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A philosopher’s appreciation for Jean-Pierre Vernant
(January 4, 1914—January 9, 2007)
By Nickolas Pappas
Department of Philosophy, CCNY & the Graduate Center, CUNY
Page II
Wasn’t Nietzsche nevertheless right to speak of “the typical ‘ideality’ ” of tragic characters and the distance of their world from the world that Socrates occupied? Euripides studying Aeschylus’s tragedies found “something incommensurable in every feature and in every line . . . an enigmatic depth.” Even if Socrates belongs to the same conceptual universe as Thales and Heraclitus, the heroes of tragedy still appear to their audience from out of another realm. Though Nietzsche could not have known about a Mycenaean Bronze Age that Agamemnon and Odysseus lived in, he did see that they would never speak in the kinds of words Socrates demanded of his interlocutors.(16)
Vernant can accommodate this conceptual distance; he only locates it in a different place, not between tragedy and Socrates but within tragedy itself. On the account he developed in the essays collected in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,(17) the hero’s incommensurability is itself the subject that a tragedy meditates on. See for instance “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece.”(18) Athenian tragedy translates the outsized characters from Greece’s heroic age into the legal vocabulary of the democratic fifth century. “Imagine Orestes alive today. Who could do him justice?” tragedy asks, and goes after its hero, weighing mitigating and aggravating circumstances and turning the assessment of his matricide over to a jury.
The point of a tragedy’s applying anachronistic terms and penalties to Homeric heroes is that it recognizes the distance that stretches between its own time’s lawcourts and prosecutions and an earlier era’s barely containable battlefield heroics. Beyond legal terminology tragedy can generally be said to see the heroic age as similar enough to the age of tragedy—just similar enough—for its characters to be evaluated as humans.(19) They are legally bound or exonerated, vain and cowardly or nobly dignified. And yet they are simultaneously different enough to be explicable only in supernatural terms, as pawns of a godly whim or agents of divine will.
It is as if, Vernant says, the syntactical ambiguity in Heraclitus’s saying “êthos anthrôpôi daimôn [the character of the person is a spirit]” came to life on stage as a moral ambiguity. Greek grammar permits Heraclitus’s apophthegm to mean equally 1) that a person’s character is all that the so-called guiding spirit in that person can be; and 2) that one’s so-called character emerges under closer investigation to be a divine spirit. The êthos is actually a daimôn and the daimôn in fact is nothing but êthos. Sacralization and desacralization are both available.
Heraclitus’s saying loses its force when the two grammatically permissible readings cease to be both metaphysically possible. Then much more is lost as well. “The minute it becomes impossible to read it equally well in the two different senses . . . the tragic consciousness is gone.”(20) The tragic consciousness is the awareness that Theseus could not exist within Athens of the present day even though Athens could not exist without its founder-hero Theseus. The heroes on stage are real in a way, illusory in a way.(21) Here is where the book’s title pairing “myth” and “tragedy” may mislead.(22) Myth “does not yet question itself”; tragedy by contrast is “a questioning to which there can be no answers.”(23) Thus the inapproachability that Nietzsche so precisely rightly spotted in tragic heroes but with less precision attributed to their mythic status has been given a historical context. The classical city again stands at the center of Vernant’s inquiry, committed to isonomia but curious to learn the limits of the concept. Being the effort to translate what is alien prevents tragedy itself from being wholly alien.
The alien also haunts Plato’s dialogues; here again Nietzsche defined what has become a persistent problem. That problem is not the usual worry about Plato’s difficulty as an author—the worry that has led some people to call the dialogues “literary.” The word is misleading but it responds to something real about the dialogues, not so much their ironies and elusiveness as a constant destabilizing alternation between seductive obliqueness and bullying directness, faced with which the reader cannot rest in either suspicion or earnestness. Ignoring that quality of Platonic writing Nietzsche pressed an opposite interpretive worry. For if the pre-Socratic age is as different as he claims it to be from the Socratism of the dialogues and therefore foreign to the present, then modern readers reading Plato can only hear half of the conversation. Despite his questioning method Socrates is not really having words with the young gentlemen of Athens. He is no teacher to the Greeks, there must be something familiar about teachers, rather an alien among them who could therefore alienate the Greeks from themselves.
So who was Plato’s audience? How did his philosophy sound when it was first written?—that is the problem that Nietzsche bequeaths to Plato’s interpreters. It is a contrary hermeneutical problem in that readers of a “literary” Plato try to bring him close but readers of a lost pre-Platonic time need to keep him at a distance reconstructing what an intrusion on that time he must have been.
Broadly understood all Vernant’s researches help the student of Plato who interprets in this second way, which again makes him the right author to turn to from Nietzsche. As Vernant continued to read antiquity and to write his remarkable papers he expanded his scope to include topics in ancient art, warfare, marriage, and city life. Most of all he read ancient religions and rituals. He asked as urgently as Nietzsche had where Greek religion came from and what forms it took; as Nietzsche also had he saw Greek religion to be a moral code and projection of human society; but he went further in translating the language of religion, perhaps able to go further because he listened more patiently to the way people spoke that language.
