The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of - download pdf or read online

By Pierre Hadot

ISBN-10: 0674030494

ISBN-13: 9780674030497

Approximately twenty-five hundred years in the past the Greek philosopher Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic phrases "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, frequently translated as "Nature likes to hide," has haunted Western tradition ever due to the fact that is the topic of this enticing examine by means of Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical determine of the veiled goddess Isis as a consultant, and drawing at the paintings of either the ancients and later thinkers resembling Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot strains successive interpretations of Heraclitus' phrases. over the years, Hadot unearths, "Nature likes to cover" has intended that every one that lives has a tendency to die; that Nature wraps herself in myths; and (for Heidegger) that Being unveils because it veils itself. in the meantime the pronouncement has been used to provide an explanation for every little thing from the opacity of the flora and fauna to our sleek angst. From those kaleidoscopic exegeses and usages emerge contradictory ways to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, procedure, which embraces know-how as a way of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets and techniques; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, technique, in accordance with which one of these denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. instead of those attitudes Hadot proposes one urged via the Romantic imaginative and prescient of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling, who observed within the veiled Isis an allegorical expression of the elegant. "Nature is paintings and artwork is nature," Hadot writes, inviting us to include Isis and all she represents: artwork makes us intensely conscious of how thoroughly we ourselves usually are not in simple terms surrounded through nature but in addition a part of nature. (20070729)

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Moreover, forced and violent observation, as Cicero hints, following the Empiricist physicians, risks disturbing the phenomena it wishes to study. 17 In addition, invisible things can become visible, like comets, which, as Seneca remarks, appear only rarely, and of whose withdrawal we are unaware when they are hidden. —they both fill' our eyes and escape them. Are they so subtle that the human eye cannot perceive them? Or is their majesty hidden in a retreat too sacred for men, and do they rule their domain from there, that is to say, themselves, inaccessible to all, except to the mind?

Yet there is also a part of physics that must speak of the gods, since mythical traditions and religion place them in relation to the phenomena of nature. This is a physics that is "theological," uses the method of allegorical exegesis, and is therefore the noblest part of philosophy. 13 Moreover, we must distinguish three primary meanings of the word "theology": the word may designate the mythical system implied in ancient theogonies or religious texts; it can also refer to the allegorical exegesis of myths; finally, it may mean the theory of first principles, as presented by Plato, Aristotle, or the Neoplatonists.

Did not Plato himself criticize the poets' mythical inventions, those fables that provoke the fear of death? And yet is not the myth of Er, which ends the dialogue and narrates the souls' pilgrimages after death, liable to provoke the same kind of terrors? And if it is claimed that myths are imagistic modes of expression, adapted for simple people while providing sages with matter for thought, it will be answered that the common man does not understand them, and sages do not need them. Myths are therefore dangerous and useless.

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