/lit/ - Literature

>>11084317

>Why so little Hellenism? It's all proto-indo-european, right?

Yes but it's not a living tradition (unlike the ones in the East which are still alive) but effectively died out with the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the closing of the Platonic Academy and definitively with the end of the Byzantium (by which time it was arguably long dead). Secondly the metaphysical teachings of the hellenics don't even begin to approach the sophistication of the great eastern traditions. The Greco-Roman religion itself was for the most part devoid of metaphysical teaching and mostly revolved around aesthetics, ancestor worship and paying homage to the gods at the proper and auspicous times. The only genuinely metaphysical teachings found in the Hellenic world were found in the various mystery cults, a few philosophers and a few fringe groups like the Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists. Plotinus's Enneads are great but them or anything else from the Hellenic world don't even come close to the Upanishads and Brahma Sutras, or any of the dozens of other major Hindu texts, to say nothing of Islamic and East Asian.

It was not at all established as part of any tradition but was carried on sporadically in small and relatively inaccessible groups. Well, what does that matter one might ask? Well it matters because when it is not taught as part of a tradition that is central to it's host culture it ends up being lost to time which is exactly what happened. Arguably the reason that the West is so devoid of Metaphysical traditions is because the few instances of it occurring in Western history were in fringe groups. If Neoplatonism was taught and propagated all throughout the Roman Empire than Europe might have a Traditional culture today similar to Eastern ones, but it wasn't. Compare that to India where you have an entire caste of people devoted to studying, teaching and propagating the Vedas and metaphysical knowledge. The result is all these subjects have been dealt with much more extensively in Eastern thought than in Greek thought, where much of the metaphysical groups didn't even produce much writings and those that did produced barely anything compared to the eastern cultures.

>I suggest reading Uzdavinys who is a great perennialist who links Greek philosophy to Egyptian mytho-theology

I agree that he is good but the reason you have to rely on scholars like him to piece together a bunch of fragments of evidence is precisely because Greek culture was so lacking in genuinely metaphysical teachings that there are very few texts that delve into it and instead you are forced to rely on after-the-fact analysis instead of the thousands of texts and there commentaries and the tertiary commentaries on those commentaries that you find in India.

>Much more comensurable with the post-Kantian turn.

lol