on a tangential aspect of the famous myth of Prometheus
IN the Protagoras dialogue, Plato observes in passing that Prometheus might have stolen “political wisdom” (σοφίαν πολιτικὴν, sophian politikon),1 but Zeus kept it too closely-guarded so he settled for fire instead, which he enclosed in a hollow fennel stock as he raced down Mount Olympus to convey the gift to mankind. Of course, Prometheus can conceived both as a benefactor of man as well as a tempter of sorts, and can fruitfully be compared to the Serpent in the Garden, which tempts mankind with the Forbidden Fruit, and with Lucifer, “Light-Bearer”2:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? and cut down to the ground, which didst cast lots upon the nations?3
When Zeus later mandates Hermes confer “civic skills” onto mankind, he is responding to their lack of what in the Greek is called πολιτικὴν τέχνην (politikon techne).4 Techne is of course, related to the achievement of given ends through craft, skill, and power. Sophia, by contrast, is not directly ordered to solving problems at all but to the Idea of the Good.
Wisdom shows us how to use our techne. The latter can be conceived in abstraction from the fundamental ethical question of how to live, but wisdom never can, and to possess technics without ethics or wisdom (they are, again, not so different) is a pitiable state.
on the so-called “incommensurability of paradigms”
First, as an idea is neither a phenomenon (pace some idealists) nor a mental figment (pace nominalists and materialists), but rather a condition and capacity to perceive phenomena, so a paradigm is like a tapestry of interwoven ideas, or an ecosystem of symbiotic ones. And just as each organism in such a natural economy occupies a distinctive niche, so ideas fit together organically within a comprehensive paradigm. In my dissertation, I suggested a better term for what Kuhn meant to indicate by paradigm might have been Vorstellungsart, borrowed from Goethe’s scientific writings. Vorstellen means, materially, “to place before,” and by extension is employed as a synonym for “represent,” while Art means “manner,” “means,” or “way.” When Kuhn argued that “After Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world,” it was liable to scandalize anyone who hadn’t yet worked through the fundamental problem of epistemology for himself vis-à-vis the relation of mind and world. To a naïve person, that a shift in worldview should entail a shift in the world itself is preposterous; to the one who has wrestled with these questions himself, the connection is self-evident. Arguably, the use of the word “paradigm” served to conceal this relationship behind the indication of a quasi-Hegelian idealistic mysticism whereas, as I suggested, the use of Goethe’s preferred term would have served to emphasize the active cognitive process involved in even the most elementary perceptual acts.
While paradigm and Vorstellungsart alike are foreign terms, only the former has been naturalized into the extended English lexicon so that is an obvious counterargument to my objection over his choice. But in any case, there is no sense in relitigating the diction of a work that was published over 60 years ago. The point is, rather, to repair the curse of Babel in the spirit of Pentecost and seek to apprehend what the word intended to convey in the place of remaining hung up on what one of us would have conveyed by that word.
I treated this topic at greater length in my 2020 dissertation, The Redemption of Thinking. Here is a relevant passage from , beginning on page 49:
Johann W. von Goethe developed a keen awareness of this ineluctable correlation of fact and theory in his little-known scientific work, which will be the topic of the next part of this dissertation. “Let us here acknowledge, that the history of science is science itself,” he wrote in 1810.5 With this assertion, Goethe meant to indicate the manner by which the scientific findings of a given time supervene upon that age’s operative world-conception. The latter evolves through history and this necessarily transforms the former. Philosophers of science in the twentieth century like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend strove to develop and articulate the same relation of fact and theory that Goethe recognized. Their work may be summarized with the phrase “all observation is theory-laden.” This is to say that all observation is undertaken according to the mode and context of one’s inquiry. Evidence and its converse are relative terms; they are implicit to a way of conceptualising a situation. Goethe sometimes used the word Vorstellungsarten to refer to the various manners of conceiving—literally “representation-types” or “ways placing before”—a given situation.6 Kuhn famously employed to term “paradigm” for what Goethe meant by Vorstellungsart. Kuhn very cogently articulates the nature of scientific paradigms, or Vorstellungsarten, in his monumental 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake. Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies.7
Kuhn argues that the questions that a given community is disposed to consider are a function of the metaphysical paradigm in which that community operates. The intent of this investigation has been to disclose the nature and the generation of the particular paradigm that has engendered the insolubly hard problem of consciousness. To further underscore what Kuhn refers to as “the incommensurability of paradigms,” one may consider an illustrative example from the 1997 collection of essays on Goethean science titled The Marriage of Sense and Thought in which the authors compare “a warm smile between friends” to “a widening of the oral aperture, caused by contractions of the cheek musculature.”8
