The Grammar of Being : Benardete
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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.
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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.