The Iliad and the Wisdom of Mourning : How to Live in a World of Collapsing Values

For coaching and consulting: premieretat.com/coaching-cons...
Follow me on Odysee: odysee.com/@premieretat:f
And Bitchute: www.bitchute.com/channel/fXnF...
You can find a corresponding essay here: premieretat.com/the-iliad-and...
In this video I explore a response to cultural collapse that can be found in Homer's Iliad. Though the story is ostensibly about rage, ultimately this rage gives way to the wisdom of mourning. The conflict begins with a showdown between Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greeks, and Agamemnon, the chief ruler. I then examine how the Iliad presents the collapse of three core values of Homeric culture: Marital Virtue, Political Virtue, and Divine Virtue. The video concludes with a consideration of the wisdom of mourning.
The images used in this video are in the public domain. The image of Hera from Pompei is under a CC0 license and can be found here: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

[@jtzoltan]

Based on the title alone so far, it seems I'm about to embark on a lesson very relevant and valuable for the present time.
Your delivery also has the appropriate tone for the subject... like you're reading heroic poetry.

[@julianoaliberti]

Amazing channel and content! Do you have an analysis of the Odyssey somewhere? Thanks!

[@marah7344]

Thank you so much for posting could you make a video on the contrast between the ego and true self? Ppl make the ego seem so bad and we should destroy it but it exists for a reason and I would love your take on the argument. I would also be very curious on a video about how you got into all of this stuff. I know your channel isn't really about your life if you ever have extra time. The thins is I've been binge watching all your Videos I would love to hear more on your personal experience and how your life has changed as your knowledge grew of this type of stuff

[@premieretatphilosophy]

Thanks! Yeah that does seem like a worthwhile topic to explore, especially given that people use "ego" and "true self" to mean so many different things. So, for example, Jungian's seem to identify the ego with our conscious personality which is the locus of our reason and moral principles, and the true-self as something like God, though a God in Jung's ideosyncratic way where it is somehow amoral, irrational, and includes shadow elements within it. But this seems different than others who seem to equate ego with the self that's constructed by culture, custom, and family history, while the true self is the authentic self that feels the call of conscience to live in light of a different principle. And others (more in the new age community) seem to equate the ego with consciousness as such, identifying it with duality thinking, and the true self with some kind of absolute unity that's beyond consciousness (which, like the Jungian view, requires an abandonment of all value judgements).

[@OriginalSocalgranny]

While your modern critique of the values presented in the Iliad are compelling because of the way you have argued directly from the text, I do not agree that the ancient listeners would have disagreed with you. After all, it is the pathos of the human condition being described by the poem, not the idealized world you wish for in which justice prevails, all men are good and power and status have no part in daily life. The model of Greek religion fits much more closely to the lived human experience than Christianity's rather absurd concept of a loving god who is interested in our every petty whim, except in so far that this god can commisserate with his followers based on his own brutal experience. So I was completely baffled by your closing image of human sacrifice, the totem of the modern religion of the west. One other point that bears mentioning is that in Book 24,, Achilles is finally able to accept his fate and let go of his thirst for vengeance. But he also finally realizes that perhaps he deserves his fate. Perhaps it because it will cleanse him of his guilt in the death of his friend and therapon. He is careful to offer up a prayer to Patroclus apologizing for letting Hector have a funeral and promising to share the ransom with him, perhaps through cult sacrifice. He finally understands that it was his own unrelenting anger which resulted in Patroclus going to war without the protection of Achilles. He ignored Phoenix's warning in Book 9 about holding on to his anger until it was "too late" to do him any good. Achilles great guilt is shown in his lament to his mother Thetis in Book 18, 100-110:
"...swift-footed Achilles spake to her: “Straightway may I die, seeing I was not to bear aid to my comrade at his slaying. Far, far from his own land [100] hath he fallen, and had need of me to be a warder off of ruin. Now therefore, seeing I return not to my dear native land, neither proved anywise a light of deliverance to Patroclus nor to my other comrades, those many that have been slain by goodly Hector, but abide here by the ships. Profitless burden upon the earth- [105] I that in war am such as is none other of the brazen-coated Achaeans, albeit in council there be others better- so may strife perish from among gods and men, and anger that setteth a man on to grow wroth, how wise soever he be, and that sweeter far than trickling honey [110] waxeth like smoke in the breasts of men; even as but now the king of men, Agamemnon, moved me to wrath. " [from Perseus online]
Truly, lamentation is what is left to all humans, since it appears that for all this great art, literature and millennia of history that we have still NOT learned to live together without causing each other pain and death. Look at how we withheld the Covid vaccine from poor countries and how we are so eager to ship weapons of death to Ukraine and how we support a brutal, theocratic, apartheid country like Israel with billions every year.