Review: The Ambiguities of Philology

Reviewed Work(s):
Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Jean-Pierre Vernant; Marcel Detienne;
Janet Lloyd
Les Maîtres de Vérité dans la Grèce Archaique by Marcel Detienne
Robert Pogue Harrison

Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 2. (Summer, 1986), pp. 14-20.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0300-7162%28198622%2916%3A2%3C14%3ATAOP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Diacritics is currently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/jhup.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Fri Oct 19 11:20:33 2007
THE AMBIGUITIES OF
PHILOLOGY

ROBERT POGUE HARRISON

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne. CUNNING INTELLIGENCE I N

GREEK CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Trans. lanet Lloyd. New jersey:
Humanities Press, 1978.

Marcel Detienne. LES MA~TRESDE VERITE DANS LA GRECEARCHAIQUE.

Paris: Maspero, 1967.

Classical philology has made notable advances in the work of Marcel

Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. These two authors combine philological
rigor with adventuresome interpretation in a breakthrough of what could be
called "liberal philology." By liberal philology I mean an approach to the study
of antiquity that employs new and untraditional theoretical perspectives
without breaching the empiricism that is innate to philology's paradigm. The in-
sights of Vernant and Detienne are grounded in historical, textual, and factual
evidence, but they often betray the influence of theorists like Levi-Strauss,
Foucault, and even Derrida who have little to do with the empirical scope and
procedures of philology. Vernant and Detienne, though, insist on the rules of
philology, which must preserve at all costs its "scientific" character. This im-
perative is even stronger in their case since liberal philology must carefully pro-
tect its revisionary ambitions from denunciation on the part of conservatives.'
Consequently the practice of Vernant and Detienne often shows a tension be-
tween the explicit scholarly discourse- philological in nature- and the implicit
"transphilological" performance that sustains it. I do not mean to suggest a pat-
tern of "persecution and the art of writing." O n the contrary, Detienne and
Vernant clearly want to champion the traditional empiricism of philology and to
defend it against the vagaries of mere speculation. This state of affairs, in which
a liberal is a conservative at heart who wants to preserve his paradigm by cor-
recting, revising, and stretching it to its limit, gives rise to a number of am-
biguities that I shall explore in this paper. To articulate them in terms of specific
instances, I immediately move to the example of Detienne's book Les Maitres
de verite.
Detienne's study traces the transformations of the Greek concept of truth
from the archaic period to the period of Greek rationalism. It explores the social
function aletheia, the politico-cultural economies that were founded on its shift-
ing meanings, and the historical factors that determined who possessed privi-
leged access to truth (priest, poet or philosopher, etc.). Detienne claims that the
epoch of Greek rationalism begins when Parmenides defines truth on the basis
of the principles of non-contradiction, setting up truth and falsehood as mutu-
ally exclusive terms. This radical redefinition of aletheia marks a break with the
archaic period, in which aletheia (understood as memory) and lethe (under-
stood as oblivion) were experienced as a "fundamental opposition" based on

I The liberalization of philology is of course a widespread recent phenomenon that in-

