Introduction to the Book of Judges by Robert Alter

Like so many biblical books, Judges reflects the editorial splicing together of disparate narrative material. Some of these materials, at least in their oral origins, could conceivably go back to the last century of the second millennium B.C.E., incorporating memories, or rather legendary elaborations, of actual historical figures. In any case, the redaction and final literary formulation of these stories was much later – perhaps, as some scholars have inferred, towards the end of the eighth century B.C.E., some years after the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and before the reforms of King Josiah a century later.

The word shofet, traditionally translated as ‘judge’, has two different meanings – ‘judge’ in the judicial sensed and ‘leader’ or ‘chieftain’. The latter sense is obviously the relevant one for this book, though the sole female judge, Deborah, in fact also acts as a judicial authority, sitting under the palm tree named after her. The narrative contexts make perfectly clear that these judges are ad hoc military leaders – in several instances, guerilla commanders – but it would have been a gratuitous confusion to the readers to call this the Book of Chieftains or even to designate these figures in the text as chieftains or leaders rather than judges.

The first two chapters are both a prologue to what follows and a bridge from the end of the Book of Joshua[1]. They incorporate a report of Joshua’s death an account of the incompletion of the conquest of the land, for which at least two rather different explanations are offered. The unconsummated conquests  sets the stage for a sequence of stories in which Israel is sorely oppressed by its enemies on all sides – the Philistines based on the coastal plain, the Midianites and the Moabites to the east, and the Canaanites in the heartland of the country. From the latter part of chapter three  to the end of Chapter 12, there is a formulaic rhythm of events: Israel’s disloyalty to its God, its oppression by enemies as punishment for dereliction, the crying out to God by the Israelites, God’s raising up of a judge to rescue them.

This process of ‘raising up’ leader is what led Max Weber to borrow a term from the Greek and call a political system of this sort charismatic leadership. That is, the authority of the leaders derives neither from a hereditary line nor from election by peers but comes suddenly when the spirit of he Lord descends upon him: through this investiture, he is filled with a sense of power and urgency that is recognized by those around him, who thus become his followers.


The pattern remains the same, but for some of the judges we have no more than a bare notice of their name and their rescuing Israel whereas for others we are given a detailed report of an act of military prowess or a whole series of narrative episodes. The story of the fratricidal Abimelech breaks the sequence of Judge narratives but provides foreshadowing of the bloody civil war at the end of the book.


The last in the series of Judges is Samson, who is in several ways quite unlike those who precede him. Only Samson is a figure announced by prenatal prophesy, with a full panoply of an annunciation type-scene. Only in the case of Samson is the first advent of the spirit of the Lord indicated not by a verb of descent (tsalah) or investment (labash) but of violent pounding (pa’am). Unlike the other judges, Samson acts entirely alone, and his motive for devastating the Philistines is personal vengeance, not an effort of national liberation. Most strikingly, only Samson  among all the Judges exercises  supernatural power. It seems likely, as many scholars have concluded, that the sequence of episodes about Samson reflects folkloric traditions concerning a Herculean, quasi-mythological hero, though the narrative as it has been formulated shows evidence of subtle literary craft. In any case, the Samson stories, editorially placed as the last in the series of Judge narratives, exemplify  the breakdown of the whole system of charismatic leadership. Samson, battling alone with unconventional weapons or with his bare hands, more drawn to the sexual arena  than to national struggle, hostilely confronted by fellow Israelites, sowing destruction all around him to the end, like the fire with which he is associated from before his conception, is a figure of anarchic impulse: the man in whom the spirit of the Lord pounds down enemies but offers no leadership at all for his people, which may be a final verdict on the whole system of governance by charismatic warriors represented in the preceding episodes of the book.


The Samson narrative suggests that the shape given to Judges by its editors may be more more purposeful than is often assumed. What  follows the Samson cycle is the bizarre story of Micah’s idol and then the grisly tale oft he concubine at Gibeah who is gang-raped to death by the local Benjaminites, leading to a costly civil war between Benjamin and the other tribes. These two blocks of material are often described as an appendix to the Book of Judges, and although it is true that they differ strikingly in subject matter and to some extent in style from the stories about the Judges, they also show significant connections as well both with the immediately preceding Samson narrative and with the book as a whole.

