Greece Hotels Travel - The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures)
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List Price: $19.95
greece-hotels-travel.com Price: $52.26
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Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 913.38
EAN: 9780520003279
ISBN: 0520003276
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 327
Publication Date: 1962-12-01
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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In this philosophy classic, which was first published in 1951, E. R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?" Praised by reviewers as "an event in modern Greek scholarship" and "a book which it would be difficult to over-praise," The Greeks and the Irrational was Volume 25 of the Sather Classical Lectures series.
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Summary: The Gods Were Crazy ... and still prescient
Comment: E.R. Dodds' "The Greeks and the Irrational" is based a series of lectures the author gave at Berkeley in 1949 and by his admission "reproduced here substantially as they were composed." I have a fervent wish other scholars in the last half-century have followed up on his work, although as of this writing I'm unaware of the extent to which they've done so.
Through a style and format that could use a little polish, Mr. Dodds annihilates one idea (the ancient Greeks were primarily philosophical purveyors of reason) and strongly suggests another (later-arriving Christianity borrowed liberally from the Greek mystical tradition). Both of these views, I suspect, stunned even receptive academic listeners at this early date.
Consider the origins of gods as agents of justice--an idea strongly favored in Judaism (in a monotheistic setting, and later extended by Christians). Dodds clearly shows the Greeks far ahead with their jealous deities, but adds "religion and morals were not initially interdependent, in Greece or elsewhere." Or try on the notion that "in the Archaic Age the mills of God ground so slowly ... in order to sustain the belief that they moved at all, *it was necessary to get rid of the natural time-limit set by death*". (Italics mine.) So before we get out of the second chapter the good professor (in 1949!) has introduced us to the idea that the Greeks set religious precedents in attributing justice to their gods (fear would be added later) and extending deistic dominion to the afterlife.
Beyond unearthing a treasure-trove of religious antecedents, Mr. Dodds daringly devotes an entire chapter ("The Blessings of Madness") to the rich history of the uncomfortably close association (for some) between supernatural beliefs and ... mental illness. As a reference Julian Jaynes' seminal work "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1976) also provides a wealth of fascinating data in this area. Indeed, both Dodds and Jaynes raise the non-intuitive yet strangely attractive thesis that schizophrenics (who obviously hear "second voices") might have attained priestly status in many ancient societies.
These ideas and many others (e.g., the application of dreams, the non-originality of afterlife rewards and punishment, and the toxic introduction of a mind ["soul"]/body dichotomy), had me not only furiously underlining, but also footnoting (which Dodds also provides, almost to the point of annoyance) and questioning. As a springboard for digging into other ancient religion sources, "The Greeks and the Irrational" has few rivals even in the present--Joseph Campbell, perhaps, excepted.
Dodds' scope and insights also unintentionally contribute to the book's two minor failings: a lack of full development for many of his ideas and a non-linear and anti-climactic chapter organization. The professor glumly admits these shortcomings in his preface, attributing both to the material's original lecture source.
But these are trifles. As a wonderfully rich vein of ancient religious ideas--culled from the history of a stereotyped "rational" culture--this book is first-rate. That the author points out a myriad of ideas that continue to be claimed as "original" by modern religions was an unexpected and fascinating bonus.
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Summary: 'A SIMPLE PROFESSOR OF GREEK'
Comment: Eric Dodds was sometime professor of Greek at Oxford. This book created a certain amount of a stir in its day both within and outside the arena of classical studies by either addressing, or being believed to address, up-to-date issues of anthropology and psychology. It consists basically of the Sather Classical Lectures that Dodds was invited to deliver at the University of California in 1950, and as it has been reissued in paperback in 1997 it's fair to assume that the publishers intend it to reach a wider readership than the dwindling band of classical initiates.
I very much hope it does that, but a word or two would probably be in place regarding what to expect and what not to expect to find in the book. The author's preface warns us not to look in the book for a history of Greek religion, and more pertinently recognises that modern scholarship is a world of specialists, and Dodds reiterates right at the end that he is `a simple professor of Greek'. Amateurs, dilettantes and bluffers will find plenty of material to suit them I don't doubt, but Dodds is not one of their number. This work is best read as a standard piece of classical scholarship, not as breaking down any moulds or enclosures. The most casual glance at the daunting catalogue of references in the notes appended to each chapter will show what a vast amount of writing on the topics covered here was in situ before Dodds, and how could it be otherwise? Any commentary on, say, Plato or Empedocles or Greek history by and large had to do its best with issues of religion and trends in thought. There are numerous references to other cultures, and Dodds is certainly better versed in such matters than other classics dons that I knew. By my standards he shows wide reading and deep interest in anthropology and human behaviour. On the other hand my standards in these matters are a thing of shreds and patches, and if I wanted to improve that situation this is not where I would look. The focus here is exclusively on Greeks, and any parallels cited are cited from that point of reference. Another thing to be wary of is trying to read this book as any kind of parable for our times. In my own view it is a powerful parable for our times, but that's my own parable only. In the last chapter Dodds alludes to recent history. His date is 1950, which is nearer to the start of the first world war than to 2005. It seems to me that what he has to say about the recrudescence of irrational religion and what he calls `the pathetic reverence for the written word' is very near the bone indeed in 2005, but even if I'm right Dodds could not have known that in 1950, and modern history is invoked by him to illustrate ancient history, not the other way about.
