Metis

Metis or "Cunning Intelligence" - the fluidity of thinking that kept mythos and logos together is an important subject, that Detienne and Vernant, as mentioned earlier in the Jaynes thread, handle it the best. I relate most of this to all that's excerpted on the Active Nihilism thread.

I'll post metis related topics here, few as they are.

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I don't know much about metis, per se, or how it is defined.
From what I've read it is associated with the Pan, Loki, Satyr (ironically), character.

I associate it with Daemonion, the Greek cunning.

In my mind it is the balance between feminine and masculine attributes, resulting in a creative cleverness that cannot be matched by the Apollonian and Dionysian extremes.
A sort of near-perfect mix between the two.

Of course there is no perfect anything, and so the balance oscillates between feminine and masculine attitudes.

The ancient Greeks considered philosophers a hybrid of scientist (rational, masculine), and artist (emotional, feminine).
This would be daemon.

Quote :

"Detienne and Vernant identify mêtis as a way of knowing,

"a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic."

Hephaistos is born crippled, perhaps clubfooted, a defect which causes Hera to cast him from Olympus in horror and rage. In Homer’s Iliad, Hephaistos falls a second time when Zeus ragefully casts him from Olympus when he takes his mother’s part in challenging Zeus’s absolute authority. He lands broken upon Lemnos, where the Sintian people rescue the god and nurse him to health but not to wholeness. Hephaistos’ lameness is mythopoeticized into an imputation of sexual deficit, specifically symbolic phallic impairment or castration. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, however, suggest an alternative interpretation of Hephaistos’ crippled condition. The

“[. . .] divergence in the direction of his feet, a gait oriented in two directions at once, forward and backward,” is “connected with his powers as a magician” (98, italics mine). Hephaistos’ special circular lameness is echoed in the magical wheeling tripods he fashions, described by Homer in Book 28 of the Iliad as “[. . .] animated automata [that] could move forward and backward with equal ease.” This circularity is emblematic of that which is fabulously and powerfully magical. Vernant observes that

[t]he movement of Hephaestus, the lame god, ‘rolling’ around his bellows in the workshop, was circular [. . .]. So was that of the primordial men, those beings described by Aristophanes in the Symposium who were ‘complete’ in comparison to the men of the present, cleft as they are in two (down an axis separating front from back).

Vernant also remarks that in describing the men suited to form the elite ruling class of the ideal Republic Plato compared those whose thinking is “deformed and lame,” which is to say divergent from the linear rational mode of Platonic philosophy, to those whose patriarchal line of descent is skewed or deformed. In short, he compares those whose thinking is divergent—i.e., characterized by the qualities of mêtis—to bastards and illegitimates. What makes individuals “well-born” and qualified to rule is the straightness and linearity of their thinking as much as the excellence and legitimacy of their lineage. In this light, it is interesting to note that Hephaistos, the crooked-gaited god of technology, had, at least in Hesiod’s account of his parentage, a mother but no father. It is also here that the definitive philosophic fracture between technê and mêtis can first be seen.

The image of the golden net is at once emblematic of Hephaistos’ technê and his mêtis. It will be seen that the art and craft of Hephaistos do not rely on technê alone, and that the fragmentation of the Hephaistean mythos can, at least in part, be traced to what Roochnik identifies as the definitive parting of ways between craft and ‘craftiness’ in the development of the concept of technê.

Though later forged in the smithy, the thunderbolts of the early sky-gods were originally imagined as and retain in their etymology the memory of stone. Motz cites the English term “thunder-stone,” applied to flint celts (hafted blades), the German terms Donnerstein and Donnerhammer, French pierre à tonnère and Greek keraunia lithos as evidence. Likewise, Thor’s hammer, forged by dwarves, was originally stone as shown by its name, Old Icelandic hamr, meaning “rock” or “precipice.” Magical stone cudgels named “Crusher” and “Driver” were made by Kothar-wa-Hasis for Baal. These and other examples are given by Motz to show that “[. . .] throughout the confines of Europe [and elsewhere] [. . .] stone celts and axes are regarded as the thunderbolt” (A. B. Cook, Zeus: a Study in Ancient Religion, qtd. in Motz: 147). Numinous power residing in stones and later reflected in sacred and funeral architecture is perhaps most simply shown in the planting of a boulder in the earth by Jacob, who named it Beth-El, the house of God (Motz 145). This numinous power was later translated to metal and metalworking, for example in beliefs such as that in Scotland, where the possession of a piece of iron, or a knife or nail carried in one’s pocket might protect one from fairy mischief, or in India, where the belief that a mourner attending to the dead might ward off evil spirits by carrying a piece of iron.

