Persian Philosophers Quotes

We’re not here to argue with you about the wisdom of our alliance that has kept the Persians at bay for forty years. An argument requires a measure of equality between those in the dispute and Samos is not the equal of Athens.

Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. “Out of every one hundred men,” he wrote, “ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior…

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.

Beauty is dad kissing mom's hand when it cramps. Beauty is seeing a Persian woman dance. Ugly is not the absence of beauty. Ugly is the inability to identify it. The inability to be surprised by it. It is the persistent reluctance to be made a child by it. Beauty is simply the manifestation of love.

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. - Omar Khayyam, Persian philosopher (1048-1131)

In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was dancing. Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision. She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you. All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and, in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural creature.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.

The myth of the Islamic Golden Age The medieval philosophers and thinkers who dedicated their lives to science and philosophy, who stood up to Islam and paid a dear price for rejecting its teachings and discrediting its founders are currently introduced as Muslim scholars.

Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.

the tenet of the philosopher that for each man there was only one perfect friend;

He is no mean poet, and his verse can rouse or persuade even if his logic fail to convince. His message is not for the Mohammedans of India alone, but for Moslems everywhere: accordingly he writes in Persian instead of Hindustani—a happy choice, for amongst educated Moslems there are many familiar with Persian literature, while the Persian language is singularly well adapted to express philosophical ideas in a style at once elevated and charming.

After Justinian became Emperor: "He was a man of deep piety, which he signalized, two years after his accession, by closing the schools of philosophy in Athens, where paganism still reigned. The dispossessed philosophers betook themselves to Persia, where the king received them kindly. But they were shocked-- more so, says Gibbon, than became philosophers-- by the Persian practices of polygamy and incest, so they returned home again, and faded into obscurity." How tumultuous thou art, sixth century!

Another much-discussed question is, whether women are intended by nature to be subject to men.“No,” said a very gallant philosopher to me the other day; “nature never dictated any such law.The dominion which we exercise over them is tyrannical; they yield themselves to men only because they are more tender-hearted, and consequently more human and more rational.These advantages, which, had we been reasonable, would, without doubt, have been the cause of their subordination, because we are irrational. “Now, if it is true that it is a tyrannical power which we have over women, it is none the less true that they exercise over us a natural dominion- that of beauty, which nothing can resist.Our power does not extend to all countries, but that of beauty is universal.Why, then, should we have any privilege?Is it because we are stronger than they?But that would be the height of injustice.We use every possible means to discourage them.Our powers would be found equal if we were educated alike.Try women in those gifts which education has not weakened, and we soon will see which is the abler sex.

The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers — among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality and equal rights — are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards — while the esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS.

Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind you, floating in nothing was comforting, light-less, airless, like a mother’s womb. This man was grateful. But then he decided he would love to have sturdy ground beneath his feet, so he would feel more solid himself. Lo and behold, he was standing on earth. He knew it to be earth, for he knew the feel of it. Yet he wanted to see. I desire light, he thought, and light appeared. I want sunlight, not any light, and at night it shall be moonlight. His desires were granted. Let there be grass. I love the feel of grass beneath my feet. And so it was. I no longer wish to be naked. Only robes of the finest silk must touch my skin. And shelter, I need a grand palace whose entrance has double-sided stairs, and the floors must be marble and the carpets Persian. And food, the finest of food. His breakfast was English; his midmorning snack French. His lunch was Chinese. His afternoon tea was Indian. His supper was Italian, and his late-night snack was Lebanese. Libation? He had the best of wines, of course, and champagne. And company, the finest of company. He demanded poets and writers, thinkers and philosophers, hakawatis and musicians, fools and clowns. And then he desired sex. He asked for light-skinned women and dark-skinned, blondes and brunettes, Chinese, South Asian, African, Scandinavian. He asked for them singly and two at a time, and in the evenings he had orgies. He asked for younger girls, after which he asked for older women, just to try. The he tried men, muscular men, skinny men. Then boys. Then boys and girls together. Then he got bored. He tried sex with food. Boys with Chinese, girls with Indian. Redheads with ice cream. Then he tried sex with company. He fucked the poet. Everybody fucked the poet. But again he got bored. The days were endless. Coming up with new ideas became tiring and tiresome. Every desire he could ever think of was satisfied. He had had enough. He walked out of his house, looked up at the glorious sky, and said, “Dear God. I thank You for Your abundance, but I cannot stand it here anymore. I would rather be anywhere else. I would rather be in hell.” And the booming voice from above replied, “And where do you think you are?

