the grammar of being : benardete

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The Grammar of Being Author(s): Seth Benardete Reviewed work(s): Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Mar., 1977), pp. 486-496 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20126957 . Accessed: 01/02/2013 19:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The  Review of Metaphysics. http://www.jstor.org

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The Grammar of BeingAuthor(s): Seth BenardeteReviewed work(s):Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Mar., 1977), pp. 486-496Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20126957 .

Accessed: 01/02/2013 19:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The

 Review of Metaphysics.

http://www.jstor.org

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CRITICAL STUDY

THEGRAMMAROF BEING

SETH BENARDETE

vaharles H. kahn's The Verb "Be" in Ancient Greek

(Reidel: 1973) is the sixth part of a series edited by J. W. M. Verhaar

with the overall title, The Verb "Be" and its Synonyms: Philosophical and Grammatical Studies; but it differs from the others by its

being devoted to a single language. This privilege is due to the link,which is still sensed as indissoluble, between philosophy proper and

ancient Greek philosophy. To the Greek philosophers themselves,

however, this link seems to have been of no importance, and itwould

have come as a surprise to most of them that grammar and philosophy

could be thought to overlap. They spoke of logos; we speak of

language; and whereas for them Greek or Persian exemplified theconventional, they are for us "natural languages." Plato was content

to distinguish among the parts of speech only noun and verb (as actor

and action respectively), a distinction that plainly did not cover either

the verb "to be" or the noun "being"; and he did so in a dialogue whose

theme is the problem of being (Sophist 261e4-8). Indeed, as the

Eleatic stranger makes clear, being belongs with same, other, mo

tion, and rest, while logos belongs with opinion, thought, and imagina

tion(266a5-6);

and it is one of thesophist's

delusions which he seeks

to impose upon others that the problem of speech coincides with the

problem of being. Aristotle's pejorative use of logikos (Met.

1029b13, 1030a25) is fully in accord with Plato's understanding of the

"weakness of speeches."

Kahn ismore than sympathetic with the ancients' view; he be

lieves in theWhorfian hypothesis only to the extent that the threefold

function of the inherited Indo-European root *es?as copulative,

existential, and veridical?gave Parmenides and his successors an

easier access to the problem of being than would have been the case if

truth, predication, and existence were handled in Greek by three

wholly distinct verbal roots. When Euripides' Eteocles replies to his

brother's appeal to the simplicity of truth, he asserts that only in

words is there equality among mortals, "but the deed is not this"

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GRAMMAR OF BEING 487

(Phoenissae 502). Whether eartv in a sentence like to 8' epyov ovk

?dTLvT?Se is

copulative, existential,or

veridical isan

idle question.If T?8e is replaced by "as men say," the sentence has the form which

Kahn calls veridical;1 but one can just as easily express the thought

existentially; "Equality does not exist" (or,more literally, "Equalityis not the case"), and there is nothing in the structure of the sentence

as such that distinguishes it from the copulative construction. Kahn

readily acknowledges this kind of three-in-one; but he denies, in opposition to a widespread view, that it led Plato to ignore the difference

between, for example, "Zeus is not" and "Socrates is mortal." For

Kahn, what is sub specie graecitatis a matter of fact is sub specie

rationis a necessity. There is a unity in the diversity of eivaL that

truly reflects, however imprecisely, the relations among the concepts

of truth, existence, and predication. But one may question whether

Kahn, in his eagerness to vindicate Greek philosophy, does not have

to make too many accommodations to certain fashions of contempo

rary thought. He does not cite any ancient source for his own charac

terization of the ancient meaning of elvac "For the Greeks, to be meant

to be a subject orto be a predicate for rational discourse and true state

ment" (p. 404). It is hard to see how Aristotle, let alone Plato, could

agree with a characterization of being that must exclude from being

those beings about which falsehood is impossible (Met. & 10).

Kahn's procedure is inseparable from his results. Neither is as

neutral to the evidence as, itmight be thought, a grammar is obligedto be. Kahn himself often refers to his syntactical structuring of

eivaL as a"myth." In order to see how different modern linguistics

is from traditionalphilology,

it isworthwhile tobegin

with aquotationfrom J. H. H. Schmidt's Synonomik der griechischen Sprache (1878),

vol. 2, pp. 528-529:

The sentence ?o-tl Toj/jlt) "Rome exists" and its expanded form eari

T?/jar) 7t?Xic "The city Rome exists" are, we assume, complete and

adequate statements, a substantive with a complete predicate. But

should we say 'p?/xr) 7ro\i? ixrr?v "Rome is a city," it no longer appearsto us that ?o-t?v is the actual statement, but 7r?Xic alone is,and we usually designate kcrriv as "copula," or sentence-binder.

