Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece

Description

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first wide-ranging philosophical study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. Because our modern western culture is a particularly visual one, we can overlook the significance of the auditory which was so central to the Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy.

Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Homer, Heraclitus, Pythagoreans, Sophocles, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece.

Acknowledgments
Editor's Introduction, by Jill Gordon
Part I: Listening to the Logoi
1. Wakeful Living, Wakeful Listening in Heraclitus, by Drew A. Hyland
2. Sound, Water, and the Unity of Life in Empedocles, by Michael M. Shaw
3. Indoor Voices: Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Derrida on the Devocalization of Logos in Plato, by Michael Naas
4. Hearing, Touch, and Practical Intelligence in Aristotle's Philosophy, by Eve Rabinoff
5. Listening to the "Egg", by Sean Alexander Gurd
Part II: Sound Education
6. Like Those Who Are Untested: Heraclitus' Logos as Tuning Instrument for Psuchê, by Jessica E. Decker
7. Philosophical Listening in Plato's Lysis, by Shane M. Ewegen
8. Sound and the Soul in Plato, by Ryan T. Drake
Part III: Sound Politics
9. Listening to the Seventh Letter, by Jill Gordon
10. Observations on Listening in Aristotle's Practical Philosophy, by I-Kai Jeng
11. Mis-aulogy: Aristotle on the Politics of Sound, by Sara Brill
Part IV: Alogos, Embodiment, and Silence
12. The Sound of Pain in Sophocles' Philoctetes, by Rebecca Goldner
13. Socratic Death Rattles: Pythagorean Hearing and Listening in Plato's Phaedo, by Kris McLain and Anne-Marie Schultz
14. Socrates' Body and the Voice of Philosophy, by James Barrett
15. Works of Silence, by Jeremy Bell
Index

Sujets

• Essays
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Histoire
• Culture of Greece
• Ancient history
• Aristotle
• Plato
• Ancient
• Greece
• Socrates

