{"id":1486,"date":"2011-01-10T21:11:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T01:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1486"},"modified":"2011-01-10T21:11:49","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T01:11:49","slug":"the-life-of-the-immortals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2011\/01\/the-life-of-the-immortals\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life of the Immortals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The philosopher Patrick Lee Miller has an intriguing new book out\u2014Becoming God<\/em>\u2014which I’ve been privileged to follow from the dissertation stage some time ago. It’s a daring philosophical argument wrapped up in a close reading of ancient texts. In the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, he finds an alternative to the most cherished axiom of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the modern analytic school: non-contradiction. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I interview him<\/a> about the book as well as about some implications it has for thinking about Christian theology.<\/p>\n

One theme that runs through Becoming God<\/em>, though, is the one suggested in the title\u2014that for its Greek practitioners, philosophy was a way of reaching (and not simply, as I say above, “thinking about”) the divine. Here’s a whiff of the interview:<\/p>\n

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us\u2014as some might chastise\u2014that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?<\/em><\/p>\n

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by \u201csecularity,\u201d as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we\u2019re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: \u201cDo not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.\u201d His warning came in the midst of the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.<\/p>\n

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance\u2014which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger\u2014makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as has revolutionary zeal, so I\u2019m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"The philosopher Patrick Lee Miller has an intriguing new book out\u2014Becoming God<\/em>\u2014which I’ve been privileged to follow from the dissertation stage some time ago. It’s a daring philosophical argument wrapped up in a close reading of ancient texts. In the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, he finds an alternative to the most cherished axiom of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the modern analytic school: non-contradiction. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I interview him<\/a> about the book as well as about some implications it has for thinking about Christian theology.<\/p>\n

One theme that runs through Becoming God<\/em>, though, is the one suggested in the title\u2014that for its Greek practitioners, philosophy was a way of reaching (and not simply, as I say above, “thinking about”) the divine. Here’s a whiff of the interview:<\/p>\n

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us\u2014as some might chastise\u2014that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?<\/em><\/p>\n

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by \u201csecularity,\u201d as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we\u2019re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: \u201cDo not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.\u201d His warning came in the midst of the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.<\/p>\n

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance\u2014which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger\u2014makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as has revolutionary zeal, so I\u2019m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,38,41,40,61],"class_list":["post-1486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-ancients","tag-books","tag-double-truth","tag-logic","tag-platonism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1487,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions\/1487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}