An Appetite for Knowledge

I have argued elsewhere that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once approached  in terms of conjectures about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These conjectures follow on from the initial question, which is: why is there something rather than nothing? Plato’s argument, following on from propositions made by Parmenides, who declared that we should look only to the one, and that only the one truly is real, is the most sophisticated of all discussions in antiquity concerning why there should be something rather than nothing.

Plato argues that we should always look to the ‘one true thing’. This is different from saying only the one exists, or only the one is truly real.

The anthropologist and classicist J.G. Frazer was very dismissive of Greek questions concerning the one and the many, saying that they constituted ‘popular questions of the day’. The argument of Parmenides about the nature of Being  remained entirely undiscussed by Frazer.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being.*1

This of course is a spectacular instance of intellectual blindness, by which the richness of the intellectual matrix of ancient Greek thought was spirited into nothingness. We like to see Plato’s articulate discussion of Being as the surfacing of a human capacity to grapple with abstract ideas, and the marker of our emancipation from irrational ideas about the world and the gods. For Frazer, Plato was as guilty of intellectual error as any of his contemporaries, as well as his predecessors.

In late Hellenistic times, there seems to have been a very poor grasp of the context of the development of philosophy around the Mediterranean. Nods were made toward the notion that the discipline of philosophy might not have been first developed in Greece, including (tellingly) at the beginning of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers.  Plato after all argued against the idea that this was so in the Protagoras, saying that the practice of philosophy was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and also in Crete. He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks to be very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  

Aristotle presented the common sense view that philosophy was first developed in a place where there was a leisured class, with the time and resources to think about philosophical questions. He may have had Egypt in mind, since Egypt had professionalised priesthoods. Later philosophers such as Porphyry suggested that key parts of Pythagorean doctrine came west to Greece from Babylon, in the late sixth century B.C.E.*2  Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras.*3 Aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in the pages of Herodotus (concerning Solon),*4  and also in Homer’s Iliad (Book 18), where a number of key details associated with the doctrine are run together in close order, without being explained. *5

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on the idea of an initial plenum (which is a philosophical concept) using the image of a sage emerging daily from beneath the sea (symbolising primal fulness and abundance), granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts. *6 He also gave information about the Babylonian New Year festival (Enuma Elish), the liturgy for which contained accounts of two creations: the first irrational, and the second one, rational, and which was given its rational character by the chief of the Babylonian gods.*7  Berossus' book was the Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost. But the christian writer Eusebius had access to it as late as the early fourth century C.E, and quoted a number of passages from it which survive in his writings. Recovered Mesopotamian texts, including tablets containing the Enuma Elish liturgy, generally confirm the accuracy of Berossus. 

Not much of this was of use to the Enlightenment agenda, which preferred to look at the development of philosophy in Greece as the first beginnings of a rational understanding of the world. And so the information was deprecated and ignored. The phrase ‘I doubt that’ is a dangerous one in the classics community. It is a way of saying ‘this is not the consensus view of scholars and the profession’. Usually no discussion follows, since the opinion is usually an opinion of the worth (or otherwise) of evidence. Scholars weigh evidence, and they do so (they are convinced) with better tools than were available to ancient scholars. The judgement is fitted to modern requirements. So, as a result, it is clear that it is unlikely that Solon visited Egypt, and that Pythagoras visited Babylon. Tread carefully, or your credibility as a scholar may be in doubt.

Thus, the scholarly consensus is that philosophy is an autochthonous development. The culture of the modern west rests on this idea.Why in Greece? The idea of the ‘Greek genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard the phrase uttered by people who should know better. But during the high days of the enlightenment, and the beginnings of what became the fully-fledged discipline of Classics, that is what the scholars wanted. Something pure and out of the orbit of other cultures, which, by definition, had no philosophy or anything which would measure up to something like rational thought.

Sometimes history is built backwards. It isn’t just a matter of looking to the historical record and starting from that. History always has been in part about critical scrutiny of sources and judgements, even among the Greeks *8 But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision begun in the enlightenment was wholesale, and created an alternative representation of the origins of European civilisation.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, the philosophe Denis Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopédie, but also about the arts and crafts. The latter may have been wrapped up with myth, folklore, and superstition, but they were still essential to the rational life of man, so these were also added to the Encyclopédie. Everything from the past which served some purpose, or which could be made to serve some purpose within the rational enlightenment model of reality, was critically examined, and reworked to fit what was intended to become a new understanding of man and his place in a new world of reason. A new understanding of how man might live.

I wrote in the article ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ that there are in fact two logical modalities present in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is mostly (though not always) concerned with the modality which has come down to us as the basis of formal logic. Plato is clearly aware of this modality, but, though no modern academic has dared to identify the other modality as logical, it is. It is simply that to us, it does not describe relationships which should be described as logical. Plato  talks about this other logical modality several times, in the Republic and in the Timaeus. It is connected with the doctrine of wholes and totalities, and is the basis of explaining how things may participate in other things, which is not a pattern of ideas which fits with Aristotle’s general understanding of logic.*9

Why is this important? Simply put, it matters because it is the basis of the Greek understanding of how transcendent reality relates to secular and physical existence, which was a matter of great significance up to the middle of the first millennium B.C.E, and beyond.  The doctrine underpins the understanding of the divine as something which can be both transcendent, and immanent, and thus be present in existence. *10 *11 It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.*12

It might be imagined therefore that this doctrine would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in which the doctrine appears have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that his discussion is based on an alternate logical modality is not acknowledged, and the conclusions which might follow from treating it as such, do not follow, and are therefore not discussed. It is treated as it is often presented by Plato – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

I've argued elsewhere that there is, in general, very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms.*13  When he talks about transcendent reality, this is treated as some sort of literary fiction, which has no necessary properties of its own. When Plato talks about the Forms, this also is treated as a species of literary fiction, which Plato records as being demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. When Plato discusses the soul (in the Timaeus), it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so he argues that knowledge is acquired by the activation of that connection. We have forgotten what we knew (apparently) through the shock of physical birth, but it is possible for us to reacquire this knowledge by looking to the one true thing.*14 

Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion to the modern mind, since Plato talks about ascending purely in the mind from Form to Form, and then descending back to the world of physical reality, Form by Form, and says this is the only way to acquire genuine knowledge. How can real knowledge be acquired in this way? Why should Plato argue like this?  How can any of this make sense to us?

It makes very little sense to us, because we have lost the original doctrinal context of his discussions, and we are not that interested in attempting to recover what we can of that context, even for the purposes of a better scholarly understanding of what he is talking about. So the study of Plato languishes lifeless in the seminar room, taught and discussed from generation to generation by people who have no clear idea of what Plato meant. Books and papers are published, which clear up a minor detail here, discuss another one there, but do not leave us much the wiser.

We can understand the range of existing discussion about Plato in terms of what scholars do not or cannot understand about Plato, and their attempts to fit what they think they understand about his work into some kind of modern frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which create the problem, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. That understanding needs to be restored, along with a basic comprehension of why it is important. Not just for our understanding of Plato himself, but also for our understanding of his cultural context; the context in which philosophy was understood to be of inestimable value; and also for an understanding of some very strange things about the ancient world, which are all the stranger because (it seems) they made sense in antiquity (sacrifice, divination, idolatry, prophecy, omens, oracles, etc.).

