EUDAIMONIA

EUDAIMONIA – TO SEE WITH THE DIVINE EYE (Part One)

I

A title with a strikethrough! A strikethrough that represents a prevailing attitude
in modern thought. The catechism of what is true and not. All true things must be
objects experiencible by some degree of measure. An object of influence cannot
influence in an unknown way, though we would have to ignore an “incredible”
amount of what we don’t know for this to be true.
What is rejected is often minutely defined within whatever constitutes the bulk of
one’s historical heritage, and that particular heritage may be one of polemic
polarities, in which there are assumed to be no new ideas.
Stoicism talks to us, in ways that have been presented admirably by modern
authors. It is an ancient heritage that has survived perhaps because of its
usefulness, its ability to inspire new generations. But is has always been wider in
its scope than many enthusiasts have been willing to accept.
Some of its ideas were all but lost, surviving in the fragments of friends and critics
with more lasting clout. Other ideas hide in plain sight, avoided by nervous
Christians in the renaissance and the early modern era. Still others have spurred
revolution, albeit through new schools of thought. But, it seems for each
generation only the most acceptable parts have been chosen. We seem to have a
different sort of eclecticism going on in our times, where certain basic Stoic ideas
have gained in popularity. But once again they’ve been cherry-picked to accord
with broader cultural tolerances.
To “see with the eye” is simply the physical eye’s function stated redundantly. But
more often we use ‘sight’ or ‘view’ as a metaphor for thought, the field of “vision”
being constructed in the mind. A “divine eye” is something different by its
addition, but a god is either not defined or it is defined, sometimes narrowly,
sometimes widely. But what is it to have a god of sorts? I would say its to see
existence as a kindred experience, but its clear that such a creating creature must

think differently, and for us to think of it, we must view it inside. It seems I’ve
struck through the wrong word! I took the liberty of striking the divine through
for your sake, when I should have struck through the eye. It is only the uneyed
view that can be “divine”, through the unsensual perceiver.

II

I’ve often heard it inferred that eudaimonia is the height of our existence, and in a
very shallow way that can mean “happiness”, but not in its typical modern range
of meanings: satisfaction, elation, or the absence of bad feelings.
Happiness as elation is a fleeting ‘up’ with its own relative ‘down’ in the lack of
elation, and being lead in a constant chase for it isn’t really conducive to real
happiness. Opinion and what we call “feeling” being the same thing, we can have
the opinion/feeling that we are satisfied with our circumstance, and the absence
of bad feelings/opinions may be a side-effect of this.
Eudaimonia is often reduced to more sustainable kind of tranquility, and an even
keel is preferable of course – whether in the midst of the crowd or in tranquil
platitude. But this is ataraxia, the preferred state of being across ancient
philosophies, Stoic, Epicurean, Pyrrhonist, whether Socratic, pre- or post-Socratic,
imperturbence both had and holds value today.
Another common interpretation of the term eudaimonia is “flourishing” (or
“human flourishing”), which has the sense of an opening flower, and I admit that
I’m critical of that particular inference of eudaimonia being something that
develops from one state to another. Although I can see that it’s a useful idea, I
don’t believe it’s an accurate representation of its meaning – particularly its Stoic
meaning.
I would say that, taking from ancient virtue ethics, there is a kind of happiness
‘ecosystem’, an optimal way to co-exist. A virtue of co-existence covered by two
different happenstances of the same thing: Like “duty” and “kindness”. These are

both expressions of providence, or virtuous forethought (phronesis). Duty as
represented by the Latin word officium is best understood in connection with the
rendering of a ‘necessary service’ whether the onus is upon you or it is done as a
kindness for someone else. That informs the sense of “duty”. An impromtu
kindness is a beneficium. If you ask me, I would say that “officia” and “beneficia”
are equal kindnesses, though I might suspect a modern preference for elevating
“beneficia” above “officia”. I suppose the idea is to give happiness in the form of
what might mirror one’s own expectation, and this giver can also be made happy
by the giving as well. This kind of happiness is known as “personal fulfillment”.
The longer history of the word “fulfillment” though biases more towards duty.
I’m using this as just one example of “virtue”, because virtue needs examples. It is
not simply an abstract state, a fixed halo. It is the lifeblood of human interaction.
There are a lot of terms that interchange awkwardly when attempting to describe
what the ideal state consists of. Each term representing a shifting context. Logos
is perhaps the most vague of all, but it has a high profile due to its use in the
Gospel of John “…and the Logos was God”, an almost co-incidentally Stoic
statement, logos representing the reason inherent in the universe.
If I were to break it down and describe the ancient Greek meaning of the term
eudaimonia though, it might also seem otherworldly to modern people, but it’s
something worth doing, because this is the same problem that other ancient Stoic
terms suffer from in the modern world.
“God” is perhaps the paramount example of a term that is widely misunderstood,
and you may reject it if you like, but I feel that it and its context should be
properly understood first, as it is related to the idea of eudaimonia.
“God” is a word which suffers from its almost unavoidable association with the
religions that came after Stoicism. But in Stoicism it is an hermeneutical term – it
has interpretive cachet, and deep psychological significance. It has been a
constant in the human mind in many ways, from the earliest recorded history

