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I maestri di verità nella Grecia arcaica
Esta pesquisa de Marcel Detienne - Iniciada em 1960 como um breve artigo, "terminada em 1965 e apresentada para a obtenção do grau de PhD na Universidade de Liège - partia de uma observação simples: na Grécia arcaica, três personagens, o adivinho, o acedo e o rei justiceiro, têm em comum o privilégio de dispensadores da Verdade pelo simples fato de terem as qualidades que os distiguem. O poeta, o vidente e o rei compartilham de um mesmo tipo de discurso. Graças ao poder religioso da Memória, Mnemosyne, o poeta e o adivinho têm acesso direito ao além, enxergam o invisível, enunciam 'o que foi , o que é, o que será'. Dotado desse saber inspirado, o poeta celebra com sua palavra cantada os feitos e as ações humanas que, assim, entram no esplendor e na luz e recebem força vital e plenitude do ser. De modo homólogo, o discurso do rei, baseado em procedimentos ordálicos, possui uma virtude oracular; realiza a justiça; instaura a ordem do direito sem prova nem inquérito. No cerne desse discurso, proferido pelas mesmas três personagens, aloja-se Alethéia, potência inseparável de um grupo de entidades religiosas que lhe estão ao mesmo tempo associadas e opostas. (...) No meio dessa configuração de ordem mítico-religiosa, Alethéia enuncia uma verdade assertórica; ela é potência de eficácia, é criadora de ser. O discurso verdadeiro é o 'discurso proferido por quem de direito e segundo o ritual exigido', como dirá Foucault. (...) Qual é então o lugar do filósofo e do sofista na linhagem dos 'Mestres da Verdade'? Como o discurso de ambos se diferencia do discurso eficaz e portador da do real, proferido pelo adivinho, pelo poeta e pelo rei justiceiro? Como ocorre a passagem de um pensamento marcado pela ambiguidade e sua lógica para outro que parece abrir um novo regime intelectual, o da argumentação, do princípio de não contradição, do diálogo com, o sentido, com o objeto de um enunciado e de sua referência?" (Abertura, p. viii-ix). Tradução de Ivone C. Benedetti.
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First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Marcel Detienne
36 books23 followersMarcel Detienne was a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of Ancient Greece.
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January 24, 2023
To fully appreciate Detienne’s impressive and dense scholarship, readers will require a working knowledge of ancient Greek history and its literature: History, Mythology, Epic, Tragedy, Poetry, and the tradition of works produced by the Sophists, pre-Socratic philosophers, and Plato and Aristotle. The book, however, is undoubtedly written for scholars and advanced academic researchers - classicists, historians, philosophers, literary theorists. Pierre Vidal-Naquat provides a helpful forward to the text, and assures readers that Detienne avoids the trap of argument from etymology, or “proof through etymology.” For Detienne is adamant, “No etymology can be singled out as infallible.” Detienne’s analyses are deep and labyrinthian and rely as much on etymology as the exploration of the practices of the ancient Greeks, contributing to the reader’s grasp of the unique and protean historical meaning their language conveyed for their changing times.
Readers will note that the ancient Greek incorporated is transliterated and definitions are provided for all the terms, which greatly assists with the flow of the reading and enhancement of the understanding of the material. My only quibble is with the style and presentation of the content, Zone Books (the publisher) opts for including end notes, and they are voluminous, so for those interested in supplemental commentary, be prepared to continually turn to the end of the text. Indeed, the main text runs a scant 137 pages, with endnotes spanning pages, 139-217.
In direct and non-technical terms, Detienne’s approach or method to his subject matter is similar to that of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who synthesizes (to some, in a controversial manner) the disciplines of philology and cultural anthropology, which produces works that are in addition, both hermeneutic and philosophical - embracing the view that no text is a plenary source of self-contained meaning, composed by a fully autonomous (historically-solipsistic) author. The so-called controversy revolves around the inclusion of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work in structural anthropology, a move which Detienne admits, “Greek scholars hardly dared mention, even to themselves.” In this text, the author considers how ancient language (and its essential features, which must be revealed anew through its historical development) gives form and structure to a culture, a society, a unified way of thought-and-life (word-and-deed). He is critical of what is identified as two distinct schools of philology, and this includes Greek scholars whose work embraces a philosophical-and-hermeneutic component, this because they “exclude anthropology” and what might be termed “historical contextualism,” and thus ignore the evolution of language and the important inclusion of the analysis of the mechanism of human thought across different cultures, which includes for Detienne, as this study testifies, the scholarly attention to and inclusion of ethnographic and religious contexts.
