00:00 Introduction: Nolan, Hollywood, and the Odyssey’s Philosophy00:46 The Pitfalls of Modern Interpretation & Homeric "Misogyny"01:52 The Feminine Nature of Greek Values: Sophia, Aletheia, Arete03:33 Hesiod’s Encounter with the Muses on Mount Helicon04:33 The Two Faces of Logos: Plausible Lies vs. Genuine Truth05:45 Why Modern Mythological Retellings Often Fail08:33 Coded Metaphysics: From Parmenides to Plato
Partial Video Excerpt:
Plato the Cratylus, the divine wondering.
Plato takes the word aletheia and digs a bit deeper. In Cratylus the dialogue, Socrates says about aletheia that truth is thea ali. He twists the word around, and this means wondering. It is [music] a divine wondering. Thea is divine and Ali is is wondering. So it [music] is the movement of the soul toward being, toward what truly exists. And right beside it he places its opposite, falsehood pseudos. And he said it [music] is related to stillness, to standing still. So a lie holds you in place. It stops you from moving forward.
So truth [music] isn't an object you possess once and then the matter is closed. Truth [music] is motion. It is something you do, not something you have. While the lie, the comfort of deception, is exactly what keeps you where you already are. It suits you to not look any further. It's comforting. That's why truth [music] takes effort. Not because someone fears it and hides it on purpose, but because the very nature of [music] knowledge works this way. Staying still is always easier and that moving toward what [music] actually exists. It is uncomfortable to do this.
And this exact same theme, true speech versus false speech, shows up again in the dialogue with a god pan. Socrates says pan is the son of Hermes and so is either speech itself or a brother of speech. Of logos, of movement, of speech and he [music] has a double nature. The exactly as speech, Diphyes has [music] a double nature. His upper part, Socrates says, is Leion and Theon, smooth and divine, dwelling above and among the gods. This is the [music] althees, the truth and his lower part, the goat legs down below among the many rough parts, which is the false part. Socrates says around the the life that resembles a tragedy a deception piled on deception. So speech itself in one and the same body holds both. And it's notonly speech we have talked about logos many times on this channel. Logos is speech in movement. It's analogy. It is a lot of things but all of it the same body. So we have the smooth part of pan divine true and the rough part which is the false part. These aren't two separate beings. It is the same thing. Speech that can take you either up or down. The same image again that we saw with the muses. The lie isn't foreign to the truth. It is the same material, the same speech that stayed in the rough, the low, the common instead of rising to the smooth and the divine. And this applies to everything. It applies to arts. It applies to anything that happens in the world because laws is movement. Anything that moves, anything that creates sequence can be either truthful or false.
But if everything, the true and the false, the smooth and the rough is in front of us all the time, what determines what we actually see? And Empedocles has an answer. He says, "With earth, we see earth. With water, we see water. With ether, we see the divine ether. With fire, we see the destructive fire."
What's the idea here? It is simple. You perceive the like through the like. Whatever already exists inside you iswhat you recognize outside of you. If the rough and the low dominates within you, you will readily recognize the rough and the low around you and it will look true to you because it resonates with what you already are. If you have cultivated the [music] smooth, the higher part of yourself, that's what you will recognize more easily. Truth, in other words, isn't hidden somewhere far away and out of reach. It is right in front of us, exactly like the lie is. The question isn't where it is located. It is what you are looking at with. If truth is the unconcealed, that implies something important that something by definition is concealed. But we don't need any conspiracy theory to see this because Heraclitus already said it. He says, "nature loves to hide".
It is no coincidence that reality itself tends toward concealment. It doesn't sit on the surface waiting for you to pick it up. You have to pull it out. And that's not because nature is evil. It is simply [music] how knowledge works at its root. We are within polarity within multiplicity. We have to understand where we stand at all times. And this is a whole science. And this is what philosophy is for.
So we return to the motion and the stillness.If truth is [music] ali, wondering, the movement of the soul toward being, then you don't acquire it once and close the matter, because it isn't a state, it is something you practice continuously and every time you stop asking, every time you stay still, every time you settle for what resembles the genuine without ever examining it, you slip back into lethe and you lose again what you had uncovered covered. That's why together with "know thyself" and "nothing in excess", the delphic oracle had a third maxim carved into stone. The angia paradata "give a pledge and ruin is near".
Ati is catastrophe, the blinding of the mind. I have seen often this maxim analyzed as a financial guarantee or something, putting your name on the line for someone else's debt. But think about where this maxim was carved, not at the marketplace.It was at the temple of Apollo, rightbeside "know thyself", which has nothing to do with with banking. It has everything [music] to do with knowing your own self.
So its deeper truth is that every time you give a guarantee, every time you offer certainty where you haven't actually checked, every time you say I have already understood this, no need to ask again, no need tofilter what what I see in front of me. You have already stopped the motion and ati, the blindness, isn't far behind.
So complacency isn't some innocent rest. It is the moment the mind stopsmoving and starts going blind. Life, truth, and freedom aren't thingsyou win once. They demand vigilance. Continuous everyday vigilance without pause. The muses don't warn you because they are malicious. They give you right on the first page of Hesiod's poem the tool for living, to know that speech can take either form and to choose every time to move toward the one that is genuine.
So the next time you watch a film, a video, or hear a story about the ancient gods, whether it is Nolan or anythingelse, the question isn't whether it is realistic or faithful to the [music] original. The question is whether it holds you still on the surface or pushes you to look further toward the smooth, the divine, and the genuine. That's what the muses were saying and that's [music] what Plato was saying too. And maybe that's the only criterion that actually matters. Discernment.
The "Bath of Athena" (also known as the Bath of Pallas or Loutra Pallados) is a famous classical Greek myth and a 3rd-century BCE hymn by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus. It describes an annual ritual in Argos where the cult statue of Athena was taken to the sea to be washed, and it warns mortals against accidentally seeing a deity unclothed.The Myth and the Poem
- The Ritual: The poem opens with a call to the women of Argos who carry the sacred water and prepare the goddess's bath, comb, and oils.
- The Warning: A cautionary tale is told within the poem warning men not to look upon the naked goddess, stating,
“Whoso shall behold Pallas, Keeper of Cities, naked, shall look on Argos for this the last time.” as written by Callimachus.
- The Blinding of Tiresias: The myth recounts how the young seer Tiresias accidentally stumbled upon Athena bathing in a spring. Though he lost his physical sight as punishment, Athena—comforted by his mother, her close companion—granted him inner spiritual sight and prophetic vision.
