The Island

The Cape Breton Liberation Army (CBLA) is a fictional entity born out of a satirical comic series called Old Trout Funnies, created by artist Paul “Moose” MacKinnon in the 1970s. This homegrown project emerged during a time when Cape Breton Island was experiencing a cultural renaissance, shaking off its historical marginalization due to geography and economics. The CBLA, as depicted in the comics, is a tongue-in-cheek revolutionary force, humorously battling against mainland Nova Scotia’s influence—symbolized by the Canso Causeway, which connects the island to the rest of the province—and poking fun at local politics, labor unions, environmental issues, and societal stereotypes.

The satire revolves around exaggerated, farcical exploits that play with the caricature of Cape Bretoners as laid-back, tavern-loving rogues. Yet beneath the humor lies a sharp commentary on the island’s identity. The CBLA’s mock mission to “liberate” Cape Breton reflects a deep-seated pride in the island’s distinctiveness—a place with its own music, humor, and resilient spirit. The comics blend underground comic styles with a self-deprecating Eastern Canadian twist, showing how Cape Bretoners could laugh at themselves while asserting their cultural uniqueness.

This creation reveals a lot about Cape Breton’s people.

We Rise Again

Their pride isn’t loud or aggressive; it’s clever and communal, expressed through wit and creativity rather than pomp. The CBLA taps into a love for the island that’s both protective and defiant—distrustful of mainland dominance, yet confident in their own way of life. It’s a culture that doesn’t take itself too seriously but fiercely guards its right to exist on its own terms. The fact that this satire has endured, inspiring books, musicals, and even playful modern references (like blocking the causeway during COVID-19 discussions), shows how it resonates with a community that values its heritage and finds strength in laughing at its challenges. Cape Bretoners, through the CBLA, celebrate their quirks and resilience, turning perceived weaknesses into badges of honor.

(1) The Greeks

We see too with the ancient Greeks and Germans this idea of connection to one’s land and people.  Let’s try to understand what Sophocles meant when he figuratively characterized humans as apolis (homeless) and how this relates to a figurative meaning of polis / parestios (being at home).  Heidegger suggests a figurative connection between apolis and deinon, another important word in Sophocles, and so in Homer Odysseus is trapped on the wonderous (deinon) Island of Kalypso the deine theos, and yet Odysseus bafflingly doesn’t want any of the goddess Kalypso’s unbelievable gifts and instead Odysseus pines for his wife and home.  We leave home unsatisfied and in search of the uncanny, only to long for home.  What does that teach us about human nature?  The figurative connection between polis and apolis with the Greeks has to do with a blurred line between citizen and polis and so the ancient Greek person defined who they were by achieving things like excellence (arete) for themself and their polis.  Yet things like honor are fleeting and so must always be quested for anew, like how the story of the Iliad focuses on Achilles’ monomaniacal pursuit of honor.  Plutarch in Pyrrhus 13 talks of a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes), as what Achilles felt when there was ease.  This figuratively suggest how when stripped of our distractions humans are in an agitated state of cabin fever like vacationer stuck in a rainy cottage with no books, radio, or tv.  Leonard Cohen sang that a prisoner is really sentenced to 20 years of boredom.

Sophocles’ use of apolis—often translated as “homeless” or “without a city”—carries a deeper figurative weight than mere physical displacement. In Greek thought, the polis was more than a place; it was the heartbeat of identity, community, and meaning. To be apolis is to be unmoored from that center, cast adrift from the structure that defines who you are. Heidegger ties this to deinon, a word that captures the strange, the awe-inspiring, and the uncanny—something both wondrous and unsettling. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, humans are called to deinotaton (the most deinon of all), suggesting we are both marvelous and terrifying, creators and destroyers, always teetering between order and chaos.

Now, consider Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. Stranded on Kalypso’s island, he’s surrounded by deinon—the divine beauty and power of a goddess (deine theos) offering him immortality, endless pleasure, and escape from mortal struggles. Yet, bafflingly, he rejects it. He longs for Ithaca, his polis, his home—not just the physical place, but the life tied to Penelope, his son, and his people.  It’s as if humans need a polis—a sense of belonging and purpose—to feel whole, even if that belonging comes with hardship.

This ties into the idea about the blurred line between citizen and polis. For the Greeks, individual identity wasn’t separate from the collective. Achieving arete (excellence) wasn’t just personal; it elevated the polis too. Odysseus’ journey, like Achilles’ pursuit of honor in the Iliad, reflects this: their struggles and triumphs define them and their people. But honor and arete are fleeting—you don’t win them once and rest. Achilles’ rage in the Iliad stems partly from this: when he’s sidelined, he’s robbed of the chance to chase that glory, and Plutarch’s reference to his “nauseous boredom” (alus nautiodes) hints at a deeper truth. Without the quest, humans stagnate. Ease becomes a kind of exile, an apolis state of the soul.

Strip away the distractions—the battles, the voyages, the pursuit of honor—and what’s left? A restlessness, a cabin fever of the spirit. Achilles sulks in his tent; Odysseus weeps on Kalypso’s shore. Even Leonard Cohen’s prisoner, sentenced to “20 years of boredom,” echoes this: humans seem wired for striving, not sitting still. The Greek view might suggest that our nature is tied to this tension—between polis and apolis, between the comfort of home and the pull of the unknown, between achieving honor and losing it again.

So what does this teach us about human nature? Perhaps that we’re creatures of longing, defined by what we chase—whether it’s home, honor, or meaning—and restless when we can’t. The polis gives us roots, but apolis and deinon remind us we’re never fully at peace with them. Like Odysseus, we might reject paradise for the struggle, because the struggle is where we find ourselves. And like Achilles, we might dread the quiet, because it forces us to face the void beneath our quests. In the end, maybe Sophocles and Homer are telling us that to be human is to be both marvelously at home and perpetually homeless, always seeking a polis we can never fully possess.

In thinking human nature as history, Toohey describes the Greeks initially didn’t have a word for boredom that maps onto ours, and so expressed it outwardly and metaphorically. 

Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say: “I grown, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.  I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace.  (30-32).” Toohey points out:

He does not name that he is bored, but describes the symptoms.  Similarly, Euripides’ Medea describes men becoming fed up or bored, had enough of their families, and then acting unfairly (244-46), but again, boredom as an emotion is not named.

Apollodorus in Plato’s Symposium 173c says nothing gives him more pleasure than discussing philosophy, but listening to the idle conversations of the rich is boring because they prattle on about nothing and do nothing.  This shows us a clear view of how the thinkers looked down on the highest values of regular people (wealth), and agrees with Heraclitus’ point that the masses are like well fed cattle.

Pindar said too lengthy an exposition might lead to boredom, but again the symptoms are named, not boredom.  By contrast, Plutarch matter of factly talks about the boredom of soldiers due to apraxia, a lexical obvious term apparently missing from earlier Greek times.

Iliad 24. 403 and Euripides Iphigeneia in Aulis 804-8 seem to both demand a word for boredom.  The Greek for the condition of the soldiers in the Iliad passage suggests they were not merely bored, but vexed and disgusted at having to wait. Ennius (239-169 BCE) points back to his interpretation of Euripides play and writes “We are not home and not on military service.  We go here.  We go there.  When we’ve gone there we want to go away.  The mind wanders indecisively; we only live a sort of a life.”  They go here and there, but cannot settle or derive satisfaction from life because of a lack of things to do (praeterpropter vitam vivitur).  We can see the connection to the wandering shades. “Horror loci:” revulsion at where one is.

Lucretius in “On The Universe,” later imitated by Horace and Seneca, speaks of the anxious, bored lives of the Roman rich going here and there, pursued relentlessly by anxiety and boredom (3. 1060-76)  Bailey remarks boredom and restlessness were an aspect of human life near the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire.