The reality of the Islamic metaphysical world was not taken seriously despite the fact that Iqbal, who was the ideological founder of Pakistan, had shown much interest in Islamic philosophy, although I do not think that he is really a traditional Islamic philosopher. He himself was influenced by Western philosophy, but at least was intelligent enough to realize the significance of Islamic philosophy. The problem with him was that he did not know Arabic well enough. His Persian was very good, but he could not read all the major texts of Islamic philoso- phy, which are written mostly in Arabic. Nevertheless, he wrote on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and he had some philosophical substance, much more than the other famous reformers who are men- tioned all the time, such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Muh:ammad ‘Abduh.

When Nietzsche made his famous definition of tragic pleasure he fixed his eyes, like all the other philosophers in like case, not on the Muse herself but on a single tragedian. His “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed” is not the tragedy of Sophocles nor the tragedy of Euripides, but it is the very essence of the tragedy of Æschylus. The strange power tragedy has to present suffering and death in such a way as to exalt and not depress is to be felt in Æschylus’ plays as in those of no other tragic poet. He was the first tragedian; tragedy was his creation, and he set upon it the stamp of his own spirit. It was a soldier-spirit. Æschylus was a Marathon-warrior, the title given to each of the little band who had beaten back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught.

The Eternal Return has certainly not been thought by philosophers or by those who are concerned about Nietzsche in the contemporary history of ideas, and this because the Eternal Return can not be thought of. It is a revelation that presents next to the Silvaplana rock, or on the threshold of the Gateway of the Moment, where the Two Ways meet. You will have to travel step by step along the path of Western yoga that Nietzsche rediscovered and practiced, putting his feet in the tracks that he left in the paths of the high peaks, relive their great pains and divine glories, reaching to reach similar tonalities of the soul, to be possessed by Dionysus and his ancient drunkenness, Luciferian, that makes dance in the solitude of forests and lost from a solar age, laughing and crying at the same time. And this is not achieved by the philosophers of the intellect or the beings 'of the flock'. For to achieve this, the Circle will have to be traversed for several eternities, again at the Gateway of the Moment, already predestined at noon. In addition, the doctrine of the Eternal Return is selective. As the initiatory practice Tantric Panshatattva is not for the paśu [animal], but only for some heroes or viryas, thus the Noon is reached by the 'Lords of the Earth' and by the poets of the Will to Power, predestined in a mysterious way to perform the Superman, that individualistic and aristocratic mutation. The 'herd', the vulgar, has nothing to do with all this, including here the scientists, technologists and most philosophers, politicians and government of the Kaliyuga. Nietzsche's description of the Eternal Return is found in some aphorisms that precede 'The Gay Science', Joyful Science, using Nietzsche the Provencal term, Occitan, from 'Gay'. Joyful Science will be that of the one who has accepted the Eternal Return of all things and has transmuted the values. The one of Superman. There is also a description in the schemes of 'The Will to Power'. In they all take hold, with genius that transcends their time, of the scientific knowledge and the mechanics of the time, which does not lose validity to the doctrine, let us say better to the revealed Idea, to the Revelation that, of somehow, it was also in the Pythagoreans, in their Aryan-Hyperborean form, differentiating itself from other elaborations made in the millennia of the East. Also would have been veiled in the Persian reformer Zarathustra. We are going to reproduce what Nietzsche has written about the Eternal Return. In the schemes of 'The Will to Power', he says: 'Everything returns and returns eternally; We can not escape this.

The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers — among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality and equal rights — are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards — while the esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS. There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?…

Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

The Angles Of The Frame 1 Many years have passed since the day, I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face. I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed. 2 Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium. 3 The bull I breast-fed for many years And I've submerged into the frame. 4 I knew the justifications were hard, Hard as against the current of water. No news from the ambiguous points something uncommon. It can't be justified by natural rules, many years we've been tangled on it. 5 This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands No finger points in any direction. Lost in the dead-end alleys Tracing images without a compass. 6 Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood. My kinsmen of horses… Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof. 7 You can't stop the hands of the clock. You can't come back to the broken minutes. The days have been arranged one after another. The knights have left the game one after another. 8 There was a straw mat where you fell asleep. I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house. 9 Was something supposed to get away from the core to join us? A century has passed and we still live in this house. 10 Dimensions have shifted Not exclusive to the roof The letters approved us as the residents of the house They ran away as the convicts And we got used to the standstill. (Translated from original Persian into English by Rosa Jamali)

There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: what must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition of the Christian nations. For example, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and especially Rousseau. But in more recent times, since Hegel's assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards. The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzche's half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others. Turgenev made the witty remark that there are inverse platitudes, which are frequently employed by people lacking in talent who wish to attract attention to themselves. Everyone knows, for instance, that water is wet, and someone suddenly says, very seriously, that water is dry, not that ice is, but that water is dry, and the conviction with which this is stated attracts attention. Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of the pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.

