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A pdf version of this item is available here: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/dm-sequel-holding-the-line.pdf
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In a missive written in August 2023 titled Holding The Line [1] I quoted a paragraph from a 2012 missive:“I have some forty years experience of interaction with the police, from ordinary constables and detectives, to custody sergeants, to officers from specialist branches such as SO12, SO13, and crime squads. During that time, I have known far more good police officers than bad – corrupt – ones. Furthermore, I realized that most of those I came into contact with were good individuals, motivated by the best of intentions, who were trying to do their best, often under difficult circumstances, and often to help victims of dishonourable deeds, catch those responsible for such deeds, and/or prevent such deeds.”In the matter of the British Police those four decades of mine, from the late 1960’s to the early 2000’s, provided me in retrospect with a particular insight which, combined with others, contributed to my rejection of all extremisms. Thus I have a hitherto unvoiced personal response when there is some report – as there now seems to be almost every week in the mass media – of some person or persons or of some ‘policy group’ or of some politician “losing confidence” in the Police and demanding some reform or other or that some figurehead resign.
Which response is that those who for whatever reason and from whatever motive criticize the Police or the Police response to some incident or to some crime real or alleged, is that such critics before or after they publicly voice such criticism should spent at least a month with Police officers “on the front line” and experience what such officers face almost every day with what over the past decade or more have become limited and increasingly shrinking resources and a dwindling number of officers. In many instances, these officers have only a split-second to decide what to do in a particular situation.
Would those critics then revise their opinion? For we now seem to have the all too familiar ‘those who do not know’ complaining about those who, from practical experience, do know.
To me, at least, there are lessons here for our Western societies and for their future. But who now listens to such ancient wisdom as this: τῇ δ᾽ ἐπιστήμῃ σύ μου προύχοις τάχ᾽ ἄν που, “about this, your experience has the advantage over mine,” Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1115. [3]
David Myatt
April 23rd 2024
[1] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/holding-the-line.pdf
[2] The Politics and Ideology of Hate, https://davidmyattinfo.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/dm-politics-of-hate-2012.pdf
[3] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/oedipus-tyrannus-v1.pdf
Image Credit: NASA – Earth and Moon from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
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A pdf archive of my new website, as of March 2024, is available at https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/website-march-24.pdf
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After nearly twenty years with the same provider I have taken down my davidmyatt dot info website due to a change in their polices: to replace static sites like mine, with its handcrafted html, with ‘dynamic’ sites using JavaScript and php with a decorative ‘website builder’.
The new (advertisement free) website is at https://dwmyatt.net/2024/03/01/a-question-of-pathei-mathos/ and consists of a static main page with links to pdf versions of various writings.°°°
NASA:
Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
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An interesting article about my old political idea of a rural homeland, how that idea was ethically evolved and was finally, post-2010, rejected along with all such political ideas with the development of my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.
A Rural Homeland And The Pursuit Of The Numinous
Image Credit:
To The Distant One, A Painting by Richard Moult
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§ Physis And Being
§ The Way Of Pathei-Mathos – A Précis
§ Glossary Of Terms
§ Appendix: Notes on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 5, 1015α
§ Bibliography
Summary Of The Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos
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Related:
° The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos
(Seventh Edition 2022)
° Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
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Précis Of The Way Of Pathei-Mathos
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What I have previously described as the ‘philosophy of pathei-mathos’ and the ‘way of pathei-mathos’ is simply my own weltanschauung, a weltanschauung developed over some years as a result of my own pathei-mathos. Thus, and despite whatever veracity it may or may not possess, it is only the personal insight of one very fallible individual, a fallibility proven by my decades of selfishness and by my decades of reprehensible extremism both political and religious. Furthermore, and according to my admittedly limited understanding and limited knowledge, this philosophy does not – in essence – express anything new. For I feel (and I use the word ‘feel’ intentionally) that I have only re-expressed what so many others, over millennia, have expressed as result of (i) their own pathei-mathos and/or (ii) their experiences/insights and/or (iii) their particular philosophical musings.
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Related:
° The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos
(Seventh Edition 2022)
° Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
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Image Credit:
NASA:
Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
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A pdf version of my now defunct davidmyatt dot info website (as of February 2024) is available enabling the complete site to be accessed, and searched, by means of a stand-alone pdf reader or by opening the file in a web-browser such as Firefox.
Website: Portable Document Format
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Image credit:
κρατῆρ ἡ μονάς, Tractate IV, Mercvrii Trismegisti Pœmandres, Paris (1554)
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The following is taken from a handwritten letter I wrote in 2002, addressed
to an Oxfordian friend who later transcribed it.
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The Greatest Joy,
The Greatest Sadness
It is a very cold day at the start of my second week living in this tent. Last night it was so cold that there was ice on my beard and the inside of the tent, and I could not sleep. Warmth came only by walking to the top of a nearby hill, hours before dawn. But it was good, to be there, in the frosty silence, viewing the dome of stars and wondering about our future as a species. Will we be ever be “out there” – among those stars? Will we ever reach the worlds around, the life upon, some of them? This prospect, the very stars themselves, certainly put our petty personal and Earth-based squabbles into perspective.
As for myself, the days of coldness have worn me down, a little, and I am again like I once was, decades ago, at peace in my homeless world: enjoying the simple joy that a warming mug of tea brings when I sit, on a plastic bag, outside my tent and listen to the silence. There is plenty of time to reflect upon the past. I have been both above time and in time – to use the words of Savitri Devi – enjoying and seeking violent action-in-the-world, and the challenges and stirring of the blood, the soul, that such action, born of duty, brings, and yet also seeking and finding a beauty, a contentment – at least for a while – in peaceful, numinous Nature, while always in the past returning, in some way, to the struggle because this struggle vitalizes, making me treasure even more the beauty, the numen, of the world. Never sufficiently against time to remain with action, and yet never sufficiently above time to scorn the doing of deeds.
There is beauty, certainly, here in this coldness and rural place where my every breath can be seen and where I have to stop often to warm the hand which holds this pen. There is certainly an intimation of such beauty, such numinosity, in some women: a beauty which many times has brought me to tears as I shared with a woman one of those sometimes strange wordless moments when, together, we become more than we are, were, as individuals, as if, together, we are an intimation of the stage of human evolution which awaits. I often feel that some women embody the beauty, the numinosity, the joy, the sensuality, of Nature; as if they are Nature made manifest – an aspect of Nature’s living being, a presencing, and one which, alas, so few it seems seem to know let alone appreciate.
And yet: I have always returned to this other, ordinary world of involvement, of action. Was it only duty – a duty to strive to make my vision of a better, more empathic, more honourable, world real – which drew me back? Or was it also that by so returning I knew, and treasured this other, numinous, world which one day we might make real here on Earth? Was this a knowing as when we have loved one person so deeply we miss their very presence and only realize how much we loved them, needed them, should have treasured them, when they were gone: when for some reason – often our own fault – their love for us was no more and we had to learn to be alone, again?
Will I ever, for more than a few months, a few years, and as I often dream and desire, live only in the world of the numen? Will I, for this, need to be alone, isolated, as I am now? Distanced from people by a physical distance, a rural isolation, and distanced in my very being, as if I am some strange alien from another world who finds it difficult to be enclosed in some city or some town or even a vehicle and who, many times, can only be with people for a limited time since I often feel their feelings, their sadness, their hopes, their joys, their anger, their despair, as if they are my own. And if I do so live, in, with, the numen, will it be because I have turned away from duty – too old and burdened by sadness to care about the world – or because I have truely transcended to that compassion, that understanding, that species of time, which, being acausal, is the real genesis of genuine change?
Such ramblings, created by days alone. And are you now my random audience? And do you mind? How many years – well over a decade – since I, by the public then unknown, stumbled into you in the Classics Bookshop that hot humid Summer day in Oxford when the very air sweated us and we went to sit, tree-shaded, by the river to talk of books read, music heard? How many sultry nights since that concert of Vivaldi’s Gloria, shared? How many lives have I, you, lived since then? How many stored feelings, impressions, images, memories, waiting for some means of release? How many regrets of what might have been?
I have no music now – no Bach, Brahms, Schubert – to connect me to that world which entwined us then, that Summer, with its intimations of the greatest sadness, the greatest joy; but there are memories, yes there are memories which bring the tears of such sadness and joy and which remind me of how much I do not know, how many times I have been wrong, and of how far we all have to go to reach where we can reach given the faculties of empathy, reason and honour which we can and indeed must develope. Mea culpa; mea culpa; mea maxima culpa.
