From Aeschylus To The Numinous Way
The Numinous Authority of πάθει μάθος
Pathei-Mathos
The Greek term πάθει μάθος (pathei-mathos) derives from The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (written c. 458 BCE), and can be interpreted, or translated, as meaning learning from adversary, or wisdom arises from (personal) suffering; or personal experience is the genesis of true learning.
However, this expression should be understood in context [1], for what Aeschylus writes is that the Immortal, Zeus, guiding mortals to reason, has provided we mortals with a new law, which law replaces previous ones, and this new law – this new guidance laid down for mortals – is pathei-mathos. Thus, for we human beings, pathei-mathos possesses a numinous authority [2] – that is, the wisdom, the understanding, that arises from one’s own personal experience, from formative experiences that involve some hardship, some grief, some personal suffering, is more valuable than any doctrine, than any religious faith, than any impersonal words one might read in some book.
Hence, in many ways, this is an enlightened – a very human – view, and is rather in contrast to the faith and revelation-centred view of Judaism, Islam, and the Nazarenes. In the former, it is the personal experience of learning from, and dealing with, personal suffering and adversity, that is paramount and which possesses authority; in the latter, it is faith that some written work or works is or are a sacred revelation from the supreme deity one believes in which is paramount, combined with a belief that this supreme deity has appointed or authorized some mortal being or beings, or some Institution, as their earthly representative, and who thus possess authority.
Thus, the enlightened, Aeschylian, view is that learning, and thus wisdom, arises from within us, by virtue of that which afflicts us (and which afflictions could well be the from the gods/Nature or from some supra-personal source) and from our own, direct, personal, practical, experience. In contrast, the conventional religious view is that wisdom can be found in some book (especially in some religious text), or be learnt from someone considered be an authority, or who has been appointed as some authority by some Institution, religious or otherwise.
The enlightened view is thus numinous – that is, some-thing which lives, which is part of our own living, grounded in the reality of the immediacy of the moment; while the religious view is un-numinous, inert, abstract, indirect, impersonal. Thus, for religion, wisdom and indeed truth can be found in revelation from some supreme deity, or imparted to or taught to us by someone in some position of authority, or discovered in something dead, such as a book.
The essential difference between these two ways is that what we may call the way of pathei-mathos is the personal way of direct experience, while the religious way is the way of abstractions. For the way of pathei-mathos, knowledge – and thus learning, based on such knowledge – is personal, direct, acquired in the immediacy of a living, a lived-through, moment of one’s own mortal life. For the religious way, knowledge – and thus learning, based on such knowledge – can be and has been contained in something other-than-ourselves which we have to or which we can learn from: something impersonal, some abstraction, such as a book, a dogma, a creed, some Institution, some teacher or master.
Philosophy, Logic, and Politics
In essence, conventional philosophy seeks to find certain and particular causes for what exists, and to express certain general principles, by and through which knowledge and understanding of Reality, and existence, and thus wisdom, may be said to be obtained.
But, in a quite real way, conventional philosophy is founded upon the religious notion, the religious approach to wisdom mentioned above, for conventional philosophy is based upon abstractions [3]; upon abstract or idealized categories and ideas by and through which it is claimed we can acquire a knowing of what such categories and ideas are said to represent. All conventional philosophy has this approach – this ideation – by its very nature as an interior process of reflexion, by human beings, upon Reality and existence, and a process which requires the use of ideation and words and/or terms, and thence their collocation, to present to other human beings the result or results of such reflexion. Such ideation, such abstraction, is inherent in the finding of certain particular causes and general principles.
Exterior to this interior process, this ideation, there is logic, which may be defined as the dispassionate examination of the collocation or collocations of words and/or terms (or symbols) which relate, or which are said to relate, to what is correct (valid, true) or incorrect (invalid, false) and which collocation or collocations are considered to be or which are regarded as being, by their proponents, as representative of, or actually being, knowledge or a type of or a guide to knowing.
For logic, what is or what may be represented by such collocations (the content) is fundamentally irrelevant. What is relevant – what determines the logical validity of any any examined collocations – is the natural unfolding, or the form, behind and beyond all ideation.
Logic thus regards abstractions and ideas as irrelevant, as no guarantee of truth, and thus as no sure guide to a genuine knowing and to wisdom itself, and thus logic can be considered as a valid means whereby truth can be ascertained [4].
It may be objected, however, that the use of logic in philosophy makes philosophy a reasonable and a valid guide to Reality and thence to truth. However, what conventional philosophy does and has done is apply logic to theories that are derived from some abstraction or other, which application is basically irrelevant if the basal abstractions themselves are flawed. Furthermore, all such abstractions are in and of themselves flawed because they are, by their very nature, abstractions, divorced as they are from the numinous, from that which lives, and which unfolds in that natural way which Φύσις does.
Thus, one can conclude that logic, rather than conventional philosophy, is a more valid means to truth and thence to knowledge, than the speculations and ideations of conventional philosophy.
