Selections on Aion and Chronos [αἰών; χρόνος] in Onians’ Origins of European Thought

 

by Corry Shores

 

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The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate

 

Selections on Aion and Chronos

[αἰών; χρόνος]

 

 

Brief summary:

In ancient Greek mythology, philosophy, and literature, there are (at least) two important names for time. First note some cosmological ideas. Around the world flows a river, Ὠκεανός, which is the source of all generation in the world. And, a body’s procreative element is the ψυχή, which is both a liquid and also appears under the form of a serpent. Likewise, Ὠκεανός is thought to be the primal cosmic procreative power or ψυχή, being as well both liquid and serpent. The Orphic version of this serpent is called Χρόνος, which is also the word for the usual meaning of “time”. Euripides also names the circling stream around the universe as Χρόνος. And for the Orphics, Χρόνος is mated to Ἀνάγκῃ, which means “necessity”. For the ancient Greeks, time and fate are also understood in terms of movements circling around the earth. The other word for time is αἰών, which like Χρόνος, is understood in terms of the waters and a serpent circling around the world. In Homer, αἰών means a couple things. It can mean a vital fluid from our marrow or cerebral system that comes out as tears and sweat. As such, it can be understood as the fluid that we are drained of as we age and that we lose when we die. So αἰών also means “lifetime”. As a fluid that gives life, it is thus related to the Ὠκεανός, which is also the life-fluid of the world, and, as a circling movement around the world, is time and fate. For Pindar αἰών is both the life-fluid and a compelling destiny or δαίμωνthat controls life. Αἰών, then, also means “eternity.” And Heraclitus uses the word to mean “the power controlling the changes of the world” (Onians’ words, p.251). In Heraclitus’ conception of αἰών as this cosmic principle, it is like a child playing a game.

 

 

 

Selections

[The following are quotations]

 

On the assumption that its nearest cognates are ἀεί and aevum it is generally agreed that the fundamental meaning for Homer and later is ‘period of existence’ and so, from the meaning ‘lifetime’, that of ‘life’ is derived. But the passages, from which this is inferred for Homer, can be put thus: “If I go home, my αἰών will exist for a long time.’

(200, citing Homer Il. IX, 415f)

 

And elsewhere in Homer αἰών clearly is not a period of time but a ‘thing’ of some kind like ψυχή persisting through time, life itself or a vital substance necessary to living. At death ‘ψυχή and αἰών leave’³ a man, or we are told merely that ‘αἰών leaves’⁴ him or that he ‘is deprived’ of it⁵ or of it and ψυχή.⁶

(200, citing, 3: Il. XVI, 453. 4: Il. V, 385; Od. VII, 224. 5: Il. XXII, 25. 6: Od. IX, 523f).

 

Later also, as we know, tears and sweat were thought to be the same liquid.² It is this liquid which Homer calls αἰών.

(p202, citing the Problemata, 884 b 22ff).

 

‘nor were his eyes ever dry of tears, but there flowed down the sweet αἰών as he lamented for his return’ …. This has hitherto been ignored and paraphrased away: ‘his life ebbed’, etc., but its natural interpretation in fact is that the liquid flowing down was αἰών and that it is the same liquid which is said to be ‘wasted’ when husband or wife weeps.

(201, citing maybe Od. V, 151 ff.)

 

This liquid was, we saw, thought to be concentrated particularly in the head, to be dependent upon the cerebro-spinal fluid and ‘marrow’.

(205)

 

For Aristotle 'the living creature is by nature moist (“liquid”, ὑγρόν) and warm, and to live is to be such, but old age is cold and dry and so is what has died... it is inevitable that one who grows old should dry up’.² It was thus natural to regard the liquid (αἰών) as the life, the stock of life inevitably diminishing with the passage of time, the measure of lifetime like the diminishing sand in the glass.

(215, citing De Long, et Brev. Vit. 466 a, 19ff. Cf. De Gener. Anim. 784 a, 34, etc.)

