(Originally written June 6, 2016 in Book 26)
It's been nearly nine years since I've written in this particular journal. To the archivists (Ha!) I'm sorry for the lapse. I just didn't want to leave so much blank space in journal 26 on up and waste paper. But, I haven't been completely idle in nine years. Anyway, I've been primarily digitizing my journals recently; thus, I haven't studied much. Currently I'm midway through Salman Rushdie's Fury. It's a pretty riveting book and much newer than most of my reading this year.
As I state, primarily I've been working to bring my journals all into a comprehensive blog, tagged with numerous categories in case I ever want to research a topic. This way I can pull up my notes and move from there. Books 3, 4 and 5 have a lot of notes from 2006 on Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy and lo and behold, ten years later I'm reading it again, It's somewhat coincidental and definitely gives it a comical symmetry. Iv'e read the introduction which covers the PRe-Socratics and am now starting the part on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Additionally, I'm reading my books from History of philosophy at Taylor (A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones) to get a fuller depth of understanding. It is there I'll actually begin.
The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
Ch. 2 - Education by Violence
Aristophanes
Aristophanes held that democracy was destroying the state.
Aristophanes was a playwright during the violent chaos of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. It is for this reason he so avidly opposed the unruliness and inefficiency of democracy.
He criticized the Athenian practice of paying people to be on the j tries because it led to lazy, incompetent and ignorant juries, making a travesty of justice.
Aristophanes used many of his plays to attack the mass democracy and the ills it foisted on Athens. But in Ecclesiazusae he offered a solution that anticipated Plato's Utopia and is akin to communism:
- land, money and private property became common to all
- no rich or poor
- women belong to all men in common
- "Athens will become nothing more than a single house, in which every thing will belong to everyone" (Jones, 51).
Euripides
Euripides (480-406 BC) was a playwright during the Peloponnesian War. Initially his plays were optimistic and patriotic to the Athenians, but after the brutal subjugation of the Melians by the Athenians his tone changed.
Euripides believed in a moral order which was a natural order. He used the gods and goddesses as an embodiment of that order, dishing out justice and punishment.
In his play Trojan Women he points out the doubly futile nature of war. First, its consequences are greater than the spark which ignited the war in the first place. Second, ti generally does not achieve the desired ends.
The war caused Euripides to lose his faith in the natural order, the moral order and religion. This profound loss contrasted Euripides from an earlier generation. While they were sure and optimistic in light of the Pax Athenica, in spite of many flaws, Euripides was a product of the horrors of war.
Euripides clings to the Greek ideal of moderation, but taught by war, mourns its loss.
Showing posts with label Euripides. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Euripides. Show all posts
Monday, June 6, 2016
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980
-For Heraclitus, the original stuff is fire. "This world...was ever, is now, and ever shall be an everlasting fire" (Jones, 14).
-Heraclitus was influenced by the Milesian three, but was more subtle and refined
-Heraclitus' notion to resolve the problem of how one thing becomes every thing and is still one was to make the 'one thing' a non-material thing. For Heraclitus, the one thing then was the process itself.
-For Heraclitus, who like most men have difficulty in truly thinking abstractly, let alone communicating abstract thoughts, he called this process 'fire', which is always changing and yet still fire.
-The problem for the Milesian three was they held a belief in unity and still needed to reconcile the fact that things changed. Heraclitus however in proclaiming process as the one thing went to the extreme and created the problem of permanence. Because everything was fire and process, everything was always changing. This is the state of flux.
-Flux accounts for the change. Permanence is accounted for by accepting that the thing that is changing appears permanent because the rate of change is always the same.
-In addition to the Milesian three's problem of one and the many, Heraclitus has the problem of the world as it appears and the world as it really is.
-Heraclitus did not stop at describing the physical world as the Milesian three did. He dabbled into more areas.
-He used the eternal flux in describing how politics works as well. The political system is a constant tension of opposites. For example, without strife peace could not exist.
-Heraclitus' political theory was representative of his time. There was constant strife between the various city states and peace only existed when neither of the warring city states had enough power to overcome the other. Likewise, in the individual city states the nobles and the commoners only achieved a balance of peace when neither party was powerful enough to impose their will on the other. Heraclitus was on the side of the nobility.
-Heraclitus was contemptuous of the masses.
-In addition to social theory, Heraclitus showed an interest in religion. For Heraclitus, his aristocratic contempt for the masses extended to his religious sentiments. Accepting the scientific nature of the Milesian three, he rejected the contemporary religion of the masses.
-Heraclitus is quoted as saying 'the wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man'
-Heraclitus sometimes identifies his god as the process of flux
-Heraclitus' god was not personal. It was indifferent to human conceptions of right and wrong, justice and was immune to men's prayer.
-Heraclitus equated the flux/process sometimes with 'logos'.
-Some passages indicate that Heraclitus' ethics held that the chief good of man is to listen to the logos and even become absorbed by the logos
-Heraclitus was both a scientific and religious philosopher.
The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972
[The Greeks] "discovered mathematics and the art of deductive reasoning. Geometry, in particular, is a Greek invention, without which modern science would have been impossible" (Russell, 39). The limitation to this Greek way of thinking though is that it is reasoned deductively from self-evident facts rather than inductively from empirical observations.
-Heraclitus was an aristocratic person from Ephesus.
