Eric A. Havelock - Later Years

Later Years

Shortly after publication of Preface to Plato, Havelock accepted a position as chair of the Classics Department at Yale University. He remained in New Haven for eight years, and then taught briefly as Raymond Distinguished Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He retired in 1973 and moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, where his wife Christine Mitchell, whom he had married in 1962, taught at Vassar College. He was a productive scholar after his retirement, writing three books as well as numerous essays and talks expanding the arguments of Preface to Plato to a generalized argument about the effect of literacy on Greek thought, literature, culture, society, and law.

Increasingly central to Havelock's account of Greek culture in general was his conception of the Greek alphabet as a unique entity. He wrote in 1977:

The invention of the Greek alphabet, as opposed to all previous systems, including the Phoenician, constituted an event in the history of human culture, the importance of which has not as yet been fully grasped. Its appearance divides all pre-Greek civilizations from those that are post-Greek.

But his philological concerns now were only a small part of a much larger project to make sense of the nature of the Greek culture itself. His work in this period shows a theoretical sophistication far beyond his earlier efforts, extending his theory of literacy toward a theory of culture itself. He said of the Dipylon inscription, a poetic line scratched into a vase and the earliest Greek writing known at the time, "Here in this casual act by an unknown hand there is announced a revolution which was destined to change the nature of human culture." It is this larger point about the differences between oral and literate culture that represents Havelock's most influential contribution. Walter J. Ong, for example, in assessing the significance of non-oral communication in an oral culture, cites Havelock's observation that scientific categories, which are necessary not only for the natural sciences but also for historical and philosophical analysis, depend on writing. These ideas were sketched out in Preface to Plato but became central to Havelock's work from Prologue to Greek Literacy (1971) onward.

In the latter part of his career, Havelock's relentless pursuit of his unvarying thesis led to a lack of interest in addressing opposing viewpoints. In a review of Havelock's The Greek Concept of Justice, a book that attempts to ascribe the most significant ideas in Greek philosophy to his linguistic research, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre accuses Havelock of a "brusque refusal to recognize the substance of the case he has to defeat." As a result of this refusal, Havelock seems to have been caught in a conflict of mere contradiction with his opponents, in which without attempt at refutation, he simply asserts repeatedly that philosophy is fundamentally literate in nature, and is countered only with a reminder that, as MacIntyre says, "Socrates wrote no books."

In his last public lecture, which was published posthumously, Havelock addressed the political implications of his own scholarly work. Delivered at Harvard on March 16, 1988, less than three weeks before his death, the lecture is framed principally in opposition to the University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss had published a detailed and extensive critique of Havelock's The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics in March, 1959, as "The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy" in the journal Review of Metaphysics. (Strauss died 14 years later in 1973, the same year in which Havelock retired.) Havelock's 1988 lecture claims to contain a systematic account of Plato's politics; Havelock argues that Plato's idealism applies a mathematical strictness to politics, countering his old teacher Cornford's assertion that Platonic arguments that morality must be analyzable in arithmetical terms cannot be serious. This way of thinking about politics, Havelock concluded, could not be used as a model for understanding or shaping inherently nonmathematical interactions: "The stuff of human politics is conflict and compromise."