His goal is to show how radical, and at times subtle, changes to the Greeks’ linguistic practices alters their worldview. To the point, he demonstrates, in a quite compelling manner, how “lexical systems” or “semantic fields” historically evolve and develop within the ancient Greek culture. In this book Detienne traces the transformation of the Greek experience and understanding of and attitude toward aletheia (truth as revelation) in its complicated relationship to lethe (oblivion) and apate (cunning and deceit). Detienne elucidates the unfolding and evolution of this dynamic relationship contained in the overarching notion of “truth” as it undergoes transformation from the time of the Archaic Greeks to the Greeks of the Classical era.
Again, the historical-cultural analysis provided by Detienne is quite involved, so I’ll provide only a summary of some of the major findings and themes that I believe will be of interest to potential readers, and I note here, that Detienne’s book serves as an excellent companion to Vernant’s, The Origins of Greek Thought (Cornell University Press). I then follow this summary with several observations (an addendum of sorts) that have been drawn from Detienne’s scholarship that might be related, in a unique and productive manner, to contemporary Heidegger scholarship, most specifically Heidegger’s later philosophy of the so-called “turn,” which stated in non-controversial terms, refers to writings that are post-Being and Time (1927).
According to Detienne, aletheia is an undeniable force related to archaic “mythoreligious” forms of life (which are also “magicoreligious), expressive and inclusive of ambiguity, mystery, efficacy, and even prophecy. Aletheia is traced to and linked exclusively with three key archaic figures of history: The poet (Hesiod), the seer or chiro-mantist (Tiresias), and the king or monarch (Agamemnon). They instantiate archaic truth due to their intimate relationship with the ancient religious power of Memory (Mnemosyne) and Justice (dike), and these forces harbor the dynamic unfolding between aletheia and lethe, and the Masters of Truth embrace and strive to preserve this relationship of their symbiotic counter-striving in and through their works. Detienne contends that the forces of aletheia and lethe do not stand opposed, rather they coexist within the context of a living counter-striving relationship - similar perhaps to Heidegger’s (ontological view of the) counter-striving between World-and-Earth (“The Origin of the Work of Art”) and Nietzsche’s (metaphysical view of the) interplay between the Apollonian-and-Dionysian (The Birth of Tragedy). The poets and diviners have access to aletheia through their relationship to Holy Memory and the Muses, both of which are indicative of the power to not merely recollect or “remember” the past, what has been, but beyond this, they have the mantic ability to visualize and experience the past, present, and future. It is clear from Detienne’s careful analysis, the poet, in communion with divine forces, experiences an ecstatic (ek-stasis) moment of standing out and beyond time; it is an event of trans-temporality - a moment of “Kairos-time” that transcends chronological time. The kings, in their relation to the gods, for example, Zeus or Nereus (The Old Man of the Sea), are human (god-like) dispensers of justice (dike) and also imbued with the Holy insight into the nature of things, for justice too instantiates the primordial or archaic experience of aletheia, and so is oracular and divinely inspired. Detienne contends that kings such as Minos and Agamemnon “embodied a mantic power whose wisdom the ancients always praised and whose ‘pronouncements’ preserved and passed on,” mandating decrees inspired by the guiding and revelatory light of aletheia.
Moving to consider what amounts to the radical alteration of the Greeks relationship to aletheia, it is possible to understand these changes in relation to the thought and practices of both the sophists and the philosophers. Here I do not include other transitionary changes occurring, e.g., those Detienne reveals in his analysis of the rise of the “warrior society.” This change in the view and experience is described by Detienne as the “secularization of the semantic context of aletheia,” this despite Detienne’s claim that the philosophicorelgious group sought to retain a connection to the magicoreligious tradition, e.g., consider such pre-Socratic thinkers as Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Parmenides. These early philosophers and later thinkers attempted the precarious task of reconceptualizing a view of truth that was simultaneously “a homologue to and antithesis of religious truth,” but they failed, and ultimately severed divine ties to archaic aletheia, which degenerated into “dialogue-speech” as opposed to the “sung-speech” of the poets. With this new form of communication, debate, and argumentation, alethiea was no longer associated with and expressive of efficacy, mystery, or the “logic of ambiguity,” and became an instrument that expressed through language the “logic of non-contradiction” (and this transformation to aletheia also manifested in the burgeoning legal practices and politics of the Greeks. After the archaic era, aletheia divides along two specific and unique lines: The manner in which was understood by the sophists (and rhetoricians) and the manner in which it was experienced by the philosophers. With respect to the former, where persuasion through emotional appeal is central to their respective purposes, aletheia “regressed, melted away, and disappeared,” and in its place apate (deceit) rose to prominence and supplanted aletheia. In the latter group, aletheia becomes “consolidated,” and this indicates that the primordial religious connection to lethe was covered over, i.e., the counter-striving relationship between revelation-and-oblivion so important to the original Masters of Truth was lost, or more appropriately, obscured.