With what justification? If we stress 7roXi?, kcrTiv looks sec

1I am not sure whether Kahn would count this as a variant of ovk

?cTTLTaOra, of which he says he found no extra-philosophical examples

(p. 366); but cf., Euripides AIcestis 1126; Ion 341; fr. 978,5; Antiphanes fr.

56, 1K; Aristophon fr. 9, 4. Since Kahn seems to put Xenophon among the

non-philosophers, perhaps one should cite Oeconomicus XIX. 17.

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488 SETH BENARDETE

ondary; we can omit it without obscuring^our understanding of the

sentence. But if the sentence were

Tw/xr]i)v, eorcu or even

yiyveTaL,(paiveTaL, Kake?TaL 7roXi?, the main stress would still be on the predicated noun, unless logical constraints required a different emphasis.

Accordingly, 7roXi? is not the statement, but kvT?v, t)v, yiyveTaL,KaXevraL etc. is, and 7r?Xic is only a closer determination of the predi

cate, as laetus in the sentence laetus advenio. . . .Tedafi/xevoL eLcriv

"They are buried" is the same as Ionic TeB?<paTaL. Is this a new use of

elvaCl If that were the case, we should have a wholly other use in a

sentence like ovro? ? kt)7to? tov ?ao-iXcc?c ?ctt'lv, and another one in

turn in &ttl /xot k^7to?.In all these cases, however, the essence of

the verb is not distinct; it means being present (Vorhandensein),

existence, and this verb shares nominal or adverbial supplementswith a great number of other verbs, which designate either an action

that can be expanded differently, or a condition that can be expressedin different ways. The concept of action or condition is not distinct in

the cited examples; only the additions make them different, as sub

stantives or adjectives, adverbs, oblique cases, participles. . . But

since existence is the totality of all actions and conditions, and con

sequently the most general concept, and the one lying nearest at

hand, its use seems to us the most self-evident and least important,and we speak therefore of a copula or an "auxiliary verb," as merelya formal part of the sentence, which, however, it is not at all.

This quotation is all the more revealing because the primitive mean

ing which Schmidt assigns to eivaL, on the basis of a specious

etymology, almost coincides with Kahn's. The "stative" and "loca

tive-existential" of Kahn are comprehended by Schmidt in the

German wohnen.

Whatever one may think of Schmidt's intuition, it is still nothingbut intuition, and the variety of syntactic structures which eivaL

admits of is neither articulated nor unified. Kahn, on the other hand,

by theuse

of Transformational Grammar (in the version of Zellig

Harris), is able to a large extent to generate in a regular way from a

posited notion of "kernel sentence" all the Greek sentences inwhich

eivaL occurs. Kahn's original plan was "to correlate every intuitive

difference of meaning in the use of elpi with a formal descriptionof the corresponding sentence-type" (p. 251), but he admits that he

cannot always do so. Whether this is a failure inherent in Trans

formational Grammar itself, or in the version Kahn uses, can for the

moment be left aside. First, an

example

of the success and another

of the failure of the technique,as Kahn practices it, are in order.

Kahn formulates the rule for the recognition of periphrasis somewhat

as follows: eivaL is used periphrastically with the participle if and onlyif it is impossible to obtain two kernel sentences, one of which has a

finite form of eivaL and the other a finite form of the participle, but

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GRAMMAROF BEING 489

if two kernel sentences can be so obtained, the usage is not periphras

tic. This rule is both simple and elegant; it will no doubt becomein time a standard part of Greek grammar. The enchantment, how

ever, which mathematical clarity can cast is best illustrated in the

case of another construction, (ovk) ?cttlv ?cttls . . . ("There is

[not] someone who . . .") is not uncommon. It looks like the exis

tential operator ofmodern logic, and the fact that it occurs farmore

often with ovk than without seems to be, linguistically, irrelevant.

Now, Kahn asserts that, though he looked hard for examples, he

could only find one (inPlato) inwhich the second clause has the copula,and he offers a proof as towhy this should be the case (p. 299, n. 61).

He ismistaken. Euripides has ovk earn dvr)T&v oori? ?or' ?Xevoepo?

