I.D. Greeks 0008

Now, the consideration of the Pre-Socratics, for purely speculative purposes, could be compared to the unraveling of GENESIS into “Elohim,” “Jehovah” and “other” narratives. The context of such narratives, though also speculative, is evoked through separating the intent of the meanings of various words from traditional context, where they are supposedly noncontradictory, into the literal implications of the specific words such as “el elohim” where the definite article “el” is singular and yet the modified noun is plural, something missed in the more simplistic English “the gods” which in being defined by the context of normal historical reference means a polytheistic context whereas in the Hebrew it seems we have an evolutionary in-between state betwixt the implied monotheism of  “el,” actually the name of a single god in several mid-eastern mythologies, and “elohim” which is the plural term “gods”. With the supposed “Jehovah” or “YHWH” narrative, we are supposedly dealing either with a semi-firm monotheistic tradition or another in-between evolutionary situation where there may actually be a number of gods but the narrator is emphasizing only one specific god amongst them is of importance to his hearers, somewhat like Paul with his angels and demons and “Why pay attention to them when Jesus Christ as God is the only object whatsoever of any importance ultimately?.” “El elohim” implies other deities, such as Baal, are real participants in the term and real competitors for attention. And one might well recall the constant threat and turning back to the worship of Baal throughout Israel’s history, also called “El,” a synonym to a degree for the word “lord:, supposedly until the destruction of the northern Israeli tribes and ‘state’, but probably more truthfully the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile where possibly and purely speculatively the Persian conquest made Judaism even more stringently  defined its monotheism as meaning that truly only one god exists as opposed to the dualist systems of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism which Judaism, with its strong sense of the reality of evil as opposed to good, still retained to a large degree thus making both Judaism and Christianity always open to and almost helpless to oppose the dualist theologies of two deities, one evil and one good, such as Mithraism that became so popular amongst Roman legionnaires, Manichaeism, the Bogomils, Catharism, etc., and made theologians like Augustine and Aquinas argue against the reality of evil, while yet saying evil had a negative reality, and yet having to still emphasize the reality of sin, on the other hand, against mystical thinkers who advocated that the only way to free oneself from evil was to free oneself from good also.

The point of this is to emphasize that there are a number of different and totally contradictory traditions of thinking going on throughout the BIBLE. And this just touches upon a few of the most basic undercurrents, not to mention Rahab, god of the sea, Leviathan, possibly the same figure, and the four gods (the directions? the winds of the earth?) portrayed on each of the four walls of the Elephantine temple built by the Jewish mercenary colony started there by the pharaohs and retained by the Persians (in addition to the temple at Heliopolis). And there is also the variations of the tradition of pessimistic skepticism of the books of JOB and ECCLESIASTIES. This is not a simple confusion of different texts saying completely different things as though a moronic librarian was putting together fragmentary texts in randm and meaningless connection but rather the deliberate preservation of oral tradition, sacred not because of the doctrines it expounds, but simply because it is tradition, that it is of value and something good simply because it is tradition no matter what it says theologically and philosophically. The BIBLE was not put together originally based on an editorial criteria of right and wrong, good or evil, of what was theologically acceptable or unacceptable. And, although those criteria did arise later on, originally the only standard was if it is traditional it is valuable, and this is still reflected in the text we have today because that original text was judged sacred because it was traditional, not because it was judged doctrinally correct.

Now, in Aristotle, one sees a very clear and deliberate judgment of the Pre-Socratic tradition according to the standards he judges as correct at his present moment and that he is projecting, with its whole present context, upon a distant past that shared little or none of his criteria. It is possible that we misjudge him saying so because we in turn are casting our present context of ‘rational’ judgment upon him, and that what he is really saying is “This is what their words mean to us now outside their context and purely in ours” and not “This is what their words should have meant to them then.” The second view is the traditional way of reading Aristotle, and it is only recently we have become aware that Aristotle may be writing in a fundamentally different context than what we consider the universal unity of the meaning of “rationality” throughout space and time. In Plato, there seems to be an awareness of the judgment of traditional thinkers that both says in what ways the application of traditional values in specific instances now, i.e. the applicability of the statements of poets in guiding current moral and political action, versus the realization that the loosing of oral traditional thought we are loosing something of immense value (the PHAEDRUS).

One consideration that should be taken into account is the nature of poetry. It is obviously something of great value to both Plato and Aristotle yet it is also something they repeatedly attack in their own ways as highly detrimental. In this, one must remember the Pre-Socratics are among these ‘poets’ along with Alkeon and Sappho and Pindar. They have not been separated from poetry in general as they will be in later Greek literary and philosophical tradition. And yet they are all considered as teachers of knowledge being judged by the objective criteria of Plato’s dialectic. They had, in a certain sense, taken on the status of Pop singers of today where the emotions are always swayed and yet ‘true’ wisdom is rarely conveyed. Homer, of course, is the primary exemplar of what is wrong in traditional oral poetic thinking and seems to be the primary target of Plato’s attacks in the REPUBLIC and the ION as well as other dialogues. But it must also be realized by Plato’s time the text of Homer had become fixed in the most extreme form of alphabetic writing. The nature of the epic poet’s performance from creative memory adapted to the present-at-hand audience making it alive and meaningful had been changed into the mindless recitation of a fixed text by a rhetor. The social situation of poetry had completely changed from one of adapting traditional laws and mores to a new situation into one of trying to impose fixed and static and therefore irrational laws from an older age onto the present time in a totally different context. Much the same occurred with the BIBLE. In other words, judged by a clear eye in the present situation in the pure and unambiguous light of cold reason, the ‘poets’ as lawgivers seemed either ridiculously silly or downright tyrannical and sadistic. And when traditional oral poetic thought became both sacred AND fixed, this was exactly the true and real evaluation: the blind imposition of laws and mores that has no relationship whatsoever to the questions and needs of living people.

Now, another consideration: The Greek “axial age” as Karl Jaspers called it, the supposedly unique explosion of Greek intelligence and creativity might need to be reconsidered. In the West, there is just that one event that is judged as the key event explicatory all of world history. Nehru objected to this so much, he wrote a history of the world that made the West as we know it merely a sideshow of what he portrayed as the real course of world history. Could there have been many intellectual and creative explosions like “the axial age” of the Greeks? But, to be honest and frank, there is no counterpart elsewhere to the dynamism and rapidity of change that the Greek explosion brought about AND is still going on. Its success has become the standard of its valuation. What “success” is, however, is no longer seriously considered. That which ‘wins’ is right and proper and that which loses is wrong and should be forgotten as impractical and inappropriate to the modern world. However, necessarily and fundamentally implicit in the concept of “success” is the concept of goal or, much more appropriately but much, much more distasteful, the concept of end. What is the end-goal of world-wide ‘success’ as an ideology? Why does that sound like a totally ludicrous and utterly inappropriate and off-centered question? And if it is off-center, then what EXACTLY is on-center? Why did Nietzsche consider himself a Buddhist? Why did Heidegger consider the deliberate acceptance of nihilism and the negation of all values as the only real value: Freedom? Why did Hegel and Sartre seemingly confuse the concept “human being” as being both all of humanity and yet at the same time the irreducible individual ontologically, epistemologically, and solipsistically utterly alone?