Like philosophy, politics is founded upon abstractions – upon the religious way to knowledge and truth – but takes, and has taken, abstractionism much further, through the manufacture of ideologies, which are specific collocations of dogmatic abstractions.
In addition, politics is often or mostly based upon an appeal to the emotions, where individuals allow themselves to be persuaded by others (often through rhetoric or because of propaganda) and/or suspend their own judgement in favour of accepting that of someone else (some leader) or of some political organization or movement. That is, there is an identification with certain abstract political views, or some ideology, or some political organization or leader, in place of or instead of one’s own judgement and in place of or instead of one’s own unique, individual, identity deriving from one’s own pathei-mathos.
In particular, there is or there comes to be, an immoral, an un-numinous, judgement of (and often a dislike or even hatred of) others based on what is perceived to be their political views, allegiance, or opinions, so that, for instance, a person is viewed not as an individual human being, but as an abstraction: as a Conservative, or as a fascist, or as a liberal, or as a Communist, and so on. This is same type of inhuman, immoral, prejudice that conventional religion often still produces and most certainly has produced, for millennia, and which ethnic, or racial, abstractions certainly still produce and encourage.
The Pathei-Mathos of Experimental Science
In contrast to philosophy, experimental science seeks to explain the natural world – the phenomenal world – by means of direct, personal, observation of it, and by making deductions, and formulating hypothesis, based on such direct observation, with the important and necessary proviso, beautifully expressed by Isaac Newton, in his Principia, that
“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearance….. for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”
The raison d’etre of experimental science – unlike philosophy, religion, and politics – is knowledge acquired in a personal, direct, manner, without the intervention of abstractions, and this, as is the knowledge obtained by pathei-mathos, is numinous: a re-presentation, sans abstractions, which is living, possessed of Life, and a practical guide to what actually is real, as opposed to the assumed, the imaginary, the abstract un-living reality that conventional philosophy, religion and politics present to us.
Hence, experimental science may be said to complement and extend – as a guide to Reality, knowledge and wisdom – the personal way of pathei-mathos.
The essential difference between experimental science and philosophy is that of abstractions: for philosophy, unobservable (theoretical) abstractions are the beginning of, and indeed the necessary and required basis of, our enquiry into the nature of Reality, and existence, and meaning; whereas for experimental science such abstractions, or theories, which may arise or which are conjectured, do so only on the basis of direct observation, are only and ever conjectural, temporary, subject to falsification by further practical observations, and are always rational, that is subject to logic (the rules of reasoning).
In addition, in philosophy, authority is the authority of some individual or individuals recognized by others for their theoretical contributions(s), so that, for instance, a scholarly paper in philosophy is of necessity replete with what other philosophers have said or written or thought or conjectured. For experimental science, authority lies in the evidence of observations and the application of logic.
Tradition and The Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos
We may define a new philosophy – the philosophy of πάθει μάθος – which is that of the way of a personal pathei-mathos combined with the way of experimental science, where we obtain knowledge about Reality, and may move toward certain truths about ourselves and existence, through direct practical, scientific observation of the phenomenal world, through the learning that derives from pathei-mathos, through the application of logic, and through an appreciation of a living tradition.
Why an appreciation of a living tradition? A living – a numinous – tradition may be defined as the remembered or the recalled accumulated pathei-mathos of one’s ancestors or of one’s kin [5], and is numinous because it still lives within people, within individuals, and derives from the pathei-mathos of others. An appreciation of this collection, of and from the personal experience of others, places or can place one’s own pathei-mathos into a numinous, a living, perspective, and thus allows for a dispassionate examination of one’s conclusions, akin to using the process of logic to examine the collocation of words or symbols.
As Aeschylus wrote:
Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσ-
ιν μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει:
τὸ μέλλον δ᾽, ἐπεὶ γένοιτ᾽, ἂν κλύοις: πρὸ χαιρέτω:
ἴσον δὲ τῷ προστένειν. [6]
Thus, in contrast to conventional philosophy, in this new philosophy there are no basal abstractions, no ideation, only (1) the results of a personal pathei-mathos (2) the evidence of practical observations; (3) the application of logic to both the deductions and generalizations about or concerning these observations, and to the one’s own results deriving from pathei-mathos; and (4) an appreciation of a living tradition.
Since this new philosophy is some-thing which lives in a through a living tradition and/or in living, individual, human-beings, it is thus numinous – of Life – and so it is apposite to call it The Numinous Way, with this Numinous Way balancing logic, the results of practical observation, and a living tradition, with one’s own individual pathei-mathos. In this sense, it is, or could be considered to be, a guide to λόγος, to Φύσις, and thus to what we understand as σοφός.
David Myatt
2455329.933
Footnotes:
[1]
Ζῆνα δέ τις προφρόνως ἐπινίκια κλάζων
τεύξεται φρενῶν τὸ πᾶν:
ὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-
σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος
θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν.
