[Glice]

Tenpence:

pbradley speaks of Aristotle's teleos; the problem with talking about ancient Greeks at this point in history is that the dominant metaphysic since at least medieval times has been monotheistic, if not outright Christian.

By my understanding it's inappropriate to speak of Greece as 'polytheistic'. Their God system was heirarchichal (I'm tempted to say, like Adorno, that it's the model of capitalism) - you have your Euronyme, Gods are born and can die and can breed half-Gods and heroes, can become animals, can become human, can be cursed for eternity...

There's also the 'fact*' that 'Greek religion' strikes me as more akin to the folk religions (which so-called 'paganism', a 20th-century invention seeks to fetishise) - what we see in contemporary times is settled in a singular conceptual time-space, but in reality it's a gestalt bastardisation of snippets, fragments, a smidge of written records (your Homers and your Ovids (etc)) and several hundred years of stories passing from person-to-person, and with travel, from village to village. Robert Graves, in White Goddess, talks an awful lot about this, about the idea of Apollo as one iteration of a Jesus-like character, of how, over time, Zeus went from a minor God to the father-God, the stilted judge-God.

I've not looked into that many translations of Greek stuff (the stories interest me, the people's history/ religion less-so) but I think we could draw comparisons between Taoism or the religions of India which spring from the Vedas and Upinshads (Hinduism/ Buddhism). Where tao talks of the 'tao being the one that is in everything [terrible rendering, sorry]', this could be interpreted as what monotheistic religions sometimes call 'God', or it could, in Animism, be called 'nature', or another interpretation. By a different tack, you read English translations of the Vedas and there's a lot of talk of a singular force (which is nearly akin to the God of Genesis). By the time you get Kali, and Genesh and the like, the notion of God becomes different - you read one translation which will say that Hinduism is 'polytheistic' but that these different Gods are different manifestations of 'the true force', or Judaism's YHWH, or Christianity's God; another translation will insist that there is no singular 'God', only many Gods; another translation will insist on Kali as a sub-God (a hierarchy similar to my understanding of the Greek Gods).

Anyway, the point of all this is that the context which could decide the providence of Zeus, or Greek 'myth', or Greek 'religion' is entirely absent - moreso than the already-troublesome context for a dyed-in-the-wool Christian to understand Zazen or Mahayana. I'm of the opinion that we may observe, in ourselves, certain epistemic lacunae, but to try and pin down 'the correct answer' misses the point and is an effort to 'control' something which is beyond and behind (but also in front of) you.

Anyone saying 'X ruined thought forever' needs to sit down and think about their life.



* I parenthesise this because 'facts', as in truth-values, come fairly late in ancient-Greek history, by my understanding with Plato.