Oedipus & the Sphinx

Marble capital and finial
in the form of a sphinx, 530 BCE.
By Metropolitan Museum of Art -
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0

The Greek sphinx, like the Egyptian, has a lion's body with a woman's head … seductive but destructive: humans no matter how prudent are still drawn to the fate that will eat them.

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At a crossroads a human being who flatters himself rational meets a monster liable to speak or act in unaccountable ways. We are tempted to identify with the egocentric human but that would be doom and folly as well: that is the archetypal misstep, in every life and every generation. In the contest between yourself and the world, side with the world, said the human sphinx of Prague.

: : :

"I can answer any riddle," boasted Oedipus.

"What is man such that he should be subject to the authority of mystery?"

"I did not make myself. So I do not know."

"Then how do you know you are omniscient? What have you declared other than your own egomania?"

: : :

"How can I tell whether I am asking myself the right questions?" petitioned Oedipus.

"Do you know from where questions arise, or why one is necessitated rather than another? How do questions ripen, and why? What makes the questionable questionable?"

"Because man has forgotten to think about it, or to think it worth knowing. But why does he forget and neglect?"

"Every man is obliged by life to be what he is least competent to be, the judge in his own case. His corruption only cheats himself. The issue is not intellectual but characteral."

: : :

"Why do sphinxes haunt the travelers' lanes?" pled Oedipus.

"There are mysteries also in the settlements and cities but there men sleep too deeply in the beds of language and custom. It is only in transit from one outpost of artificiality to another that the lonely wayfarer discovers how much of the world he did not know. When the great world is distracting him with its details and novelties, then he is most susceptible to those missteps that lead inadvertently but ineluctably into the mysterious. He awakens briefly and becomes fit for an illusion-killing question."

: : :

"What must I do to be happy?" implored Oedipus.

"Put your affairs in the hands of a god."

"And? What is the catch?"

"No god would have them. Gods have responsibilities of their own, for which they wish there were higher gods to help them. Even for gods, to live is to endure strife and distress: humans mistake the gods' bonus of wisdom for happiness."

: : :

"Why should I disturb myself over what is not known or knowable? Why should I care about limitations on my knowledge or understanding that are not my fault?" complained Oedipus.

"But they are your fault. Every child begins shaping his own mentality long before he comprehends the issues and implications of thinking or believing one way rather than another. No human knows what life may ultimately require him to be competent or resourceful for. All preparation for an unpredictable life may be delusory or irrelevant. What is most decisive is the elusive self-formation humans carry out long before they are fully conscious and perspicuous, the darkling first steps by which the character of the soul announces itself. Humans inherit themselves from their own more obscure selves. … How much of human finitude can even be put into words, much less explained?"

: : :

"Why do sphinxes harass humans?" challenged Oedipus.

"Not all humans, only those pregnant with a sense of their own incongruity or anomalous significance, whose minds are ripe with mindeating questions. A sphinx must be there as a midwife to steer the little head through, to turn it just so in birthing."

: : :

"Why do the gods send such a messenger as a sphinx?" shivered Oedipus.

"To remind men of how much in human life cannot be averted — because it is perennial, eternal, oceanic, fated. In awe, eerily, human will discovers the laws it is subject to. Immolated, incandescent, one life may prove a torch to illumine others' lives."

: : :

"Is there a correct mentality for living?" sought Oedipus.

"'Correct' is not the correct category. There are many ways to be intelligent or wise but many, many more to be wrongheaded or deluded. Not the authority of the gods but life itself punishes man's delusions; and not the rules of a particular form of society but history itself will draw the penalties for self-indulgence."

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"Won't humans outgrow folly naturally, just in the process of living and being abused?" speculated Oedipus.

"Wisdom is too difficult, says every fool. How much harm can a little pleasant folly do? — as if any fool knew the measure of his own benightedness. I will make my mistakes and then repent on my deathbed, resolving my life on a chord of wisdom, thinks the fool — ingeniously strategizing a way to avoid suffering for wisdom. Instead he suffers relentlessly for folly, in ways he is too shallow and obtuse to sense. All lifelong he confirms habits that inure a fool to his folly, cleverly rationalizing away what should be educational, coddling his own feelings gingerly, caressing the tender delusions of his narcotic ego. Does he think to have it both ways, to indulge the godling Ego and then when it no longer matters make a deathbed conversion to principles? In extremis, as Death is about to take his pulse, is that the only time he makes himself deal with ultimate, last matters? For all of life is rife with finalities. Does the fool suppose a deadline will acutely improve his deficient thinking? A slack, improvident, wastrel life is killing itself every passing moment — paying for what is specious with what is truly precious, selling itself into slavery on the installment-plan. Wisdom is arduous but folly is murderous, killing the very meaning of being alive. A fool lives to drift and be gulled."

: : :

"Why do you kill those who misanswer your questions?" pressed Oedipus.