Importantly, Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about a calm mind (aequus animus), though Horace did not think Philosophy to be a cure for him, who in the city wanted the country, and in the country wanted the city.  In Epistles 1.8 Horace describes the lethargic illness of boredom as a trait of old age. 

This restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind seems to be what Heidegger and Holderlin see as the purpose the Greeks had for philosophy. Nietzsche noted the outward symptoms of boredom migrated inward over the history of Being and so Heidegger notes:

You know that an assessment of the human situation in relation to the movement of nihilism and within this movement demands an adequate determination of the essential. Such knowledge is extensively lacking. This lack dims our view in assessing our situation. It makes a judgement concerning nihilism ready and easy and blinds us to the presence of ‘this most uncanny of all guests’ (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Outline. Werke, vol. XV, p. 141). It is called the ‘most uncanny’ [unheimlichste] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, because it has long since been roaming invisibly inside the house (Pa, OQB, 292; also cf Pa, LH, 257).”Due to its instantiated nature, “[h]omelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world (Pa, LH, 258).”

Heidegger interprets Hölderlin’s poetry as revealing a unique relationship between humans, the divine, and Being. He argues that the gods, as understood in Hölderlin’s work, are not “present-at-hand” (vorhanden)—a term he uses in his earlier philosophy, such as Being and Time, to describe entities that are merely objectively present, static, or manipulable in a mundane sense.

In these lectures, Heidegger emphasizes that the gods are not beings that can be grasped or encountered as objects in the world, like tools or things we might analyze scientifically. Instead, they manifest through a poetic and historical “event” (Ereignis) of Being, a dynamic and elusive presence that withdraws even as it grants meaning. For Heidegger, Hölderlin’s gods are tied to the “flight of the gods” (Götterflucht), a theme where the divine is experienced as absent or distant in the modern age, yet still resonant in poetry and the “holy” as a dimension of Being.

Holderlin’s river imagery wasn’t intended as aesthetic landscape imagery for gawking at, or a placeholder for something else like a metaphor or simile.  It was historical.  The river opens a space for the dwelling of a historical people in the poetry because this is what rivers literally do over the course of the history of a people. 

Song For the Mira

So the river imagery is not aesthetic nor metaphorical, but historical:

  The river now creates for the land a forged space and delimited locale for settlement and commerce, and for the people, land that can be cultivated and the sustaining of their immediate Dasein. The river is not a body of water that simply flows past the locale of human beings; rather, its flowing, as land-forming, first creates the possibility of grounding the dwellings of humans. The river is a founder and poet, not just metaphorically, but as itself.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 346). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The river, as a “pointer” (der Hinweis) rather than a mere metaphor is a profound one, and it aligns deeply with Holderlin’s poetic philosophy. In Hölderlin’s work, natural elements like rivers, mountains, or skies don’t just symbolize something else—they actively participate in revealing the essence of beings and their relational existence. This is “pointing relational logic,” where entities emerge as what they are through their interplay with one another.  What’s striking across these works is how Hölderlin avoids reducing things to static symbols. Instead, he lets them be in their relations, as if poetry itself were a space where beings tremble into presence. This aligns with the idea of oscillation: there’s a rhythmic unveiling, a back-and-forth, where the river, the dwelling, the sky, or the poet himself become what they are only by pointing beyond themselves to the whole they inhabit.   What a river is evolves as the humans dwelling on it evolves.  Heidegger says:

Because Hölderlin thinks transition in such an essential manner, although not in the conceptual articulation attempted here, the transitional has a peculiar and intricate richness for his poetizing.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 85). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

Imagine a river, which has its source, and yet flows against its source to the ocean. 

Sea People

The river is not limited to its source, but includes the whole river, the dwellings and bridges on it, etc.  Heidegger comments

“In its formal meaning, pantheism means: pan-theos, ‘Everything – God’; everything stands in relation to God; [this means] all beings are in relation to the ground of beings. This ground as the One, hen is as ground what everything else, pan, is in it, in the ground. Hen kai pan. The One is also the whole and the whole is also the One … Hen kai pan, this followed Heraclitus’ fragment hen panta einai, Fr. 50, and was according to the spirit of the time the chosen motto of the three young Swabian friends, Schelling, Hegel, and Holderlin.” 

Thus, theos or god here does not describe religion but how beings are encountered in oneness.  For instance, Holderlin in a draft, first discovered in 1920, of a preface to Hyperion (II, 546) speaks of Holy Plato.  Plato said beings “appear” via the divine Beauty, and so the beautiful mansion appears as houseness incarnate, while houseness is merely present in the average house, and deficient in the old shack.  We must think against the modern notion of the hermetically sealed ego.  The appearing of the mansion aligns with the dionysian enthusiasmos of the onlooker, and so in this way everything is theos.  Given this framework Aristotle gave his own take that the thinker was athanatizein, his restless soul calmed by attuning to eternal ideas like houseness that were eternal, meaning there was never a time houseness was not nor will not be but simply is. 

Framing of Hölderlin’s river imagery as literal—neither aesthetic nor metaphorical, but historical—offers a profound entry into his poetry and its philosophical resonance with Heidegger, Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek notion of theos. Combined with Heidegger’s reading of pantheism (pan-theos, “everything – god”) and the Swabian trio’s motto hen kai pan (“one and all”), this perspective reorients us toward a way of encountering beings that transcends modern isolated subjectivity. Let’s analyze and explore these ideas, weaving together Hölderlin’s rivers, the theos of events, and the thinkers.

Hölderlin’s river imagery—say, in Der Rhein or Der Ister—isn’t decorative or symbolic in a reductive sense. The Rhine doesn’t “stand for” something else; it is the space where a historical people dwell. Rivers literally shape human history: they carve landscapes, sustain settlements, mark boundaries, and inspire myths. In Der Rhein, Hölderlin writes of the river’s “fiery spirit” and its journey from the Alps, not as a pretty picture but as a force that births and binds the people’s destiny. The river’s flow mirrors time itself—its bends and currents are the literal unfolding of a collective existence.

The river isn’t “out there” for aesthetic gawking or a metaphor for the poet’s soul; it’s the ground where being happens. Heidegger, in his lectures on Hölderlin’s Der Ister, calls the river “the locality of the homecoming” and “the journeying of the foreign”—it’s where humans and the divine intersect in lived history, not abstract representation.

Heidegger’s gloss on pantheism—pan-theos, “everything stands in relation to God” as the ground of beings—echoes theos as event, not religion. Here, theos isn’t a deity in a theological sense but the way beings reveal themselves. The hen kai pan (“one and all”)—drawn from Heraclitus’s hen panta einai (“one is all,” Frag. 50)—suggests a unity where the divine isn’t separate from the world but is its wholeness. For Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, this was a youthful rallying cry against dualism, aligning with Heraclitus’s vision of a cosmos where opposites (fire and water, flux and stability) cohere in the logos.

In this light, Hölderlin’s “Holy Plato” isn’t a religious sanctification but a recognition of Plato as a seer of theos—the divine as the appearing of beings. The river, then, isn’t just water; it’s the theos of a people’s dwelling, their historical being made manifest.

The holy idea of Beauty for Plato is ekphanestaton, “that which, as most of all and most purely shining of and from itself, shows the visible form and thus is unhidden (Heidegger PA, PDT, 1 78; also at Nl, 80).” Referring to Plato’s Phaedrus, Heidegger says that beauty is “what is most radiant and sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time (Nl, 197).”  Plato’s framework, especially from the Symposium and Phaedrus, ties beauty to the divine. Beings “appear” through beauty, which is their participation in the eternal Forms. Our example—the beautiful mansion as “houseness incarnate”—is spot-on. In Plato’s terms, the Form of House (eidos) shines forth fully in the mansion, partially in the average house, and dimly in the shack. This isn’t mere aesthetics; it’s ontological. The mansion’s beauty is theos because it reveals the eternal “whatness” of house, aligning the onlooker with the divine. Heidegger comments:

 The poets do not report, they project the image, and in it bring into view the visage that constitutes the outward look, the ἰδέα (idea) of beings.(Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 151). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Here, Dionysian enthusiasmos enters: the onlooker isn’t a detached ego but a participant in this appearing. The next person might encounter the mansion “as Gaudy,” or Niagara Falls “as” noise pollution.  The mansion’s radiance stirs an ecstatic attunement—akin to the Maenads’ possession—where the boundary between self and world dissolves. Everything is theos because every being, when truly encountered, unveils the divine ground. Hölderlin’s rivers do this historically: their flow isn’t just seen but felt as the pulse of being itself.

