A reponse to comments on Hesiod, Plato, and Moraline: An Eternal Golden Triangle

The missing link, and all the work that has to be done if Western man is to entertain himself in this philosophical business is to get at the phenomenology of the fall of man from Eden. I am pointing out here that the fall of man was lamented by even a statist like Plato. Why was that? It is a smoking gun insofar as man, in all his progress and glory, still thinks he has done something wrong when he sees nature and animals. Why would an ex-futures trader and truck-driver (Moraline), a small farmer and son of a sailor (Hesiod), and an aristocrat (Plato) all say the same thing? (Namely, why would they all lament the fall of man from Eden)?

Also, note the contradiction between Hesiod's philosophy--currently my central philosophy as well-- and your explanation for the fall from grace: that of claiming possession. What it reveals is how entrenched man already was that private property was a far lesser evil than government. Seen in another light, perhaps it is premature to point back immediately the the hunter-gatherers before we have addressed the more immediate and menacing problem of the state. This is Hesiod's point, although he spends plenty of time on the fall of man from the golden age, to the silver age, to his current age, in which he says he wishes he were never born. So, like Moraline, he is an unabashed pessimist of the current age, but believes the pessimism is warranted, and without such pessimism, there would be philosophical illusion rather than clarity--in other words, a sugar-coated view would be mendacious and cause more harm than a candid and critical viewpoint. His poetry about the golden age might also offer a mystical solution to again finding the path of the hunter-gatherer. Not transcendent, where one meditates and believes one is an Inuit, for example, but one in which there is an indirect attitude which leads to a lessening of legibility, conflict, and possession. But for Hesiod, there is an overarching pragmatism that, no matter how terrible the loss of the golden age, it can only get worse if man loses autonomy. This means enforcing the great sin of property and self-sufficiency. I myself learned this the hard way in Alaska: if you have no roots in Alaska, you will starve, freeze, and die, at which point noting is possible. I found my own plot of land, marked it off, pounded nails into trees with the sign: No Trespassing, Private Property. I would carry a fire arm with me as I walked my property. Kevin said that you'll never be able to look at an animal the same once you look down at him on your plate.

Kubrick surmised in 2001: Space Odyssey that it was man's increase of protein through killing other animals that made him more aggressive, and this led to his killing and enslaving other men. I wonder if it was the hunting aspect of hunting-gathering that was a potential cause of vortex.

I don't believe we find illumination by merely saying that the fall of man happened when he first said "this is mine." Much had to happen before that could happen. First, he had to have language. Second, he had to know the land well enough to pick out one piece and say it was his. This meat tat he had to stop moving. Did he stop moving because the climate changed, or because there was a tribe who was so different from his own that they didn't get along? (New languages, customs, competition for women.)

Second, if we are claiming that this man delineated a piece of land for farming, then we have to travel far back and get at the origin of farming. Did that happen by accident or by a radical, new project, and break with man, animals, and earth?

The screaming, blaring, hot-coals-under-feet question is WHY DID MAN LEAVE HIS GOLDEN AGE BEHIND? If he was happiest under ideal conditions, why on earth would he pursue that which makes him unhappy and sick? Everyone skips the essential questions, the essential phenomenology. Either there was no golden age, and man progressed, and continues to progress, or there was a golden age, and something bad happened to end it. What was the bad thing that happened that ended the golden age? That is the question of philosophy. I wrote the above article to draw attention to the modern reader that your questions of surplus are continuations of perennial questions of literate men, going back at least 2,700 years. In other words, the men who founded the current way of living still lamented a loss of an older, and better way of living. Why didn't Plato say that the present is better, and the past was inferior?