perspective about the true choices that need to be made? After all, insofar as pots are an-other, they reveal that which we don’t know and thus the fear we possess about others and ourselves.
It is for this reason that we need to summon up
the courage to challenge our present situation,
our present “human” condition, to ask how it came to be that reason has became so dominant a factor in our culture and to wonder whether such a privileged position is proper. It is also for this reason that we need to be concerned about pots and the museums that hold them. Finding context for the dichotomy of us and them, literally a place within the language and literature of History, we might find a space large enough to house a more expansive and encompassing view of western civilization.
It's All Greek to Me
It would take a lifetime of study, and probably the writing numerous books, to articulate fully what the western tradition has to say about who we as men are and what we with certainty know. As this article does not allow for such a detailed study or presentation, let’s just say what we know and how we know it can all be traced to the Greeks. And thus it becomes important to take a brief walk through the history of ideas, so to hear the conversations our mostly white males have held and continue to hold with their dead counterparts across time. Talking back and forth to one another, in one continuous conversation, addressing issues and concerns about identity and knowledge, it is these people who have come to frame our contemporary world view of pots and people.
The early Greeks wanted to create an environment in which man became immortal, where deeds could be saved from the “futility that comes from oblivion.”3 Choosing to distinguish man in this manner, the Greeks introduced the first concept of linear time into the cyclical order of the universe. The result was also the particularity of man:
What is difficult for us to realize is that the great deeds and works of which mortals are capable, and which become the topic of historical narrative, are not seen as parts of an encompassing whole or process: on the contrary, the stress is always on single instances and single gestures.4
These single gestures, these interruptions, became “the subject matter of history” 5 Being in the human capacity of mortals to ‘endow’ their works with permanence and thus ‘enter and be at home in the world of everlastingness,’ history could thus be considered the proper focus of and for man.
History as pure storytelling, however, conflicted with the striving for greatness, the latter at least since Achilles came to exemplify how man should be defined. Thus the Greeks were, on the one hand, confronted by the realm of immortal things: on the other hand, by the realm of mortality. The paradox “haunted Greek poetry and historiography as it perturbed the quiet of the philosophers.”6
The Whole Pot Made: The Tripartite Mind
Philosophers settled on a solution that sacrificed the doer of great deeds to the claim that immortality could occur only in silent contemplation. Thus it became the argument of the early Greeks that philosophy was the
if pots or people were really something other than objects to be appropriated, if they were actually subjects in their own right with rights, might not listening to them help expand our world view and thereby allow us to gain even more perspective about the true choices that need to be made? After all, insofar as pots are an-other, they reveal that which we don’t know and thus the fear we possess about others and ourselves.
13