 

The thought traced that it is the ‘fluid’ in which life is and by which life is generated not only appears from Homer onwards in the recognition and worship of rivers as the generative powers (see pp. 229 ff.), but it also has its cosmic correlate.

(247)

 

For Homer the ‘generation’ (γένεσις) ‘of all’ (πάντεσσι) is the river ‘Ὠκεανός’¹ (Okeanos) which surrounds the earth and is associated with ‘mother Tethys’.

(247, citing Il. XIV, 246; cf. 201, 302. Cf. patrem rerum, Virgil, Georg. IV, 382; parens rerum, Anth. Lat. (Riese) 718, 14).

 

We shall see that Ὠκεανός was believed to be a bond around | the earth, apparently of serpent form even as Acheloos, the primal river or water, was conceived as a serpent with human head and horns. The procreative element in any body was the ψυχή which appeared in the form of a serpent. Ὠκεανός was, as may now be seen, the primal ψυχή and thus would be conceived as a serpent in relation to procreative liquid. The conception of Ὠκεανός has no basis in observation. It can now be explained as the imagined primal cosmic ψυχή or procreative power, liquid and serpent.

(248-249, citations removed)

 

While identified with or believed to be in the procreative liquid, the ψυχή was πνεῦμα. We can now understand as a survival of the earliest Greek conception the picture attributed by Epiphanius to Epicurus, who said almost the last word of Greek science about the structure of the universe. He is credited with saying that ‘the all was from the beginning like an egg, and the πνεῦμα in serpent wise around the egg was then a tight band as a wreath or belt around the universe’ ...  It is the same conception which appears in two versions of the Orphic cosmogony which we may now correlate: (1) that the world egg was begotten by a wind ...; (2) that it was engendered by a serpent which arose out of water and slime; the upper part of the egg became Ὠκεανός and the lower part Earth, including Τάρταρος in its nether depths .... We can perhaps also better understand at one and the same time why in this Orphic version the serpent was called Χρόνος and why, when asked what Χρόνος was, Pythagoras answered that it was | the ψυχή of the universe.¹ According to Pherekydes it was from the seed of Χρόνος that fire and air and water were produced. This conception of Χρόνος, the usual meaning of which is ‘Time’, may be related to that of αἰών, which was not only the procreative life-fluid with which the ψυχή was identified, the spinal marrow believed to take serpent form, but also came to mean ‘lifetime’, ‘period of time’ and so ‘eternity’. For Pindar αἰών meant not only the life-fluid but also a compelling destiny, a δαίμων controlling life.⁷ It is the name Heraclitus gave to the power controlling the changes of the world.⁸ For the Orphics Χρόνος was mated to Ἀνάγκῃ, ‘Necessity’, which also, according to the Pythagoreans, lies around the universe.⁹ Below¹⁰ it will appear how for the earliest Greeks time and fate were circles. The process of time was the movement of the circle around the earth.

((250-251, many citations removed.

1: See Plut. Quaest. Plat, VIII, 4 (1007 A f.). For Χρόνος as a circling stream around the universe see Eurip. Fr. 594 (Nauck) = Krit. B 18 Diels: ἀκάμας τε χρόνος περί τ' ἀενάῳ / ῥεύματι πλήρης φοιτᾷ τίκτων / αὐτὸς ἑαυτόν.)

7: See pp.405f.

8: See pp.252f.

9: See p.332.

10: Pp. 442ff.

))

 

He [Heraclitus] calls the cosmic | principle αἰών and conceives it as a child playing.

(253)

 

[Note, the following are from other sources, but they expand on this last quote by Onians. They give the Heraclitus text:]

 

XCIV (D. 52, M. 93) Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.9.4

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.

“Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.”

Notes:

Lifetime: aiōn, vitality, life; lifetime, duration, time; cognate with aiei, forever.
moving pieces: pesseuōn, playing pessoi, a board game perhaps involving dice, like backgammon and modern Greek tavli.

(Kahn 1979: 70-71)

 

Some other translations:

Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s.