I am so cold now I have to move, and will walk the many miles to post this letter while the daylight lasts…
David Myatt
Selected Letters of David Myatt
In context, the first two letters in the collection were written during the period, January to just past the Summer Solstice, spent as a vagabond in the county of Westmorland in 2002. Apart from Bringing Back The Numen, the remaining letters were written between August 2002 and late Autumn 2008 when I lived on a farm and worked on the land in a rural part in England. Bringing Back The Numen was written during a brief period when out of necessity I worked in an industrial concern and lived in a nearby town. Such letters, and such working on the land, were the genesis of what became, post 2012, my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, qv. Development Of The Numinous Way
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A pdf version of this item is available here: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/holding-the-line.pdf
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One of the matters often pondered upon in the past fifteen years is whether we as a species are in sufficient numbers self-aware enough to not only cease to personally cause suffering but also to contribute to our societies in such a way that we are or become vectors of a duty sufficiently honourable to prevent or to alleviate the suffering of others in some personal manner.One example of such a duty I have mentioned several times these past fifteen years is a Police officer, such as this mention from 2012:
“I have some forty years experience of interaction with the police, from ordinary constables and detectives, to custody sergeants, to officers from specialist branches such as SO12, SO13, and crime squads. During that time, I have known far more good police officers than bad – corrupt – ones. Furthermore, I realized that most of those I came into contact with were good individuals, motivated by the best of intentions, who were trying to do their best, often under difficult circumstances, and often to help victims of dishonourable deeds, catch those responsible for such deeds, and/or prevent such deeds.” The Politics and Ideology of Hate [1]Most of this interaction was the result of the suffering-causing deeds I had personally done or had incited by what I wrote, possessed as I was for some forty years by a certitude of knowing, a fanaticism, born of adhering to, believing in, some supra-personal cause, some -ism or some -ology and that extreme lack of self-awareness that such a certitude cultivates and maintains.
In many ways I was much worse than most political or religious extremists because I was, both as a National Socialist and later as a Muslim, an ideologue meaning, in the case of National Socialism, I often arrogantly spurned guidance and then manufactured new guidelines for myself and for others; and as a Muslim having given a personal pledge of loyalty to a particular person, I supported and justified his cause.
“In truth they, those officers, as one of them once said to me, were guided by what ‘was laid down’ and did not presume to or tried hard not to overstep their authority; guided as they were by the law, that accumulated received wisdom of what was and is good in society; a law which (at least in Britain and so far as I know) saught to embody a respect for what was fair and which concept of fairness was and always has been (again, at least in Britain and so far as I know) untainted, uncorrupted, by any political ideology.In regard to part of the initial question of whether there are sufficient numbers of sufficient honourable individuals to prevent or able to alleviate the suffering of others in some personal manner, my fallible answer is that there seems to be just enough to ‘hold the line’ enabling modern societies in the West to maintain societies which currently just about function despite enduring problems such as poverty, homelessness, social disorder, crime, and corrupt politicians one of whose mottos is “do as we say not as we do” as evident for example by a certain British Prime Minister and his cronies during the Covid pandemic.Now I know, I understand, I appreciate, that for that reason – of so being mindful of the limits of their authority, of being guided by what had been laid down over decades – those people, those police officers, were far better individuals than the arrogant, the hubriatic, extremist I was; an arrogant extremist who by and for himself presumed ‘to know’ what was right, who presumed to understand, who presumed he possessed the ability, the authority, and the right to judge everyone and everything, and who because of such arrogance, such hubris, most certainly continued to contribute to the cycle of suffering, ignoring thus for so long as he in his unbalance did the wisdom that Aeschylus gave to us in The Oresteia.” [1]
But for how long will, or can, this line be held? I do not know but – as I listen to Kyrie Orbis Factor as performed by Ensemble Organum – I sadly intuit that our current Western societies are following the natural pattern of decline that all other societies in our human history have undergone mostly as a result of our selfish primitive nature unchanged in our majority as we still seem to be by our own pathei-mathos and by that knowledge which resides in our thousands of years-old human culture of pathei-mathos.
I myself through my extremist decades have contributed to this decline. Too little and too late my own pathei-mathos, drowned out, publicly smothered, as it now seems to me to be, by those who cannot forget or cannot forgive the extremism of my past and who with their hubriatic certitude of knowing about me and others perpetuate the cycle of suffering. Whether they know this or not is yet another question, but I am inclined to believe that they do not know such is their hubris and just as I in my hubris did not know for decades.