One of the most valued books in my library is Religion and Magic: Approaches and Theories, which is a survey of modern anthropological thought. *15 The author is Graham Cunningham, a specialist in the ancient Near East and the relevant languages. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. *16 Cunningham’s book covers the whole range of these, at least in terms of summarising the views of those who first suggested those theoretical approaches. He divides the approaches into several sections, which are:

1 German pioneers, 2 Early Intellectualist approaches, 3 Emotionalist approaches, 4 Phenomenological Approaches, 5 Structural Functional Approaches, 6 Symbolic Approaches, 7 Recent Intellectualist Approaches, 8 Structural approaches, 9 Cognitive Approaches, 10  Feminist Approaches.

All of these approaches were developed and used without any meaningful distinction being made between ancient cultural phenomena and cultural phenomena of modern times. I write carefully here, since there are unpleasant presumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out. Anthropology as a formal subject was founded in the early nineteenth century, and the presumptions of the time are necessarily locked into the work of the pioneers. Many of these can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that a dangerous equation was early made between the cultures of antiquity and the world of  'the primitive and the savage' in the modern world (which the Classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson referred to as ‘running folklore to the death’).*17

So Cunningham’s book covers two centuries of thought about culture, civilization, religion, magic and ritual. All premised on the assumptions, understanding and categories of knowledge of those living and working in those two centuries. Nothing about those matters is covered from earlier centuries. It is as if the study of human culture, human thought, and the nature of man himself, began only in Hegel’s study, and nothing of worth came before Hegel. *18 

I could digress here, and lay out what came before in detail, but that is for another time. I will allow myself to say that Plato had something else to bring to the party, which is not covered in Cunningham’s survey; the Neoplatonists (who thought of themselves as Platonists, but we will not let them be what they are) would have brought the same thing to the party, as would some of the early Gnostic writers. The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances also understood what Plato was writing about, at least for the most part, and would be shocked that, not only do we not understand Plato, but that we have chosen to explain much of human culture in terms of a fundamental conceptual error about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

It is assumed by the moderns (in the west, at least) that philosophy is a cultural phenomenon which, in historical terms, follows on from religious thought, and does not precede it. We are sure of this because we are sure we know what religion is, and what philosophy is. We think that religion enshrines a form of knowledge about the world and the universe which is less than rational, and that the devotees of religion are often credulous. Religious thought is often transfixed by the numinous and the invisible, and its responses to these things are unfathomable to the rational mind. We also think religion, to a great extent, developed in response to the ideological needs of social groups, sometimes in conflict with other social groups, which can give very distinctive structures to the myths and rituals which become part of the bedrock of the public show of these religions.We believe this (admittedly oversimplified) picture to be a correct interpretation of what religion is. Modern religion differs from ancient religion only in details.

Whereas philosophy is about a critical and rational understanding of the world and how it presents itself to us. Religion is cast as an un-philosophical and irrational understanding of that reality. The development of philosophy represents progress.

These notions are subject to nuance of course, but this is the core of the enlightenment idea of what these things are.

We assume that religion, as it presents itself to us in the form of the relatively young Abrahamic religions, is not fundamentally different in nature to other religions, either elsewhere now, or in the distant past. We make such an assumption, because there is nothing in our understanding of other religions which suggests to us, at least not with any clarity, that any other process is active in the creation and operation of religion. The dynamics are the same, and the functions are the same.

Graham Cunningham’s postscript makes it clear that religion is generally understood by anthropologists to be a relic of an earlier time where rational thought was absent. Certainly in terms of what we would recognise. Somehow religion is still with us, because large parts of the human race believe in the importance and efficacy of belief in the divine: that belief in the reality of the divine is something which is essential to the religious life, and the religious understanding of reality. *19

Yet this is not what ancient writers tell us. They tell a different story, as I’ve suggested, and one which is not represented by any current anthropological approach. That different story is that religion in the ancient world was not about belief, but concerned both knowledge and conjecture about the nature of the divine; and about the nature of reality itself.*20

I prefer to write about ancient religion in terms of divine cult. I distinguish the two for clarity - religion is often understood in the modern world in terms of sociological and ideological functions. And indeed religion has these functions: it often provides social cohesion, ideology, and useful rules of social behaviour. But to attempt to explain the core of divine cult in such terms is presumptive. If the core of a divine cult involves rational conjecture about the nature of reality itself, we will not easily find this out, even if the evidence is screaming this at us. In antiquity the ritual practice of divine cult was often a private affair, rather than a public one, which implies an important division between the performative function of ritual, and the outward show. Ritual and observance were the important things. The public show might echo the thought behind the cult in some respects, and offer clues to its significance and nature, but it is not the cult itself. *21

The association of knowledge with the core divine cult (and, consequently, a confirmation of the  connection of the cult with the divine itself), gave the rituals of ancient religion (both private and public) their efficacy, and patterned their meaning. But this did not involve belief.  Belief is something which is not supported by credible argument, or is a step beyond the limits of an rational argument.  That is not what was involved in ancient discussion of questions concerning the divine. Can you have knowledge without rational modes of thought? And what did the ancient writers mean by knowledge of the divine, and by equating knowledge with the divine? Clearly, it is not possible to have actual knowledge of something without rational modes of thought. But what rational thought is, is another one of those things which we are quite clear about in modern times, even if the evidence points to a different conclusion, and exists in teeming quantities.

___

 1. Frazer wrote this in his prize essay of 1879 on the 'Growth and Development of Plato's Ideal Theory'. Published finally in 1930. I'd found this essay after noticing that there were odd features in the structure of The Golden Bough. I wrote about this in J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016), and also in the more compact essay 'Frazer and the Association of Ideas', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
2. In his 'Life of Pythagoras' Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras travelled extensively around the Near East and Egypt in the service of Cyrus. Discussed in 'Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity'.
 3. In the Timaeus. Discussed in 'The Platonic Theory of Being' (full text with notes). Originally published in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
4. Discussed in 'Solon in the Court of Croesus' (extract). The full text is a chapter in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
5. Discussed in 'Working Wonders: Hephaestus and the Armour of Achilles'. A retitled chapter from The Sacred History of Being (2015), originally titled  'Being in Homer'.
 6. Discussed in 'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind', which is one of the appendices to The Sacred History of Being (2015).
7 Discussed in 'The Babylonian Creation': an extract from the chapter 'Creation' in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 8. Modern scholars are well aware of this. Ancient historians arranged information, but also questioned it. The Assyrians seemed to have a similar attitude to their materials - the chronicles associated with Ashurbanipal's reign exist in more than one version, with events recorded in a different order.
 9. Discussed in 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens' which is a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
10. Consequently this ought to be a matter of interest to Christian theologians, owing to the importance of the idea of the incarnation of the divine in the Gospels. For centuries the incarnation has been presented as a mystery (to both believers and theologians), without any kind of theoretical basis. But the theoretical basis is present in ancient literature, in various places. It even surfaces in a text in the Nag Hammadi documents.
 11. The logical basis of the incarnation is discussed in 'The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth', a chapter from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
12. Discussed in 'The Transcendental understanding of Reality', and in 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.'  from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
13.  'The Sweet Song of Swans'. The full text of this chapter, which concerns (among other things) the modern creation of the Greeks as the originators of philosophy, was published in the The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 14. In the chapter 'Plato's Theory of Vision', from The Sacred History of Being (2015). This extract concerns the discussion of the cosmos as “a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible.”
 15. Cunningham, Graham, Religion & Magic: Approaches & Theories, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
 16. That there are so many conflicting views might suggest that perhaps few, or even none of the approaches are correct, but are simply the product of the failure to grasp the sophistication of ancient thought.

