Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-07. Odysseus. Abraham

The Crossroads. The Supreme Task. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 7. Odysseus. Abraham. Golgotha. Metaphors. Covenants. Odysseus Already Heraclitus said of Homer that, unlike the moralizing authors who came later, he passes no moral judgments — an opinion that was never contested and set the Iliad apart from all subsequent literature as a work in which there is supposedly no morality (or not yet any morality) in the sense familiar to us. Plato went even further, recommending that Homer be banned as an author ill-suited to the moral education of citizens. And yet the impression of moral non-involvement is produced by the neutral manner of narration, which Homer was apparently compelled to adopt by the low social status of the wandering bard, who had not yet grown accustomed to the role of teacher of humanity. A hero is a hero, even when he flees the battlefield, schemes for armor, or cheats at athletic competitions. The Muse, if you will, shall celebrate his hysterical fury, called wrath. But she will not justify it. The Trojan War began because a woman accepted rich gifts (the ancients harbored no illusions on this score). Troy was a hearth of Minoan culture in Asia Minor (the Achaeans still looked up to Crete at that time; Zeus came from there and, out of old habit, favored the Trojans) and the birthplace of the most beautiful people — Anchises, the beloved of Aphrodite; Ganymede, the favorite of Zeus; and Paris, the judge of Olympian beauties. The aesthetic was combined with the ethical. The positive ethical principle in the Iliad is embodied by Hector, the defender of his homeland, a loving husband and father. The victors who destroyed the magnificent city, with rare exceptions, perished on the homeward journey or, upon returning, were betrayed by their own wives. This is the moral judgment upon their deeds. The proud and beautiful Trojans clashed with an enemy possessed of a truly bulldog grip and deaf to the arguments of reason. When Thersites, guided by common sense, called for abandoning the bloody slaughter and returning home, the cunning Odysseus found nothing more persuasive than a blow with his staff, met with the joyful roar of the crowd. A second outburst — against Achilles, who had conceived a necrophiliac passion for the Amazon he had slain — cost Thersites his life. The wrathful Achilles, who sacrificed the interests of the cause and the lives of those close to him to unbridled self-love, violated all the ethical norms of his time. He desecrated the dead. He slew one who clasped his knees and reached out his hand to his chin. And he was not alone in such acts. Dolon, a Trojan scout, vainly touched the chin of the bloodthirsty Diomedes in a gesture of appeasement — in the next instant his severed head was rolling across the blood-soaked earth, its stiffening lips still begging for mercy. Dolon was clad in a wolf-skin and, like a wolf exposing its neck to the fangs of a stronger rival, hoped that the posture of submission would prevent his death. But what works among wolves did not work among humans. The death of Dolon and those like him is explained not by the fact that people had not yet heard the commandment “thou shalt not kill” and therefore differed little from animals, but by the fact that they had moved too far from the animals and had lost the innate prohibition against killing their own kind — the foundation of instinctive ethics. The clasping of knees and the touching of the chin recall a more ancient stratum of ethical norms, which in Homer's time was already almost destroyed and of which, for this very reason, we know little. The moral impulse behind the creation of the Iliad was the collapse of the most ancient ethical system. We can only guess that symbolic poses and gestures played a prominent role in it. The guardian of piety was Prometheus, to whom the creation of humans was still attributed (his brother Epimetheus created the animals and endowed them with adaptations for the preservation of all species), although the role of the heavenly father had long since been usurped by Zeus (two great peoples, descended from Egypt and Danaus, grandsons of Io, had to regard Zeus as their progenitor, as did the Persians — descendants of Perseus of the same lineage; and yet Io on her way to the Nile could not have bypassed Prometheus). The ancient deities, the Erinyes, continued as if by inertia to fulfill their functions under the new regime, pursuing violators of the ancient commandments. Deliverance from the Erinyes was brought by the rite of purification (absolution of sins) in the temple of Apollo, who figured here in his most ancient hypostasis as the god of the sun. It is noteworthy that the Greeks associated the change of gods with a deterioration of morality from the golden age (the age of Cronus) to the bronze and iron ages, as set out by Hesiod (perhaps those who summoned from the east the capricious storm god who became Zeus also introduced grey iron). The new lords of the world cheat, lie, steal, and commit adultery. When lame Hephaestus, by means of a magic net, bound his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares in each other's embrace and summoned the gods in search of moral support, the only response was a shameless, unrestrained — Homeric — laughter, by which it is easy to distinguish a god from a human. The amoralism and carefree nature of the Olympians provoked reproaches