Obviously the first cannot serve as counter-evidence to disprove the second because any findings will be framed in terms that are evidentially irrelevant. Nor can the second account for the first in respect to any further interactions and behaviour to follow for the same reason. No quantity of such external correlations will compensate for the methodological exclusion of the internal ones. Moreover, and with specific pertinence to the subject of this investigation, no description of physical characteristics accounts for the quale of the happiness itself, which was the formal cause and meaning of the smile in the first place, and of which all of the physical processes were a consequence and signature. A brief consideration of the work of two contemporary philosophers of mind—Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger—may serve to reveal the severity of such incommensurability of paradigms in the context of the present theme [i.e. the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”]…
Kuhn’s thesis surrounding the “incommensurability of paradigms” presents a particular challenge to comprehend because we are used to thinking within a given paradigm, in which propositions are not mutually incommensurable. But thinking in within a given frame doesn’t approach the crucial issue of the question at stake here, no matter how deftly or energetically, any more than a sum of vectors within a two-dimensional plane can add up to a vector in a three-dimensional one. Moreover, for the same reason that fish avoid emerging from water, it can feel awkward and even fatal to allow ourselves to be transposed into an unfamiliar paradigm. Imagine, for instance, the “fish” that took the first tentative and faltering steps on dry land, by the conjectured evolutionary lineage according to the Darwinian theory. Sometimes we can feel like a fish out of water when we try to think not only different things, but think the same things differently. Note that the moment the fish leaves the water for dry land, it has ceased to be a fish. Hence, discarding a given paradigm is not a small thing, and cannot be easily done without concomitantly discarding a part of the self-identity and hence can be experienced as a sort of “ego-death” for anyone whose thought is not amphibian. But the Creator did not endow us with the creative power to “trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature,”9 as Pico sayeth, for it to flounder in the submarine depth, “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.”10 As I argued in The Redemption of Thinking, paradigms and what I called “the procession of paradigms” were once given as the passage of the seasons, but increasingly the task for their elaboration and maintenance is given to man himself:
…one may first consider the stellium of ideas that makes up the Copernican picture of the solar system and then attempt to discern the backdrop against which this group is set. The basic conception that subtends pertinent concepts like the zodiac houses and the wandering stars is the operative Vorstellungsart or paradigm. The notion of an evolution of consciousness inquires into a procession and transformation of these very Vorstellungsarten or paradigmata through history. Barfield has inquired into the nature of this procession with uncommon perspicacity and therefore it is to him that I will now turn.
…
The implication of Barfield’s thesis is that changes in language testify to changes in the consciousness which uses that language. The consciousness that stamps its changes in language is the same consciousness by which the world is experienced. Philological evidence suggests that Ancient humanity perceived a world in which the separation characterized two paragraphs earlier—between material and immaterial imports—had not taken place. If one assume this possibility as a hypothesis, a line from The Gospel According to John shines forth like a nova in one’s apprehension; a nova whose light will easily illuminate the entire book from which the line was drawn. The King James version of the Bible translates the Greek text of John 3:8—τὸ πνεῦμα ὅπου θέλει πνεῖ καὶ τὴν φωνὴν αὐτοῦ ἀκούεις, ἀλλ’ οὐκ οἶδας πόθεν ἔρχεται καὶ ποῦ ὑπάγει· οὕτως ἐστὶν πᾶς ὁ γεγεννημένος ἐκ τοῦ πνεύματος.11
—in the following manner:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
The pleasing poetic quality of the King James version notwithstanding, an English translation of that line is impossible. The reason for this is that, as the careful reader may have noted, the words “wind,” “breath,” and “Spirit,” are all the same word in the Greek original: pneuma, πνεῦμα. The line might, therefore, have read “The spirit breathes (or respires, or inspires) where it will, its sound you hear, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; such is everyone born of the wind.” It could have rendered in countless other forms as well. The profit in this quandary lies in whether it can help us to conceive of a world in which “wind,” “breath” and “spirit” meant the same thing. Put another way, the selfsame perception could be called by any one of these words. Imagination often provides the most comprehensive insight: we may imagine a solution of meaning out of which these three words gradually crystallize. It is a solution which once, as inspiration, nourished Ancient minds as water passing passively through gills, but now must be extracted by the laborious breath of working lungs.12
The argument that man is called to play an increasingly active role in sustaining and contributing to the economy of Creation is one of the implications of the Incarnation of Christ but it has been prefigured since Adam’s iconic “naming of the animals”13 and Noah’s iconic “saving of them.”14
on the Son of Man and the so-called “Socratic maxim”
The paradox—present at the very heart of Platonic philosophy—I have sometimes christened as “the Socratic maxim”: to wit,
“knowledge of one’s own ignorance is the beginning of wisdom (i.e. the idea of the Good).”