Detienne focuses heavily on Parmenides’ (On Nature) relationship to Aletheia, and highlights the importance of truth understood in relation to Being (on) in opposition to non-Being (me on): Being is plenary, simple, and “true,” while non-Being is related to apate, it is deceptive, ambiguous, and double-headed - philosophically, aletheia is related to “correctness” and stands opposed to error, falsehood, and contradiction in dialogue, debate, and argumentation. It is notable that within this milieu, efficacy, mystery, fluidity (intimate ties to magicoreligious ways of Being-in-the-world) are devalued, and instrumentality, clarity, and immutability are elevated to a position of privilege. Detienne states the following about Parmenides: Although he is “connected in some ways to the lineage of the Masters of Truth [his understanding of aletheia], is also the first kind of truth in ancient Greece that is open to rational challenge. It is the first instance of objective truth [stripped of all ambiguity and efficacy], a truth established in and through [rational] dialogue.”
Detienne makes what I find to be an interesting observation: “Few scholars of antiquity or educated readers are aware of how carefully Heideggerians and ‘deconstructionists’ have built a veritable wall to separate themselves from the explorations of Greek Scholars.” He admits that classicists are more often than not, blind to Heidegger’s crucial contributions to Greek scholarship, offering high praise, Detienne lauds Heidegger as “the only real innovator in Greek thought” (this despite the issues Detienne has with some of Heidegger’s etymologies, especially the translation, for philosophical purposes, of the Greek, “polis”). Conversely, Detienne is also critical of Heidegger scholars that refuse or resist rendering legitimate critique against Heidegger for accepting “at face value his notion of the ‘unconcealed’ or the ‘deconcealed,’ making no attempt to deconstruct it or set it alongside those archaic representations of Aletheia.” The only text of Heidegger’s that is mentioned in Masters of Truth is Being and Time, so I am unsure how much of Heidegger Detienne has actually read; I’m curious to know whether he read some of the later works on Language and Being, Being and Truth, Hölderlin’s poetry, and the pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus. Indeed, the only texts cited on Heidegger and truth by Detienne are secondary works of French scholarship, i.e., analyses of and about Heidegger and truth. In light of these foregoing remarks, those working on Heidegger’s philosophy can certainly plumb the rich depths of Detienne’s analysis to glean compelling insights into expanding themes that are well-known within Heidegger interpretation. There are many such insights, however, for the sake of brevity, I focus on three:
(1) The human’s relationship to truth and how this relationship has deteriorated since times immemorial. For Heidegger (according to set of certain scholars), the forgetfulness or oblivion of truth (Read: The oblivion of Being) occurs within Plato’s philosophy; truth as an experience or occurrence of aletheia, truth in its intimate relationship to Being, is supplanted with “truth as correctness.” For Detienne (as stated above), this transformation of aletheia is also a monumental historical event, but as opposed to an event in the history of Western metaphysics (onto-theology) linked to Plato’s philosophy, it is actually the poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BC) who is responsible for the devaluation of aletheia, this based on his view and practice of poetry/art as a technical, instrumental and profitable endeavor. Holy Memory becomes a secularized technique, a “psychological faculty available to all via definitive rules, no longer a privileged form of knowledge, nor was it an exercise [askesis] for salvation.”
