Hubert Dreyfus lecture series on Homer's Odyssey

Back to it (sorry for the long digression, but I was inspired by some esoteric god or other).

You'll notice that, if Homer says Helen is frequently possessed by Aphrodite, he doesn't judge her for it, even if she's very happily married. It's simply a fact that, when she meets new people, she tends to have Aphrodite around somewhere, and so she sees everything in an erotic way. That's just the way some people are most of the time, and even those of us who aren't usually like that get stricken every now and then by it.

Question from inaudible student—No, it isn't right to say that they're inspired with a new way of thinking. It's more than that, and that's too internal. It's a new way of being or of relating to the world. When Telemachus became a man suddenly, he was so transformed that there was something godlike about him. Everyone noticed it immediately. Reading: "Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace that held their eyes on him." It's not just his thinking that's transformed, it's his posture, the look in his eyes, the way he talks, and how people pay attention to him when he talks. He's just a different—he's become a grownup. Nobody paid attention to him before. It has to be a big dramatic change in a person. A god doesn't inspire you to buy a hot fudge sundae when you're at the market, that's too trivial. If it isn't on the level of world-attuning, then I think the gods aren't there, then it's just people doing what they're supposed to do.

Then after Athena left and was no longer inspiring him, he lost the gift for oratory, he lost all their attention, he started sort of whining and complaining, and became sort of the ordinary schlub he was before. He regresses to a child when Athena and Mentes aren't around. It's not magic—you can't turn a boy into a man just like that. He just has a temper tantrum. He throws his rod, his scepter, to the ground, and he cries. The moral, I want to say is, that the gods are not magical, they can't make him have the skill of being a prince and an orator, just when they're actually there and active (I think is what he's trying to say, he got very confused and confusing here).

And I think we just hit the end of a lecture, It's very hard to tell. And I don't know which lecture.

The conscious mind is very language-based, it's the part of the mind that uses language and that developed it, and language shapes what we're able to think about. If we don't have a word or can't put words together in a familiar way to describe something, then it's very difficult to talk or think about it. This becomes clear when you remember being a child, who didn't yet have certain concepts for certain things. It would be difficult, you'd have to struggle, when adults were trying to teach you some of these terms, because you hadn't thought about them before, you didn't have the words for it. The hardest things to think or talk about are abstract ideas, like emotions or thoughts or the inner things that have no material reality. If you want to talk about a material object you can just point to it or crudely draw it in the ground or mime it. But it's much harder to do that for internal emotions or thoughts, especially thoughts of an abstract nature. It took a very long time to develop mathematics, because numbers are very abstract. You don't see numbers lying on the ground or growing in trees. You can see a pile of apples, and then at some point somebody got the idea that there are a certain number of them, but he didn't have a word for 'number.' If you wanted to get across the idea of twelve apples to somebody, you had to show them a pile of twelve apples. Gradually, if the person was pretty smart in the abstract realm and willing to work with you, you could, probably between the two of you, start to work out a way to get this weird idea across. Maybe they found they could make a hand gesture that represents Twelve, and they both understood what it meant. But nobody else did, and it was hard to get it across to them. And even when they had maybe taught their entire family about twelve, then one of the kids suddenly was inspired by a god (let's call him Pythagoras) with the number 6. Well shit, what strange magic is this?! Maybe Ugg, who originally noticed the number twelve, gets mad, he thinks Grunt is trying to steal his thunder, and he totally can't understand that twelve is just one of many possible numbers. A war might develop, between the Twelvians and the Sixians. And then there steps forward some forward thinker who begins the cult of "They're both true!" And then they hear about a family down the road who came up with something they call Three.

What if they went to the top of Mount Olympus and there were no gods there, would they lose their religion? (Rhetorical question posed by Dreyfus). No, they think of the whole thing in another ontological way, gods exist of a different plane of exsitance or Being. They don't exist the same way we do. They don't even think it, they experience it somehow. The gods are the names for these events, which are very important, these life-changing moments of inspiration. They don't think of it as an inner thing or an outer thing, they think of it as whether a person is attuned or not. If you're out of attunement with the world as it is, then you need the help of a god to bring you into attunement.

