However, when Socrates tells the story of Er in Plato's REPUBLIC, we learn about the recycling of souls. We find a similar reference about the recycling of souls in Virgil's AENEID. But the recycling of souls would be cyclic thought or closed-systems thought. Readers interested in cyclic thought should see Mircea Eliade's book THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN (1954), Lynne Ballew's book STRAIGHT AND CIRCULAR: A STUDY OF IMAGERY IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY (1979), and Donald L. Fixico's book THE AMERICAN INDIAN MIND IN A LINEAR WORLD: AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE (2003).
In any event, through the character named Socrates, Plato intimates that reflective philosophic thought is an advance over the Homeric life-world. As Socrates famously puts it, the unreflective life is not worth living. Evidently, Socrates did not see the movie ZORBA THE GREEK (1964), so he does not understand how being open to the world trumps the reflective life. Even though Dreyfus and Kelly do not happen to advert to this movie, they understand the point of the movie.
If all of Western philosophy can be summed up as a series of footnotes to Plato, then we could characterize Dreyfus and Kelly as writing a footnote saying that we in Western culture today should question Socrates' dictum about the unreflective life not being worth living. In theory, I have no problem with questioning this dictum. If we do not question it, then we run the risk of accepting it on the authority of Socrates. So we should question it. We should examine it. And we should come to our own conclusion about it.
Up to a point, Dreyfus and Kelly's characterization of Homeric Greeks being open to the world is accurate and true not only of Homeric Greeks but also of all other peoples in preliterate cultures, which Ong styles oral cultures. As Dreyfus and Kelly say, we in Western culture today "can barely understand" the life-world of people in oral cultures. But there are an estimated one billion people in the world today who do not know how to read and write any language, so they live in a residual form of oral culture, as did Zorba the Greek.
Throughout much of their book, Dreyfus and Kelly in effect work with the contrast open-to-the-world and introspection. To be sure, Ong explores the inward turn of consciousness. But he characterizes what Dreyfus and Kelly refer to as open-to-the-world as the world-as-event sense of life. In the movie THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965), Julie Andrews sings of how the hills are alive with the sound of music. For the world-as-event sense of life, something like this is the case: The world does seems alive. The Walt Disney animated musical POCAHONTAS (1995) captures this sense of the world being alive in a stylized way. Even though the Homeric epics are not Hollywood musicals, we should remember that the Homeric Greeks celebrated by Dreyfus and Kelly are stylized characters.
Aristotle was closer to the world-as-event sense of life than we in Western culture today are. For example, he refers to vegetative life as being animated by the vegetative soul; infra-human animal life as being animated by the animal soul; and human life as being animated by the rational human soul. The Greek term that is rendered in English as "soul" can be transliterated into our alphabet as "psuche" or "psyche."
When meat-eating Americans today eat meat, do they reflect on the fact that an animal gave up its life so that they could eat its meat? In the ancient world, polytheists and monotheists alike had enough reverence for animal life that they established rituals for slaughtering and butchering animals. The established rituals were usually carried out by priests. The ritual included giving thanks to the gods or God for the animal's life.
Now, in folk tales out of oral cultures, trickster figures are popular. In the Homeric epics, King Odysseus is a trickster figure. He is known as wily Odysseus. Arguably, trickster figures must engage in some kind of introspection. How could you be a trickster figure without engaging in introspection of some kind? No introspection and reflection, no trickster figure.
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