(2) The primordiality of language, which is to say, language as a celestial gift as opposed to purely a human invention and possession. For “later” Heidegger, language, rendered in reverential terms, is the “House of Being,” it is not a possession of the human being and rather a primordial power that emerges from Being; the human is called to respond to language and in so doing, does not become a linguistic practitioner, but rather a guardian and custodian of the deep mystery of language. Language is a primordial gathering force for our life and world, and according to Heidegger, just as language speaks Being, language also speaks the human being. This precise relationship to language is traced by Detienne to the archaic poets and prophetic seers (as described above), this relationship to language is highlighted by and established within their primordial relationship to aletheia. For example, the poets’ language, or specifically, “sung speech” (NB: Heidegger highlights the “singing-saying” of poetic speak), derives its efficacy and power of vision and prophecy directly from its source, Holy Memory and the Muses, the daughters of Holy Mnemosyne - a power that stands beyond the human being. Memory, in this archaic context, was not “psychological function” or formulary technique upon which the art of poetry is founded, it was, “above all a religious power that gave poetic proclamations their [divine] status of magicoreligious speech.” This gift of language that takes the form of “sung speech” is therefore, based on Detienne’s reading, ontologically antecedent to, more primordial than, human being, and importantly, it imbued and empowered the poet with the “gift of second sight.”
(3) The privileged access of certain poets to transcendent modes of reality, who are also in an important sense prophetic, e.g., those who experience an enlightened and transformative relationship to a magico-religious or Holy source in ways that contribute to a culture’s vitality and ascending development. For Heidegger, this notion relates directly to the issue of the “flight of the gods and the loss of the Holy” as highlighted in his many readings of Hölderlin, whose poetic vision, a form of “remembrance-commemoration” - a form of poetically-philosophically inspired thinking (Andenken) - which seizes Hölderlin and affords him a glimpse into what has already been, while at once providing insight concerning the implications of the intimations gleaned regarding what has not yet come to pass, what is still on the approach, relating to a potential new historical origin, a founding and grounding. In Detienne, as I have already discussed, there is mantic vision afforded the poet that is ecstatic in nature, transcending temporality, granting a prophetic vision into the events that his “memory” invokes. “His privilege was to enter into contact with the other world, and his memory granted him the power to ‘decipher the invisible,’’ and in this case the “invisible” (a vision of the simultaneity and unity of past, present, and future - a prophetic poetic vision) is linked to and inseparable from the poet’s communion with the “symbolicoreligious world that was indeed realty itself.”
To conclude, reading Detienne’s study in tandem with Heidegger might open the potential for scholars and readers to reconceptualize the seemingly mystical, religious, and even wonderous elements of Heidegger’s writings of the “turn” in a way that potentially gathers and acquires a renewed sense of historical reality and justification.
Dr. James M. Magrini
Former: Philosophy/College of Dupage
NCIS
Readers will note that the ancient Greek incorporated is transliterated and definitions are provided for all the terms, which greatly assists with the flow of the reading and enhancement of the understanding of the material. My only quibble is with the style and presentation of the content, Zone Books (the publisher) opts for including end notes, and they are voluminous, so for those interested in supplemental commentary, be prepared to continually turn to the end of the text. Indeed, the main text runs a scant 137 pages, with endnotes spanning pages, 139-217.
In direct and non-technical terms, Detienne’s approach or method to his subject matter is similar to that of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who synthesizes (to some, in a controversial manner) the disciplines of philology and cultural anthropology, which produces works that are in addition, both hermeneutic and philosophical - embracing the view that no text is a plenary source of self-contained meaning, composed by a fully autonomous (historically-solipsistic) author. The so-called controversy revolves around the inclusion of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work in structural anthropology, a move which Detienne admits, “Greek scholars hardly dared mention, even to themselves.” In this text, the author considers how ancient language (and its essential features, which must be revealed anew through its historical development) gives form and structure to a culture, a society, a unified way of thought-and-life (word-and-deed). He is critical of what is identified as two distinct schools of philology, and this includes Greek scholars whose work embraces a philosophical-and-hermeneutic component, this because they “exclude anthropology” and what might be termed “historical contextualism,” and thus ignore the evolution of language and the important inclusion of the analysis of the mechanism of human thought across different cultures, which includes for Detienne, as this study testifies, the scholarly attention to and inclusion of ethnographic and religious contexts.
His goal is to show how radical, and at times subtle, changes to the Greeks’ linguistic practices alters their worldview. To the point, he demonstrates, in a quite compelling manner, how “lexical systems” or “semantic fields” historically evolve and develop within the ancient Greek culture. In this book Detienne traces the transformation of the Greek experience and understanding of and attitude toward aletheia (truth as revelation) in its complicated relationship to lethe (oblivion) and apate (cunning and deceit). Detienne elucidates the unfolding and evolution of this dynamic relationship contained in the overarching notion of “truth” as it undergoes transformation from the time of the Archaic Greeks to the Greeks of the Classical era.