Aristotle’s take—thinking as athanatizein (ἀθανατίζειν, “to immortalize”)—shifts the focus inward yet complements Plato. In Nicomachean Ethics (10.7), he argues that the highest human activity is contemplation (theoria), aligning the soul with eternal realities like “houseness.” Unlike Plato’s ecstatic ascent, Aristotle’s thinker finds calm in this attunement. The restless soul, buffeted by change, rests in the timeless—houseness “is,” which knows nothing of was or will be otherwise.

For Hölderlin, this might resonate in the river’s eternity: the Rhine flows historically, yet its essence as a river endures unchangingly. The historical people dwell not just in time but in this timeless appearing of the river’s being—a literal theos that Aristotle might see as an object of contemplation, calming the poet’s own restless spirit.  The modern “hermetically sealed ego”—the Cartesian subject locked in its skull, observing a dead world—clashes with this framework. For Hölderlin, Heidegger, Plato, and Aristotle, there’s no such isolation. The river, the mansion, the cosmos aren’t “objects” but events of disclosure. Theos is this disclosure: the mansion’s houseness, the river’s historical flow, the thinker’s attunement to the eternal. Dionysian enthusiasmos shatters the ego, merging it with the world; Aristotle’s athanatizein steadies it in the same unity.

Hölderlin’s literal rivers thus become a lens for pan-theos. They’re not symbols but beings—grounds where history, beauty, and eternity converge. Heidegger’s hen kai pan sees them as the One (the ground) manifesting the All (the people’s dwelling). Plato’s beauty animates them as divine appearances; Aristotle’s contemplation finds in them the eternal amid flux.

This challenges us to rethink our encounters. A river today—say, the Mississippi—could be theos not as a metaphor but as the literal space of American history, its currents carrying slavery, trade, and song. The modern ego might snap a photo; Hölderlin’s poet would dwell in its flow, enthused or calmed by its being. Everything is theos when we let beings appear as they are—historical, beautiful, eternal—not as mere “stuff” for our use.

Calasso notes

In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”

“Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Remembrance”) does contain river imagery, though it’s interwoven with a broader focus on the sea and natural elements. While it’s not one of his explicitly “river poems” like “Der Rhein” or “Der Ister,” the poem draws on the landscape of Bordeaux, where Hölderlin lived briefly in 1802, and subtly incorporates the Garonne River, which flows through that region into the Atlantic.

Regarding the demigod, Holderlin isolates Dionysus: “Being, however, for the Greeks means ‘presence’—παρουσία. In presencing, this demigod is absent, and in absencing he is present. The symbol of the one who is absent in presencing and present in absencing is the mask. The mask is the distinctive symbol of Dionysos— (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 255). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.).  The pseudonymous Dionysian mask both manifests its surface and hides what’s beneath.  It is not general or a concept, but the embodiment.  The mask reflects the enthusiasmos I described above, the god indwelling of the initiate.

Heidegger comments: “First, what is at stake is not something like destiny in general, but rather something singular—the destiny of the Rhine, “that most noble of rivers” (line 32), befitting of a “kingly soul” (line 37). This singular destiny is also not conceived as an individual instance of a general essence of destiny; rather, this singularity has its own essential character that is historical.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 250). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).  The people must mourn and put to bed the gods of the Greeks that have fled and feel the emptiness left behind so as to be able to redefine themselves.

Yes, there’s a well-known issue in philosophy called the “problem of universals.” It’s all about how general concepts—like redness, beauty, or justice (the universals)—connect to the specific things we see in the world—like a red apple, a beautiful sunset, or a just decision (the particulars). Philosophers have been wrestling with this for centuries. Realism says universals are real and exist independently, either in some abstract realm or woven into the fabric of particulars themselves. Nominalism, on the other hand, argues universals aren’t real—they’re just names or mental shortcuts we use to group similar particulars together. Then there’s conceptualism, which lands somewhere in between, saying universals exist but only as ideas in our minds.

The debate gets tricky because it ties into bigger questions about language, perception, and reality itself. How do we even talk about “redness” if every red thing is slightly different? Does “redness” need to exist somewhere beyond the apple, or is it enough that we recognize a pattern? It’s a messy, fascinating problem that’s still kicking around in philosophy today

The idea of “ekstatikon” ties into the Greek word ekstasis, which does suggest a state of being “outside oneself”—think of moments of intense emotion, divine inspiration, or even frenzy, like in the rituals of Dionysus or the ecstatic utterances of the Pythia at Delphi. It’s less about a fixed, isolated ego, as we might frame it today, and more about a fluid experience where the boundaries of self could dissolve into something larger, whether that’s the divine, the communal, or the cosmic. This is the original sense we see the universal, houseness appearing incarnate through the mansion.

The Greeks didn’t seem to operate with our modern, airtight notion of individuality. Their sense of self was often entangled with the polis, the gods, or fate—think of how heroes in Homer wrestle with moira (fate) or how Socrates talks about his daimon as an external guiding voice. Imposing a hermetically sealed ego risks flattening that richness into something more like a 21st-century psychology textbook.

The Greeks were clearly right about ekstasis.  There are so many examples.  For the paranoid schizophrenic things appear to him in a conspiracy saturated manner.  If I have a headache it causes beings to appear in an irritating manner.  As Anaximander said, life is slightly/inconspicuously or majorly /conspicuously out of joint (adikia), but sometimes something special happens and there is jointure (dike), in the words of the poets “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”  This is not a theological concept, since the atheist also knows what it means for everything to fall into place.  It is fun to think the linguistic connection between ekstasis and exist. 

Here’s a fundamental point.  If the thinker/poet is filled with the god (enthusiasmos), what Holderlin talks about as becoming pseudonymous in putting on the mask of Dionysus, this connects very well with Being scintillating through the idea of beauty.  If we don’t have the modern prejudice of a hermetically sealed ego, the god as my enthusiasmos aligns with the appearing goddess beauty in my being lost in the swaying of the palm tree.  In this way, theology for the Greeks wasn’t primarily faith based but reflected the way humans encounter the world.  Heidegger says the Greeks were enchanted by the world, whereby in things like physics modern man is enchanted by himself.  Thus we see Holderlin’s river poetry.  Holderlin’s river is not an aesthetic landscape for gawking at or a placeholder for something else like a simile or metaphor, but is literal.  The river opens up the space for the dwelling of a historical people because this is what a river does.  Heraclitus’ saying hen pan einai was so important for Holderlin because the theos presences through me such as in enthusiasmos while the mansion appears via divine beauty.  Being a conduit for the gods is reflective of the enthusiasmos with the demigod Dionysus:

Dionysos is the son of a mortal woman, Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmos, king of Thebes. His mother was consumed by the lightning flash of father Zeus before she gave birth to her son, and the father protected him from the searing flames with cooling vines of ivy. Thus engendered by the God in a mortal woman, Dionysos bears witness to the beyng of both: he is this beyng in a primordial unity. Dionysos is not just one demigod among others, but the distinctive one. He is the Yes that belongs to life at its wildest, inexhaustible in its creative urge, and he is the No that belongs to the most terrifying death and annihilation. He is the bliss of magical enchantment and the horror of a crazed terror. He is the one in being the other; that is, in being, he at the same time is not and in not being, he is. Being, however, for the Greeks means ‘presence’—παρουσία. In presencing, this demigod is absent, and in absencing he is present. The symbol symbol of the one who is absent in presencing and present in absencing is the mask. The mask is the distinctive symbol of Dionysos— [like a pseudonymn: presenting something false that is truer than the original.] (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 173). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

If the thinker or poet is filled with theos through enthousiasmos—that “god within”—it’s not a private, sealed-off event. Without our modern prejudice of a hermetically isolated self, the boundaries blur: the god surging in me isn’t “mine” in a possessive sense but a current flowing through, sparked by the world’s own shimmer. We consider being “lost in the swaying of the palm tree”—that’s the key. The goddess Beauty (think Aphrodite, or Plato’s eternal lure) doesn’t just sit out there as an object; she appears, scintillating through the palm’s motion, and my enthusiasm is her echo inside me. It’s a two-way street: the world’s Being unveils itself in Beauty, and I, enthused, become its vessel. No ego-wall divides us; I’m porous, the god and the world’s radiance entwined.