17. Discussed in 'Running Folklore to the Death', an extract from section 13 of J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016).
18. I've discussed Eriksen and Nielsens' A History of Anthropology (2001) in the chapter 'Before Anthropology', which book illustrates that modern anthropology is sometimes about how things ought to be, rather than a profound engagement with the evidence. They do however give a useful account of what came before Hegel. Published in Man and the Divine (2018).
 19  We tend to inject our presumptions about the past onto the evidence, as if common sense is a servicable tool in understanding it. It takes more than that. Discussed in 'Beyond the Religious Impulse'. Published as a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). See also 'Distinguishing Belief and Faith', in Man and the Divine (2018).
20 A close look at Assyrian divination reports makes it clear that there was nothing mystical or vague about Assyrian queries about the future. The queries to the Sungod (Shamash) were expected to provide accurate information in response. This is because the diviners and scholars formulating the questions understood the universe to be rooted in a plenum. In which case,  all things which might be, already exist in the plenum. The diviners were therefore asking the Sungod for information which was available to the god. Twenty divinatory queries are available on the page 'Who will Appear before the City?' The concept of the plenum and its connection with the Mesopotamian story of the creation is discussed in the chapter: 'The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon'; further discussion of  the concept can be found in  'Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence', both from Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

21. Discussed in 'Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

Draft version, October 29, 2019. Final version, All Hallows Eve, 2019. Updated 11 January 2020. TY. 

Writing to Alvin Plantinga

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. There it appears as 'Contra Plantinga'. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

I wrote to Alvin Plantinga on Sunday, 2nd of July 2017, concerning the ontological argument, which he has done so much to promote.

I imagine ... that you would be interested to see alternative arguments for the reality of the divine, were these to exist.

And they do exist. I spent many years assembling the arguments for the understanding of the divine in the ancient world. These are quite different arguments from those offered from St. Anselm onwards.

You are under no obligation at all to read my book, but it may be worth a look, if only to dismiss the arguments as threadbare, or even completely baseless. And in short order.

If you are interested in reading the book, I will send it to you either as an ebook or a pdf, according to your choice. You are under no obligation at all to respond, if you accept the book.

I didn't get a response from that, so I wrote again on 18th of July, 2017 

The ontological argument has obviously been important and highly influential over the past thousand years. But I argue that, in any of its instances, it is not sound, and does not resemble argument about the divine in the ancient world. I've written about this issue in detail in The Sacred History of Being, which was published in 2015. 

I think we have come to the end of a road with the ontological argument, which has profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, theology, and the development of anthropology. Ancient discussion of the divine was based on logical argument about the nature of a transcendent reality, which gave rise to space and time, rather than the more constrained question of whether or not God exists in a pre-existing and unexplained frame. Mesopotamia provides the intellectual background for the development of public philosophy in Greece. I will send you my book by email if you are interested in reading an alternative view.

Professor Plantinga was kind enough to accept the offer of a copy of my book, and a PDF was sent by email the next day. 

I followed up on the exchange on the 19th of September:

Some useful things can be taken away from the arguments in The Sacred History of Being. First of all, if the Divine and Reality are not artificially separated from each other (they are usually coterminous in eastern thought), then atheism is unreasonable and almost unthinkable. This separation is a characteristic of western philosophy, after the closure of the schools. Plato does not argue like this. Neither do the Neoplatonists. 

The importance of belief is less important when the Divine and Reality itself are not understood to be separate. In ancient religion (if we insist on referring to the phenomenon with that term, rather than using Cicero's more appropriate phrase 'cultus deorum'), belief was mostly beside the point, being subordinate to observance, if you understood the basis of what was being discussed. Belief is a phenomenon which assumes importance when a population does not know the traditional arguments concerning what is Divine, and the speculative and conjectural conclusions which might be drawn from those arguments.

This was the case by the time Anselm put together his version of the ontological argument. Faith is slightly different, since it isn't the same as blind belief, but signifies an understanding of why certain arguments are made, and an acceptance of the scope of what they suggest. The possibility of conjecture and discussion remains.

How does Plato argue about the nature of the Divine? He understood the Divine to be beyond physical space, and the dimension of time. Without shape and colour, or any other characteristic which could be easily understood by the human mind. However, and paradoxically, the Divine was capable of participation in the world, because some aspects of the Divine have exemplars on earth. Such as totality, greatness, perfection, completeness, etc. The  nature of the Divine emerges from a number of philosophical questions, such as: if the Divine is one, how is the many possible? If the Divine is one and beyond change, but God needs to make a copy of it in which movement is possible, has the integrity of the nature of the ur-reality been fatally compromised? If the one thing which we should all look to is, by definition, one and unchanging (see the self-description of God in the 3rd book of Malachi, where God says: 'I do not change'), how is participation in the world of movement and change possible? 

And so on. Frazer wrote these arguments off as 'popular questions of the day', with no more significance than that. A rational basis for belief, is I think, a contradiction in terms. If it is rational, then belief is unecessary. A key conclusion of The Sacred History of Being, is that the basis of ancient religion was the acquisition of knowledge of the Divine, and as a corollary, the acquisition of knowledge itself, since it was understood to be already present in the Divine (an idea most clearly expressed in Mesopotamian literature and liturgy).   

We lost almost all of that in the west, except in rhetorical and literary terms. But the evidence from antiquity does not support either the necessity of belief in religion, or the necessity of God possessing the property of existence within an unexplained and inexplicable pre-existence of space and time, The evidence from antiquity *does* support the reality of God, and the importance of the reality of the Divine in every aspect of human existence.

Of course if the Greeks did invent philosophical argument and sound logic, and no-one else around the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East was able to think about the Divine in such terms as far back as the middle of 2nd Millennium B.C.E., when they were building their accounts of the nature of reality, then this argument would be impossible to support. I would suggest instead, that the argument be reversed, as it can be, however much the classicists and the historians of philosophy would object to the loss of Greek intellectual primacy which would result.  

Best regards,  

Thomas Yaeger

The Double Nature of Reality

One chapter in The Sacred History of Being is particularly difficult to understand as presented. It is the way it is because it concerns an argument by Plato concerning the nature of reality, and whether or not divine things can have a presence in the world. It also concerns how such a presence should be understood. The chapter is an assemblage of Platonic argument,  scattered through a number of dialogues. I'm not aware of any other attempt to reconstruct Plato's discussion of the nature of reality, so the job needed to be done. 

The chapter can be understood as a reconstruction of how Plato might have discussed the nature of reality with those of his students deemed to have the ability to grasp the esoteric understanding of Being. It is a reconstruction based on references in his writings, which documents in detail the sources I used.  This documentation allows the argument to be discussed critically by those who have not been on the same path as I have over the past twenty years or so. 

Though the chapter is a difficult read, it is not that difficult to explain. In conversation with a reader recently, I provided a short explanation of the nature of the chapter, and its significance for the overall argument of The Sacred History of Being. It concerns the belief that divinity could be present in inanimate objects, and whether reality itself is necessarily one. And the consequences which necessarily follow from such discussion. 