from humans, who in this paradoxical situation are more moral than the gods. Human moralizing irritates Zeus: How strange that mortals are so quick to blame the immortals for everything! Evil comes from us, they claim, but is it not they themselves who bring ruin upon themselves, against fate, through their own folly? This Zeus, grumbling like an elderly bureaucrat, is difficult to imagine as the master of fate, still less as its husband, as in the old myths. Once a god is rational and fate is irrational, so close a relationship cannot exist between them. At best the god is a mediator between a human and his fate, which is blind, impersonal, knowing neither good nor evil. Morality begins with a human being's relationship to fate. The good lies in fulfillment, evil in opposition. The madman tries to change fate. Reason, by contrast, helps one to experience it, to follow its prescriptions. This is the lesson taught by the example of Odysseus. Boldly sailing the waves of life, he meets his fate — there is no other way to come to know it. Knowledge opens the path to a happy conclusion of the journey of life. In this still thoroughly fatalistic idea lie the roots of the rationalistic ethics of Socrates, who linked good with knowledge (evil with ignorance) and, much later, of Spinoza, who saw freedom in the fulfillment of fate. For rational man, from the very moment he became rational, knew that there exists some force directing his life's path, and that to struggle against it is senseless. For him the embodiment of this force was nature itself, with its immutable laws. The rotation of the celestial spheres, the movement of the Sun, served as the model for the journey of life. This model survived both in ancient philosophy and in Christian doctrine. “If there are motions that reveal kinship with the divine principle within us,” writes Plato in the Timaeus, “they are the thinking revolutions of the Universe; each of us must follow them, so that by discerning the harmonies and revolutions of the world we may correct the revolutions in our own heads that were disrupted at birth — in other words, ensure that the contemplating part, as its original nature requires, becomes like the contemplated, and thereby attain that perfect life which the gods have set before us as the goal for this time and times to come.” Fate presented itself to Plato as the spindle of Ananke-Necessity, consisting of eight spheres (the Universe is harmonious and sounds as an octave), rotating at different speeds and impelled by three Moirai: Lachesis representing the past, Clotho the present, and Atropos the future. History entered the spindle of Ananke from eastern religious doctrines, within which arose the concept of karma — the predetermination of the future by the present, which is itself conditioned by events of the past. But the human soul in Plato is not passive; it itself chooses its own “daemon,” and upon this choice depends whether a person races upon the chariot of fate or finds himself beneath its wheels. Whereas Eastern thinkers, proceeding from the historical approach, concluded that it is better to do nothing lest one inadvertently harm those who will live after us (a conclusion that condemned the East to passivism), Greek necessity did not exclude human activity. On the contrary, in order to live rightly one had to experience fate, and this could be accomplished only through experience. Even if a seer revealed fate, one still had to seek him out, to haul him from the ocean's depths as Menelaus did Proteus, to pursue him into the underworld. Mystical journeys acquired a new purpose — to experience (to test) fate and along the way to test oneself. Among Odysseus's companions, only Eurylochus espouses passivism, attempting to restrain his comrades from unrestrained experimentation. What are you doing, madmen — toward what new misfortunes do you hasten? But in vain. Odysseus has one principle, as much in the affairs of life as in games: “I am glad to meet each man and to test myself against him.” It seems that this experimental disposition played a decisive role in the formation of Western culture (the Near Eastern world was in the hands of an all-powerful god whose designs are inscrutable to human reason and whose ways are unfathomable — they cannot be known through experience. The Far Eastern world was bound by the unbreakable chain of cause and effect of saṃsāra. The inexorability of karma — the far-reaching consequences of any physical, oral, or mental action — left no room for experimentation). The flowering of Greek philosophy, like the Homeric epic some centuries earlier, falls during a period of crisis. The Great (Peloponnesian) War was longer than the Trojan War, and Attica suffered a series of crushing defeats at the hands of Lacedaemon. This war, in all likelihood, reinforced the notion of inescapable fate, since both the Athenians and the Spartans waged it as if against their own will. Indeed, their actions were covertly directed by the experienced hand of Persian diplomats, who exploited the Greek internecine conflicts to expand their empire. As the Greeks became instruments in the hands of the Persians, they lost their moral bearings and came under the influence of Eastern beliefs. This continued until the Macedonian conquests shattered the power of Persia and united West and East in the eclectic philosophy of Hellenism. Greek philosophy (like “Greek love”) is firmly associated with Plato, although in reality there is nothing in Plato's teaching that was born on Attic soil. I have already mentioned that Platonic cosmism reflects the common ancient-world conception of the identity of the Universe and the human, while Platonic Ananke-Necessity is a pan-Aryan image enriched by the Vedic philosophy of the age. Far more “Greek”, apparently, were Plato's opponents — the older Sophists, who took their departure from Heraclitus's teaching on the irreducibility of phenomena to essences. Unfortunately, we know of the Sophists mainly through the accounts of their adversaries, who created the image of a clamorous and money-hungry arguer capable of turning anything inside out. Yet even in these caricatures there shines through the Sophist's conviction that reason is not subject to the dogmas of social consciousness, and the right to a personal point of view that must be capable of being defended. At a time when unity of opinion was valued far above logic, when the assertion “all our people think so” was the decisive argument, the Sophist had the courage to say: “I think otherwise.” Sophism was a philosophy of individualism, one that appeared prematurely and, despite its ephemeral popularity among the gilded youth of Athens, was doomed to defeat. Socrates used the dialectic of the Sophists to construct an ethical system of the opposite sign. The existential phenomenology of the Sophists failed to dislodge the development of the intellect from the deep groove left by the essentialist thinking of primitive humanity — its innate essentialism. Their duel with the Platonists was deferred for two thousand years. In calling man the “measure of all things,” the Sophist Protagoras was not exalting humanity (it was not in his character to exalt anyone), but merely stating a fact — there was no other measure. Concerning the gods, he declined to judge whether they exist or not. Such views brought about exile and the burning of his books, so that we shall never know what conclusions Protagoras reached in his search for measure. Socrates fared better: he wrote no books and drank his cup already as an old man. He maintained that man is indeed perfect by nature, and that evil arises from ignorance. Both parts of this assertion gave rise to widely diverging branches of ethics. The idea of knowledge as the source of the good was developed by Socrates's student the hedonist Aristippus and by his student Epicurus, who equated rational with happy existence, since reason delivers one from suffering by opening an inexhaustible source of pleasures. Epicurus completed the work begun by Homer — he fully liberated ethics from the gods (isolating them in the metakosmos), holding that its sources should be sought not at metaphysical heights but at the lower levels of the organization of matter, in the behavior of atoms. No one before or after him plunged so deep, but the approach had been found. At the same time, the thesis concerning the naturalness of moral feeling took a leading place in the Cynic ethics founded by another student of Socrates, Antisthenes. The Cynics, one of whom — Diogenes — was called a Socrates gone mad, sought with the philosophical intuition characteristic of the ancients the sources of morality both in human nature and in the surrounding living nature. They called themselves dogs not only on account of the sign above a tavern or by virtue of totemic reminiscences, but also because they consciously strove to imitate animals, opposing the unconditional morality of instinct to the conditional, and in most cases false, social morality. Diogenes, who had renounced practically all human needs, followed migratory birds and wild beasts in their seasonal migrations, changing his dwelling according to the time of year. The soles of his feet had hardened like a horse's hooves. He openly practiced masturbation as a remedy against the amorous passions that had once led to the destruction of great Troy. For happiness, according to the Cynic, consists in freedom, and true freedom consists in deliverance from passions and the fear of death bound up with them. However, the latter theme was more thoroughly elaborated by the Stoa, which grew from the depths of Cynicism (Crates — Zeno of Citium), and the thought that death cannot trouble those whom it has already overtaken, since the dead are not troubled by anything at all, was probably placed in the mouth of Diogenes by Dio Chrysostom at a later, Hellenistic period, since entirely the same ideas were expressed by his famous contemporary Seneca. If the Epicureans developed an ethics of life, the Stoics created an ethics of death, though both identified perfection with eternal repose. The Cynic simplification and doubt about the value of fleeting human life was supplemented by fatalism and an apologia of suffering that prepares one for a positive reception of death as a blessed deliverer. The development of both branches of rationalistic ethics was interrupted by the spread of Christianity, to which each of them made its own contribution. Abraham While Odysseus was plowing the waters of the Aegean Sea on his homeward journey, the herdsman from Ur, Terah, left his homeland never to return and drove his flock northward to Haran. Here his son Abraham concluded with his personal god a covenant by which he undertook to worship only this god in exchange for support in the struggle with the Hamitic tribes of the promised land of Canaan. The covenant was drawn up along the lines of those concluded in Mesopotamia and Egypt between a master and