Hellenism: Its Essence, Its Manifestations, and Its Demise

A prevailing theme inherent in the teachings of the great Hellenic sages is as follows: that is, the greatest good is Virtue, and Virtue is to live in accordance with Reason and Nature. But what does this mean exactly? To the post-Judeo-Christian mind, it would appear that Reason and Nature were at odds; but this is of course merely a symptom of the perversion of reason into that which it is not. Such an evaluation misses the essence of reason: reason is necessarily in reference to that which presents itself (aletheia), being a product of memory, and from there a signification of that which is past. Thus, reason, and by extension, truth, is inextricably dependent on Process.

The forgetting of the meaning of Being, as Heidegger put it, was an ironic nullification of Reason for the sake of Reason; the concealed nature of analytic logic was ignored, leading all from the time of Plato onward to assume that Reason was autonomous to aletheia, with the latter being a subsequent manifestation of the former. Being irrefutable, logical truths were deemed entities of superior ontologies instead of manifestations of an ordering consciousness. And so the Being of Reason was stripped from Reason itself, thereby creating the mysterious realm of the Noumena.

Metaphysics becomes spiritual cosmology. Emancipated from aletheia, Reason becomes a whore for all of the feeble subconscious desires of aspiring Nihilists. This is the death of Hellenism, and the birth of the Christian-Platonic disease.

This new "Reason" judges that previously deemed real as imperfect, temporary, contextual, dependent, all the while ignoring its own arbitrariness; the further removed from actuality an idea is, the more real it is deemed. Human conventions and symbols overtake reality and bend it to the will of the social consciousness. Padded cushions replace the harsh realities of Nature as man revokes responsibility from himself.

The greatest danger of Modernity is not the destruction of order and civilization; on the contrary, Modernity is the very perfection of civilization's very essence: the absolute nullification of Nature's influence on the mind of Man, the progressive atrophy of individuated consciousness to the point of absolute unawareness of Self, and thus the perfection of the Social Organism.

In Hellenism, it is not "the common good", nor the absence of strife and entropy, nor the perfection of social order that is the highest good. The greatest good is necessarily in struggle with these very things more often than not; that greatest good is Awareness of the Real. To live in accordance with Nature is to realize the ultimate falsity of anything Human that refers not to the Real. Eudaimonia is NOT religious ecstasy, it is NOT hedonic nor "spiritual" bliss; it is the ultimate Rational and Impersonal satisfaction that one has when one has truly known one's self and Nature, free from all delusion, free from all feeble, willing unawareness. It is to have a Soul of ever-burning Fire, never giving in to the temptation of becoming damp in consciousness.

Some of the very last strains of Hellenism in literature would have to be, in my evaluation, the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. Cosmic Horror is just what the name implies. It is a genre of horror in which the protagonist goes mad upon discovering "forbidden knowledge", that is, a sort of fantastical discovery revealing the ultimate meaninglessness of weak human concepts, and Nature's indifference to them.

In the words of Lovecraft:

" In your mind, MAN is the center of everything, and his exact conformation to certain regulations of conduct HOW EVER EFFECTED, the only problem in the universe. Your world (if you will pardon my saying so) is contracted.

....I recognize a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an overpowering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws that affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain."

For me Hellenism is the highest peak of human reason as it relates to nature, existence.
It is the peak of Indo-European, aryanism, paganism.

Roman civilization is the end phase of Hellenic culture, which is an offshoot of Aryan paganism, just as Americanism is the end phase of Judeo-Christian nihilistic culture.

We are living the apiphany of nihilistic civilization.
The sensation of euphoria, at the feelnig of liberation from nature, has given way to the emptiness.

Reason as a byroduct of a living self-organization (organism) is, indeed, in a state of conflict with reality, which is this ceasless effrotless towards chaos (randomness).
This is what the Hellenes call agon: struggle, strife, war.
This is felt by the consciuos organism as nbeed/suffering, as it battle agaisnt temporla attrition.

Resentiment, using Nietszche's contexts, is this negative reaction to this existntial awareness.
This results in Nihilism proper, and not the simple awareness that life is withuot purpose, morals and meaning, and that man must give it all that.

Man as Creator.  

This resentiment and the natural hierarchies produced by strife, is what birthes nihilism, and makes it popular.
This also produces nihilistic asceticism, in contrast to helelnic asceticism which is more a trainnig of the will, just as athelticism is the training of the physical, automatic processes.

The Hellenes achives this cultural balance...simialr to the Hindus, since they are both part of the same tradition.

Hellenism = Timocracy. Meritocracy.
One isn't born with rights...one earns them and must maintain them throughout his lifetime with service - duty.

Hellenism = open ended world-view.
Even accommodating closed systems.
Openness to expanding space/time, i.e., possibilities.

This openness is also what makes it vulnerable to closed systems, closed minds, protective defensive ideologies, like Abrahamism, offering wholes, completes, perfections: singularity, oneness.