I wrote:

The chapter which explores Plato's theory of Being is the most difficult chapter in the whole book, without question. But it is crucial to an understanding of the overall thesis. I recommend skipping forward to read the postscript, and the chapter on Pythagoras and Totality, which explain  something of the context and significance of Plato's argument.

I can however tell you what the significance of Plato's argument is, once all the pieces are put together (which is what I did in that chapter). One of the central mysteries of the ancient world is how and why did they believe that inanimate objects could be considered to be divine? Modern anthropologists are forced to argue that they believed this because of intellectual error. The chapter shows that in fact the belief that an inanimate statue could house the divine was based on a logical argument, which Plato references at various points in his canon (most crucially in The Sophist). The logical conclusion of the argument is simply that the world in which we live has a double nature. The world is a plenum which presents to us a partial picture of reality (because we are finite creatures and not infinite). The real world (the fulness, or the plenum) cannot move without compromising its nature. So reality is not subject to change. There cannot be a finite world and an infinite one, which would also compromise the nature of the plenum.

The conclusion which must be drawn, though not overtly and clearly expressed by Plato, is that on purely logical grounds, the finite world is an illusion, and a representation of the unmoving plenum which appears to contain movement. That is its double nature. It is both infinite and finite at the same time.

This is the reason why it was possible to understand an unmoving statue as a god: because it is both infinite and finite at the same time.

The overall argument of the book is to this effect - hence the examination of Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues toward the end of the book.

So the ancient belief in the divinity of statues was not the result of careless thought or a primitive stupidity, but the result of careful argument about the nature of reality itself, in both Greece and Assyria, and elsewhere. This places philosophical thought (dialectical argument) at the root of religious cult, rather than a separate and unrelated discussion of abstract questions, with no bearing on thought concerning the gods.

I hope this helps with your understanding of the argument.

Best regards,

Thomas 

[Post title changed to 'Plato's theory of Being',  January 2, 2018. Changed again, this time to 'The Double Nature of Reality', January 17, 2020.]

Understanding Ancient Thought

This book is a compilation of eighteen essays drawn from a number of times and places. Some short, some long. All of them are meditations on our understanding of history (mostly ancient history), on the importance of philosophical ideas in antiquity, and also on our understanding of the human mind, then and now.

The ancient world is often very mysterious to us, since those who peopled that world believed different things. After the passage of two millennia, it is hard for us to make sense of the assemblage of information which has survived the enormous passage of time. Sometimes the nature of the evidence is problematic, and sometimes our approach to that evidence is the problem: we carry intellectual baggage which often makes it very difficult to know and understand what we are looking at.

In essence, this collection of essays attempts, as far as possible, to understand the ancient world within its original context, and to highlight where modern thought and the modern mind introduce obstacles to what can be understood.

***

Current chapter list:

Divination in Antiquity was written in the latter stages of The Sacred History of Being. It was uploaded as a post to my website, and I promoted the essay by adding in brackets ‘and the sense it made’. Most people have no idea why divinatory procedures would ever have made sense in antiquity, but there is a sense to it, once the conceptual model in operation is grasped. This essay explores that conceptual model. 

Knowledge and Esoteric Doctrine concerns scholarly disinterest in the role of esoteric ideas and doctrine in ancient models of reality. Partly this disinterest is because the esoteric is, by definition,  kept secret and unknown, and partly because it is assumed that esoteric doctrine would have had no connection with abstract and universal ideas known to us, and therefore must remain unintelligible to us, even if we could disinter the details. The first of these appeals to the evidential invisibility of what is esoteric, and the second, to its irrational nature. Plato’s esoteric doctrine however is in plain view. We need to look for evidence, rather than presuming that it is not to be had.

Being, Knowledge and Belief in Israel is an expanded version of a chapter which appeared in The Sacred History of Being (The Idea of Being in Israel) which looked at the body of Mesopotamian ideas about the gods and the divine through the extensive commentary on these ideas present in the books of the Old Testament, and in documents from Assyria. The chapter also explored how Old Testament ideas about images were understood by the Christian writer Tertullian, in the early second century of the common era. Now supplemented by a discussion of the problematic relationship between monotheism and polytheism in the ancient Near East.

The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon argues that the description of Marduk in the Babylonian New Year Festival liturgy (The Enuma Elish) and the fact that the described creation was two-fold (it began before Marduk appeared, and was subsequently destroyed), indicates that their creation was understood to emerge from a plenum, in which all things potentially exist. This is an abstract conception which is not supposed to be present in Mesopotamia in the early 1^st millennium B.C.E.

Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence explores the kind of discussion that would necessarily underpin the idea of a plenum or pleroma as the root of physical creation.  The discussions closely parallel some of those found in Plato, including the question of whether reality retains its nature after the production of a physical reality.

The Divine and the Limit explores the prominence of Janus in the ritual life of the Romans. In the songs of the Salii (‘jumpers’ or dancers) he was called the good creator, and the god of gods; he is elsewhere named the oldest of the gods and the beginning of all things.  The king, and in later times the rex sacrōrum, sacrificed to him. At every sacrifice he was remembered first; in every prayer he was the first invoked, being mentioned even before Jupiter. He is especially associated with the idea of limit, which is a preoccupation of a number of ancient cultures.

Logical Modality in Classical Athens finds that though we have recognised only one logical modality for more than two millennia, there were in fact two. One of them was appropriate to earthbound existence; the other supplied a rational basis for contact with the divine.

Sameness and Difference in Plato is a further discussion of the idea of the Plenum.  Philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages, and as a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, deals poorly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature.

Shar Kishati, and the Cult of Eternity is a discussion of the hypothetical core of the ancient understanding of Reality as something which might be separated from everything else (in a Husserlian sense), though it does not mean that such a hypothetical core was separable from the rest of the religious and theological implex of ideas which constituted Greek and Mesopotamian religion. The point of the exercise was to explore what was actually essential to that implex of ideas, and to get a better understanding of why it was important to the functioning of the ritual universe, in both Greece and Mesopotamia.

The Harmony of the Soul explores the idea of Justice discussed in Plato’s Republic, which argues that the pursuit of special excellences by individuals, in terms of skills, and moral and intellectual virtue, without reference to the activities of other individuals, was understood to result in a harmonious arrangement of society.  They are joined together as a consequence of the fact that each of the virtues is complete and perfected. A parallel notion of the virtue of special excellences in ancient Assyria is discussed in the chapter ‘Standing in the Place of Ea’.

Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis discusses what we know of the idea of the polis, which appears to have been modelled according to a conception of the divine. Thucydides tells us that, from the time of the first kings down to Theseus (the legendary founder of Athens, whose name is probably related to the verb tithemi, "to set in place") the people of Attica always lived in (their own) poleis; unless there was some common danger they would not come together in council with the king, but each individual polis would govern itself. Theseus did away with the multiplicity of poleis and their separate councils and governments.

Teotihuacan and the river of Mercury explores the symbolic function of this highly reflective metal, recently found inside a tomb in Mexico and known, on the basis of historical records, to be present also inside the Qin tomb in China, and finds parallels with such ideas (mirroring the heavens to provide connection between transcendent reality and the earthly world) in both Greece and in Mesopotamia.