In response to un-hearable student question: No, it isn't really an abstraction, it's something different and more real than that. There is an ontological level in which we move through different worlds, and each god rules one of the worlds. Aphrodite is the goddess of erotic love for instance, because when we're in that world it has a different set of characteristics than the worlds of planting or fishing or war (I often forget his specific wording and have to substitute my own). When things get erotic, Aphrodite is around, and when things get aggressive, Ares is around. What does it mean that they're around? I think it's just calling attention to the fact that the world can become erotic, and that that's something very powerful which nobody is able to control, and it isn't a question of the willpower of the people, or the beliefs of the people involved. Some people tend to lean in the direction of one god or another, For instance Helen (of Troy I think he means) tends to lean in the direction of Aphrodite, Aphrodite seems to always be around or show up when you're near her. And some people incline toward Ares much of the time, but Areas can suddenly show up even in the life of someone who is normally much more inclined toward Aphrodite or Hera or whatever god.

It's a language convention. How do you talk about what we today would call moods or inclinations or tendencies or personality traits, when they didn't know anything about psychology yet, and had no idea of an inner world? Abstract concepts are very difficult to talk about when you don't have the terms for them yet, and they were very new to the idea of abstract conepts. As I often say, the conscious mind was in the process of developing back then, and that's the part that does the abstract thinking. Before you can just come up with terms like a persoanlity trait, you need to wrestle for a long time with the basic idea of it. Language developed as a way to talk about things, and the things that were important in the beginning were food, shelter, things to run away from, etc. Consciousness itself was developing little by little, and it could only develop as the language allowed it to.

Notes on Odyssey lecture pt. 4
From 1:37:59 to 1:58:00

Ok, so Athena had just inspired Telemachus with the idea that he's a man now, and a potential hero rather than a victim, and she was wearing mentos like a skin-suit when she did it. I think it means Mentos said it, but he was in Athena mode when he did, he was struck with the inspiration to say what needed to be said to activate hero mode in Telemachus. So Mentos was possessed by the Athena spirit when he said that. But in Homer's world and time, it isn't that Athena changed anything internal in Telemachus, anything psychological, she changed his world. He now lives in the world of a man.

His mentors are surprised, but accept that Telemachus was just flipped into manhood by a god. They don't seem to know or care what god, they just understand it was by a god, and that's good enough for them. Here Dreyfus talks for a while about the fact that nobody back then really thought about or talked about the gods in an objective way. They didn't think of them as having bodies, or taking any particular form, in fact they seemed to have a very esoteric idea about them. A god would just suddenly be in someone you're talking to and inspire that person to say something that changes your world. It didn't seem at all surprising to them. In other words, they didn't have a materialist worldview, and gods was just the name they used for any sudden burst of inspiration that would strike, whether it came fROm somebody else, or from within yourself. When a new resolve takes someone over or something of that sort, it's a god working in or through them. They did personify them when they talked or wrote about them, because how else are you going to do it? After all, each god has particular traits that are very human traits but the most perfect versions of them. So the easiest way to conceive of them is as something like people who personify those particular traits, only they're very magical people, they can fly around or suddenly appear somewhere etc. By the way, in checking my spelling of Conceive I was just shown that the first meaning is to give birth. But it also means an idea taking shape or coming into being in your mind. Another human trait or activity. An idea is something like a baby we have in our mind. I suppose it starts off weak and needing some protection, and then it can grow strong and take on its own independent life, much like a child does when they grow up. It's difficult to talk about ideas and the things of the inner world without using metaphors from the external world and some of them are best thought of in personified form. This is why we call gods he or she, and imagine them as people, partly so they can be represented in paintings and carvings etc, but also partly just so we can talk about them meaningfully, otherwise we'd have no language for them.

She tells him "You need not bear this insolence any more, you're a child no longer," and she waves a magic wand over him and he stops being a child. But it's not magic. This is the job of gods. She gets him in tune with his situation. Dreyfus calls it "The Athena Function." It doesn't matter whether it was Mentes who performed it, or Athena—there's a way you can influence another person, in a very important way, by changing their world, by giving them a whole different understanding of what's going on and who they are. That's what Mentes/Athena is doing for him. It's like attuning him to a mood, but it's bigger, it's more realistic and powerful. You get them attuned to the situation, to reality as it exists. You could say Telemachus got 'Inspired.' That literally means a spirit takes over. Remember spirit is the word for air or wind and also for thought/feeling etc. It's the life in a person, the living part. God breathed spirit into Adam to give him life, after making him out of earth. Spirit/inspiration. Same root word. So Telemachus stops feeling like a victim and starts to understand that he's a potential hero.

