Heidegger

14/09/2007 Richard Sansom writes:

Hi Jud,

Your lengthy remarks on the ancient Greek folks, as to their importance and
the degree to which we should revere them, reminds me of much I have read
regarding their collective personality and social priorities, etc. First, I
believe the ancient Greeks were primarily of the following caste: They had no
*religion,* or the kind of religion that the Hindus, Muslims or Hebrews had, but
only a pantheon of very *human* gods who fought and argued and behaved like
spoiled children atop their conclave on Mount Olympus. They were perceived as
a group of distant, figures who actually had little to do with the goings on
of the universe and were indeed subject to its laws, but simply appeared to
meddle in the affairs of humans —especially on the battle field. The Greeks
were not bound by any proscriptions from the gods – the latter were merely
human-like immortals, living more or less human-like lives.

Hi Richard:
Sorry for the slight delay with this response but as usual your comments
stimulated me to reply at greater length.
I think you have given a very fair precis and overview assessment of the
Greeks here. Have you noticed that before the rise of the major religions - the
monotheistic ones anyway - there did not appear to be any *religious wars.?*
Am I correct in this assumption? Gary might be able to help here too? Wars
then seemed to be all about building empires, defending territory, stealing
goods and women and internecine attempts at overthrowing Kings and ruling
families. Religion does not seem to have been a contributory component of warfare
in the ancient world, in the way it developed later under Christianity and
Islam do you agree?

Richard:
Ancient Greeks were generally cruel, selfish, extremely egocentric,
concerned with strength, valor, winning at all cost, and generally could not care
less about things like *kindness* or *equity.*

Jud:
Yes, and that is what is so hard to understand, in that they [apparently]
were the first to set up republics and arrogate power to the demos [but not the
slaves] and they usually had about 500 citizens acting as the [democratic]
jury in major trials [see trial of Socrates.] In ancient Athens, in the
Archaic period, when you thought someone had hurt you or stolen something from you,
you could drag him or her in front of an aristocrat (if you were strong
enough) and then you could try to convince the aristocrat to order the person to
be beaten or killed. One can easily imagine the abuses of justice that came
from that.

Do you think that the later Greeks instituted their reforms because just
like it is in our modern world humankind [though intensely selfish] they
realised that they had to be willing to forego some freedoms on the understanding
that they enjoy the power to work, play, act or speak, or think without
externally imposed restraints and protection of the state. But why choose
democracy? The answer I think was a desire for fairness and evenness of treatment for
citizens - but not for the slaves they depended upon or for guys like
Socrates who died for daring to posit another view of politics or those damned gods
- would you agree?

Richard:
But I believe that the dearth of what we generally call religious sentiments
actually laid the foundation for more introspective and original thought,
and especially thought that, far aside from the gods, led to speculations about
things the gods did not care at all about. The fact that the gods did not
lead them to the introspections of the likes of Pythagoras or Thales or Plato,
etc. is telling in terms of what happened in ancient minds as to the
connection of the mind to the world.

Jud:
I think you are right again Richard, in fact what you say blends in with
what is on my mind at the moment. I continually attack religion which is my
bete noir - a monster I recognised and marked as the main enemy of happiness
and goodwill through my early experience of the murderous infighting of
Catholics and Protestants on the Liverpool streets of my childhood. But AM aware
that the reification of abstraction can, in certain circumstances, be
beneficial. We can see it in Greece. For all Socrates’ failings at least he latched
on to the benefit of a dialogic examination of reified abstract *objects* as
an acceptable and crowd-drawing method of doing philosophy. Putting it bluntly
it was his way of singing for his supper.

Why such intelligent minds did not recognise the different nature of
proper nouns as opposed to abstractions, which being nominata-less pointed
nowhere, as opposed to words like amphora which pointed to a solid object full of
a liquid which could make you wet or drunk - I have no idea. It can only be
that due to the hereditary nature of reification the abstract nature of
certain words was not recognised even to the Pre-Socratics and the ontological
confusion was interiorised by those that came later from birth onwards, much as
it is today. Nowadays it is so firmly embedded in our language that
ninety-nine people out of a hundred are not even aware of it, and it is for this very
reason that demagogues like Osama Bin Laden, Bush, and Bullshitter Blair and
Hitler etc can get away with it - never mind the evil pederastic clergy, and
radio-evangalistas, evangelizing con-men and their ilk.

Richard:
I think we do owe some debt to the ancient Greeks. We [in the West] have not
intellectually grown out of the Vedas or the Old Testament, but rather from
the thinking vector laid down by our ancient Greek intellectual progenitors
and we should honor them in proportion to that debt.