David Myatt
August 2023
[1] Some Notes on The Politics and Ideology of Hate: https://davidmyattinfo.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/dm-politics-of-hate-2012.pdf
Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
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Notes On Expiation, Forgiveness, And Implacability
An interesting article, complementing the four interviews I gave between March 2022 and March 2023, [1] which article concerns a particular accusation made about me. As surmised in tractate XI of the Corpus Hermeticum:
τοῦ δὲ θεοῦ ὥσπερ οὐσία ἐστὶ [τὸ ἀγαθόν, τὸ καλόν, ἡ εὐδαιμονία,] ἡ σοφία·
It is as if the quidditas of theos is actuality, honour, the beautiful, good fortune, Sophia [2]
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[1] An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews, 2023, ISBN 979-8394746574
[2] My translation. As noted in my commentary I follow the MSS and read τὸ ἀγαθόν, τὸ καλόν, ἡ εὐδαιμονία which is omitted by Nock and Festugiere in their Corpus Hermeticum, Third Edition, 1972. As also noted in my commentary:
Quidditas – post-classical Latin, from whence the English word quiddity – is more appropriate here, in respect of οὐσία, than essence, especially as ‘essence’ now has so many non-philosophical and modern connotations. Quidditas is thus a philosophical term which requires contextual interpretation. In respect of οὐσία, qv. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 5, 1015α: ἐκ δὴ τῶν εἰρημένων ἡ πρώτη φύσις καὶ κυρίως λεγομένη ἐστὶν ἡ οὐσία ἡ τῶν ἐχόντων ἀρχὴν κινήσεως ἐν αὑτοῖς ᾗ αὐτά: ἡ γὰρ ὕλη τῷ ταύτης δεκτικὴ εἶναι λέγεται φύσις, καὶ αἱ γενέσεις καὶ τὸ φύεσθαι τῷ ἀπὸ ταύτης εἶναι κινήσεις. καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως τῶν φύσει ὄντων αὕτη ἐστίν, ἐνυπάρχουσά πως ἢ δυνάμει ἢ ἐντελεχείᾳ. [Given the foregoing, then principally – and to be exact – physis denotes the quidditas of beings having changement inherent within them; for substantia has been denoted by physis because it embodies this, as have the becoming that is a coming-into-being, and a burgeoning, because they are changements predicated on it. For physis is inherent changement either manifesting the potentiality of a being or as what a being, complete of itself, is.] Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf
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Image credit: Attic red-figure vase, c. 500-450 BCE, depicting The Horae. Antikensammlung, Berlin
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Nearly a decade ago I considered a particular question: what opinion would a hypothetical visiting alien from another star-system form about us? [1] My answer was that the alien would consider us an aggressive, still rather primitive and very violent, species best avoided until such time as we might outwardly demonstrate otherwise.
Subsequent to that I pondered four related questions. First, is there any land on planet Earth, any of what are now called countries and nations, that over the past three thousand years that has not been fought over or subject to the clash of opposed armed violent groups of mostly men? Second, how many countries or lands now, for whatever reason or because of whatever excuse or whatever supra-personal causal abstraction, are not the subject of some armed conflict domestic or foreign? Third, how many countries are still plagued by homicides, robbery, theft, fraud, rape, domestic violence, subsuming hatred, poverty, dishonesty, and corruption political or otherwise? Fourth, have we as a supposedly consciously-aware species capable of reason and of honour [2] learnt anything from thousands upon thousands of years of such conflict, hatred, and such violence personal and impersonal?
In seeking answers to such questions I was and am painfully aware of my own, decades-long, past of violence, extremism, conflict, intolerance, hatred, incitement, and selfishness. Of whether my own fallible ‘learning from experience’ and attempt at expiation, as manifest in my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, [3] has any meaning or relevance external to myself.
But that weltanschauung is all I have in answer. The answer of a personal, a non-interfering, empathy, compassion, humility, and of a personal honour in the immediacy of a living moment. [4]
Will we, can we, as a species change? Evolve away from the violence, the mistakes, the hatreds, the dishonours, of our past and of our present?
David Myatt
July 2023
[1] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/non-terrestrial-view.pdf
[2] Sophocles, Antigone, v. 334 & vv. 365-36:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλε […]
σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων
τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει
There exists much that is strange, yet nothing
Has more strangeness than a human being […]
Beyond his own hopes, his cunning
In inventive arts – he who arrives
Now with dishonour, then with chivalry
[3] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf
[4] Honour, The Numinous Balance, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/honour-the-numinous-balance/
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Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
David Myatt 