Discursive thinking: proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition.
Poets, philosophers, tragedians.
First note here.
The subtitle: The liberation of the western mind, from Odysseus to Socrates.
Chapter I: the Wooden Horse -- where the author begins his book. The author's theme:
... the invention of the Wooden Horse constitutes a divide in the
history of European civilization and consciousness. For the first time,
we witness a human being thinking discursively -- that is to say,
separating action from awareness, internal and external, which until
then had been a unity.
Chapter II: Homer is analyzed as a metaphor for the narrative structure. Comment: perhaps, metonym might have been a better word?
Chapter III: Homer intends to replace the original cult of
fertility goddesses, linked to the earth and the realm of the dead, with
the divine patriarchal rule of Olympus, which he more or less invents
Chapter IV: The Trojan War itself is seen as a paradigm of the
fundamental experience of the Greeks -- that development pre-supposes
and takes place through an unbroken rotation of strife and eros
Chapter V: read summary of Chapter VI below first. Then, Chapter V -- the maternal bond is the primary theme in the Telmachy
in which Telmachos' paralysis derives from his bond to his mother. His
voyage away from her -- to seek information on the fate of his father --
describes his liberation and maturity so that he can meet his father --
and the father in himself
Chapter VI: the precondition for realizing Homer's utopia of a
peaceful world order is for his hero Odysseus to prove himself in the
trials that await him on his ten-year voyage home. We are given a
detailed outline of his psychological character. All the monsters of the
voyage home emerge as deadly forces from the revolt against the mother
that is a hidden them in Homer's texts. Now back to Chapter V.
Chapter VII: during the adventures on his voyage, Odysseus
integrates the demonic, primeval maternal realty from which he freed
himself as a younger man. WOW!
Chapter VIII: his final trial consists of regaining his kingdom,
Ithaka, by slaying the arrogant suitors. After this he is reunited with
his wife ....
Chapter IX: Homer's guiding utopia stretches through both his
works: to achieve a lasting peace, which in a contemporary perspective
corresponds to the social order or eunomia for which Solon becomes the spokesman
Chapter X: the subjective and reflective breakthrough in poetry and philosophy
Chapter XI: in the second main section, Homer is developed
further -- in new genres. As the first poet of whose biography we know
anything. Hesiod is viewed as a transitional figure from Homer to later
writing, philosophy, religiosity, and science
Chapter XII: the individuality that the Odysseus figure partly
represents is fully established in the first subject-oriented poets:
Archilochus and Sappho, who each in their own way put their personal
passions at the center of poetry
Chapter XIII: Alongside them, the first philosophers emerge ..
try to explain the world on the basis of objective observations. Against
the background, several of them (Xenophanes and Heraclitus) criticize
the divine worlds of Home and Hesiod as human projections. Key figure in
this section is Heraclitus, while Parmenides is the philosopher of
pure logic, who forms the transition to Plato's idealism
Chapter XIV: the origin of tragedy; tragedy defined as an existential necessity
Chapters XV - XVIII: now the three great tragedians -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Clear differences among the three
Chapter XVIII: the study ends by showing the in Plato's
description of Socrates, we find the answer that Euripides and the
crisis of the time sought. Socrates attributes the highest value to the
inner being. Plato's utopia reflects Socrates' desire to convert his
doctrine of the soul into a new form of state. Here, women would have
equal status with men, which they did not have in the Athens of the day.
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