down to the present, and its many representations are a part of us in more ways
than one.
In modern secular understanding, ‘God’ is the supreme being that at one point in
the past mysteriously brought everything we know into being, but that we can
communicate with in our own mind. The various religious points-of-view may
bring many other ideas to this understanding that qualify it in a more particular
way, but that basic definition suits most religions of this day, especially those of
the monotheistic-exclusivist family most active vaguely west of India. Even the
polytheistic religions have creator Gods, they just might not be the same God you
communicate with (which is where Christianity dissembles into a vaguery in the
role of Jesus, a vaguery kept at arm’s length by dogma). In fact creation is more of
a function of myths in which a variety of scenarios can play creation out
haphazardly as a plot element. But when your God becomes the exclusive power
in heaven, that God creates alone and when invisible the God creates unknown.

III

Now in the modern world we are conscious of a greater knowledge of ‘the
universe’, of just how immense its expanse is, of how small and uncentral we are.
This creates a certain cognitive dissonance with the idea of an ostensibly human-
like God doing human-like things.
In the ancient world, religion revolved around the sacrificial cult, where the God
was not felt to be so distant at all. Gods and Goddesses were given gifts to seek
favour from them. This was the means of communication accompanied by formal
expressions of respect thought most likely to be acceptable. Gods being seen as in
a contractual relationship that was continuous and required a kind of regularity
that placed it within the regularities of nature that both Gods and people were
seen to be a part of. Gods resided over oaths, they were the third party there to
witness deals struck between human powers, being physically transported in the
form of statues that both parties would pay respect to. They were tied to cities,
one or many.

The divine also presided over the larger implicit contract of the people of the
cities themselves by being the givers of the gift of law, by which the
responsibilities were ordered which ensured the most co-benefit, and sought to
define what was ill-sought by proscription.
Plato often alludes directly to the governance of a city, most notably in the
Republic, but also throughout the dialogues (which are set in the city of Athena):
they are true laws inasmuch as they effect the well-being (eudaimonas) of those
who use them by supplying all that are good. Now goods are of two kinds,
human and divine; and the human goods are dependent on the divine, and he
who receives the greater acquires also the less, or else he is bereft of both.
Plato’s Laws 631b
The nomoi (laws) are seen as orthos, correct or reliable, thus agathos (good) is
what is truly reliable, and its reliability is seen as evidence of divinity. The benefit
being derived by all is eudaimonia, and it is supposed that a general eudaimonia is
possible so long as “true laws” prevail. so long as reliability isn’t being written into
circumstances by various motives. In Greek, idios is a private interest, those
persons attached to oneself, or an opinion – a private interest of the mind. An
idiotes is contrasted with a philosopher in possession of logic, or a professional in
possession of real knowledge. But idios can often prevail where least noticed. It is
part of the human. An in-group is capable of insinuating a different circumstance
to that which is real. In such cases, fate (tuche) as necessity can reassert itself, and
the real circumstance becomes knowable.
Jéferson Assumção in discussing the philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset, writes
“The communion of those who look at reality is able to show more”. Ortega in his
book The Rebellion of the Masses states that “man made up of mere idola fori
(‘idols of the forum’)..lacks…a self that cannot be revoked”. They are positing this
same distinction in my opinion, but there is always a mixture with some degree of
idios. Ortega’s most famous phrase is: “I am me and my circumstance. And if I
don’t save it, I don’t save myself” and circumstance at a greater elevation is
always shared, this is Ortega’s take on oikeiosis. Assumção writes that this
manifests “as an individual I-circumstance, an I-with-others that is also