Jud:
I agree that the Greeks should be respected for their intellectual
contribution to the world, but in my mind that honour should not be in the nature of
a *blanket respect* for their culture, which was the habit of Heidegger and
the Nazis for example, but a discriminative honour – an identification of what
was progressive and what remained primitive. Some of their ideas were evil
and some were good. I refer of course to slavery and the ease with which a
master could take an escaping slave’s life. This was high-lighted in one of
Plato’s dialogues, when the main protagonist decided to pursue his own father
for such a crime.

This negative reification of slavery was inherited from the Greeks and
perpetuated in western society right down until the nineteenth century when in
the Southern States, where a runaway slave could be killed if he resisted
recapture etc. As well as homosexuality being institutionalised, whereby a male
youth, if admired, felt an obligation to submit to the attentions of an older
man. Nor was the majority of woman’s lot much improved by the Greek *demos
rule.* As usual Richard, you have wisely already recognised this factor and
made the point that:

*This does not mean they are holy or without fault. It merely means they are
to be respected and understood for the foundations they have provided –
nothing more.. While Nietzsche, Hitler and Heidegger may have been misguided as
to the true value of the ancient Greeks, surely theirs is not the only
interpretation that can be chosen. We can take from the Greeks what we choose and
should disparage those who chose wrongly.*

But many are unaware of the scale of the evil that was ancient Greece.
Prostitution was a part of daily life. In the more important cities, and
particularly the many ports, it employed a significant proportion of the population
and represented one of the top levels of economic activity. It was far from
being clandestine; cities did not condemn brothels, and they existed in plain
view.
In Athens, the legendary lawmaker Solon is credited with having created
state brothels with regulated prices. Prostitution involved both sexes
differently; women of all ages and young men were prostitutes, for a predominantly male
clientele. Pseudo-Demosthenes in the 4th century BCE proclaimed in front
of an assembly of citizens “we have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to
provide for our daily needs, and our spouses to give us legitimate children and
to be the faithful guardians of our homes” (Against Naeara, 122). Reality was
somewhat less of a caricature, the Solonian brothels provide sexual
satisfaction accessible to all[5], regardless of income. In the same light, Solon
erected, thanks to the taxes he levied on brothels, a temple to Aphrodite
Pandemos (literally “Aphrodite of all the people”). Even if the truth of all of the
historical anecdotes is somewhat dubious, it is quite clear that the
Athenians considered prostitution to be part of their democracy.

Richard:
Think for a moment about what might have happened had they not had the
curiosity and courage to not only ignore the gods, in terms of what and how they
could think, but to ask questions that had never been asked before.

Jud:
In my self-assumed role of Devil’s advocate I must point out that the fact
that the very need for courage to ignore the gods and be outspoken in terms
of what and how they could think, does reveal the presence of a greater
society which condemned and resisted such intellectual curiosity. One of the
charges against Socrates was that he spurned the gods in some way, which is not
spelt out in Plato’s text. As usual it was religion that lay behind this evil,
negative facet of Greek life, but where in the history of mankind can we find
a society that was not so stricken with the blight of ass-headed,
reactionary religion?

Richard:
Think what might have happened had the prophets of other systems of thought
taken over and thwarted the creativity of the ancient Greeks? It is all well
and good to disparage Plato for his limiting vision of the mind, but read his
writings deeply along with the dramatists Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides
who were psychologists far in advance of Freud and showed more about the
workings of the human mind and human relations than so many who followed them –
especially the Christians and their long dominion of fear, hatred, murder,
torture and the urge toward such a dark and limiting dogma.

Jud:
In fact I find the writers you mention much more illuminating and
progressive that Plato himself, who seemed obsessed with
establishing/maintaining/improving a slave-based society which in modern terms we would equate with
fascism. You are aware that he advocated lying to the lower-classes just as
Goofball Joseph Goebbels did. I will try and find the reference, which must be in
The Republic somewhere.

Richard:
Surely there is nothing wrong in elevating our philosophical and
intellectual forbears – we all need, or at least take pleasure in heroes.

Jud:
The intellectual and political heroes yes. But very selectively in my
opinion – not warts and all. There is just at this moment a Chinese exhibition
of the famous *Terracotta* or *Buried Army* with selected examples of the
ceramic soldiers and other earthenware artifacts of the era. Doubtless it is
one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and provides
an insight into China’s First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, and his legacy.
Unfortunately although we British have done a wonderful job of the presentation of
these examples sent over from China, with soft, dramatic lighting, sensitive
ethnic background music and well-thought-out public access with close
quarter inspection possible – there is no mention of the incredible cruelty of the
man-beast Qin Shihuangdi himself who was responsible for this phenomenon
which out-classes the ancient Egyptians in its vastness of scale and the
immensity of its egotism. According to a TV programme last night he was responsible
for atrocities which puts even Attila the Hun and the Germans to shame for he
was responsible for burying thousands of people alive and much, much more
during his evil career. It reminds me of the juvenility that is post-modernism
- never mind the author - just look at his toy soldiers.

End of Part One

Posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
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