Beyond the Religious Impulse Sometimes the important bit of evidence which will enable us to make sense of something is present, but not recognised, because the scholar is asking the wrong questions, and possibly asking questions within the wrong analytical paradigm. In fact there is a very large quantity of material available to scholars which can tell us much about the intellectual life of the ancient world, but because of the contemporary intellectual and cultural landscape, with its relatively inflexible interpretative structures, developed over many years, it simply cannot be seen for what it is. Worse, if the evidence is present but indicates counter-intuitive conclusions, it is unlikely ever to become part of the discussion. Better to grasp at straws.

Frazer and the Association of Ideas Like other scholars, then and now, Frazer did not recognise the other logical modality in classical Athens, though he read the relevant texts. Instead, he devised an explanatory mechanism of his own. This was based on the phenomenon of the association of ideas, argued by John Locke in the seventeenth century as a description of how we think. Applying this to human behaviour across history and cultures, he concluded that much human activity could be understood in terms of intellectual error. The phenomenon of the association of ideas is real enough. But it isn’t the basis of religious life in antiquity.

Aristotle’s Four Causes We recognise only one cause in the modern world, which is the efficient cause. This is concerned with work, energy and power. In antiquity Aristotle described four causes, which are discussed here. Did Aristotle conjure these by himself, or were these concepts understood across the civilised world for centuries before Classical Greece?

Cultural Parallels and False Narratives discusses our understanding of what religion is, the etymology of the word (including Cicero’s definition), and compares the Hindu concept of religion with those of Greece and Rome. The evidence makes more sense if we talk instead in terms of divine cult.

Plato’s Point of View - Plato’s main concern was what was truly real, which remained necessarily unchanging and itself, and therefore could not be present, at least as itself, in the world of the here and now. This is not however, how Plato is understood or represented by modern philosophers. There are two main schools of thought: the first is that his position is consistent throughout his work, but his work is shaped by an unknown agrapha (unwritten esoteric doctrine). The second is that his work represents a discursive exploration of philosophical questions, which comes to no firm conclusion.

Standing in the Place of Ea explores the role of the King in ancient Assyria, as the vizier of the god Assur. He was trained in the Adapa discipline, which is related to the myth of Adapa. He was required to be skilled in crafts, spear-throwing, scholarship, mathematics, divination, etc., and to excel other men, as chosen for the role by Assur. Thus he would emulate the knowledge and power of Ea, the divine sage whose home was the Abzu, the abyss at the root of creation.

Publication date is midnight Eastern Standard Time, August 20, 2017. 

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Buying a copy of Understanding Ancient Thought

The book is available in eBook format from a number of large retailers, including Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio,  (search) Kobo, Inktera, and other retailers around the world. So, if you are already signed up to an account with one of those, you can buy the book in exactly the same way as any other book. 

The eBook is in ePub format, which can be read on Macs, iPads, iPhones, etc, and most other tablets, irrespective of the operating operating system they use. If you have an Amazon Kindle, the ePub formatting of the book can be converted easily to the MOBI format, which the Kindle uses, with the excellent eBook management software Calibre, which can be downloaded free. 

The book can be read on a PC, laptop or notebook computer, in ePub or any other eBook format, using the Adobe Digital Editions software, which is also available free, in both Mac and PC formats. Supports conversion to many formats, including PDF. 

The principal distributor of Understanding Ancient Thought is Smashwords. The book (from mid-August 2017) can be downloaded from Smashwords directly, after a signup which takes just a minute or so. The book can be paid for using a credit or debit card, or with Paypal, if you have an account with them. After purchase, the book goes into a library space associated with your signup, and it can be downloaded on to your device from there. Just follow the link.

[Updated 29 May, June 12  2017, June 17-18, July 30, August 8th, August 12, and October 5  and 19, 2017.]

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

The following is a sketch of a paper on an alternative reading of the understanding of logical modality in ancient Greece. It isn't yet properly annotated and referenced, and is subject to significant revision in the near future. Treat it as a working paper. It discusses an issue which surfaced in SHB, but which was explored differently there. It may also be of interest to those who have read my book on Frazer, since what follows below discusses how Plato was understood before Frazer argued that he was guilty of  'intellectual error'. 

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We are accustomed to the idea that Aristotle was the first person to codify the laws of thought which have come down to us as the basis of what is now formal logic. For the most part these laws are formulations and refinements of what is essentially common sense, so we are not forced to imagine that no-one had any clue about logical thinking before Aristotle.  Plato for example, is not deficient in the logic of his thought processes because he came before Aristotle’s codification.

However there is much in ancient writing, earlier and later, and also in the pages of Plato, which is not easily intelligible as being based on the laws of thought, or even based on plain common sense. In fact the laws of thought appear to be contradicted, and often. Are these just deficiencies in clarity of thought? Or is there another logical modality present in these writings, not codified by Aristotle or anybody else, but which was understood in classical Athens?

First, it is important to be clear about what is the essence of logical thinking, as codified by Aristotle. Aristotle’s laws of thought are as follows:

The first is that a thing is itself and not something else. Which is known as the law of identity.

The second, the law of non-contradiction, states that a thing cannot be a thing other than itself, at least at the same time. Aristotle gives three definitions of the law of non-contradiction in his Metaphysics:

At the ontological level, he says that: "It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect" [1005b19-20]. Looked at from the psychological level, he says: "No one can believe that the same thing can (at the same time) be and not be" [1005b23-24).  Finally, in terms of logic, Aristotle claims that: "The most certain of all basic principles is that contradictory propositions are not true simultaneously" [1011b13-14].

The third is the law of the excluded middle. Meaning that a thing is either itself, or something else, not something in between.  He states it as a principle in the Metaphysics [996b 26–30], saying that “it is necessary in every case to affirm or deny, and that it is impossible that there should be anything between the two parts of a contradiction”.

This is not part of Aristotle’s manual of logical procedure, known as the Organon. The Organon codifies how the human understanding should deal with identifying and differentiating aspects of reality, reasoning, deduction, detecting false or misleading conclusions and specious modes of argument (the text on Sophistical Refutations is part of the Organon).

The Metaphysics is a text which employs the ancient practice of collection and division; of identifying the same, and what is different. We normally think of dialectic (which is the Greek term for this critical technique, perhaps most clearly illustrated in Plato’s Sophist) as what the Greeks did in the course of philosophical argument, but its original scope was much wider than that. The practice of collection and division was also used in Babylonia and elsewhere in the second millennium B.C.E. Which is why the Babylonians and the Assyrians created lexical lists of objects which had something in common, such the property of whiteness (scholars initially found the purpose of these lexical lists puzzling, and most still do). Marc van de Mieroop has recently published an intriguing study of the legal, divinatory, and literary texts, and word lists from Babylonia, which shows a strong adherence by the scholars to a logical understanding of what is the same, and what is different. Though he does not compare instances of the same and the different found in Babylonian literary texts and the word lists,  with discussion of the same and the different found in the pages of Aristotle. [‘Philosophy Before the Greeks’, Stanford, 2015].

The law of non-contradiction, as stated by Aristotle, isn’t actually provable, though he tried to demonstrate it. Many later philosophers have tinkered with the law, but its main use is as a guide to thinking, and it is useful to know, even if it is possible to give instances where it does not hold.

Plato had the concept of an inner and outer knowledge, which probably reflects something of a priestly understanding of both teaching and of reality. He referred to these grades of knowledge as ta eso and ta exo In the Theatetus. Which means that teaching operated at two levels – the exoteric and public level, and another which was esoteric in nature.