From: Samuel Béreau / 

http://philoctetes.free.fr/heraclitefraneng.htm

 

Eternity is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s.

From: John Burnet

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus

 

Other translations listed at

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus

 

 

 

 

Kahn, Charles. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Cycles of Synthesis. Ch.4.2 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:

summary by Corry Shores

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Cycles of Synthesis

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 2: Back to Plato


What does Deleuze's modification of Plato's circle of time got to do with you?

You once returned to a place that you haunted in your childhood. The past returned to you, but as completely new, because wasn't the experience so much different than when you experienced that place as a child? But in every moment of our present living, doesn't the past inform us? It is never as though we see the things around us for the first time. They have become familiar. But the present moment itself, doesn't it always feel fresh? Even when we are bored, isn't the problem really that the present keeps imposing itself anew, and we are doing something unstimulating with that freshness of the moment? Is boredom maybe a tension we feel, having before us the immediate feeling of newness accompanied secondarily by forced distracting redundancies?

If you get bored staring at a clock, is it because the past keeps returning redundantly as the same? Or is it that the past keeps returning differently; each moment of seeing the clock has its own unique qualities and feels, but the situation compels us to ignore the differences from moment to moment, hence we become frustrated? Perhaps an interesting exercise might be not so much a meditation where you try to keep your focus on the clock or some other thing and stabilize your awareness, but rather an antimeditation where you keep your focus on the clock and experience each moment in its new freshness. Perhaps then boredom will be less a factor in your life, as you come to find normal redundancies continually renewed. The past is cycling back into the present always as something new. We can feel it.

Brief Summary

To expand the concepts of pure and empty time, Deleuze turns to Plato's theory of reminiscence and circular time. The main difference is that the return of the past is not based on an ideal and resemblances, but rather the past returns as something undetermined and yet also determinable.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze has a cyclical temporality.

Summary

To further explain a pure and empty form of time, Deleuze turns now to Plato's theory of reminiscence: "knowledge must be remembered ... rather than acquired through the senses." Yet because knowledge is recalled, it must have been first forgotten. (84b) The Plato material also fits nicely with the concepts of the pure past and circular nature of time in the eternal return.

"On the one hand, there are aspects shared by the two philosophies: a circular notion of time, a relation between a phenomenal world and a world of Ideas (the actual and the virtual in Deleuze), and the foundation of time through the past rather than the present (explaining the priority of reminiscence for Plato and the necessity of the second synthesis of time for Deleuze). " (84-85)

Yet there are important differences between Deleuze and Plato. For Plato, the circle of time has layers of resemblance that culninate in the in-itself of the ideal. Things resemble the ideal, and they do so to more or less of a degree. If the soul can preserve the ideal or in-itself, it can escape the circle. "It does not return but is always the same ideal other things return to – to greater or lesser extent in relations of resemblance. In Deleuze’s circle, taken from Nietzsche’s eternal return, there will be no order of resemblance, no ideal or in itself and no escape through true knowledge." (85a)

For Plato, our lives are circular, because we undergo the cycle of death and rebirth.

"But each soul can return to the ideal or immortal part of its former incarnations through knowledge of the Idea, that is, through a return of the Idea as the same origin from which all phenomena decline. This means escaping the circle, because the ideal remains the same and hence does not revolve." (85b)

The only things that revolve are things that resemble, the simulacra. Deleuze's pure past is a 'founding' rather than a 'foundation', because it is a process that allows the present to pass. Plato's
past is a foundation and is

"still a present, because it is a present that has become past. However, it is not a present like any other, since all other presents | exist in relation to that foundation. So the present as foundation has to be a mythical present: ‘[. . .] the Idea is like the foundation from which successive presents are organised into the circle of time such that the pure past that defines it must necessarily still be expressed in terms of the present, as an ancient mythical present’ (DRf, 119)." (85-86)

Thus

"Deleuze’s objection to Plato is then two-fold. First, the past becomes the ground for identity and representation in the circles of resemblance of presents to mythical present. Second, this mythical present subsumes the past itself to representation and identity, and thereby it turns the past back on to presents that it is supposed to found, in the sense of make pass or dissolve in terms of identity: ‘This is the insufficiency of the founding, to be relative to what it founds, to borrow the character of what it founds, and to be proven by them’ (DRf, 119)." (86a.b)

Because of Deleuze's restricting representations from the cycling returns, "when the past returns with a new present it does so free of any determinations." (86c) This means that the new present is radically new; it is completely undetermined, although it is determinable. "This is why he adds the work on Plato to the work on Kant: it allows him to introduce the idea that time is circular with the paradox that this circle must not involve the return of identity and representations, of the same and the similar." (86c.d)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

The Soul of the Cosmos: Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Ch.4, subsection 4

by Corry Shores
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Paul Shepard

Coming Home to the Pleistocene

Chapter IV: How the Mind Once Lived

Subsection 4

The Soul of the Cosmos

Our ancestors hunted. The "act of killing and facing one's own death" raised "intense emotional and philosophical problems." (61b)

It is right to kill and be killed in this "game" of the hunt so long as we understand the transformation of life and death as a natural consequence of the gifting cosmos where one receives and gives and in the final hour finally passes the gift on. When that clarity is lost the hunt becomes monstrous, along with the rest of nature, and we remove the killing to a butcher's abattoir. (61b)

Their practices of gathering and hunting structured their broader view.

Gathering and hunting are the economic basis of an intricate cosmology in which epiphany and numinous presence are embodied and mediated by wild animals, plants, mountains, and springs. (61b)

Hunter's had their own way of conceiving the cosmos. Stanner called it "the dreaming." The universe is a moral system made-up of three components: marvels, species diversity, and institutions.

Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. (61c, emphasis mine)

We understand the world around us metaphorically. So our natural taxonomies provide us conceptual tools. And our morality is built on these systems. This is the element of 'species diversity' in the hunter's cosmogony.

Institutions

are what humans create most successfully, based on stories of origins, as analogies to the structures that bind the species into marvels of affinity. These are the keys to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave. (61-62)

Tales give commentary on society's underlying principles, and provides models for morality. Some tribes of Australian aborigines have developed some of the most complex and sophisticated metaphysical systems, despite their stone-age technologies.

This cosmogony -- how the universe became a moral system -- is nothing like an Athenian skeptical philosophy but is a continual, visionary, intuitive, poetic understanding, an ahistoric abiding. There is no quarrel with life. Their metaphysic assents to what men have to be because of the way their life is cast. (62b)

Civilized societies feel superior to nature. But the cosmography of certain tribal cultures expresses humility toward the natural world. The animals know more than we do. And all the world around us is besouled.

Shepard, Paul. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998.

A Wilderness of Chance: Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Ch.4, subsection 3

by Corry Shores
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Paul Shepard

Coming Home to the Pleistocene

Chapter IV: How the Mind Once Lived

Subsection 3

A Wilderness of Chance

Shepard now examines the complex mental processes involved in primitive foraging. The result of their interpenetration with the nonhuman world are such human accomplishments as toolmaking, intellectual sophistication, philosophy, and tradition. As Lévi Strauss writes: "in a world where diversity exceeds our mental capacity nothing is impossible in our capacity to become human." (57b)

On the one hand, civilized thought aims to simplify complexity rather than to clarify it. We unify, seek continuities, variabilities, and relativities rather than conceptualize new schemas. But this is precisely what primitive cultures attain.

the "civilized mind" attempts to simplify and level the world whereas the "savage mind" is not afraid to become enmeshed in its complexity. (57bc)

Rituals transcend the difference between real and imaginary. And yet, the way that primitive people conceptualize their world is nonetheless coherent and sophisticated. It is a "science of the concrete." And the world is seen as made-up of discontinuities. Lévi Strauss writes:

The manner in which primitive peoples conceptualize their world is not merely coherent but the very one demanded where objects are discontinuous and complex. (qt 59c, emphasis mine)

They treated plants and animals as "elements of a message."

