1 comments about Plato: The Statesman (BCP Classical Studies) (BCP Classical Studies).

1. This book, the culmination of Benardete's masterful translation of what Jacob Klein was pleased to call `Plato's Trilogy,' includes not only a translation of `The Statesman' but also a superb commentary with notes. (Benardete, btw, is something of a rarity these days, a `non-political' student of Leo Strauss.' This `trilogy' (as Klein would say) in question consists of 3 dialogues; Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman. But, as Benardete points out, the Sophist and Statesman belong together as a pair. The singular appearance of the Eleatic Stranger - some translate `Stranger' as Visitor - and the near silence of our Socrates, the inability (or unwillingness) of Plato to give us a third dialogue (as seemingly `promised' at 217a) called `The Philosopher,' all this points to the unique pairing of Sophist and Statesman. Benardete also points out that these 2 dialogues are the only ones with specific and "explicit allusions" to each other.
   
   In turning away from the Sophist and turning towards the Statesman we are leaving the rarefied heights (and obscure depths) of theory, and its imitators, for the `lowly' everyday world of political/social life. Indeed this `turn' can perhaps be said to be foreshadowed in the Sophist (at 247e) when the Stranger makes a remarkably `Nietzschean' definition, "I'm proposing, in short, a definition (boundary mark): `The things which are' are not anything but power." Being as Power! Plato is not Nietzsche, however. Plato always hedges. The `proposal' is perhaps only made to convince some so-called `improved' materialists to leave their `artless' materialism. But later, when speaking to some `friends of the forms,' who are `idealists' like Socrates, the logic of this dialectic forces the Stranger (249a) to say, "But, by Zeus, what of this? Shall we easily be persuaded that motion and life and soul and intelligence are truly not present to that which perfectly is, and its not even living, not even thinking, but august and pure, without mind, it stands motionless." Thus materialists and Idealists are `forced' to concede that being is the ability to affect and be affected.
   
   Later, at 249c-d, the Stranger will speak of this arrangement in such a manner that it reminds us of compromise between two warring parties. But compromise, and the seeming impossibility of enduring compromise, brings us towards the very heart of the Statesman. Socrates is going to die. (It is tragically fitting, perhaps almost necessary, that Benardete ends the final installment of his commentary on the Triptych Theaetetus/Sophist/Statesman with the words "Socrates is about to go on trial.") Death, the threat of death, hovers above these pages as it does around political life. "The Statesman is more profound than the Sophist" Benardete (p III.142) correctly reminds us. It is profound for several reasons. Benardete brings at this point to our attention just one: "Virtue consists in the strife of the beautiful with the beautiful." The metaphor/image/standard for morality in the Sophist - health - is replaced in the Statesman by beauty. ...Perhaps it is true that `we have beauty so we don't die of the truth' as Nietzsche somewhere remarked. But he fails to mention that we now die of beauty instead of truth.
   
   The two types of beauty that are at war are courage and moderation. "Dialectics, it seems, is the practice of resolving the strife between moderation and courage." Benardete, I think correctly, indicates there is, and can be, no final reconciliation between them. Indeed, it seems there is no natural mean between them. "Nature might herself be neutral, but her apparitions are always skewed and cluster around either one of two partial kinds." Men and women are emblematic images of courage and moderation, the ever-present reminder that they can never simply be the same.
   
   But the City can, in theory, also be either moderate or courageous. A city of the first sort, "moved by the spirit of accommodation, such a city ends up enslaved, its unwilled and inadvertent cowardice hardly separable from its stupidity." A city of the second type, "in contrast, looks at every other city as its enemy. Its' insight is too keen. The otherness of the stranger [foreigner] is for it so absolute that it must be constantly engaged in war, until it brings upon itself either its enslavement or destruction." This last, the beautiful error of courage, could only not be an error if the courageous city never lost. "The Stranger disregards the possibility that such a city might never fail and thus achieve a universal empire." But this is the beautiful modern dream of Kojeve and his universal homogenous state; it is not the dream of the Stranger or, I think, Benardete and Plato.
   