immediately connected to the whole of society, the planet and what we don’t
know”, the last indicating that we are inevitably connected to things we know
nothing, or next-to-nothing about, but connected nonetheless.
I can see the relation between fate and circumstance. Circumstance is “fate” from
whichever view or timeframe we put on it. In Marcus Aurelius’ point of view, he
writes in Meditations (12.14) “either there is (before you) an alloted necessity and
unalterable order, or kind providence, or an aimless and unarraigned confusion.”
That’s my translation because I want to make clear that he’s putting experiences
into categories, not speculating on ultimate truth. All of these are true, and “fate”
is an experience, but behind it is an ephemeral and thus unknowable chain of
effects at the edge of knowledge.
There is another daimon-related word we come across in’ Meditations (1.16.3) in
a passage where he considers what he had learned from the previous emperor,
his adoptive “father” Antoninus Pius, who was said to have “No superstitious fear
of divine powers”. That superstitious fear is deisidaimonia, and it means ‘dread of
the divine.’ Plutarch echoes this assessment of its defect in De Superstitione (Ch2):
“superstition, as the very name (‘deisidaimonia’ -dread of deities) indicates, is an
emotional expectation (‘doxan empathe’) and an assumption productive
(‘poietiken hypolipsin’) of a fear (‘deous’) which utterly humbles and crushes a
man, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and
injury…the superstitious man is moved as he ought not to be, and his mind is thus
perverted…it bestows the added idea that He (or, the divine) causes injury…
superstition is an emotion (‘pathos’) engendered from false reason.”
The root of the deisi- element is deido – to ‘fear’ in the sense of becoming anxious
or alarmed, as opposed to the other sense of fear being reverence or respect.
They are insinuating the life of those who pay too much heed to omens, the ritual
involvements they require, and the supernatural dangers they imagine, and the
thousand ways they imagine to fail in appeasement.
The shadow of this assessment of divine injury, the vengeful God, can even drive
those who otherwise disavow religion to act as if they are in a struggle against

that power, but the struggle is as illusory as the mythological figure they seem still
to fear.
There is a problem of the over-dogmatic interpretation of oracles and events, and
the dissonance of feedback being the apparent ineffectiveness of remedies, an
anxiety that either drives them – or they are driven – to ever more ensuring
actions. There is the negative predictive horizon intimately related to the positive
predictive horizon, and both involve extrapolation from expectation (doxa).
A constant is the ineffectiveness of over-dogmatic interpretation. This is because
of the nature of fluidity, or we could say the fluidity of Nature.
Behind most fears hides the unknown, and this usually drives the search for
surety, which is both asked for and given in various ways.
If eudaimonia isn’t simply individual happiness then, it exists in a web of
interaction that includes the divine and is divine itself, at least as far as ancient
psychology is concerned. But is it simply something that happens to us and is
beyond our ability to affect? There have been many approaches to the divine that
strain to affect its presence. Philosophy generally critiques these hopes for
agency, and I believe that Stoicism critiques them by the standard of their use,
much like Psychology has at its most adventurous and perspicacious.
Interesting is Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s observation: “God speaks in
the imperative mode, but the strange neglected fact is that when men address
God…they speak in the imperative mood”, as a part of his assertion that “religion
is simply a huge attempt to build a world on the ground of an imperative of a
commandment.” God commands us, we command God.
My response to Agamben about the imperative mode is that it is an expression of
urgency that has probably from early times been used for pleading. The
conceptual power arrangement is something that may have come later, the
certain aloofness that we perceive today is the conceptual aloofness of God
himself, and this is tied to the aloofness of the sacred space and its class of
“employees”, as much as to the silence of God in the human realm. But the
formality of pleading has its reflective response in the formality of command. The

aloofness of the temple may have to do with the guarding of its secrets – physical
treasures stored there as a guarantor of contracts, of official records, of law and
the interests of the temple as an elite class.
I see a lot of the tension between the political assertions of “science” and
“religion” of the past two centuries that have influenced us to this day, as being
prompted by this somewhat continuing role of the “temple” in the early to mid
modern world, during which science emerged as the output of a new class that
did not want to be restrained.
But this tension was also present in the ancient world. The tension between
philosophy and the political regimes of which “religion” was a part.
In bringing in the political however, we come to a dead end. Because we have
been primed to think in terms of class tensions (tensions between political
actors), we can drift into dualism and be blind to the huge swathe of our output
that is not expressly political. Things of beauty and inspiration also found their
home in the “temple”, which also produced and preserved literature, poetry,
music, art, and wisdom.
I’ll backtrack to where I was explaining the hermeneutical focus. “God” as a
touchstone of deep psychological significance throughout human existence.