Divisiveness in the Israelite community, adumbrated in Samson’s confrontation with the men of Judah, is vividly manifested both in the story of Micah and that of the concubine. Micah’s narrative begin with his stealing eleven hundred shekels (the exact amount that the Philistines offered to Delilah) from his mother. Part of this purloined fortune, returned to his mother, is used to create a molten image of dubious monotheistic provenance, which will then become an object of contention. The displaced Danites, arriving on the scene as a military contingent, have no compunction about confiscating a whole set of cultish objects and buying off the young Levite whom Micah has hired to minister to his private sanctuary. The Danites then go on to conquer a new northern town in which to settle their southern tribe, but this is hardly a story that ends with the land quiet for forty years: tensions, verging on clash of arms, between Micah and the Danites; dishonesty and deception; venality and the ruthless pursuit of personal and tribal self-interest – such far-from-edifying behavior dominates the story from beginning to end.

The morality exhibited in the book’s concluding narrative is even worse. Another Levite, considerably more egregious than the one engaged by Micah, ends up reenacting the story of Sodom with a bitter reversal. In this tale devoid of divine intervention, there are no supernatural beings to blind the brutal sexual assailants; the Levite pushes his concubine out the door to be raped all night long; and when he finds her prostrate on the threshold in the morning, he brusquely orders her to get up so that they can continue their journey, not realizing at first that she has expired. His remedy for this atrocity is as bad as the violation itself: he butchers her body into twelve parts that he sends out to sundry tribes to arouse indignation against Benjamin ,and the ensuing civil war in which the other tribes suffer extensive casualties, comes close to wiping out of the tribe of Benjamin. Unbridled lust, implacable hostility, and mutual mayhem provide ample warrant for the implicitly monarchist refrain from these chapters: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.’


Anarchy and lust link these stories directly with the Samson narrative. But the theme of violence, threatened in Micah’s story, shockingly realized in the narrative that follows, ties in the concluding chapters of Judges with everything that  precedes them in the book. Judges represents, one might say, the Wild West era of the biblical story. Men are a law unto themselves – ‘Every man was right in his eyes.’ There are warriors who can toss a stone from a slingshot at a hair and not miss; a bold left-handed assassin who deftly pulls out a short sword strapped to his thigh to stab the Moabite king in the soft underbelly; another warrior chieftain who panics the enemy camp in the middle of the night with the shock and awe of piercing ram’s horns and smashed pitchers.

All this is certainly exciting in a way that is analogous to the gunslinger justice of the Wild West, but there is an implicit sense, which becomes explicit at the end of the book, that survival through violence, without a coherent and stable political framework, cannot be sustained and runs the danger of turning into sheer destruction. In the first chapter of the book, before any judges are introduced, we are presented with the image of the conquered  Canaanite king, Adoni-Bezek, whose thumbs and big toes are chopped off by his Judahite captors. This barbaric act of dismemberment, presumably intended to disable the king from any capacity for combat, presages a whole series of episodes in which body parts are hacked, mutilated, crushed. King Eglon’s death by Ehud’s hidden sword is particularly grisly: his killer thrust the weapon into his belly all the way to the top of its hilt, and his death spasm grotesquely triggers the malodorous release of the anal sphincter. Women are also adept at this bloody work: there is a vividly concrete report of how Jael drives the tent peg through the temple of Sisera the Canaanite general and into the ground; another women, this one anonymous, smashes the head of the nefarious Abimelech with a millstone she drops on  him from her porch in a besieged tower. Samson’s slaughter of a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone is surely a messy business of smashing and mashing – no neat spear’s thrust here – though descriptive details are not offered. The grand finale of Samson’s story, in which thousands of Philistine men and women, together with the Israelite hero, are crushed by a toppling temple, is an even more extensive crushing and mangling of bodies.

Against this background, one can see a line of imagistic and thematic continuity from the maiming  of Adoni-Bezek at the beginning of the book to the dismembering of the concubine at the end. The act of chopping a body into pieces, of course, is intended as a means to unit the tribes against Benjamin and its murderous rapists, but there is a paradoxical tension between the project of unity - unity, however, for a violent purpose- and the butchering of the body, the violation of of its integrity, which in the biblical world as in ours was supposed to be respected through burial. The famous lines that Yeats wrote at a moment of violent upheaval in European and Irish history precisely capture the thematic thrust of Judges:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed .  .  .

After this dark impasse to which the Book of Judges comes, will be the task of the great narrative sequence, which is the book of Samuel, concluding in the second chapter of 1 Kings, to imagine a political means to create center and leash the anarchy. The goal is in part realized, but the undertaking itself is an arduous one; and because these stories turn increasingly from legend and lore to a tough engagement in history, even as the center begins to hold, the blood-dimmed tide is never stemmed.