Notes on Odyssey lecture pt. 3
From 1:25:33 to 1:37:59

Yeah, every day when I look at the lecture video it's defaulted back to zero. I'm writing the number down in Evernote each time (hope I don't forget, it took a few frustrating minutes yesterday to find where I had left off).

Telemachus, Odysseus' son. Today we would say he's driven by inner psychological or emotional urges or drives or desires or motivations, but in Homer's day they said he was driven by a god. The more autonomous you are, the more able to direct your own life by your inner beliefs, convictions, and will, the more mature you are. But they don't understand that. For Homer, if somebody has strong inner convictions and will, it's the work of a god. These two views are called the psychological and the ontological explanation. Onto is the Greek word for Being. Ontology is the study of Being (existence). It's a huge current in philosophy, for instance the contrast between Being and Becoming, or Being and Nothingness. It's neither external nor internal. Apparently the Greeks in Homer's day didn't really even think in terms of an inner. Descartes created the idea of the inner (at least officially). (I'm guessing any time someone has a voice in their head, an inner monologue or dialogue, that's considered the voice of a god? But then what about the responses, from the person? I 'hear' those as a voice too, but that's my voice. Sometimes I answer myself, sometimes the response seems to come from deeper inside. This bothers me in the same way it does when people say "The ancient Greeks couldn't see the color blue, because the sea is always Wine-dark, and they never call the sky blue." Well ok, but that doesn't mean they literally couldn't see the color, just maybe they didn't have a name for it, or Homer (whoever that was) just never mentioned it. Maybe he just really loved the wine-dark thing and used it as his favorite convention. I suspect the idea of an inner dimension was floating around and some people got it, but the culture as a whole didn't recognize it yet, and they didn't really have words or the concept of it fully formed yet.) The ontological is neither inner nor outer, it's more basic than either.

Telemachus is 19 or 20, his dad has been gone all his life so far, from right after he was born, and now there are all these suitors living in the house (it's a large estate with expansive grounds as I understand it), they all treat him as a kid, and so does his mom. He's getting the idea that he needs some kind of purpose, something to do to get him out of that situation and to be able to see himself maybe as a man. Athena had said to Zeus, a few pages back, "I'll go visit Ithaca and stir up the son of Odysseus." So he's old enough to grow up and take over his father's job (as the king of Ithaca), but he's just sitting around daydreaming and doing nothing. If you take the psychological view, you'd say he needs to have better beliefs and more courage to do it, but that's not how it happens in Homer. So Athena shows up in the form of an old friend of the family. He's daydreaming what if his father showed up and drove these men like dead leaves from the palace (oh wow, it's a palace. Well I guess so, since Odysseus was the king). So Mentes, the old family friend, arrives and tells Telemachus that he should take action and do something about these suitors, who are taking a lot of liberties with the palace and eating up all the food and constantly hitting on his mom. But it's said that it wasn't really Mentes, it was Athena in the form of Mentes. She didn't really give him courage, she gave him something much more powerful and useful. She gave him an understanding of the situation, and of who he is. And the way to express it is, she's turning him from a child into a man.

But unfortunately Jung's discoveries didn't become widely known, because he pissed off Big Daddy Freud and got himself excommunicated from what went on to become the ruling paradigm of psychological practice around the world. So, I guess like Woodstock, his writings became segregated off and are available to whoever wants to seek them out, but never reached the widespread popularity I think they should have. Well ok, I guess spiritual seeking has never and will never be popular or for the masses. I mean, not in the modern world anyway.

Jung's approach is a rainbow of different religions

Had some more thoughts on the single attitude, or mood, or interpretation, or perspective of monotheism. I'm still not quite sure what he means by it, but this is my latest round of thoughts—

As far as I know Judeo-Christianity is the first religion to see itself as 'for everyone in the world,' rather than just being a local religion only for a particular tribe. It doubtless began as just a local religion of the Jews, but at some point it expanded and became a religion that included anyone willing to follow it. But of course it also includes the idea that it's The Only True Religion, and Thou Shalt Not worship any false idols etc. I think of that as common to all religions, but it might just be common to the monotheisms, I don't know.

