Some Conjectures Concerning Our
Nexible Physis
Given that we human beings are a sentient species, an interesting
question is whether we have, over the past three thousand years,
fundamentally changed. Changed in physis sufficient to enable us to
avoid what our thousands of years old human culture of pathei-mathos
informs us is unwise. For example, around 700 BCE
Hesiod wrote:
σὺ δ᾽ ἄκουε δίκης, μηδ᾽ ὕβριν ὄφελλε:
ὕβρις γάρ τε κακὴ δειλῷ βροτῷ: οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλὸς
215 ῥηιδίως φερέμεν δύναται, βαρύθει δέ θ᾽ ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς
ἐγκύρσας ἄτῃσιν: ὁδὸς δ᾽ ἑτέρηφι παρελθεῖν
κρείσσων ἐς τὰ δίκαια: Δίκη δ᾽ ὑπὲρ Ὕβριος ἴσχει
ἐς τέλος ἐξελθοῦσα: παθὼν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω
You should listen to [the goddess] Fairness and
not oblige Hubris
Since Hubris harms unfortunate mortals while even the more
fortunate
Are not equal to carrying that heavy a burden, meeting as they
do with Mischief.
The best path to take is the opposite one: that of honour
For, in the end, Fairness is above Hubris
Which is something the young come to learn from adversity. [1]
Certainly, in the many intervening centuries, some individuals -
from adversity, or otherwise - have learned to avoid hubris and be
fair, as is evident in our ever-growing human culture of
pathei-mathos. But have we as a species, en masse, learned anything
physis-changing - and learned by ourselves or by virtue of being
instructed or educated - from the likes of Hesiod, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Pliny, and Cicero; from
the Rig-Veda; from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama and Lao Tzu;
from the gospel narratives of the life and crucifixion of Jesus of
Nazareth; from the music of JS Bach; from the art of Botticelli,
Hokusai, and van Gogh; from the literature of the likes of Jane
Austen, Solzhenitsyn, and Mariama Bâ; from the thousands and
thousands and thousands of armed conflicts, wars, and invasions, of
the past three thousand years; from the individual stories of
suffering - of rape, torture, murder, starvation, theft, humiliation
- traumatically recounted year after year, decade following decade,
and century after century?
If we human beings - we mortals - have in sufficient numbers so
learned and so changed, is that change qualifiable? My own,
admittedly fallible, view is that it is qualifiable; with my
tentative suggestion - the conclusion of some years considering the
matter - being that it is by how we as individuals perceive, how we
understand, and how we humans as a result of such a new
perceiveration externally manifest (in terms of, for example, our
societies, our attitudes, and our laws) the muliebral virtues and
thus the position of women and gender roles in general. Qualifiable
in this way because - at least according to my own learning, and my
understanding of the culture of pathei-mathos - of our nexible
physis.
For our physis - our being, as mortals, and thus our character
as individuals - is not only subject to enantiodromia:
"[to] the revealing, the process, of perceiving, feeling,
knowing, beyond causal appearance and the
separation-of-otherness and thus when what has become separated
- or has been incorrectly perceived as separated - returns to
the wholeness, the unity, from whence it came forth. When, that
is, beings are understood in their correct relation to Being,
beyond the causal abstraction of different/conflicting ideated
opposites, and when as a result, a reformation of the
individual, occurs. A relation, an appreciation of the numinous,
that empathy and pathei-mathos provide, and which relation and
which appreciation the accumulated pathei-mathos of individuals
over millennia have made us aware of or tried to inform us or
teach us about," {2}
but also, as I have mentioned elsewhere, because my thesis is that
"it is the muliebral virtues which evolve us as conscious
beings, which presence sustainable millennial change. Virtues
such as empathy, compassion, humility, and that loyal shared
personal love which humanizes those masculous talking-mammals of
the Anthropocene, and which masculous talking-mammals have -
thousand year following thousand year - caused so much suffering
to, and killed, so many other living beings, human and
otherwise." {3}
Considered in such qualifiable terms, there do appear to be some
promising signs: for it does seem that several modern societies are
- via more and more individuals acquiring a new perceiveration and
thence a new understanding - slowly moving toward that equality
between men and women, that rejection of stereotypical gender roles,
and that recognition of the importance - of the necessity - of the
muliebral virtues; which, combined, manifest an enantiodromiacal
change in our human physis and which change, which balancing of the
masculous with the muliebral, consequently could evolve us beyond
the patriarchal ethos, and the masculous societies, which have been
such a feature of human life on this planet for the past three
thousand years, genesis as that ethos and those societies have been
of so much grieving.
Which leads to interesting questions, to which I admit I have no
answers. Questions such as whether we can, en masse, so change, and
whether - if we can so change or are so slowly changing - it will
take us another three thousand years, or more, or less, to live,
world-wide, in societies where fairness, peace, and compassion, are
the norm because the males of our species - perhaps by heeding
Fairness and not obliging Hubris, perhaps by learning from our
shared human culture of pathei-mathos - have personally,
individually, balanced within themselves the masculous with the
muliebral and thus, because of sympatheia, follow the path of
honour. Which balancing would naturally seem to require a certain
conscious intent.
What, therefore, is our intent, as individual human beings, and can
our human culture of pathei-mathos offer us some answers, or
perchance some guidance? As an old epigram so well-expressed it:
θνητοῖσιν ἀνωΐστων πολέων περ οὐδὲν ἀφραστότερον πέλεται
νόου ἀνθρώποισι
"Of all the things that mortals fail to understand, the
most incomprehensible is human intent." {4}
Personally, I do believe that our human culture of pathei-mathos -
rooted as it is in our ancient past, enriched as it has been over
thousands of years by each new generation, and informing as it does
of what is wise and what is unwise - can offer us both some guidance
and some answers.
David Myatt
September 2014
Notes
1. Hesiod, Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι [Works and Days], vv 213-218. My
translation. Some notes on the translation:
a. δίκη. The goddess of Fairness/Justice/Judgement,
and - importantly - of Tradition (Ancestral Custom). In this work,
as in Θεογονία (Theogony), Hesiod is recounting and explaining
part of that tradition, one important aspect of which tradition is
understanding the relation between the gods and mortals. Given
both the antiquity of the text and the context, 'Fairness' - as
the name of the goddess - is, in my view, more appropriate than
the now common appellation 'Justice', considering the modern (oft
times impersonal) connotations of the word 'justice'.
b. Mischief. The sense of ἄτῃσιν here is not of 'delusion' nor of
'calamities', per se, but rather of encountering that which or
those whom (such as the goddess of mischief, Ἄτη) can bring
mischief or misfortune into the 'fortunate life' of a 'fortunate
mortal', and which encounters are, according to classical
tradition, considered as having been instigated by the gods.
Hence, of course, why Sophocles [Antigone, 1337-8] wrote ὡς
πεπρωμένης οὐκ ἔστι θνητοῖς συμφορᾶς ἀπαλλαγή (mortals cannot be
delivered from the misfortunes of their fate).
c. δίκαιος. Honour expresses the sense that is meant: of being
fair; capable of doing the decent thing; of dutifully observing
ancestral customs. A reasonable alternative for 'honour' would
thus be 'decency', both preferable to words such as 'just' and
'justice' which are not only too impersonal but have too many
inappropriate modern connotations.
d. νήπιος. Literal - 'young', 'uncultured' (i.e. un-schooled,
un-educated in the ways of ancestral custom) - rather than
metaphorical ('foolish', ignorant).
2. The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, 2013.
3. Some Questions For DWM, 2014.
4. Vitae Homeri, Epigrammata V. My (poetic, non-literal)
translation.