[1] In my view the most interesting event in the Book of Joshua, chapter 20, v. 1-6, is:

And the Lord spoke of Joshua, saying: ‘Speak to the Israelites, saying, Set aside for yourselves the towns of asylum about which I spoke to you through Moses [Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19] where a murderer, one who strikes down a person in errance, without intending, may flee, and they will be an asylum for you from he blood avenger. And he may flee to one of these towns and stand at the gateway to the town and speak his words in the hearing of the elders of that town, and they will take him to them into that town and give him a place and he will dwell with them. And should the blood avenger pursue him, they will not hand the murderer over to him, for he has struck his fellow man without intending, and he had not been his enemy in times past. And he shall dwell in that town until he stands before the community in judgment . . .

Alter comments that role the high priest would perform in this rudimentary judicial process involves the provision of amnesty but in the text the conditions or limits of this amnesty are ambiguous [ . . .]. The writer  ‘wanted to emphasize that the fugitive’s innocence had to be determined by judicial proceedings’.

Normalization of the Logos and the End of History by Peter Sloterdijk

The fact that a profoundly radical climate change occurred in the Greek intellectual domain, and among the Athenians in particular, as the fifth century BCE ended and the fourth began, is a well known, if seldom appreciated, part of old European cultural history. It is usually associated with the negative effects of the Peloponnesian War – a thirty-year ancient conflict that lead to Athens’ ruin and the loss of its hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. After the Sparta invasion in 404, the infamous dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants was established and provoked a democratic counter-movement whose far-reaching consequences included the indictment brought against Socrates in 399, when he was charged with atheism and corrupting youth.

The Normalization of the Logos

There is a commonplace, as legitimate as it is clichéd, according to which Socrates’ death opened a new chapter in the history of ideas. The discipline of philosophy established by Plato, influenced by Ionic and Pythagorean models adopted the Passion of the sage as its foundational myth. It thus introduced an unprecedented, almost religious seriousness into the quarrels of the learned and of intellectuals. Above all the story of Socrates’ death dramatically widened the gap between the few who were engaged in obtaining real knowledge for themselves or were at least striving for it and the ignorant many. At the same time, Plato delegitimized the poetic expression of the divine, which had thrived in the context of Dionysian festivals and reclaimed the endeavor to speak truly of God and the divine for the school he founded on the fringes of the city, whose name is supposed to have been taken from an otherwise unknown local hero by the name of Akademis.

This ‘academization ’of the logos as not merely supposed to harm the reputations of the poets – whom Plato began to ironically refer to as theologoi, implying that they spoke of God without  really knowing anything about him. It was also meant  to thoroughly delegitimize the eristic discourse that was quite prevalent among Greek men at the time, and indeed to completely delegitimize all forms of the instrumental or strategic use of reason, insofar as the latter involved a claim to pubic legitimacy. Plato’s polemic against the Sophistic movement is supposedly a stable factor in the old European culture of rationality. But there was actually a break here with the older custom of agonal urban speech, and historians can justifiably claim that Platonism, with its odd pathos for the afterlife, its spirit de serieux and its latent Egyptianism, remained a foreign body within Greek culture and only found its proper milieu after the rise of Christianity.


The phenomena of Plato may well have represented an idealistic exception in its time. However, we are here concerned with the development of a new discursive rule, which stipulates that the conventional techniques for being right in the eristic opinions when conversing with others in search of truth and wisdom (with those who will henceforth be called philosophoi),have been rendered inoperative. If the Platonic invention of philosophy ended up having far-reaching consequences, this was less because it established a dominant school and more because it introduced a logical practice through which a new type of authority gains ground. The oft-cited Socratic school of dialogue, the dialectic, was not essentially eristic, not an art of disputation (lasting more than 2,000 years, until Schopenhauer again evoked this submerged disciplined in his short text The Art of Being Right),but rather understood itself as a process for disarming the participants in a discussion and leading them out of fruitless strife. The goal of this process was to estrange the holders of opinions from the ideas they also associated with it, so that they henceforth received their beliefs directly from ‘truth itself.’ Thus the Platonic caesura should not merely be interpreted as an alien idealism that has pervasively spread throughout a pragmatically minded environment. Rather, it must be attributed to a much wider development, which would be characterized as the establishment of a new logical norm. This  is closely associated with two cultural innovations that led to Greece’s special placed in the history of rational cultures.