My own take on religion is the Jungian one. He studied them all through the lens of psychology (his own variety of it, which is built from the truths he discovered in the religions and mythologies of the world), and he found that most if not all of them contain certain ideas in common, if expressed somewhat differently, but they also all contain big differences. Again I'll reiterate that I think Dreyfus might misunderstand Jung's take, and confuse it with Joseph Campbell's, which seems to be that all religions are essentially the same, with different surface trappings. Jung was well aware of the many strong and often incompatible differences in various religions. But he was also aware that many of them, in their own way, expressed certain very similar takes on the unconscious and its relation to the conscious mind. For example, the many different branches of Alchemy had some very different sets of ideas, some of which shared certain core truths about how to come into a better relation with the unconscious (basically this is the core of all religions founded by people who have experienced it for themselves). Once you've had an experience of recognition of the deep unconscious, which can come from a psychedelic experience, a dream, a vision, or in many other ways, you become aware of it and either try to wall yourself off from it (if you fear it), or dedicate your life to trying to experience it more and hopefully bring yourself (your conscious awareness) into better alignment with it. If you manage to succeed at that task, you will eventually reach what's been called a spiritual awakening—a much more full awareness of the unconscious and a union with the core of it, that he called the Self or the Archetype of the Self (the Higher Self), based in large part on the Hindu Atman concept. He found all these similarities between spiritual and religious practices all around the world, and it became clear they were all referring to the same inner process he had discovered himself. Many of them used very different terminology and some used different methods, but essentially, when it came to this particular process of awakening to the inner reality of the unconscious, they had all made the same discoveries.

In his writings he referred to these truths sometimes in psychological terms, but he also discussed the terminologies and the different perspectives of some of them, and tried to understand where many of them aligned and where they differed. So really what he did was take many different perspectives (interpretations, moods, attitudes, what-have-you), and try to ferret out the commonalities that aligned with the truths he was discovering in the human psyche. I wouldn't call that "only one perspective." He discovered the one from the many, and the many from the one. In fact quite literally, it's what Dreyfus is calling "Cobbling together bits and pieces of various other viewpoints or moods or perspectives." This is why I'm open to so many different religious/spiritual paths and mythologies and folk tales/fairy tales etc, all of which contain truths about the psyche couched in various metaphors, without being attached to any of them in a dogmatic way.

So I now think Dreyfus is referring to becoming dogmatically attached to one particular branch/sect of religion and rejecting all others and every other viewpoint, such as science. Hopefully what he means becomes more clear as this goes forward. Because, don't all religions demand that "There Can Be Only One?" I mean, including the polytheisms?

"He (Melville) thinks something essential was lost. He worries about the fanaticism, people being so fanatical about God"

Ok, I think this must be what's meant by the single attitude or mood of monotheism. Maybe.

This is weird, I can't tell where one lecture ends and the next begins. This might be lecture 3 now, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll just stop numbering them in the titles.

Melville worries about the loss of polytheism in his own time. He thinks something essential was lost. He worries about the fanaticism, people being so fanatical about God, and about people with no religion at all. He thinks both ways are wrong, and that the polytheism of the Greeks was better.

Leni Riefenstahl tried to show in Triumph of the Will that Hitler was a work of art for the time, that he articulated what it was to be the perfect German. But it's hard to define what makes the good ones work and the bad ones not work. It's something to do with—struggles to define them. The good works of art are constantly being haggled over and argued over, trying to understand exactly what they mean, rather than just a single interpretation being forced on it and all others crushed out. It's not a real work of art if you have to enforce just one way to interpret it, it's some sort of a fanatical version of a work of art. You're trying to create the culture rather than articulating a culture that already exists. Jesus was certainly a work of art, and now, even 2,000 years later, people are still struggling to figure out how to interpret it and what it means. There are many ways to interpret his meaning. It either has to crush all the competition, which is what Hitler did, or people are going to constantly struggle over the interpretation.

I was going to talk about modern writings where people say that Homer didn't understand things as well as we do today, these kind of smug interpretations, where the people are so lost in just their own modern interpretation they don't even understand what they're reading or how it worked if you lived in ancient Greece. And I think they were inside the modernist interpretation, which we haven't got anymore. Remember the modern interpretation was about subjects and objects. They believed they understand that we're subjects, and that what goes on in us is so important and psychological that it—this is very important, they think this is what Homer was missing, they believe Homer was stupid. But what it is, is a psychological way of thinking about us, in which we believe that we've got inside of us our beliefs, our desires, our fantasies, our ambitions, and so forth, and it's in terms of these psychological states, which are in our minds, and even our moods are in us. Homer would have said: "He's in a mood," but Descartes would say: "a mood is in him." To Homer a mood was something that takes over a party or some kind of gathering. But it's psychological, it's Cartesian, to think that we have all this in us, and of course these moderns think Homer didn't understand that, that he didn't think there was any inner.