Our deepest insights must — and should — appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them. The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers — among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality and equal rights — are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards — while the esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS. There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?... That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe PURE air.

The Eternal Return has certainly not been thought by philosophers or by those who are concerned about Nietzsche in the contemporary history of ideas, and this because the Eternal Return can not be thought of. It is a revelation that presents itself next to the Silvaplana rock, or on the threshold of the Gateway of the Moment, where the Two Ways meet. You will have to travel step by step along the path of Western yoga that Nietzsche rediscovered and practiced, putting his feet in the tracks that he left in the paths of the high peaks, relive their great pains and divine glories, reaching to reach similar tonalities of the soul, to be possessed by Dionysus and his ancient drunkenness, Luciferian, that makes dance in the solitude of forests and lost from a solar age, laughing and crying at the same time. And this is not achieved by the philosophers of the intellect or the beings 'of the flock'. For to achieve this, the Circle will have to be traversed for several eternities, again at the Gateway of the Moment, already predestined at noon. In addition, the doctrine of the Eternal Return is selective. As the initiatory practice Tantric Panshatattva is not for the paśu [animal], but only for some heroes or viryas, thus the Noon is reached by the 'Lords of the Earth' and by the poets of the Will to Power, predestined in a mysterious way to perform the Superman, that individualistic and aristocratic mutation. The 'herd', the vulgar, has nothing to do with all this, including here the scientists, technologists and most philosophers, politicians and government of the Kaliyuga. Nietzsche's description of the Eternal Return is found in some aphorisms that precede 'The Gay Science', Joyful Science, using Nietzsche the Provencal term, Occitan, from 'Gay'. Joyful Science will be that of the one who has accepted the Eternal Return of all things and has transmuted the values. The one of Superman. There is also a description in the schemes of 'The Will to Power'. In they all take hold, with genius that transcends their time, of the scientific knowledge and the mechanics of the time, which does not lose validity to the doctrine, let us say better to the revealed Idea, to the Revelation that, of somehow, it was also in the Pythagoreans, in their Aryan-Hyperborean form, differentiating itself from other elaborations made in the millennia of the East. Also would have been veiled in the Persian reformer Zarathustra. We are going to reproduce what Nietzsche has written about the Eternal Return. In the schemes of 'The Will to Power', he says: 'Everything returns and returns eternally; We can not escape this.

The Eternal Return has certainly not been thought by philosophers or by those who are concerned about Nietzsche in the contemporary history of ideas, and this because the Eternal Return can not be thought of. It is a revelation that presents itself next to the Silvaplana rock, or on the threshold of the Gateway of the Moment, where the Two Ways meet. You will have to travel step by step along the path of Western yoga that Nietzsche rediscovered and practiced, putting his feet in the tracks that he left in the paths of the high peaks, relive their great pains and divine glories, reaching to reach similar tonalities of the soul, to be possessed by Dionysus and his ancient drunkenness, Luciferian, that makes dance in the solitude of forests and lost from a solar age, laughing and crying at the same time. And this is not achieved by the philosophers of the intellect or the beings 'of the flock'. For to achieve this, the Circle will have to be traversed for several eternities, again at the Gateway of the Moment, already predestined at noon. In addition, the doctrine of the Eternal Return is selective. As the initiatory practice Tantric Panshatattva is not for the paśu [animal], but only for some heroes or viryas, thus the Noon is reached by the 'Lords of the Earth' and by the poets of the Will to Power, predestined in a mysterious way to perform the Superman, that individualistic and aristocratic mutation. The 'herd', the vulgar, has nothing to do with all this, including here the scientists, technologists and most philosophers, politicians and government of the Kaliyuga. Nietzsche's description of the Eternal Return is found in some aphorisms that precede 'The Gay Science', Joyful Science, using Nietzsche the Provencal term, Occitan, from 'Gay'. Joyful Science will be that of the one who has accepted the Eternal Return of all things and has transmuted the values. The one of Superman. There is also a description in the schemes of 'The Will to Power'. In they all take hold, with genius that transcends their time, of the scientific knowledge and the mechanics of the time, which does not lose validity to the doctrine, let us say better to the revealed Idea, to the Revelation that, of somehow, it was also in the Pythagoreans, in their Aryan-Hyperborean form, differentiating itself from other elaborations made in the millennia of the East. Also would have been veiled in the Persian reformer Zarathustra. We are going to reproduce what Nietzsche has written about the Eternal Return. In the schemes of 'The Will to Power', he says: 'Everything returns and returns eternally; We can not escape this.

