Athens Corner

If you're enjoying the recordings I've been providing here and you're curious about my larger project with AthensCorner.com and my own story, then I think you'll find this brief discussion interesting and hopefully as enjoyable as the others. 

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This is my discussion in its entirety of The Shield of Achilles from the Technology & Nihilism series on my website (AthensCorner.com).  The purpose of this discussion is to reveal the teaching in Homer's Iliad on this thing we call "technology."  This is particularly important for us because of the way in which we tend to mistakenly believe that the most urgent questions concerning our own technology are unique to us today because of Modern science.  This mistaken belief leads us further to mistakenly think that our most urgent questions of technology today are only, or best, approached by way of their different treatments in the various recent postmodern philosophers and sociologists.  In contrast to all that, through a very meticulous reading of key passages throughout the entirety of Homer's Iliad I demonstrate the way in which Homer provides us with a very rich teaching on the very meaning of this thing we call technology in the life of man, along with its possibly great advantages and its possibly great perils, even and especially concerning the proper relationship between man and the divine.  

Throughout the discussion I include numerous and in-depth relationships between the themes that Homer has his finger on the pulse of and how those same themes arise in later definitive thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition, such as Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger.  Among the comparisons and contrasts with these later thinkers, a few of the most important themes I go into great detail about in this discussion are the following:

1. The philosophical meaning of natural rights and just how complicated they can become upon careful analysis.
2. The similarities and differences between poetry and philosophy, and how they each respectively go about inquiring into the meaning of the good life as well as offering guidance, if not answers, to it.
3. The philosophical significance of mathematics as it arises in our ability to make distinctions between the most basic (but definitive!) concepts we all use in the necessary ordering of human life as such and, in particular, any understanding of political community that is to be flourishing.

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This is my second discussion on Homer's Odyssey for the Fathers & Sons series on my website (AthensCorner.com).  I've provided the entirety of the discussion here because I believe that what Homer provides us with is still so very urgent and relevant for us today and, in particular, for fathers seeking to have a direct involvement in educating their sons toward virtue.  A few of the ways I demonstrate how fathers can do that in this discussion consists in showing how such an education from reading the Odyssey translates into everything involved in the following constellation of overlapping themes: 

(1) The meaning of justice in the life of man and the divine
(2) The unmanliness of gossip in the becoming of a man from adolescence and, just as importantly, the effeminacy of men regressing into adolescence by trafficking in gossip
(3) The importance of the element of experience for knowledge to properly be called knowledge, with emphasis upon Achilles in Hades
(4) The meaning of "nature" and, in particular, "natural right"
(5) The relevance of poetry for Aristotle as a helpful lens through which to understand the opening scene with Odysseus's son Telemachus
(6) The meaning of the imagery of the bow and the lyre in Homer
(7) The relevance of Glaucon and Socrates from Plato's Republic for understanding Telemachus and Athena in the absence of Odysseus
(8) The meaning of fathers and sons amid nihilism
(9) The meaning of all these things for what we call "life" and "education"

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Talk of Nietzsche is almost always synonymous with talk of the "Overman [Übermensch]," and so what I do in this discussion is introduce a number of the most definitive themes in Nietzsche's thought by way of an introduction to the Overman in his thought.  To achieve this goal, I begin with the importance of Goethe's Faust for Nietzsche, and then I canvass such diverse but thematic things pertaining to Nietzsche's thought as Homer, Greek tragedy (Aeschylus and Sophocles in particular), the so-called "death of God" or nihilism, and the confluence of the political ideals of the Modern Enlightenment with what we call "technology."  I show how all these things come together for Nietzsche and explain how his concern with a seemingly inexorable and impending planetary dominance of a single technological nation-state led him to place at the very heart of his own deeply political project an enormous emphasis upon the differences of human types, their existence in "culture" as it presently is, and the possibility that they could become something much more noble from within experimentally new understandings of "culture" ushered in according to his understanding of philosophy and its new ranking and ordering of the most defining values by which man orients all life. 

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This is the first half of a discussion in which I broadly but rigorously introduce the most definitive characteristic of Postmodern philosophy and how that characteristic is inherently related to what we refer to as "technology" and PreModern philosophy. Specifically, I discuss the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss, all in relation to:
 
(1) each other, 
(2) what we refer to as "technology," 
(3) Premodern philosophy as represented by the Greeks, specifically Homer, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, 
(4) so-called "return" movements and, lastly, 
(5) how and why it is that Thucydides in particular is important in Postmodernity beginning with Nietzsche and continuing up to and especially in the thought of Leo Strauss

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This is the full recording of a discussion for the series "Technology and Nihilism" in philosophy on my website AthensCorner.com.  At issue here is what Thucydides understands himself as providing us in his text.  Accordingly, the question at hand in the opening of the text is this:

Is Thucydides's text simply or merely "history," or does he understand himself as providing something much more encompassing of human life than our contemporary understanding of history?  

I explore that question by carefully reading and meticulously examining the opening paragraph of the text.  In doing so, what unfolds from just that opening paragraph is a rich alternative to what is found in, for instance, Plato and Aristotle concerning the nature of man in political community.  That is to say that what comes tumbling out of the first paragraph of Thucydides is an introduction to the question of the possibility of wise statesmanship, given his understanding of human nature.

I also briefly discuss the various translations of Thucydides in English and which one is best for those who do not know Greek, in order that they not be misled by poor translations which have done great damage by adding the word "history" in the opening sentence from which the text is named.  Thucydides does *not* use that word at all in the opening paragraph, thereby raising the all-important question of how we are to properly understand the text as he himself intends for it to be understood.