anarchonomicon.substack.com
Piece I wrote on the even now under-estimated impact of Grecco-Roman Culture, and how Modern Culture IS just classical culture with some odd conceits thrown in.
I Contrast Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and his thesis that most of what westerners consider "Human Nature" are actually just cultural artifacts of how our culture has adapted Shakespearean psychological ideas and self conceptions... Which would not hold across cultures unexposed to Shakespeare or Shakespeare inspired fiction and narratives...
And I contrast Ancient Greek Texts with biblical texts, with shocking results.
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Notes -
Nice work.
The re-invention of the Bible as a Greek text with a folded narrative, wherein a teller of parables is represented as a parable itself is the true invention of today's human. Bloom missed this (for obvious reasons) even though he catches the phenomenon in Hamlet and Tempest and so credits Shakespeare w/ the invention of self-reflexive narratives, thereby conceding this is where the human starts: folded storytelling.
More interesting to me is how this was only made possible by what the Greeks reappropriated from the Persians. The first folded culture, wherein they conceptualized a being who could both: a) be itself and b) create itself at the same time. The story needed a story about the story itself in its telling. It's the Hebrew (see Egyptian) "I am become" tailored to the microcosm. This was destroyed by the Greeks and replaced with the twined notions of Truth and Logic but it lived on in their texts.
We now live in a world where our stories and our stories about stories (and ourselves) require explicit folding. This self knowledge is what we call "Human" today.
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