/asatru/ - Asatru / Heathenry / Paganism

^^ what he said. Churchill is the war criminal and should be treated as such.

When Aristotle praised justice as the first virtue of political life, he did so in such a way as to suggest that a community which lacks practical agreement on a conception of justice must also lack the necessary basis for political community. But the lack of such a basis must therefore threaten our own society. For the outcome of history has not only been an inability to agree upon a catalogue of the virtues and an even more fundamental inability to agree upon the relative importance of the virtue concepts. It has also been an inability to agree upon the content and character of particular virtues. Nowhere is this more marked and nowhere are the consequences more threatening than in the case of justice. Everyday life is pervaded by them and basic controversies cannot therefore be rationally resolved.

Ever since the Homeric poems were first translated into English, the Homeric word 'dikē' has been translated by the English word 'justice'. But the changes which have taken place in modern English-speaking societies as to how justice is to be understood have rendered this translation more and more misleading. For the use of the word 'dikē', both by Homer and by those whom he portrayed, presupposed an order structuring both nature and society. To be dikaios is to conduct one's actions and affairs in accordance with this order.

The structure of normality provides the most basic framework for understanding action. Acting in accordance with those structures does not require the giving or the having of reasons for so acting, except in certain exceptional types of circumstance in which those structures have been put in question. It is departing from what those structures prescribe which requires the having and the giving of reasons. And so reasoning which justifies particular requirements of that structure may emerge from the reasoning which puts it in question. But this does not mean that the structures of normality may not themselves be understood, independently of and prior to any reasoning, as worthy of respect; and when they are so understood, it is commonly because the structures of normal life are taken to be a local expression of the order of the cosmos. So classical Greeks, like Greeks of the archaic period, for the most part understood the forms and structures of their communities as exemplifying the order of dikē; and what gave literary expression to that understanding above all else was the recitation and the hearing and the reading of the Homeric poems.

It is over this order that Zeus, father of gods and men, presides; and it is over particular communities that kings preside. Of the uses of dikē in the Iliad all refer either to a judgment by a judge in a dispute or to a claim by a participant in a dispute. A particular dikē is straight if it accords with what themis requires, crooked if it departs from it. Themis is what is ordained, what is laid down as the ordering of things and people. A king judges straightly when he judges in accordance with the themistes. Kingship, divine governance, and cosmic order are inseperable notions, and the words 'dikē' and 'themis' are nouns derived from two of the most basic verbs in the Greek language, 'dikē' from the root of 'deiknumi', 'I show' or 'I indicate', 'themis' from that of 'tithēmi', 'I put' or 'I lay down'. Dikê is what is marked out; themis is what is laid down. And these nouns are tied to the verbs so that what we are dealing with is, not dead etymology, but a way in which the nature of cosmic order is presupposed in a great deal of everyday speech.

The order over which Zeus and human kings reign is one structured in terms of hierarchically ordered social rules. To know what is required of you is to know what your place is within that structure and to do what your role requires. To deprive another of what is due to someone occupying his role or to usurp the role of another is not only to violate dikē; it is to infringe upon the timē, the honor of the other. To do what my role requires, to do it well, deploying the skills necessary to discharge what someone in that role owes to others, is to be agathos. 'Agathos' comes to be translateable by 'good', and 'aretē', the corresponding noun, by 'excellence' or 'virtue'; but since originally to be agathos is to be good at doing what one's role requires, and since the primary all-important role is that of the warrior-king, it is unsurprising that 'aretē' originally names the excellence of such a king.

Good (agathos) is used first of all of those who are good at doing what is required of each person inhabiting his or her own particular role by excelling at the types of task so required. If I do what it is good for me to do, I will be approved of by those who want to see human beings do what is required of them, and they will be those who uphold the order of dikē. So that to call someone agathos, in its original use, is not just to express approval; it is to express the kind of approval that is characteristic of those who are themselves good and just.

