Browse our books below. You can also search for books.
DODDS, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1966. 5th impr. 327p. Paperback. Signature and date on free endpaper. ‘The concern of our age for the irrational element in man and the development by psychology of a ‘novum organum’ to deal with have made it inevitable that a classical scholar of our time should give us a systematic study of the irrational and the Greeks. (…) It is a systematic review of almost all the facts and opinions held on the subject, deepened and enlarged by a scholar of real vision and width of experience, and revealing carefully weighed judgement on the most controversial questions. (…) This book asks the right questions and seeks to answer them with imaginative integrity. (…) The analysis of nationalism in its relation to irrationalism is made not only with great precision and sane judgement, with accurate stratigraphy in the complex layers of Greek thought, but also with a fresh approach. (…) The arrangement of the text and the notes is dictated by the oral presentation of these lectures. (…) The reader will find the notes a post-graduate education in themselves, for they open suggestive trails in fields tangent to the understanding of our Greek text. (…) Chapter one (…) is a penetrating study of Homeric ‘ate’, with which Zeus blinded Agamemnon and took away his understanding. (…) The chapter concludes with the important role which ‘ate’ plays in the Homeric society, whose ideal of ‘time’ resulted in (…) a ‘shame-culture’, I.e., one where there is tension when a warrior is not able to live up to the high code of honor. ‘Ate’ for him becomes a convenient escape, for he projects his own failure on this psychic agency.’ Chapter Two describes the transition from a shame-culture to a guilt-culture, wherein ‘ate’, by reason of a growing sense of guilt, is transformed into an agency of punishment, which Erinyes becoming the ministers of Justice, and Zeus developing from an amoral god into cosmic justice. The period in which this change occurs is the Archaic Age, which in the realm of the spirit extends as late as the first half of the Fifth Century. We witness in this period the moralisation of ‘phtonos’, which is not a factor in a scheme-culture, and man’s projection into religion of his own sense of justice, which rises out of his social relations. (…) Chapter Three is an illustration of Socrates’ statement that ‘our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness’ (Plato, Phaedra’s 244 A). This chapter deals with three of the four types in Plato’s classification of divine madness-prophetic madness (inspired by Apollo), ritual madness (Dionysus), and poetic madness (Muses) - and attempts to relate them to the basis of belief in them (…). Though no exhaustive treatment is given of each of these states Dodds’ remarks about each of them are valuable for their sound insights. (…) Chapter Four, entitled ‘Dream-Pattern and Culture-Pattern’, deals with the attitude of the Greeks toward dream-experience in which the individual escapes from time and space. (…) Chapter Five, ‘The Greek Shamans and the Origin of Puritanism’, is the most original contribution in the book and important for its new light on the history of fifth-century irrationalism. (…) This interesting chapter ends with a discussion of reincarnation, which Nilsson takes to be the product of Greek logic. Dodds seeks an explanation for it as a more satisfactory solution than post-mortem punishment to the problem of divine justice which was born in the Archaic Period. It is to be associated with the deep-seated feelings of guilt and the growth of Greek puritanism in the form of catharsis, askesis in the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions. (…) Chapter Six, entitled ‘Rationalism, and Reaction in the Classical Age’, illustrated Whitehead’s dictum that ‘the major advanced in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.’ (…) The Seventh Chapter, ‘Plato, the Irrational Soul, and the Inherited Conglomerate’, depicts Plato’s attempt to stabilise the situation in the tense picture which we find in Athens at the end of the Fifth Century. (…) Though himself a product of the Age of Enlightenment, Plato has some affinities, through his € 18.00 (Antiquarian)