(Hecuba 864; cf., fr. 150N), and Sophocles kol oi)8?v tovtcov o tl ?jlj)

Zevs (Trachiniae 1278; cf., Antigone 737), and there are several

examples in just one passage of Plato's Charmides (167elff.). The

Sophoclean example is important since it illustrates a double "zeroing"

ofeLvaL, and whereas for traditional grammar such nominal sentences

are treated as primary, with the insertion of ?or? as a secondary

development, in Kahn's use of Transformational Grammar no distinc

tion between the presence or the absence of the verb can be allowed.

For deep structure, the verb is always present, and itmight be no

more than an apparent paradox that a verb, whose primitive mean

ing is said to designate presence, can in its absence make its presence

equally felt. Can a verb which is almost always eliminable be the

word for reality and truth? Or is it because "being" is the only word

that cannot be just aword that it can so easily be suppressed in speech?

If a distinct syntactic structure could be found for every mean

ing of eivaL, then the goal of machine-translation could be achieved:

context-free translatability. In accordance with this goal, Kahn had

to begin by treating eivaL as if itwere any other verb, but since he

admits his failure, it is proper to ask whether he was bound to do so

precisely because it is not like any other verb. Is not the colorless

ness of the copula no less a sign of the wholly context-bound character

of being than is the fact that existence is not a predicate? When

Aristotlesays,

eart?xev

ovv77av8pe?a

tolovt?vtl, k?yovTaL

8e kol

?TepaLKaTa Tr?vTe rp?7rovc (EN 1116a15?17)?"Courage is of this

sort, but other kinds are spoken of in five ways"?ecrri here means

"in its being" only because of X?yovTaL8e, etc.; without the contrasted

clause, the beingness of ?crri vanishes. One might suspect, then,

that the degree of negativity in the context of eivaCs occurrence

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490 SETH BENARDETE

determines its meaning. Being is context-bound because non-being

necessarily is so, and the negation of eivaL cannot be dismissed, as

Kahn does, on the grounds that the syntactic forms do not alter re

gardless of whether they are affirmed or denied. When eivaL by itself

means to be alive it occurs far more often negatively as "to be dead";

when it does mean to be alive, it usually is the case that it has just

been asked whether so-and-so is dead. Being comes to light not only

for philosophers through non-being. The conceptual priority of

eivaL overyiyvecrdaL, upon which Kahn insists, and for which he

could have cited Pindar's

yevoColos ?crai

/xadcov("Learn what you

are and become it"), does not affect the human priority of motion

over rest. Euripides' Achilles says to Clytaemnestra (IA 973-4),

oeo? kyo) Tr?(piqv? crot/^?yicrro?,ovk H)v, ?XX' o/acoc yevrjoropiaL

("I appear to you as the greatest god, not being so, but nevertheless

I shall become so"), and Aristotle remarks that "motion is especially

thought to be being-at-work (energeia), and therefore men do not

assign motion to non-beings, but (only) some of the other categories"

(Met. 1047a32-4).

Kahn cites Achilles' words at Iliad XXIII, 103-4 as "perhaps the

most 'philosophical' use of eipi inHomer" (p. 274). Achilles is speak

ing out loud on the departure of Patroclus' ghost:o> ttottol, rj p? t?

ecTTL KOLL v'

Ki8ao ?o/xoicri ipvxv Kai e?8(okov ("So it is true after all

that soul and wraith are something even in the house of Hades").2

By finding here just another example of the "locative-existential,"

Kahn fails to stress what is truly astonishing about this passage.

Achilles is suddenly forced to acknowledge what we would have

thought Homer's heroes believed implicitly, that the soul truly existsin Hades. Soul, Achilles says, is not, any more than Hades is, just a

manner of speaking. This is in a sense the culmination of the Iliad,

for the poem, which ends with the burial of Hector's corpse, had

begun with Homer's assertion that Achilles' wrath had cast forth into

Hades many stout souls of heroes and left themselves (avrov?) to be

the prey for dogs and birds. The significance of Achilles' speech

for the Iliad is confirmed by the fact that only on the occasion of

Patroclus' and Hector's deaths does Homer himself say that the soul

2If one reads, with Kahn, rt? in line 103, it qualifies ifwxy, "some

sort of soul is etc."; but Propertius' sunt aliquid manes is just one of several

considerations that seem to guarantee the lectio difficilior.

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GRAMMAROF BEING 491

went toHades, and its significance for us would be that it establishes

at the start that eivaL primarily means "to be something."If Greek literature begins with a question about the being of

soul, the questioning of the being of the gods cannot be far behind.