IV

A variety of scenarios have played creation out as a plot element in which one
God or another are involved often haphazardly in creation of the world around us,
but when your God becomes the exclusive power in heaven, that God creates
alone and invisibly. This we can see in the literary account of Genesis.
But the Stoic God is a philosophical development already present in the Socratic
heritage, which was being further developed in Stoicism. It represents that
creation, but the creation is from within. It is the power that manifests within
everything that changes, because it is that change and that constancy. It exists
both within us and within the things we depend upon for our existence, because

it has grown within this existence in the most appropriate way. This is both
providence and oikeiosis inherently (inherent ‘affinity’). The ‘nature’ (physis)
within us appropriates us to itself. It is no different to ‘nature’ outside of us.
Physis (“Nature”), being growth within us and amongst us, will strike its healthiest
path if we know what is “best”, what is arête or ‘excellence’ meaning virtue.
The divine is a way of explaining what is perfect around us, a hermeneutic.
‘Science’ and ‘psychology’ are great hermeneutics of our time, ‘science’ is a
hermeneutic of the perfect in objective truth by falsification, and ‘psychology’ is a
hermeneutic of the imperfect mind in search of better state, perhaps even the
perfect way; what is being interacted with is the object and subject of the human
mind, the uncovering of error (vice) and the discovery of virtue (or, what is best).
For Stoicism there is no distinction here between object and subject: It respects
proof, proposition, and true aporia, and directs all that is imperfect and subjective
in the human mind towards its underlying perfect state.
The reason there is philosophy at all is that people have cognitive dissonance.
They experience pleasures and prefer them to pains. They dislike the pains and
seek to avoid them, but if they cannot, they experience a further pain at the state
they are in. They are imperfect. Pleasures seem fleeting and they long for their re-
occurrence.
For Stoicism, there are two different categories, the human and the divine, and
the divine is part of what it is to be human. The human without the divine is little
more than another animal. In fact, the human can quite often be worse than the
animal, because humans can use some shade of reason to make themselves
worse. Humans have proven to be great organizers of death, for example, but also
act very effectively in support of life.
We have emerged with the necessary impulses that preserve us in our world, and
though these impulses can become abstracted from their best purpose, we know
that we have also emerged with an eye to what is better through a certain kind of
knowledge.

Some simulacrum of reason is the constant habit of the human mind, being really
just the way in which an individual finds and sustains themself in the society of
language, communication, and emotions. But pure reason is most fruitful of all,
and requires training (techne), and this the purpose that Stoicism attends to.
Our guiding soul (the one that uses pure reason) is akin to God as the pyr
technikon, the active principle seen to work in the manner of a fire, the trained
and training fire, an intelligence (noeron) built of process which is like a mind
(noos) at work in everything, whether manifest in a simple or a complex process,
the cause of motion held in check, it proceeds (badizon) step after step
compounding and reaching out, ‘orderly’ from a detached view. It generates what
can be considered as ordered (epi genesin kosmou) from a larger view. “epi/eph”
is the reaching manner, ‘towards’ generation. “eph’ hemin” (Epictetus’ Discourses
1.1) or “what is within our reach” being the ethos of growth or ‘nature’ (physis).
Faulty reasoning (or ‘vice’) is simply human, but good reasoning (or ‘virtue’) is
divine, and the divine, whether seen as ‘God’ or as some other ultimate, is the
category above what is simply human. It contains an idea of perfection that is
innate to us, but easily clouded over unless we are wise to what we should and
shouldn’t concern ourselves with. In many ways this idea of perfection informs
civilization as well.
The word “divine” in its Latin origin relates back to the word for “god” (deus), that
has branched out to many other languages from a very early common origin (The
Indo-European reconstruction is *deywos, which became Sanskrit deva as well as
Greek dia and zeus.) It is a group of words associated with the sky and its obvious
importance. The sky gives us sunshine and rain (English day and Latin dies are also
related to *deywos through the root *dyew – to shine). The power of life is
correctly seen to emanate from the power of the sky, but interestingly another
related word dives is used of land that is “fertile”, of people who are “talented”,
figuratively of “wealth”, of anything overflowing with life. The divine from above
is mirrored in the divine springing up from below. This is the psychological
significance at play, but there is a perceptible balance at play as well that we are
able to benefit from: a golden mean.

