Philosophers and Their Poets by Charles Bambach;Theodore George;

Author:Charles Bambach;Theodore George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Gregory, 252.

2. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 84.

3. Seth Benardete and Gregory Nagy both observe that even though heroes were mortal, they were above ordinary caliber. See “Achilles and the Iliad,” in Benardete (15–33, here 18); Nagy (9–10).

4. Despite the revisions that the notion of courage underwent, the requirement of extraordinariness has been preserved. It is there in Plato and Aristotle, and continues to inform most contemporary views. We call courageous those who go the extra mile, and we are especially moved by the death of those who left behind too great a life, or who departed too early, for their beliefs.

5. Heretofore abbreviated as BT.

6. Nagy, 32.

7. Ibid., 21.

8. Nagy remarks that Hector elicited the sympathy of the ancient Greeks as well, but not to the extent that he does from the moderns (21). Modernity vilifies Achilles, whom it does not understand. Hector becomes the proper object of modern pity because of his defeat. This shift of allegiance signals the passage from an aestheticized version of ethics to a “pure” morality.

9. Benardete, 258. See “Plato’s Laches: A Question of Definition” in Benardete (257–76). For Benardete, Nicias and Laches represent the divine and beastly view of courage, respectively. The former is the fully epistemic notion of courage as knowledge and foreknowledge of hope and fear; the latter comes closer to Homeric, natural power. The human forms the middle point between god and beast, and thus, to tailor courage to this middle point, Socrates foregoes the nobility (and aestheticism) afforded by the Homeric model. To recall Nagy and the Achillean example, the Homeric hero is not commensurate to ordinary humans: Achilles oscillates between the nearly divine (he is half-divine on his mother’s side) and the beastly (his treatment of Hector).

10. Benardete, 261.

11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1115a15–20, 1116b4–5.

12. Explaining the various semantic interrelations between the good, the noble, and the beautiful (kalos/kallos), translator C. D. C. Reeve of The Nicomachean Ethics observes that what makes acts ethically choiceworthy and praiseworthy is that they lie in the mean (meson), thus exhibiting a sense of order and proportionality, which are aesthetic qualities. Reeve concludes: “This brings us full circle, connecting what is ethically kalon to what is aesthetically noble, lending the former too an aesthetic tinge” (204n20).

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1115a30–31, 1115b21–22.

14. Ibid., 1115a25.

15. Nietzsche opposes the Romantic reading of Homer as a naive artist: “Where we encounter the ‘naïve’ in art, we should recognize the highest effect of Apollinian culture—which always must first overcome an empire of Titans and slay monsters” (43). He also describes the severity of Doric art in terms of a “permanent military encampment of the Apollinian” (47).

16. Summarily, Luyster argues that BT was written in response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Nietzsche’s own ambivalent relation to this philosophy—he was drawn to it but also wished to affirm life—led him to the Apollonian/Dionysian divide. Tragedy as a reconciliation of the two opposites is, for Luyster, only a Hegelian incidental. On the primary opposition, Luyster writes: “As we consider . . . the implications

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