I just finished the William Hazlitt book, which was ok, but 19th century prose is a bit turgid. After that I read Catullus--he is one of the few ancient poets that almost reads like a contemporary. I just started this:
I'm just starting it, but it is a clear and concise discussion of how post-modernism came to be, tracing the intellectual history from Enlightenment figures like Bacon and Locke up to contemporary ones like Foucault and showing how each stage encountered problems that led to the next stage. For example, I had never read a really good discussion of the problems of empiricism. Anyway, so far, excellent book. I'm also halfway through the Iliad in this edition:
This is about the third or fourth time I have read it--the translation is thirty-five years old! But it reads really well. Amid all the blood and gore, Book 14, that I just read, is about the preparations Hera goes through to seduce Zeus so as to distract him from the battle between the Acheans and the Trojans. It's all about scented oils and what must be the Bronze Age answer to the pushup bra. Hera seeks Aphrodite's counsel:
Aphrodite, smiling her everlasting smile, replied,
"Impossible--worse, it's wrong to deny your warm request,
since you are the one who lies in the arms of mighty Zeus."
With that she loosed from her breasts the breastband,
pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment
woven through it . . . There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible--magic to make the sanest man go mad.
And thrusting it into Hera's outstretched hands
she breathed her name in a throbbing, rising voice:
"Here now, take this band, put it between your breasts--
ravishing openwork, and the world lies in its weaving!
[p. 260, op. cit.]
3 comments:
Unrelated to this post, but check out https://classicalvoiceamerica.org/2025/03/27/schiff-on-his-boycott-if-i-were-a-u-s-citizen-i-would-move-to-canada/. His defense of Classical music echos (no pun intended) those of Bryan in this blog.
I read somewhere a riff from Andrew Bowie about how he doesn't regard postmodernism as an actually coherent or compelling set of ideas, more of a fad self-label from folks who he regards as having not competently or responsibility engaged actual modernism. I'm reading through Bowie's Music, Philosophy and Modernity lately and it's interesting. It might be a bit over my head on Wittgenstein but his writing is lucid and I think I take his point about being skeptical about taking self-identified postmodernists a face value.
Thanks Patrick and Wenatchee for commenting. I finished the Hicks book and it is one of the best intellectual histories I have ever read. Sometimes philosophers are accused of losing touch with reality: Hicks reveals that this is literally true and he outlines exactly how it happened. It all started with some problems with empiricism pointed out by Bishop Berkeley who noted that while we have perceptions of what we believe is a material reality, the fact is that it is extraordinarily difficult to prove that they are anything more than mere perceptions. We don't know that they are perceptions OF anything. Then Kant provided a solution that was almost worse than the problem and so it went. I'm re-reading Berkeley right now with a view of answering that critique.
When I get a chance I will have a look at the Bowie book.
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