The Invisible Behind Appearances

In the closing essay of Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, “The Origins of Philosophy,” Vernant names the structural continuity between Greek religion and early philosophy: both posit a truer reality behind the visible, and philosophy inherits this gesture rather than overthrowing it.

“Behind nature and beyond appearances, an invisible background is formed, a truer reality, secret and hidden, which the philosopher seeks to attain and which he makes the proper object of his meditation. By insisting on this invisible being against the visible, the authentic against the illusory, the permanent against the fleeting, the certain against the uncertain, philosophy takes over, in its way, from religious thought. It locates itself within the very framework established by religion when it posited the sacred powers that provide the foundation of this world beyond the world of nature and in an invisible realm” (Vernant 1983).

Milesian cosmology, Pythagorean number, Eleatic being, Euclidean geometry — each articulates in a new idiom what religious thought had already held: the conviction that the visible world is supported by an invisible framework, and that the proper work of thought is to attain that framework. The philosopher seeks the same invisible the priest sought; the method changes, the metaphysics does not.

For the Lineage this is decisive. It licenses reading Heraclitean fire, Plotinian the-one, and Platonic nous as psychological-religious material in a new register rather than as documents of a rupture with religion. It is the classical-philological warrant for the Jungian claim that depth psychology does not supersede metaphysics but translates it into the vocabulary of the psyche.

Relationships

• mythos-to-logos
• fire-heraclitus
• the-one
• nous
• figuration-of-the-invisible

Primary sources

• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)
• vernant-origins-greek-thought (Vernant 1982)