In the OP of my “The 4 Aeons: Platonic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, Homeric” thread, I wrote and quoted:
[size=95]The Straussian scholar Seth Benardete, in his The Bow and the Lyre, which first made me see Homer as a philosopher in the Nietzschean sense—i.e., a commander and legislator (BGE 211)—, seems to me to argue that Homer’s innovation was the promotion of the Olympian gods to the rank of supreme gods and thereby the demotion of the cosmic gods to lesser gods:
[list][/size][size=85]Homer […] gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus’s men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish individual men; he can withdraw his light from gods and men equally, but he needs Zeus to carry out what alone would satisfy him (12.382-83). Homer does not mention Zeus. If we may distinguish between cosmic gods like the Sun—gods whose possible existence is manifest to sight—and Olympian gods, about whom there is only hearsay, then Homer begins [the Odyssey] with a cosmic god who punishes human folly, but he is at once corrected as soon as the Muse takes over and introduces Homer and us to Poseidon, Zeus, and Athena. Homer on his own suggests that Odysseus’s wisdom and justice are supported by the cosmic gods, who no less exact terrible vengeance for injustice and folly. That this suggestion is not confirmed by the Muse to whom Homer hands over the story seems to imply that Odysseus, in choosing to return home, chooses the Olympian gods. [Source: Benardete, op.cit., page 5.][/size][/list:u]
Now in my “Nietzschean superhumanism versus (trans)humanism” thread on the Think Humanism forum, I quoted and wrote:
[size=95][That there will be no wars to end all wars would also be vouchsafed by] “those natural cataclysms which ensure that humanity will not fall final prey to human inventions, those beneficent cataclysms, cataclysms of grace, whose goodness toward humanity consists in their annihilation of civilized human life and the enforced return of humanity to its natural primitive conditions from which the earth can again be repopulated and recivilized.” (Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche.) The only alternative to awaiting or engineering such a cataclysm would be a “spiral dynamic” in which the current, “humanist” phase is not succeeded by the most primitive phase but by the higher-tier equivalent of that phase. That higher-tier equivalent could then be followed by the higher-tier equivalents of the later phases as well, for example the Homeric phase, the Platonic (or Vedantic) phase, and our current Machiavellian-Cartesian phase.[/size]
This passage contains a reference to Spiral Dynamics. The best summary of the phases of Spiral Dynamics can be found here: http://themagicofbeing.squarespace.com/spiral-dynamics (but see also http://vievolve.com/values-systems-4). I already associated the Red phase with the Homeric age, the Blue phase with the Platonic age, and the Orange and Green phases with the Machiavellian age (for an idea as to why I still consider Green Machiavellian, see my “The conquest of human nature versus the conquest of nature” thread). Now the Purple phase, which precedes the–individualistic–Red phase, is not just a collectivistic phase, but actually precedes any real individualism (the first phase, the Beige, though technically an individualistic phase, precedes any real self-consciousness): its kind of society is the primitive commune-- the one with a “group soul” (except, perhaps, for the shamans). So in the pre-Homeric age, it may not have been a problem that the Sun cannot punish individual men: if the Sun threatens to “withdraw his light” (i.e., when there is a solar eclipse), that is because the society as a whole has not been good enough. But by Homer’s time, individualism had developed so far that the animistic religion with its cosmic gods could no longer keep the society “pious”. Hence Homer had to command and legislate a new religion that kept the Red warriors in check by appealing to their pride.
I discern a pattern among the ages in that they alternate between ending with too much religion and too much enlightenment. The Homeric turn led to too much enlightenment: the Sophistic enlightenment, which was “screened off” (esotericized) by Socrates because it threatened to burn down the wooden pillar of faith that held it aloft and thereby threatened itself. The Platonic turn, however, led to too much religion, which in the Middle Ages already led to precarious conditions for philosophy among the Abrahamic religions and especially Christianity, where toward the end of the Renaissance it led Machiavelli to command and legislate the use of science for the inventions of warfare, a holy war against Christianity. This however has now, in turn, led to too much enlightenment (global technology, nihilism). This suggests that the Nietzschean turn will lead to too much religion. But if we foresee this, shouldn’t we try to prevent it from happening? Shouldn’t we try to make future turns unnecessary? But this was precisely what Machiavelli intended and what ultimately led to the current crisis. The Nietzschean religion, whose core idea is the idea of the recurrence, is started precisely in order that there shall be future turns; the unnecessariness of any future turns is precisely what makes the Nietzschean turn necessary…