On the one hand, we have the emergence of Greek writing, which was connected to the formation of memory capacity  for coded knowledge and eo ipso connected to an increase of claims to lasting knowledge. On the other hand, we have the discovery of rigorous sciences, particularly in the form of mathematics. It may well be that the Academy, which was nominally devoted to paideia, the education of youth, was initially perceived as a foreign body within the framework of the old Athenian institutions – at this time, in the agora, the theater, and the stadium, the city possessed three  institutions where citizens could practice stepping out into the light of the  public sphere (Hannah Arendt very fittingly called such spaces, the agora in particular, ‘spaces of appearance’ [Erscheinungsraume] for ambitions typical of the polis). Its initial strangeness soon yielded to solid habitualization –this can be seen from the remarkable fact that the Academy pursued its mission uninterrupted for nearly a millennium, and was only shut down in CE 529 due to an imperial order from Byzantium.[1]

The real foreign bodies within the polis-space, however, were the novel epistemic disciplines, especially geometry, arithmetic, and philosophical semantics, the emergence of which shook the communities standards of speech and thought. In order to understand this, we must bear in mind that Plato provocatively claimed that he was putting a definitive end to the disoriented and disorientating chatter of the polis, in order to model political argumentation in the agora  on the sciences and mathematics – although we do not know how serious he was about this. He was able to make his famous demand for the rule of philosopher-kings only because he had argued for the transition from a rhetorical democracy to an epistemological aristocracy. To see why this idea is excessive, we can refer to Aristotle’s objection against Platonic epistemocracy. According to Aristotle, political affairs are subject to the law of the probable, not the law of the true, which entails that rational governance can only be orientated by plausibility, and not by scientific knowledge. The democratic debate of lay persons is sufficient here, while the conversation of the learned remains for an extra-political realm.

However we care to evaluate the Platonic caesura in the world of Greek discussion, it  unquestionably  represented a great event in the history of Western culture of rationality, whose consequences can be traced up to the present day. We could call its modus operandi an epistemic domestication of the logos. The word ‘logos’ itself, in its traditional sense, which remains distinct even today, indicates that speech that wishes to be rational in the foundational age of philosophical thought is supposed to undergo a double purification. Its first purgation refers to the doxic origin of true thought – the true logos, initially, at least, takes root in the mire of opinion, as even the philosopher concedes, but must then be uprooted from this mire in order to claim independence from any lower genesis (the reasons for the validity of true utterances are only to be found ‘above’). The second  purgation involves isolating true statements from the passions and particular interests of speakers, since with their inevitable agitation the former disturb the ideal of rest, which from this time on is considered the constitutive feature of alethes logos. The true statement’s state of rest is the guarantee of impartiality, without which science as a comprehensive practice of neutrality and disinterestedness is inconceivable. It brings about the intellect’s free passivity in receiving the final results of logical and empirical investigations.


It is only by means of these two purifications that the improbability known as scientific objectivity can be elevated into a norm and a habitus of the professional and committed pursuit of theory- faced with these stringent demands, we understand why philosophy as away of life could at first  only be made appealing by recommending it to followers as a path to salvation. It formed the core  discipline of academic passivism, without which old European efforts to institutionalize the logos – whether in academies, cathedral schools, universities, archives, or argumentative media – would have been unthinkable.

To put this emphatically for the moment, we would have to say that the idea of objectively universal truth is inseparable from the supreme tranquility of contemplation that is supposed to occur as soon as evidence and findings have been taken care of. The philosophical path leads from interest to disinterest, from pathos to apathy, from a position to ascendance above positions. With their efforts to come to rest, which alone make philosophically scientific cognition possible, the most resolute adepts of this new discipline initiate nothing less than the being-at-rest of the god of philosophers. He represents a newcomer in the Greek heavens, distinguished toto ceolo from the popular gods of Homeric and Hesiodic times  by his radicalized cognitive design.

[1] So if he didn’t have an axe to grind against paganism why did Justinian close the Academy in 529?

Competition.  He had just founded a new University in Constantinople  which was directly under imperial control, and this was a convenient way to get rid of a rival.  He did the same thing to the main competitor of his new law school.  When an earthquake hit the renowned university of Beirut in 551 he took the opportunity to close it down (officially it was ‘moved’ but it never recovered) while transferring its most distinguished faculty to the capital. Ruthless? Yes.  Anti-intellectual religious fanaticism? Not quite.


The End of History


The concept of time ‘after history’ is initially associated with the theological idea that God will one day reclaim the world he created and eo ipso cast into time – and indeed at a moment that is humanly inconceivable, namely when he is finished with the world. If one translates these ideas into the language of secular logic, we find the assumption that history as a whole is pursuing an end, or an estuary, to put it more cautiously, in which the historical process is finished with itself.  It could reach such a point if the energies which impelled it forward until now were used up or if the conflicts that had hitherto rendered it dynamic were completely resolved. Such an end would be humanly conceivable and ascertainable, in distinction to the transcendent conclusion brought about by God. As is well known, these kinds of ideas had previously been part of the Hegelian tradition, which had suggested the establishment of the constitutional state in the Napoleonic era, the cessation of class conflict following the Russian Revolution, and the satisfaction of the human striving for recognition ( or rather its hedonistic miniaturization) as possible criteria for admission into post-history.