Language was critically important to the religious transition. The rise of Islam meant not just the eclipse of Christianity but the near annihilation of what had hitherto been the commonly spoken vernaculars of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world: of Syriac, Coptic, Greek, and Berber. Already in the eighth century, Arabic was the language of politics and administration from Spain into central Asia, although Persian and Turkish would both become critical vehicles for Islamic thought and culture. From the earliest years of the Muslim era, the Arabic language and its attendant culture exercised a magnetic pull for non-Muslims, even for church leaders. As early as 800, Christians like Theodore Abu Qurrah, a Melkite bishop born in Edessa, were publishing their treatises in Arabic. The greatest Eastern Christian philosopher of the tenth century, Yahya ibn 'Adi, wrote in Arabic and lived in a thoroughly Arabized intellectual world. Even in the self-confident world of Syriac literature, ninth-century hymn writers began introducing the Arabic poetic device of rhyme.14

In Greek, the most significant area to which these curricula were reduced was the rudiments of Aristotelian logic. It is possible, for instance, to discern a major structural change in the medical curriculum in Alexandria toward the end of the sixth century, perhaps as a reaction to the decline of philosophical instruction in that last remaining center of Greek philosophical studies. ...The theological applications of philosophy in Greek patristic literature, by contrast, were many and longevous, though clearly harnessed to their theological, apologetic, and polemical goals rather than free philosophical discourse. In Syriac Christianity, as in Greek, there is a similar development of a logical curriculum, except that it was rather shorter: The Sasanian rulers actively endorsed a translation culture that viewed the transferral of Greek texts and ideas into Middle Persian as the “restitution” of an Iranian heritage that was allegedly pilfered by the Greeks after the campaigns of Alexander the Great.17 It was this cultural context, and the atmosphere of open debate fostered most energetically by Chosroes I Anushirwan (ruled 531–78), that must have prompted the Greek philosophers to seek refuge in his court after Justinian’s 529 edict prohibited them from teaching.

The beginnings of Arabic philosophical literature can be described as taking place in two stages. The first occurs from roughly the middle of the eighth century until the appearance of al-Kind¯ı in the first third of the ninth century. It is characterized by the continuation of the engagement with the remnants of philosophy in Greek, Syriac, and Middle Persian that have just been reviewed, though in Arabic this time – by the study, that is, of the logical curriculum and the application of philosophical ideas to theological concerns of the time....The second stage begins with al-Kind¯ı and represents a resurrection of philosophy as a discipline in its own right, independent of theological or other concerns.

Seen through the eyes of Arab alchemists, or Persian mystics, the earliest Greek philosophers weren’t just thinkers or rationalists. They were links in an initiatory succession

Ibn Sina was born in a tiny settlement called Afshanah, outside the village of Kharmaythan, and soon after his birth his family moved to the nearby city of Bukhara. While he was still a small boy his father, a tax collector, arranged for him to study with a teacher of Qu’ran and a teacher of literature, and by the time he was ten he had memorized the entire Qu’ran and absorbed much of Muslim culture. His father met a learned vegetable peddler named Mahmud the Mathematician, who taught the child Indian calculation and algebra. Before the gifted youth grew his first facial hairs he had qualified in law and delved into Euclid and geometry, and his teachers begged his father to allow him to devote his life to scholarship. He began the study of medicine at eleven and by the time he was sixteen he was lecturing to older physicians and spending much of his time in the practice of law. All his life he would be both jurist and philosopher, but he noted that although these learned pursuits were given deference and respect by the Persian world in which he lived, nothing mattered more to an individual than his well-being and whether he would live or die. At an early age, fate made Ibn Sina the servant of a series of rulers who used his genius to guard their health, and though he wrote dozens of volumes on law and philosophy—enough to win him the affectionate sobriquet of Second Teacher (First Teacher being Mohammed)—it was as the Prince of Physicians that he gained the fame and adulation that followed him wherever he traveled. In Ispahan, where he had gone at