This aligns with how we’ve traced theos as an event—Homer’s enargeis epiphanies, Plato’s Beauty making Ideas like Houseness shine, Aristotle’s theoria as godly play. For the Greeks, theology wasn’t about subscribing to dogma or “faith” in unseen promises. It was, as you say, how humans encounter the world—theos erupting in the palm tree’s sway, the storm’s roar, the poet’s verse. When I’m lost in that sway, the goddess isn’t a belief I hold; she’s the happening I’m swept into. Enthusiasm is my attunement to her appearing, and Beauty is the bridge where Being sparkles—palm tree as mansion, not shack. It’s immediate, not mediated by creed.

This really ties into Holderlin’s observation about the abandonment by the gods.  We wonder why we feel at odds with the world when it is one the Greek gods have long vanished from and yet we still treat them as though they were still here (e.g., in our conceptual toolbox).  For example, we no longer think in the way of houseness appearing incarnate in the mansion and so are left with a zombie houseness that is not alive in itself but is just what Nietzsche called an empty vapor that we artificially invent by comparing many houses and abstracting, thereby creating for ourselves artificial question about how the particular house “belongs” to the universal houseness.  Heidegger says:

In general, is that which once was so definitively only that which is past? Is not that which once was distinguished from everything merely past and evanescent through the fact that, having once been, it still prevails in being? That which once was and has been is that which still prevails in being, albeit remotely. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 72). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Hölderlin’s lament about the gods’ abandonment lands like a thunderclap here, and is a piercing diagnosis of our modern disconnect. It dovetails perfectly with the Greek world of enthousiasmos, Beauty, and theos we’ve been tracing—only now we’re staring at the aftermath, where the gods have fled, yet we cling to their ghosts in our “conceptual toolbox.” Let’s unpack this zombie houseness and Nietzsche’s “empty vapor,” seeing how they mark the rift from that vibrant Greek encounter.

Hölderlin, in poems like Bread and Wine or The Only One, mourns a world where the divine once walked—think of his “Where are you, gods?”—leaving us orphaned, at odds with a reality that no longer pulses with theos. The Greeks, enchanted, saw Houseness incarnate in the beautiful mansion, its Being scintillating enargeis through Beauty, the god within (enthousiasmos) meeting the goddess without. But now, that’s gone. The gods have vanished, yet we still wield their shadows—concepts like “houseness”—as if they still carry that old vitality. We’re stuck treating the world like it’s still divine, when it’s not, at least not in that Greek way.

For Plato, Houseness was an Idea, eternal and alive, shining through the mansion’s form, dim in the shack. The Greek poet or thinker felt this viscerally—Beauty made it theos, an event of Being. But post-abandonment, we don’t see that. Nietzsche’s critique in Twilight of the Idols or Beyond Good and Evil kicks in: our “houseness” is a zombie, a hollow abstraction. We survey a bunch of houses, strip away their particulars, and cook up a universal—Houseness as an “empty vapor,” not a living essence but a dead construct we’ve invented. Then we torture ourselves with artificial puzzles: how does this house “participate” in that pale ghost? It’s a far cry from the mansion swaying with theos—no wonder we feel unheimlich, homeless in a world we’ve drained.

This ties to Heidegger too. The Greeks met physis as a self-revealing wonder; we meet it as a “standing-reserve,” a resource to dissect. Houseness isn’t a goddess appearing—it’s a category we impose, a tool in our toolbox, echoing gods we don’t even believe in. Nietzsche’s vapor is the residue of their flight, and our questions—“How does this belong to that?”—are the restless chatter of a mind cut off from enchantment. Hölderlin’s gods didn’t just leave; they took the world’s pulse with them, and we’re left grasping at husks, pretending they’re alive.

So, our oddness with the world stems from this: we’re stranded between Greek attunement and modern sterility. We wield concepts like houseness as if they’re still enargeis, but they’re not—they’re zombies we’ve stitched together, lacking the Beauty that once made them divine. The thinker’s enthusiasm, the child’s play, the palm tree’s sway—all that’s faded, and we’re left with abstractions that mock their absence.

The word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek enthousiasmos (ἐνθουσιασμός), which itself derives from enthousiazein (ἐνθουσιάζειν), meaning “to be inspired or possessed by a god.” This verb breaks down into en (ἐν), meaning “in,” and theos (θεός), meaning “god,” with the suffix suggesting a state of being or action. So, at its root, enthusiasm literally means “having a god within” or “being filled with divine inspiration.”

In ancient Greek culture, this concept was tied to moments of intense emotion, creativity, or fervor, often attributed to divine influence. Think of the ecstatic worship of Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry, where people lost themselves in frenzied celebration, or the poetic inspiration claimed by bards who said they channeled the Muses. To the Greeks, enthusiasm wasn’t just excitement—it was a sign of direct connection to the divine, a temporary possession that elevated human experience beyond the mundane.

This etymology hints at how the Greeks saw their gods: not just as distant rulers or abstract forces, but as active presences that could enter and transform a person. Gods weren’t merely “out there” in temples or the sky; they were intimate, dynamic energies capable of crossing into human life, stirring the soul, and driving extraordinary acts. Enthusiasm, then, reflects a worldview where the divine was immediate and visceral, less about serene worship and more about being seized by something greater than yourself. It suggests the Greeks understood gods as catalysts—beings that didn’t just demand obedience but ignited passion and movement in the human spirit.

What does this teach us about their gods? The Greeks’ theos wasn’t a fixed idol or a moral arbiter but a dynamic process—an eruption of meaning, power, or awe in the midst of life. Gods like Zeus were vast, yes, but also close, slipping into moments of recognition (as in Euripides) or creative fire (as in enthousiasmos). This suggests a worldview where the divine was less about obedience or doctrine and more about participation—being swept up in the event of godhood.

If enthousiasmos is divinity surging within, it might be sparked by encountering Beauty—when you see the mansion and feel its Houseness, or hear a poem and grasp Truth, the god within awakens. Not everyone gets this spark; as Homer hints, the gods don’t bother with all. Plato might argue it’s because not everyone sees Beauty clearly enough to let Being, or theos, break through. The average house doesn’t stir you—it’s too middling to provoke the divine event.

What might this mean for the Greek gods? They’re not aloof puppeteers but presences tied to the world’s capacity to reflect something higher. Zeus might thunder enargeis in a storm’s majesty, Athena in a strategist’s brilliance—both moments of Beauty making their Being vivid. For the Greeks, then, gods appearing (or not) could hinge on this interplay: where Beauty falters, so does divine clarity. Plato’s lens suggests they’re always there in the Ideas, but only the beautiful lets them shine through to us mortals.