If anyone, from reasoning, exclaims loudly that victory of Zeus,
Then they have acquired an understanding of all these things;
Of he who guided mortals to reason,
Who laid down that this possesses authority:
Learning from adversity.
Aeschylus: Agamemnon,174-183
[2] The numinous is what predisposes us not to commit ὕβρις – see Footnote [3], below.
[3] Abstraction(ism) can be philosophically defined as the implementation, the practical application, of ὕβρις.
In respect of the numinous, and recalling The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Antigone and the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, we could say that the numinous is what predisposes us not to commit ὕβρις – to not overstep the due limits.
As Sophocles wrote in Oedipus Tyrannus:
ὕβρις φυτεύει τύραννον:
ὕβρις, εἰ πολλῶν ὑπερπλησθῇ μάταν,
ἃ μὴ ‘πίκαιρα μηδὲ συμφέροντα,
ἀκρότατον εἰσαναβᾶσ᾽
αἶπος ἀπότομον ὤρουσεν εἰς ἀνάγκαν,
ἔνθ᾽ οὐ ποδὶ χρησίμῳ
χρῆται
“Insolence plants the tyrant. There is insolence if by a great foolishness there is a useless over-filling which goes beyond the proper limits. It is an ascending to the steepest and utmost heights and then that hurtling toward that Destiny where the useful foot has no use…” (vv.872ff)
We might thus conclude, with some justification, that hubris is the genesis of abstractions, and the numinous is what guides us, or what can guide us, to a dis-covery and understanding of Φύσις and which understanding of Φύσις, as Heraclitus noted [see also Footnote 3, below] in respect of σοφός, is beyond and independent of every-thing, every ideation (and abstraction):
Ὁκόσων λόγους ἤκουσα οὐδεὶς ἀφικνέεται ἐς τοῦτο, ὥστε γινώσκειν ὅτι σοφόν ἐστι πάντων κεχωρισμένον.(Heraclitus Epigrammaticus, 18)
In more general terms:
” The numinous places our own personal lives in a larger context: that of other human beings; that of the other life with which we share this planet; and that of the very Cosmos itself, with its billions upon billions of stars and billions upon billions of Galaxies, some of which stars and some of which Galaxies may well have life-bearing planets of their own.
What is numinous is that which predisposes us to change ourselves in an ethical way; that which reminds us of our mortality – of life, existence, beyond us; that which manifests the essence of Life itself, and that which re-presents to us what we feel is beautiful and good…” An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
and, also in general terms, abstraction is:
” The manufacture/creation, and/or use of, an idea, ideal, “image” or category, and thus the denotation, or denoting – usually by means of a name or term – of some “thing” which is either general, a generalization or of a group. Implicit in abstraction is the referring of a “thing”, or an individual or individuals, to some manufactured abstraction, and often a judgement, or classification, of that “thing” or individual(s) on the basis of some abstraction which has been assigned some “value” or some quality. The positing of some “perfect” or “ideal” form, category, or thing, is part of abstraction…” A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
[4] In many ways, the λόγος that is logical reasoning [cf. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 583, εἰ διδοίης γ᾽ ὡς ἐγὼ σαυτῷ λόγον ] is the opposite – τοῦ λ. ἐόντος ξυνοῦ – of an idea, of an abstraction,
Τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος αἰεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον (Heraclitus Epigrammaticus, 2).
In respect of wisdom -
Ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην ᾗ κυβερνᾶται πάντα διὰ πάντων (Heraclitus, 19)
and this is beyond all abstractions, being concealed by the word or words (and the speaking of them) describing such an abstraction, and also
Ὁκόσων λόγους ἤκουσα οὐδεὶς ἀφικνέεται ἐς τοῦτο, ὥστε γινώσκειν ὅτι σοφόν ἐστι πάντων κεχωρισμένον. (Heraclitus, 18)
This wisdom is a knowing of Φύσις which both naturally (according to its own nature), and by humans with their words, has a tendency to become concealed -
Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (Heraclitus, 10)
[5] The essential aspect here is a closeness of personal knowing – of having some direct, some personal, knowledge of, some connexion and relation to, in the past, the individuals whose pathei-mathos is recalled, recounted, or remembered. By the very nature of such pathei-mathos, what is recalled, recounted, or remembered is personal experience, the personal and the very individual wisdom acquired from pathei-mathos – that is, it is not some philosophy, not some political dogma, not ossified into some religious form or other, not regarded as some definitive or some abiding guide to truth, and is never expressed by means of ideation, by abstracting it in some impersonal way.
In many cases, this accumulated pathei-mathos will form part of a particular, and numinous, culture.
[6]
The goddess, Judgement, favours someone learning from adversity.
But I shall hear of what will be, after it comes into being:
Before then, I leave it,
Otherwise, it is the same as a premature grieving.
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 250-254