With that said, the claim that there was also a non-Hegelian route to the posthistiore – thesis should now be plausible. According to out interpretation, Heidegger, with his powerful intuitions about the diagnosis of time, followed this alternative path to establish the end of history, before he was compelled by his non-heroic imperative to take a detour in order to devote himself to the creation or letting happen of supposedly decisive world-historical actions, works, or events.

The real father of the non-Hegelian theory of the end of history (it would be better to call it a vision or a daydream), which Heidegger occasionally espoused, is acknowledged to be Fyodor Dostoyevsky – particularly  in his short novel Notes from the Underground, published in 1864. This work has to be recognized as the founding charter of anti-globalization sentiment, if such an anachronistic back-dating of the term is allowed. The narrator of the virtuous monologue in the first part of the book (a bitter and comic prelude to philosophical anthropology offered in the first person) is a figure whom we would call today a modernization-loser. He represents a neurotic version of Nietzsche’s last man, a character whose motivation has been undermined, who can only satisfy his desire for self-respect by deviously taking pleasure in his own humiliation. He is someone who contrives his own misfortune and flirts with it. He settles into a ‘cold, loathsome despair,’ into a ‘half-belief’, into a ‘assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness,’ which serves as an Archimedean point that he can use to unhinge the world of progressive mind.

The narrator in his squalid hole (which is described as a deliberately chosen dingy subterranean dwelling on the fringes of St. Petersburg) presents himself as a vehement critic of the Western way of life, and opponent of globalization, in the parlance of or times. He also professes himself to be a man of the present day and argues that the ‘man of the nineteenth century’ is morally obligated to be a ‘characterless creature’- almost the only claim in the subsequent cascade of words that he realty seems to believe in. It gives him the greatest satisfaction to act like an anthropologist who marshals evidence that the predominantly pro-Western ideologists of the market, of relaxation, and of universalized humanitarianism have made their calculations without reference to actual human beings or, to put it more precisely, without reference to the ungrateful and rebellious freedom of human beings, which amounts to little more than continually taking it into one’s head to oppose every given order, even one promising universal happiness. In this context, the well-known neo-Cynical thesis is formulated according to which  the human being is an ungrateful bipedal animal  Nietzsche could rightly remark that Dostoyevsky’s ‘terrible and cruel work’ presents us with the sharpest mockery of the Delphic inscription ‘Know Thyself’.

The author of this confession clearly and intuitively understands himself to be a creature of boredom – a witness to an existence without beliefs, responsibilities, and obligations. His stream of words reflects whatever enters its author’s mind, without reaching a standpoint of truth worthy of being repeated. The rambling talk of the voice from the underground thus demonstrates just how impossible it has become to participate in a meaningful history.

I swear to you, gentlemen, that  do not believe word, not one little word, of all I have scribbled! That is, I do believe, perhaps, but a the same time, who knows why, I sense and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler. ‘Then why did you write it all?’ you say to me. And what if I put you away for some forty years with nothing to do, and then come to you in the underground after forty years to see how you’ve turned out? One cannot leave a man alone and unoccupied for forty years, can one?

It is crucial to note that this man without commitments  continuously refers to those opposed to his own modus vivendi with the clairvoyance of the evil eyes; he finds such opposition in the secular anthropology of Western progressive parties. Such progressives, whether liberal or socialist, believe that human beings have needs that can in principle be satisfied. They derived various policies for satisfying need from this view, but strategic differences of their policies could not conceal the fact that they were basically after the same thing.

The Crystal Palace of London, erected in 1851, the greatest structure in architectural history at that time, was a public symbol of this belief. It was triumphantly erected in a mere ten months to accommodate the first world’s fair in Hyde Park. It was set up again on an even larger scale in 1854 on  Sydenham Hill, near London, as a popular indoor park. The Crystal Palace’s articulation of the nineteenth century’s civilizing tendencies had a significance that an be compared with the World Trade Center in New York City, whose collapse in September 2001 was symbolically on a par with it. The megastructure of Sydenham, in which the ultimate aims of the progressive way of life were completely revealed for all to see. The underground man is quite obviously a contemporary of the Crystal Palace, since he understands why the superb construct was erected: the temple of satisfaction is a house of worship for the anti-metaphysical project of modernity, which aims to dissuade satisfied human  beings who have been accounted for, made equal, and discretely animalized, from the further  use of their freedom. Historic tensions [Spannungen] are supposed to achieve a post-historical equilibrium in this grand overarching receptacle [alles uberspannenden Behalter].

