The Prisoners in the Cave

 @SemprePhi drew my attention to the following book review on the 23^rd November:

Phillip Sidney Horky, Plato and Pythagoreanism 2013. Reviewed by Simon Trépanier bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-05-1… #brynmawr #philosophy

I responded in four short posts, which I’ve now augmented with further discussion.

@SemprePhi Hi. Thanks for the pointer to Horky's book and the review. Where to start! You cannot rely on Aristotle for accurate information about the Pythagoreans. Huffman has been occupying academic space for thirty years, and won't cross the boundaries. 1/

Note the whole argument is based on the idea that philosophy in Greece is an autocthonous development. Not invented elsewhere. I've shown that Pythagoras derived many of his ideas from Mesopotamia. And that these influences are reflected in Plato. They just don't want to see. 2/

Or they fear to step outside the accepted paradigm for fear of committing heresy, and having to pay for their sin. There is much information about what Pythagoras brought back from the east in Greek writing. But scholars don't know what it is, and why [it] is important. 3/

In order to stay within the acceptable paradigm, or 'episteme', they don't read the full range of sources which are available. Consequently it is difficult to make sense of the sources that they do read. If you read the full range of sources, it is an eye-opener. 4/

Philosophers and Historians are nervous about crossing the boundaries of their subjects, not just because of the risk to their reputations. They are happiest when sense can be made of what they are looking at. That sense isn’t always the sense that things made in antiquity. Modern scholars make fictions, and sit upon the pile they have made.

The philosopher Adrian Moore wrote a history of the infinite in 1990, and presented a series on BBC radio in 2016 on the same subject. Both discuss the problems and issues around the human response to the idea of the infinite. However Moore’s idea of the history of man’s relationship is strangely structured. Writing about the broadcast series I pointed out that:

We  get many clues about the Greek understanding of the infinite and the unlimited from a number of Plato’s dialogues, including The Timaeus, The Sophist, The Republic, The Theaetetus, The Laws, and The Parmenides. In skipping Plato, the first reference to Parmenides and his notion of the universe as simply one and one alone, is as an introduction in the first episode to his pupil Zeno of Elea, and his response to paradox. There is no discussion of Plato’s demolition of Parmenides arguments, no discussion of the Platonic forms, no discussion of the relationship of the forms to the form of the Good, which is another way of talking about what is infinite, and no discussion of what amounts to a different logical modality in the pages of Plato (where he discusses things passing into one another by means of their similitude), which is a way of understanding the relationship of finite things to the infinite.  

What Moore has constructed is a Catholic perspective on the idea of the infinite, since it is viewed from the perspective of Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Anselm. What made sense to those scholars, makes sense to Moore. Plato was largely unavailable to any scholars  of that period (with the exception of some sections of the Timaeus). But to write now about the infinite as if the writings of Plato are unknown to us, or of no importance to our understanding of the human response to the infinite, is difficult to fathom. I summarised part of this first episode of the series as follows:

Essentially Aristotle’s rapprochement, which Moore characterises as an attempt to make the concept of the infinite more palatable to the Greeks, involved dividing the idea of the infinite into two. As already mentioned, one of these was the potential infinite, and the second was the actual infinite. As outlined in the first episode, Zeno’s paradoxes depended on the idea of an infinite divisibility, which seemed to make the idea of any kind of movement impossible, since that would require a universe of infinite complexity. Zeno therefore regarded all forms of movement as illusion. Since in order to travel a certain distance, you would have to travel half the distance to your destination, and then half of the distance remaining, and then half of that, and half of what still remained, and so on. Which would result in an infinite number of steps. Which would be impossible. 

Aristotle’s response was that though the various stages of the journey could be understood in such a way, the stages were not marked, and did not have to be considered in making a journey. The idea of limit is however a crucial point. What Aristotle was saying is that there are two ways of looking at the idea of what a limit is.  Essentially there is limitation which is defined by what a thing is, and there is limitation which is not. In the first case the limit of a thing cannot be transcended without the nature of that thing turning into something else.

The essence of this argument is that there are forms of limit which can be ignored. One of which is the actual infinite: instead we should deal with the potential infinite. The actual infinite, by its nature, is always there. But we cannot deal with it. The potential infinite we can work with, since it is not always there, and spread infinitely through reality. So we can count numbers without ever arriving at infinity, or ever being in danger of arriving there. Moore mentioned that this conception of infinity more or less became an orthodoxy after Aristotle, though not everyone accepted that his argument against actual infinity was solid. Which is something of an understatement. Aristotle’s distinction between the potential infinite and the actual infinite is between what is, in practical terms, something we can treat as finite, and what is actually infinite. 

