This project begins from a simple premise: human nature has not changed. The technologies surrounding us have transformed almost beyond recognition, but the underlying motives that drive human action remain stubbornly familiar. Ambition, envy, loyalty, desire, the longing for recognition, the dread of mortality: these appear in every age, already fully visible in the earliestContinue reading “Why Return to the Greek Myths”
Category Archives: myth
Helen
Medusa reveals something the Greeks already suspected. Beauty and terror are not opposites. They are twins. Both arrest the mind through the eye. A man who sees Medusa cannot move. A man who sees Helen often cannot act. The mechanism is identical. The Greeks understood this long before philosophers explained it. The eye commands theContinue reading “Helen”
The Locus of Human Action
The funniest critique of Cartesian dualism ever put to film occurs on the moon. In Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Robin Williams plays the King of the Moon: a giant disembodied head floating serenely above his own detached body. The head is refined, articulate, and philosophical. The body, meanwhile, rampages below: lustful,Continue reading “The Locus of Human Action”