The Eastern observer is opposed to such pretension and intervenes, drawing upon Christian anthropological motifs to claim desire is insatiable:

Shower him with all Earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the non-cessation of world history [P.S.- i.e. to have sex] – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread.

This challenge to the politics of happiness reveals two clearly distinct modes of post-historicity. In the first mode, human beings participate in systems of satisfaction, but from time to time escape the crystal palace to preserve their honor as human beings, that is, as those who are free to break the given conditions – in the most extreme case, on a whim, they opt for madness and self-destruction.  In the second mode, human beings indeed remain excluded from the benefits of existing in the sphere of comfort, but find their own satisfaction in despising the contentment of the palace-dwellers. Even the idle despiser lives in a post-historical situation, though with a twist, namely that such post-historicity contains elements of pre- and extra-historical existence, since it never participated in the struggle for historical satisfaction – and is not subsequently inclined to struggle, either.

The first mode results in a comfortable posthistoire of freedom reduced to absurd whims (half-amusement park culture and half bloodbath), while the second mode results in the uncomfortable posthistoire of ressentiment, which remains condemned to self-satisfaction and otherwise to lethargy, due to its supposedly (or perhaps genuinely) greater depths. While suffering and doubt are eliminated in the system of comfort, or are at least continually reduced  (‘. . .what good is a crystal palace in which one can have doubts?’), only partisans of ressentiment have the option of intentional suffering.

And yet I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering ,that is, destruction and chaos. Suffering – why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.


The observing despiser of the crystal palace does not have an alternative project, as to be expected. Yet he remains parasitical on the faded historicity of others, and history is not really at an end and the satisfaction provided by the crystal palace would not amount to much, because the human resolution to suffer and impose suffering has not been extinguished even under post-historical conditions as the underground man tries to demonstrate. With his will to suffer, he fends off the unreasonable demand that he should admire the accomplishments of the party that has triumphed in history. In his masochistic authenticity, the first opponent of globalization deflects the progressive’ claim to superiority – though he seems to be susceptible to envy. He objects to the world of happiness with the thesis that another world is possible, a world in which there is still enough suffering to give the cold shoulder to history and its  tranquillization by universal satisfaction.

[One could could properly speak of the dialectic of posthistoire whose modes may not be entirely distinct from a psychoanalytic point of view.-[ J. S.]

Odysseus the Sophist by Peter Sloterdijk

The epithet used by Homer for Odysseus is polymetis, which literally means ‘of many counsel’ or ‘the powerful schemer’- since in Greek  metis refers to good counsel and the ability to ensure that things turnout well; it means the stratagem, the simulation, the hunter’s trap, the feint, and inspired wit. Hence it is the quick-witted man’s virtue par excellence. At the same time, Metis is the proper name of the goddess on intelligence, whom Zeus pursues in his usual manner.

 He fathers a child with her, whose birth he fears, since it has been foretold that the child would be his equal in intelligence – which prompts him to devour the pregnant mother. He winds up with a very difficult brain-pregnancy as a result. Hephaestus relieves his headache by striking Zeus on the skull with a double axe, so that Athena can leap out of his head armed with a lance and wearing a full suit of armor. Zeus later comes to terms with his exceptionally wise daughter, and when Athena offers candid opinions during the gods’ council, he contents himself by saying to her in a paternal tone: ‘my child, what strange remarks you let escape you.’


In what follows, I would like to make a case for my basic thesis that ancient Greek intellectual culture, informed by metis as it appears in the Odyssey and is reflected in Hellenistic myths about cunning, represents a distant prelude to what in our view is the most Greek of all phenomena –the Sophistic movement, which led to the secession of philosophy in the fourth century. In contemporary German, a society animated by sophistic arts would be called Streitkultur [‘agonistic culture’]- we an see here that even though Germany has a word for this phenomena, it lacks the thing itself, because, instead of Streikultur, we have an accusatory culture [Hetzkultur], a culture of denunciation, a culture of disparagement, in which things are decided in advance, before they have a chance to become controversial. In contrast, the Greek polis was organized ion an agonistic basis. Not only were there organized interests and divergent classes in every city, there was a ubiquitous pluralism of claims to nobility and excellence that could not have been made without a rhetorically articulated competition between the claimants.