What one does expect and demand from a professor of Greek is knowledge and elucidation of what Greeks said thought and did. This is where The Greeks and the Irrational comes up trumps. There are eight chapters plus two appendices (on maenadism and the semi-magical theurgy). Dodds begins, very reasonably, at the beginning with Homeric terminology for the divine, seeing a culture in which values were a matter of status rather than of morality in any modern sense. He traces the development of the latter together with an analysis of various kinds of `madness', the significance (for Greeks not for Swedenborg or for Kant or for moderns) of dreams, the phenomenon of shamans in the context of trends in religious belief, the rise of rationalism and the counter-reaction that followed it, and the complex issue of Plato's teachings, which are far from unified or consistent. His final chapter is `The Fear of Freedom', and for my money this rings (or tolls) a loud clear bell in the early years of the third millennium. Genuine freedom of thought, much less of expression, is resented widely as being subversive, it seems to me, not least in a culture that likes to pose as embodying liberty by some kind of definition. In this Dodds seems to me to support my own view, but my own view it remains. Dodds is talking about Greeks.
The presentation of the material improves as the book goes along. The early chapters contain too much Greek that should have been reserved for the notes in what was after all lectures, not the printed word, and will not be fully intelligible without help unless you have Greek. For all that they remain readable, and anyone who can recognise a first-class mind and a first-class scholar will recognise it here. In this respect Dodds has not been as adept as his Cambridge opposite number Denys Page, whose History and the Homeric Iliad followed about a decade later in the Sather series of annual lectures.(Curiously, Page was restricted to six lectures, not the eight he seemed to have been expecting.) Dodds has all eight at his disposal, the book is beautifully written, and I ended wishing there had been more. Still a book for a wide reading-public I should say, wherever intellectual curiosity and a wish to understand human thought-processes thrive.
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Summary: Greek Enlightenments
Comment: Surprised to see this old classic still in print, one can certainly recommend it, though with a list of debating points. Written in the Age of Freud the viewpoint is a trifle dated, yet not so, and wears well, despite the slight 'Greek on the couch' tone. It should not surprise us that the Age of Reason coursing through the Greeks should coexist with a great deal of Hyperborean tribal lore among some quite rude and saucy fellows, with their epic tales, animal sacrifices, Olympian divinities and iron weapons. Further, we overselect the 'Ionian Enlightenment' from a world far richer in content, one where Pythagoras sounds echoes of Indian religion, reincarnation was associated with the classic cultic mysteries, and the polytheism denatured by later monotheism flowered for the last time as the first version of the 'aesthetic state' so doted upon by Hegel, Wagner, and Nietzsche. The latter, after all, blames Euripides for 'rationalizing' the rich masterchords of the world of Greek tragedy. Dodds worries along with Gilbert Murray over this aspect of the Greek 'irrational' but we seldom realize that Indian culture and Greek culture in the Axial Age resembled each other more than we think. But more than that, it is our own conception of rationality that might be at fault. After all, between the high Enlightenment, Kant and Hegel on reason in history, then the instrumental reason critiqued by Adorno, we have no good stable definition of what rationality we are talking about. Homer's nod! What is the boundary of the 'irrational'? In an age of scientism, that boundary is miscast, and the Greeks remain to be discovered as a people with a balance we may well have lost! Always a fascinating piece of work.
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Summary: Stimulating, despite a questionable agenda
Comment: It is not uncommon for major figures of Ancient Greek thought to be deemed 'rationalists', a word often tainted by modern science in its implications. E.R. Dodds' book is fairly difficult to gauge on this. On one hand, it reconsiders the 'rationalist overview' by tracing back various guises of irrationalism that permeated Greek culture - a belief in daimons, the conception of a useful mania, theurgy, astrology, mystery cults. Writing about these elements, Dodds surveys a wide variety of authors and themes and provides a lively compendium. On the other hand, his methodology has shortcomings. The reader soon realizes that the ambivalence of Greek thought between the power of reason and its limitations is not a virtue according to Dodds. This is a legitimate point of view, but it has important consequences on the book's agenda. It is unabashedly teleological: irruptions of irrationalism are usually seen as 'symptoms', as setbacks from Dodds' ideal of positivistic rationalism. This is emphasized by his characterization of 5th century BC as Greece's Aufklarung. The chapter on theurgy is equally representative: while it is well-researched and in-depth, it is also filled with simplifications (the equation 'theurgy = magic', frequent in 1950s and 1960s scolarship, is stated repeatedly) and shows little sympathy for either theurgy or its theorists; this section would color many subsequent studies on the spirituality of late Neoplatonism, until scholars such as H.-D. Saffrey (a pupil of Dodds) favored an approach which was more open-minded and receptive. In spite of this, Dodds' book remains extremely stimulating and should be read by all those who are fascinated by the blurred line between reason and what is out of its reach; but it should not be considered as the last word on its objects of study.
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Summary: Those Crazy Greeks
Comment: Dodds introduces his material with an anecdote of a young man he met in the British Museum who confessed his inability to get excited about the Elgin Marbles, because, after all, the Greeks were so "terribly rational." Dodds then poses the question, "[w]ere the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics?" In answering his own question (the answer is, of course, "no"), Dodds writes an interesting book.Dodds's chapters (originally lectures) are roughly chronological and thematic, starting (as one must) with Homer's use of "ate" and working down through the increasing rationality of classical Greece to the Hellenistic Return to Irrationality. En route, he deals with perceived shamanistic influences, the notion of divine inspiration, the question of whether man has a soul, etc. _The Greeks and the Irrational_ is great in itself and may have value, as Dodds indicates in his closing chapter, to moderns seeking to understand their own relationship with Irrationality. It is also enlightening background reading for any student of the classics generally, in particular providing useful commentary on Homer, Plato (lots on Plato) and the tragedians. Because each chapter was originally a lecture, Dodds' style is eloquent and also readable. Each chapter is buttressed with an impressive clump of endnotes (about a quarter of the book must be notes) for further research.
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