With the grounding of Motz’s work in uncovering the most ancient derivations of ideas concerning matter and its numinous significances, it becomes easier to understand Heidegger’s definition of poiēsis as a “bringing-forth” (in German, hervorbringen) of the inherent message of matter in relationship with the human maker. Heidegger points out the distinction between the natural bringing-forth of nature, physis (the root of our “physics”), which, like a blossom, is “the arising of something from out of itself” and the bringing-forth of an object like a silver chalice through an other, i.e., the craftsman or artist (Heidegger 10-11). Yet, by calling the bringing-forth of nature “poiēsis in the highest sense,” Heidegger does not thereby diminish the human maker. The point, instead, is that poiēsis, whether a work of nature or of handicraft, reveals something,
“[. . .] brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment.” That unconcealment of something already present in its essence the Greeks called alēthia, which means “revealing.” “The Romans translate this with veritas. We say ‘truth’ and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea” (11-12).

This bringing-forth/unconcealment/revealing/bringing-into-being is accomplished through instrumentality, i.e., technê, so that its presence shines forth (164). “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.” The essence of technology lies in “the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth” (12). Heidegger looks further into the Greek word alēthia to clarify the idea of “truth” as intimately connected with making. The Greek word theōria (from which we have “theory”) from the roots thea and oraō, means “to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences [that which has come into being] becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing—to linger with it” (163). Not merely a mode of thought, theōria signifies the attentiveness of humans to the radiance that lies within the outward appearances of things, in which the presence of the gods shines forth. For the Greeks, this attentiveness was “the consummate form of human existence” (164). Heidegger stresses that the Greeks:

[. . .] were also able to hear something else in the word theōria. When differently stressed, the two root words thea and oraō can read theá and ōra. Theá is goddess. It is as a goddess that Alēthia, the unconcealment from out of which and in which that which presences, presences, appears to the early thinker Parmenides [. . .]. The Greek word ōra signifies the respect we have, the honor and esteem we bestow [. . .]. [Thus,] theōria is the reverent paying heed to the unconcealment of what presences. Theory in the old, and that means the early but by no means the obsolete, sense is beholding that watches over truth. Our old high German word wara (whence wahr, wahren, and Wahrheit [“truth”]) goes back to the same stem as the Greek horaō, ōra, wora. (164-65)

Thus, technê, technology, “is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technê belongs to bringing- forth, to poiēsis; it is something poetic” (13). It is sacred.

Heidegger acknowledges that there is a disturbing problem with applying these ideas to the essence of modern, mechanistic technology. Technology is, as it always was, a revealing. However, “The revealing that lies in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such [. . .]. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (14). The worldview that feels the presence of Alēthia as goddess and the reverently observes the numinosity of the body of nature is lost.

In her examination of the smith, Motz goes back to very ancient traditions that render an understanding of poiēsis, “making,” as partaking in the numinous. Matter is implicated in an interplay with divine forces; both making and matter are rendered magical. Technology and art are makings that reveal the essence of what lies under material reality and shines forth: whether the making is a silver chalice or a poem, a “truth” shines forth through the agency of the maker. And this agency is significant, for without it, the potential of things remains hidden, and cannot be known.

It has long been noted by scholars that a “transformation” in Greek speech and thought occurred that “led from the mythos of Homer and Hesiod to the logos of Heraclitus and Plato” (Lincoln 3). However, as Bruce Lincoln’s textual and etymological research painstakingly demonstrates, it is not a transformation in the sense of a transition from valuing one mode of thought or expression to another. Instead, it can be seen as a gradual and complex transposition in meanings between a set of two existing terms and concepts.

In the proem to his Theogony 27-28, Hesiod (eighth century BCE) claims to be directly addressed by the Muses as follows:

We know how to recount (legein) many falsehoods (pseudea) like real things, and We know how to proclaim (gerusasthai) truths (alēthea) when we wish. (3 n.1)

As Bruce Lincoln points out, two modes of speech are employed in these lines. The Muses “recount falsehoods” and “proclaim truths”.

The term mythēsasthai is shown to be an appropriately synonymous term with gērusasthai to denote “speaking truth” by its appearance in the last line of the proem of Works and Days, where Hesiod calls upon Zeus for justice in legal proceedings, pledging in turn to speak the truth thus revealed:

Zeus of the lofty thunder, you who dwell in the highest palace, Hear me, you who see and perceive: Straighten out the judgments, according to justice!
And I will tell [mythēsasthai] real things to Perses. (4)

Thus, the speech of “proclaiming,” mythos, is the speech of divinely mandated justice and truth.