To truly understand the Sophistic movement in its original sense, we must get rid of the bad name given to it by the Academy, a reputation it received partly on valid grounds, and partly from dubious strategic motives. One of the positive effects of Nietzsche’s epochal emergence in the history of ideas was that even academic philosophy was compelled to reevaluate the Sophistic movement In our present context, we can resume this reconsideration by observing that the Sophistic movement signifies precisely the continuation of the Odyssean praxis of intelligence with urban means. The homecoming hero’s capacity to negotiate a viable future for himself with every power in the world, with the gods, with human beings, indeed with the sea itself, recurs in the polis as the capacity of orators and lawyers to navigate the sea of disputes within the city and between cities and to conclude their mandates successfully.


If Homer often endows the storm-tossed voyaging hero with the epithet ploymetis, he is not merely labeling a specific person, but characterizing a type of masculine existence in which renowned heroic vigor (in other words, the ability to make an impact) for the first time includes a new kind of compromising cunning- with a purely navigational or operative cunning. Such cunning thought still remains entirely bound to the current situation. This early version of cunning is still a long way from abstract theory. The characteristic feature of Odyssean intelligence is that it understands itself to be dealing with the challenges that fate has posed for it from day to day, from port to port, and from case to case. The challenges to be overcome by the seafarer on his delayed journey home are prototypes of what one day will be called ‘problems’ – but there can only be ‘problems’ at all, if homecoming heroes have turned into argumentative citizens and if they have transformed the monsters at the ends of the Earth into mere legal adversaries.

In urban space, a free-ranging intelligence forms concepts that are gradually detached from the level of given cases and concrete examples. The desire to have and to solve ‘problems’ begins to flourish when the cunning of polymetis Odysseus changes into the maneuverability of the urban or ‘political’ rhetoric that distinguishes lawyers and orators at the peak of Hellenic culture. There is a moving episode in the Odyssey that is a powerful example of polymetis Odysseus’ art. I am thinking of the shipwrecked sailor landing on the beach on the island of Phaeacia, after a storm has destroyed the raft that was supposed to bring him home when he left the nymph Calypso behind. More than half-drowned, with his last  bit of strength he saves himself, and after several days of floating around on the tempestuous sea ends up on the beach, where, stumbling into the bushes, he falls into a deep sleep, concealed by a hedge. On the following day, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous, and her maids head to the shore to wash their clothing and discover the unkempt shipwrecked voyager, who emerges from his hiding place at that very moment.


Homer sets the scene, showing how tee unclothed foreigner winds up in the young women’s view:

Odysseus had this look, in his rough skin
Advancing on the girls with pretty braids;
And he was driven on by hunger, too.
Streaked with brine, and swollen, he terrified them,
So that they fled, this way and that. Only

Alkinoos’ daughter stood her ground, being given
A bold heart by Athena, and steady knees . . .


Odysseus is now faced with a fateful choice: he can either throw himself at the feet of ‘this beauty’ and clasp her knees – or stand away from her and appeal to her from afar with flattering words. After deliberating for a moment, he realizes that he prefers the second option, because he is mindful that a daughter from a good house might become easily annoyed if he were to presume to touch her knees without permission. This consideration leads to the ship-wrecked voyager’s speech on the shore –or, as Homer puts it, he ‘let the soft words fall.’.  In terms of the history of rhetoric, his can be viewed as the first plea ever made by a lawyer pro se on European soil. The naked speaker mounts the rostrum that his need has erected, and devotes himself to the task of winning the harshest public in the world, the bold heart of a woman, over to his side.

Mistress: please: are you divine or mortal?
If one of those who dwell in the wide heaven,
You are most near to Artemis, I should say -
Great Zeus’s daughter – in your grace and presence.
If you are one of Earth’s inhabitants,
How blest your father, and your gentle mother,
Blest all your kin. I know what happiness
Must send the warm tears to their eyes, each time

They see their wondrous child go to dancing!
But one man’s destiny is more than blest -
He who prevails, and takes you as his bride.
Never have I laid eyes on equal beauty
In man or woman. I am hushed indeed.
So fair, one time,  I thought a young palm tree
At Delos near the alter of Apollo -
I had troops under me when I was there
On the sea route that later brought me grief -
But that slim palm tree filled my heart with wonder:
Never came shoot from Earth so beautiful.
So now, my lady, I sand in awe so great
I cannot  take your knees. And yet my case is desperate:
Twenty days, yesterday, in the wine-dark sea,
On the ever-lunging swell, under gale winds,
Getting away from the island of Ogygia.
And now the terror of Storm has left me stranded
Upon this shore – with more blows yet to suffer,
I must believe, before the gods relent.
Mistress, do me a kindness!
After much weary toil, I come to you,
And you are the first soul I have seen- I know

No others here. Direct me to town,
Give me a rag that I can throw around me,
Some cloth or wrapping that you brought along
And may the gods accomplish your desire:
A home, a husband, and harmonious

 Converse with him .. .