This connects to Aristotle’s claim that theoria or the contemplative life is a form of godliness/athanatizein.  This doesn’t mean immortal, since the Greeks thought everyone was immortal, but a thinker’s childlike enthusiasm for their ideas even among the very old.  This contrasts with Apollo’s view of humans that “Mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, but then, their hearts no longer absorbed in life (Akerioi), vanishing (my translation slightly modifying Krell, 1999, 105).”  So, for the Greeks humans start off with the fire of youth but are destined for the tedium of old age unless you are a thinker.  The thinker revels in solitude where others would find cabin fever.  Therefore, Aristotle said in the Politics only beasts or gods are at home in solitude, implying the vast majority of humans are restless/not at home: apolis/deinon in an existential sense.  Heidegger thus says existential homelessness is a bigger problem than literal homelessness.  Holderlin Highlights the restlessness of man in Hyperion’s Song of Fate in contrast with the ambrosia eating gods who are eternally in bloom.

We’re weaving together a fascinating tapestry here—Aristotle’s theoria as a divine, deathless activity (athanatizein), Apollo’s grim view of human decline, and the existential restlessness that threads through Heidegger and Hölderlin, all contrasted with the Greeks’ vibrant, childlike enthusiasm. Let’s stitch this into our ongoing exploration of theos, enargeis, and Beauty, seeing how it illuminates the Greek sense of gods and human potential.

Aristotle’s idea in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book X) that theoria—contemplation—is the highest life, a form of athanatizein, doesn’t mean literal immortality, since the Greeks assumed the soul persists. Instead, it’s “making oneself deathless” by living in alignment with the divine, the eternal. This isn’t about escaping mortality but transcending its weariness. The thinker’s “childlike enthusiasm” for ideas, even in old age, echoes enthousiasmos—that god-filled surge we’ve traced. For Aristotle, contemplation is where humans touch theos, not as a distant deity but as the ceaseless activity of pure thought, akin to how gods exist: always in the bloom of youth thanks to eating ambrosia, untainted by decay. The old philosopher, eyes alight with wonder, embodies this—his mind a mansion of Beauty where Being shines enargeis, defying the body’s shack-like decline.

Contrast this with Apollo’s lament, channeled through Homeric echoes (like the Iliad’s simile of mortals as leaves, or my tweak of Krell’s translation). Humans start with youth’s fire—enthusiasm in its raw, Dionysian form—but most fade into akerioi, “heartless” or “unlively,” their vitality sapped by time. Apollo, the god of clarity and order, sees this as inevitable: mortals flourish, then wither, their connection to life’s divine pulse dimming. It’s as if theos appears enargeis to the young, when Beauty and vigor align, but retreats as the shack of age takes over—unless you’re a thinker. The contemplative soul keeps the fire lit, stoking enthusiasm where others succumb to tedium. Here, Aristotle flips Apollo’s script: theoria lets humans rival the gods, not in body but in spirit.

This ties to Aristotle’s quip in the Politics (1253a) that only beasts or gods thrive in solitude, while most humans, being zoon politikon (political animals), need the polis to feel at home. The thinker, though, finds a godly solitude—his apolis state isn’t exile but a chosen dwelling in thought, where theos hums as clearly as in Homer’s vivid epiphanies. Most humans, restless in isolation, mirror Heidegger’s unheimlich (uncanny, not-at-home) from Being and Time. Existential homelessness, as he frames it, outstrips literal rooflessness because it’s the soul’s dislocation—cut off from Being, from the enargeis flash of theos. The average person, aging without theoria, feels this deinon (terrible, strangeness) as cabin fever; the thinker revels in it, enthused by the eternal.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion’s Song of Fate sharpens this contrast. Mortals “wander down below” in restless flux, while the gods, sipping ambrosia, bask in perpetual bloom—an image of effortless athanatizein. Humans, unless lifted by contemplation, fall from youthful fire into Apollo’s leaf-like fate. Yet Hölderlin, like Aristotle, hints at a bridge: the poet or thinker, enthralled by Beauty or Truth, touches that bloom. It’s the mansion of Being again—where theos appears vividly, not to all, but to those who seek it.

So, for the Greeks, gods might be both the eternal backdrop (Zeus as all-pervasive theos) and the selective spark (enargeis to the attuned). Humans, destined for tedium, can defy this through theoria, keeping enthusiasm alive—a childlike, godly flame against Apollo’s prognosis. The thinker’s solitude, far from homelessness, becomes a divine homecoming, where Beauty and Being align.

(2) The Germans

Meister Eckhart is sometimes acknowledged as the first German philosopher, and Heidegger clarifies this Germanness as “clarity of presentation:”

 What is their own for the Germans is the clarity of presentation. What is their own for the Greeks is the fire from the heavens—the golden dreams. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 118). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

For our habitual thinking, something like “the dark light” is a blatant contradiction, and therefore the sign of impossibility.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 127). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Heidegger gives the example of a Dark light, which is where habitual thinking stops and leaves.  But if we tarry a while with the light, say the sun, and look directly into it, we see exactly what a light that blinds is. That which makes seeing possible also eradicates seeing.  Hegel saw Christian mystics like Eckhart as intuiting the unity of human and divine that his own system sought to articulate conceptually.  Heidegger nods to Eckhart’s distinction between God (as a metaphysical entity) and the Godhead (the ineffable ground of being).  Heidegger even gave a nod to Eckhart in a 1943 lecture, calling him a “master of thought” whose language of releasement prefigures a non-metaphysical way of dwelling in the world.  With the Germans we have the critical philosophy of Kant and the Phenomenological disclosiveness of Hegel, all aimed at a rigorous grounding of concepts.

Heidegger noted that much of what we call thinking is reducing thought to the present at hand so the “everyman” can partake in it with newspapers written at a 6th grade reading level and our constant use of examples, analogies, metaphors and allegories that “anyone” can understand. 

Know this! Apollo has become the god of journalists, And his man is whoever faithfully narrates him the facts. (Holderlin cited in Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 151). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

And we argue this way too: A conservative vs a liberal politician in a debate may explain a political phenomenon using two mutually exclusive analogies that nonetheless equally “spin” the phenomenon for their side (eg., analogies in the pro life vs pro choice debate).  We automatically wield analogies and counter analogies, examples and counter examples like lightsabers in a jedi fight with a sith without asking why we are doing it or if it is effective.  One fun thing for fourth grade debating is to have the kids pick a side to whether there should be school uniforms or not and then research and argue for the opposite side of the issue.  In a debate between academics, who cares if you persuade a general audience?  Jurys are like this: would you randomly poll 12 non car experts how to fix your car, or hold a popularity contest polling millions of people who have no experience in political science to decide who should run a city?

Rigorousness of presentation and clarity of thought is paramount.  Plato notes in his Gorgias dialogue that Being in an average everyday Greek way means “presence,”  For example, we might say “houseness” appears incarnate in the beautiful mansion, is merely present in the average house, and appear deficiently in the old shack.  Various degrees of beauty shows how “houseness” appears.  On the contrary, the mansion may appear gawdy to someone, and the shack may appear quaint.   Similarly, Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world to a tourist, but as noise pollution to a local resident.   This framework makes sense in a ancient Greek context where gods were not only beings but events.  For example, the poet Homer says the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis (in their fullness), and gives the example of the young woman appearing as a goddess incarnate to Odysseus, but not to his companion beside him.  Protagoras thus says “man is the measure of all things,” and so a triangle is going to appear very differently to a young child, vs a teenager in geometry class, vs a geometry professor.