In Hesiodic texts, mythos is also the speech used by the powerful, as when, in a fable related in Works and Days [202-12], the hawk seizes the sweet-voiced nightingale. The helpless nightingale weeps at her fate, but the hawk forcefully:

[. . .] spoke this mythos to her:
“Good lady, why do you screech? One who is far your better has you.
[. . .]
Senseless is he who wishes to pit himself against those who are more powerful: He deprives himself of victory and suffers pains in disgrace.” (13)


Mythos is also the term given to oath, as when Zeus asks the warlike Ouranids (Theogony 664-67), to help him fight against their brothers, the Titans. Their pledge of support is termed a mythos (12).

The term also appears often in Homeric texts, as in the Iliad [2:198-202], when Odysseus prevents the Greek soldiers from fleeing to their ships. Clubbing them with his scepter, he shouts: “Sit still and hearken to the mythos of others, who are mightier than you: You, who are unwarlike, helpless, and not to be counted on in battle or assembly” (17). Of the 167 instances of the noun mythos or the verb mytheomai in the Iliad counted by scholar Richard Martin, Lincoln reports that 97% of those instances occur in a situation “in which a powerful male either gives orders or makes boasts.” Lincoln concludes, “A mythos is an assertive discourse of power and authority that represents itself as something to be believed and obeyed” (17).

The distinction between the speech of logos and the speech of mythos, notes Lincoln, is clearly characterized in the writings of Hesiod and Homer. Both poets’ works are representative of the qualities of an oral culture in which “poetry is society’s chief archival medium, as well as its most authoritative discourse and prime instrument for cultural reproduction over the course of generations” (25). In the Theogony Hesiod claims that he has received gifts—presumably for both “recounting” and “proclaiming”— from the Muses “that transformed him from the near-bestial state of the shepherd into that of the poet, close to the gods” (24). As a poet, Hesiod, like all poets, is given knowledge of past memory by the Muses, heirs to their mother, Mnemosyne. Too, he is given the laurel-scepter of “specially privileged kings, priests, seers, and poets,” a symbol of the deities’ favor and presence in the living speaker. The laurel scepter is, along with the poet’s lyre, an attribute of Apollo, from whom the poet receives knowledge of the future. Thus, the divinely inspired poet sings of “things past and those yet to come.” This gift of the authority to proclaim is the gift of mythos. Further, observes Lincoln, “like all gifts in a precapitalist economy,” the gifts of the Muses represent part of a process, rather than an end product; and, the relationship between donor and recipient is reciprocal. The poet mentions the Muses by name, expresses his gratitude, and invokes their continued presence. This reciprocity suggests the recursive nature of recounting, the gift of logos (24-25). The poet in early Greek tradition possesses both mythos and logos.

Later, however, the rise of writing in Greece, Lincoln observes, provided an opportunity for study and reexamination of texts experienced outside the realm of performance, stripped of music, feasting and conviviality (26). By the sixth century BCE, criticism of poetry and poets began to appear in the writings of the Pre-Socratics. Xenophanes complained that

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all
The shameful things that are blameworthy among humans: Stealing, committing adultery, and deceiving each other. (26)

In his longest extant poem, Xenophanes describes the ideal symposium, celebrated in a ritually purified chamber amidst luxury and elegance, provided with a simple and majestic banquet. “[M]en of good cheer [. . .] hymn the god / With well- spoken mythoi and pure logoi.” By “pure logoi,” Xenophanes means tales of “noble deeds” as opposed to “...treating battles of the Titans, Giants, / Or Centaurs.” These latter Xenophanes terms “fabrications [plasmata] of earlier times,” telling of “blameworthy” things that should not be recounted of the gods, “behaviors that would undermine important institutions (marriage, the family, law, commerce, the polis)” (28-29).

Xenophanes distinguishes these things from mythoi, a term he reserves for stories drawn from human memory, unaided by direct divine inspiration, that are “moral in their content, reverent in their attitude, and socially beneficial in their consequences” (29). Noble deeds are retold, “As memory and striving for excellence make them known [. . .]” to the teller. The quality of excellence is here understood as a human factor, not a divine one.

Democritus coins the term mythoplasteontes (“myth fabricators”), which he uses to denounce those who try to pass off falsehoods as sacred truths (mythoi). Lincoln points out that this term connects two lexical domains with which we are familiar: the noun traditionally used for true, authoritative, and trustworthy accounts (mythos), and the verb used for artisanal creations in malleable, impermanent materials such as clay, plaster, and wax and also in words and ideas (plassō, “to mold, form, fabricate”).

The term plassō also applies to forgeries, counterfeits and fictions in general. Democritus thus distinguishes between those “whose mythos is true,” which he equates with uncrafted and unvarnished, as opposed to those “whose logoi are many,” implying trickiness and seductive techniques. Democritus thus conflates cunning intelligence—mêtis—with making—poiēsis—and damns their conjunction as untrustworthy.

Empedocles (c. 495-535 BCE) claims divine status not only for his mythoi but for himself as he addresses his audience on his theory of the transmigration of souls (that souls descend from an original divine state through various forms on a path toward increasingly elevated incarnations to regain their empyrean status, shedding their mortality): “Know these things clearly, having heard this mythos from a god”. There is a large difference, Lincoln reminds us, between Hesiod’s claim that his poetic authority comes to him through the mythos spoken by the Muses, and Empedocles’ claim to be the divine authority speaking the mythos. By the time Protagoras states “Man is the measure of all things” (in the latter half of the fifth century BCE), the very existence of the gods is called into question. Human life is too brief to determine the truth in the matter of the divine, but is competent to judge its own truths.

This also calls into question the authority of the poet’s traditional claim to divine inspiration and with it an exalted place amid human activities. The question, Lincoln asserts, now becomes, “Do poets speak mythos, logos or both, and what value ought to be attached to these categories?”. Gorgias (said to be the pupil of Empedocles) calls poetry nothing more than logos with meter. It manipulates opinions by playing on the emotions and otherwise persuades by means of methods that have nothing to do with truth. Its enchanting wiles work on the soul as drugs work on the body. In a rhetorical exercise in which he defends Helen of Troy against the poets who maligned her unjustly, Gorgias argues that Helen was deceived by Paris’s seductive logos, and thus deceived was powerless to resist his persuasion to abandon her husband. Helen is therefore deserving of forgiveness, not revilement. In this exercise, Gorgias not only skillfully undermines the language and authority of the poet, but in effect directly accuses Homer of “having gotten her story wrong”—which means he could have been wrong about everything else. Gorgias also shows his own language, that of reasoned argument, to be superior in persuasive power. This is the essence of Sophism. Yet, at the same time, Gorgias [in Gorgias, Fragment B23] takes what modern thought would characterize as a relativistic stance in granting to the telling of myths an important moral status:

Tragedy inspires and proclaims. It is something wonderful for people to see and hear, and produces deception through its mythoi and the passions it arouses. Further, one who deceives in this fashion is more just than one who does not, while he who has been deceived is wiser than one who has not. (34)

After exposing the manipulation of the poet’s logos, Gorgias nevertheless grants a greater moral value to the poet’s mythoi as carriers of wisdom, which is gained through the arousal of the passions and not through the moral force of reason. Not only is the question of poetic authority left unresolved, but the distinctions between mythos and logos appear increasingly blurred.

In writings attributed either to Euripides or Critias (ca. 460-403 BCE), the author praises the strategem of a man “shrewd and wise” who first thought of inventing the undying, all-knowing gods in order to put fear into the hearts of men who might otherwise contemplate evil in secret. “Recounting these logoi”—telling these invented stories of the gods—and “having hidden the truth with a false logos,” says the author (in Critias, Fragment B25), that shrewd man

[. . .] affirmed that the gods dwell in that place where, By saying this, he could most frighten people.
As a result, he knew the fears that exist for mortals And the advantages of a troubled life.

Laws that prevent disorder and violence work well in the agora, but the law is incapable of following those with evil in their hearts into the privacy of their homes. However, fear of the just retribution of the gods can and a well-crafted logos can arouse this fear. This audaciously cynical passage, Lincoln notes, is not only a myth about myth, but purports to be a true story that puts to the lie traditionally accepted stories, claiming them as fictions (pseudei logoi) “fabricated and propagated by the state for purposes of its own”. Moreover, the actions of the state in employing these false stories as a tool for regulating society are morally correct, for by doing so it imposes the good of public morality in places where laws cannot reach. Whether Critias was the author of the foregoing passage or not, his biography fits the totalitarian worldview expressed in the text. Critias led the viciously repressive Spartan-backed “Tyranny of Thirty” that took power in Athens after its defeat in the Pelopponesian War and carried out a reign of terror that lasted nearly a year until it was overthrown and Critias killed (36). The above passage, says Lincoln, well states his political views that “a small elite can and ought to impose moral order on citizens, who are by nature weak, unruly, and given to secret sins” (37). And further, that in order to carry out its ends, this elite is justified in its means.

