Greek Mythology and Philosophy

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonize about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. Another peculiar characteristic of the human being is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.

 Humans fall easily into despair and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value. Logos is the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. Logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. Mythos, in contrast, is not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.

 All mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it. Belief in this invisible but more powerful reality, sometimes called the world of the gods, is a basic theme of mythology. According to premodern people considered both modes essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. While logos can tell us how to grow crops, build cathedrals, and split atoms, mythos, often in circuitous ways, speak of why we do these things. The ancient Greeks provided Western culture with both a mythology that would have an impact all the way to the present day and a naturalistic, proto-scientific approach to reality that would serve as the seed from which would spring modern science and philosophy.

Greek Mythology
Greek mythology refers to the body of stories belonging to the Ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. Mythology was at the heart of everyday life in ancient Greece. Greeks regarded mythology as a part of their history. They used myth to explain natural phenomena, cultural variations, traditional enmities and friendships. These accounts were initially disseminated in an oralpoetic tradition; the Greek myths are known today primarily from Greek literature.

 The oldest known literary sources, the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, focus on events surrounding the Trojan War. Two poems by Homer's near contemporary Hesiod, the Theogony and the Works and Days, contain accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the succession of human ages, the origin of human woes, and the origin of sacrificial practices.

 Additionally, myth was central to classical Athenian drama. The tragic playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides took their plots from the age of heroes and the Trojan War. Many of the great tragic stories (i.e. Agamemnon and his children, Oedipus, Jason, Medea etc.) took on their classic form in these tragic plays.

 Greek mythology unfolds like a phase in the development of the world and of man. The mythological history of the world can be divided in 3 or 4 broader periods: The myths of origin or age of gods (Theogonies, "births of gods"): myths about the origins of the world, the gods, and the human race. The age when gods and mortals mingled freely: stories of the early interactions between gods, demigods, and mortals. The age of heroes (heroic age), where divine activity was more limited. The last and greatest of the heroic legends is the stories of the Trojan War and after (regarded by some researchers as a separate fourth period).

 "Myths of origin" or "creation myths" represent an attempt to render the universe comprehensible in human terms and explain the origin of the world. The most widely accepted account of beginning of things as reported by Hesiod's Theogony, starts with Chaos, a yawning nothingness. Out of the void emerged Gaia (the Earth) and some other primary divine beings: Eros (Love), the Abyss (the Tartarus), and the Erebus. Without male assistance Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilised her. From that union were born, first, the Titans: six males and six females.

 Cronus became the ruler of the gods with his sister-wife Rhea as his consort and the other Titans became his court. Cronus was confronted by his son, Zeus. Zeus, persuaded by his mother, challenged him to war for the kingship of the gods. At last, with the help of the Cyclopes (whom Zeus freed from Tarturus), Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.

 According to Classical-era mythology, after the overthrow of the Titans, the new pantheon of gods and goddesses was confirmed. Among the principal Greek deities were the Olympians, residing atop Mount Olympus under the eye of Zeus. Regardless of their underlying forms, the ancient Greek gods have many fantastic abilities; most significantly, the gods are not affected by disease, and can be wounded only under highly unusual circumstances.

 The Greeks considered immortality as the distinctive characteristic of their gods; this immortality, as well as unfading youth, was insured by the constant use of nectar and ambrosia, by which the divine blood was renewed in their veins. Each god descends from his or her own genealogy, pursues differing interests, has a certain area of expertise, and is governed by a unique personality.

 Most gods were associated with specific aspects of life. For example, Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, Ares was the god of war, Hades the god of the dead, and Athena the goddess of wisdom and courage. Some deities, such as Apollo (the sun god) and Dionysus (the god of wine and intoxication) , revealed complex personalities and mixtures of functions.

 Bridging the age when gods lived alone and the age when divine interference in human affairs was limited was a transitional age in which gods and men moved together. These were the early days of the world when the groups mingled more freely than they did later. Most of these tales were later told by Ovid's Metamorphoses and they are often divided in two thematic groups: tales of love, and tales of punishment.

