Agora Talk by Dr Ben Brown

Presuppositions of Critique in Early Greek Thought: Forest Tracks

Abstract:

In the Homeric epics the reality of past events is sanctioned by the mediation of the singer. Song is the vector of at once both past event and its central meaning, that the present remains intimately bound to a foundational event whose significance is revitalised at the occasion of its reperformance. Occasion—the formal assembly of the community—is the sovereign agency at work here. In other words, whatever else the singer is, he is not an author or fabricator, but a witness for the group, a hermeneutes, one who utters speech with divine assertion, prophetes. Prompted by the summons of the occasion, he restores the bond of intimacy between past and present, collapsing the gap between founding ancestors and current institutions, and points the way.

By the end of the sixth century BCE the past and its events have a new metaphysics. Once distilled in the speech of a concrete moment, that is, bounded by the time of the occasion, the past is now substantial, it has become an object with a location separate from speech and occasion. Where is it? Song and its occasions now sit alongside this past, awkwardly, imperfectly, and incompletely. Speech is now only a property of the speaker, his speech artifice, insubstantial representation. Its relations to the past as object? Artifice, image, the speaker’s opinion... What has happened? What remains has become a problem, the open question of cause and responsibility. If the past could be apprehended, who could explain it? There were no certain answers. Once a ritual apparatus of truth effaced the time of forgetting and grounded the past; now that ritual apparatus falls short—but falls short of what? Even Pindar, the great romantic, was troubled: what if the denial of due recognition of the suffering of heroic ancestors—the betrayal of epic—was itself sanctioned by Homer? Then the blind singer must be wrong. Somewhere the path forked, the mirror’s image splits. Schizoid pasts vie and contest. Intimacy cedes place to doubt, past and present become estranged. More than wrong: the poet lied.

In this lecture I will meander along the forest tracks (how else can we proceed?) left by these changes, picking up the traces and fragments scattered along the way, from Homer to Sophocles. I will do so as a historian, not of ‘ideas’ but of the relation between thought and the objective conditions that determine their form. It is not my aim to offer a new account of the origins of historical discourse, but rather to continue the work of those who want to understand the entanglement of forms of thought with forms of society. By focussing more narrowly on the force of critique in these texts, and by exploring the preconditions both in thought and society for such a critical mode, it is hoped the assumptions of early historiography—inherited perhaps by History in general—might become clearer.

Bio:

Ben Brown is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. He is co-director of the Critical Antiquities Network and author of The Mirror of Epic, The Iliad and History (2016).