By Angelo Mazzei
There is a revival of ancient figures that fascinate us without us knowing why. The success of Etruscan or Roman reenactments, the full theaters that stage Greek tragedies, and the widespread, diverse, and fantastic opinions on the identities of ancient peoples are phenomena that recur every time our present culture’s value system and paradigms are in crisis. Incidentally, the word “crisis” carries the ancient semantics of “change, growth, and caring.”
Man is inherently a social animal. Despite believing in the autonomy of our individual choices, we are actually embedded in a common ground that shapes us. Thus, a trend emerges, we follow it, we like it, and we don’t know why. To explain the structural causes, we illustrate the thesis of this article starting with a passage from Nietzsche.
Nietzsche writes (implicitly arguing with the Cartesian/Fichte tradition) in paragraph 17 of *Beyond Good and Evil*, that we should not say “I think” (cogito; Ich denke) but rather “it thinks” (cogitat; Es denkt). Nietzsche’s idea was picked up a few decades later by a very avant-garde doctor, a precursor of holism who believed in natural medicine rather than pharmacology. His name was Georg Groddeck, and he turned Nietzsche’s brief passage into a book. Freud, his friend and colleague, drew inspiration from this to develop the famous concept of ‘Es,’ a sort of external subjectivity internalized.
But if it’s not “I” who “thinks,” then who is it? Who is this unidentified “Es” that thinks? Even if not explicitly, the Greeks, if we listen to them carefully, tell us: this non-I that thinks in us are They: the Gods, the Divines. It is therefore the Divine Genius that moves the Spirit, and our individual consciousness is only its instrument to make us believe we are each the master of ourselves.
The divine subject would be the one that guides, orders, and directs us, hiding itself because if it were to show itself, our consciousness would realize its own ephemeral mortal period, absolutely powerless and incapable of determining and manipulating its own destiny. It would have the consciousness of a machine, which instead must ignore its empty essence and its improper being belonging to others for it to function well.
The role of divinity in the ancient world is too often reduced to our paradigms and ends up being humiliated in interpretations that make it a mere political tool for mass control. Certainly, it’s also true that religion can be a kind of opiate for the poor, but this aspect doesn’t exhaustively represent what the Divines truly symbolized in the ancient world.
Human life progresses driven by an architecture of the soul (psychhé, which should be transliterated with a double ‘h’), whose bricks are character or mood (thymòs), meditative and spiritual mind (phrhén), analytical and intellectual mind (noos), and the heart (etor, kradie, ker). However, their fates are decided behind the scenes by machinations, confabulations, and agreements among the divinities. In the nuances and chiaroscuro of this picture lies something much greater.
At first glance, this ancient world may appear as a culture of gullible people, but upon deeper reflection, it reveals something between the lines: the idea that no matter how far man pushes beyond the limits of his will and power, his actions will always be bound by another’s will, much more effective than his own. This will acts as an efficient cause of human actions, never perfectly autonomous or complete, but always oriented and driven by an additional complement to them.
Nietzsche’s youth was characterized by a deep interest in Greece before Philosophy (Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras lived around 500 BC). He initially focused on the philological study of literature from Homer to Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, debuting with a work on Homer, one on the Presocratics, and then making a splash with *The Birth of Tragedy*. In this work, he performs the very operation we were hinting at, somewhat similar to what Freud would do with mythology, which is to make man understand how the wills of the Gods, hidden, manipulate the outcomes of life’s tragedies and how the grand Greek theater lies on the track of implicit divine moods.
Through his schematization of their dynamics under the categories of the Apollonian and Dionysian, there is a margin and perspective in these modern readings of antiquity that – besides answering the initial question of why we are so attracted to the remote, ancient, or exotic, which appears alien and ultimately reveals itself as the same but forgotten – responds, or at least lays the groundwork for a terrain on which to seek an answer, to the question of who thinks in our place while we still believe we are the ones thinking.
CULTURA COMMESTIBILE
Nr 496
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