"To make wisdom matter as much to imbeciles as it does to the wise. Every lapse in sagacity is lethal, and a pattern of negligence is fatal, an index to structural and ultimate character. To lack wisdom is to suffer a life of self-immiseration and self-ruin, one illusion failing after another, seriatim. To kill an idiot is to enact a mercy — for which he would thank you were he not an idiot."

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"Is the truth always and necessarily otherwise than how we conceive it?" resented Oedipus.

"It is not only otherwise but otherwise in such a way as to make humans misconceive it the way that they do. The truth is complex and deep enough to explain delusion and falsehood: falsity is one way truth may work on the mind; but falsity is also a necessary precondition without which truth is not possible."

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"Why must there be mystery, a surplus beyond the reach of our minds? Why can't everything reveal itself and shine forth for us? Why must the world be shifting and deceptive, deep and surprising, rife with anomalies? Why not an obvious world that gives itself utterly to us?" demanded Oedipus.

"You seem not to know where the world leaves off and your own responsibilities begin. A mind simple enough to be wholly obvious to itself would not be able to think, and a world simple enough to be just a flux of seeming would not be complex enough to produce thinkers. Mystery is a boundless ocean and so is man's shameless lust for simplicity and obviousness: there is mystery to teach at least a few humans that the world does not revolve around the interests and preconceptions of idiots. You live in a world intriguing enough to induce your mind to grow; a wise creature, realizing what is good for it, would be grateful for that subtlety."

: : :

"Were you waiting here for me? How did you know the turning I would choose?" beseeched Oedipus.

"You carried me along with you, blind wretch. You breathed me, thought me when you did not think, saw me when you did not see. You incurred me as your own inverse; I am your liability and live implicit in every strategy you wedded yourself to."

for Lee E.

— Kenneth Smith, "Parable 95: Oedipus and the Sphinx." In Otherwise: 100 Parables, Paradigms, & Paradoxes on the Reality Alongside of Us. Dallas: Memnon Press, 1997.

If a Prophet Had Come

Plaster life cast of Black Hawk,
original ca. 1830,
at Black Hawk State Historic Site.
Photo by Billwhittaker at English Wikipedia,
CC BY-SA 3.0

"Our village was situated on the north side of Rock river, at the foot of the rapids, on the point of land between Rock river and the Mississippi. In front a prairie extended to the Mississippi, and in the rear a continued bluff gently ascended from the prairie.

"On its highest peak our Watch Tower was situated, from which we had a fine view for many miles up and down Rock river, and in every direction. On the side of this bluff we had our corn fields, extending about two miles up parallel with the larger river, where they adjoined those of the Foxes, whose village was on the same stream, opposite the lower end of Rock Island, and three miles distant from ours. We had eight hundred acres in cultivation including what we had on the islands in Rock river. The land around our village which remained unbroken, was covered with blue-grass which furnished excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs poured out of the bluff near by, from which we were well supplied with good water. The rapids of Rock river furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land being very fertile, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins and squashes. We always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all of which time we were the undisputed possessors of the Mississippi valley, from the Wisconsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length.

"At this time we had very little intercourse with the whites except those who were traders. Our village was healthy, and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor hunting grounds better than those we had in possession. If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed him. What! to be driven from our village, and our hunting grounds, and not even to be permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers and relatives and our friends?"

—Black Hawk (1767/1838-10-03), Chief of the Sauk and Fox, Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of His Nation, Various Wars in Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels Through the United States. Dictated by Himself. Antoine Le Clair, U.S. Interpreter. J.B. Patterson, Editor and Amanuensis. Rock Island, Illinois: 1833.

Project Gutenberg edition

Wikipedia article about the author

The Familiar

"Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility, and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface. Apprehending and testing likewise consist in seeing whether everybody's impression of the matter coincides with what is asserted about these fixed points, whether it seems that way to him or not.

"The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar."

--Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translation by Arnold V. Miller, Preface: On Scientific Cognition, Oxford University Press, 1977

"Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt. Es ist die gewöhnlichste Selbsttäuschung wie Täuschung anderer, beim Erkennen etwas als bekannt vorauszusetzen, und es sich ebenso gefallen zu lassen; mit allem Hin – und Herreden kommt solches Wissen, ohne zu wissen, wie ihm geschieht, nicht von der Stelle. Das Subjekt und Objekt u.s.f., Gott, Natur, der Verstand, die Sinnlichkeit u.s.f. werden unbesehen als bekannt und als etwas Gültiges zugrunde gelegt und machen feste Punkte sowohl des Ausgangs als der Rückkehr aus. Die Bewegung geht zwischen ihnen, die unbewegt bleiben, hin und her, und somit nur auf ihrer Oberfläche vor. 

So besteht auch das Auffassen und Prüfen darin, zu sehen, ob jeder das von ihnen Gesagte auch in seiner Vorstellung findet, ob es ihm so scheint und bekannt ist oder nicht.

"Das Analysieren einer Vorstellung, wie es sonst getrieben worden, war schon nichts anderes als das Aufheben der Form ihres Bekanntseins."

--George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Geistes (Mind/Spirit)], Vorrede, 1807