The famous painting of The Death of Socrates by David ..., if set aside as a crucifixion picture, brings out a way in which Socrat...es' death was quite unlike that of Christ. While his disciples are in agonies of grief, Socrates himself remains calm and poised; his philosophy has saved him from pain and passion. Christ, on the contrary, dies after hours of torment and doubt. Socrates imperturbably takes the cup of hemlock: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane cries out, "Take this cup from me."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud was, in effect, trying to take the mystery out of myth. Once it was decoded as a history of the unconscious, all was explain...ed. As Anthony Storr put it: "he was only happy when he was reducing things to the lowest common factor; and he did regard the unconscious as primarily the repository of bits of oneself that one couldn't accept." A very different way of looking at the psychology of myth was developed by Freud's one-time friend and colleague Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The fundamental difference between the two is immediately apparent in Jung's dictum that modern man is faced with "the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit." Jung, who was very interested in archaeology and thought of himself as excavating the mind, took myths to represent the inmost thoughts and feelings of the human race, patterns which are the product of inherited brain patterns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Greeks have given to the world the science of history; the Israelites gave to the world historical religion. In contrast to al...l their neighbors, both peoples knew what history is; this is no consequence of their mental giftedness, however, for there is another reason. Through mighty events both peoples experienced what history is, and by the investment of their lives they made history. The peculiar mental capacity of each of the two peoples comes to the fore in the way in which they experience history and express it. For both peoples history was a source of present and future knowledge. Thucydides wrote his history because what happened would, according to human ways, surely happen again in the future in the same or a similar way. This was conceived in a genuinely Greek way, for history is an eternal repetition; nothing new happens under the sun. Even in the stream of eternally changing events the Greeks sought the unalterable, the regular occurrence. Thus they employed the same method with regard to history as with regard to nature because history was a piece of nature. For this reason their mental life can justifiably be called non-historical. If God is to be found, he must be sought in the unalterable, in mental being, in the Ideas. God revealed himself to the Israelites in history and not in Ideas; he revealed himself when he acted and created. His being was not learned through propositions but known in actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.... From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and lis...tened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regula...rly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »