Transcript Vernant

 For Vernant, mind
can at no time be
separated from its society; every mental fact
is also and always a social fact (and the
inverse), and its presence is discernible in
the multiple and multi-dimensional
workings of that society. ' 'Whether it is a
question of religious facts: myths, rituals,
and figural representations-or of philosophy,
science, art, social institutions, technical or
economic facts, we always consider them as
works created by men, as an expression of
an organized mental activity."
 The
institution of marriage is an excellent
case in point. It can be studied
historically as the changing customs of a
social institution and also as a subject for
mythological analysis, without any
divorce between the two on grounds of
incompatibility.
 In
this emphasis on the formal structures
and codes underlying the surface of the
mythic narrative, myth assumes a
function and meaning as a provisional
problem-solving device; it is a kind of'
'logical tool" that each time aims to find
some middle term to mediate "between
contradictionsthat, in life, are actually
insoluble."
 Refusing
to accept the idea of' , a
scattered and heterogeneous pantheon, a
mythology of bits and pieces," he asks: "If
this was the polytheism of the Greeks,
how could these men, whose exacting
rigor in the realms of intellectual
consistency is extolled, have lived their
religious life in a kind of chaos?"
All the general trends and habits enumerated above
can be found, I think, in the cultural tradition of The
Other that serves as the fundamental and enduring
model: the emphasis on mind from the noos of the
Odyssey to Anaxagoras's deified Nous to Platonic
and Aristotelian notions of intellection, the demand
for reason and intelligibility, the gift for theory and
formal categories of thought, the preoccupation with
the analysis of society and social norms, endlessly
debated, and the curiosity about human nature and
what is often sentimentally called “the human
 condition.”

 …the
paradox of gods who are endowed
with bodies and yet are beyond
corporeal limitations. They may eat but
have no need of food, sleep but yet their
eyes are open, and a blood courses
through them that is not blood.

In a face-to-face society, a culture of shame and
honor where competition for glory leaves little
room for the sense of duty and does not know
that of sin, everyone's existence is continually
placed under the regard of someone else. It is in
the eyes of the one who faces you, in the mirror it
presents you that the image of the self is
constructed. There is no consciousness of one's
identity without this other who, in facing you,
reflects you and yet is opposed to you. Self and
other, identity and alterity go together, are
reciprocally constructed.
 Three ‘Others’
stand out. ..as particularly
significant: the figure of the gods, the face
of death and the visage of the beloved.
Because they mark the frontiers within
which the human individual is inscribed,
because they emphasize one's own
limitations and yet, by the intensity of
emotions they arouse, also awaken the
desire to overcome them, these three types
of encounter with the other serve as
touchstones for the testing of identity as the
Greeks understood and adopted it.
In making the goddess of the margins into a power of
integration and assimilation, as when they take
Dionysos, who incarnates the figure of the Other in
the Greek pantheon, and install him at the center of
the social system, right out front in the theater, the
Greeks pass on an important lesson. They invite us,
not to become polytheists, to believe in Artemis and
Dionysos, but to construe the idea of civi lization as giving each his or her place. They invite us
to an attitude of mind that not only has moral and
political value, but that is properly intellectual and is
called tolerance. “ [quote is from V himself]

 Six
speeches, of which 2 are especially
important.
 Phaedrus the rhetorician
 Pausanias the lawyer
 Eryximachus the doctor
 Aristophanes the comedian
 Agathon the dunce
 Socrates the philosopher
 Alcibiades [who’s been drinking…]