Gordian Knot - Use of The Phrase

Use of The Phrase

• Brian Coless has suggested that Donald Wiseman "cut the Gordian knot" of "the intractable problem of identifying King Darius the Mede" in the Book of Daniel, by identifying Darius with Cyrus the Great.

• W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn recounts the episode of Joseph Conrad who was shot or shot himself in the chest allowing him to "Cut the Gordian Knot" of a stormy love affair.

• In Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County, Bill Fordham uses the phrase to describe his marital problems with his wife Barbara when he says to her: "Just because you and I are struggling with this Gordian knot doesn't make me any less of a --"

• Lord Upjohn, speaking of the allocation of beneficial interests between the parties under a constructive trust in National Provincial Bank Ltd v Ainsworth, said that the parties' affairs are sometimes so inextricably intermixed that "an equitable knife must be used to sever the Gordian Knot".

• Gottfried Leibniz argues in his essay On Nature Itself that refusing to acknowledge an active force in things and instead "simply to absorb this force into a command of God’s - a command given just once in the past, having no effect on things and leaving no traces of itself in them - is so far from making the matter easier to grasp that it is more like abandoning the role of the philosopher altogether and cutting the Gordian knot with a sword."

• Charles Spurgeon, preaching at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England, made mention of the "many gordian knots which wicked men may cut, and which righteous men may try to unravel, but which God alone can untie."

• Albert Camus, in his lecture at the University of Uppsala on December 14th, 1957, used the Gordian knot as a metaphor for the civilization falling apart at the sword of rampant politics of power and nihilism of the 20th century. He called for the new-born artists, the "anti-Alexanders", to heal the wound and repair the knot: "Yes, the rebirth is in the hands of all of us. It is up to us if the West is to bring forth any anti-Alexanders to tie together the Gordian Knot of civilization cut by the sword. For this purpose, we must assume all the risks and labors of freedom."

• Jean Paul Sartre, "In Sein und Zeit Heidegger seems to have profited by study of his predecessors and to have been deeply impressed with this twofold necessity: (1) the relation between "human-realities" must be relation of being; (2) this relation must cause "human-realities" to depend on one another in their essential being. A least his theory fulfills these two requirements. In his abrupt, rather barbaric fashion of cutting Gordian knots rather than trying to untie them, he gives in answer to the question posited a pure and simple definition." (from "Being and Nothingness", Wash. Sq. Press, 1956, p330)