But the white-armed maiden, Nausicaa, says: ‘Stranger, there is no quirk or evil in you that I can see.’

We can clearly see that Odysseus on the shores of Phaeacia does not have  what we would call  a ‘problem’ at all. He is in need, in a tight squeeze with only one way out, precisely were the young woman is standing. The man who Homer calls polymetis is warrior who has learned to transform every hardship into a challenge. From his nakedness he makes an argument, and he forms a project out of his destitution. He is literally someone who is never at a loss. We should never forget that at the inception of European rhetoric, we find a sea monster making its plea and frightening off young women. Only one brave maiden holds her ground to forms an audience.  A miracle occurs in her ears – the salt encrusted monster opens its mouth and reveals itself to be the most human of all human beings. The zoion logon echon, as defined a half-millennium later by Aristotle, the living being that has speech – here stands on the beach, with his irresistible flattery, his musical declamation, and his ability to make a virtue, that of beautiful speech, out of the most urgent necessity. It then occurs to Nausica that she might fall in love with a man who speaks to her this way, not so much beause of his quite forward compliments, which drift past her like a warm breeze, but because she feels and suspects that a good and clever man stands before her. She has experienced a logophany – proof that language, as soon as it comes into its own, elevates the human being.  If the disheveled foreigner is not a god, he has provided proof of his humanity by speaking as no beast, no fool, and no villain could.


From here, we can proceed further in an almost direct line to a scene that played out centuries later in Athens. In one of his dialogues, Plato tell as us how a father brings his teenage son to Socrates the sophist, who was known for his ability to educate youth. Socrates turned to the young man with a single request, ‘Speak boy, so that I may see you.’ The belief in the logophanic revelation of the human being’s essential nature reaches its culmination here. At the same time, Odysseus’ plea on the beach also leads directly to other fifth-century sophists who were famous for their ability to argue any position. Isocrates, the prince of Greek lawyers, demonstrates how significant this influence was in his notorious Helene Encomion (Encomium of Helen) which is supposed to prove that a good lawyer wins a case that seems lost in advance. What case could be more than the one against the most fatal woman of antiquity, the unfaithful beauty for whose sake the Trojan War must be fought?

We learn of Gorgias that, in his case, the ability to speak about anything at all degenerated into his really being a know-it-all. In one anecdote we read: ‘For coming into the theater of the Athenians he had the boldness to  suggest a subject, and he was the first to proclaim himself willing to take this chance, showing apparently that he knew everything and would trust to the moment to speak on any subject.’ Only one aspect of this story is of interest here. Gorgias has walked every step of the path that leads from a distress that still can find words to playing with mere ‘problems’ – this can be observed in the word he uses to challenge the Athenian public to propose a topic for him: the word is proballete – from the verb proballein, meaning ‘to throw something’ at him, ‘to suggest’ something to him, ‘to pose a topic,’ a word from which both ancient and modern problemata derive. The ‘problem’ that Gorgias wanted to ‘solve’ in the theater was simply a random topic for an expert to develop a thesis on or a virtuoso to use as a basis for extemporization.

If the Sophistic movement is supposed to involve the translation of existential hardships into a kind of relaxed playing with topics, then Odysseus is not yet a sophist in this sense. Odyssean intelligence is still bound to the harsh necessities of the struggle for survival, and cannot claim the privilege of relaxed observation for itself. Nevertheless, we an trace a line of descent from him to the Sophistic movement, since we discover in polymetris Odysseus the first signs of a general craft consciousness that is an essential feature of Classical Greek civilization. From a distance, the Odyssey already heralds that great event in the history of thought which can be called the Greek miracle: the birth of problems from the proud awareness of being able to deal with them. The brilliant words of an Austrian essayist (Egon Friedell),written before the First World War, seem appropriate for fifth-century Greeks: ‘Culture has a wealth of problems, and the more mysteries it discovers, the more enlightened it is.’ We could even say instead that culture is the sum of relief efforts [ Entlastungen] in response to primal needs. Decadence sets in the moment that the recipients of such relief forget why they needed culture to relieve them in the first place.

 What Happened in the 20th Century? by Peter Sloterdijk; Polity Books (2016) 2018 English. pages 159-164