Odysseus's "winning words" in the Philoctetes

When Odysseus arrives on Lemnos, he ascertains first that Philoctetes is still alive, and second that he is and has been totally isolated. Having anticipated as much, the wily emissary is already working on the ruse to bring back the man he abandoned on that spot nine and a half years earlier.

He tells Neoptolemus:

τὴν Φιλοκτήτου σε δεῖ 55ψυχὴν ὅπως δόλοισιν ἐκκλέψεις λέγων.  

You must deceive the soul of Philoctetes by speaking craftily.

He fully acknowledges that this goes against all that the noble son of Achilles believes is honorable, yet insists:

ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸ τοῦτο δεῖ σοφισθῆναι, κλοπεὺς ὅπως γενήσει τῶν ἀνικήτων ὅπλων. 

No, the thing for which we must devise a ruse is just this: how to become a thief of his unconquerable weapons.

If Philoctetes has that formidable bow, force is not a viable option. But Odysseus has Neoptolemus, and a blank canvas. He saw immediately that Philoctetes is cut off from access to what is happening in the world, and thus is susceptible to virtually any representation. The world's greatest liar is tasked with persuading the world's most informationally deprived man, who happens to hate his guts. The talespinner's entire focus is on the "ruse" - σοφισθῆναι - a word that runs the gamut from "the teaching of wisdom" to "use fraud:"

σοφίζω ,

A.make wise, instruct, LXX Ps.18(19).8; “τινὰ εἰς σωτηρίαν” 2 Ep.Ti.3.15.
2. Pass., become or be clever or skilled in a thing, c. gen. rei, ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος skilled in seamanship, Hes.Op.649; “Μοίσαι σεσοφισμέναι” Ibyc.Oxy.1790.23; so ἐντοῖς ὀνόμασι ς. X.Cyn. 13.6: abs., to become or be wise, freq. in LXX, Ec.7.24(23), al.; “βέλτερος ἀλκήεντος ἔφυ σεσοφισμένος ἀνήρ” Ps.-Phoc.130.
3. Med., teach oneself, learn, ἐσοφίσατο ὅτι . . he became aware that . ., LXX 1 Ki.3.8.
II. Med. σοφίζομαι , with aor. Med. and pf. Pass. (v. infr.), practise an art, Thgn.19, IG12.678; play subtle tricks, deal subtly, E.IA744, D.18.227, etc.; οὐδὲν σοφιζόμεσθα τοῖσιδαίμοσι we use no subtleties in dealing with the gods, E.Ba.200; to be scientific, speculate, “περὶ τὸ ὄνομα” Pl.R.509d, cf. Plt.299b, Muson. Fr.3p.12H., etc.; σοφιζόμενος φάναι to say rationalistically, Pl.Phdr.229c; καίπερ οὕτω τούτου σεσοφισμένου though he has dealt thus craftily, D.29.28; σοφίσασθαι πρός τι to use fraud for an end, Plb.6.58.12; 

As the first scene closes, the question is not whether Neoptolemus will have to tell Odysseus's lie. The question facing Odysseus is what specific form of "speaking craftily" will get the job done.

* * * * *

Merchant 

There was a seer of noble birth, [605] a son of Priam, called Helenus, whom that man, out on a solitary night raid—that deceitful Odysseus, whose repute is all shame and dishonor—captured. Leading him back in bonds, he displayed him publicly to the Achaeans as his glorious prey. [610] Helenus then prophesied for them whatever matter they asked, and, pertaining to Troy, he foretold that they would never sack its towers, unless by winning words [πείσαντες λόγῳ] they should bring Philoctetes here from the island where he now dwells. And, as soon as he heard the seer prophecy this, Laertes' son immediately promised that he would bring the man and show him to the Achaeans. He thought it most likely that he would get him willingly, but, if unwilling, then by force, and he added that, were he to fail in this, whoever wished it might sever his head. [620] 

The merchant is speaking according to Odysseus's script. In point of fact, the merchant is almost certainly Odysseus in disguise. Not only would that make sense, given the character's masterful ability to play any role, but it would enable Odysseus to give out precisely the information he wishes to further his ruse. Onstage it would play wonderfully as he denigrates himself. And, it's entirely in keeping with the wit and craft and fun of polutropos Odysseus. Only, why does he disclose precisely this information?

Now Philoctetes might be spurred to have Neoptolemus take him from the isle, fearing the coming of Odysseus. But at a certain point he will know that he's been tricked and that the lord of Ithaka has him -- how willingly will he go? Is there not a good chance the plot will backfire? Why does Odysseus tell the man he's trying to persuade "by winning words" that he, Odysseus, stands to lose his head if his attempt to capture Philoctetes fails? What stronger motivation could Philoctetes have to ruin the plan?