Heraclitus says the “logos” is the basic structure of reality and Aristotle defines man as Zōon logon echon, the animal determined by the logos.  In logos or language we focus on the “as” structure in terms of “appearing as.”  Aristotle thus refines the logos of Heraclitus in terms of “something as something else,” such as “the table as brown,” which for Aristotle is logos apophantikos.  There is thus a difference needed to apprehending beings, not just “something,” but “something as something else.”  Therefore, in its most basic structure, the entity is seen through a lens of categories.  I encounter the dog “as” not me, or in itself, etc.   We can see the “as” structure as fundamental when the process breaks down, and so if I hear a living thing at my feet in the forest only to look down and see I “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind “as” a living thing, this shows a basic stance of ours toward the world is “taking as.” 

Philosophy is at its greatest when it thinks what is fundamental.  Parmenides says “apprehending and Being are the same,” which we see when the process breaks down.  For instance, if I try to apprehend movement in terms of fractions, absurdity results.  Why?  To go from point A to point B in a race, you must first make it to halfway point C.  But to get from point A to C, you must first get halfway to C as point D, and so on to infinity.  This shows us that a basic stance of humans toward the world is being in the sameness of apprehending and being.  Here’s the question: Why are these 2 thoughts, “something as something else” (Heraclitus/Aristotle) and “apprehending and being are the same” (Parmenides) important in understanding the human condition?

A good follow up question is how do the insights of Heraclitus/Aristotle and Parmenides help us begin to solve the modern problem of how does a “hermetically sealed” person/ego reach the world?  We are not egos cut off from the world.  For example, I may find boringness to be a trait of a book along with plot and characters, though I know the next person may not experience the book “as boring.  Our moods are somehow already in the world.  Dicken in David Copperfield gives this example of love: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wildflowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud  (Dickens, 2004, ch 33 Blissful).” 

This helps us to understand Kant and causality.  Hume said we don’t sense rule governed causality, just that B always follows A, not that this happens according to a rule.  Kant says this is right, that in sense we only ever encounter B following A, but still the mind furnishes the rule of 3-fold irreversibility, and so we experience (1) the physical cause of ball hitting ball, (2) the temporary change of form of water boiling until the heat is removed, and (3) permanent change of form that you can’t uncook an egg: positive, comparative, superlative.  But here is where Kant ran into a problem.  If threefold causality is applied to the world, cause isn’t just in the mind but something about the world must be welcoming the framework.  Cooking an egg is always experienced as superlatively one directional.  So, causality is both furnished by the mind, but world dependent.  Think about the boredom example.  If I experience to book as boring, there is presumably something about book triggering that, yet not since the next person need not find the book boring.

This background prepares us to see Plato’s metaphysical foundation of the modern university. Let’s start with natural science. Heidegger says that:

Kant defines this thing of nature as the thing accessible to us, the body that is as object of experience, i.e., mathematical-physical cognition. The body is in motion or at rest in space, such that motions, as changes of place, can be numerically determined in terms of their relations. For Kant, this mathematical determinateness of natural body is nothing contingent—is no form of calculating processes merely attached to it—but rather the mathematical, in the sense of what is moving in space, belongs first and above all to the determination of the thingness of the thing.  There is in this mente concipere, a prior grasping-together, of what is supposed to be determinative, in a unifying way, for every body as such, i.e., for corporeality: All bodies are the same. No motion is privileged. Every place is the same as every other; every point in time is likewise the same. Every force is determined only in accordance with the change of motion it causes—and this change of motion is itself understood as change of place. All determinations of body are delineated in one blueprint, according to which is: the natural.  As mente concipere, the mathematical is a projection of the thingness of things that, as it were, leaps over [hinwegspringender] things. Projection first opens a play-space within which things, i.e., facts, show themselves.   As axiomatic, mathematical projection is the grasping-in-advance of the essence of things, of bodies; hence, the blueprint prescribes how each thing and the relations between all things are to be constructed.  Natural bodies are now only that which they show themselves to be in the domain of projection. Things show themselves now only in the relations of places and time-points and in the measures of mass and working forces.  Because projection, according to its sense, posits a uniformity of all bodies according to space and time and relations of motion, it also simultaneously makes possible and demands as an essential mode of determining things a completely uniform measure, i.e., numerical measurement.  Specifically, the res extensa or extended substances are re-presented in terms of shape and motion as what is “really real” in them, location and mobility, that which makes the res extensa predictable and controllable.  For Descartes this made us “the masters and possessors of nature (Descartes, Opp. VI, 61 ff).”  This is made possible for Descartes via the structure of the cogito as that which, in re-presenting, unconsciously creates for beings the conditions for presentability: indubitability and certitude.  On the basis of this, error is possible, when in re-presenting, something is presented to the one representing that does not satisfy the conditions of presentability: indubitability and certitude.  So, just as a historian always has in view what the historical being is, modern science made similar projections as to what counted as nature.  For instance, Galileo projected that the motion of each body is uniform and rectilinear if every obstacle remains excluded, but also changes uniformly when an equal force acts upon it.

What is crucial in this genesis lies in the fact that Galileo gave a direction to natural sciences by asking (when not literally, at least intentionally) how nature as such must be viewed and determined in advance, such that the facts of nature can become accessible to the observation of facts in general. How must nature be determined and be thought in advance, so that the entirety of this being as such can become accessible to calculative knowledge in a fundamental way? The answer is that nature must be circumscribed as what it is in advance, in such a way as to be determinable and accessible to inquiry as a closed system of the locomotion of material bodies in time. What limits nature as such—motion, body, place, time—must be thought in such a way as to make a mathematical determinability possible. Nature must be projected.  It is only in light of the mathematical opening and projection of nature, i.e., by delimiting [nature] through such basic concepts as body, motion, velocity, place, and time, that certain facts of nature become accessible as facts of nature. It is only on the basis of disclosing the mathematical constitution of nature that the knowing determination of nature obtains meaning and justification according to measure, number, and weight.  What was crucial and consequential about the achievements of Galileo and Kepler was not observation of facts and experimentation, since ancient science did this too, but the insight that there is no such thing as pure facts and that facts can only be grasped and experimented with when the realm of nature as such is circumscribed.  Thus, underlying all natural sciences from the beginning are propositions and cognitions, like, e.g., the principle of the permanence of substance: “In all change of appearances substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished.”  Moreover, the principle of causality: “All alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”   These propositions state something a priori about nature. More exactly put, these propositions state what belongs to nature as nature. These propositions contain a knowledge of what nature is, while at the same time this knowledge is not grounded in experience.  The greatness and superiority of natural science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based upon the fact that the investigators were all philosophers; they understood that there are no mere facts, but that a fact is what it is only in light of the explanatory concept and always in accordance with the range of such explanation

Galileo experimented dropping objects, with the result that bodies of different weights released from the tower did not arrive at precisely the same time, but the temporal differences were slight; despite these differences, therefore really against the appearance of experience, Galileo maintained his scientific position.   But those who witnessed the experiment became rightly suspicious, thanks to the experiment itself, of Galileo’s assertion, and persisted all the more stubbornly in the ancient point of view. On the basis of this experiment, opposition to Galileo intensified so much that he had to give up his professorship and leave Pisa. Galileo and his opponents both had the same “fact” in view, but they interpreted the same fact differently and made the same happening visible to themselves differently. What appeared for each as the authentic fact and truth was something different.  Galileo and his opponents both had the same “fact” in view, but they interpreted the same fact differently and made the same happening visible to themselves differently. What appeared for each as the authentic fact and truth was something different. Both [Galileo and his opponents] thought something in relation to the same appearance, but their respective thoughts differed, not at the level of the particular alone, but in principle and in relation to the essence of body and the nature of its motion. What Galileo thought in advance about motion comes forward in the following definition: the motion of each body is uniform and rectilinear if every obstacle remains excluded, but also changes uniformly when an equal force acts upon it. 

So, there is an original interpretive framework in place through which we look at nature. Now, let’s see the same thing in Social Psychology and love.