I will close with a word about one example of Vernant’s inquiries that both discover the pre-Socratic world and illuminate the Socratic response to that world. The subject is ancient visual art. My own research is focusing on some of the passages in which Plato turns decisively against poetry and the visual art it resembles. And Vernant has done much to show what that art could have been like before Plato and how it might have been conceptualized before him. His work is essential. The study of Plato’s aesthetics, despite having been pursued exhaustively, has not yet adequately treated the uses of visual art before him. What mimetic relation did Plato think was at work in the paintings and sculptures of his day, and what alternative relations were available to his imagination? Here again I am indebted to Vernant for demonstrating how much richer a reading of Platonic aesthetics can become when it is set in the contest of statuary in ancient ritual.
A modern reader knows too much about sculptures and paintings that look like the objects they represent, and can forget that in Plato’s time visual objections had replaced another representational relation.
In one pair of articles Vernant reconstructs the uses that archaic (pre-500 BC) statuary had been put to.(24) His prime example is the kolossos, not necessarily a large object despite the later uses of that name for it; the kolossos functioned roughly as a grave marker, sometimes a grave’s surrogate when the presumed-dead body could not be found. Without making the slightest effort toward resembling the dead (or resembling any human) a kolossos nevertheless stood in the dead person’s place and can even be said to have referred to the person. The kolossos is a double “as the dead man is a double of his living self.”(25)
Vernant brings together the attested rituals by means of which a kolossos could effect communication between the living and the dead; between, as he puts it, visible and invisible realms. The communication takes place by virtue of the rituals but Vernant does not jump to conclusions about “convention” grounding the reference. Blanket and blank appeals to convention leave a process sounding arbitrary. Philosophers sometimes have purposes that make the question of whether some phenomenon is conventional the only question that needs to be answered. For most purposes however one knows nothing without knowing how the convention shapes practices and frames experience. Vernant reads the uses of a kolossos for the logic of the referential relation.
For instance the object is blind. The stone it is made of is sightless to begin with, and the kolossos may well be made eyeless.(26) This blindness, however paradoxically, evokes the invisibility of the psychê it connects to. The kolossos’s immobility by a different route points to the psychê’s extravagant mobility.(27) Such associations are not logical implications; they reveal what Vernant calls “the play of correspondences and oppositions . . . among the different aspects of reality” that operates within a religious ritual.(28) The ritual gives the kolossos its referential power, so that the sculpture denotes its object regardless of whether or not it looks like that object.
Already Plato’s reader has something to go on; for the communication between visible and invisible realms has a specific meaning in the Republic. Plato names the lower and worse part of the Divided Line “the visible” and repeatedly equates progress into philosophy with the passage out of visibility and away from even lingering vestiges of the visual. Consistent with this depiction of intellectual success is the Republic’s diagnosis of the greatest cognitive failure, which is to say mimêsis. Book 10 assesses painting by contrast with a Form (the bed, the table) and the human-made objects (beds, tables) that derive from a Form. Painting ranks third (the picture of a bed) because unlike the real-life bed it does not refer to the truest one which is the Form and the bed that the god made.(29) In the language that Vernant translates ancient ritual into: The physical bed permits communication with the invisible Form while the bed in the painting keeps the mind shuttling between two visible objects.
An intense and specific pressure is being brought to bear on this passage that distorts the very theory it appeals to. Besides Republic 10 only one passage in Plato’s entire corpus admits the possibility of Forms for artifacts.(30) And as he never does elsewhere he makes the Forms products of divine manufacture here. In other words Plato says two things in Book 10 that contradict his usual account of Forms, and the two departures from the theory are needed for him to posit a type of artificial object to contrast with mimêsis. By contradicting his own account of Forms in both respects he can connect an artifact with a god. Why force this link? Perhaps to show that what mimetic art fails at, a religious art once accomplished. The “imitation of appearance alone” that Plato defines mimêsis as, which is the concoction of a visible thing related to another visible thing’s visibility, is blameworthy by virtue of abandoning the effort to communicate with the invisible.
It was Vernant who helped me see that Plato was using the prosaic bed to function in his argument as a kolossos. (More speculatively one might even see the “double” of Vernant’s analysis as a precursor to the Platonic idea—“belonging to some other, inaccessible sphere.” The double is the inspiration for and the condition for the possibility of metaphysical dualism.(31)) It had already been uncontroversial to say that Plato has traditional religious art of some kind in mind as his aesthetic goal—thus in Republic 10 only “hymns to gods and praises of good men” will be his city’s admissible poetry(32)—but now it appears that even the alternative to mimetic painting he spells out is a case of everyday manufacture that he describes as if it were religious art.
Hard to say how specifically Plato could identify the practices that had given images their old power, but he knew that the power had disappeared by his time. In this respect tragedy again resembles painting. An ancient proverb allegedly said that tragedy had “nothing to do with Dionysus”(33) and Plato would have agreed. Never mind the parade of gods and heroes, tragedy had lost its divine function. I came to see the breadth of Plato’s complaint only thanks to Vernant’s reading of ancient art.
There is no escaping that key word “reading.” It has to figure in any portrayal of Vernant and every statement of gratitude to him. For all the variety of topics that Vernant took up and all the interpretive methods he tried, the consistent theme in his writing is his expert reading. Over and over in his hands leaden coincidence turns into a lustrous and ductile significance. Instructing by example as the best teachers do he inspires his own readers to seek out for themselves those humble but puzzling and stubborn little facts, images, orthographies, turns of phrase, and twists of argument that once unriddled permit a distant and formal time to address the investigator with Vernant’s own preferred tu.
Notes
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