   Not that a universal state is, for Benardete at least, impossible. "But apart from the difficulty that it [the courageous city] would then be forced to turn against itself if it were not to give up its own nature, the myth [of the Reversed Cosmos, 268e] has taught us that God alone is capable of universal rule, and even he is periodically forced to abandon control. Excessive moderation then, is more a danger to the city than the hubris of courage. The nature of things is more disposed to check the tyranny of a part over the whole than the enslavement of a part to a part. We perhaps might believe that the Stranger in this regard is a shade too hopeful." It seems that while Benardete thinks the Universal State, ala Kojeve, is technically possible, it would be a calamity. It would not be entirely an exaggeration if we were to observe that the major difference between `non-political' or philosophical Straussians and those Straussians actively involved in politics is that the latter no longer believe that the Universal State is necessarily a calamity.
   
   Be that as it may, Benardete points out that while the city executes, exiles or disgraces those courageous natures that oppose it, the moderate it merely enslaves. This only seems, btw, to contradict what Benardete said earlier about moderation being a greater danger. The greater danger to the city qua city is moderation; the most dangerous individuals, however, are always courageous. "The city cannot afford excessive courage; it cannot dispense with excessive moderation." But the binding of "moderation and courage, which the paradigm of weaving [279e] implies, cannot be accomplished politically."
   
   Indeed, we turn from the political to the biological and psychological. Intermarriage (of the moderate and courageous) and education (for common opinion) replace (or augment) pure politics, as the proper form of the paradigm of weaving. "The Stranger's solutuion, then, really amounts to this: the true King assigns the members of courageous families to the city's army, and the members of moderate families to its lawcourts." Benardete doesn't here mention it but in this manner the City itself, the institutions of the city itself, are forced to mimic the Guardians we meet in the Republic; they are fierce to enemies but gentle towards friends. Benardete then observes that "the Stranger does not even hint at which families are to supply the rhetoricians of the city." Or which family supplies the weavers or true Kings.
   
   Benardete fills the penultimate paragraph with observations on how it is very difficult to get the members of the different families (courageous and moderate) to love each other. One can convince them that the `mixed' marriages are best but one cannot make a married couple into lover and beloved by education alone. "Insofar as Eros is love of the beautiful, and not identical with sexual desire, these most suitable marriages are against the grain of Eros." Each `family' sees itself only as beautiful. But the city requires that each family marry its non-beautiful other. "And, likewise, since the divine bond of the city consists of opinions about the beautiful, just and good, which are for the wise statesman nothing but prescriptions for the health of the city, the city through the law incorporates in its ruling families as little satisfaction of the requirements of pure mind as of the needs of Eros." Thus the laws of the city satisfy neither the mind nor the eros of citizens. ...But the city is healthy; and the citizens bodies are protected and sated.
   
   "The law, said the Stranger, is like a stupid and willful human being. We now know what this means. The law combines the vice of moderation with the vice of courage and thus passes itself off as the perfect weaving into the web of justice of the beautiful with the beautiful. But the true synergy of mind and Eros in soul was the impure dialectics of Socrates, and Socrates is about to go on trial." By `impure' dialectics Benardete means a dialectic that is a mixture of moderation and courage. The philosopher Socrates is about to die so the city can live. The city, or, if you prefer, its laws, are an inverted philosopher. The city and its laws are stupid and willful, while the philosopher is both moderate and courageous. ...In any city Socrates would die.

No comments about The Correspondence of William James: 1885-1889 (Correspondence of William James).

No comments about Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer.

No comments about Analytic Theism, Hartshorne, and the Concept of God (Suny Series in Philosophy).

5 comments about Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography.

1. Don't be mislead by the dust jacket. It promises that Halperin answers those who disagree with him, but it doesn't. I was especially looking forward to Halperin snarking back at Camille Paglia for her devestating review of his book "100 Years of Homosexuality", but Paglia's infamous "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is never addressed. When he does approach his dissenters, it is in a roundabout, inconclusive, Foucaltian way. Very irritating.

   The worst thing about Halperin is his dependence on theory and on other theorists. He doesn't seem to know that there are sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, etc.) which might address his Queer Theory dilemmas. Instead, we get incessant name-dropping and logrolling. A disgrace.