Esoteric knowledge is by definition obscure, and/or difficult to understand. Which is what the story of the prisoners in the cave in Plato’s Republic is all about. They see the shadows of reality on the wall before them, but not the reality itself. When they are released with suddenness, their reason is deranged by the experience. Instead they should have been released gradually, being shown details of reality first, without the whole of the shocking truth of reality being given to them all at once.  So Plato was engaged with both exoteric and esoteric understandings of knowledge. 

  

In Mesopotamia there was a similar division of the types of knowledge. We are told by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (Seventh century B.C.E.) that the common run of men are ‘deaf and blind throughout their lives’. Exoteric knowledge of divine things would consist of the names of the gods, their epithets, and stories told of the gods. This superficial knowledge could be imparted by fathers to sons, and could be taught in the schoolroom, as sometimes is said in tablet colophons. The esoteric knowledge was kept secret by the initiates and the priesthood, and tablets relating to the mysteries of the gods would state that they were not to be read by the uninitiated.

Did Plato understand a different kind of logic invoked by him to understand the nature of reality? There are intimations in his canon that he understood pretty well the laws of thought that we find in Aristotle, but I think there is another pattern of logic present, and discussed at length, which entirely cuts across the three laws, and enables a quite different picture of reality. Whereas Aristotle’s laws of thought provide guidance for understanding what exists in the world of physical existence, what Plato tells us about is an esoteric doctrine, which explains what is hidden and obscure, and relates to the gods, and what is divine. As one might expect, the rules for the gods are different.

In the Timaeus Plato refers to a principle of wholes, or totalities. It is later mentioned by the Neoplatonist Porphyry as a Pythagorean doctrine, and Pythagoras is supposed to have learned of it in a lecture in Babylon, after the fall of the city to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. Since this principle of totalities or wholes is ascribed to Pythagoras, if this ascription is correct, then the latest date of the principle is therefore the sixth century B.C.E.

It is of course, very much older. It can be detected in the Iliad, in Bk 18, where Hephaestus makes objects which, on account of their nature, can pass into the counsel of the gods, and return. The principle may have been brought back to the west by Pythagoras after his spell in Babylon and the Levant, or it may already have been part of a body of ideas already well established in Italy and in Greece. The principle might be simply put, as ‘things which are total participate in totality’, in the same way that Plato declared that ‘greatness is participation in the great.’ But it is so much more important than a statement that wholes conjoin with one another. It is the essence of the ascent from image to image to an apprehension of the Good which Plato refers to in the both the Timaeus and the Republic.

Each of these images must represent or embody an aspect of what Plato referred to as ‘the Good’. Each of the images must allow the supplicant to pass from one to the other via their essential identity (i.e., in that each image represents an image or embodiment of an aspect of the Good). What varies between them is the degree of their participation in the Good. Plato is very clear that the viewer of the images must be able to pass along the chain of images in either direction. The chain of images is not therefore purely about gaining an understanding of the Good (meaning the divine, or Being itself), either in reality or figuratively. Passage through the chain of images is about both the transcendence of images or forms, and about the descent of Being into the world of generation, as a generative power.

Each of these images is a symballō, a conjecture, based on certain agreed ideas among the sacerdotal class, and different across cultural groupings. The images are thrown or struck together in order to reduplicate and re-energise the power and presence of divine Being in the human world. For man, this might be seen as an act of worship or observance of what is holy, but it can also be understood also as a form of theurgy.

Given what we are given to understand about the differences between the patterns of the discussion of ideas in the near-east and in Greece, it may be surprising to hear that Pythagoras learned about the principles of wholes through lectures in Babylon. We know that ideas were discussed publicly in Mesopotamia, if usually in the form of a debate which explored the relative merits of one idea against another. It is possible that a lecture was the source of his knowledge of this doctrine, but it may be more likely, given the importance Pythagoras himself attached to the distinction between ‘hearers’ and ‘students,’ Pythagoras learned of the principle of wholes and totalities in some other way.

In the Timaeus  Tim 30a-b, Plato speaks through Timaeus, saying:

For God desired that, so far as possible, all things should be good and nothing evil; wherefore, when He took over all that was visible, seeing that it was not in a state of rest but in a state of discordant and disorderly motion, He brought it into order out of disorder, deeming that the former state is in all ways better than the latter. For Him who is most good it neither was nor is permissible to perform any action save what is most fair. As He reflected, therefore, He perceived that of such creature as are by nature visible, none that is irrational will be fairer, comparing wholes with wholes, than the rational….

Plato, in using the phrase ‘comparing wholes with wholes’, is referring to the principle of wholes and totalities mentioned in Porphyry’s account of Pythagoras.

It is interesting that Pythagoras is said to have associated with the ‘other Chaldeans,’ after Porphyry mentions his conferring with the king of Arabia. The current academic view is that the Chaldean dynasties were essentially Arab dynasties, and that they were in control of Babylon at this time.  This helps to confirm the reliability of some of the detail in this important passage, written so long after the lifetime of Pythagoras. 

So what did Pythagoras take from his long sojourn in Egypt, and the near-east? Is his doctrine like Plato’s? Porphyry’s account tells us that:

He cultivated philosophy, the scope of which is to free the mind implanted within us from the impediments and fetters within which it is confined; without whose freedom none can learn anything sound or true, or perceive the unsoundedness in the operation of sense. Pythagoras thought that mind alone sees and hears, while all the rest are blind and deaf. The purified mind should be applied to the discovery of beneficial things, which can be effected by, certain artificial ways, which by degrees induce it to the contemplation of eternal and incorporeal things, which never vary. This orderliness of perception should begin from consideration of the most minute things, lest by any change the mind should be jarred and withdraw itself, through the failure of continuousness in its subject-matter.

To summarise: the principle of wholes can be understood as a logical modality which connects the world of the mundane with transcendent reality. The definition of transcendent reality in Plato (articulated by Socrates) is that it is a place beyond shape, form, size, etc., and occupies no place on earth. It is however the place where knowledge has its reality (the ‘eternal and incorporeal things’ mentioned by Pythagoras). Connection with transcendent reality is possible by the likenesses to the transcendent which have existence on earth, such as things which are complete and whole, which therefore participate in the completeness and wholeness of the transcendent reality. Completeness and wholeness require (in the world of the mundane) delineation and limits, and so the limits and the extremes of things are also things which participate in transcendent reality.

The principle of ascent to the ‘eternal and incorporeal things’ is entirely a mental process, which does not involve any of the senses. It proceeds via chains of similitudes, both up and down, as a sequence of orderly perceptions. The goal is a form of communion with that which never varies, and which is always one and unchanging, as Plato tells us in the Sophist. The return from the communion with the Good delivers beneficial things, because the Good is the source of all knowledge.

Is this a logical modality? Yes it is. It is the inverse of what is implied in Aristotle’s three laws of thought, in that Aristotle is arguing that things are themselves and nothing else. And he suggests that similitude and likeness with other things is without meaning: no connection is opened to another level of reality. And that reason is only possible if the symbols we use in order to reason – words – have a one to one correspondence with the things we are talking about.

Aristotle knew his teacher’s work and views very well, and he spent many years in the Academy. So he would have been very conscious that he was contradicting Plato’s argument about ascending to knowledge via the Forms. Whether this was a serious assault on Plato, or just an argument which was intended to flush out the intelligent student, is a question which is very hard to answer.