The Socratic maxim gestures towards an esoteric identity of wisdom and humility, at least when they are considered as intellectual virtues. Knowledge without wisdom can make a person prideful so that he fails to consider what he doesn’t know. This condition consists in a sort hubris, and is a pride that goeth before a fall. Wisdom, by contrast, guards against hubris because it always leaves one with a consciousness that, as Hamlet sayeth, “there’s more in Heaven & Earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your Philosophy.”
Touching on the question of whether we are born with all wisdom, this also seems to embody a sort of paradox. Perhaps we could say, “the wisdom that accompanies us into this world comes with an expiration date.” What I mean by this is that, while we are equipped with an instinctive wisdom to guide us in our early years, it soon begins to wane and any wisdom that we possess in our later years was won by dint of humility coupled love and truth and the fruits of reason exercised upon experience. A baby alligator, by contrast, is endowed with all wisdom it will ever need the moment it hatches from its lacertilian shell and takes in the first beams of moonlight through its saurian eyes. In this way, wisdom is both earned and unearned. Like the servants in the so-called “Parable of the Talents,”15 we are granted an inheritance in life not so that we can hide it under a bushel but so we can put it to work and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. In this way, the Son of God and the Son of Man is not two men, but one:
the All-in-All works through my hands.16
Plato, Protagoras, 321d
lux, luc- ‘light’ + -fer ‘bearing’
Isaiah 14:12
Plato, Protagoras, 322b
“…laß uns hier behaupten, daß die Geschichte der Wissenschaft die Wissenschaft selbst sei” (“Zur Farbenlehre,” 14).
This difference is behind Goethe’s notorious polemic against Newtonian optics: Goethe criticises the entire Vorstellungsart of Newtonian science and not the discreet findings within that Vorstellungsart.
Kuhn, 37.
Edelglass et al., 1.
cf. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man:
“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”
Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother’s womb” all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.
Matthew 5:15
The Greek source text is provided together with the King James translation here: https://biblehub.com/john/3-8.htm.
Psychologist Julian Jaynes offers another view into the world of Original Participation in his seminal 1967 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes, like Barfield, interprets ancient texts not as stories but as histories. In other words, the gods and goddesses of the Homeric epics are not poetic inventions, but rather factual, historical descriptions of the manner in which Ancient Greeks conceived the world. Jaynes writes of the Iliad that: “It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of [personal] consciousness” (72). We need not evaluate all of Jaynes’ arguments to appreciate his conviction that the Ancient Greeks perceived a different world, in a different manner, from the ordinary human of today. Jaynes asserts that this difference is an expression of the lack of inner subjectivity and deliberation on the part of the characters. What we today experience inwardly as thought, emotion, and volition, Achilles experienced objectively as the deeds of gods. Again, to imagine the condensation of discrete aspects out of a common solution confers the nature of this evolution in a comprehensive and intuitive way.
Genesis 2:20
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
1And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. 2Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. 3Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. 4For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. 5And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.
6And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. 7And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. 8Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, 9There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah. 10And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. 11In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
13In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; 14They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. 15And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. 16And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.
14For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. 15And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. 16Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. 17And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. 18But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.
19After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. 21His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
22He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. 23His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
24Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
26His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: 27Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. 28Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
29For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
When we consider Lucifer placed in the Garden of Eden, it is as if a supersensible being, not previously described, suddenly appears out of nowhere. This is how Genesis, chapter 3 starts:
"Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; 3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! 5 For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings."
So, if we attempt to dissect just this portion, what is going on? It is obviously a temptation and a test, which is rigged by the Lord God in order to see if Adam and Eve will be faithful and obey. They prove not able to obey and uphold the commandment. Thus, the consequences are severe. We can read the remaining verses of this chapter, in which the Lord God first speaks His Word to these three who have disobeyed. I want to only draw attention at this point to what the Lord God says to the Serpent (Lucifer):
14 The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
Cursed are you more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you will go,
And dust you will eat
All the days of your life"
Would this not be the point where Lucifer splits into its alter-ego, Ahriman? It gets worse for Adam and Eve. They are expelled, with a Cherubim stationed in all directions to guard the tree of life. Yet, by chapter five a new hope has arisen. The Generations of Adam and Eve. Noah becomes the important integer for the future. The laboring is redeemed by way of Noah. Yet, the Flood starts a new descent phase. Steiner called it, "post-atlantean cultural epochs", which infuriates even anthroposophists today.
Yet, the phenomenologists have their points to be made, don't they? An Earth that was once alive and thriving passes into a death phase, and is now a quantifiable entity. These are the so-called 'facts', are they not?