 The age in which the heroes lived is known as the heroic age. The epic and genealogical poetry created cycles of stories clustered around particular heroes or events and established the family relationships between the heroes of different stories. In contrast to the age of gods, during the heroic age the roster of heroes is never given fixed and final form; great gods are no longer born, but new heroes can always be raised up from the army of the dead.

 Traditionally, Heracles was the son of Zeus and Alcmene, granddaughter of Perseus. His fantastic solitary exploits, with their many folk tale themes, provided much material for popular legend. In art and literature Heracles was represented as an enormously strong man of moderate height; his characteristic weapon was the bow but frequently also the club.

 Other members of this earliest generation of heroes, such as Perseus, Deucalion, Theseus and Bellerophon, have many traits in common with Heracles. Like him, their exploits are solitary, fantastic and border on fairy tale, as they slay monsters such as the Chimera (by Bellerophon) and Medusa (by Perseus).

 The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (epic poet, scholar, and director of the Library of Alexandria) tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis. In the Argonautica, Jason is impelled on his quest by king Pelias, who receives a prophecy that a man with one sandal would be his nemesis. Jason loses a sandal in a river, arrives at the court of Pelias, and the epic is set in motion. Nearly every member of the next generation of heroes, as well as Heracles, went with Jason in the ship Argo to fetch the Golden Fleece.

 Greek mythology culminates in the Trojan War, fought between the Greeks and Troy, and its aftermath. In Homer's works the chief stories have already taken shape and substance, and individual themes were elaborated later, especially in Greek drama. The Trojan War acquired also a great interest for the Roman culture because of the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero, whose journey from Troy led to the founding of the city that would one day become Rome, is recounted in Virgil's Aeneid .

 The Trojan War Cycle, a collection of epic poems, starts with the events leading up to the Trojan War: (Eris and the golden apple of Kallisti, the Judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis). To recover Helen, the Greeks launched a great expedition under the overall command of Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon, king of Argos or Mycenae, but The Trojans refused to return Helen.

 The Iliad, which is set in the tenth year of the war, tells of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, who was the finest Greek warrior, and the consequent deaths in battle of Achilles' friend Patroclus and Priam's eldest son, Hector. After Hector's death the Trojans were joined by two exotic allies, Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and Memnon, king of the Ethiopians and son of the dawn-goddess Eos.[61] Achilles killed both of these, but Paris then managed to kill Achilles with an arrow.

 With Athena's help, the Greeks built the Trojan Horse. Despite the warnings of Priam's daughter Cassandra, the Trojans were persuaded by Sinon, a Greek who feigned desertion, to take the horse inside the walls of Troy as an offering to Athena. At night the Greek fleet returned, and the Greeks from the horse opened the gates of Troy. In the total sack that followed, Priam and his remaining sons were slaughtered; the Trojan women passed into slavery in various cities of Greece.

 The adventurous homeward voyages of the Greek Odysseus and the Trojan Aeneas were told in two epics, Homer's Odyssey and Virgils Aeneid.

Greek Myth: Prometheus and Narcissus

On the one hand, ancient Greek mythology provides us with elaborate, fantastic stories about how the cosmos and the world came to be and how the forces that rule the universe are manifestations of divine beings. For example, there are any number of creation myths: the Pelasgian, the Homeric, the Orphic, the Olympian. All of them attempt to explain the emergence of all that is in terms of the deeds of gods and goddesses interacting with one another.

The Pelasgian creation Myth

In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of all Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves. She danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! The great serpent Ophion.

 Eurynome danced to warm herself, wildly and more wildly, until Ophion, grown lustful, coiled about those divine limbs and was moved to couple with her. Now, the North Wind, who is also called Boreas, fertilizes . . . So Eurynome was likewise got with child. Next, she assumed the form of a dove, brooding on the waves and, in due process of time, laid the Universal Egg. At her bidding, Ophion coiled seven times about this egg, until it hatched and split in two. Out tumbled all the things that exist, her children: sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures.

 While these kinds of myths gave the ancient Greeks some sense of how forces external to them operated, other myths were more concerned with explaining the human condition itself, that is, the forces at work within the individual.