* * * * * 

Gene Fletcher, a writer acquaintance, recently shared an essay in which he describes a man he knew more than a half century ago in North Florida:

[He] was a complex man. He lived by a code that I find difficult to understand much less explain. He was loyal to a fault to his friends. He was honest and you could depend on him regardless of the circumstances. His word was his bond. He understood the nature of people. He was the most adept man I ever met at making quick assessment of a person’s character. He knew how to arrange people and events in a fashion that caused the result that he wanted to occur. He was like a Master of Chess except he applied those skills to politics.

Two things are given with the figure of Odysseus: First, he is theatrical in the most persuasive way - he can successfully simulate anyone (or outis - no one) - it's a trait he shares with his great grandfather Hermes. Second, like this Florida gentleman, he could read people -- he knows what makes them tick, and how to get them to tick to his beat.

Keen insight into the tumblers of human nature was a key component of the craft of the master rhetorician -- a trait shared with Athena. Sophocles brings in the full range of Odysseus because he's deeply interested in the power of rhetoric, of "winning words."

Small digression

It gets more interesting. Much of the tradition deriving from Plato and Aristotle addresses the same inquiry -- the power of rhetoric as wielded by sophists to seem to speak truth. In fact they either do not know the truth (as Socrates usually ferrets out) or it's irrelevant -- they brashly use the power of tropes and syntactical dexterity to their advantage. Sophists win arguments regardless of the truth -- their power lies in "speaking craftily."

With Sophocles, it's different, I think. YES, all the beguiling charms of rhetoric are fully seen in all their misleading beauty, BUT the comfortable edge, the clear frame dividing mere crafty speech from truth is not so easy to locate. Just as we saw above with σοφίζω -- instruction that makes one wise and fraudulent pretense can make strange bedfellows within one and the same word, and do. Crafty speech indeed.

This can be seen in the Merchant's tale of Helenus' stipulation that Philoctetes must be brought back to the war, and reintegrated into the Greek cause not by force, but with πείσαντες λόγῳ -- linguistic power that persuades, or in Jebb's inspired translation, "winning words." What we call truth is what we are persuaded of. Many times in the tragedies a character will intend, "such and such is true," but what he/she actually says is, "I am persuaded of x."

* * * * * 

Later in the play Odysseus will describe himself as one whose natural desire, in everything, is to win:

νικᾶν γε μέντοι πανταχοῦ χρῄζων ἔφυν  (1052)

Victory, however, is my inborn desire in every field

There is no question of losing; it's a matter of discovering what craft will do the job. After telling Neoptolemus he must lie to Philoctetes, the first thing he coaches him to say is that he's the son of Achilles. The truth, if it will serve, is the best lie.

But we still have to ask: why does Odysseus introduce through the Merchant's mouth (which is his own, literally or no) the imminent arrival of himself? Why inject himself into the fiction, given how anathema he is to Philoctetes? What's the strategy, the rhetorical advantage, of disclosing that he is on his way?

A lesser liar would have kept that to himself. Is he not making his task ever so much harder? We'll take this up in another post.

The Bible as philosophy

Yoram Hazony

What precisely is the content of the natural law ethics that emerges from the History of Israel? How is this ethics related to the content of the Mosaic law imbedded in this History? And how does it relate to the instructions God is depicted as giving individuals on particular occasions regarding specific actions they are to undertake? All three of these questions will have to be given satisfactory answers if we are to attain a clear view of the ethics of the History. And such a view will be needed, I suspect, if we wish to gain a full picture of the ethics of the prophetic orations and other biblical works as well.

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/160350794/the-philosophy-of-hebrew-scripture?tab=excerpt#excerpt


"The bottom line is that the Bible introduces hope into human political affairs. What it does is it takes the individual, empowers the individual and says, 'Somewhere above you, there is a transcendent God who is not controlled by the king or by the priests or by the military, a power in the world that is able to hear you, and that is going to allow you to develop your understanding of what's right, and of the way the world should develop.' All of human history has proceeded from that first spark of hope that appears in the Hebrew scriptures."
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160388922/an-individualist-approach-to-the-hebrew-bible

"The Knight-Errant of Philosophy"

That is the epithet assigned to Giordano Bruno by Pierre Bayle, according to this brief account of Bruno's life and thought.