cludes more protagonists than Vernant and Detienne.
an interdependency between the two terms. Detienne writes: "There is not aletheia ( + ) on
the one side and lethe ( - ) on the other, but an intermediary zone between the two where
aletheia slides toward lethe and vice versa" [71]. The rationalist turn in Parmenidies abolishes
precisely this intermediary zone of ambiguity, where truth and non-truth imply each other,
and with this turn the power-value of truth is transferred from the priestly seer to the dialec-
tician.
Some readers will pick up, in Detienne's thesis, notes reminiscent of Heidegger's ar-
chaeology of the original meaning of aletheia. Already in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger
had translated the word as "unconcealment," stressing the movement into presence from out
of oblivion. In subsequent essays-"On the Essence of Truth" (1938) and "Plato's Doctrine of
Truth" (1942) - Heidegger repeatedly emphasized, as Detienne does, the original belonging-
together of aletheia and lethe: "Concealment [lethe] preserves what is most proper to aletheia
as its own" [Basic Writings 1321. Likewise in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936), he
delineates the modes of untruth from which truth can never detach itself- refusal, dissem-
bling, error, etc. In light of this striking precedent, Detienne's book seems almost like a
philological fleshing-out of Heidegger's insights into the archaic ambiguities of aletheia.
Whether this i s the case or not, one cannot but wonder why Heidegger does not figure in the
exhaustive footnotes that lend the book its philological rigor. Les Maitres de verit6 i s 147
pages long and contains a total of 614 footnotes. Indeed, Detienne's scholarly conscience is
such that he adds a postscript to acknowledge "the many studies relevant to our problem"
that had appeared since the book's definitive redaction. Why is Heidegger the only "rele-
vant" name that i s absent?
"Silence is an objection," Nietzsche once said. A philologist is of course entitled to ob-
ject to Heidegger's reappropriation and idiosyncractic translation of Greek words, and
silence is one way of expressing objection.2 Vernant, for example, maintains such a silence
with regard to Heidegger in his book The Origins of Creek Thought. There he advances the
claim that Greek philosophy originated in a set of concrete political and social transforma-
tions in the Greek world, the most important being the rise of the democratic polis. His ac-
count of philosophy's origins is implicitly at odds with Heidegger, who, in "The Anax-
imander Fragment," declared that Greek philosophy originated from out of itself as an
originary thinking of Being: "Philosophy," writes Heidegger, "arises solely from thinking and
in thinking" [Early Creek Thinking 401. However the disagreement may stand, Vernant's
silence about Heidegger is consistent with his conclusion that "thus restored to its historical
setting, philosophy casts off the character of pure revelation that scholars have sometimes
bestowed upon it" [130]. In Detienne's case, however, the silence is somewhat less consist-
ent, for the author of Les Maitres de v6ite does not seem to object to Heidegger's
"aletheiology" as such. O n the contrary, he seems to valorize it from a philological perspec-
tive. W e are left, therefore, in the realm of speculation as to Detienne's silent objection.
Perhaps it has to do, finally, with irreconcilable paradigms, with an inherent enmity between
the project of philology and Heidegger's call for a post-metaphysical "retrieval" of pre-
Socratic thinking. Perhaps Detienne's silence objects merely to Heidegger's presumption to
indict philological historicism for the way it "systematically destroys the future and our
historic relation to the advent of destiny" [Early Creek Thinking 171.
The case of Heidegger i s a good example of one of the distinguishing features of Ver-
nant's and Detienne's liberal philology, namely its hostility toward philosophers. Despite the
strong theoretical component that informs it, their work as a whole paradoxically aims to
deprivilege the speculative drive of Greek philosophy and to vindicate the practical nature of
the Greeks. Philosophers- whether Parmenides, Plato, or even Heidegger- are by and large
the targets of this liberal philology. Its heroes, on the other hand, are men of action, of cun-
ning know-how, of practical resources, in a word, the men of metis. Metis is that "great

2 0 n the question of Heidegger's etymology oialetheia, it is interesting to note that Paul Frledlander, in
the second editlon of his Plato [New jersey: Princeton UP, 19691 revises his chapter on Heidegger's inter-
pretation of aletheia because of recent philological discoveries that seemed to confirm his etymology. In
the preface to the second edition, Friedlander writes: "Recent extensive analysis of the meaning of
aletheia in the older literature has more clearly brought out the various early meanings of the concept. It
has become clear that the aspect of unhiddenness most stressed by Heidegger was present very
early. . . ."

