“achievement of immortality,” and as such it would correspond to the exercises of the human mind.7
In all, it was a tripartite structure. Nous, or noos as Homer would regard it, consisted in speechless (aneu logou) contemplation of the everlasting. It was the exercise of the mind that brought you in contact with your vision. Logos, designed to say what is (the legein ta eonta of
Herodotus),”8 applied to mortal thought. It was the exercise of the mind that allowed for practical speech and the conversations that would connect men with other men.
Aletheuein, the attempt to translate that vision into speech, was the motor of desire that served as the essential link between the world of being and the world of appearance, between divinity and humanity.
Homer tended, for example, to emphasize
noos. As Julian Jaynes has noted in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,9 Homer’s conception of man suggested that man was held captive by a vision of the gods that spoke directly to him, a vision telling him or her what to do and what not to do, that did not allow men — who had yet to engage logos — to individually or collectively reason, debate, and challenge the prescriptions of the vision. On the other hand, as Enlightenment philosophers tended towards reading Aristotle outside the context of Plato’s theory of friendship and in the context of a strict rationalist, the emphasis would shift to logos. As evident in the writing but contrary to the reasoning of Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind,10 the Enlightenment writer’s conception of man suggested that man was highly rational and articulate but held captive by the reason of words – whether in the form of ‘dialectics” (dialegesthai) or the “syllogism”
(syl-logizesthai) – rather than a prescriptive vision of the gods.
The point to note is over time, in fact from its earliest articulations, man’s view of himself moved away from a being that both thought and acted against the world towards a being which simply thought about the world. This is not to say that thinking is not action. It certainly is. Yet it may not necessarily be an inter-action
with an-other, the “Other”. It may instead be an in-action, or inward action of silent contemplation or restrained thought that thinks upon its self (which is why men can never be lonely even in isolation, as they can engage in conversations with themselves, though they can be isolated in their loneliness).
Breaking into Shards
I and others have argued in great detail elsewhere how and why this happened.11 Suffice it for now to say that if one views the entirety of the western tradition in terms of this mental operation, moving ever increasingly to a more open embrace of logos in isolation, one can actually “see” how men treat objects – or, in this case, pots – over time. Let us begin with Socrates, for Socrates was, at least in the opinion of his protégé, Plato, the one man in history who could be regarded as a complete man acting in full moral character.
Who was Socrates, and what did he know? Well, Plato tells us that Socrates was a man who claimed to know but one thing: that he knew very little. Thus he was nothing more than what he described himself to be: a man who asked questions. And that is what we see from the dialogues. Socrates sets about walking the town doing little more than questioning people, asking them what they knew and querying
Over time, in fact from its earliest articulations, man’s view of himself moved away from a being that both thought and acted against the world towards a being which simply thought about the world.
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