What differentiates means-ends reasoning in the Homeric poems from later reason-giving is that it does not, except in a secondary way, answer the agent's question "What am I to do?" The agent already has envisaged the action that he or she is to perform; what he or she reasons to is either a reminder that he must curb his thumos if he is to perform it or else must suffer baneful consequences or a conclusion that he or she must perform such and such other actions if he or she is to do what is required (as, for example, Odysseus reasons that he must have the bow if he is to kill the suitors, and Penelope that she must unravel her weaving if she is to fend the suitors off). If they are to do what they envisage as required of them, they must first do certain other things. So in a secondary way they derive conclusions about what to do next, but they are able to do so only because they already know independently of their reasoning what action it is that they are required to perform.

And since what is required of one in one's role is to give what is due to those others occupying roles that stand in determinate relation to one's own, king to kinsman or subject, swineherd to master or fellow servant, wife to husband and other kin, host to stranger and so on, there is not the same contrast between what is to one's own interest and what is to the interest of others as that which is conveyed by modern uses of 'self-interest' and cognate terms.

In our moderns uses of such expressions we often presuppose some account of human nature in which actions are the expression of or are caused by desires and according to which chains of practical reasoning always terminate in some "I want" or some "It pleases me." From this point of view every reason for action is a reason for some particular individual, and it is therefore a mistake to suppose that there could be good reasons for someone to do something independently of his or her motivation. And we envisage the desires which provide such motivation as capable of being organized either so that they serve the purposes of socially cooperative achievement or in a way that produces instead a mutually frustrating competitiveness. In this context a contrast between the altruistic individual who gives weight to the desires of others and the egoistic individual who does not is completely at home.

On the Stoic view, aretē is essentially a singular expression and its possession by an individual an all or nothing matter; either someone possesses that perfection which aretē (virtus and bonestas are both used as Latin translations) requires or he does not. With virtue one has moral worth; without it one is morally worthless. There are no intermediate degrees. Since virtue requires right judgment, the good man is, on the Stoic view, also the wise man. But he is not necessarily successful or effective in his actions. To do what is right need not necessarily produce pleasure or happiness, bodily health or worldly or indeed any other success. None of these however are genuine goods; they are goods only conditionally upon their ministering to right action by an agent with a rightly formed will. Only such a will is unconditionally good. Hence Stoicism abandoned any notion of a telos.

The standard to which a rightly acting will must conform is that of the law which is embodied in nature itself, of the cosmic order. Virtue is thus conformity to cosmic law both in internal disposition and in external act. That law is one and the same for all rational beings; it has nothing to do with local particularity or circumstance. The good man is a citizen of the universe; his relation to all other collectivities is secondary and accidental. Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and political circumstance at the very same time that it requires us to act in conformity with nature. There are symptoms of paradox here and they are not misleading.

Stoicism is not of course only an episode in Greek and Roman culture; it sets a pattern for all those later European moralities that invoke the notion of law as central in such a way as to displace conceptions of the virtues. This is a type of opposition which, given the relationship between that part of morality which consists in the negative prohibiting rules of the law and that part which concerns the positive goods toward which virtues move us, ought to appear surprising; although subsequent moral history has made us so familiar with it that we are in fact unlikely to be surprised.

A community which envisages its life as directed toward a shared good which provides that community with its common tasks will need to articulate its moral life in terms both of the virtues and of law. This suggestion is perhaps a clue to what happened in Stoicism; for given the disappearance of such a form of community, any intelligible relationship between the virtues and law would disappear. There would be no genuine shared common good; the only goods would be the goods of individuals. And the pursuit of any private good, being often and necessarily in these circumstances liable to clash with the good of others, would appear to be at odds with the requirements of the moral law. Hence if I adhere to the law, I will have to suppress the private self. The point of the law cannot be the achievement of some good beyond the law; for there now appears to be no such good.

Stoicism is a response to one particular type of social and moral development, a type of development which strikingly anticipates some aspects of modernity. Hence we should expect, and we do in fact find, recurrences of Stoicism. Indeed whenever the virtues begin to lose their central place, Stoic patterns of thought and action at once reappear. Stoicism remains one of the permanent moral possibilities within the cultures of the West.

>Luna_Phantasma

Tits or GTFO!

Naw i meant urs heh

Go back to reddit you supreme faggot, I googled some of your shit and its source is a book written by an autist who converted to Catholicism