(N.B. This entry follows from the previous one, titled: “An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War”) Pierre Clastres states that “primitive societies […] invest themselves totally in their religious and ritual life, which unfolds as a continuously repeated affirmation of the communal Self,” and hence that “[e]ach ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if…
Category: Greece
Mythology’s Oblivion
An epoch – any epoch – can be assessed by both the quantity and the quality of its gods. Christianity has accustomed us to imagine a single god: an all-powerful Father as the hypostasis of human hope; and once that god has been declared dead, the two only gods we still seem capable of evoking…
Enigma and Early Greek Thinking
People say that [Homer] died on the island of Ios when he found himself undone because he could not solve the riddle of the fishing boys. The riddle was: “We left whatever we caught and carry whatever we didn’t”. They were obscuring in riddle the fact they actually had discarded whichever of the lice they…
The Poetics of Aidos: On Pindar, Parmenides, and Bacchylides
(N.B. This entry complements our entry “Aidos Before What Is: On Homer and Parmenides“) Michel Briand has recently noticed a number of poetic parallelisms between Pindar and Parmenides, as regards the images they both employ.(⊙) Yet in our view, their affinity is even deeper. Take, for example, Parmenides’s well-known fragment (our translation): τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ…
Aidos Before What Is: On Homer and Parmenides
(N.B. This entry complements our entries “Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus” and “Hybris’s Reverse: On Heraclitus and Pindar”) this gleam (kosmos), the same for all things, neither the gods nor men have made it, but it always was, is, and will be an ever-living fire measuredly kindling and measuredly going out – Heraclitus, DK…
Hybris’s Reverse: On Heraclitus and Pindar
(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “Hybris over What Is: On Aeschylus.”) Heraclitus (fl. 504–501 BCE), Pindar (c. 518–438), and Parmenides (fl. 475) were roughly contemporary with one another; and with Aeschylus (c. 525–455). Pindar is commonly considered to be a poet, Aeschylus a tragedian, and Heraclitus and Parmenides philosophers. But this is…
Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus
(N.B. This entry follows from the conclusion to the previous one, titled “Τhe Last God.”) hybris (“excess”) must be extinguished more than a fire (ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαῖήν) – Heraclitus, DK B43(⊛) “Prometheus,” προμηθεύς (pro-metheus) means “forethought” (from προ- [pro-, “fore-”] + μανθάνω [manthano, to “think”]). It is paramount to make clear the…
The Last God
It can be said that, in its fragility, the last in the sense of the last flash of something remains for us as a claim even after it passes. Such is its power. Entitled “The Last God” (»Der letze Gott«), the penultimate chapter of Heidegger’s posthumously-published Contributions to Philosophy opens with a reflection similar to…
The Other(s) – In Homage to Borges
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me… – Borges We have already mentioned in a different context a passage in Jean Oury’s Création et schizophrénie in which, inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient evinces her lack of self-recognition: upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees no…
Dionysos and Apollo
I Dionysos and Apollo Dionysos and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassos mountains overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Krissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysos was worshiped there in the winter, whereas…