-famous for his theory that everything is in a state of flux
-He was mystical in thought
-Fire was the fundamental substance
-everything is born by the death of something else
-there was a unity in the world, but that unity came out of the combination of opposites
-believed that mankind was so inherently bad that only force would compel them to act for their own good
-believed that War was necessary and good
-believed that strife was justice and that all things come into being and pass away through strife
-"His ethic is a kind of proud asceticism, very similar to Nietzsche's" (Russell, 42).
-The soul was a mix of fire and water, the fire being the noble part.
-Claimed the 'dry' soul was the best, but that it is pleasurable to the soul to get 'wet'. Hence, the asceticism
-He was hostile to the Bacchic religion, for example he wrote "They vainly purify themselves by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing this, would deem him mad" (Russell, 43).
-Perpetual change was the state of the world.
-The unity in the world was a result from diversity.
-His god did not care about mankind - "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right" (Russell, 44).
-Like Hegel, Heraclitus seems to believe that a synthesis of opposites creates the world as it is.
-Heraclitus has a sense of cosmic justice in his system as no single thing can ever prevent one thing from totally taking over its opposite
-For Heraclitus, his God is distinct from the gods. His God is the embodiment of cosmic justice.
-Both Plato and Aristotle agreed that Heraclitus taught that nothing ever is, everything is always becoming.
-"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it. One of the main ambitions of philosophers has been to revive hopes that science seemed to have killed. Philosophers, accordingly, have sought, with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time. This search begins with Parmenides" (Russell, 47).
Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001
-Heraclitus came from Ephesus in Asia Minor, circa 500 BC
-He was nicknamed 'The Obscure' and 'The Riddler'
-Even Socrates, when given a book of Heraclitus by Euripides states what he understood was splendid and was sure that what he didn't understand was splendid as well.
-Heraclitus rebuked and condemned a lot of people for their ignorance in his writings
-He claims all things are one, 'day and dusk - for they are one', 'the path of the carding-comb is straight and crooked', 'the path up and down is one and the same', etc.
-He was very critical of everyone he disagreed with, which was basically everyone. "Much learning does not teach thought - or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus" (Barnes, 53).
-He defines wisdom as the ability to grasp the knowledge of how all things are steered through all.
-He was regarded by some of the ancients as arrogant and purposefully obscure
-He claimed that all things were made of fire and perished back into the fire
-Everything that exists is harmonized by the transformation of opposites
-Everything is full of souls and spirits
-He distrusted sensory perception
John Stobaeus quotes a couple of interesting Heraclitus sayings:
-It is better to hide folly than to make it public
-It is not good for men to get what they want
-To be self-controlled is the greatest excellence. And wisdom is speaking the truth and acting with knowledge in accordance with nature.
-All men can know themselves and control themselves
Again, he is not very complimentary of the common man: "For what thought or sense, he says, do they have? They follow the popular singers and they take the crowd as their teacher, not knowing that most men are bad and few good" (Barnes, 58).
He claims that most men satisfy themselves like beasts. The best men seek fame from mortals.
He is especially critical of Pythagoras. "Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practiced inquiry more than any other man, and selecting from these writings he made a wisdom of his own - much learning, mere fraudulence" (Barnes, 59).
-He held that the world was uncreated
Stobaeus says "Heraclitus said that a man's character is his fate" (Barnes, 62).
On God Plutarch remarks that Heraclitus believed "In all respects superior to us, [god] is especially unlike and different from us in his acts; but of divine acts, the majority, according to Heraclitus, escape our knowledge through lack of trust" (Barnes, 66).
He claimed that philosophical men must be versed in many things
He distrusted the senses - bad witnesses for men are eyes and ears of those who have foreign souls (the mark of a foreign soul is to trust in non-rational perceptions)
War is to be praised in Heraclitus because it brings about strife, which is justice.
Aristotle describes his cosmology as the harmony achieved through the blending of the most contrary principles.
Again, he's not real complimentary of the masses, claiming that donkeys would prefer rubbish to gold.
The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980
-For Heraclitus, the original stuff is fire. "This world...was ever, is now, and ever shall be an everlasting fire" (Jones, 14).
-Heraclitus was influenced by the Milesian three, but was more subtle and refined
-Heraclitus' notion to resolve the problem of how one thing becomes every thing and is still one was to make the 'one thing' a non-material thing. For Heraclitus, the one thing then was the process itself.
-For Heraclitus, who like most men have difficulty in truly thinking abstractly, let alone communicating abstract thoughts, he called this process 'fire', which is always changing and yet still fire.
-The problem for the Milesian three was they held a belief in unity and still needed to reconcile the fact that things changed. Heraclitus however in proclaiming process as the one thing went to the extreme and created the problem of permanence. Because everything was fire and process, everything was always changing. This is the state of flux.
-Flux accounts for the change. Permanence is accounted for by accepting that the thing that is changing appears permanent because the rate of change is always the same.
-In addition to the Milesian three's problem of one and the many, Heraclitus has the problem of the world as it appears and the world as it really is.
-Heraclitus did not stop at describing the physical world as the Milesian three did. He dabbled into more areas.
-He used the eternal flux in describing how politics works as well. The political system is a constant tension of opposites. For example, without strife peace could not exist.
-Heraclitus' political theory was representative of his time. There was constant strife between the various city states and peace only existed when neither of the warring city states had enough power to overcome the other. Likewise, in the individual city states the nobles and the commoners only achieved a balance of peace when neither party was powerful enough to impose their will on the other. Heraclitus was on the side of the nobility.
-Heraclitus was contemptuous of the masses.
-In addition to social theory, Heraclitus showed an interest in religion. For Heraclitus, his aristocratic contempt for the masses extended to his religious sentiments. Accepting the scientific nature of the Milesian three, he rejected the contemporary religion of the masses.