[text correction October 1, 2017]

Logic, Sophistry and the Esoteric in Ancient Education

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

We are inclined to treat ancient argument at face value, except where we do not understand the significance of the argument. Then engagement with the material is difficult to maintain, because  what we need to know isn't present. The argument is dependent on an esoteric interpretation long lost to us. Or at least that the consensus view.

Both Plato and Aristotle's writings contain arguments which either don't make clear logical sense within themselves, or in the context of the rest of the work. One translator of Plato's Philebus (Robin Waterfield) confessed in his preface that even after translating the work, he didn't know what it was about.

Sometimes the clues to the meaning of arguments are present elsewhere in the canons of both writers, even for the ones which clearly involve an esoteric level of understanding. The whole body of their outputs need to be taken on board in order to grasp the meaning of individual works. This is usually not done with the works of Aristotle. His Historia Animalium is read by biologists and specialists in animal taxonomies, but usually they read little else of his work. As if one work is unconnected to the others.

Sometimes arguments are unsatisfactory at a logical level. It would be easy to write these examples off as sloppy instances of argument. But we may be too quick to do this. Both Plato and Aristotle taught students, and we need to explore something of their approaches to the education of their students.

We can begin by considering Aristotle's laws of thought, which are the ancestor of most later systems of non-paradoxical logical modalities. They aren't as sound as they would seem to be, and his approach to the education of his students may have something to do with this.

Aristotle’s laws of thought are as follows:

A thing is itself and not something else. Which is known as the law of identity.

There is also the law of non-contradiction – a thing cannot be a thing other than itself, at least at the same time. Aristotle gives three definitions in his Metaphysics: Ontological: "It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect." (1005b19-20). Psychological: "No one can believe that the same thing can (at the same time) be and not be." (1005b23-24). Logical: "The most certain of all basic principles is that contradictory propositions are not true simultaneously." (1011b13-14)

The third is the law of the excluded middle. Meaning that a thing is either itself, or something else, not something in between. He states it as a principle in the Metaphysics book 3, saying that it is necessary in every case to affirm or deny, and that it is impossible that there should be anything between the two parts of a contradiction.

This is not part of Aristotle’s manual of logical procedure, known as the Organon. The Organon codifies how the human understanding should deal with identifying and differentiating aspects of reality, reasoning, deduction, detecting false or misleading conclusions and specious modes of argument (the text on Sophistical Refutations is part of the Organon). This work is based on the ancient practice of collection and division, of identifying the same, and what is different. We normally think of dialectic as what the Greeks did in the course of philosophical argument, but its original scope was much wider than that. They were engaged in the practice of collection and division in Babylonia and elsewhere in the second millennium B.C.E. Which is why the Babylonians and the Assyrians created lexical lists of objects which had something in common, such the property of whiteness (the purpose of which scholars initially found puzzling, and most still do).

The law of non-contradiction, as stated by Aristotle, isn’t actually provable, though he tried to demonstrate it. Many later philosophers have tinkered with the law, but its main use is as a guide to thinking, and it is useful to know, even if it is possible to give instances where it does not hold.

I've said elsewhere that Aristotle practised sophistry. I do not mean that he was a liar or that he was trying to make 'the worse cause appear better' (Plato’s accusation against the sophists). But he did create fictions. I used the conclusion of his Nicomachean Ethics as an example, in which he states that the gods cannot move or interact with the world, and that their function is restricted to contemplation. Which must have seemed like a denial of the role of the divine in the world, current at the end of the fourth century B.C.E.

I studied the Nicomachean Ethics in some depth as a student, and noticed that a part of his argument is repeated, in slightly different words (in Book 8 I think). It has been observed before that the cramped and compacted wording of Aristotle’s treatises is reminiscent of lecture notes taken down in the classroom. And that’s what we have here - someone has collated notes from at least two different hands, and added two passages which repeat the same section of one of Aristotle’s classes (there are three ethical treatises which are attributed to Aristotle, so this may have been a popular series of classes, perhaps repeated on different occasions, and in slightly different forms).

My point is that Aristotle was a teacher, and was creating lectures which weren’t simply to be absorbed whole as the final word on the subject by a great teacher. He was expecting his students to think. Some of the students would ask questions, query points, or perhaps argue against the main pillar of the argument, though most wouldn’t.

Both Plato and Aristotle had the concept of an inner and outer knowledge. Plato referred to these grades of knowledge as ta eso and ta exo. We know that students at Aristotle’s Lyceum attended two different sets of classes, one in the morning, and the second set in the afternoon. Exoteric knowledge was taught in the morning, and the esoteric understanding of things was reserved for those who attended in the afternoon.

Esoteric knowledge is by definition obscure in nature, and/or difficult to understand. Which is what the story of the prisoners in the cave in Plato’s Republic is all about. They see the shadows of reality on the wall before them, but not the reality itself. When they are released with suddenness, their reason is deranged by the experience. Instead they should have been released gradually, being shown details of reality first, without the whole of the shocking truth of reality being given to them all at once.

So both Plato and Aristotle were dealing in what they understood to be esoteric knowledge. In Mesopotamia there was a similar division of the types of knowledge. We are told by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (Seventh century B.C.E.) that the common run of men are ‘deaf and blind throughout their lives’. Exoteric knowledge of divine things would consist of the names of the gods, their epithets, and stories told of the gods. This superficial knowledge could be imparted by fathers to sons, and could be taught in the schoolroom, as sometimes is said in tablet colophons. The esoteric knowledge was kept secret by the initiates and the priesthood, and tablets relating to the mysteries of the gods would state that they were not to be read by the uninitiated.

Aristotle’s Lyceum can therefore be thought of as a combination of school and college, with the classes in the morning providing a steady flow of students who had shown sufficient intelligence and independence of mind to be suitable for the classes which imparted esoteric knowledge in the afternoon. They could show this intelligence by challenging the sophistical arguments embedded in Aristotle’s lectures (as I’ve said, he attempted to prove some of his arguments, but didn’t always succeed. The students were supposed to spot when what he said was not soundly based).

Aristotle often begins from what people commonly believe – from common opinion. Common opinion as we know is usually wrong. It has been suggested that he attempts in the course of argument to lead the students from what they think they already know, to something closer to what Plato would have called true opinion. In short, to release them gradually from their imprisonment with the shadows of true knowledge. He isn’t always doing that, as the Nicomachean Ethics shows. So it is possible that this series of lectures, and perhaps also his Metaphysics, belong to the morning sessions, where the purpose was not to impart true knowledge, but to detect the sharpest and most critical students. For example, from the Metaphysics:

"First then this at least is obviously true, that the word 'be' or 'not be' has a definite meaning, so that not everything will be 'so and not so'. Again, if 'man' has one meaning, let this be 'two-footed animal'; by having one meaning I understand this:-if 'man' means 'X', then if A is a man 'X' will be what 'being a man' means for him. It makes no difference even if one were to say a word has several meanings, if only they are limited in number; for to each definition there might be assigned a different word. For instance, we might say that 'man' has not one meaning but several, one of which would have one definition, viz. 'two-footed animal', while there might be also several other definitions if only they were limited in number; for a peculiar name might be assigned to each of the definitions. If, however, they were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite
number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing."

— Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 4

He cannot mean this. All poetry, literature and art collapses at this point, where Aristotle claims that, in order to eliminate ambiguity in thought, there should be a one to one correspondence between words and definitions. This would have made no sense to the Babylonians and to the Assyrians, whose literature is woven all through with wordplay - homonyms, synonyms, ideograms, logograms, phonograms, metaphor, metonomy, and a litany of interchangeable signs and signifiers.