Social psychology offers several competing models and theories to explain love, reflecting its complexity as an emotion and social phenomenon. These models often differ in focus—some emphasize emotional components, others biological or evolutionary roots, and still others social and cognitive processes. Here’s a rundown of some key approaches:

One prominent framework is Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, which breaks love into three core components: intimacy (emotional closeness), passion (physical and romantic attraction), and commitment (the decision to maintain the relationship). Different combinations of these elements produce distinct types of love—like “romantic love” (intimacy + passion) or “companionate love” (intimacy + commitment). It’s elegant and widely used, but critics argue it oversimplifies by reducing love to just three factors, potentially missing cultural or situational nuances.

Then there’s the Attachment Theory angle, rooted in early work by Bowlby and later applied to adult relationships by researchers like Hazan and Shaver. This model ties love to attachment styles—secure, anxious, or avoidant—shaped by childhood experiences with caregivers. It suggests how we love as adults mirrors those early bonds. It’s compelling for explaining patterns in relationships, but it’s less focused on passion or the initial spark, which some say limits its scope.

Another contender is Lee’s Love Styles (or the “colors of love”), which proposes six distinct ways people experience love: Eros (passionate, romantic love), Ludus (playful, game-like love), Storge (friendship-based love), Pragma (practical, logical love), Mania (obsessive, intense love), and Agape (selfless, altruistic love). This model’s strength is its variety, capturing diverse expressions of love, but it’s been critiqued for lacking a unifying mechanism—why do these styles exist, and how do they interact?

From a more biological and evolutionary lens, models like Fisher’s Neurochemical Theory argue love involves distinct stages—lust (driven by sex hormones like testosterone), attraction (tied to dopamine and norepinephrine), and attachment (linked to oxytocin and vasopressin). This ties love to brain chemistry and survival (pair-bonding, reproduction), but it can feel reductive to those who see love as more than just biology.

Finally, there’s the Prototype Approach, where love isn’t pinned to a strict formula but understood through culturally shaped ideals or “prototypes” (think fairy-tale romance or soulmate narratives). It’s flexible and accounts for individual differences, though it’s less predictive than structured theories.

These models compete in the sense that they prioritize different aspects—emotion, behavior, biology, or culture—and none fully agree on what love is. Sternberg’s triangle might clash with Fisher’s stages over whether commitment is a choice or a chemical inevitability. Attachment theory might downplay the playful chaos of Lee’s Ludus. Research keeps evolving, blending these ideas or testing them against real-world data, but no single theory has won out. It’s more like they’re pieces of a puzzle, each useful depending on the question you’re asking about love. What is important for us is that the social psychological entity is going to express (like a house expresses houseness) the particular model you ascribe to. Love thus loses its ambiguity thanks to whatever interpretive paradigm you ascribe to, and so makes it teachable. Plato’s Academy said let no one enter who doesn’t know math. He meant math in the sense of mathema/polymath, that which is learnable (numbers are eminently learnable)..

There are different kinds of reasoning depending on what discipline your considering.  Historical reasoning in historical Jesus studies is different from physical reasoning in physics, but they are all reasoning.  Philosophical logic seeks to establish clear, precise, and unambiguous (univocity eindeutig) concepts and reasoning processes.   In historical Jesus studies, historical reasoning is used to sift through ambiguous gospels to isolate historical material from legend.

Heidegger points out that since Plato, anything that ‘is’ can be differentiated into two realms, the aistheton and the noeton, that which is apprehended by the senses and that which can be experienced by nous, the mind’s eye. The noeton is that which truly is because it is not subject to the changeability of the things of the senses, and hence are constant. The particular house shows the essence, house as such, but only in a limited way, and hence is me on, not simply nothing, ouk on, but deficient with respect to what truly is, the primary image, the paradeigma (cf HHTI, 24).  The lens according to which we encounter beings “as” beings includes einai. Being, choris, separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath auto, in itself (also cf N, 193).  I encounter the dog “as not me,” for instance, a standing over against me or object (gegenstand).

The metaphysical means distinguishing true beings (alethos on) from deficient beings (me on), which are not nothing (ouk on), e.g., houseness is “present” in a limited aspect in the house at hand.  All the academic disciplines are sciences in that they are determined by a metaphysics of true vs deficient being and are logical even though, for example, reasoning in historical Jesus studies is different from a Marxist reading of a text in literary theory.  Logic in general aims at univocity, though the basic concepts of a particular discipline appear on a continuum from univocal to analogical.  The aim is always to strip a phenomenon of as much ambiguity as possible, making it graspable and learnable. 

Aristotle noted the analogical polysemy of our basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) resist definition. A definition would just be general and vague and so basically empty of content.  For example, Aristotle posited a fourfold analysis of the concept of cause.   For example, this includes a narrow determination of what an efficient cause is, but also a rich figurative meaning: e.g., a feminist interpretive paradigm is the efficient cause of a feminist framework of a literary text.  Heidegger notes:

Our calculative thinking, yet perhaps in general all Western thinking hitherto since the predominance of Platonic philosophy—metaphysical thinking, that is—keeps to the single track of the sequences of cause and effect. On this track, all beings are lined up as actual–acting–acted upon. Whatever is not an actual effect is a cause, and vice versa.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 79). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Yet let us quietly concede that we everywhere and always have difficulty in knowing being itself, instead of always only explaining beings in terms of beings along the lines of the cause-effect relation… The other knot entangles those who are thus entangled still further, insofar as the human being lets those beings, which he alone esteems, count as beings only if they are actual, that is, something actually effected or effecting, something that can be effected by him or at least explainable in terms of an effecting.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 87). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

Within the sphere of the two-thousand-year dominance of metaphysics that has yet to be broken anywhere it must seem fantastical to think being otherwise than in terms of the guiding thread of cause and effect.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 88). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

For a further example of the richness of causality, Kant noted there is a 3 fold irreversibility of things in experience, the mind furnishing this causality because all sense ever gives us is one thing following another, not “rule governed irreversibility.” (1.  Positively, physical change ball hits ball 2.  Temporary change of form, Heat boils water that then returns to normal when heat removed 3. Complete irreversibility, you can’t uncook an egg),  Seeing the richness  of Causality in Kant, Kant notes that as causality the self unconsciously and categorically self-legislates a rule that I morally accompany all my actions morally, unlike infants, animals and certain mentally challenged people who are not morally attached to their action in the same way as they “don’t know any better.”  A dog isn’t “evil” if he chews up the couch, and so Schelling notes only a human can sink below a beast in terms of capacity for depravity.  If we have this analogical polysemy approach to our basic concepts, what does this teach us about our basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) and language that doesn’t try to reduce rich concepts to general and empty definitions?

Aristotle’s insight into analogical polysemy—the idea that a single term like “cause” can carry multiple, related meanings—suggests that language isn’t a rigid cage for capturing reality. Take his fourfold analysis of causality: the material cause (what something’s made of), the formal cause (its structure or essence), the efficient cause (what brings it about), and the final cause (its purpose). The efficient cause alone stretches from the straightforward (a sculptor chiseling stone) to the metaphorical (a feminist paradigm shaping a literary interpretation). This isn’t vagueness; it’s depth. A flat, one-size-fits-all definition would strip “cause” of its ability to bridge concrete actions and abstract frameworks, leaving us with something lifeless and abstract. In this way Platonic metaphysics such as the obsession with creating and learning definitions stifles thought in modern universities.

Kant takes this further by showing how causality isn’t just out there in the world—it’s something the mind imposes on experience to make sense of it. His threefold irreversibility (physical change, temporary transformation, permanent alteration) underscores that causality isn’t a simple “this, then that” sequence handed to us by the senses. Instead, it’s a rule we unconsciously legislate to organize the chaos of perception. And then there’s the moral twist: Kant ties causality to self-legislation in ethics, where the mature, rational self attaches moral weight to its actions—something a dog or an infant doesn’t do. This layering reveals causality as a concept that spans physics, psychology, and morality, defying any attempt to boil it down to a single, empty formula.