2. I very much enjoyed Prof. Halperin's early book, *Before Pastoral.* There, his familiarity with classics and with the pastoral and bucolic traditions led to insightful observations about important literary modes, their definitive characteristics, and their evolution. Unfortunately, *Saint Foucault* is symptomatic of a problem that has been plaguing English departments for some time now: English professors dismiss their primary object of study---literature---as "bourgeois" or "elitist" or "oppressive" or "economically superstructural," and they become dilettantes in a mish-mash of fields that they end up calling "cultural studies" or "cultural poetics." As his work was received in North America, Foucault had a great deal to do with that shift in English studies. Nonetheless, I do find it amusing that Halperin can create an only half ironic "cult of personality" around the very man who argued that the category of the individual "subject" was infinitely less important than a transpersonalized, discursive and ultimately ill-defined "POWER/KNOWLEDGE." Whatever my serious reservations about Foucault's ideas may be, I know for sure that he would find the idea of a "gay hagiography" very unsound.



3. I thought Halperin's book was great. What I can't believe is the reaction his book has gotten from the other reviewers. You would think that of all people Foucault fans would not be homophobic or heterosexist -- and yet this is common with heterosexuals interested in Foucault. They often say, "It's what he said that is important, not what he was." As if there were a difference, which, of course, there is not. Straight people often attempt to colonize gay thinkers (Wittegnstein, for example), and the first thing they do is hide from others the sexual orientation of these thinkers as much as they can. Then, when someone mentions how awful gay people are based on what he or she saw from skewed footage of a Pride parade on the news, do these colonists ever say, "Well, not all gay people are silly and frivolous: look at Foucault, look at Wittgenstein, look at Alan Turing, and a whole host of other famous minds." No, they keep quite about all that and nod their heads in agreement. Tisk. Tisk.



4. This is the best book I have ever read on Foucault, no contest--though one must be clear that Halperin is EXPLICITLY NOT attempting any general and comprehensive explanation of Foucault's life work and thought, which Halperin makes quite clear, though there seems to be some confusion below regarding this point. In fact, the tone of some of the reviews only serve as a demonstration of some of Halperin's points.
   
   My main criticism is that I would go even a little further than Halperin with respect to Foucault's actual purpose or mission in _The History of Sexuality_. I would say that, with volumes two and three, Foucault has shifted his purpose from a general "history" (hence the title) of the rise of "sexuality" to a deconstructive and very narrow focus on certain discourses in antiquity that ostensibly SEEM to mirror our own while actually being quite alien to it. It just so happens that these ancient discourses are about men. From this perspective, all the complaining of a small but very loud minority of feminists merely reflects a failure to understand what Foucault was doing. He wasn't trying to give us a general history; rather, he became fascinated by how the ancient world's most familiar discourses (which are about men) could, in fact, be extremely different, by the demonstration and analysis of that difference. As for general history, Foucault repeatedly refers the reader to Dover's _Greek Homosexuality_, which was published between volumes one and two, and which he just as repeatedly tells us he accepts in basic outline. Feeling there was no longer an urgent need for a "history," he gave us his actual second and third volumes. Should he have given us a hint he was changing course? He did!--in the introduction of the second volume. Readers need to learn to be a bit more active--though, clearly, as original, good, and rigorous as the thinking and analysis may be, it does make for a rather uniquely structured set of books.



5. This book is probably the best book on how to ground and use Foucault in relation to contemporary social movement politics - an incredibly important rejoinder to the depoliticized, sterile versions of Foucault that do the rounds today in British sociology departments etc.Halperin is one of the best (and certainly most entertaining) readers of the History of Sexuality Vols 2 & 3. Do yourself a favour & get it!

5 comments about Phoenix: Conversations with Isaiah Berlin: Recollections of an Historian of Ideas.

