greeks, fore and aft
September 28th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: being _kata symbebaekos_ :: Etwas Raetselhaftes — Somewhat perplexing :: just plain philosophy, not religion (GA55 Heraklit) :: being _kata symbebaekos_**
“The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that they
almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their
cloud-capp’d towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging
for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of Greek
mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of Greek
thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so swiftly and
completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek material only to hand,
we might never have marked the transition. Happily, however, we are not
confined within the Greek paradise. Wider fields are open to us; our subject
is not only Greek, but ancient art and ritual. We can turn at once to the
Egyptians, a people slower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish
but more instructive operations. To one who is studying the development of
the human mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminating
than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, too advanced,
too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive.”
[from ‘Ancient Art and Ritual’, Jane Ellen Harrison 1913]
I am reading Harrison’s text with respect to understanding better how for
2500 years drama (straight and musical theatre in the west) has been based
upon the ancient greeks’ ‘art and ritual’ (and especially with respect to my
ongoing heideggerian opera project). And, I was struck by the above quote
(early on in her excellent book) in its similarity in tone and content to
some of Heidegger’s explicated thoughts on the greeks. For instance, that
they were brilliantly close to an ‘intuitive’ grasp of be-ing but they
themselves did not see it that way and that others (both temporally fore
{for Harrison and her purpose} and aft {Heidegger and others of our time})
were better able (being slower, hindsighted and more analytical perhaps) to
see and elaborate what the greeks grasped but did not subject.
Could Harrison have influenced Heidegger? Would he have likely to have read
the superb greek scholar? Whatever, I’m plunging further into this splendid
text…
Is everyone not engaged in the current display of sophistry on holiday or
just waiting it out for godot to appear?
Anyway, rearguards to all
michaelPooh
