phaedrus
in May 1980, I suggested to Kathy Wilkes that we should read the dialogue together.
She obtained a grant for that purpose, and we spent four weeks in July and
August 1980, my last weeks in Prague before going to Oxford, reading the Phaedrus. The summer was lovely, and so
we did most of our reading in Stromovka, formerly a deer park of the Czech
kings. Without being aware of it, we were photographed by secret policemen. My
brother, who after the Velvet Revolution became the Head of the Police
supervisory commission, donated the photos to me. Four of these photos follow.
Our joint reading provided me with a
powerful argument in favour of the ancient dating of the Phaedrus. In the dialogue Socrates presents Polemarchus as a model
philosopher. This follows Socrates’ assertion that those who pursue philosophy
live a blessed and harmonious life here on earth. Polemarchus died at the hands
of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 B. C., five years before Socrates’ death. The
ancients believed that a man’s life can be considered good only if he meets a
good end. Polemarchus’ end was not good; his brother Lysias gives a graphic
description of the circumstances in which he died in Against Eratosthenes, written shortly after the demise of the
Thirty. In my view, the Phaedrus had to be written and published prior to Polemarchus’
death. Kathy agreed. After arriving at Oxford we wrote together ‘Socrates in
the Phaedrus’, which Kathy sent to The Classical Quarterly. The Editor,
Anthony Long, replied that it was well written and that he thought of
publishing it and be damned, but that in the end he decided not to do so, for
publishing it would destroy my prospects as a philosopher. Later I learnt that
Kathy had to return the grant she had received for her month in Prague.
These are some of the themes that I should like to discuss with
Oxford colleagues.
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