 

Moore has defined himself as an Aristotelian finitist, meaning that, since (he argues), man cannot deal with the actual infinite, only the potential infinite can make any sense to us. And so, much ancient discussion is swept away, as of very little interest or importance. This is why we cannot easily understand much of the intellectual world of antiquity. Instead we choose to write unflattering fictions about it.

I said that we cannot rely on Aristotle for accurate information on the Pythagoreans. This is not because I regard him as a poor scholar. Both Plato and Aristotle taught in the Academy in Athens. They were both dealing with a body of traditional doctrine (there are many passages where a comparison shows this – their discussion of the importance of the liver, for example). But they had quite different ways of discussing doctrine. Plato gives the reader real information about the subject, but hedges it about with other arguments, and sometimes talks in terms of images and myth (the account of the prisoners in the cave, in the Republic, for example). So his work makes sense to those who already know the doctrine, and intrigues those who don’t. Aristotle on the other hand, seems to have had the job of sifting through students to find those who might have the intelligence to  be able to grasp the essence of the doctrine (when properly instructed). He did this sometimes by constructing complex sophistical arguments which actually contradicted doctrine, and sometimes even rational sense.

Two examples: The first is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, originally a series of lectures, ends up concluding the gods cannot act in the world, but only contemplate. Imagine the response to that argument in the ancient world! Why did Aristotle argue like this? He was looking for students who could provide critical rational responses to the argument, and who could  see that it did not make any sense in a reality which was (at the time) populated by divinities expected to play a constructive role in the world. The second example is Aristotle’s comments on logical modality (mostly in the Metaphysics), which I’ve discussed elsewhere (in ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’). This also contradicts traditional doctrine which underpinned the human relationship with the divine. And not just in Greece. Plato discusses the logical modality which enables contact and engagement with the divine, and other authors do too. We ignore all of this information concerning doctrine, because we prefer the unfathomable shadows on the wall.

However, despite the occasional tricksiness of Aristotle, he tells us something important, which, if we are familiar with relevant texts by other authors, we can figure out. I quote again from my critical review of Adrian Moore’s broadcast History of the Infinite, concerning the arguments of Zeno:.

The idea of limit is however a crucial point. What Aristotle was saying is that there are two ways of looking at the idea of what a limit is.  Essentially there is limitation which is defined by what a thing is, and there is limitation which is not. In the first case the limit of a thing cannot be transcended without the nature of that thing turning into something else.

Aristotle’s discussion references the doctrinal view which is also discussed by Plato. Which is that there is an important connection between the idea of limit and the infinite. The infinite is just another way of specifying what is unlimited, and beyond the physical world. Paradoxically, it is the actual limit of what is, and what can be. This does not represent a retreat from commerce with the actual infinite, but actually tells us how that commerce was supposed to work.

However the physical and finite world is also full of limits. These sometimes function as boundaries, and serve to close off access. Some limits you can choose to pass beyond, and there are others which you cannot pass. And in some cases, because of the nature of the limit, it is the nature of the limit itself which allows commerce with the ultimate limit of everything, which is where the Gods were once understood to have their existence.

This is the most important thing to understand about antiquity, both east and west. For Moore, the actual infinite is simply something which defies our understanding. In antiquity, the actual infinite was something of vital importance, and which we could have commerce with through its earthlly analogues (totalities, completions, limits. etc). Aristotle, in talking about Zeno’s paradox, is referencing the key doctrinal point, which is that reality has a double nature. And that we have (if we are properly informed), a choice about how we respond to that double nature.

In modern times, we no longer have this choice, since the doctrine concerning actual infinity has been mostly lost, and in fact entirely lost to those who function in the modern successors of Plato’s Academy. We are stuck in a world that imagines it must deal with everything in terms of calculable finitudes. Effectively we are, to quote the Mesopotamian king Esarhaddon, “blind and deaf ” for the whole of our lives.

It was not always so.

'I and Thou'. Anthropology and the Presumption of Primitive Intellectual Error in Antiquity.

[This is a section from Thomas Yaeger’s book J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published by the Anshar Press in April 2016.]