So, what does this teach us? First, our basic concepts aren’t meant to be reduced. Trying to define “cause” or “being” or “good” in a way that’s general enough to cover all cases often drains them of content, leaving us with hollow shells. Language, when it respects analogical polysemy, mirrors the complexity of experience—it’s a tool for navigating reality, not flattening it. Second, this richness shows that our concepts are inherently relational and context-dependent. “Cause” means something different when I’m talking about a billiard ball, a boiled egg, or a moral choice, yet these meanings resonate with each other through analogy, not strict equivalence.

This approach liberates us from the illusion that precision always equals simplicity. It suggests that philosophy—and language itself—thrives when we embrace the multiplicity within our Grundbegriffe. Instead of chasing definitions that erase ambiguity, we should explore how these concepts stretch and adapt across contexts, revealing the interconnectedness of thought, action, and experience. It’s a reminder that language isn’t a net to trap reality, but a web that connects it—and the threads are stronger for their flexibility.

That our academic disciplines are since Plato “metaphysical” means distinguishing true beings from deficient beings to make learning easier and reduce everything to a commonplace level with examples/counterexamples, analogies/counter analogies, etc.  This permits the newspaper to be read at a 6^th grade reading level.  Everything follows the aim of Formal Logic at univocity/unambiguousness, and so for example you may view a novel through various literary lenses (Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructionist, etc) so that your interpretive selection and arrangement of the text might then become, if it’s a really good feminist reading, the feminist interpretive paradigm incarnate like we said of the mansion and houseness earlier.  Heidegger comments in his time:

Let us just look at the dubious apparatus of contemporary literary theory, where all the components of ancient poetics are at work in a corruption of their essence and in all sorts of guises, even if the orientation of their content changes. Until recently one was still searching for the psychoanalytic underpinnings of poetizing; now, everything is dripping with [talk of] national tradition [Volkstum] and blood and soil, but everything remains wedded to the old. ‘Poetic comparison’—what an unpoetic concept that is in the end! Yet people are so occupied with writing books, with founding new journals, with organizing compilations of literary works, and with not missing the boat that they have no time for such questions. An entire life could be spent on such things, even the effort of an entire generation. Indeed! So long as we fail to devote ourselves to such questions, talk of the ‘heroic science’ that is supposedly now coming is idle talk. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (pp. 230-231). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The task of thinking that we are initially faced with here consists, rather, in thinking our way out of our entanglements in metaphysical ways of explaining. Admittedly, so long as poetizing is a hunting ground for scientific research, the path to the word will often be futile, even as the most extensive detour. For all “science” rests on metaphysics.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 75). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Modern Philosophy as an academic discipline is thoroughly metaphysical in this way. Learning Philosophy is equated with memorizing as many “isms” as you can (rationalism, stoicism, etc). But there are other ways of doing philosophy. Try actually questioning Ethics! Naturally arising is the question about judging right and wrong.  This usually means comparing a behavior to a standard.  Theists thus make fun of atheists like me sometimes because without God where does the standard of right and wrong come from?  But, what if this misconstrues the phenomenon of ethics completely?  Here’s a different way to look at it:  Suppose humanity was going along with its traditional definition of marriage guiding perspective, when suddenly it becomes apparent that it does figurative and literal violence to LGBTQ rights, and so we are compelled to deconstruct our traditional guiding perspective on marriage and reconstruct it in a more inclusive way.  This is done according to the idea of Justice, though we do not reinvent the idea of Justice in redefining marriage, but rather more fully uncover (aletheia with the alpha privative) what Justice is and always was.  Plato thus says in his allegory of the cave we go along according to our guiding perspective when we encounter something we can’t appropriate (aporia; epekeine tes ousias) which causes thaumazein or wonder, which is the birthplace of Philosophy.  We thus do not need God for objective morality any more than we need God for objective criteria for judging fine wine or student fiction writing.  We thus have as a people come to understand the ethical standard of the golden rule, which occurs cross culturally and at different times in history,  and the ethical evaluation criteria implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So, one person may view 9’11 as a terrible tragedy, though many Palestinians at the time viewed it as wonderful and holy.  But, a clash of views on what justice is doesn’t necessarily lead to relativism.  It just shows the human factor will always be there.  The criteria for judging fine wine don’t really work if you hate the taste of wine.  Two teachers could use the same rubric to come up with different evaluations of a student’s writing.  Two judges in MMA may pick different winners though they are using the same criteria.  Criteria of assessment and evaluation don’t guarantee scientifically certain results but are still useful and improve upon the older method such as a teacher grading by saying a piece of student work “feels like” it deserves a “B” grade or judging grades on assignments relationally where the best assignments are given “A’s” even though if you were using standards and criteria even the best ones of this group would only get “B’s”

(3) Conclusion

Heidegger calls himself a German Christian theologian, not from the point of view of confessional faith, but from trying to think the truth of Jesus’ claim to love widow, orphan, stranger and enemy as more important than yourself.  Such a transfiguring agape love, which is the opposite of the tragic eros love of Achilles, does not look to beings to quench desire (“You complete me” in the Jerry McGuire movie), but creatively transforms the other into being lovable.

Jesus in Matthew says “You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, buy I say love your enemy and bless those who persecute you.”  If you have a transfiguring approach to life the important thing is not what happens to you but how you creatively appropriate it.  This is also seen in psychology such as the glass half full/silver lining insight of cognitive behavioral therapy.  The key is to see the “texts of life” that present themselves to you not as repositories of meaning but open ended choose your own adventure novels with polysemy interpretations.  There is no human nature, life is neither tragic nor joyous in itself, and so triplets can grow up in an abusive home where one grows up with mentally crippling PTSD, the next is unaffected, and the third is stronger for it.  Nietzsche thus says “what does not kill me makes me stronger.”  A successful lawyer can be a miserable alcoholic just as a prisoner can make a game out of dancing in her chains like in the movie Life is Beautiful:

If a thinker has divined a way to go from human (E.g., Apollo’s declaration about humans – restlessness; fated to go from the fire of youth to the tedium of old age, essentially in cabin fever when stripped of distractions) to godliness (athanatizein) as Aristotle says (like the ever youthful ambrosia eating gods – delighting in solitude), this implies a poet has already opened up a space for the reciprocal pointing back and forth between gods and humans, letting their essence stand forth

Holderlin speaks of March-time: transition time.  Eg., the blueing of the sky after the storm shows us the relationship between grey and blue sky to highlight what the blue sky really is, the blueing, and that it is always blueing inconspicuously just that we don’t usually notice it.  Similary, if we turn down the unknown street looking for the yellow house, the yellowness leaps out at us when we see it, hence the unknown helps make a reciprocal contrast with yellow leaping out.  Heidegger says:

Here, the bridge is not some thing that is installed from one bank already present before us to another bank that also lies present before us. Rather, at the very same time as it spans the river at a single stroke, “the bridge” arches over it, thereby first making the banks into banks and opening the open realm for a going back and forth. The greater the height from which the bridge arches, the more bridged and closer are the banks. Their distance from one another is measured not by the interval between two sides that lie present before us but in accordance with the height from which the span of the bridge extends. The relations that hold sway here, and that are initially anathema to calculative, reifying thought.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 85). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Heidegger noted we are in a homeless age and so we need to find ourselves again and reconnect to our world – like a Cape Bretoner!

ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought)

by Martin Heidegger

The present volume makes available in English the second of three lecture courses that Heidegger devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin at the University of Freiburg. The first, on Hölderlin’s hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” was given in the winter semester of 1934–1935;1 the course on the hymn “Remembrance” was presented seven years later, in the winter of semester 1941–1942;2 and the third, on the hymn “The Ister,” took place the following semester, in the summer semester of 1942.3

Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) Indiana University Press.