This is a good place to pass on to a discussion of the kind of logic invoked by Plato to understand the nature of reality. There are intimations in his canon that he understood pretty well the laws of thought that we find in Aristotle, but there is another logic present and discussed at length, which entirely cuts across the three laws, and enables a quite different picture of reality. Whereas Aristotle’s laws of thought provide guidance for understanding what exists in the world of physical existence, what Plato tells us about is an esoteric doctrine, which explains what is hidden and obscure, and relates to the gods, and what is divine. As one might expect, the rules for the gods are different.

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (I)

Most arguments in physics take for granted a frame of space and time, and the reality of physical existence. Such things need to be explained, not assumed for the purposes of description and analysis. Otherwise physics is a multi-million dollar parlour game (I stood inside the fantastically complex Atlas detector in CERN three times, while it was under construction. The cafeteria cutlery was magnetised, which was impressive).

I covered a wide range of subjects in writing The Sacred History of Being (hereafter ‘SHB’ as my friends now generally refer to it). Not everything the book explores is reflected in the blog postings however.  This range is not the consequence of a lack of focus, but because the implications of the core argument impact on many subjects, including logic, mathematics, physics, cosmology, religion, etc. I was also interested in why we had arrived at where we are, culturally speaking, so that the central argument of SHB can seem to be without meaning.

There are two principal logical modes present in antiquity:  Aristotle’s laws of thought, upon which most everything since has been built, up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (things became interesting with Cantor’s work relating to the infinite and transfinite groups, and with Russell’s paradox). And the other is a mode of logic present in Plato, but also connected with Pythagoras, and with the Babylonians, from whom Pythagoras is supposed to have received it, when he was present at the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE. The second modality has not been the focus of thorough scholarship over the past two hundred years, and is scarcely recognised for what it is. These two modalities are so different from each other, that they provide radically different understandings of the world. Taking account of the second modality was a major part of SHB. I still haven’t dealt with it properly.

We have turned our understanding of the world upside down during the past three hundred years in the west, without really knowing what we were doing, and what the consequences would be. What that means is that the ancient picture of the world was always built on the idea that there was a question behind its understanding. That question is one which has often been repeated since – it is ‘why should there be anything rather than nothing?’ The question goes nowhere in the modern world, because we have no way of answering it.

In the ancient world, a possible answer would be that our physical reality exists as part of a plenum; as a consequence of the reality and the properties of that plenum. Arthur Lovejoy wrote a book on how important that way of looking at reality was for the history of western culture from the ancient Greeks up until relatively recent times (The Great Chain of Being, published in 1936). In a sense SHB is designed to knock the bottom out of the notion that the idea of a plenum, a plenitude, or Being itself, began with the Greeks. It used to be the natural place to start. Now our understanding is different. A premise of the argument is that the idea can be traced back at least until the 14^th century B.C.E. So I wrote a kind of prequel to Lovejoy’s book.

Why a plenum? The power of this idea is that it allows us to accept that there is nothing, rather than anything, at the root of our reality. It is just that it so transcends the common sense idea of nothing, in that it is neither something, nor nothing. It has no presence, and no absence: it is just what it is. A field of possibility, if you like. Undefined, and without limit.

This is the essence of the teleological world view, in which the end and the beginning, the idea of limit itself, is a matter of some significance. This idea was dominant in antiquity. It is very prominent in Aristotle’s writings, but he did not invent it. Solon expresses the idea very clearly in the account of his conversation with Croesus in Herodotus, some two centuries earlier. It underpins the Assyrian picture of the world, and also the Babylonian account of the creation, as expressed in the liturgy of their New Year Festival, the Enuma Elish (‘When on High’).

Originally the idea of the telos was intimately associated with the gods, and with religious cult. The gods were understood to be a product, a consequence of the telos, and of the initial plenum. Later, this association was less well understood, so that the concept of the telos became reified into an intellectual frame in which things had purpose, function, and value (one of my teachers of philosophy once said that ‘a teleological universe is one in which fact and value interpenetrate’, meaning that everything has a meaning in such a universe). For Aristotle, in his writings, everything was ‘rowing towards its end’. Without the idea of an initial plenum, the idea of the telos is insupportable and without meaning. It isn’t a secular idea, though nevertheless it does have a range of presences in time and space, since reality does not adjust itself to suit our point of view. If it is there, it continues to function.

We have let all of the transcendent nature of the telos slip, and we deprecate what we currently understand as teleology, outside religion, poetry and literature, because it is a view of the world which sees purpose and direction in processes and things, which cannot be present. It has for us no meaning, no significance. It lasted longest in biology, perhaps because of Aristotle’s massive legacy for the study of the subject, but it is now nowhere to be seen in any of the sciences. At least not explicitly.

I could take an excursion here into Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, since we are talking about the final cause. I will stay on course by saying that one of the four causes is the efficient or physical cause. This is now, since Newton, the only cause the west recognises. This is physical force, physical determinism, energy, power, action and reaction, etc. Why only the efficient cause? Because Newton made such a good job of his explanation of the universe in terms of the mathematical description of the consequences of physical force, and of inertia. His work was so profoundly impressive that even the Divines wanted to be part of the new dispensation, in which the universe could be understood in terms of a certain uniformity, a clockwork precision. They presented this uniformity as evidence for the existence and controlling power of god, which was not of course Newton’s intention. This uniformitarian view of the universe has persisted (in various forms) until the present day. The efficient cause rules.

So, when a physicist or a cosmologist is asked: how did the universe come into being, it is hard to give any kind of answer beyond the ‘Big Bang’. The efficient cause always presumes a mover, and when the beginning of the universe is considered, there is no obvious prime mover. And in any case, identifying a prime mover simply moves the question of the start another stage back (‘it’s turtles all the way down!’).The idea of the ‘Big Bang’ exists only because an expanding universe suggests that a primordial explosion might have taken place. It’s an inference. It isn’t a very sophisticated notion, and doesn’t have exclusive explanatory rights. Why did it explode?  What was there to explode, and why was it there? What was there for it to explode into?

The questions have expanded, without the possibility of answers, which is often a sign that the critical model in which something is being examined is crippled.

We can conceive an alternative kind of physics which considers initial cosmological conditions, the idea of creation, the properties and attributes of the plenum and of the creation of visible reality, and the implications of the two opposing logical and inferential frames promoted by Plato and Aristotle.

I’m drawing up something on Plato and Aristotle’s respective modes of logic. I outlined Plato’s views on the logical relations of the Forms with each other in SHB (he’s only interested in the abstract cases), but I haven’t written much about Aristotle’s laws of thought. We think of them as enshrining common sense. 

But Aristotle practiced sophistry (he wrote a text on sophistical refutation - De Sophisticis Elenchis). What he is saying therefore depends on the context in which he is saying it; on who he is talking to and why. Aristotle’s writings on the soul (De Anima) mirror Plato’s closely, which suggests that they are not far apart in their understanding, but chose to come to different conclusions elsewhere. The absurd conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics, where it is concluded that the gods are unmoving, and limited to contemplation, is a case in point. It would have looked profoundly odd at the time, since it means that the gods cannot act. 

[a text correction and a link added, November 4, 2017]