The thought of Critias, states Lincoln, leads directly to that of his kinsman and fellow student, Plato. Plato follows Xenophanes in condemning certain traditional poetic themes. Tales of battles among the gods incite civil strife. Tales of the hopeless underworld sap the courage of soldiers. Like Gorgias, Plato [in Gorgias 502c] views poetry as a form of logos appealingly enhanced by melody, rhythm and meter, but none of these things make it true, which is to say verifiable through analytic rigor (38). Moreover, poetry renders the populace lazy, seeking the pleasure of images rather than seeking truth. Plato [in Phaedrus, Ion and Laws] allows that inspired speech sometimes flows through the poet, but its force renders him, temporarily, divinely mad, so that he functions as a mere transmitter who himself adds nothing. Mere poetic skill withers in the face of the power of this legitimate madness (38).

Plato categorizes mythoi as a form of logoi, a category which possesses some truth but is false on the whole and morally defective. However, poetry has a place, and a dual purpose. It can speak with certainty on topics which philosophical inquiry cannot, such as the nature of the gods and the fate of the soul after death. And, following the spirit of the author of the passage praising the shrewd man who invented the gods, Plato envisions the use of mythoi to indoctrinate segments of the populace—women, children, and the lower classes—who are unable to follow the subtle philosophical arguments that persuade rational men to propositions deemed necessary to the good of the state. Lincoln concludes:

In the network of communicative relations envisioned by Plato, poets—who understood themselves to mediate between gods and humans—were significantly repositioned. The space he assigned to them is that which lies between the state and its lowliest subjects, where they craft mythoi at the direction of philosopher- kings, for mothers and nurses to pass on to their charges. And in this system, mythoi were not only revised but also radically revalorized.

In Plato’s ideal republic, myth finds its status reconfigured and reduced. It no longer emanates from the gods and heroes but becomes a property of the state, properly constrained into the well-ordered structure mandated by elite philosophers. Its ambiguous and unsettling aspects are discredited and deprived of voice.

Mythos has been shown to have changed its meaning. What then of logos? Logos as presented in the Platonic dialogues remains a difficult and much-discussed philosophical concept. Socrates uses the analogy of the sun, light, and vision to describe the relation of the unchanging ideal or “good” to logos. The sun, says Socrates, “[. . .] is not vision, yet as being the cause thereof is beheld by vision itself.” The good stands in a similar relation to reason, by means of which the good may be perceived. When illumined by reason, the mind apprehends truth and reality; but “when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and being passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason” (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Republic 6:507, 508). In another dialogue, the sun metaphor reappears. One looks at the sun only indirectly as during an eclipse, never through mediation of the senses, lest, Socrates says, the soul be blinded. Rather, one must turn to the world of theories [en logois] “and use them in trying to discover the truth about things” (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Phaedo 99d-99e). “We predicate ‘to be’ of many beautiful things and many good things, saying of them severally that they are, and so define them in our speech [logōi] (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Republic 7:507b).

Yet, how does the speech of logos determine ‘truth’? In Plato’s Phaedrus, Sophocles has led Phaedrus to agree that the contention of rhetoricians in law courts of what is just and unjust relies on speech, and asks, Is it not true that “He who possesses the art of doing this can make the same thing appear to the same people now just, now unjust, at will?” (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Phaedrus 261c-d). Not only this, but if the speaker in the law court wishes to mislead someone else, he may do this through shifting his ground “little by little,” so as to be more able to “pass undetected from so-and-so to its opposite” than he could do “in one bound” (262a). If this is so, then, “It follows that anyone who intends to mislead another, without being misled himself, must discern precisely the degree of resemblance and dissimilarity between this and that” (262a). With Phaedrus agreeing that this is essential, Socrates continues, “Then if he does not know the truth about a given thing, how is he going to discern the degree of resemblance between the unknown thing and other things?” (262a). Even he who intends to mislead can only do so with “[. . .] knowledge of what the thing in question really is” (262b). In other words, the truth of a thing must be known, ironically, even if one intends to deceive. “Thus,” remarks John Sallis of this passage, “it appears that there can be no effective rhetoric independently of the knowledge of things” (Sallis 169)." [Ciantis, Hephaestos]