-Heraclitus is quoted as saying 'the wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man'
-Heraclitus sometimes identifies his god as the process of flux
-Heraclitus' god was not personal. It was indifferent to human conceptions of right and wrong, justice and was immune to men's prayer.
-Heraclitus equated the flux/process sometimes with 'logos'.
-Some passages indicate that Heraclitus' ethics held that the chief good of man is to listen to the logos and even become absorbed by the logos
-Heraclitus was both a scientific and religious philosopher.
The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972
[The Greeks] "discovered mathematics and the art of deductive reasoning. Geometry, in particular, is a Greek invention, without which modern science would have been impossible" (Russell, 39). The limitation to this Greek way of thinking though is that it is reasoned deductively from self-evident facts rather than inductively from empirical observations.
-Heraclitus was an aristocratic person from Ephesus.
-famous for his theory that everything is in a state of flux
-He was mystical in thought
-Fire was the fundamental substance
-everything is born by the death of something else
-there was a unity in the world, but that unity came out of the combination of opposites
-believed that mankind was so inherently bad that only force would compel them to act for their own good
-believed that War was necessary and good
-believed that strife was justice and that all things come into being and pass away through strife
-"His ethic is a kind of proud asceticism, very similar to Nietzsche's" (Russell, 42).
-The soul was a mix of fire and water, the fire being the noble part.
-Claimed the 'dry' soul was the best, but that it is pleasurable to the soul to get 'wet'. Hence, the asceticism
-He was hostile to the Bacchic religion, for example he wrote "They vainly purify themselves by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing this, would deem him mad" (Russell, 43).
-Perpetual change was the state of the world.
-The unity in the world was a result from diversity.
-His god did not care about mankind - "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right" (Russell, 44).
-Like Hegel, Heraclitus seems to believe that a synthesis of opposites creates the world as it is.
-Heraclitus has a sense of cosmic justice in his system as no single thing can ever prevent one thing from totally taking over its opposite
-For Heraclitus, his God is distinct from the gods. His God is the embodiment of cosmic justice.
-Both Plato and Aristotle agreed that Heraclitus taught that nothing ever is, everything is always becoming.
-"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it. One of the main ambitions of philosophers has been to revive hopes that science seemed to have killed. Philosophers, accordingly, have sought, with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time. This search begins with Parmenides" (Russell, 47).
Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001
-Heraclitus came from Ephesus in Asia Minor, circa 500 BC
-He was nicknamed 'The Obscure' and 'The Riddler'
-Even Socrates, when given a book of Heraclitus by Euripides states what he understood was splendid and was sure that what he didn't understand was splendid as well.
-Heraclitus rebuked and condemned a lot of people for their ignorance in his writings
-He claims all things are one, 'day and dusk - for they are one', 'the path of the carding-comb is straight and crooked', 'the path up and down is one and the same', etc.
-He was very critical of everyone he disagreed with, which was basically everyone. "Much learning does not teach thought - or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus" (Barnes, 53).
-He defines wisdom as the ability to grasp the knowledge of how all things are steered through all.
-He was regarded by some of the ancients as arrogant and purposefully obscure
-He claimed that all things were made of fire and perished back into the fire
-Everything that exists is harmonized by the transformation of opposites
-Everything is full of souls and spirits
-He distrusted sensory perception
John Stobaeus quotes a couple of interesting Heraclitus sayings:
-It is better to hide folly than to make it public
-It is not good for men to get what they want
-To be self-controlled is the greatest excellence. And wisdom is speaking the truth and acting with knowledge in accordance with nature.
-All men can know themselves and control themselves
Again, he is not very complimentary of the common man: "For what thought or sense, he says, do they have? They follow the popular singers and they take the crowd as their teacher, not knowing that most men are bad and few good" (Barnes, 58).
He claims that most men satisfy themselves like beasts. The best men seek fame from mortals.
He is especially critical of Pythagoras. "Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practiced inquiry more than any other man, and selecting from these writings he made a wisdom of his own - much learning, mere fraudulence" (Barnes, 59).
-He held that the world was uncreated
Stobaeus says "Heraclitus said that a man's character is his fate" (Barnes, 62).
On God Plutarch remarks that Heraclitus believed "In all respects superior to us, [god] is especially unlike and different from us in his acts; but of divine acts, the majority, according to Heraclitus, escape our knowledge through lack of trust" (Barnes, 66).
He claimed that philosophical men must be versed in many things
He distrusted the senses - bad witnesses for men are eyes and ears of those who have foreign souls (the mark of a foreign soul is to trust in non-rational perceptions)
War is to be praised in Heraclitus because it brings about strife, which is justice.
Aristotle describes his cosmology as the harmony achieved through the blending of the most contrary principles.
Again, he's not real complimentary of the masses, claiming that donkeys would prefer rubbish to gold.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides & Proverbs
(Originally Written February 11, 2014 on scrap paper now lost)
History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Book I - Ancient Philosophy
Chapter 4 - Heraclitus
Xenophanes taught that gods were made up through anthropomorphic tendencies. He believed in only one God, but that God was not like man in either thought or form.
He also believed knowledge of God and gods to be impossible, "even if a man should chance to say something utterly right, still himself knows it not. There is nowhere anything but guessing (Russell, 40).
Xenophanes was a rationalist who disliked the mystical elements of Pythagorean thought.
Heraclitus lived around 511 BC in Ephesus. He was a mystic, believing the fundamental substance to be fire. He believed that everything was born by something else's death.
Heraclitus had a very negative view of mankind. He believed it was only force that compelled man to be good.
He believed war was not only a fact of life, but necessary to maintain existence. War brings death. Death brings life to the better things.
He was ascetic and proud of his asceticism.
The soul was made of fire and water. The better the soul, the more fire it had. The "dryer" the soul, the better it was.
He believed the world to be uncreated and eternal.
He believed that everything was in flux.
The constant flux produced strife. Strife produced conflict and that conflict proved to create the balance that exists in life. The flux had the effect of creating the cosmic justice that kept everything in its place and from one thing or one man from attaining too much power.
"The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. The wisest man is an ape to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man" (Russell, 44).
Heraclitus' metaphysical notion of the endless flux is the stated by Plato to be: nothing ever is, everything is becoming. Aristotle described it as 'nothing steadfastly is'.
The doctrine of perpetual flux is a horrifying thing to men who seek something permanent. Science and philosophy have been trying to escape Heraclitus for thousands of years.
Chapter V - Parmenides
Parmenides countered Heraclitus' notion that everything is always changing by stating nothing ever changes.
Parmenides lived around 450 BC in southern Italy.
Parmenides taught that both thought and language require objects outside of themselves. You can't think of an object if that object doesn't exist.
Parmenides believed that in order for words to have meaning they must be attached to an object. If that object existed in the past it maintains some existence, otherwise we could not use the word meaningfully.
Chapter VI - Empedocles
Empedocles lived around 440 BC in Sicily. He claimed to be a god.
Empedocles was an old combination of science, religion and philosophy. His science and religion were often times at odds with one another.
Empedocles discovered properties of air and centrifugal force by experiment. He had a scientific belief in an odd version of survival of the fittest type of evolutionary theory.
Empedocles believed not in one primordial substance, but four: earth, fire, wind and water. However, love and strife were on equal footing with the aforementioned substances. Love brought about the combination of the elements. Strife brought about the dissolution of the elements.
Love and strife fought one another. There were periods of time when one mastered the other. Chance and necessity brought about the changes in the universe, not some overarching purpose.
Chapter VII - Athens in relation to culture
The greatness of Athens began when they defeated the Persians at Marathon (490 BC) and defeated Xerxes (480 BC).
Athens grew rich and prosperous after this under the guidance of Pericles until about 430 BC.
During this time Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished.
Proverbs 8
8:9 - "To the discerning all of them are right. They are faultless to those who have knowledge".
The wisdom of the Lord is known to the discerning. It is faultless to those who have knowledge. THen do the unbelieving have no knowledge, no discernment?
Help me to seek you that I may find your wisdom. Help me to seek you God.
Proverbs 9
9:10 - "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding"
Proverbs 10
"The way of the Lord is a refuge for the righteouss"
Lord, may you be my refuge. Put in me a desire to seek you always. Light my heart on fire so that it burns for you. Help me to turn from folly and wickedness. Keep my paths straight. Bless this request my God, my King.
History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Book I - Ancient Philosophy
Chapter 4 - Heraclitus
Xenophanes taught that gods were made up through anthropomorphic tendencies. He believed in only one God, but that God was not like man in either thought or form.
He also believed knowledge of God and gods to be impossible, "even if a man should chance to say something utterly right, still himself knows it not. There is nowhere anything but guessing (Russell, 40).
Xenophanes was a rationalist who disliked the mystical elements of Pythagorean thought.
Heraclitus lived around 511 BC in Ephesus. He was a mystic, believing the fundamental substance to be fire. He believed that everything was born by something else's death.
Heraclitus had a very negative view of mankind. He believed it was only force that compelled man to be good.
He believed war was not only a fact of life, but necessary to maintain existence. War brings death. Death brings life to the better things.
He was ascetic and proud of his asceticism.
The soul was made of fire and water. The better the soul, the more fire it had. The "dryer" the soul, the better it was.
He believed the world to be uncreated and eternal.
He believed that everything was in flux.
The constant flux produced strife. Strife produced conflict and that conflict proved to create the balance that exists in life. The flux had the effect of creating the cosmic justice that kept everything in its place and from one thing or one man from attaining too much power.
"The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. The wisest man is an ape to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man" (Russell, 44).
Heraclitus' metaphysical notion of the endless flux is the stated by Plato to be: nothing ever is, everything is becoming. Aristotle described it as 'nothing steadfastly is'.
The doctrine of perpetual flux is a horrifying thing to men who seek something permanent. Science and philosophy have been trying to escape Heraclitus for thousands of years.
Chapter V - Parmenides
Parmenides countered Heraclitus' notion that everything is always changing by stating nothing ever changes.
Parmenides lived around 450 BC in southern Italy.
Parmenides taught that both thought and language require objects outside of themselves. You can't think of an object if that object doesn't exist.
Parmenides believed that in order for words to have meaning they must be attached to an object. If that object existed in the past it maintains some existence, otherwise we could not use the word meaningfully.
Chapter VI - Empedocles
Empedocles lived around 440 BC in Sicily. He claimed to be a god.
Empedocles was an old combination of science, religion and philosophy. His science and religion were often times at odds with one another.
Empedocles discovered properties of air and centrifugal force by experiment. He had a scientific belief in an odd version of survival of the fittest type of evolutionary theory.
Empedocles believed not in one primordial substance, but four: earth, fire, wind and water. However, love and strife were on equal footing with the aforementioned substances. Love brought about the combination of the elements. Strife brought about the dissolution of the elements.
Love and strife fought one another. There were periods of time when one mastered the other. Chance and necessity brought about the changes in the universe, not some overarching purpose.
Chapter VII - Athens in relation to culture
The greatness of Athens began when they defeated the Persians at Marathon (490 BC) and defeated Xerxes (480 BC).
Athens grew rich and prosperous after this under the guidance of Pericles until about 430 BC.
During this time Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished.
Proverbs 8
8:9 - "To the discerning all of them are right. They are faultless to those who have knowledge".
The wisdom of the Lord is known to the discerning. It is faultless to those who have knowledge. THen do the unbelieving have no knowledge, no discernment?
Help me to seek you that I may find your wisdom. Help me to seek you God.
Proverbs 9
9:10 - "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding"
Proverbs 10
"The way of the Lord is a refuge for the righteouss"
Lord, may you be my refuge. Put in me a desire to seek you always. Light my heart on fire so that it burns for you. Help me to turn from folly and wickedness. Keep my paths straight. Bless this request my God, my King.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Birth of Tragedy Section 13-19
(Originally written July 4, 2007 in Book 15)
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 13
Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.
Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.
Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.
The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.
Section 14
Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.
"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).
Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.
Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.
Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.
Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.
Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.
The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.
The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.
Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.
Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).
Section 15
The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.
Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).
The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.
Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.
With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.
This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.
Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.
Socrates stands as the turning point of history.
Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.
Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.
Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.
Section 16
There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.
Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.
We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.
Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.
Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.
The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.
Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.
Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.
Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.
Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).
It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.
Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.
Section 17
Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.
Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.
Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.
By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.
Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.
In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.
Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.
The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.
The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.
With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.
Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.
Section 18
There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)
The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.
The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.
Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.
The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.
The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.
Section 19
The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.
The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.
The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.
The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.
Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.
The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.
"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).
The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.
The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.
Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.
Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).
Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.
Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.
The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.
The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.
"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).
Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.
The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 13
Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.
Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.
Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.
The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.
Section 14
Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.
"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).
Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.
Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.
Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.
Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.
Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.
The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.
The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.
Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.
Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).
Section 15
The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.
Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).
The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.
Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.
With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.
This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.
Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.
Socrates stands as the turning point of history.
Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.
Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.
Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.
Section 16
There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.
Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.
We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.
Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.
Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.
The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.
Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.
Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.
Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.
Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).
It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.
Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.
Section 17
Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.
Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.
Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.
By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.
Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.
In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.
Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.
The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.
The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.
With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.
Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.
Section 18
There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)
The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.
The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.
Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.
The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.
The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.
Section 19
The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.
The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.
The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.
The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.
Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.
The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.
"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).
The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.
The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.
Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.
Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).
Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.
Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.
The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.
The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.
"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).
Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.
The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Birth of Tragedy Sections 10-12
(Originally written June 26, 2007 in Book 15)
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 10
Dionysus was himself the original and only hero in stage and the other heroes who gradually emerged - Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. are really mere masks of Dionysus.
The sufferings of Dionysus is the agonizing experience of individuation.
Dionysus was torn to pieces by the Titans according to Greek mythology. The true Dionysian suffering is the dismemberment of an individual and a transformation into the elements.
The world out to be as one, but the tearing of Dionysus made the world individualized. The rebirth of Dionysus is the coming together and re-harmonizing of all individuals into a oneness.
Oneness is the fundamental part of existence. Individuation is the primary cause of evil. Art is the joyous hope that individuation may be broken and a openness can be restored.
[page 75] an attack on religion.
Section 11
As Hellenism aged tragedy died out. Euripides discarded Dionysian elements and thus the Apollonian counterpart as well. He replaced the god-like hers with the every man character and the New Comedy emerged out of the suicide of tragedy.
Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage.
But, Euripides felt himself better than the public he put on stage.
Euripides relied on himself as a critic. That is Euripides the thinker, not Euripides the poet. HE did not understand the tragedy and that is why he sought to reform drama.
Euripides found one other person who shared his opinion.
Section 12
Euripides attempted to reconstruct Greek tragedy on the basis of an un-Dionysian art and morality.
Socrates shared Euripides view of the tragedy.
The art of Greek tragedy was shipwrecked by Socratic thinking. The Dionysian and the Socratic were enemies.
The combination of Euripides the actor and Euripides the thinker is the combination of cool rational thoughts and fiery passionate portrayals of emotion. Euripides is a paradox.
Euripides reduced tragedy to aesthetic Socratism: "To be beautiful everything must be intelligible" (Nietzsche, 83-84).
Euripides dramas in following the Socratic maxim that "knowledge is virtue" became naturalistic and inartistic.
Euripidean plays rested on rhetorical features that lead the groundwork for pathos, not action.
Euripides found suspense made audiences so anxious to solve the mystery that it distracted from the pathos of the play and thus was removed from his plays.
"Euripides as a poet is essentially an echo of his own conscious knowledge" (Nietzsche, 85).
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 10
Dionysus was himself the original and only hero in stage and the other heroes who gradually emerged - Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. are really mere masks of Dionysus.
The sufferings of Dionysus is the agonizing experience of individuation.
Dionysus was torn to pieces by the Titans according to Greek mythology. The true Dionysian suffering is the dismemberment of an individual and a transformation into the elements.
The world out to be as one, but the tearing of Dionysus made the world individualized. The rebirth of Dionysus is the coming together and re-harmonizing of all individuals into a oneness.
Oneness is the fundamental part of existence. Individuation is the primary cause of evil. Art is the joyous hope that individuation may be broken and a openness can be restored.
[page 75] an attack on religion.