Again, the historical-cultural analysis provided by Detienne is quite involved, so I’ll provide only a summary of some of the major findings and themes that I believe will be of interest to potential readers, and I note here, that Detienne’s book serves as an excellent companion to Vernant’s, The Origins of Greek Thought (Cornell University Press). I then follow this summary with several observations (an addendum of sorts) that have been drawn from Detienne’s scholarship that might be related, in a unique and productive manner, to contemporary Heidegger scholarship, most specifically Heidegger’s later philosophy of the so-called “turn,” which stated in non-controversial terms, refers to writings that are post-Being and Time (1927).
According to Detienne, aletheia is an undeniable force related to archaic “mythoreligious” forms of life (which are also “magicoreligious), expressive and inclusive of ambiguity, mystery, efficacy, and even prophecy. Aletheia is traced to and linked exclusively with three key archaic figures of history: The poet (Hesiod), the seer or chiro-mantist (Tiresias), and the king or monarch (Agamemnon). They instantiate archaic truth due to their intimate relationship with the ancient religious power of Memory (Mnemosyne) and Justice (dike), and these forces harbor the dynamic unfolding between aletheia and lethe, and the Masters of Truth embrace and strive to preserve this relationship of their symbiotic counter-striving in and through their works. Detienne contends that the forces of aletheia and lethe do not stand opposed, rather they coexist within the context of a living counter-striving relationship - similar perhaps to Heidegger’s (ontological view of the) counter-striving between World-and-Earth (“The Origin of the Work of Art”) and Nietzsche’s (metaphysical view of the) interplay between the Apollonian-and-Dionysian (The Birth of Tragedy). The poets and diviners have access to aletheia through their relationship to Holy Memory and the Muses, both of which are indicative of the power to not merely recollect or “remember” the past, what has been, but beyond this, they have the mantic ability to visualize and experience the past, present, and future. It is clear from Detienne’s careful analysis, the poet, in communion with divine forces, experiences an ecstatic (ek-stasis) moment of standing out and beyond time; it is an event of trans-temporality - a moment of “Kairos-time” that transcends chronological time. The kings, in their relation to the gods, for example, Zeus or Nereus (The Old Man of the Sea), are human (god-like) dispensers of justice (dike) and also imbued with the Holy insight into the nature of things, for justice too instantiates the primordial or archaic experience of aletheia, and so is oracular and divinely inspired. Detienne contends that kings such as Minos and Agamemnon “embodied a mantic power whose wisdom the ancients always praised and whose ‘pronouncements’ preserved and passed on,” mandating decrees inspired by the guiding and revelatory light of aletheia.
Moving to consider what amounts to the radical alteration of the Greeks relationship to aletheia, it is possible to understand these changes in relation to the thought and practices of both the sophists and the philosophers. Here I do not include other transitionary changes occurring, e.g., those Detienne reveals in his analysis of the rise of the “warrior society.” This change in the view and experience is described by Detienne as the “secularization of the semantic context of aletheia,” this despite Detienne’s claim that the philosophicorelgious group sought to retain a connection to the magicoreligious tradition, e.g., consider such pre-Socratic thinkers as Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Parmenides. These early philosophers and later thinkers attempted the precarious task of reconceptualizing a view of truth that was simultaneously “a homologue to and antithesis of religious truth,” but they failed, and ultimately severed divine ties to archaic aletheia, which degenerated into “dialogue-speech” as opposed to the “sung-speech” of the poets. With this new form of communication, debate, and argumentation, alethiea was no longer associated with and expressive of efficacy, mystery, or the “logic of ambiguity,” and became an instrument that expressed through language the “logic of non-contradiction” (and this transformation to aletheia also manifested in the burgeoning legal practices and politics of the Greeks. After the archaic era, aletheia divides along two specific and unique lines: The manner in which was understood by the sophists (and rhetoricians) and the manner in which it was experienced by the philosophers. With respect to the former, where persuasion through emotional appeal is central to their respective purposes, aletheia “regressed, melted away, and disappeared,” and in its place apate (deceit) rose to prominence and supplanted aletheia. In the latter group, aletheia becomes “consolidated,” and this indicates that the primordial religious connection to lethe was covered over, i.e., the counter-striving relationship between revelation-and-oblivion so important to the original Masters of Truth was lost, or more appropriately, obscured.