Having an inner was something people had to work very hard to convince themselves of, and Homer was already interested in whether there was anything inner. You'll understand better when I'm talking about it. I'm gonna talk about the difference between the psychological way of looking at us, which in the Homeric... Well, Homer has one moment where he sees something inner going on, and he thinks it's so strange that he has to stop and mention it. There's a place where, at one of these dinner parties, there's singing and harp playing, and they're singing about the great Odysseus. Odysseus is there, listening to his own story, and what happens in Troy, and his friends were all being killed, and he says he listened, and his heart ached, but his eyes were bone dry. He had this secret, and that's amazing, he's the only one in the book who can do it. They're all crying all over the place in Homer. We've all got that secret now, we can all cry inwardly now and our eyes stay dry as bone.

The Christians were a big step toward the inner. The people's desires were very important, and sort of defined who they were. Homer didn't talk about anybody's desires. He just doesn't care about their desires, any more than he cares about their dreams or their fantasies, or their beliefs. He just wants to see what they're doing and whether they're in synch with the world. But Augustine has this amazing ploy in Confessions, where he talks about the fact that people came from all over to watch St. Jerome read the Bible. Now what could he be doing that would be so interesting that people would come from miles away to see him reading the Bible? He was reading it to himself instead of out loud. He had discovered that he could communicate with his own inner self, without having to go through listening to himself read. And of course that's another step toward this inner.

When ancient Greeks thought about what we call inner thoughts and desires etc, they had to say: "The gods put them there." They don't understand the subject's own consciousness. (I think this is what's called the Bicameral Mind?)

So you see how the course is laid out. I didn't choose these books, they're the works of art that have created the epochs of the West. Don Quixote is a great book and a really interesting piece of literature, but it didn't establish a world. In fact it sort of made fun of a world. And it's always good to have a counter-example, so you understand the limits of what you're looking at. Goethe when he wrote Faust was trying to create a work of art, and the Germans take it very seriously, but it doesn't work I think (says Dreyfus), but I don't know why. I'll have to think of why. I think it's something like all aspects of the culture don't fall under it, the way if you believe in a creator god, everything is a part of creation. If anything it's got as lot to do with Will. Is Faust enough of a figure—does he possess the will? I don't know. The test is—does it give things their look and people their outlook?

(Inaudible comment from a student) Yes, that's an interesting point. Cervantes and Goethe and Proust were mirroring their times. They didn't really articulate a new outlook, they were making a copy of what it looks like to live in their time and their place (my own thought is that it also wasn't during a big paradigm change).

In America we treat the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as works of art that created our culture (and I agree, I was thinking this from the beginning). We continually refer to them in disputes etc, and most of us have parts of them memorized. They definitely show us the way to be an excellent American, and they enshrine the values and principles that we live by. A work of art doesn't have to be a book, the Greek temple (Parthenon? Pantheon?) is a work of art in this sense, and plays can be as well. Why not a founding document?

Some talk about Woodstock and how it was sort of a sub-work of art, but not everybody was included. It was only for a certain group within the society, not for everybody. And then Dreyfus says we now live in a different culture that doesn't have any defining work of art, and he says he doesn't understand why.

My thought is that it's because we've thrown out that entire mode of thinking, we've become materialists, and we no longer believe in any kind of spirit. Our forefathers believed strongly in the spirit of liberty and liberalism (from the same root word), and of independence articulated by the Declaration and the Constitution, but today's materialists disbelieve in the entire notion of any kind of spirit of anything, or rather they insist on reducing it down to something trivial. They understand when you say a spirit of adventure or school spirit or my spirits are down, or lift my spirits, but they refuse to believe in a bigger or more binding spirit that can hold together an entire society and turn it into a nation. Somehow they see that as superstitious. I see it as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in the sense that they think science is somehow analogous to a binding spirit that can hold a society together. But it isn't. Science is only a method of obtaining facts and data about the world. Science can't be the work of art that holds us together—it doesn't articulate what it means to be an excellent man or woman, an excellent American, or anything else. It just points out facts. It's only a method of investigation. (Contiued)

Notes on Odyssey lecture 2:
From about 45 minutes to 1:25:33

History of Being—First there were things—objects in the world around us. Then there were creatures, because God created everything, then there were subjects and objects, because Descartes created a new language for it or a new paradigm or way to look at things (new perspective, new style etc). And now there's a new way. Now we see everything as resources and try to maximize our ability to use them. And it doesn't change gradually, it's punctuated equilibrium. There are these huge sudden changes that upset the whole apple cart.