The Greeks had a goddess of wisdom (Athena), a goddess of love (Aprodite), a god of war (Ares), and so forth, that helped explain the powerful emotional and psychological forces at work within the human being.
Yet other myths served as cautionary tales about behavior to be avoided if one is to live the good life. While these myths are not historically accurate accounts of real things that happened to people, they nevertheless constitute a kind of true lie, in the sense that they frequently reveal something psychologically insightful about the human condition. Two such myths are the myth of Prometheus and the myth of Narcissus.

The Myth of Prometheus

Prometheus was the Titan son who sided with Zeus during the Titanic wars. Zeus was so grateful for the help of Prometheus during the war, that he asked Prometheus (and his brother Epimetheus) to cover the task of creating mankind. Prometheus, whose name means forethought, was very wise, wiser even than the gods, but Epimetheus, which means afterthought, was a scatterbrained person who invariably followed his first impulse and then changed his mind.

 Before making men, Epimetheus said to Prometheus: "Let me distribute, and do you inspect. He gave all the best gifts to the animals, strength and swiftness and courage and shrewd cunning, fur and feathers and wings and shells and so on until no good was left for men, no protective covering and no quality to make them a match for the beasts. Epimetheus, who, not being very wise, forgot that he had distributed among the brute animals all the qualities which he had to give and when he came to man, who was still unprovided, he was terribly perplexed. Now while he was in this perplexity, Prometheus came to inspect the distribution, and he found that the other animals were suitably furnished, but that man alone was naked and shoeless, and had neither bed nor arms of defense.

 Prometheus,not knowing how he could devise mans salvation, stole the mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athene, and fire with them (they could neither have been acquired nor used without fire), and gave them to man. In this way man was supplied with the means of life. But Prometheus is said to have been afterwards prosecuted for theft, owing to the blunder of Epimetheus.

Prometheus in Western Art

Prometheus in Western Art

Prometheus in Western Art

 According to contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, if we want to understand the question of technology as it poses itself to us today as men of the 21st century, we must go back to ancient Greek mythology, not only to philosophy, but to the tragic Promethean mythology of the ancient Greeks. This ancient Greek myth poses the problem precisely and correctly, in mythological terms of course, and in terms of primitive Greek religion, of tragic religion. But, incredibly, it poses the question as it must be posed. So, Prometheus will steal fire, in other words technology, and also the intelligence of Athena. With Prometheuss gifts, man will be a mortal living being condemned to fabricate prostheses. According to the myth, man has no essential qualities. He is obliged to endlessly equip himself with new artifices for survival. And since they have no quality defined in advance, men enter into conflict with one another, to decide on their quality, on their future.

 Stiegler: The animal, the zebra, the gazelle of which I spoke a moment ago, the cow, the lion, they have no question to pose concerning 'Who are we?' It's not a question for an animal. But for man, it's an eternal question. Who are we? Should we develop computers? Should we land on the moon? Raze that forest? Build that dam on Hlderlin's river? Should we do that?

As soon as I am technical, I am questioning. This is why Zeus is forced to send Hermes. Because men want to make war against each other. They ask themselves questions, they don't agree on the answers. So they massacre one another. Thus the famous civil war which inspires so much fear in the Greeks.
Zeus will send Hermes, the knowledge of dike, justice, to prevent men from annihilating one another.

The Myth of Narcissus and Modern Narcissism

In Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of a graceful and pretty nymph named Echo who loved Narcissus in vain. Narcissus' beauty was so unmatched that he felt it was godlike in scope, comparable to the beauty of Bacchus and Apollo. As a result, Narcissus spurned Echo's affections until, despairing, she faded away to nothing but a faint, plaintive whisper. To teach the vain boy a lesson, the goddess Nemesis doomed Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection in Echo's pond. Entranced by his own beauty and enamored with his own image, Narcissus lay on the bank of the river and wasted away staring down into the water. Different versions of the story state that Narcissus, after scorning his male suitors, then was cursed by the gods to love the first male that he should lay his eyes on. While walking in the gardens of Echo he discovered the pond of Echo and saw a reflection of himself in the water. Falling deeply in love with himself, he leaned closer and closer to his reflection in the water, eventually falling into the pond and drowning.

