Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths - ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for the fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning - in sense - and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself (Gyorgy Lukacs 29).
The Greek age is an era of complete homogeneity not despite its seeming binaries but because of them: the new yet familiar; the wide, expansive world that is home; the self in and of the world; the fire of the light. These distinctive, seemingly contrasting features of the Greek world are, though individual and separate ideas, nevertheless codependent of each other, the world fully perfect and complete only so long as both halves exist - the new and the familiar are one and the same; the great and vast world is the familiar home; the self exists in harmony with the world that is the familiar home; the fire of the soul is as the light of the stars. The fire and light come closer in their relation to the idea of homogeneity in the Greek world; as "the fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light" (Lukacs 29), the souls of the stars shine brightly as the light within the souls of conscious beings. The stars of the world's skies and the soul of the self are separate yet inseparable, a part and yet apart. Each entity is both a part of and apart from the other within the homogeneous perfection of ancient Athenian society - "sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another...each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality" (Lukacs 29). This duality brings to light Edmund Husserl's notion of the "duality of the body" and the fundamental sense of touch. The "Body is originally constituted in a double way" (Husserl 176): the double sensation - the body's ability to sense itself and other objects - and the double apprehension - the body's double sensation of itself simultaneously touching and being touched. The soul - or perhaps even the being - of the body remains apart from the tangible world, yet somehow both [the tactile being and the tangible world] are conjoined in the act of touching. The body - as the only entity with the ability to feel itself feeling, to touch and to be touched and to feel itself touching and being touched - performs the act of completion and rounding that encapsulates the seemingly strange, oscillating binaries within the homogeneous Greek world. In this way, it might be possible to understand the concept of "the world and the self" (Lukacs 29); the organic body or the individual man within the collective is unique and separate from others but inherently linked to the whole through the shared characteristic or sense of touch. Man's fundamental sense is tied to the collective. In this bodily understanding of the tactile sense, the "essential difference between the self and the world" (Lukacs 29) might be temporarily and philosophically bridged; as Lukacs explains, "philosophy...is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world" (Lukacs 29), a philosophical - or rather phenomenological - insight is offered by Husserl.
In the following description of the soul that rests within itself - "the soul rests within itself even while it acts" (Lukacs 29), Maurice Merleau-Ponty is recognized; he offers an explanation of the world as a Visible world, consisting of both the Seer and the Seen or the Viewer and the Viewed [the Toucher and the Touched to Husserl] - "the visible about us seems to rest in itself" (Merleau-Ponty 130). Given, is the notion of the Visible world, projecting visibility unto the individual that sees - an unusual concept of the visible creating vision in the viewer instead of the other way around. So here, the philosophical bridge is built through the sense of vision instead of touch.
Both notions [of the tactile and the visible] are capable yet temporary conceptual bridges, both philosophical understandings that do connect the assumed binaries; however in the Greek world, there are no true binaries, and what only seem as such are resultant from modern perceptions. The "happy ages have no philosophy" (Lukacs 29); there is only complete and rounded homogeneity. Modern philosophy - or simply philosophy - exists as a symptom, a side-effect of modernity's lost utopia. The perfection of the Greek world appears to us - Lukacs's use of "us" situates himself in the modern realm - as an unthinkable, unimaginable realm of contradictions. The Greeks knew the answers. The Greeks knew the truth. We are asking the questions in the aftermath, in reflection of ancient actions; but as soon as we even begin to ask or ponder or philosophize those answers that only the Greeks knew and understood, we will always already have lost them - "[he] drew the creative circle of forms this side of paradox, and everything which, in our time of paradox, is bound to lead to triviality, led him to perfection" (Lukacs 31). Already in summoning up both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, an error has been committed. Already in attempting to bridge the assumed binaries of that happy age, already in attempting to bridge the chasm between modernity and the classical world of Greece, already in merely asking the question, we have embarked on a trivial pursuit. The modern world has extended beyond the known parameters of the ancient world; the triumph of manifest destiny has made it impossible to understand how "the world is wide and yet it is like a home" (Lukacs 29) - "[the] circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours: that is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it...[our] world has become infinitely large and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks, but such wealth cancels out the positive meaning - the totality - upon which their life was based" (Lukacs 33-34). Interestingly enough, the modern world, in all its expansionist glory, has lost even more than it has gained: the meaning and completeness of the Greek world's perfection. The totality of the Greek world is and forever shall be lost to the modern world.
Sources
Lukacs, Gyorgy. "Integrated Civilisations." The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, 1974.
Husserl, Edmund. "Perception, Spatiality, and the Body: The Self Constitution of the Body." Transcendental Aesthetics. Indiana University Press, 1999.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "The Chiasm - The Intertwining." The Visible and The Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1969.
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