Nietzschean Hypothesis:

1) What does the mutilation of the Herms have to do with Paul of Tarsus?
2) Why is Nietzsche the last initiate and disciple of Dionysus and the Anti-Christ?

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Greeks lived and perished for countless generations with out a written language. Instead they practiced the guest/host relationship. The best door to this perspective is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Here Aristotle describes a method for practicing the guest host relationship. This was how the Greeks lived, they lived what they practiced and practiced what they lived. Today, we pick up a book and read written language about Aristotle’s ethics; then the Greeks lived and practiced this kind of relationship. This was needed to obey the first fundamental law, survival. Arete, the state which produces faithfulness to law, a.k.a. virtue, was a necessity for life.

The Homeric question is vaguely about an “individual”. Most scholars deny that there was any one Homer, but what can not be denied is that the Homeric epics show authorial intent. The question of authorial intent points to a particularly strong Nietzscheian theme, Will to Power. So we return to the origin of the phenomenon of Will to Power in its original Western form of Xenia. In this perspective, what would Will to Power mean, and how did it become corrupt with resentment? It would mean the lived experience of a people who would not say something like “Will to Power is dead”. That we can even think the proposition “God is Dead” says something about how we live as a civilization, and about how our minds have been conditioned to accepting the shadows of reason for reality.

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The notion of friendship was one of the founding relations of western civilization. Besides being a major topic of Aristotle, how can this be justified? If one reads Plato as having given birth to philosophy via written discourse, why did it happen at the time of Plato in particular? If you investigate the Homeric epics, one will observe that this cultural discourse is the precursor to Platonic philosophy. The point being that Homer was transmitted orally for uncountable generations. This would have been impossible with out a working concept equivalent to or greater than friendship.

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Xenia was protected by Zeus, and covers the whole range of obligations that guests and hosts have to one another. Violations of these obligations bring dire consequences: Paris’ theft of Helen was, among other things, a violation of xenia, as are the suitors’ actions throughout the Odyssey. Prof. E. Vandiver.