Bruno was born near Naples in 1548 and died in flames in Rome in 1600. In between, he lived a restless life, moving through various Italian cities to Paris, where he interested the king in his famed arts of memory, then to England, where he befriended Sir Philip Sydney, gained the favor of Elizabeth, and published a few key works, including the Heroic Furors, dedicated to Sydney. He visited Oxford while there, and, as he'd done in other locales, he departed in disgust, writing that the Oxford profs "knew more about beer than about Greek."

From England he went to Germany, where he managed to be excommunicated by the Lutherans, then on to Venice, perhaps the most intellectually "open" city of the day. It was there that the Inquisition arrested him and had him extradited to Rome, where he remained imprisoned for 7 years until his execution in the Campo dei Fiori on Feb. 17, 1600. In that Roman square, a statue of the rogue priest/theologian/natural philosopher/magus/satirist/playwright/heretic memorializes the event.

Whatever Bruno's philosophy ultimately has to teach, it's fair to say that it is hauntingly evocative - richly figural and allegorical, tending to meld disciplines and the study of nature, theology, and science as if they were so many elements of a vast Bouillabaisse. Every account attempting to summarize some core of his teaching sounds unlike every other account. The body of Bruno's work, like its earthly equivalent, vanishes within the fires it feeds. Let's hear a bit of what he sounds like (in translation):

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things. 

The universe is then one, infinite, immobile.... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.

In this infinite space is placed our universe (whether by chance, by necessity or by providence I do not now consider). 

Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.

My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them [Aristotle; Plato] as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true. 

One can perhaps see in this description how Milton might have recognized a kindred imagination:

Bruno also affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, made up everywhere of the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air), rather than having the stars be composed of a separate quintessence. Essentially, the same physical laws would operate everywhere, although the use of that term is anachronistic. Space and time were both conceived as infinite.. . . 

Under this model, the Sun was simply one more star, and the stars all suns, each with its own planets. Bruno saw a solar system of a sun/star with planets as the fundamental unit of the universe. According to Bruno, infinite God necessarily created an infinite universe, formed of an infinite number of solar systems, separated by vast regions full of Aether, because empty space could not exist. (Bruno did not arrive at the concept of a galaxy.) Comets were part of a synodus ex mundis of stars, and not—as other authors maintained at the time—ephemeral creations, divine instruments, or heavenly messengers. Each comet was a world, a permanent celestial body, formed of the four elements. 

Clearly, Bruno was no Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). Indeed, had Bruno lived during the time of that rigorous Dominican, it's likely that his furious books, along with his hide, would have fed the Bonfire of the Vanities. It's equally likely he'd have said to Savonarola what he reportedly told the judges who ordered him to be burned:

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it. 

Mario Livio on the enigma of knowledge

Excerpt from a longer, fascinating interview here:

Ms. Tippett: … and you end up with all these puzzles or mysteries that feel to me that they're verging on the philosophical and the theological as well, right, by implication. So you can say that our minds give rise to mathematics but then mathematics are found to explain the physical world.

Mr. Livio: That's right.

Ms. Tippett: Which is a very mysterious thing to think about.

Mr. Livio: Yeah. You're absolutely right. And, you know, my colleague Roger Penrose, I don't know if you've ever interviewed him …

Ms. Tippett: I haven't, but I know his work. Yeah.

Mr. Livio: Yeah. So he's a very famous mathematical physicist. So he once said that there are at least three worlds and three mysteries.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. Livio: So the three worlds are, one is the physical world. You know, this is the world where we exist. There are chairs, tables, there are stars, there are galaxies, and so on. Then there is a second world, which is the world of our consciousness, if you like. You know, a mental world, a world where this is where we love, where we hate, you know, and so on. All our thoughts are there and so on. And then there is the third world, which is this world of mathematical forms. This is the world where all of mathematics is there. You know, the theorem of Pythagoras and so on and so forth, all the imaginary numbers and all that. So these are the three worlds. And now come these three mysteries. One mystery is that somehow, out of the physical world, our world of consciousness has emerged. That's one mystery.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right.

Mr. Livio: A second mystery is that somehow our world of consciousness or mental world gained access to this world of mathematical form. You know, that we were able to invent and discover all these mathematics. And third, and maybe most amazing mystery, is that we find that this world of mathematics provides the explanations for the physical world.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right. So it's that circle again.

Mr. Livio: Right. So there are these three worlds and three mysteries which, you know, of course at the end of the day they are all part of one universe, right? But it's an interesting way of posing the question.

Laughable otherworldliness

Apropos the deep association of silliness and philosophy, Mussy points us to this essay by Simon Critchley. A snippet:

"What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly."