Proclus on Mythic Conflict
Dec. 15th, 2024 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bowerI wrote this short piece to speak to an issue that was coming up repeatedly in different forms among students in my current course, "Polytheism in Greek Philosophy 3", and since this issue comes up so often, I thought I'd share it in a form widely accessible.
As a good example of how conflict in myths can be interpreted as cooperation in the production of a conflictual plane of being, we can look at Proclus' interpretation of Iliad 20.67-74 from his commentary on Plato's Timaeus (In Tim. 1.78f, trans. Tarrant):
“The divine Homer develops oppositions, setting Apollo against Poseidon, Ares against Athena, the River against Hephaestus, Hermes against Leto, and Hera against Artemis. It is necessary, you see, to view generation in incorporeals, bodies and combinations of the two, and to posit Poseidon and Apollo as demiurges of all of becoming, the former universally and the latter partially; to make Hera and Artemis as the leaders of animal birth, the former of rational life and the latter of physical life; to make Athena and Ares responsible for the rivalry that runs through both, through being and through life, her for the [rivalry] determined by intellect, him for the more material and more impassioned kind, and to make Hermes and Leto the chiefs of the double perfection of the soul, the former of the one [achieved] through cognitive powers and the offering of reasoned arguments, the other through the smooth and willing and assenting elevation of the vital forces; to make Hephaestus and Xanthus the chiefs of all bodily composition and of the properties within it, the former of the more active properties, and the latter of the more passive and more material so to speak.”
Each of the pairs of Gods depicted in the poem as being in conflict thus form between Them a field of oppositions that form a matrix for generation or coming-to-be. Their conflict is thus no mere strife arising from motives that would make no sense to ascribe to Gods, but rather a symbol for Their cooperation in producing things for which certain kinds of conflicting forces are integral to their nature—things, in other words, the unity of which is looser, and held together by these polarities, in accord with a basic imperative to maximize the kinds of being that are able to manifest, to the utmost limits of what can be unified at all. This is what it means for the Gods to want everything to become as much like Themselves as possible (Timaeus 29e) and to let anyone who wishes to follow Them as far as they can (Phaedrus 247a), namely to extend unity, individuation, to as many things of as many different kinds as possible, including things for which certain kinds of conflict is constitutive of the unity they are capable of possessing.
The prevalence of conflict on this plane of being, and its formative power there, are seen from the tradition in Greek cosmological thought attributing a dominant role in natural processes to the conflict of elemental forces such as heat and cold, which remains strong in Greek medicine, even after Greek philosophy had mostly moved on from treating such oppositions as metaphysically ultimate, while continuing to recognize that they were epistemically useful in thinking about physical processes in particular.
This is theologically grounded, moreover, in the recognition of Athena as "a lover of war and wisdom" (Tim. 24d), that is, as Proclus says above, of the kind of "war" that is governed by intellect, rationally understood, intelligible, such as the conflict of natural forces, which is predictable and can be harnessed for use in all manner of crafts, or simply managed through insight. The kind of "war" with which Ares is associated, by contrast, is "impassioned" (pathētikos), literally, passive, because it presupposes the action of such forces upon the soul, insofar as these reasons are phenomenologically opaque, and a different kind of causality is operative. Hence, while we might recognize that a person is angry about something for physiological reasons—a chemical imbalance, for example—this is not why they think that they are angry. We may say that they are wrong in their judgment, but ontologically, we still need to recognize its reality, in order to preserve the integrity of their soul, and not reduce them to a bundle of forces into which they have no first-person insight. For this reason, psychoanalytic therapy operates on the level of such representations, so that even to the degree that actions are the product of the subject's "unconscious" cognition, they are still have the form of subjective thought, and sustain the integrity and agency of the psychological subject.
As a good example of how conflict in myths can be interpreted as cooperation in the production of a conflictual plane of being, we can look at Proclus' interpretation of Iliad 20.67-74 from his commentary on Plato's Timaeus (In Tim. 1.78f, trans. Tarrant):
“The divine Homer develops oppositions, setting Apollo against Poseidon, Ares against Athena, the River against Hephaestus, Hermes against Leto, and Hera against Artemis. It is necessary, you see, to view generation in incorporeals, bodies and combinations of the two, and to posit Poseidon and Apollo as demiurges of all of becoming, the former universally and the latter partially; to make Hera and Artemis as the leaders of animal birth, the former of rational life and the latter of physical life; to make Athena and Ares responsible for the rivalry that runs through both, through being and through life, her for the [rivalry] determined by intellect, him for the more material and more impassioned kind, and to make Hermes and Leto the chiefs of the double perfection of the soul, the former of the one [achieved] through cognitive powers and the offering of reasoned arguments, the other through the smooth and willing and assenting elevation of the vital forces; to make Hephaestus and Xanthus the chiefs of all bodily composition and of the properties within it, the former of the more active properties, and the latter of the more passive and more material so to speak.”
Each of the pairs of Gods depicted in the poem as being in conflict thus form between Them a field of oppositions that form a matrix for generation or coming-to-be. Their conflict is thus no mere strife arising from motives that would make no sense to ascribe to Gods, but rather a symbol for Their cooperation in producing things for which certain kinds of conflicting forces are integral to their nature—things, in other words, the unity of which is looser, and held together by these polarities, in accord with a basic imperative to maximize the kinds of being that are able to manifest, to the utmost limits of what can be unified at all. This is what it means for the Gods to want everything to become as much like Themselves as possible (Timaeus 29e) and to let anyone who wishes to follow Them as far as they can (Phaedrus 247a), namely to extend unity, individuation, to as many things of as many different kinds as possible, including things for which certain kinds of conflict is constitutive of the unity they are capable of possessing.
The prevalence of conflict on this plane of being, and its formative power there, are seen from the tradition in Greek cosmological thought attributing a dominant role in natural processes to the conflict of elemental forces such as heat and cold, which remains strong in Greek medicine, even after Greek philosophy had mostly moved on from treating such oppositions as metaphysically ultimate, while continuing to recognize that they were epistemically useful in thinking about physical processes in particular.
This is theologically grounded, moreover, in the recognition of Athena as "a lover of war and wisdom" (Tim. 24d), that is, as Proclus says above, of the kind of "war" that is governed by intellect, rationally understood, intelligible, such as the conflict of natural forces, which is predictable and can be harnessed for use in all manner of crafts, or simply managed through insight. The kind of "war" with which Ares is associated, by contrast, is "impassioned" (pathētikos), literally, passive, because it presupposes the action of such forces upon the soul, insofar as these reasons are phenomenologically opaque, and a different kind of causality is operative. Hence, while we might recognize that a person is angry about something for physiological reasons—a chemical imbalance, for example—this is not why they think that they are angry. We may say that they are wrong in their judgment, but ontologically, we still need to recognize its reality, in order to preserve the integrity of their soul, and not reduce them to a bundle of forces into which they have no first-person insight. For this reason, psychoanalytic therapy operates on the level of such representations, so that even to the degree that actions are the product of the subject's "unconscious" cognition, they are still have the form of subjective thought, and sustain the integrity and agency of the psychological subject.
