Using history to escape the system
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- Ideological systems, scientism, improvement for its own sake, what learning feels like, social sciences as sorcery, history's erasure, history as dimension, intelligence, creativity, escaping PURE IDEOLOGY.
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Great talk. Make more videos in this format. Looking forward to seeing more.
For lack of better words to convey the depth of my appreciation, thank you.
What a refreshing channel. I loved this. Thank you.
Beautiful. Thank you!
Fantastic and inspiring video! and book suggestions, will definately check out Houses of History..Thanks
mmmm many nice words
Inspirational! Thanks.
A very good, thought provoking video - thanks!
Earned a subscriber. Keep going
“But how his arms and legs are thin!”
Happily my hair is not growing the same
Good talk. Etymology is crucial too. The way a word or concept changes itself and relates to other words gives you so much. It's like it's own meta-history in a way. People in ancient times didn't think about "green stuff" when they refered to nature for example, but rather to an essence by which something perpetuates itself.
I wish I'd said this in the video now, damn it. Case in point, 'freedom' was once 'freedom from licentiousness' rather than 'freedom to engage in licentiousness.'
Or the old Greek vision of art as 'tekhne', more like 'craft' than art, where it seems to presuppose the truth of the thing being made and the skill in getting to it is merely a technique with results as objective as those of an electrician or plumber, where we'd now think of that goal as our own and treat it like a unique artistic expression. (Not that old technicians didn't have their own artistic flair of course).
@@VersoFolioBooks Very good point. The Greek word "μῆνις" ("mênis", used often to describe the "wrath", "anger", etc. of Achilles (First line of the Iliad: "μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος" - "Mēnin aeide, thea, Pēlēïadeō Achilēos") is a very important hint to understanding the figure of Achilles, the Iliad and the Ancient cult of "hero/demigod" ("ἥρως" - "hḗrōs" in Homer but interestingly "ημίθεος" - "imítheos" in Hesiod). In modern translations "μῆνις" becomes "rage" in Fagles, "cataclysmic wrath" in Wilson, and simply "anger" in Lattimore. This undermines totally the original meaning and hence function of the word. In fact "μῆνις" is extremely rarely used when describing the anger of humans, and describes exclusively the wrath of Gods, specifically Apollo ("μῆνιν Ἀπόλλωνος ἐκάλεσσεν ἄνακτος", I75). The reason for using "μῆνις" to describe Achilles is to provide a textual or linguistic equivalence to the mythological antagonistic parallelism between Achilles and Apollo. A modern reader that does not read Homeric Greek reading in translation cannot (without secondary sources) understand that the very first word naming the central theme of the Iliad (one function) also points the way toward a fundamental relation between Achilles and Apollo (second function). This relationship is not immediately obvious, but it is supported both on the level of myth (see the Homeric hymns to Apollo or Pindar's "Paean 6", where Neoptolemus, son of Achilles (known as Pyrrhus in Virgil, sacker of Ilion and murderer of Priam: perhaps you know it from Hamlet) is himself murdered by Apollo) and on the level of language (see aforementioned "μῆνις", but other words appear specifically in relation to both Apollo and Achilles; "ἄλγε", "λοιγὸς", etc., both Achilles' and Apollo's "wrath" inflicts "pain" on the level of "devastation" on the Achaeans). Understanding how Achilles relates to Apollo is integral to understanding Achilles and the function of "hḗrōs" in ancient Greek life, and yet I've practically never met a "general" reader of Homer who even realized that Achilles has a special relation to Apollo. This is like reading the Iliad and trying to analyze Achilles without considering his relation to Thetis or Patroclus!
Sorry for rambling, it's just that a classmate (a student of comp lit nonetheless) once claimed that the Greeks and specifically Homer are "too old" to really have any deeper textual meaning, and to prove her wrong I boldly proclaimed that you could write books on just the first word of the Iliad, whereafter I spent the entire night perusing book 1 and my Liddell&Scott, and soon discovering the importance of this one word. It led me to some books on Homer and Comparative Mythology, where I found all this.
This was great, really enjoy your take on stuff.
Highly recommend Raymond Tallis’ book Aping Mankind for a through deconstruction of scientism and the worship of bad science
@@budusbusham3324 thanks, will check this out
Incredible insights, thank you. In what video do you talk further about The White Goddess?
Thanks. Haven't actually done a full video on white goddess yet. Might give it a go at some point, sounds like fun.
@@VersoFolioBooks Could you recommend a few other RUclips channels you like to watch?
@@MsFruittwist orpheus
paperbird
luke smith
jonathan pageau
book shore and leaf by leaf sometimes
mementomori but he hasn't made anything for aeons
sometimes I point and laugh at steve donoghue for a few seconds at a time
unfazed review (which has almost nothing to do with books btw)
I used to have a wider variety but cut most of them out years back because I was trying to escape the cycle of just consuming content all day
@@VersoFolioBooksyou should make one. this is like one of the few videos that comes up when searching the white goddess. (still, fantastic video)
This is good. I enjoyed your video. I am reading "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. Please tell us more about the "Poetic Mindset". How would you describe it? The Bards needed to have excellent memories; they memorized many poems, songs, stories. Graves posits that all true pre-Roman-conquest poetry in Wales and Scotland were actually magical incantations -- they were the acting out of religious rites to the White Goddess. yes?
Thanks. In my mind at least, the poetic mindset entails creating art, which is to say making metaphors, in service of the depiction of the accurate world. Metaphors are more than equivalencies, more than rhetorical devices: they're actual, essential (as in, of essence) links between seemingly disparate objects.
The old alchemical formula 'as above, so below' referred to this Hermetic/poetic mindset, as the notion of creating things in the mortal world mirrored God's act of creating everything; you may already know the term 'poesis,' origin of 'poetry,' means 'to bring something into being.'
All speech is composed entirely of metaphors because the arbitrary sounds made by the mouth are identified with specific concepts in the world around us. So, to talk, to create metaphors and have them be translated from metaphor into (obviously slightly different) understanding by someone else, is to create in a very basic sense, and this creation allows us to become closer to others.
This makes poetry the root of empathy - I see myself as literally being someone else, and then I can feel for him - and this, in turn, provides a starting point for the understanding of the logos. It provides a kind of clue as to why Christ was a mortal man.
Given that I've just posited all speech to entail creation, I think I understand why Graves had that idea. I'm not great with the history of the UK though, so I basically only know what he said in WG. I can tell you, however - and I don't remember if I mentioned this in the video - there was a Mother Goddess cult on Crete before the Proto-Indo-Europeans got there, and I'm fairly sure this cult was maintained by the Minoans.