Section 11
As Hellenism aged tragedy died out. Euripides discarded Dionysian elements and thus the Apollonian counterpart as well. He replaced the god-like hers with the every man character and the New Comedy emerged out of the suicide of tragedy.
Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage.
But, Euripides felt himself better than the public he put on stage.
Euripides relied on himself as a critic. That is Euripides the thinker, not Euripides the poet. HE did not understand the tragedy and that is why he sought to reform drama.
Euripides found one other person who shared his opinion.
Section 12
Euripides attempted to reconstruct Greek tragedy on the basis of an un-Dionysian art and morality.
Socrates shared Euripides view of the tragedy.
The art of Greek tragedy was shipwrecked by Socratic thinking. The Dionysian and the Socratic were enemies.
The combination of Euripides the actor and Euripides the thinker is the combination of cool rational thoughts and fiery passionate portrayals of emotion. Euripides is a paradox.
Euripides reduced tragedy to aesthetic Socratism: "To be beautiful everything must be intelligible" (Nietzsche, 83-84).
Euripides dramas in following the Socratic maxim that "knowledge is virtue" became naturalistic and inartistic.
Euripidean plays rested on rhetorical features that lead the groundwork for pathos, not action.
Euripides found suspense made audiences so anxious to solve the mystery that it distracted from the pathos of the play and thus was removed from his plays.
"Euripides as a poet is essentially an echo of his own conscious knowledge" (Nietzsche, 85).
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
The Peloponnesian War & its sons
(Originally written September 6, 2006 in Book 10)
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War
- Athens' strength grew after Greece defeated the Persian Empire, in which Athens played a pivotal role.
- Athens was beginning to rival and even surpass Sparta in power,
- Athens dominated the trade of Greece.
- Sparta and Corinth convinced many other states to fight against "the tyrant city".
- The Peloponnesian war began in 431 B.C.
- Pericles, tyrant of Athens opted to concede territories to the Spartans and her allies. He moved all Athenians within the city walls and executed Naval raids on the Spartans. He opted for a war of attrition. Unfortunately, the overcrowded city was decimated by a plague. Then Pericles died. Athens fell into the hands of ill-equipped demagogues
- In 415 B.C. Athens made the mistake of attacking Sicily and wasted troops and money. Within two years of the attack the mighty Athenian navy had been decimated.
- The war continued for ten years simply out of bitterness on the Athenian side.
The Old Oligarch
The Old Oligarch was an unknown author who criticized the Athenian democracy. He concluded that a state has to make a choice between freedom an good governance.
Aristophanes
- Criticized the Athenian democracy for being inefficient, indecisive and irresponsible
- Aristophanes was not as mild mannered in his criticisms as the Old Oligarch was
- Aristophanes preferred the country gentleman to the urban aristocrat. He hated ignorance wherever one lived, but despised the urban leaders of the Assembly for being disloyal and without piety, hell bent on destroying tradition
- Aristophanes attack on democracy: He hates the jury system of paying poor people to serve jury duty. While the jurors claim to be powerful, Aristophanes calls them slaves of the demagogues.
- Aristophanes' solution: He offers a communism, very similar to Plato's Utopia, with common houses, women and meals.
What War does to Man
Spartan idealism and Athenian idealism split cities in two. The aristocrats sided with sparta as the common man sided with Athens.
"War which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions" (Jones, 54).
Intelligence is no longer a virtue.
Importance of political unity
Thucydides was shocked by the brutality and savagery of the war and even more so that it was a civil war in Hellas.
The unity of a city-state was a difficult achievement as men still held family and clan loyalties, which had held over since a more primitive time.
Class warfare between rich and poor also prevented city-state unity.
The polis played an integral part in every Greek's life and unity was a huge aspiration for every individual polis.
The "New" Man
The old man was a conservative like Aristophanes and held virtue as esteemed, loved a simple life, had respect for law, religion, customs and was deeply patriotic.
The New man, born of civil war was a tyrannical cynic. He was self-serving.
Euripides
Horrors of War: The Trojan Women
Early on, Euripides had been pro-Athens and anti-Sparta. He was patriotic and optimistic. The Trojan Women was a stark difference. He was no longer hopeful.
He believed in a moral order and that the moral order was a natural order. He held that the Greeks were violating that natural order.
He believed war to be futile.
He mentions a dichotomy between reason and passions. Passions lead to destruction.
The war shook his belief in the moral order and the existence of the gods. He doubts because of the war.
Euripides must have been a deeply religious man and his loss of faith must have been excruciating to him.
Euripides contrasted with Sophocles
Aeschylus (b. 525 B.C.) fought in the Persian War and believed religion to be benign and enlightening.
Sophocles (b. 495 B.C.) represents a belief in Athenian greatness. He believed in a transcendent divine law.
While Sophocles was only fifteen years older than Euripides, he was vastly different in his outlook on life.
The Dissolution of the Old Ideal
Egoism had destroyed the Greek unity of the polis and patriotism.
The passions here destroyed the Greek reliance on reason.
The orderliness of Greece decayed as the Civil War ground ever on.
Saturday, July 1, 2006
Bacchus & Orphics
(Originally Written July 1, 2006 in Book 2)
The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1974
Commerce initially arose as piracy.
Writing came to the Greeks via piracy and commerce. It came from the Phoenicians (whose alphabet was derivative of Egypt). Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet. Writing quickened the rise of Ancient Greece.
Homer was the first product of Greece of real merit. He became a staple of Greek learning in Athens and later, all of Greece.