1. Isaiah Berlin was not only a skillful writer covering fascinating topics of the History of Ideas. He was also best at enganging in a stimulating and (given his vast knowledge) educating intellectual conversation. Mr. Jahanbegloo's book is one of the few proofs of this less known aspect of Berlin. Having been out of print for a long while, the paperback edition is out there now, finally. Read how Berlin vividly describes his youth and student years, how he got into the History of Ideas, how Oxford was like after the War, what he thinks of Hannah Arendt, communism and nationalism, etc. If not Berlin's best known books, certainly his most entertaining. This poses a serious problem: you will devour it in a day and wish there was a sequel...



2. Just for information, the title as listed is wrong. The title is simply CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAIAH BERLIN. (You do correctly list the hardback title.) The "Phoenix" you've placed in the title is, in fact, the publisher: Phoenix Press in London.



3. I am a huge fan of Berlin's writings. There have been several posthumous releases and I've enjoyed every one. Unfortunately, I enjoyed this one half as much as some others.

   The problem, in a nutshell, is that if you are at all familiar with Berlin, then not much of this info will come as anything new. He discusses his view of pluralism, his admiration for Herder and Vico, his zionism, and several other well known areas of Berlin's thoughts.

   The interviewer, in particular, did not ask very illuminating questions and as such, Berlin gives less than illuminating answers. At times (just my perception) it seemed like Berlin himself was less than pleased with a few of the questions. One important one that was not but should have been asked (as it is much on any Berlin-admirer's mind)is how he can reconcile pluralism (the belief that values irreducibly conflict both personally and interpersonally) and relativism (the view that ethical truths and ideals may simply be relative). While pluralism and relativism were talked of, there was not a single word about this question (that more than a few Berlin scholars have troubled over).

   I gave the book three stars because it is just too hard to give Berlin any less. To be sure, I did like the book and the interview style makes it very readable and in some senses exciting ("Yeah! I would've asked that one. I wonder what he'll say?") It may suffer from a problem long known to Berlin - his work is too historical for philosophers and too philosophical for historians. For me, it was just right. It may be for you too. If you are fairly new to Berlin this is a good place to start. If you are a veteran (or moderately so) you won't find much new or illuminating here.




4. Isaiah Berlin is one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He has been spoken of as the second greatest talker in the history of the English language( after Samuel Johnson) Here his remarks are a trifle short and yet there is enough substance in them to fill 'forty books' of others.
   Some samples.
   "For me a great man in public life, is one who deliberately causes something important to happen, the probability of which seemed low before he took up the task. A great man is a man who gives history a turn without which it scarcely could have taken without him."
   "The purpose of Zionism is normalization; the creation of conditions in which the Jews could live as a nation,like the others. Alexander Kojeve whom I spoke of before once said to me." The Jews have the most interesting history of any people. Yet now they want to be what? Albania? How can they?" I said "For the Jews to be like Albania constitutesprogress. 600,000 Jews in Romania were victims- before the Nazis.They tried to escape. But 600,000 Jews in Palestine did not leave because Rommel was at their door. That is the difference. They considered Palestine to be their own country, and if they had to die they would die not like trapped animals but for the country."
   " I believe there is nothing more destructive of human lives than fanatical conviction about the perfect life,allied to political or military power.Our century affords terrible evidence of this truth.I believe in working for a minimally decent society.If we can go beyond this to a wider life, so much the better.But even a minimum of decency is more than we have in some countries."
   "But not every genius is like one's image of a genius.Pasternak was such a one. He talked marvellously, he was a little unhinged at times, but at all times a man of pure genius. Nobody could have had a more fascinating experience than to listen to him talk- in my exprience only Virginia Woolf talked something like that. She too, of course, was a trifle crazy"



5. This book is not for the connoisseur of Berlin's ideas and works; rather it is really a broad and introductory survey. The book is based on a series of largely unstructured conversations with Berlin about his personal past and better known works, as well as some of his views on others' famous works and ideas on philosophy. The interviewer, Ramin Jahanbegloo, cannot be faulted for his brief and often open-ended questions as he is clearly prodding Berlin to speak his mind. Berlin does seem to 'correct' the errors of his interviewer but this is to be expected from such a reknowned and learned philosopher. For those already familiar with Berlin, the responses are far from shocking: Hobbes and Machiavelli are, in fact, ethical thinkers; do be weary of those who propose rational, 100% 'final solutions'; 'total liberty can be dreadful, total equality can be equally frightful'; philosophy, if properly taught, allows one to see through 'bad arguments, deceptions, fumisme, verbal fog..'; etc. That said, it is a lighter read than any one of Berlin's books and, for anyone who is curious about Berlin's views on things, it just might a good place to start.