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253062840
• Langue: English

Extrait

HEARING, SOUND, AND THE AUDITORY IN ANCIENT GREECE
HEARING, SOUND, AND THE AUDITORY IN ANCIENT GREECE
edited by Jill Gordon
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06281-9 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06282-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06283-3 (webPDF)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Editor s Introduction / Jill Gordon
Part I. Listening to the Logoi
1. Wakeful Living, Wakeful Listening in Heraclitus / Drew A. Hyland
2. Sound, Water, and the Unity of Life in Empedocles / Michael M. Shaw
3. Indoor Voices: Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Derrida on the Devocalization of Logos in Plato / Michael Naas
4. Hearing, Touch, and Practical Intelligence in Aristotle s Philosophy / Eve Rabinoff
5. Listening to the Egg / Sean Alexander Gurd
Part II. Sound Education
6. Like Those Who Are Untested: Heraclitus s Logos as Tuning Instrument for Psuche / Jessica Elbert Decker
7. Philosophical Listening in Plato s Lysis / S. Montgomery Ewegen
8. Sound and the Soul in Plato / Ryan Drake
Part III. Sound Politics
9. Listening to the Seventh Letter / Jill Gordon
10. Observations on Listening in Aristotle s Practical Philosophy / I-Kai Jeng
11. Mis-aulogy: Aristotle on the Politics of Sound / Sara Brill
Part IV. Alogos , Embodiment, and Silence
12. The Sound of Pain in Sophocles s Philoctetes / Rebecca Steiner Goldner
13. Socratic Death Rattles: Pythagorean Hearing and Listening in Plato s Phaedo / Kris McLain and Anne-Marie Schultz
14. Socrates s Body and the Voice of Philosophy / James Barrett
15. Works of Silence / Jeremy Bell
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M ORE SO THAN OTHER ACADEMIC PROJECTS , A VOLUME of essays depends on the work of many and on a community of scholars and others who support their work. I am most grateful to Erin Maidman, my student research assistant, for her meticulous work in the early stages of editing the contributions, setting up the infrastructure for the contributions to be submitted to us, and communicating with the contributors. Thanks also to Colby College for the funding to support Erin s fine work, though my debt to her goes well beyond that.
I want to thank the contributors, as well, for all their work and their responsiveness to queries and requests. The Ancient Philosophy Society has supported my own scholarship, as well as the scholarship of many of the contributors, and I would like to thank the organization personally for fostering such a collegial environment for rigorous and interesting work in ancient philosophy. Every APS meeting is an opportunity to listen and be heard and to engage philosophically with bright, open minds.
Finally, I want to thank Jon for his love and support. It makes so much else possible and beautiful.
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
O UR CULTURE IS A VISUAL ONE , ALMOST OBSESSIVELY so. Sight is the focus of a significant body of philosophical and classical research, whether literally in cognitive, epistemic, and phenomenological studies or in scholarship about sight s symbolic importance to human apprehension of the world. This scholarly attention to sight is perhaps due to our own cultural impulses to turn to the visual.
Among the ancient Greeks, by contrast, we discover finely tuned attention to and valorization of the auditory. They explored the human aural experience deeply, and they deployed the auditory to signify myriad human experiences and natural phenomena. This collected volume presents new research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, listening, voice, and even silence shape and reveal the worldview in these ancient texts. Like all good and provocative philosophical work, the essays also form a bridge across cultural and historical difference to contemporary concerns.
While there was a burst of scholarship in the mid- and late twentieth century focused on the shift from oral to written culture among the Greeks in the classical period, this scholarship primarily focused on the shift toward written texts and the cultural practices, attitudes, and anxieties that accompanied that transition to writing. 1 One might assume that the concerns and artifacts of a culture so rooted in oral communication, oral recitation, and oral performance would necessarily also be rooted in the auditory and finely attuned to aural life, but this scholarship attends to the oral without attending to the aural. Even the groundbreaking and centrally important work by Eric Havelock on this transition from oral to literal culture does not take up hearing or the auditory per se. In distinguishing the abstract intellectualism that we think of as philosophy from the oral tradition that preceded it, Havelock describes that previous oral tradition as a total state of mind which is not our mind and which was not Plato s mind. 2 Havelock s observation is likely true, but the central importance of the aural, even if not the oral, is more continually present in ancient texts. Although Plato s work is placed within this broad cultural transition from oral to written culture, the aural remains a living aspect of Greek life, whether in the quotidian or in the arts. Hearing remains central to the lives of the Greeks for hundreds of years in a way that has lost its vitality in our contemporary, more visually oriented moment.
Jasper Svenbro moves beyond Havelock s work in the direction of the aural, noting that the framing of the issue between oral and literal culture fails to appreciate the full picture of writing among the Greeks. Greek writing was first and foremost a machine for producing sounds, he says. 3 In a relationship that Svenbro likens to that between erast s and eromenos , the writer s words subject the reader to them, and the reader becomes a vocal instrument for the writer. Although Svenbro s work does focus on this vocalization and the sound of reading as well as the voice of the reader, its emphasis is not on the experience of an audience or of hearing those sounds.
Scholarly interest in sound studies appears to be increasing in several disciplines, but until recently, the scholarship in ancient philosophy and classics had not turned in this direction-either in the context of ancient theories of perception or cognition, or with respect to the cultural meaning or significance of the auditory in the ancient Greek world-even though there is compelling reason to do so, based both on ancient cultural practices and on the abundance of textual attention to the issue in the ancient world. 4
The essays in this volume aim to fill the gap left by the dearth of scholarship on the sense of hearing, listening, and the auditory. Ranging historically from archaic Greece to imperial Rome and taking up myth, poetry, tragedy, comedy, dialogue, treatise, and rhetorical speeches, this collection of essays explores a range of issues, opening up new ways to hear these texts and to understand the cultural milieu in which they were written and gained meaning.
I might here provide a precise account of just what hearing, listening, and the auditory refer to, as academic expectations might demand, but that task would, I think, undermine one of the goals of the volume. The volume, taken as a whole, shows that hearing and the auditory are deployed in various and complex ways in Greek texts. One case in point is Michael Naas s essay (though it is only the most explicit example), which shows the complex differences and connection between ph n as sound and ph n as voice. Understanding these semantic subtleties and intricacies is more central to the theme of the volume than arriving at or starting from some singular definition of these terms-likewise when it comes to the question of whether these terms and concepts appear in the ancient texts literally or metaphorically. As with providing singular definitions of hearing, sound, and the auditory, the task of distinguishing these concepts would rather undermine than serve the purposes of the volume. What damage we do to Heraclitus s exhortation to listen to the logos, for example, if we say-either way-that this is meant merely metaphorically or literally. We must literally listen to his words, his logoi; otherwise, we do not get his message or hear the audible jokes, puns, and puzzles in his work-and yet what he exhorts us to listen to ultimately is well beyond something we might do with ears alone, and if we don t hear Heraclitus correctly, we have not heard him. Several essays present a nuanced (and, in a couple of cases, critical) view of this very dichotomy between the literal and the metaphorical. They thus do a great service by way of probing this distinction and showing where the boundary between them is rather fluid.
I have organized the essays thematically and then historically within those themes, so that the reader can hear resonances and dissonances across various texts and figures in relation to the theme in each part. In part 1 , five contributions help lay groundwork by exploring the connections between the sense of hearing and logos, a foundation on which much can be built. The conceptual meanings of logos are both complex and varied in the ancient world, from Heraclitus s view of