Introduction
The essays in this collection – written over the past few years or so – are autobiographical in nature, and express, in essence, the raisons d’être behind my recent move away from the Way of Al-Islam and back to my own weltanschauung which I have termed both The Numinous Way and The Philosophy of The Numen.
This return has been the result of an almost four-year long interior struggle following one seminal event – the suicide of my then fiancée – and which struggle led me to not only reflect upon certain ethical and philosophical questions, but also to develope and refine my own weltanschauung. There was, thus, for me, πάθει μάθος – a certain learning from the adversity of a personal suffering [1].
A most important part of this interior struggle, and this period of reflexion, concerned notions of duty and personal honour – subjects that are somewhat outré in these causal material times of large nation-States, rapid (and vapid) communication, vulgar mass ‘popular’ entertainment, and a general unfamiliarity, among the populace of such nation-States, with what we may term the culture of ἀρετή [2] and which culture now includes the works of such individuals as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Livy, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Isaac Newton, JS Bach, and TS Eliot, among others.
Thus, I was for several years torn between doing what I considered was my honourable duty and following where my own personal learning from experience and reflexion took me. For some time before this – for around seven or eight years – I considered that I was under the noble obligation to adhere to an oath I had sworn; the oath of my Shahadah, taken when I became Muslim, and while occasionally some doubts did arise, they all became dispelled by a loyal clinging onto that oath. It just seemed, to me, dishonourable to place my own feelings, the results of my own reflexion, before this oath.
However, the aforementioned seminal event eventually – after much interior and external peregrinations – led me back to the culture of ἀρετή and to develope, at least in my possibly biased opinion, a deeper understanding and appreciation of φύσις, Δίκα, ἀρετή, and thus of honour.
As TS Eliot so wonderfully expressed it:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
My understanding of honour thus came to be as expressed, in The Philosophy of The Numen, as an ethical means to aid the cessation of suffering and thus as “a practical manifestation of empathy: of how we can relate to other people, and other life, in an empathic and compassionate way” [3]. That is, as a means whereby we as individuals can manifest a well-balanced, a fair, a noble, personal judgement, and thus how both ἀρετή and Δίκα can be presenced in those communities, those societies, we belong to or establish.
The Philosophy of The Numen is, therefore, and perhaps more correctly, the philosophy of πάθει μάθος – where the numinosity of authority of or deriving from πάθει μάθος is given precedence over the ways of doctrine, religious faith, and the ideation of causal, un-numinous, abstractions [4].
Naturally – given my somewhat unusual if not eccentric past and various peregrinations among what it is convenient (though not entirely accurate) to describe as political, social, and religious -isms and -ologies – I do not expect to be understood, except perhaps by some of those few who today understand and appreciate the culture of ἀρετή, or in whom the culture of ἀρετή resonates.
As someone, not that long ago, wrote:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
So, perhaps these essays are just another failure of communication on my part; hopefully, possibly not.
David Myatt
2455522.321
(November 2010 CE)
Notes:
[1]
Ζῆνα δέ τις προφρόνως ἐπινίκια κλάζων
τεύξεται φρενῶν τὸ πᾶν:
τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-
σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος
θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν.
στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας
μνησιπήμων πόνος: καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-
κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν.
δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος
σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων.
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‘. Even in sleep there trickles through the heart
The disabling recalling of the pain:
And wisdom arrives regardless of desire,
A favour from daimons
Who have taken the seats of honour, by force.
[2] Central to the culture of ἀρετή are two things: the currently unfashionable concept (or archetype) of a noble, an aristocratic, personal character bred from physical and intellectual challenges (a personal development of, or discovery of, personal potential from direct and challenging personal learning) and the concept (or more correctly, archetype) of Δίκα.
In respect of noble personal character – and learning from πάθει μάθος – one has, for instance, Odysseus, and the fabled Oedipus, of whom Sophocles says:
ὦ πάτρας Θήβης ἔνοικοι, λεύσσετ᾽, Οἰδίπους ὅδε,
ὃς τὰ κλείν᾽ αἰνίγματ᾽ ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ,
οὗ τίς οὐ ζήλῳ πολιτῶν ἦν τύχαις ἐπιβλέπων,
εἰς ὅσον κλύδωνα δεινῆς συμφορᾶς ἐλήλυθεν.
ὥστε θνητὸν ὄντα κείνην τὴν τελευταίαν ἰδεῖν
ἡμέραν ἐπισκοποῦντα μηδέν᾽ ὀλβίζειν, πρὶν ἂν
τέρμα τοῦ βίου περάσῃ μηδὲν ἀλγεινὸν παθών.You natives of Thebes: Observe – here is Oedipus,
He who understood that famous enigma and was a strong man:
What clansman did not behold that fortune without envy?
But what a tide of problems have come over him!
Therefore, look toward that ending which is for us mortals,
To observe that particular day – calling no one lucky until,
Without the pain of injury, they are conveyed beyond life’s ending.(Oedipus Tyrannus, vv. 1524-1530)
In respect of Δίκα Aeschylus wrote:
Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσ-
ιν μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει:
τὸ μέλλον δ᾽, ἐπεὶ γένοιτ᾽, ἂν κλύοις: πρὸ χαιρέτω:
ἴσον δὲ τῷ προστένειν.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
Thus, the culture of ἀρετή is, in essence, the education of discovering and knowing, intellectually and personally, that noble balance between our natural human tendency to commit ὕβρις – to go beyond the respectful, noble, limits of behaviour – and the necessity of learning the hard way, from πάθει μάθος, from direct personal experience. Δίκα is this balance; a balance manifest in us – or which can be manifest in us – through thoughtful reasoning, that is, by a well-balanced, fair, noble, personal judgement.
As Heraclitus wrote:
σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ μεγίστη, καὶ σοφίη ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαίοντας. (Fragmentum B 112 )
Which suggests that what is most excellent [ ἀρετὴ ] is thoughtful reasoning, a well-balanced judgement – [σωφρονεῖν] – and that such reasoning is both (1) to express (reveal, discover, learn) meaning and (2) that which is in accord with, in balance with or in sympathy with, φύσις – with our natural noble human nature and the nature of Being itself.
[3] Refer, for example, to my essay An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life.
[4] A brief analysis of this philosophy of πάθει μάθος in the context of the culture of ἀρετὴ is given in the first part of my essay The Classical Foundations of The Numinous Way, entitled From Aeschylus To The Numinous Way: The Numinous Authority of πάθει μάθος.
A concise discussion of abstractions, and their un-numinous nature, is given in my essay A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction.