Kahn, however, seems to deny this, for he wishes to separate the

meaning "to be alive" from the strictly existential meaning which, he

claims, first occurs at the end of the fifth century. Aristophanes'Socrates' ov8' ecrT?v Zevs (Clouds 367) represents a syntactic innova

tion which at the same time is semantically novel: "eon as existential

operatorhas been isolated from the

operandsentences to which it is

normally bound" (p. 304). The evidence does not bear this out, and

since Kahn might further mislead the reader into believing that the

issue of the gods' being is only to be found in the few passages he cites,I think it would be helpful to give a fuller account. First, two

centuries before Aristophanes, there is Alem?n fr. 58, 1 P: 9A(ppo8?Ta

fi?v ovk ecTTL, ix?pyo? 89 "Epco?ota [77a??] 7ra?a8eL ("Aphrodite is

not, but rampant Eros like [a child] sports"). Whether Alem?n

means to distinguish between the sudden lust of Eros and the serious

passion of Aphrodite is not clear, but the syntax is the same as Aristoph

anes'. Second, and more importantly, to keep the gods and soul

or life apart obscures what is involved in the denial or the assertion of

the existence of the gods. The absence of life is often just what is

meant by "non-being." "In comparison with thinking," Aristotle says

(de gen. animal. 731a35-b4), "to share only in touch or taste is thought

to be as itwere nothing, but in comparison with the plant or stone it is

wonderful; for it would then be thought desirable to obtain even this

kind of knowledge and not lie dead and [as] a non-being (KeladaLTeOvebs Kai /xi} bv)." The slogan, "God is dead," no less than the

modern physicists' speaking of the "life" of elementary particles (and

the "half-life" of radioactive substances), should have been enough to

warrant more caution on Kahn's part. It is life and only life that

makes the pre-Socratic denial of becoming implausible.

InPlato's Phaedrus, when asked whether he believes themyth of

Boreas, Socrates puts aside the question of the existence of centaurs

and the like until he has come to know himself; he thus implies that if it

should turn out that the soul is a monster, the existence of other

monsters cannot be precluded. Laws X is, of course, the plainest

proof that life and gods can constitute one problem, and in Sophocles'Electra the Chorus say (245-250):

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492 SETH BENARDETE

ei yap ? pkv Baviov y? Te Kai ov8ev iov

Ke?aeTaL r?Xac,

?l 8? /xi) ttcxXlv

8o)crovo"' otvrupovov? ?t/ca?,

eppoL r' av at?w?

aTt?vTi?v r' evak?eLa SvaTwv.

("If the hapless dead [Agamemnon] will lie [as] earth and non-being,and they [Clytaemnestra andAegisthus] will not pay back with bloodfor blood, the reverence and piety of all mortals are gone.")

The belief in the existence of the gods and the belief in the existence

of the soul apart from body thus stand or fall together.

Some early instances of existential eivaL Kahn has missed.

Herodotus, in discussing the source of the Nile, mentions the sug

gestion of some that it is Ocean, but, he says, this does not admit of

refutation, "for I do not know of any river Ocean that is" (ov yap

TLva eyorye oi8a irora/xov 'ClKeavbv e?vra, 11.23). And later, in the

same book (174), he tells the story of Amasis, who before he became

king was a thief, and when his victims brought him before various

oracles, he was no less often acquitted than convicted; so Amasis, on

becoming king, sacrificed only where he had been convicted, on the

grounds that "these were truly gods (tovt?ov ?>?akiqd?cu? Oe v eovr v)3

and gave not-false oracles." These Herodotean examples might give

the impression that existential eari always has a theological dimen

sion, but Thucydides shows that it is not restricted to that: "And the

four-hundred because of this were not willing for the five-thousand

either to be or to make it plain that they were not" (oihe eivaL ovre

/xi) bvTa? ?tj?ov? eivaL, VIII.92.11; cf., 1.3.2).

In his discussion ofSocrates'

denial that Zeusis,

Kahn wavers

between his former view that cort, there, has its source in the

"locative-existential" and the possibility that Socrates "intends to

deny that anything could be truly said of Zeus, that he is a possible

subject for any reliable elementary statements: the stories of priests

and poets are all a pack of lies" (p. 319). This second formulation,

which I think, is near the truth (cf., Socrates' words at line 365),4

conceals something which ismost remarkable, that since Zeus is a

fictive being, eivaL by itself now means "to be by nature." It is not,

3A variant reading is ?kr}6?(ov.

