Pavel Gregoric

Okay, please don't laugh at me because instead of reading Heraclitus, or Aristotle's anecdote about Heraclitus, or Heidegger's and Robertson's and Wheelwright's and Robert's commentaries on Aristotle's anecdote about Heraclitus, I am instead reading Gregoric's meta-commentary on Heidegger's and Robertson's etc. The thing is, 1) I'm still sorting out the kinks of my post-master's non-PhD life, where I'm one of the very few lucky enough (via my job in academic publishing) to get to dig deep deeeeeep into the arcanest of scholarship without having to twist it into a footnote in my diss. You know? All the knowledge of the ages at my fingertips, no need to drown it in the icy water of egotistical calculation? And so I need to adopt a formal reading plan that shakes out the dross a little bit but I haven't yet established the best way to do that.

And 2) Hey, who said this was dross, man? Gregoric gives a neat, fast-paced, deft but to all appearances fair and balanced summary of the original anecdote (at the beginning of Ari's lectures on animals, where he is telling us not to scorn and execrate the humble sponges and snails in our eagerness to learn things about the noble eagle and the mountain goat, he talks about Heraclitus's visitors seeing him warming his hands by the fire and hesitating to come in and H looks up and smiles and goes "it's okay. There are gods here too.") and the interesting questions that come out of that, like where is he exactly and why do they hesitate and what does he mean when he says that and what's the relevanced to animals? And goes over some of the previous responses, many of which have in common a speculative arbitrariness in common and little else, like Heidegger's goofy mysticism where it's like "here too in the humble oven, in the humble sponge, there are magical mysteries" as against Robertson's seemingly baseless assertion that by "warming his hands" Aristotle really meant "takin' a piss" and that's why they were embarrassed. That doesn't need more talking about really, but Heidegger's take may seem superficially appealing unless you know something about ancient Greece, where gods are hardly the magic lamppost to a more incredible world but just super everywhere and everyday and reassuring even if sometimes scary like when there's a storm. So we move to Robert, whose Greek is better than Heidegger's and who recognizes that we are talking about the hearth and not the oven, and sees it as a welcoming-in of the visitors and an invitation to huddle and get warm and do some philosophy; and for whom the gods as evoked by Aristotle are then more about the spirit of the discussion than about the animals specifically; and then finally Gregoric lays his own interp on us, where Robert's good but he doesn't see the depth of the analogy where we are being invited to see gods in among the sponges and so on and in seeing be like "they're worth somerthing, they're connected to us and the mighty eagle and the stars." All things are full of gods, that allied old saw of Heraclitus's or was it Thales. And I'm totally with that--seems obvious, don't it? Not to run down this well-written piece? except that I also think on the basis of only weird gutfeel and no Greek that probably the repulsion and disgust that Gregoric sees Aristotle's audience putatively expressing and Aristotle taking preemptive manoeuvres against is more of a rhetorical move on Ari's part or at best a discourse commonplace in Ari's society, and that it's more the sense that these low creatures are unglamorous and unpromising compared to the great beasts that he wants to gainsay. I know the Greeks had a scale and it ran from gross to rarefied or whatever but I still think they were more sophisticated than just "ew! bugs!" And if I were a real scholar I'd prove it but isn't it fun just to read in the bath and float a few rubber-ducky thoughts and not have to prove fuckall?

(Ancient Philosophy.)… (altro)