a hired laborer (for instance, the story of Joseph contains the agreement between Pharaoh and the farmers stricken by famine: “...and we and our lands shall be servants to Pharaoh, and give us seed, that we may live and not die.”). It stipulated tribute in the form of firstborn animals, and in an earlier version, perhaps also of humans, as is attested by such dark recollections as Abraham's sacrifice of his firstborn son Isaac, replaced at the last moment by a ram, or, later, God's attempt to kill Moses's firstborn, who was saved by the circumcision of the foreskin (circumcision, like monotheism, probably goes back to an older phallic cult). In nature, infanticide — the killing of offspring — is practiced mainly as a means of regulating population size. Among lower invertebrates the consumption of one's own progeny is fairly common. The walleye pollock, for example, regularly feeds on its own young. At higher stages of evolution, mechanisms for preventing infanticide appear. The effeminacy of young cockerels, who have not yet grown combs and tails, saves them from attack by the adult male — this mechanism operates in humans as well. A puppy can also prevent aggression by adopting a puppy posture of submission. Already among chimpanzees a kind of ritualization of infanticide is observed (in which only males participate), which underwent further development in humans. However, a tribe that is conquering new lands and is interested in rapid reproduction cannot afford child sacrifice. In any case, the original covenant envisaged the possibility of replacing them with the foreskin, which cemented kinship by blood. It should be said that animal sacrifice also gradually lost its original meaning. Pastoral peoples conceived of the other world as a pasture on which the deceased tend the cattle slaughtered at their funerals, and the gods were the supreme herdsmen in that world (even in the relatively late Greek mythology, the sun god Helios, one of the most ancient, had his own cattle). Sacrifice was, in the literal sense, tribute: the divine herdsman was entitled under the covenant to a certain number of select animals. With the loss of the ancient worldview, new explanations had to be invented — for example, that the god enjoys the smell of burning meat (this is how the notorious illogic of myth arises). Abraham, by the covenant, belonged to God, but God belonged to Abraham as well. This God, who had no name of his own, known to his people as “the Existing One” (Yahweh), later called himself “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” When he proposed to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham had to remind him of the righteous, who must not perish together with the sinners. In this episode Abraham is morally superior to God, but he himself sees nothing remarkable in this: it happened that even a master acknowledged the rightness of a slave. The original covenant imposed no ethical obligations on Abraham beyond (1) loyalty to God, (2) norms of sexual behavior that excluded incest and sodomy, and (3) the requirement not to create idols — that is, substitutes for God. These were held to include not only living beings but any images whatsoever (which, in the opinion of the ancients, acquired the properties of that which was depicted, thus opening the possibility of magical influence). For a time this was sufficient, but the Exodus from Egypt and the subsequent wanderings apparently undermined traditional morality. The situation resembled the Homeric one (see above), but whereas the Greeks tried to find a way out through reason, the Jews, lost in the desert, placed their hope in fear. It was then that a new (bearing in mind what followed, an “intermediate”) covenant was needed. It was then that the injunction “thou shalt not kill” was pronounced in imperative form — a commandment that bears witness to the tragic loss of the innate, inherited from the animal ancestors, prohibition against killing a kinsman — the foundation of instinctive ethics. The thunder, lightning, and trumpet blast that accompanied the words of God were intended, as Moses explained to the people, so “that his fear may be before your faces, so that ye sin not.” Despite the intimidation, the chosen people continued to misbehave, worshipping the golden calf even during Moses's direct communion with God, who was compelled, not limiting himself to verbal admonitions, to inscribe with his own hand upon stone tablets a body of extremely severe laws concerning the order of sacrifice and the remission of sins, diet, strong drink, infectious diseases, sexual relations, and everyday morality, containing in particular articles on love of one's neighbor, reverence for elders, and hospitality (“if a stranger sojourn among you in your land, you shall not vex him”). Violation of God's laws was invariably punished by death. God's laws, unlike Caesar's, are prescribed for the spiritual world, holding sway over the human soul. But lived experience suggests that true power belongs only to one who governs the basic instincts. Therefore any power structure, including a religious one, strives to control nutrition and reproduction. Whoever determines what may be eaten, with whom and when one may mate, holds the power. Hence dietary prescriptions, fasts, abstinences, licenses for sexual life are altogether indispensable. The Crossroads. The Supreme Task. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 7. Odysseus. Abraham. Golgotha. Metaphors. Covenants.