For many prehistoric foragers, animals were the "principle actors in cosmology."

The human task was to discover social themes coded in nature and cataloged as taxonomy, told as stories and danced to the rhythms of animal-skin drums. (58a)

To hunt and gather, we need memory, which is directly related to brain size.

Memory becomes more important the bigger and more dangerous the game, the more helpless and far-traveled the gatherers. (58a)

Humans are naturally the prey to large animals, or at least we are their inferiors in the natural order of the wild. But we developed hunting abilities. Giant animals became our prey, and not the other way around. To hunt the great beasts, we needed to cooperate in a well-timed way. And this required planning. Primitive cultures must initiate and carry-on lengthy dialogues about how they will conduct the hunt. They continue the discussion throughout. And afterward their conversation reviews and assesses the events.

When tracking, the !Kung San note birdcalls and signs and discuss the spoor. Tracks tell the species, age, sex, speed, and physical condition of the animal and whether it was accompanied by other animals, what it was feeding on, and when it passed. Since tracks change over time, the !Kung San develop "their discriminating power to the highest degree," estimating how far ahead the animals are. The hunters read the dung and watch for bits of the foliage dropped from the animals' lips while eating. They appraise the size of a herd, whether it has been seeking shade, resting, or halting to feed. The stalking of a wounded animal opens new and repeated discussions and decisions. (58c-d)

At night, the hunters enter the wilderness of spirit.

During overnight stops the hunters observe specific taboos in a ritually heightened state. Access to the spirits by hunters -- ancestral, demonic, plant or animal -- is not unusual and can be undertaken in prayer, supplication, dream, trance, visionary disembodiment, and ecstatic flight to the other world. This spiritual state leads to a deeper insight into the meaning of the hunt, the chancy character of the game that may lead to a loss of the hunter's life, and the ethical implications of taking other lives. (58-59, emphasis mine)

Hunters are humble. They learn the fragility and spiritual value of all creature's lives.

Before and after the hunt, primitive people tell stories and conduct ritual ceremonies. This enhances the hunt's spiritual dimension. The hunters will hunt animals. To do so, they spiritually become animals.

Animal masks in rites give palpable expression to transitional states. On the body of a person the animal mask joins that which is otherwise separate -- not only representing human change but conceptualizing shared qualities -- so that unity in difference and difference in unity can be conceived as a pervasive truth. And some animals, by their shape or habit, such as foxes and frogs, are also boundary creatures who already signify the threshold world of human passages. In dance and song, bodies, painted and adorned, move to deep rhythms that bind the world and bring the human into mimetic participation with other beings and the truth of the multiplicity of all domains. (59bc)

José Ortega y Gasset describes human hunting. We enter inside the natural system.

Wind, light, temperature, ground-contour, minerals, vegetation, all play a part; they are not simply there, as they are for the tourist or the botanist, but rather they function, they act. (qt 59d)

And we learn about death from the animal we kill. So "we must seek his company" in the "subtle rite of the hunt." Gasset argues that hunters are our true fathers: "we realize our true heredity in the hunt." (60a)

Power is structured much differently in primitive cultures. It is less hierarchical and more fluid. What binds them socially are

the array of natural species about them. Animals and plants are regarded as centers, metaphors, and mentors of the different traits, skills, and roles of people. Insofar as they model diversity and the polythetic cosmos, the animals provide analogs to the multiplicity of stages and forms: the are interlocutors of change that is brought ceremonially into human consciousness. (60bc)

The forager's world is just as rich. It is full of "signs of a gifting cosmos, a realm of numerous alternatives and generous subsistence, not so much to be controlled by humans as to be understood and affirmed and joined." (60c) Hence forager's and hunters affirm chance.