Narcissus in Western Art

Narcissus and Western Art

 This ancient Greek myth has prompted many a modern thinker to examine what it says about us, about the human condition to this very day. For example, Sigmund Freud wrote a landmark essay (On Narcissism) where he posited that the Greeks had touched upon a core feature of the human psyche that persists in all people: the psychological concept of self-love (narcissism). In moderation, narcissism is said to be an essential component of a healthy psyche. In psychology and psychiatry, excessive narcissism can become pathological, or manifest itself as a severe personality disorder such as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). In common usage, the word is often used as a pejorative, denoting vanity, conceit, egotism or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others.

 Since Freuds essay appeared in 1913, many writers from many different academic fields have explored the topic in their works. For example, Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism, which appeared in 1979. Lasch defines a narcissistic culture as one in which every activity and relationship is defined by the hedonistic need to acquire the symbols of material wealth, this becoming the only expression of rigid, yet covert, social hierarchies. In such a society of constant competition there can be no allies, and little transparency. The threats to acquisitions of social symbols are so numerous, varied and frequently incomprehensible, that defensiveness, as well as competitiveness, becomes a way of life. Any real sense of community is undermined -- or even destroyed -- to be replaced by virtual equivalents that strive, unsuccessfully, to synthesize a sense of community.

 In modern society, from the nineteenth century to the present day, certain types of individuals have stood out as the embodiments of this excessive level of narcissism. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the dandy. The dandy, over time, morphed and evolved into our contemporary version known as the metrosexual.

The Dandy
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and the cultivation of leisurely hobbies. A dandy seeks the perfection of his person; as the painters spirit is reflected in his canvas, so the dandy is also reflected in his own mirror. Refinement is the key to the dandy refinement in all things regarding his person: his clothes, his motions, his wit, and his tastes. The dandy is very much a snob, but it is a snobbery based not on pedigree, but on style.

 The practice of dandyism first appeared in the revolutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. In that period, a young man entered into the fashionable life of London and became the gold standard for dandyism: Beau Brummel. Brummel became an early version of the celebrity, famous primarily for his wit and the way he revolutionized mens fashion. During his heyday, Brummels dictatorship on fashion and etiquette reigned supreme. His habits of dress and fashion were much imitated, especially in France. French dandies were sometimes celebrated in revolutionary terms as self-created men who consciously designed their own personalities and broke radically with the traditions of the past. By the way they dressed and lived, French dandies sought to convey their contempt for and superiority to common, bourgeois society. One such individual was Charles Baudelaire, who put forth one of the most memorable literary essays on dandyism in a larger work entitled The Painter of Modern Life.

The Painter of Modern Life: excerpts on dandyism These beings [dandies] have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking. Thus they possess, to their hearts' content, and to a vast degree, both time and money, without which fantasy, reduced to the state of ephemeral reverie, can scarcely be translated into action.

 If I speak of love in the context of dandyism, the reason is that love is the natural occupation of men of leisure. But the dandy does not consider love as a special aim in life. If I have mentioned money, the reason is that money is indispensable to those who make an exclusive cult of their passions, but the dandy does not aspire to wealth as an object in itself; an open bank credit could suit him just as well; he leaves that squalid passion to vulgar mortals.

Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. Thus, in his eyes, enamored as he is above all of distinction, perfection in dress consists in absolute simplicity, which is, indeed, the best way of being distinguished.

 Fastidious, unbelievables, beaux, lions or dandies: whichever label these men claim for themselves, one and all stem from the same origin, all share the same characteristic of opposition and revolt; all are representatives of what is best in human pride, of that need, which is too rare in the modern generation, to combat and destroy triviality. Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited. In the confusion of such times, a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured 'outsiders', but all of them richly endowed with native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break down because established on the most precious, the most indestructible faculties, on the divine gifts that neither work nor money can give. Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.