Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Daniel Mendelsohn, in an essay in the April 2015 issue of HARPER'S that starts from the recent movie SELMA, discusses the crossroads of drama and journalism. I'll just offer a brief excerpt here: "Just how much 'story' can we responsibly mine from 'history'? The conundrum is even more elegantly visible in the Romance languages, which make no distinction between the words 'history' and 'story': histoire in French and storia in Italian can mean both. Blame Herodotus: the so-called Father of History coined the word as we know it. For him, historia was a quasi-scientific investigation....But in part because Herodotus' inquiries into the causes and events of the Persian Wars were ever so entertaining -- epic, slightly rambling, sometimes gossipy, never dull -- the word came, in time, to mean something much more like our 'narrative.'" [The bust above is of Herodotus.]

HARPER's has recently excerpted the following from a new translation of Herodotus's THE HISTORIES. I submit it with no further intrusion. Just suppose that someone proposed to the entirety of mankind that a selection of the very best practices be made from the sum of human custom: each group of people, after carefully sifting through the customs of other peoples, would surely choose its own. Everyone believes his own customs to be far and away the best. Indeed, there is a huge amount of evidence to support the conclusion that this attitude to one's own native customs is universal. Take, for example, this story from the reign of Darius. He called together some Greeks who were present  and asked them how much money they would wish to be paid to devour the corpses of their fathers -- to which the Greeks replied that no amount of money would suffice for that. Next, Darius summoned some Indians called Callantians, who do eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of t...