Astral Codex Ten

Achilles

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Achilles

Article

Achilles is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 08, 2022 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Snake Island is the final resting place of Achilles”; “Hammurabi and Gilgamesh get more play relative to Solon and Achilles”; “your model for a noble should be Achilles”. It most often appears alongside US, Puritans, 4chan.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: March 08, 2022
  • Last seen: August 08, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
j. In Greek mythology, Snake Island, where Ukrainian soldiers famously defied a Russian warship, is the final resting place of Achilles, who sometimes appears to residents.
Inline links: the final resting place of Achilles
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept. Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World. The earlier past is moving into the light, too. Ancient states like Babylon and Egypt are gradually coming alive: Hammurabi and Gilgamesh get more play relative to Solon and Achilles. And before that, the real prehistory of the first cities, the Neolithic, the growth of agriculture, the end of the Ice Age at 10,000 BC, modern humans around 100,000 BC, the first humans at 1mya (million years ago)… these dates are gradually getting fixed in the mind as turning points in the story of us.
Inline links: story of us
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
In the beginning (says Nietzsche), the word “good” was synonymous with “noble” - ie the virtues that made the nobility better than the serfs they ruled. This was way back in the Bronze Age, so your model for a noble should be Achilles, Agamemnon, etc.
I want to watch every superhero movie ever filmed. Ozy is very nice and basically never gets compared to barbarian warlords. Still, this essay is a master morality manifesto. Slave morality is goals for dead people. Corpses aren’t greedy. They don’t oppress anyone. They never hurt people. They don’t stand out, or try to be better than anyone else, or express pride. Slave morality is about compulsively making yourself smaller, weaker, less distinctive, and less disruptive to anyone else - which makes corpses the acknowledged experts. Compare Achilles (master morality) to some of the early Christian saints (slave morality). Achilles wants personal glory. He seeks personal glory by being the best - the strongest, the most handsome, the most skilled in warfare - and by doing great deeds of renown. He had the most beautiful armor, the hottest women, and the best soldiers. When Agamemnon offended him, he was willing to let all of Greece perish to piss him off and restore his honor. The early Christian saints definitely didn’t want personal glory - if anyone had tried to glorify them, they would have said something very pious like “I am only a humble servant of God, it is He who should be glorified”. They’re remembered primarily for their excellence in ensmallening themselves. They would fast until they became living skeletons, take vows of silence, or brick themselves in a tiny cell and spend the rest of their lives there. They would wash the feet of lepers out of humility, wear sackcloth to make sure they didn’t get overly proud about their clothing, and whip themselves bloody if they caught themselves having desires. Other religions’ saints are even worse - the Buddhists would try to meditate themselves into nonexistence! At least the saints had the excuse that they were ensmallening themselves so God could fill them up with His own glory. But if you ensmallen yourself, you’ll just end up anxious, miserable, and devoid of accomplishments. And at least the saints were doing this because they genuinely believed in it. For Nietzsche, the essence of slave morality is the herd instinct - ie a distributed mob of people saying “you had better ensmallen yourself if you know what’s good for you” as a sort of sinister backscratcher club. An individual might ensmallen themselves because of personal fealty to slave morality. But more often they’re doing it lest they look like Tall Poppies - people who defect from an unspoken social consensus that everyone ensmallen themselves, and so earn the envy and hatred of their peers. IV. Edward Teach1 The other useful way to think about slave morality is as a package of ideas that lets people avoid positive judgment. (by “positive judgment”, I mean judgment based on whether someone has accomplishments - as opposed to “negative judgment”, judgment based on whether someone has avoided causing harm) This comes from the same place as the embiggening critique. If people can be judged on their accomplishments, then it seems like you should go out and get some accomplishments, ie embiggen yourself. If people can only be judged on their harms, it seems like you should try to avoid causing harm, ie ensmallen yourself. So another way to think about slave vs. master morality is as coefficients on the normal utilitarian equation, good = benefits - harms. Master moralists overweight the benefits term; slave moralists focus on the harms. In a second, I’ll list some strategies for avoiding positive judgment, but first, a warning. All good defense mechanisms contain an element of truth. People deploy these strategies because they’re often true. I’m not saying that these are all false things people only believe for psychological reasons - just that if you notice someone who seems obsessed with them, deploying them far more often than the truth seems to warrant, maybe there’s something psychological going on. You obsess over the idea that the system is rigged. This is an obsession rather than a delusion - the system may very well be rigged, but you care about it way too much. The more rigged the system is, the less you can judge anyone positively for succeeding in it.
Inline links: backscratcher club, 1
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
In the end, I appreciate Nara’s perspective, and I think it’s a useful dichotomy. But I find it hard to interpret in the context of Nietzsche so frequently bringing up Achilles and Cesare Borgia, both of whom went further than just liking the Star Wars movies for the right reasons.
I got the feeling Scott was suggesting that the underachieving masses are embracing slave morality while the successful tycoons of industry today are still "masters." I think this is completely backwards in an age of global capitalism. Spend any time at all with underprivileged boys in the US or boys from macho cultures in unstable developing countries and you will see that they are the true inheritors of Achilles' and "master" morality. Rap music in the US is the ultimate Nietzschean product: a world where what is good is just what gets one ahead: big cars, big houses, hot women, respect. These are the kids who love Andrew Tate, but his ideas are hobbling them in their efforts to get ahead.
At nearly 3,000 years old, the Iliad is very much in vogue, with two recent notable translations by women (Emily Wilson and Caroline Alexander) and a book of criticism aimed at a broad audience, Robin Lane Fox's Homer and His Iliad. I think part of the reason the Iliad still hits home is that its central figure, Achilles, fascinates. He's not just stronger and faster and better-looking than everyone else, he's more thoughtful and eloquent too. People point to his appearance in the underworld in the Odyssey, where he says he'd rather be a hired hand on a farm and alive than rule over all the dead. But his rejection of the heroic ethos is found in the Iliad too. His superhuman strength and beauty can’t save him from being dishonored by Agamemnon. It can’t keep his beloved Patroclus alive. All it’s good for, ultimately, is slaughtering Trojans. Which Achilles does magnificently, when he finally returns to battle; but in a sort of frenzy of despair. To a Trojan begging for mercy, he says: Patroclus is dead; I’ll be dead soon; you die too. He calls himself a useless burden on the earth. At the end when he forgoes violence and returns Hector’s body to his aged father Priam, saying sadly as he does so that he is doing nothing to help his own aged father; instead he sits in Troy, afflicting Priam and his children. And he agrees to hold the Greek army back for two weeks so that the Trojans can give Hector a proper burial.