diacritics / summer 1986 15

category of the mind" in ancient Greece which Vernant and Detienne explore in their co-
authored book Cunning Intelligence in Creek Culture and Society. What does metis mean?
To define it with exactness presents a problem, for its presence as a master value in the
Greek world remains largely implicit. Metis means practical skill, efficacy, cunning, the abil-
ity to manipulate means in order to achieve ends; it means, in the author's words, "a com-
plex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine
flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, oppor-
tunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years" [3]. Metis is found only in
praxis, or better, it hides in praxis. For this reason it was never explicitly thematized by the
Greeks: it "appears more or less under the surface, immersed in practical operations. . . . It is
never made manifest for what it is, it is never clearly revealed in a theoretical work that aims
to define it" [3]. Given this discretion, the authors "were obliged" to vary their method of in-
vestigation. Their method consists in an analysis of the semantic field of metis, showing how
from Homer's epics to Oppian's treatises on fishing and hunting, the references to metis oc-
cur in a highly regular vocabulary-constellation: "The entire semantic field within the con-
cept of mFtis i s set, and the network of its various meanings have remained virtually un-
changed. W e find the same collection of words-dolos, mechane, techne, kerdos, dpate,
aidlos, poikilos, haim~jlos-to describe the instrinsic characteristics of this type of cunning in-
telligence" [43]. In short, while metis itself operates in a world of change and instability, its
role as a mental category of Greek antiquity remains paradoxically stable and unchanged
over the centuries that separate Homer from Oppian.
Philosophy and metis, then, operate in different and perhaps unreconcilable spheres.
The former cannot circumscribe the latter nor reduce it to a concept: "Metis must be tracked
down elsewhere, in areas which the philosopher passes over in silence or mentions only
with irony or with hostility" [4]. It i s here that the metaphilological dimension of Cunning In-
telligence asserts itself most aggressively: traditional philologists have hitherto failed to
recognize the tremendous importance of metis in Greek antiquity precisely because they
have tended to revere the lofty tradition of Greek metaphysics, which never explicitly
thematized mFtis. In the second chapter of their book, "The Fox and the Octopus," Detienne
and Vernant tell us that philologists have been overly concerned with "emphasizing, by a
consideration of the key works of the great philosophers, the distinctive characteristics which
mark the originality of Hellenism in comparison with other civilizations; its logic of identity,
its metaphysics of Being and the Unchanging" [47]. Thus traditionalists "have remained
faithful to a particular image Greek thought created of itself, where metis is conspicuous by
its absence." The message is clear enough: liberal philology calls for a revision of perspective
which frees philology from the prejudices that keep it under the sway of that idealist image of
the Greeks created by Greek philosophy. Vernant and Detienne push this polemic with
philosophy and philo-philosophy to a surprising extreme. The last paragraph of Cunning In-
telligence, concluding the authors' hermeneutic endeavor, presents the book as an implicit
critique of the metaphysical philosophy that begins with Plato and continues to bewitch
classical scholars:

In studies of the Creeks pursued by scholars who claim to be their heirs, there has
been a prolonged silence on the subject of the intelligence of cunning. The funda-
mental reasons for this have been two-fold. The first is perhaps that, from a Christian
point of view, it was inevitable that the gulfseparating men from animals should be
increasingly emphasized and that human reason should appear even more clearly
separated from animal behavior than it was for the ancient Creeks. The second and
even more powerful reason is surely that the concept of Platonic Truth, which has
overshadowed a whole area of intelligence with its own kinds of understanding, has
never really ceased to haunt Western metaphysical thought. [318]