Homer's writings showed the best of Greek religion (the gods of Olympus), but more savage religious cults lay in wait throughout Ancient Greece, coming out in times of weakness and terror.
Primitive religion was tribal, not personal.
Homer's gods were very human, his religion, not very religious. These gods were as or less moral than men.
Fate, necessity and destiny were the objects of utmost power in Homeric religion. Even Zeus was subject to them.
The Olympian gods were never said to create the world, only to subdue and conquer it.
Homer's heroes (men) were as unbehaving as the swashbuckling gods who ruled with indifference to humanity.
When the Homeric epics took their present form, in the late 6th century BC, science, philosophy and mathematics were being born in Greece. Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster lived in this century (allegedly). Cyrus established Persia in the 6th century as well.
The Philosophers endured to escape Persian domination, spreading the enlightened Greek civilization to the Hellenic world.
While Greece eventually fought off the Persians only a few cities advanced all the independent Greek city-states:
1. Sparta - military
2. Corinth - commerce & wealth
3. Arcadia - agriculture
Arcadia was supposedly an idyllic paradise, but it was truly ghastly in their barbaric ways.
1. The bull was too expensive in fertility cults, so the goat replaced it.
2. A clan of self-proclaimed werewolves terrorized with human sacrifice and cannibalism
3. Even Zeus was portrayed as a werewolf: Zeus Lykaios.
Superstition reigned in Arcadia and flourished throughout ancient times.
Religion, as we now perceive it, was not connected to the Olympic gods but to Dionysus or Bacchus. Bacchus was the god of wine and drunkenness. Bacchus originated as a fertility god of Thrace. When the Thracians invented beer they perceived intoxication as divine and attributed it to Bacchus. When wine was invented later, the Thracians loved Bacchus even more.
The cult of Bacchus was not received well by the orthodox of Greece, but was nonetheless established.
Bacchus worship involved ecstasy, brought about by intoxication; partly due to alcohol, but mainly due to mystic frenzy. It was both beautiful and savage.
Greece gravitated to the primitive and instinctive nature of Bacchus that freed them from strict Greek morality.
"The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought" (Russell, 15).
Foresight is working for benefits later and not being controlled by impulses. Impulses are checked by civilization via foresight (self-check), religion, law and custom.
Private property brought about the subjection of women and the creation of a slave class.
Prudence involves sacrificing the present to the future without extremeness. Prudence can easily destroy some of the best things in life.
Bacchus worship is a complete rejection of prudence. Intoxication (physical or spiritual) recovers intensity destroyed by prudence. The world is beautiful and full of delight and the imagination is free from the prison of prudence.
Bacchic rituals produced enthusiasm, which etymologically means "having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god" (Russell, 16).
Most achievements of men include some form of Bacchic practice of passions overrunning prudence. Bacchus worship is dangerous to life, yet it makes life interesting.
Sober civilization is akin to science. Science itself is dull and not satisfying. Man needs art, passion and religion. Science sets limit on knowledge, not on imagination.
Greek philosophy produced both scientific philosophers and religious philosophers. Plato and Christianity (via Neo-Platonism) fall into the latter category.
The ancient religion of Bacchus was barbaric and repulsive. The form that influenced philosophy was ascetic as it replaced physical intoxication with a mental form. It was spiritualized by Orpheus.
Orpheus is believed to have come from Crete. Egypt influenced Crete, Crete then Greece. Egyptian influence in Greece came indirectly via Crete. Orpheus was a priest/philosopher.
Orpheus is not well-known or certain to have existed, but the religion bearing his name certainly did: the Orphics.
The Orphics believed in:
1) The Transmigration of souls
2) that the soul may receive eternal bliss, temporary punishment or eternal punishment based on one's earthly life
3) purification rituals
4) man was partly of earth, partly of heaven
5) Through purification a man can become one with Bacchus
Orphic tablets gave instructions for the after-life to the dead.
Orphics were ascetic
They sought intoxication solely through enthusiasm.
The Cult of Bacchus was reformed by Orpheous, the Orphic religion by Pythagoras, Pythagoras by Plato and most religious philosophy has incorporated Plato.
Bacchic elements are everywhere in Greek culture:
1) Pythagoras & Plato - feminism
2) Greek Tragedies - pure emotional instictiveness
3) Euripides
4) Athens - The Eleusinian Mysteries
To the Orphic, life is pain and weariness. Their true life was in the stars, but they were bound to the earth. This cycle was ceaseless. The only hope of escape was through purification via asceticism.
A large portion of the Greeks were "passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the willful self-assertion that creates hell" (Russell, 23).
Religious Greeks embraced Orphic religion; rational Greeks despised it.
Russell then goes on to condemn not only Ancient Greek religion, but religion itself: "It looked as if Greek religion were about to enter on the same stage as that already reached by the religions of the East; and, but for the rise of science, it is hard to see what could have checked this tendency. It is usual to say that the Greeks were saved from a religion of the Oriental type by their having no priesthood; but this is to mistake the effect for the cause. Priesthoods do not make dogmas, though they preserve them once they are made; an in the earlier stages of their development, the Oriental peoples had no priesthoods either in the sense intended. It was not so much the absence of a priesthood as the existence of the scientific schools that saved Greece" (Russell, 23).
The Orphics founded 'churches'. The Olympic cults did not. It was the founding of 'churches' that influenced the conception of philosophy as a way of life.
The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1974
Commerce initially arose as piracy.
Writing came to the Greeks via piracy and commerce. It came from the Phoenicians (whose alphabet was derivative of Egypt). Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet. Writing quickened the rise of Ancient Greece.
