Tae-Yeoun Keum: Why philosophy needs myth
In 1872, at the age of 28, Friedrich Nietzsche announced himself to the world with The Birth of Tragedy, an elegiac account of the alienation of Western culture from its spiritual foundations. According to Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks had once mastered a healthy cultural balance between the ‘Apollonian’ impulse toward rational control and the ‘Dionysian’ desire for ecstatic surrender. From the 5th century BCE onward, however, Western intellectual culture has consistently skewed in favour of Apollonian rationalism to the neglect of the Dionysian – an imbalance from which it has never recovered.
The primary villain of
this story was Plato, whom Nietzsche accused of setting philosophy on its
rationalist track. Plato’s immortalisation of his teacher, Socrates, amounted
to nothing less than a morbid obsession with intellectual martyrdom. His Theory
of the Forms taught generations of philosophers to seek truth in metaphysical
abstractions, while devaluing lived experiences in the physical world. Plato’s
intellectual revolution, in particular, was born out of the destruction of
myth. In his wake, philosophy had been left ‘stripped of myth’ and starved of
cultural roots. Modern culture, for Nietzsche, continued to languish in the
shadow of Plato’s legacy, still grappling with its ‘loss of myth, the loss of a
mythical home, a mythical, maternal womb’.
Seven decades later,
at the end of the Second World War, Karl Popper mounted what would become,
after Nietzsche, the second-most famous attack on Plato in modern philosophy.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper suggested
that Plato had provided Western thought with its first blueprint of the ‘closed
society’. …
https://aeon.co/essays/was-plato-a-mythmaker-or-the-mythbuster-of-western-thought
STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a
diagnosis
A moment
of moral and political nihilism: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis
The best
books on Hegel: recommended by Stephen Houlgate
Hegel
and the mystical tradition: Interview with Glenn Magee. By Stanislav Panin
Paul
Sagar - The last hollow laugh - Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History’
Stanley
Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher passes
Susan
Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth
Telling'
Mark
Neocleous: Resisting Resilience
Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus
affair into spotlight in French election race
Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of
Covid