In the original, this closing statement is posed in the form of a rhetorical question ("mais
n'est pas aussi et surtout le signe que la Verite platonicienne . . ."). It is a question that links
the authors, however ambiguously, to a recent history of the critique of metaphysics, a
history that begins with Nietzsche and Heidegger and continues in our own day in critics like
Derrida. O n the issue of Plato especially, Vernant and Detienne share the post-metaphysical
assumption that metaphysics emerges and triumphs in the figure of Plato. This is unfortunate,
for the assumption remains questionable in ways that liberal philology, with its keen eye for
metis, might otherwise have discovered. As it stands, Platonism haunts not only "Western
metaphysical thought" but perhaps also Vernant's and Detienne's critique of Plato.
Throughout Cunning Intelligence they indict Plato for his idealist devaluation of metis and his
spurnful relegation of it to the sphere of finitude and inauthenticity. They tell us that Plato
"violently condemns" metis because its "techniques foster the qualities of cunning and
duplicity which are diametrically opposed to the virtues" of truth and transparency which
Plato envisioned as ideals. But who is the Plato they have in mind? Is he truly a Platonist in
their sense? Perhaps there is a Plato-of the early and middle dialogues, for example-who
deliberately appropriates the techniques of metis instead of condemning them. If there is in-
deed such a Plato, his texts would require a very particular sort of hermeneusis, one similar,
in fact, to that outlined by Vernant and Detienne in their introduction to Cunning In-
telligence. There they speak of the need for hermeneutics of the implicit presence of metis in
Greek texts. But is there no implicit dimension in a Platonic dialogue? Is there no metis at
work in Plato's so-called irony? Does Plato's own metis perhaps call for a metis of reading
that is absent from Vernant's and Detienne's surface reading of Plato? What, after all, is
Plato's irony all about?
Simply expressed, irony consists in a irreducible difference between the explicit and im-
plicit performance of an enunciation. Thus it is surprisingly analogous to metis itself: "MFtis,"
write Vernant and Detienne, "is characterized precisely by the way it operates by con-
tinuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into their contraries objects that
are not yet defined as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts" [5]. A number of
Plato's dialogues operate precisely in terms of such "oscillation." We may take as an example
a well-known passage in Book 10 of The Republic where Socrates speaks of art as an imita-
tion of an imitation and of the artist as being "at three removes from reality." Socrates'
denigration of art and poetry in that passage is still widely taken as positive Platonic doctrine,
but a subversive oscillation i s at work there. Socrates is the first person narrator of The
Republic. In the dramatic context, he is recounting or imitating a conversation he had the
day before with Glaucon, Thrasymachus and others. Plato, in turn, is the writer who imitates
the mimetic speech of Socrates, thus putting himself "at three removes" from the doctrine
enunciated by Socrates. The composer of the dialogue imitates not only Socrates' speech,
but also Glaucon's, Thrasymachus', and so forth, that is to say, he engages in the same prac-
tice of dramatic representation that Socrates outlaws in Book 3 of The Republic. Where is the
identity here?According to Detienne and Vernant, Plato enshrined the "logic of identity," but
it is precisely the absence of such a logic that separates Plato from the Platonic doctrine
elaborated in Book 10. In fact Detienne and Vernant seem far more under the sway of the
logic of identity when they identify Plato with the explicit doctrines proposed by The
Republic. They write: "The author of The Republic roundly condemns all forms of shrewd
knowledge . . ." [315]. But who is this author? Where does he locate himself amid the discur-
sive performances of his protagonists? Does he identify himself, for example, with the state-
ment that the republic of perfect justice must found itself upon two "noble lies," as Socrates
calls them in Book 3? There is the lie of autochthony, which states that the city and not
biological parents gives birth to its citizens, and the lie of metallic souls, which states that in-
dividual souls are naturally made of either gold, silver, or bronze, each of which disposes it
to ruling, fighting, and working, respectively. The polis of perfect justice, organized accord-
ing to the dictates of Truth, founded upon two falsehoods?Is this the author's doctrine or his
irony?
Consider another example which comes from a separate dialogue: at the beginning of
the Symposium Socrates encourages Aristodemus to come along to the banquet with a quote
from Homer-"Two heads are better than one."The phrase comes from Book 10 of The Iliad
[v. 2241 in the context of Diomedes' and Odysseus' venture into the Trojan camp at night-
time on a stealthy spying mission. Once in the camp Odysseus sends Diomedes ahead of
him and stays behind to slaughter some of the sleeping enemies. In thesymposium, Socrates
sends Aristodemus ahead into Agathon's house and stays behind in a state of immobile
distraction. This hesitation has usually been interpreted as a sudden rapture of mystical
meditation on the part of Socrates, who was known to succumb to such raptures quite un-