The Humanist understanding is that the great books (our knowledge) just keep getting it better and better, righter and righter, it's telling us universal truths, it's trying to get a copy of reality. If you're a humanist you think that works of art are good if they're a good copy. And the word for this copying function is Mimesis. For humanists art doesn't do this job, of focusing the culture, it just tells the people in a groping way what's true, and it doesn't need preservers. It's just a fact about the way people are. If it's just a copy, if it's just a great book, it's not making the people what they are. If it's gonna be a work of art that's working (to use that Heidegger talk), then it's got to not only hold up a mirror to the people, what they all share, but they've got to appreciate it, and have rituals and celebrations that continually affirm and reaffirm it.

Oh wow, this just hit me. Poiesis means to create, and this epic poetry like the Aeneid or the Iliad or the Odyssey actually created a culture. The Bible created a culture and defined it. The Upanishads, the Koran, the Torah.

People used The Odyssey to settle arguments. It showed everything at its best, and what it is to be a Greek. It shows the excellent father (Odysseus), the excellent son (Telemachus), the excellent wife (Penelope). It creates standards or benchmarks that people then try to live up to. Ideals. They use it in disputes, to settle moral issues, to settle legal issues, they know it by heart. Most educated Athenians knew whole chunks of The Iliad and The Odyssey by heart, the way people once upon a time knew The Bible by heart. And like The Bible, they'll quote it on occasion to set up whatever's going on (I think he means at certain solemn or ritual occasions). And as long as they do that they're doing this preserving job. It's working because it's organizing their culture. As long as they keep doing that then it's a living work of art, but as soon as they stop it dies. The work of art dies, and the culture dies with it. So when The Odyssey dies, there'll be no more polytheism, at least not that kind of polytheism.

But I just want to point ahead, to where we're heading. But fragments will remain. Fragments of the old worlds will get put together in some way that makes it possible for a new world, that brings back some of the things Homer saw that we lost track of. Remember I mentioned last time the importance of moods, and what a culture is like where moods are important. We'll see that again and again in The Odyssey. Different gods represent, or are personifications of different moods. And a polytheistic culture takes all those moods seriously, and it has a kind of pluralism, because there's a plurality of moods, and a kind of tolerance, because these different moods are like different worlds, and it's good to be able to be at home in several different worlds. It's not at all obvious that monotheism does that very well, that function of being tolerant and pluralistic, the way Homer did.

The works we read in this course are the works that focused culture. Homer did it for the Homeric culture, Aeschylus did it for the Athenian culture when they became the classical Greeks so to speak. Virgil did it for the Romans. In fact he's the only one who got paid to write a work of art. Augustus said: "Go write a book that shows us who we are and what we believe in," and Dante put together an absolutely total, complete picture of the Medieval world. It's totalness and its completeness was part of the point of it. And Luther set up a whole new world. And then it sort of stops. Well, Descartes is part of that modern world—that Luther and Descartes and Kant sort of finish. And now we don't have any. And that's an interesting question we'll have to talk about again at the end—why we don't have any, and could we get one back, and what would we salvage if we did. (Continued)

Well this is frustrating! This video isn't broken up into sections for each lecture like the Moby Dick one was, plus for some reason YouTube won't save my progress on it. I kept a tab open for the Moby Dick video continually, and each time I checked in the red line across the bottom showed my progress, and the video would start playing from right where I left off. But today I checked in (kept the video open in its own tab just like before), and it had defaulted back to the beginning. Guess I need to always post the timestamp at the end of each entry.

Ok, all that talk about culture helps me understand why Melville believed you need multiple perspectives on life, not just a single one. Perspectives are like cultures, when you shift into a new one you become more able to understand your original perspective (which you didn't before, you took it for granted and it went unexamined). It's starting to make more sense now.