Within us there is assumed to be our daimon. A personal guiding spirit (our genius
in Latin). It is a kind of deity in itself, which should enlighten us as to what deity is.
It is the god within, being also what people are talking to when engaged in prayer
and other similar activities where this ‘presence’ is either felt or played with, but
one need not see it as separate at all, instead one may embody it. So it is
important that this presence is the right one.
A ‘good’ daimon is one that guides well or ably (eu-), and we could say conversely
that an able daimon (eu-daimon) is one that has been treated with reverence. It is
our own guidance as an harmonious part of the whole. Our affinity (oikeiosis).
Seneca shows that the very presence of the eternal is there within us if we only
realise. In Letters 41.1 he writes:

‘Prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est’
“God is near to you, is with you, is within.”

which I’ve translated to be as close to the Latin as possible. That’s “God is near to
you, God is with you, God is within” to be explicit.
In the next verse: “a sacred spirit (sacer spiritus) abides inside of us, a guardian
(custos) and an observer of our bad and our honourable deeds.”
Guardian, which is custos may also have the double-entendre of tutor. spiritus
could likely be interchangeable with anima (soul) in this period, as a word for the
life within us (literally: breath), but is here denoting the daimon, the sacer spiritus
being eudaimon, to use the adjectival form.
An interesting quote is then supplied by Seneca from Vergil’s Aeneid: “Who is the
god, it is undecided, but a god lives here.” It suggests that the identity of gods or
God is an afterthought, and may hint at the Stoic view of religion, when you
consider the start of 41.1: “We do not need…to beg the keeper of a temple to let
us approach his idol’s ear (aurem simulacri)”. As with names, so with images
(simulacra).
The external God acting in the universe but not of the universe* is a form of
simulacrum in itself, an idol. Plato’s distorted, as opposed to ‘faithful’

representation maybe. (* the Christians’ imperative for the individual to be “in
the world but not of the world” refers instead to the typical consensus of society,
and is worthy of Stoicism)
But the spiritus appears to be referring to something different to God (if indeed
anything is different to God). It is the indwelling spirit that is sacer, dedicated to
God, sharing in what is divine itself. So for Seneca there is this matter of
distinction, the same Stoic distinction understood by Epictetus in Discourses
(1.14.13-14):
“To what other guardian could he have entrusted us that would have been better
and more vigilant than this? And so, when you close your doors and create
darkness within, remember never to say that you’re on your own, for in fact, you’re
not alone, because God is within you, and your guardian spirit too. And what need
do they have of light to see what you’re doing? “
But God and the sacer spiritus are not necessarily two different things, just two
different contexts of the divine. The spiritus being particularised within the
person. I suppose that’s where the word “difference” is imperfect, because the
difference in this case, is the universal to the particular, and my opinion is that we
can’t make objects out of either of these, and I think that’s ultimately the
implication of the quote from Seneca, that “God is near to you, is with you, is
within.”
To illustrate (imperfectly of course), the energy in lightning is the same as the
electricity in a circuit board – that would not be unreasonable to say – but there is
a difference. But it really relates to the point of Letter 41, that when we act with
virtue we come closer to the knowledge of the divine within us. The sacer spiritus
in our life.
To quote a fragment of Chrysippus: “This is the very thing which makes up the
virtue of the happy person and the well-flowing life – when the affairs of life are in
every way tuned to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will

of the director of the universe.” or we could simply say the will of the universe
being the same as what directs it, from the largest to the smallest force. We are
now in the possession of minute relevance, and this specialisation objectifies
many things. In Stoicism there is a greater relevance presumed.

V

Once again: Is eudaimonia simply something that happens to us and is beyond our
ability to affect?
I’ll answer that in a round about way by saying that the bottom up distinction is to
do with our education in virtue. It’s up to us to keep that spiritus divine.
Within the earlier religious/literary ideas of the ancient world the greater
daimones are described as demigods, mortals created by the gods to live a godlike
life
without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested
not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting
beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome
with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them
fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands
with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods. But after the
earth had covered this generation—they are called pure spirits dwelling on the
earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men.

Hesiod, Works and Days 115-122
(Hugh G. Evelyn-White translation – 1914)
after dying they were still seen to be dwelling on the earth for our benefit. As
tutelary deities they were honoured with rites but quite faceless compared with
the greater, immortal gods, who created them in this state.