diacritics1summer 1986 17
predictably. In light of the Homeric allusion, however, the suggestion is that Socrates is
entering the camp of his enemies and is gathering his forces for a nocturnal slaughter. If this
is the case-and there i s sufficient evidence that Socrates' relation to the banquet fellows is
characterized by enmity- then it becomes ironic that this hostile confrontation turns into a
theroretical discussion of the nature of eros. While love is the explicit topic of the dialogue,
the implicit story of the Symposium perhaps has more to d o with the dynamics of rivalry or
even hatred.
What is at stake in these ironic reversals? We can begin with a distinction between
Socratic and Platonic irony. Socrates' irony- his feigning of ignorance, for instance-is
above all a pedagogical maneuver which sets up the conditions for elenctic disputation,
allowing him to manipulate a conversation. His irony figures as a form of pedagogical mFtis
that enters into and controls the shifty course of discourse. His aim is usually to lead a pupil
to self-reliance, or else to expose ignorance where it conceals itself behind veneers of
wisdom. If Socrates is wiser than all other men, as the oracle at Delphi declared, it is because
he does not presume to be in possession of reliable knowledge. His wisdom is his irony
toward presumptions of knowledge.
Platonic irony, on the other hand, radicalizes Socratic irony to provoke a theoretical
crisis. It goes beyond the pedagogical mFtis of Socrates, which always operates in local
discursive contexts, and drives toward a disclosure of epistemological instability. Plato's
irony effects a "turn" in the dialogue, a reversal of terms and destabilization of metaphysical
concepts. It is also, and above all, a practice. Avoiding a thematization of dialectical laws, it
introduces negativity into apophantic and systematic speech. The statement "art lies at three
removes from reality" is posited in The Republic along with its ironic negation. Where this
negating irony is at work, the status of explicit Platonic doctrine remains ambiguous,
dramatizing the nostalgic character of theoretical knowledge, or better, the human finitude
that troubles the coincidence between the knower and his ultimate object of knowledge.
Philosophy then becomes the striving amid these tensions; and eros, as ontological lack,
comes forth as a basic trait of being in this world. To express it in a way that recalls the terms
of Vernant and Detienne: if mFtis always operates in a sphere of contingency, in a world of
Becoming, Platonic irony engages the ultimate terms of finitude which mFtis always implies.
Or, to express it figuratively in a way that recalls the drama of the Symposium: the moment
Socrates seems to leave the material world behind with his myth of the soul's vision of ab-
solute Beauty, Alcibiades breaks into the discursive performance and calls the banquet back
to its material context. And who is Alcibiades, if not one who subverts his own allegiances,
reverses his position towards fithens and provokes radical instability in the political life of the
city. Socrates takes care not only to resist him but also to fascinate him. Alcibiades-the
figure of ironic finitude and political metis- reveals the even greater mFtis of Socrates, the
cunning seducer who enters into his game and knows how to get the better of him.
It would require another investigation to explore the endless complexities of a dialogue
like theSymposium, to determine what its author is the author of. For Detienne and Vernant
Plato is the original author of that Platonism which has never "ceased to haunt the
metaphysical thought of the West." Perhaps there is such a Plato- theUterminal" Plato, as he
is called, of the later writings. But traditional metaphysics begins when certain strands of
Platonism are abstracted from Plato's works as a whole (for example by Aristotle, the first ma-
jor (mis)reader of Plato) and the counter-discourse of his irony is ignored. Only recently have
certain critics begun to correct the metaphysical reading and prepare the way for a reassess-
ment of Plato's thought. This "other" Plato requires a critical and perhaps even literary
analysis of the dynamics-the mFtis- implicit in so many of his early and middle works. It is
surprising that Vernant and Detienne- pioneers in the discovery of mAis - should read Plato
as if there were no implicit metis in his textual performances. To the extent that they read
him strictly Platonically, they repeat the metaphysical perspective which their liberal
philology wants to dethrone. In fact, they rely more heavily upon traditional metaphysical
schemes than they perhaps imagine, for it i s metaphysics that first divides the realms of being
and becoming and introduces rigid distinctions between the practical and theoretical in-
tellect. When Vernant and Detienne locate metis on the side of becoming and describe it in
terms of a practical intelligence which in no way belongs to the theoretical capacity of
thought, they invoke nothing less than the most traditional scheme metaphysics ever in-
vented. Are such distinctions ultimately viable where one is presumably at odds with
philosophical prejudices? Platonic irony dramatizes the degree to which they are viable
perhaps only hypothetically. And if such irony constitutes a species of metis, then thisZ'great
category of the mind" disrupts the very distinctions Vernant and Detienne perpetuate by
locating metis on one side of the line which divides the practical and the theoretical intellect.
The same ambiguities mark liberal philology itself. While Vernant and Detienne labor to
vindicate the practical side of the Greeks over against their philosophical bent, a parallel pro-
cess i s at work whereby the authors vindicate concrete philological research over against
mere theory. But the ambiguities which enable metis to traverse the questionable line
separating praxis from theory also enable Vernant and Detienne to go beyond traditional
philology and ground their work in new theoretical perspectives. It is finally impossible to
distinguish between their concrete philological contributions and the speculative framework
within which they marshal their evidence. But what would happen if liberal philology
acknowledged its own ambiguities, acknowledged their fecundity and even radicalized
them?What if, instead of presuming to get at the Creeks themselves, it reappropriated the in-
evitable mediations of its empirical inquiry? Perhaps then it could force a crisis on the
paradigm of philology which, as mere liberalism, it hesitates to do. Such a crisis might take
the form of a simple but crucial question: what i s at stake in the study of the Greeks?
The study of Greek antiquity is unlike any other field of investigation insofar as it ex-
amines the oneiromancy of Western origins-the eruption of those essential forms of
thought, values, society, and art that initiate Occidental history. Originsfascinate precisely to
the degree that they create a sense of debt in historical consciousness. Since the nineteenth
century the ambition of classical philology has in large part been to chart the origins of the
Greek phenomenon, as if the phenomenon itself were already somehow post-originary. The
conclusions that have been reached so far are paradoxical. Mythology, we are told, em-
bodies the first beginnings. The origins of mythology, however, are ultimately unavailable
and lead in the direction of the imagination. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that
mythology originates in thaumazein, or the state of wonder experienced by primeval man
before the sheer presence of the phenomenal world. He suggests that mythology and later
philosophy arise out of wonder's need to account for the genesis of the ~ n i v e r s eClassical
.~
scholars tend to agree with Aristotle. A question lurks in all of this, however, which can be
formulated in the following way: If at the origin of the Greek phenomenon we find a quest

