O. :Lessons to be learned from Ancient Greece

An important remark in this direction has been made by Prof. Baeck who attributed to Aristotle a 'small is beautiful' ideology related to the small sized polis and not to the Hellenistic spirit needed by Alexander to unite his vast empire (see Louis Baeck, The Mediterranean Trajectory of Artistotle's Economic Canon, Paper presented at ECHE 97 in Athens, April 1997).

These then are some of the lessons to be learned out of Ancient Greece. But all of this is cannot be understood if emphasis is given only to words, for looks experienced during a voyage, the seeing of home fade away at a distance as the boats cut into the sea, they are equivalents of both empirical and intellectual, concrete and abstract thoughts. The Greek language is filled from the very beginning with such terminology so difficult to translate and yet so easy to retain even in our present age: Agora, Logos, Photo, Anthropology etc.. This emphasis upon seeing has really to do with the 'light' to be experienced in Greece. It relates to the fact that Homer would describe Athena as the 'bright eyed one', as the one who walks in a shining veil making it possible for her to be only visible to Odysseus, but not to the others. By the same token, that veil protected the stranger Odysseus from any hostility until he had reached safely the centre of power, that is where the decision could be made whether he shall be treated as guest of honour or as foe, that is an enemy not to be trusted. And even then Odysseus did not reveal immediately his true identity and let it be that only certain words were spoken, words meant to bridge the gap, but not to let the others come too close, so that there would be no distance between him and the others.

Fortunately on all those roads connecting the small village to the temple, later the limited polis to its port, and the greater Hellenistic cities to the vast empire, something else happened. Some resisted the 'corruption of freedom', and encouraged instead the development of civic duty and a pride freed from hubris, in order to lay claim to be honoured as statesman due to standing above personal profit motives. Socrates used already for his defence, but it was another Athenian who used the powers of rhetorics for the citizens to listen finally to the 'voice of reason', Demosthenes:

I say that Athens is by all mankind acquitted, owing to my counsel; and I am

acquitted by you. And if you ask me, Aeschines, why I deserve the crown, I

answer in this way. When, beginning with Aeschines, all the statesmen of

Greece were corrupted formerly by Philip and now by Alexander, I was never

tempted and never induced to betray what I consider just and benevolent to my

country. Neither opportunity, nor fair speeches, nor hope, nor large promises,

nor fear, nor anything in the wide world led me from the path of duty. I never

leaned on the side of profit. All I did sprang from a soul which was upright,

honest, and incorruptible. Entrusted with affairs of greater magnitude than any

of my contemporaries, I administered them all honestly and faithfully. Therefore

I claim to be honoured.

Demosthenes, 330 BC raging against corrupters of freedom, and by ridiculing charges of Aeschines, justifying his entire political career

Note: the quote is taken from Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p.417

A careful reading of the Ancient Greek world can say optimism yes, but one experienced with agony due to the dilemmas to be faced and yet brought to light through calmness. For that reason the dead continue to live on to tell the other mortals what it means to live under the rule of law. While Simonides of Cos would say "Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their laws" (quoted from R. Payne, Ancient Greece, p.149), Ritsos will write in the twentieth century, that is after many experiences of war: 'the dead soldiers are lying in their graves, but they hold onto the endless ropes of church bells, awaiting the hour for them to be ringed', that is when the time has come to stand up and to argue for the freedom of man.

Witness shall become an important testimony for words, since Adorno coins it in philosophy as the 'imaginary witness' to which to bestow thoughts for the future, while Paul Celan would say for his poetry that they are filled with words which are witnesses without there being any witness, something which Derrida took up in his reflections about the language of Paul Celan marked by those years of experiences in concentration camps.
Adorno and Horkheimer would remark that any language without distance inside would mean not only a break-down in communication, but spell trouble, including violence.
Plato's discussion about the Sophists is according to Iraklis Mavridis the only dialogue which is not conducted with Socrates, but with a stranger.
The fragment is cited by Robert Payne in: Ancient Greece, 1966, p. 155):
Brendan Kennelly, a new version of Euripides' The Trojan Women, 1993, p.8
"Otherness" as a topic remains until today a problem of identity through which words and thoughts taken on a distinct meaning, given the particular cultural context in which they are spoken. Some these thoughts have been expressed by Levy-Strauss, but recently most clearly by James Clifford in: Predicament of Culture, especially where he refers to the poet William Carlos Williams.
Ernst Bloch, in discussing the concept of wisdom, refers to Socrates as emphasizing calmness as being needed when wishing to understand according to which laws of the community somebody is acting, and this Bloch calls the first true European dimension.
Shakespeare would say in his Hamlet, "is it the words that suit the actions or the actions the words", a problem that has ever since remained an unresolved tautology, even though German activism referred "thoughts striding towards the 'Tat'", Tat standing here for anything from a simple kind of action to a committed crime. This provoked later on the philosopher Tugendhat that philosophical understanding should not rest upon a word, but upon the sentence within which the word appears.

Conclusion:

In our modern world of global communication, the need to set anew our charts by obtaining orientation from the past, that is too often neglected. Yet it is crucial for our own self-understanding that not only the hunters of messages determine the outcome of social abitrations between needs and acceptable solutions to all. After all, we live in a creative tension when settling down and yet moving about like nomads, in order to learn how to live with ourselves, and this within the spirit of democracy. Thus for the kind of cultural identity we can derive from the past, our ancestors included, that is a matter of avoiding reductionism of the human spirit. However, there are those who continue to instil a conflict and a pain in order to forget that. They want to thwart human self-understanding, that is not it to be in tune with those early songs of Ancient Greece: the childhood of Western Civilization, but then they knew already then what difficulties would lie ahead on this road leading through the Polis to man's own doing with or without civilization;

I say important things for you to hear,

O foolish Perses: Badness can be caught

In great abundance, easily; the road

To her is level, and she lives near by.

But Good is harder, for the gods have placed

In front of her much sweat; the road is steep

And long and rocky at the first, but when

You reach the top, she is not hard to find.

Hesiod, Works and Days (284-293)

Hatto Fischer

Athens 21.4.97 /29.4.97

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O. :Lessons to be learned from Ancient Greece