1 comments about Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews.

1. Sartre scholar Ronald Aronson errs immediately in his intro to Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews by writing that questions about these interviews can be "posed dispassionately" now, meaning, of course, that they can be posed objectively & thereby synopsizes all that has made American liberal education the grand failure that it is. Moreover, Sartre might have disapproved. What did he write about "committed literature?"

   In the weeks before his death, Sartre and long-time personal secy Benny Levy recorded a series of discussions, in the form of interviews, some of which were published in a Paris weekly newspaper. Levy, a former Maoist student leader (for the contemporary American student, Maoist student leader is probably as archaic or unknown a term as internal combustion engine) & ardent student of Sartre, fairly attacked the blind & aging writer/philosopher, at times engaging him, at times bullying him.

   Thruout the interviews (which take up, really, just one-fourth of the entire book [hence 3 stars]; the rest is all intro commentary & postscripts), Sartre seemed to hold his own, citing the errors of Marxism, existentialism, & the left-wing political movements of the 60s & early 70s. I think the interviews offer the reader a good feel for that period (fondly known in the USA as "the 60s"), when Levy was known as Pierre Victor, Sartre was backing all kinds of radical & left-wing endeavors, & the 1968 student rebellions thruout Europe but especially in Paris threatened to topple the whole knowledge-is-power façade.

   In the end, the students failed, but the student uprisings in the USA, then & after, were a mere burlesque of those in Europe: certainly, the knowledge-is-power concept was never questioned (US students just wanted more power with their knowledge), & the smugness that allows Mr. Aronson to pose questions dispassionately has enveloped every succeeding academic iteration.

   The famous quote from Sartre's one-act play, "No Exit," was "Hell is other people." Sartre was almost 75 when these interviews took place, and then he said, "It's other people that are my old age...Old age is a reality that is mine but that others feel..." The topics that disturbed so many after the interviews were published were Judaism and Jewishness.

   Levy generalizes that Jews fear the revolutionary mob because it may become the pogrom mob; Sartre counters that "there were a considerable number of Jews in the Communist Party in 1917 [in Russia]." Personally, I am at a loss to explain why Levy was reviled by Sartre scholars: Sartre states that he was profoundly influenced by the "Jewish reality" that confronted him after the war, when he met Jews that he saw as having a destiny "beyond the ravages [of] anti-Semitism."

   Hope Now seems to me to be more of a coda to the 1972 documentary, "Sartre: By Himself," where he chatted amiably with the editorial staff of Le Temps Moderne and Simone de Beauvoir. That film depicted a leisurely afternoon with friends. Sartre with Levy seems more like colleagues at work. Unlike the current crop of celebrity academics, Sartre always appeared, to appropriate Harry Stack Sullivan's comment about schizophrenics, "simply human."

No comments about The Life and Letters of John Fiske: Volume I.

1 comments about Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards Series, Volume 16).

1. This volume gathers together for the first time all known extant letters of Jonathan Edwards, along with his major personal writings. For more than three decades George S. Claghorn has scoured America, Great Britain, and Scotland for letters and documents by and about Edwards. The result is an unparalleled compendium of 235 letters-including 116 never before published or never reprinted since Edwards' death-and four autobiographical texts-Edwards' meditation "On Sarah Pierpont," his future wife, and "Diary," "Resolutions," and "Personal Narrative." These letters and personal writings reveal the private man behind the treatises and sermons. They trace his relations with parents, siblings, college classmates, friends, and family, as well as with political, religious, and educational leaders of his day. New documents include Edwards' only known statement on slavery and letters on the Indian mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that display Edwards' interest in native Americans and his efforts on their behalf. These writings show the human face of Edwards as he applied theological and philosophical insights to the events of his daily life. They provide an unprecedented resource for understanding the man, his times, and his personal connections.

No comments about The Friends of Voltaire.