The original chancy game of prey and predator, of eating or being eaten, takes on a more significant meaning in a gifting world where chance is still an element: the only question is when the gift will pass on. (60c, emphasis mine)

Recall Bateson's notion of metarandom variables. We are only limited parts of cybernetic ecosystems. So we can never understand the whole of its workings. There are always variables that vary other variables. We can never predict everything. So we must affirm chance. Or as Shepard writes:

Hunter/gatherers know nature well enough to appreciate how little they know of its complexity. They are engaged in a humble play of adventitious risk, which is hypostasized in gambling, a major leisure-time activity. Gambling is, after all, miniaturizing the game, depicting in the bodies of beasts, lounging or in repose, the ravishing mystery and fun of being a counterplayer, of moving and being moved in the excitement of the chase, the stillness of its sacred aftermath, and the joy of retelling. The great game of chance is elaborated in foragers' myths rich in the strangeness of life with its unexpected boons and encounters, its unanticipated penalties and rewards, not as arbitrary features of supernatural visits but as infinitely complex affiliations. (60-61, emphasis mine)

Shepard, Paul. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998.

Tempestuous Intensities: Pent-Up Raging Winds of Aeolus in Bergson's Tense Body

by Corry Shores
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(Delacroix. Winter: Juno and Aeolus)

In Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), Bergson writes:

We picture to our minds a psychic force imprisoned in the soul like the winds in the cave of Aeolus, and only waiting for an opportunity to burst forth: our will is supposed to watch over this force and from time to time to open a passage for it, regulating the outflow by the effect which it is desired to produce. (20-21)

Il nous semble que la force psychique, emprisonnée dans l'âme comme les vents dans l'antre d'Éole, y attende seulement une occasion de s'élancer dehors; la volonté surveillerait cette force, et, de temps à autre , lui ouvrirait une issue, proportionnant l'écoulement à l'effet désiré. (15d)

Aeolus, King of the Winds, kept guard over windstorms imprisoned in the caves of a mountain, to be unleashed at the gods' command.

From Ovid's Metamorphosis Book I:

Now Aeolus had with strong chains confin'd,  
And deep imprison'd e'vry blust'ring wind.

From Vigil's Aeneid:
Such thoughts revolving in her fiery mind,
Straightway the Goddess to AEolia passed, 
The storm-clouds' birthplace, big with blustering wind. 
Here AEolus within a dungeon vast 
The sounding tempest and the struggling blast 
Bends to his sway and bridles them with chains. 
They, in the rock reverberant held fast, 
Moan at the doors. Here, throned aloft, he reigns; 
His sceptre calms their rage, their violence restrains:
IX. Else earth and sea and all the firmament
The winds together through the void would sweep.
But, fearing this, the Sire omnipotent
Hath buried them in caverns dark and deep, 
And o'er them piled huge mountains in a heap, 
And set withal a monarch, there to reign, 
By compact taught at his command to keep 
Strict watch, and tighten or relax the rein. 
Him now Saturnia sought, and thus in lowly strain.

Bergson uses this potent metaphor to illustrate the theory that the physical activities of our muscles are driven by psychic forces.

(Boucher Juno Commanding Aeolus to Release the Storm Winds)

Images  from the relevant Bergson pages, in the English Translation [click on the image for an enlargement]:





Images from the relevant Bergson pages, in the original French [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Transl. F. L. Pogson, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001).
Available online at:
http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewill00pogsgoog

French text from:
Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Originally published Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1888.
http://www.archive.org/details/essaisurlesdonn00berguoft

[Site Topic Directory]

Vigil. Aeneid. 

Available online at:

http://manybooks.net/search.php?search=aeneid

Ovid. Metamorphoses.

Available online at:

http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html

See also:

http://www.theoi.com/Titan/Aiolos.html

Delacroix. Winter: Juno and Aeolus.

Image from:

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/WinterDelacroix.html

Boucher. Juno Commanding Aeolus to Release the Storm Winds.