4Even though Socrates might be imagined as understanding it in this

way, Strepsiades does not; for in explaining Socrates' teaching to his son, he

says that Zeus is not since Dinos is lang, having driven Zeus out (1470-1, cf.,

380-1). He thus assimilates Socrates' teaching to the poets', whereby

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GRAMMAR OF BEING 493

then, the syntactic form which is innovative, but the packing into

what is apparently the emptiest and most general of words a distinction. The importance of this can hardly be overestimated: being

must now be qualified, explicitly or implicitly, whenever it is extended

outside its strict boundaries. What is first for us, Aristotle says, "has

little or no being" (?xLKpbv r) ovdev e'xetT?v wro?, Met. 1029b9-10).

Kahn's earlier proposal that existential eivaL arises from a

generalization of the "locative-existential" cannot.be dismissed, for in

the Clouds, in a passage which Kahn rather surprisingly does not

mention,Just

Speech and Unjust Speech havethis

exchange (902-6):U.S.: I deny that Justice is at all (ov8? y?p eivaL ir?w <pr)piAlkt}v).

J.S.: You say she is not?

U.S.: Well, where is she then?

J.S.: Among the gods.U.S.: If Justice is (At/oj? oiiarj?) how come Zeus did not perish when

he bound his father?

This last exchange brings out that the denial or the assertion of the

existence of gods is never a statement of bare existence, but rather

that the being of a god involves the effective power of the god tomaintain morality (cf., Euripides fr. 292, 7 N; Hecuba 799-801;

Cyclops 354-5). To be means to be at work, for one does what one is.

Kahn nowhere discusses this meaning of being, though it is one of the

four main meanings Aristotle gives to being (Met. 1017a35-bl).

In Euripides' Heracles (841-2), Iris says: "Or the gods are nowhere

(r? Oeo? /x?v ov8a/xov), and mortal things will be great unless he

(Heracles) is punished"; and in a fragment, the gods' being and the

gods' strength are identified (fr. 154Austin):

o) 6vr)TOL7rapa(ppovi)ixaTy avOp?m??v, p?Tiqv,o? ipao-LVeivaL tt)v tv\Vv ^XX' ov Oedv?.

co? ov?ev ierre Ke? keyeiv ?o/cetr? tl.

ei jx?v y?p 17 vxV (ttlv ovSev 8e? Oeaxv,et ?' ot 0eot crdevovaLv oi)8ev tj tvxV

("Oh the delirium of men! They say that chance is and not the gods.You know nothing even if you think you are talking sense. For if

chance is, there is no need of gods; but if the gods have strength,chance is nothing.")

"Zeus is not" means no more than "Zeus is no longer"; and that in turn

implies that being and life are virtually identified. The Chorus inAeschylus'

Agamemnon (170) speak of Uranus in the same way: ov?? Xe^erat irplv Hjv

("He will not even be counted, being before").

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494 SETH BENARDETE

The problem of the gods intrudes in another way, and it lends

some plausibility to the view that grammar might have something todo with philosophy. Kahn distinguishes between first and second

order nomin?is (e.g., man as opposed to mortal), and within the first

group, there is a "nuclear sub-class of personal nouns, defined by the

possibility of co-occurrence with first and second person forms" (p. 93).

The person, he says, "is an extra-linguistic subject that can speak

or be spoken to" (p. 92). On this basis Kahn classifies gods as persons.

Do, however, the gods and the names of the gods function in Greek

in the same

way

as men and their names?Perhaps

one

oughtto leave

aside the fact that there is no vocative of the singular 0eoc, and per

haps it is unimportant that for "mythopoetic thought and speech all

nouns are (at least potentially) personal" (p. 91, n. 8). But a line like

Helen's, "0 gods! For even to recognize friends is a god" (Eur. Hel.

560), makes one wonder whether one understands what a god is for

"Mythopoetic speech" if even a verb can be a "person." When it

comes to the gods, at least, the distinction between to be a person

and to be personified is obscure. The indeterminacy of 0eoc is indi

cated by the constant use of the phrase oort? eort*> in speeches about

the gods, and though it no doubt began as a sacral formula in order to

avoid giving offense to a god if one happened to address him with

the wrong name, its use was soon extended to express one's total

ignorance about the gods. Euripides fr. 480 is just one of many in

stances: Ze?? ocrrt? ? Zeu?, ov y?p oi8a Trkr?v k?yq) (cf., Aeschylus

Ag. 160; Eur. HF 1263;Hel. 1137;Hipp. 359). Now the question of

the person would not be very important if it did not impinge on the

Socratic question, t? ecrT?. Kahn wants to distinguish, and rightly so,

between it and the question, rt? eo-T?v (el). He notes that "Who is?"

