THE STANDARD READER
MANSFIELD, HARVEY
The Standard Reader Seth Benardete, 1930-2001 BY HARVEY MANSFIELD Seth Benardete was a scholar, a philosopher, and a most extraordinary man. His post in life was to be a classics professor at...
...This relearning is what Benardete called, following Plato, the "second sailing": It is at the heart of all serious thinking...
...All three of us were in the company of those who saw something quite remarkable in the teaching of Leo Strauss...
...His books have been published by the University of Chicago Press, a faithful friend to him and his readers...
...Not surprisingly, the classics profession never gave him recognition or honor...
...He left the task of punishing lesser scholars to others...
...Actually, in Benardete's view it's very important that flights to strange places are protected by security guards...
...But without denying the existence of such a quarrel, Benardete found philosophy in poetry and poetry in philosophy...
...When he died, he left the world, as the best human beings always do, richer for his having lived and poorer for his being gone...
...from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955, with a dissertation on "Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero...
...Those who have never read Seth Benardete might begin with a volume of his essays, The Argument of the Action, published last year...
...It must "learn from our mistakes"—not so much to avoid them as to see why we make them...
...in classics from the University of Chicago in 1949 and his Ph.D...
...Nor was he much known in the world of public intellectuals, a realm he never tried to enter...
...His books have no anger in them...
...They are there for people who want to fly to strange places without buying a ticket and without being frisked by security guards...
...That was the theme of his books on Homer, Plato, and Sophocles...
...He wrote books on Greek poetry and philosophy, and before he died on November 14, 2001, at the age of seventy-one, he was the most learned man alive—and, I venture to assert, the deepest thinker as well...
...Benardete was extremely learned in the details of philology, more so indeed than those who know nothing else and are proud of it...
...He was a family man—husband of Jane, father of Ethan and Alexandra Emma—and a scholar who worked seven days a week...
...Poetry with its image-making aims at, and depends on, the nature of things that is the object of philosophy...
...Because of his obvious gifts he received high honors when he was young, but then he settled in as a professor at NYU in 1964...
...His post in life was to be a classics professor at New York University, but he was not an especially prominent professor...
...When in 1984 his books began to appear in a steady stream, he was largely ignored...
...To me, he was both friend and hero...
...Classicists are only somewhat more insular and thick-headed than most professors, and their neglect did not bother Benardete...
...Philosophers call these beliefs into question and, to the extent possible, try to replace them with rational explanations...
...My summary does not convey the adventurous sparkle of Benardete's prose as he alternately plunges into the deep and returns to the surface...
...Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard University...
...And philosophy with its logic cannot simply reject the conceits and the plotting of the poet...
...I was introduced to Benardete by his fellow student at Chicago and our common friend Allan Bloom...
...He had received his B.A...
...I first met him in 1957 when he arrived at the Society of Fellows at Harvard, a group of very bright or highly praised young persons who are given the run of the university for three years...
...Soon to come is a book of reminiscence and self-summary called Experiences in Reflection: Conversations with Seth Benardete...
...Bloom in his brilliance went on to become a bestselling author and a figure of reknown...
...Benardete did not...
...But his specialty was the whole of things—the whole that is depicted to us by poetry and explained to us by philosophy...
...Nonetheless, he was held in awe by some Straussians, and he had a select following among students from the courses on Plato that he taught over the years at the New School for Social Research—as well as devotees elsewhere who sensed his greatness...
...The hero got in the way of our friendship because he was in every way my superior, and the best I could offer him was my unspoken admiration...
...This might sound like "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" featured in Plato's Republic...
...The depiction by poets tells us the extra-large-sized beliefs we need to hold in order to live as we do...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 12