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http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/walrobinson/walrobinson2-1-38.asp

Philosophy's Perpetual Call to Transgress the Limits of Its Mythological Origins by Means of Metaphor, in Martin Moors' Mythos and Logos course

summarization of Moors' ideas, by Corry Shores
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Development in metaphysical thought requires we critique it, which means we find those limits indicating what lies before philosophical thought, at its origin. This is myth. So the call to renew philosophy is a calling-back to its mythical origins.

There is no philosophy without presuppositions, and critical thinking examines and evaluates presuppositions. So for philosophers to critique philosophy, they must go back to its mythical origins to find out what its fundamental presuppositions are.

Because the task of philosophy is continually to renew it, philosophers are perpetually called back to philosophy's mythical origins.

Mythology is a proto-form of philosophical thinking, because it tries to account for things. Mythology tries to find causes for effects. Human suffering, guilt, and vulnerability are accounted-for by means of the myth of the fall from paradise. So mythology is a logos, but a mytho-logos. There is a logic to mythology that is the proto-form of philosophy's logic.

Philosophy makes a critical move to its mythical origin, thereby transgressing its internal limits.

Consider for example Kant's discussion of substance. What appears to us are accidents. Something else underlies these accidents, and that is substance.

Mythical thought operates by means of metaphor. We see also in the term substance a mythological spatial metaphor: lying under. So Kant returns to philosophy's mythical origin by critiquing the way philosophy thinks about substance. At root, philosophy looks at substance mythologically, as a primeval spatiality, a lying-under. And this lying under accounts for all things in the world, just as myths about God account for all things in the world.

[Taken from the second lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 2." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 02-Oct-2008.

]

Myth and Critique in Martin Moors' Mythos and Logos course

summarization of Moors' ideas, by Corry Shores
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[The following is based on student notes. My commentary is in brackets.]

Philosophers use rational discourse, which has its own logic or logos. The proper application of this discursive logic is critique. For philosophers to understand this logos, they look to its origin. Before this discursive logic developed into a critical method, it took-on a proto-critical or pre-critical form.

[The fundamental principle to all things in the cosmos is water, argues Thales. He is considered the first philosopher because he breaks from a tradition of mythological explanations for the cosmos, and instead tries to use rationality to devise a de-mythologized theoretical account of reality. And yet, compared to our current sophisticated scientific views of the cosmos, Thales' theory seems mythological. From Thales on,]

philosophy will be a gradual process of demythologization.

[When we tell a story, we give an account. There is some conclusion. Before the conclusion, there is a series of events that explain how and why that conclusion came to be what it is.

When we explain something using rational argumentation, we also give an account. We have some conclusion. Prior to that conclusion are premises whose logical relations necessitate the conclusion.

The myth of the fall from paradise explains human suffering. There were events leading up to it, that explain why the story concludes the way it does, and that also account for some aspect of human existence, namely, suffering.

If our only criteria for such an explanation is whether or not it gives an account for something, then the story of the fall is perfectly adequate.

But if we begin to wonder what makes one myth better than another, or what would be a better explanation than any given myth, then we are thinking critically.

This sort of critical origin for logos begins with Thales, who proposes that everything is fundamentally made-up of water.

And, he gives a rational account that is slightly mythologized.

According to Aristotle, Thales reasoning was that things emerge from something else which is prior to them. This origin is their principle. Whatever all things spring-from is the first principle of everything.

All living beings are nourished by water, so all life springs from water. Also, moisture produces heat, and heat persists in moisture. Moreover, the beginnings of all living beings are of a moist nature.

Also, Thales reasons that whatever the gods swear-by must be what is most highly esteemed. According to poets telling the stories of the original people, the god's swore by the river Styx. So what is most highly esteemed in the cosmos is water.

For all these reasons, Thales felt it was rationally justified, and in keeping with mythology, that he conclude that the fundamental principle of everything is water.

Because Thales proposition was based on his reasoning, it was critical of the non-rational mythical explanations of the cosmos, and as well, it was open to critique by other philosophers.]

[Taken from the first lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 1." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 25-Sept-2008.

]