questions often prompt a genealogical reply (p. 125), and he mighthave cited Plato's Symposium, where the young Socrates asks

Diotima who the parents of Eros are right after she has explained

what power Eros has (203a9). In light, however, of Diotima's whole

account, one can say that Plato presents Socrates as having learnt

from Diotima the difference between "Who is" and "What is" (cf.,

199c5).In the

Apology of Socrates,Socrates seems to instruct

Meletus in that difference. He asks Meletus who (t?c) makes the

Athenians better, andwhen Meletus says it is the laws, Socrates says,

"I'm not asking this, but what human being, who knows this very

thing, the laws?" (24dl0-e2). Meletus' second answer (the jury), how

ever, is not necessarily more profound than his first, for at the end of

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GRAMMAROF BEING 495

the Crito Socrates hears himself rebuked by the laws themselves,

"personified," as we would say. Meletus, the spokesman for the

poets, has his revenge. That Plato's dialogueon being, moreover,

should begin with Socrates' telling Theodorus who the stranger really

is?Zeus in disguise perhaps?shows that Who and What remain for

Plato problematically distinct to the end. It is not for want of reflec

tion, as Kahn seems to believe (pp. 415-419), that Plato lacks a

philosophy of the person.Kahn's discussion of veridical eivaL seems to me to be unduly

influenced by modern logic, for he passes over certain features of its

ancient use that are of some interest. Kahn is puzzled by the fact

that otkr)deLa, a word "for subjective and personal truthfulness later

became the general term for truth" (p. 365), but inasmuch as truthful

ness and justice are commonly believed to belong together (cf.,Herodotus 1.138.1), and Hesiod explicitly connects the truthfulness

ofNereus with his justice (Theogony 233-6; cf., 231-2), the semantic

development of "truth" seems strange only if one looks at veridical

eivaL by itself and apart from its legal and political setting. The

Chorus inAeschylus' Agamemnon warn Agamemnon on his return of

the insincerity of his subjects (788-9):

7ToXXot ?? ?poTwv to 8oKe?v eivaL

irpoT?ova? 8?kt]v irapa?avTec

("Many mortals, once they transgress justice, honor what seems before

what is.")

Kahn himself, moreover, cites a passage from Herodotus (1.97, pp.

353-354),where the

peoplelearn that Deioces'

judgments(r?? ?t/ca?)

turn out Kara to k?v; but he does not notice that the latter phrase

replaces /cora to bpdbv (96.3). The ambiguity of "right" is likewise

revealing.

eivaL sometimes means "to signify"; it then takes over the

function of 8vvaadaL (e.g., Herodotus II.59.2). When Homer says of

Calchas that he knew ra r' ebvTa ra r' ecrcrbfxeva rrpb t' ebvTa, it is

usually not observed that for a soothsayer to know the present means

that he can read the future in the present. Calchas knows the hidden

meaning of r? ebvTa, their truth.5 Heidegger's interpretation of

aki)deLa is therefore not as arbitrary as Kahn believes (p. 364); indeed,

5For the difference between the beings and the truth of the beings,

see Plato Sophist 234c2-e2.

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496 SETH BENARDETE

Kahn cites three passages from Herodotus, in the first of which to

e?v refers to the correct interpretation of an enigmatic utterance

(VI.37.2), in the second it refers to a proper name that is at once given

an ominous significance (VI.50.3), and in the last to Xerxes' inability

to understand that the Spartans' combing their hair at Thermopylae

meant that they were preparing to kill and be killed (VII.202.1).

The policy that Kahn adheres to throughout, of using non-philo

sophical literature (especially Homer), has its drawbacks. Although

it does give an air of neutrality to his results, it prevents him from

discussingthose authors who reflected most

deeplyonwhat

theywere

saying. Would it not have been more illuminating, for example, if in

his analysis of the "locative-existential," Kahn had discussed

Socrates' derivation of Hestia, the goddess of one's own place, from

eoTti; (Cratylus 401c-d)? It would have led him to the Phaedrus,

where Hestia is the only god who stays at home and never contem

plates the ideas. From there he could have discussed x^Pa or

"place" in the Timaeus (with a back reference to Cratylus 412d3),

and then gone on to the ordinary term for real estate, (pavep? ovcr?a.

Such a procedure would have been no doubt less systematic, but the

gain in suggestiveness would have more than made up for any loss

in precision.

New York University.