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

When the star of Islam rises, the Jews rise with it to a golden age of intellectual creativity. When feudalism settles over Europe, they open shop as its bankers and scholars. And when the Modern Age struts in, we find them sitting on the architectural staff shaping it. If we now shift our sights from a general view of the history of civilizations to focus on that of the Jews only, we see an equally incredible succession of events. We see Jewish history begin with one man, Abraham, who introduces a new concept to the world—monotheism—which he hands to his descendants. Now Jewish history hits the roads of the world. After a nomadic existence in Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, and settlement of Palestine; after defeat by the Assyrians, captivity by the Babylonians, and freedom under the Persians; after an intellectual clash with the Greeks, strife under the Maccabeans, and dispersion by the Romans; after flourishing as mathematicians, poets, and scientists under Moslem rule; after surviving as scholars, businessmen, and ghetto tenants under feudal lords; after surviving as statesmen, avant-garde intellectuals, and concentration camp victims in the Modern Age, a small segment of these descendants of Abraham return—after a 2,000-year absence—to reestablish Israel, while the rest choose to remain in the world at large in a self-imposed exile. Such a succession of events would be improbable were it not historic fact. What can we make of these events? Are they mere accidents of history? Are they but blind, stumbling, meaningless facts, a series of causes and effects without a definite design? Or is this improbable succession of events part of what philosophers call “teleologic history”—that is, a succession of events having a predetermined purpose. If so, who drafted such a blueprint? God? Or the Jews themselves? Why would God choose the Jews as His messengers for a divine mission? Or, to use William Norman Ewer’s trenchant phrase, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” The equally trenchant rejoinder by Leon Roth is, “It’s not so odd. The Jews chose God.” If God had a need for messengers to carry out a mission, He would have

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them. As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles. Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”7 What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail? You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense. What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society. Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.

In Plato’s philosophical text Symposium, he implies that the men in the Sacred Band

Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. "Out of every one hundred men," he wrote, "ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior..." p13

THE ARRIVAL OF DEVIL, DEMONS, HELL, RESURRECTION AND ARMAGEDDON WERE FOREIGN TO Judaism. With the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon, (539 BCE) came many other diverse ideas about god and goddesses and sex. The philosophers and rabbis brought back a recharged and unified religious idea of one god and his power. But instead of bringing back a purer religion they brought back one filled with non-Jewish baggage. The Babylonian group returned with many diverse ideas that did not fit well with this scheme. Most biblical scholars agree that Jews brought back from Babylon numerous concepts garnered from Persian Zoroastrianism, such as a devil, demons, hell, resurrection, afterlife and Armageddon. All of these ideas entered Judaism deeply and surfaced with fantastic aberrations in Christianity and Islam. Augustine’s teaching made it clear that Christians should realize erections were a disease caused by the original sin of lust. This one man, more than any other Christian, set the Church on a path of denying the body and denying sex and sensuality, and condemning women as instrument of the devil. “...everyone is evil and carnal because of Adam,” Augustine wrote. ‘every human has been contaminated”. He declared that semen was the agent transferring this pollution from one generation to the next. Pagans had been mocking Christian celibates as being unmanly according to the Roman tradition. Augustine said no; men who had sex conquered only weak women. At this point in time, the great phallus of creation, worshiped for millennia became the organ of uncontrollable lust to be suppressed in all of Europe. Augustine’s proclamations would proliferate all over Europe, self- loathing expanding like a plague across the continent. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant religions all inherited this lasting legacy for Western culture, enduring even after the partial eclipse of Catholic Church ideology in the Renaissance.

It’s worth noting, incidentally, that in addition to being himself a native of Syria, as his name indicates, Damascius was one of the polytheist Platonic philosophers who fled the Roman Empire in the wake of legislation in 529 CE against non-Christians teaching. These philosophers were welcomed at the Persian court, eventually returning to the Empire after a protected status was negotiated for them in a codicil of a treaty which permitted them to retire unmolested, but not to resume teaching. Some of them reportedly settled in Harran in Syria, where a temple to the Akkadian God of the moon, Sīn, and some kind of center of pagan learning possibly remained active as late as 1032 CE, having obtained some measure of recognition from the Abbasid caliphate under the ambiguous category of ‘Sabians’, and arguably playing a significant role in the transmission of pagan Greek literature to the Islamic world.