Mētis

Mētis is the Greek word for cunning, practical, time-bound intelligence — the intelligence of the fisherman who knows his waters, the weaver who works the loom, the helmsman who reads the storm, the warrior who plans the ambush. It is the intelligence of Odysseus (polymētis), of Hephaistos, of Hermes, of the poet whose song is a cunning act of memory against oblivion.

Detienne and Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (1974) is the canonical study. Mētis names a form of knowing distinct from the demonstrative sophia of the philosophers. It does not proceed by proof; it proceeds by timely effect. It is the knowledge of the kairos — the right moment — and of the poros, the passage through difficulty. Where philosophical intelligence stands outside time to contemplate the eternal, mētis is inside time, in the current, adjusting to what arrives.

The philosophical tradition displaced mētis. Plato’s elevation of abstract sophia, of the unchanging Forms, of the intelligence that stands apart from the world it knows, left mētis without a vocabulary. Detienne’s recovery restores it as a named form of intelligence that the archaic Greeks honored.

For the Lineage, mētis maps directly onto hermes and trickster. karl-kerenyi‘s Hermes: Guide of Souls reads the god as the archetypal form of this intelligence. carl-jung‘s and paul-radin‘s work on the trickster cycle generalizes the pattern. What Detienne and Vernant supply is the classical specificity — that mētis was a named and honored form of knowing, not a residue to be explained away.

Relationships

• hermes
• trickster
• wakdjunkaga
• logos
• nous

Primary sources

• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)