Quotes about Aristeia

Values by their very nature tend to seed differences and oppositions, i.e. to make it possible for us to detect and appreciate the various perspectives from which issues may be seen; even though we (by a profound self-misconception) may find this psychologically and socially unpleasant, for the sake of value-intelligence we must learn to live and to thrive AMIDST such polemics, "in medias res," in utmost self-uncertainty and insecurity. Values, also by their inherent character and natural function, tend to form hierarchies; and even though our egos and appetites and illusions and delusions may resent being afflicted with judgments of rank and superiority/inferiority, again for the sake of connoisseurial and wisdom-seeking value-intelligence we have to stretch and traumatize our minds aristically to understand the rationality and objectivity of such intrinsic hierarchicalism, valid and authoritative over and beyond all that we may have cultivated as our idiosyncratic and subjectivist preferences (idiotia). Aristeia is naturally ingrained in the very nature of values; values are naturally ingrained in the very character and laws of nature.

The Greeks took for granted a warrior-ethic ("aristeia," the virtues, values, culture and competence of "aristoi") not just between man and nature, and one city and another, and in the competitive contests (agones) between one person or point of view and another, but most especially between the individual mind striving for illumination and the vast surrounding obscure chaos of all that we do not know or understand or, as yet, have the resources to master. Humans from the earliest days of their lives have already planted their feet on one of two paths, one leading toward self-illumination or a determination to live life knowingly, as cognoscenti or "knowers," and one leading toward the absolute minimum of effort at illumination, a default-mentality marked by the vices of ignoranti, the countless herds of the mostly oblivious and passive who are content merely to be, to drift and be driven, not to be morally or philosophically accountable for themselves.

Gnosis is cultured and critical evidentialism, it is "phenomenology" i.e. Aristotelian concern and respect for the actual and self-governing shape of the phenomena; it is a self-critical recognition that mind should not be arrogantly and unilaterally dictating its own preferred and self-flattering "laws" (logicism, rationalism, a-priorism, theologism, ideologism) to actuality. It is the true aristeia or wisdom or moderation (in Greek the same word, sophrosyne) over against the intellectual hyperactivism of Platonic abstractivism and its high-handed philosophical mandarinism: it is all too easy for facile or self-uncritical "mind" to spin out a self-coherent "noetocosm" that routinely and methodically purges all the polemics and trauma from its controlled noosphere. But this projected and constructed order is not something truly known or understood as true or actual, it is merely something logicistically obligatory to take for granted and to think in terms of.