Detienne focuses heavily on Parmenides’ (On Nature) relationship to Aletheia, and highlights the importance of truth understood in relation to Being (on) in opposition to non-Being (me on): Being is plenary, simple, and “true,” while non-Being is related to apate, it is deceptive, ambiguous, and double-headed - philosophically, aletheia is related to “correctness” and stands opposed to error, falsehood, and contradiction in dialogue, debate, and argumentation. It is notable that within this milieu, efficacy, mystery, fluidity (intimate ties to magicoreligious ways of Being-in-the-world) are devalued, and instrumentality, clarity, and immutability are elevated to a position of privilege. Detienne states the following about Parmenides: Although he is “connected in some ways to the lineage of the Masters of Truth [his understanding of aletheia], is also the first kind of truth in ancient Greece that is open to rational challenge. It is the first instance of objective truth [stripped of all ambiguity and efficacy], a truth established in and through [rational] dialogue.”
Detienne makes what I find to be an interesting observation: “Few scholars of antiquity or educated readers are aware of how carefully Heideggerians and ‘deconstructionists’ have built a veritable wall to separate themselves from the explorations of Greek Scholars.” He admits that classicists are more often than not, blind to Heidegger’s crucial contributions to Greek scholarship, offering high praise, Detienne lauds Heidegger as “the only real innovator in Greek thought” (this despite the issues Detienne has with some of Heidegger’s etymologies, especially the translation, for philosophical purposes, of the Greek, “polis”). Conversely, Detienne is also critical of Heidegger scholars that refuse or resist rendering legitimate critique against Heidegger for accepting “at face value his notion of the ‘unconcealed’ or the ‘deconcealed,’ making no attempt to deconstruct it or set it alongside those archaic representations of Aletheia.” The only text of Heidegger’s that is mentioned in Masters of Truth is Being and Time, so I am unsure how much of Heidegger Detienne has actually read; I’m curious to know whether he read some of the later works on Language and Being, Being and Truth, Hölderlin’s poetry, and the pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus. Indeed, the only texts cited on Heidegger and truth by Detienne are secondary works of French scholarship, i.e., analyses of and about Heidegger and truth. In light of these foregoing remarks, those working on Heidegger’s philosophy can certainly plumb the rich depths of Detienne’s analysis to glean compelling insights into expanding themes that are well-known within Heidegger interpretation. There are many such insights, however, for the sake of brevity, I focus on three:
(1) The human’s relationship to truth and how this relationship has deteriorated since times immemorial. For Heidegger (according to set of certain scholars), the forgetfulness or oblivion of truth (Read: The oblivion of Being) occurs within Plato’s philosophy; truth as an experience or occurrence of aletheia, truth in its intimate relationship to Being, is supplanted with “truth as correctness.” For Detienne (as stated above), this transformation of aletheia is also a monumental historical event, but as opposed to an event in the history of Western metaphysics (onto-theology) linked to Plato’s philosophy, it is actually the poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BC) who is responsible for the devaluation of aletheia, this based on his view and practice of poetry/art as a technical, instrumental and profitable endeavor. Holy Memory becomes a secularized technique, a “psychological faculty available to all via definitive rules, no longer a privileged form of knowledge, nor was it an exercise [askesis] for salvation.”
(2) The primordiality of language, which is to say, language as a celestial gift as opposed to purely a human invention and possession. For “later” Heidegger, language, rendered in reverential terms, is the “House of Being,” it is not a possession of the human being and rather a primordial power that emerges from Being; the human is called to respond to language and in so doing, does not become a linguistic practitioner, but rather a guardian and custodian of the deep mystery of language. Language is a primordial gathering force for our life and world, and according to Heidegger, just as language speaks Being, language also speaks the human being. This precise relationship to language is traced by Detienne to the archaic poets and prophetic seers (as described above), this relationship to language is highlighted by and established within their primordial relationship to aletheia. For example, the poets’ language, or specifically, “sung speech” (NB: Heidegger highlights the “singing-saying” of poetic speak), derives its efficacy and power of vision and prophecy directly from its source, Holy Memory and the Muses, the daughters of Holy Mnemosyne - a power that stands beyond the human being. Memory, in this archaic context, was not “psychological function” or formulary technique upon which the art of poetry is founded, it was, “above all a religious power that gave poetic proclamations their [divine] status of magicoreligious speech.” This gift of language that takes the form of “sung speech” is therefore, based on Detienne’s reading, ontologically antecedent to, more primordial than, human being, and importantly, it imbued and empowered the poet with the “gift of second sight.”