Myths as part of the literary and dramatic output of the ancients were as relevant
or inspiring of philosophical reflection as that same output is relevant to
philosophy today, where we have the added dimension of film. But, there was
also a greater interaction with the forces perceived in “myth”, that of the ritual
life.
The gods represent collective psychological interactions with types defined by
that interaction itself. They are images arrayed with significant attributes and
their interplay contribute to an image of the world played out in myth, but it is
the very same in film and literature to this day. In the same way stories have
become attached to them as a form of entertainment that varies in its salience
according to the author. They may only be gratuities to the emotions that drive
the interest that they hold or they may have wider and more virtuous
significance. But regardless, they are ways of seeing ourselves. The significance of
motifs within entertainment are the food of philosophical involvement. What is
presented, both in stories and in the real that they interpret, can be shown by
another related word: daimonios – the ‘extraordinary’ and thus the ‘inscrutable’.
But for eudaimonia, which can be read as “blessedness”, to alight from the divine
in the form of the true good, there must be eu-daimonios, where the inscrutable,
the inscrutable path, the divine, or whatever is analogous to that state, is
‘revealed’. A state of guidance rather than becoming, because we already exist.
Daio, as the root of daimon shows that ‘what is daimon’ is ‘what is apportioned’.
Eudaimon is a state that is risen to, wherein the eu-daimon is the host, like at a
banquet, and what we “partake of” (dainumi in the middle/passive voice) is
knowledge as state of being, and thus in that state of being we are “host”
(dainumi in the active voice) to eudaimon reflexively.
This theme of the banquet presents a simile of the ethos of the times when
animal sacrifices to gods were an institution. One regular type of sacrifice was
when animals, dedicated to a god, were slaughtered and cooked in the temple.
The people present, being worshippers of the god, were served this meat as food.
The animals sacrificed in these cultures and in modern cultures where some
modicum of animal sacrifice persists, are those animals favoured as meat. (For

example, sheep and birds in Ancient Israel; and pigs, chickens, and ducks in China
to this day.)
There is a sense in which the bringing of an offering is assistance in the service of
the divine and what it represents. This is one way of seeing the “temple”: As,
instead of one’s own ‘body’ (as is canonically supposed), it can rather be other
people. We can bring assistance to others in their service of virtue. When one
brings assistance to another, both are brought closer to the divine. The example
of a “temple” being the oikeiosis (affinity) in its ‘ecosystem’ and economy.
I wonder about the relation between virtue and healing. People also go to
temples to seek healing, to be brought back to a state of health. This is a kind of
inversion, where something is sought of the divine. Of course though, healing is
within.

Just as this spirit is treated by us, in such a way it also treats us
Hic prout a nobis tractatus est, ita nos ipse tractat.

— Seneca, Letter 41.2b
What we describe as religion was a very laissez faire affair in the pre-Christian
world, which we can see outlined in Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana. But this
even pertains within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the cults of Saints,
Sheikhs, and Ravs. It also reminds me of Hinduism to this day, and the various
Buddhist syncretisms of East Asia. There is a universality to these forms of
significance. But often they carry built-in critiques of temple fiefdoms and their
routine animal sacrifices. Critiques that you find not only amongst the
Pythagoreans, but in the Hebrew prophets of the Bible as well. That the divine is
of a common substance to our intellect and that virtue is its modus operandi, is
very much echoed in Stoicism, while in the Bible it is that God can be better
served or reached with virtue, and that virtue is God’s main desire.
We might say that the biblical or classically theistic God apportions rewards, and
the Stoic God shares in a substance with us that is its own reward. It is eudaimon,
being an apportioning of the divine, that nourishes the soul that holds it in
reverence.

VI

I’m displaying here an hermeneutical method for dealing with all that is involved
in the idea of the Stoic god, in as far as it relates to eudaimonia. But you may not
need this at all.
In as much as the revelation of ‘knowledge as eudaimonia’ works psychologically
to connect us to our more natural state of oikeiosis, that is: affinity with nature
and with fate in the form of circumstance, eudaimonia is also connecting us with
a truth that is like Kant’s noumena, which I’ll typify very basically as those things
that are real but remain hidden until known.
Truth is the goal of the journey from daimonios (what is obscure and unknown) to
that which becomes known through eudaimonia (that which guides well) by the
means of Stoic logic.
This is the path of science towards revelation of knowledge, by that which guides
us well enough to discover noumena previously hidden, and this too can be
eudaimonia – being (or Being) rightly guided by the faculties within ourselves
shown enough respect to be trained in the virtues that lead to truth.
There is another issue here though: That all of the virtues must be used, which is
to say that none must be neglected.
That will bring me to the next stage of this exposition, Part 2: where I’ll delve into
the significance of the story of Prometheus…

 —-Khyel Walker, June 2023