Phaedrus and Philology

28 November 2022

Phaedrus and Philology

“The story of philology does not begin in Germany.  Its prelude appears in a violent encounter between a god and a maiden, in a story recounted by Plato.  The Greek legend concerns the story of Orithuia, the daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus.  While playing on the banks of the river Ilisus with her friends, she is abducted by Boreas, or the North Wind.  Socrates and Phaedrus, out for a walk outside the city walls, approach the river.  Here is how the conversation between them unfolds:

“’Phaedrus:  Tell me, Socrates, isn’t it from somewhere near this stretch of the Ilisus that people say Boreas carried Orithuia away?

Socrates:  So they say.

Phaedrus:  Couldn’t this be the very spot?  The stream is lovely, pure and clear, just right for girls to be playing nearby.

Socrates:  No, it’s two or three hundred yards farther downstream, where one crosses to get to the district of Agra.  I think there is even an altar to Boreas there.

Phaedrus: I hadn’t noticed it.  But tell me, Socrates, in the name of Zeus, do you really believe that that legend is true?  (Phaedrus 229a-c; Nehamas and Woodruff trans.)’

“Since philology as the study of ancient accounts, mostly written, hangs on this question, let us pay special attention to Socrates’ response.”

“’Socrates:  Actually, it would not be out of place for me to reject it, as our intellectuals do.  I could then tell a clever story: I could claim that a gust of North Wind blew her over the rocks where she was playing with Pharmaceia; and once she was killed that way people said she had been carried off by Boreas – or was it, perhaps, from Areopagus?  The story is also told that she was carried away from there instead.  Now, Phaedrus, such explanations are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all.  He’d have to be far too ingenious, and work too hard – mainly because after that he will have to go on and give a rational account of the form of Hippocentaurs, and then of the Chimera; and a whole flood of Gorgons and Pegasuses and other monsters, in large numbers and absurd forms, will overwhelm him.  Anyone who does not believe in them, who wants to explain them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity, will need a great deal of time.

‘But I have no time for such things, and the reason, my friend, is this.  I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.  This is why I do not concern myself with them.  I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was saying, I look not into them but into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?  But look, my friend – while we were talking, haven’t we reached the tree you were taking us to? (Phaedrus 229c – 230a)’”

(Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN: 9780199931361, pages xi and xii)

 

The Nay Science is a massive examination of German Indology focusing on the history of German interpretations of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita.  The purpose of The Nay Science is to uncover the distortions of German Indology regarding these classic works, as well as of Indian culture as a whole. 

But the book does not start out with a quote from a significant German Indologist, nor does it start out with a quote from the Gita or an Indian commentary on the Gita.  Rather, The Nay Science begins with a quote from Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus.  A few comments:

1. The quote from Phaedrus shifts the context and informs the reader that the authors are not primarily concerned with history, even though the book is a history of German Indology.  The quote, found in the Prologue, suggests that there primary interest is in how German Indology replicates the concerns of Phaedrus and at the same time misses the concerns of Socrates.

2. In a footnote the authors write, “’Rough ingenuity’ here should be understood as a method of historicization or positivizing, as Socrates himself makes clear by his examples.  Truth is thus reduced to method.”

3. At the conclusion of this quote Socrates asks whether his nature is that of a beast or that of the divine.  The authors are suggesting that it is this kind of question, and perhaps this specific question, which is what the Mahabharata and the Gita (and Plato) are about.  The attempt by German Indologists to historicize Indian classics ignores this kind of focus and this shift in focus away from knowing ourselves is a kind of blindness.

4. In an earlier post where I wrote about various ‘regions’ of contemporary Platonism, I noted that I thought there is likely a region of Hindu, or Indian, Platonism.  Both Adluri and Bagchee are scholars of Platonism and have brought to their understanding of Platonism the cultural perspective of Dharmic India.  I think this is potentially fruitful because in many ways Platonism more closely resembles Dharmic traditions than it does contemporary Western philosophy.

5. In a youtube presentation by Adluri and Bagchee, that I watched a few years ago, Bagchee, in his closing statement, noted that philosophy is traditionally a salvific practice.  I recall being deeply moved by this statement.  I had felt that way for many years, but it is a perspective almost totally absent from Western philosophy today.  To hear this perspective stated so directly was very encouraging for me.