'Aristotle, Metaphysics A, 2, 982b, 72 sq. Plato also tells us that origins were a dominant passion
among the Greeks. Asked by kcrates about the topic people most enjoyed to hear him discuss, Hippias
the sophist answers: "Genealogies,Socrates; of heroes and men; stories relating to the ancient foundations
of cities, and in general, everything that has to do with antiquity" [Hippias Major 285dJ.

diacritics / summer 1986 19

for origins in the mythologies, does this not mean that the study of antiquity remains within
the purview of what is Greek- namely the quest for origins- and that this purview cannot in
itself become the object of empirical inquiry since the inquiry arises from within it?That is to
say, to what extent does this purview call for a more radical historic relation to Greek
antiquity than mere historicism?
Perhaps Nietzsche already envisioned a more radical philology when, over a century
ago, he argued for the critical historicity of philology, which he understood as a transmission
of founding values. He conceived of philologists not so much as historians but as master
educators of society, where to educate meant to lead forward into history. "The philologist,"
he wrote, "must have an understanding of three things: antiquity, the present and himself"
[Cowan 101. In other words, the philologist becomes the most essential kind of critic. Nietz-
sche of course began a brillant career as a philologist; but after The Birth of Tragedy was de-
nounced by traditionalists because its insights were supposedly lacking in "evidence," he
gradually abandoned the paradigm of philology in order to recover its inner essence as a
transvaluation.
One may even wonder whether Plato himself was not a philologist in this Nietzschean
sense: a reader, interrogator, and transvaluator of the Greek world. At his time that world
had already begun to monumentalize its own past. The institutionalization of Homer as the
master text of predagogy only consolidated the static and complacent image of Greek iden-
tity which Plato's Greeks wore more like masks of themselves. In the midst of this incipient
sclerosis, aggravated by the rnFtis of the sophists, Socrates and Plato proposed the eventual-
ity of Sophia. Critical philosophy became, in a sense, a revaluation of Greek values, a revolu-
tion in the concept of paideia, and an attempt to force a crisis on Greek historical
consciousness. The surge of critical philosophy produced, in turn, a new image of Greek
identity, an image which Vernant and Detienne rightly argue has dominated subsequent
historical perceptions of them.
The effort of liberal philology to recover the pre-Platonic character of Greek antiquity is
significant both in its ambition and its results. Critical philosophy was a revolution of sorts;
hence it tells only a partial story. But the philological search for origins-which seems to
motivate all forms of philology- consists of a backward motion only up to a certain point,
after which it reveals itself as an implicit, historical motion forward. One wonders whether
mere historicism can recover what lies in the penumbra of the Greek phenomenon, that i s to
say, the unspoken and the unthematized. That penumbra, after all, lies every bit as much
ahead of us as behind us. If it i s true, as Heidegger says, that the origin comes to meet us
from the future, and if philology is in some sense the love of origins, and if, finally, there i s no
"evidence" of the future for empirical research to rely on, then a question arises as to the fate
of liberal philology: Will it content itself with reforming the traditional paradigm of philology
or will it force a crisis on the paradigm and risk the inner transcendence of its inquiry?

WORKS CITED
Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle Translated into English. W.D. Ross, ed., 12 vols. Oxford,
1908-1 952.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings, David Krell, Ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
-. Early Creek Thinking. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1974.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Creeks. Marianne Cowan, Trans.
Chicago: Gateway, 1962.
Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Benjamin Jowett, Ed., 4th ed., rev., 4 vols. Oxford, 1953.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. The Origins of Creek Thought. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.