(3) The privileged access of certain poets to transcendent modes of reality, who are also in an important sense prophetic, e.g., those who experience an enlightened and transformative relationship to a magico-religious or Holy source in ways that contribute to a culture’s vitality and ascending development. For Heidegger, this notion relates directly to the issue of the “flight of the gods and the loss of the Holy” as highlighted in his many readings of Hölderlin, whose poetic vision, a form of “remembrance-commemoration” - a form of poetically-philosophically inspired thinking (Andenken) - which seizes Hölderlin and affords him a glimpse into what has already been, while at once providing insight concerning the implications of the intimations gleaned regarding what has not yet come to pass, what is still on the approach, relating to a potential new historical origin, a founding and grounding. In Detienne, as I have already discussed, there is mantic vision afforded the poet that is ecstatic in nature, transcending temporality, granting a prophetic vision into the events that his “memory” invokes. “His privilege was to enter into contact with the other world, and his memory granted him the power to ‘decipher the invisible,’’ and in this case the “invisible” (a vision of the simultaneity and unity of past, present, and future - a prophetic poetic vision) is linked to and inseparable from the poet’s communion with the “symbolicoreligious world that was indeed realty itself.”
To conclude, reading Detienne’s study in tandem with Heidegger might open the potential for scholars and readers to reconceptualize the seemingly mystical, religious, and even wonderous elements of Heidegger’s writings of the “turn” in a way that potentially gathers and acquires a renewed sense of historical reality and justification.
Dr. James M. Magrini
Former: Philosophy/College of Dupage
NCIS
December 30, 2008
Detienne pursues an anthropology of the Greek notion of "truth" as it modulates from religious contexts into secular contexts. The hunt is fascinating insofar as it traces the major shifts in Greek perception of authority. Truth was the domain of the oracles and the prophets before it became the domain of philosophers and rhetoricians.
Particularly illuminating is Detienne's distinction between the purposeful ambiguity of the rhetoricians and the non-contradiction techniques of the philosophers as well as his (prescient for postmodern times) demarcation between "doxa" (opinion, notion) and "alatheia" (truth, particularly received truth). The main failure rests in his tendency to insist upon strong dichotomies: the break between "alatheia" and the choice of "doxa" was not so clean as Detienne presents it. The tangled relationship between "doxa" and "alatheia" in Herodotus proves the difficulty of over-emphasizing the divide.
Particularly illuminating is Detienne's distinction between the purposeful ambiguity of the rhetoricians and the non-contradiction techniques of the philosophers as well as his (prescient for postmodern times) demarcation between "doxa" (opinion, notion) and "alatheia" (truth, particularly received truth). The main failure rests in his tendency to insist upon strong dichotomies: the break between "alatheia" and the choice of "doxa" was not so clean as Detienne presents it. The tangled relationship between "doxa" and "alatheia" in Herodotus proves the difficulty of over-emphasizing the divide.
January 3, 2025
This captivating exploration of truth and falsehood, awareness and unawareness, aletheia and lethe, is highly informative and easy to follow for those with basic knowledge of ancient Greek culture and society.
"Early Aletheia meant neither agreement between a proposition and its object nor agreement between judgements. It was not the opposite of "lies" or "falsehood"." p.52
"Logos is "something double" (diplous); it is at once alethes and pseudes." p.86
"Early Aletheia meant neither agreement between a proposition and its object nor agreement between judgements. It was not the opposite of "lies" or "falsehood"." p.52
"Logos is "something double" (diplous); it is at once alethes and pseudes." p.86
February 15, 2020
itiraf ediyorum bir noktada dip notlara olan ilgimi kaybettim, nerdeyse her kelimeden sonra.. ama bu yüzden konuyla ilgili iyi bir kaynakça sunuyor.
June 3, 2014
Některé pasáže byly fakt inspirativní a četlo se to dobře... Ale místy je to prostě neskutečně ukecané. Navíc mi vadí příklady slov v alfabetě bez transliterate...
April 2, 2016
Original insight into the early philosophers. Paints a good picture of the time.
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