Homer was the first product of Greece of real merit. He became a staple of Greek learning in Athens and later, all of Greece.
Homer's writings showed the best of Greek religion (the gods of Olympus), but more savage religious cults lay in wait throughout Ancient Greece, coming out in times of weakness and terror.
Primitive religion was tribal, not personal.
Homer's gods were very human, his religion, not very religious. These gods were as or less moral than men.
Fate, necessity and destiny were the objects of utmost power in Homeric religion. Even Zeus was subject to them.
The Olympian gods were never said to create the world, only to subdue and conquer it.
Homer's heroes (men) were as unbehaving as the swashbuckling gods who ruled with indifference to humanity.
When the Homeric epics took their present form, in the late 6th century BC, science, philosophy and mathematics were being born in Greece. Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster lived in this century (allegedly). Cyrus established Persia in the 6th century as well.
The Philosophers endured to escape Persian domination, spreading the enlightened Greek civilization to the Hellenic world.
While Greece eventually fought off the Persians only a few cities advanced all the independent Greek city-states:
1. Sparta - military
2. Corinth - commerce & wealth
3. Arcadia - agriculture
Arcadia was supposedly an idyllic paradise, but it was truly ghastly in their barbaric ways.
1. The bull was too expensive in fertility cults, so the goat replaced it.
2. A clan of self-proclaimed werewolves terrorized with human sacrifice and cannibalism
3. Even Zeus was portrayed as a werewolf: Zeus Lykaios.
Superstition reigned in Arcadia and flourished throughout ancient times.
Religion, as we now perceive it, was not connected to the Olympic gods but to Dionysus or Bacchus. Bacchus was the god of wine and drunkenness. Bacchus originated as a fertility god of Thrace. When the Thracians invented beer they perceived intoxication as divine and attributed it to Bacchus. When wine was invented later, the Thracians loved Bacchus even more.
The cult of Bacchus was not received well by the orthodox of Greece, but was nonetheless established.
Bacchus worship involved ecstasy, brought about by intoxication; partly due to alcohol, but mainly due to mystic frenzy. It was both beautiful and savage.
Greece gravitated to the primitive and instinctive nature of Bacchus that freed them from strict Greek morality.
"The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought" (Russell, 15).
Foresight is working for benefits later and not being controlled by impulses. Impulses are checked by civilization via foresight (self-check), religion, law and custom.
Private property brought about the subjection of women and the creation of a slave class.
Prudence involves sacrificing the present to the future without extremeness. Prudence can easily destroy some of the best things in life.
Bacchus worship is a complete rejection of prudence. Intoxication (physical or spiritual) recovers intensity destroyed by prudence. The world is beautiful and full of delight and the imagination is free from the prison of prudence.
Bacchic rituals produced enthusiasm, which etymologically means "having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god" (Russell, 16).
Most achievements of men include some form of Bacchic practice of passions overrunning prudence. Bacchus worship is dangerous to life, yet it makes life interesting.
Sober civilization is akin to science. Science itself is dull and not satisfying. Man needs art, passion and religion. Science sets limit on knowledge, not on imagination.
Greek philosophy produced both scientific philosophers and religious philosophers. Plato and Christianity (via Neo-Platonism) fall into the latter category.
The ancient religion of Bacchus was barbaric and repulsive. The form that influenced philosophy was ascetic as it replaced physical intoxication with a mental form. It was spiritualized by Orpheus.
Orpheus is believed to have come from Crete. Egypt influenced Crete, Crete then Greece. Egyptian influence in Greece came indirectly via Crete. Orpheus was a priest/philosopher.
Orpheus is not well-known or certain to have existed, but the religion bearing his name certainly did: the Orphics.
The Orphics believed in:
1) The Transmigration of souls
2) that the soul may receive eternal bliss, temporary punishment or eternal punishment based on one's earthly life
3) purification rituals
4) man was partly of earth, partly of heaven
5) Through purification a man can become one with Bacchus
Orphic tablets gave instructions for the after-life to the dead.
Orphics were ascetic
They sought intoxication solely through enthusiasm.
The Cult of Bacchus was reformed by Orpheous, the Orphic religion by Pythagoras, Pythagoras by Plato and most religious philosophy has incorporated Plato.
Bacchic elements are everywhere in Greek culture:
1) Pythagoras & Plato - feminism
2) Greek Tragedies - pure emotional instictiveness
3) Euripides
4) Athens - The Eleusinian Mysteries
To the Orphic, life is pain and weariness. Their true life was in the stars, but they were bound to the earth. This cycle was ceaseless. The only hope of escape was through purification via asceticism.
A large portion of the Greeks were "passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the willful self-assertion that creates hell" (Russell, 23).
Religious Greeks embraced Orphic religion; rational Greeks despised it.
Russell then goes on to condemn not only Ancient Greek religion, but religion itself: "It looked as if Greek religion were about to enter on the same stage as that already reached by the religions of the East; and, but for the rise of science, it is hard to see what could have checked this tendency. It is usual to say that the Greeks were saved from a religion of the Oriental type by their having no priesthood; but this is to mistake the effect for the cause. Priesthoods do not make dogmas, though they preserve them once they are made; an in the earlier stages of their development, the Oriental peoples had no priesthoods either in the sense intended. It was not so much the absence of a priesthood as the existence of the scientific schools that saved Greece" (Russell, 23).
The Orphics founded 'churches'. The Olympic cults did not. It was the founding of 'churches' that influenced the conception of philosophy as a way of life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)