4.1. The problem of the authentic Socrates may reside mainly with ourselves: we make a clear distinction between ethical issues and matters of ontology. A proper reading of Aristotles's Ethics however, shows quite clearly that ethical issues were not distinguished in this way by Plato's pupil. The anabasis of the soul described in that work implies at the least a metaphorical emulation of the condition of the divine*[37]. The whole universe is conceived by Aristotle as a moral hierarchy from insect to the Good, and we do well to recall the passage in the Timaeus where Plato speaks of a similar hierarchy, ascended and descended according to the moral worth of the individual in life:

...by virtue of necessity... their bodies are subject to influx and efflux, [and] these results would necessarily follow, - firstly sensation that is innate and common to all proceeding from violent effections; secondly, desire mingled with pleasure and pain; and besides these, fear and anger and all such emotions as are naturally allied thereto, and all such as are of a different and opposite character. And if they shall master these they will live justly, but if they are mastered unjustly. And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star, and shall gain a life that is blessed and congenial; but whoso has failed therein shall be changed into woman's nature at the second birth; and if, in that shape, he still refraineth not from wickedness he shall be changed every time, according to the nature of his wickedness, into some bestial form after the similitude of his own nature...*[38].

 4.2. It has been argued, essentially following the Frazerian model of antiquity, [Before Philosophy, Henri Frankfort, et al.] that, among ancient cultures the world was conceived as a place populated entirely by entities, so that relation with the things in the world was essentially understood in terms of "I" and "Thou": subject and object, whether animate or inanimate, were understood to belong to the same generic category. But this presumes - for reasons which seem quite sound to us - that in fact the subjective and objective worlds are generically different. Thus, it would seem that to parallel epistemological processes with ontological ones must be to make an error. The implication of this view is that, at best, the ancients failed to formalise the difference between the two realms, and, at worst, that such a distinction never occurred to them.

4.3. If it is true that the ancients never came to grips with the distinction between the realms of the subjective and the objective, and therefore the distinction between the animate and inanimate, then it must follow that the ancient perception of the nature of the world must have been altogether in error (to which Wittgenstein objected), and the earliest part of human history may be legitimately characterized, with Frazer, as a childhood. The supposed failure to distinguish between the processes of the subjective and objective realms means that we can read the past as a struggle for the acquisition of the skill to do so: all arguments form part of an unplanned sequence, a blind upward groping toward the light of understanding. Whereas if the yoking of the subjective and objective realms owes its origin to the reasoned idea of the final cause, the concept of a final completeness of the world in which everything has its place and function, then we cannot with confidence interpret dialectical arguments or the evidence of human activity in antiquity as part of a blind anabasis, an improvised ascent to a rational understanding. This for the simple reason that these arguments and actions took place within a context in which the basic rational frame was already taken for granted. The importance of this is hard to overstate.

4.4. For now, the attempt to disinter the evidence for the unwritten history of the final cause as an idea is close to impossible: for, though the idea of the final cause might be admitted in the writings of earlier authors (Herodotus, Histories, Bk. I.30-33, already quoted, much of Homer, etc.), it is not understood to be intimately bound up with the view of reality which emerges from the Platonic corpus. Hence, evidence of the earlier history of the idea of the final cause is not of itself evidence for Platonism as a body of work emerging from an older pattern of ideas. Instead, the final cause is treated by critics as a traditional element within a radical programme of inquiry. By contrast, I argue that the Platonic teaching was not an exploration of reality by means of dialectical enquiry involving the use of traditional elements; but that Plato crossed well-rehearsed territory, probably with arguments more or less of his own construction.

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[37] interestingly, in defining the action of the gods as passive contemplation, Aristotle reproduces the extreme Parmenidean form of Plato's Ideal theory, in which the Form of the Good is unchanging and unchangeable. In Bk. X of the Ethics Aristotle characterizes the activity of the divine as contemplation. The gods are living beings from whom all forms of activity have been removed. "...if a being lives, and action cannot be ascribed to him,... what remains but contemplation? It follows, then, that the divine life, which surpasses all others in blessedness, consists of contemplation". (Nic. Eth. X. 8. 7., F. H. Peters trans.) [38] Tim. 42a-c

The World Turned Upside Down

1. People believe many of the things they believed in antiquity, but the frame which gives them meaning has shifted.
2. The modern approach to understanding is to deal in discrete and measurable entities, and their combinations. In the ancient world, they were more interested in understanding the part in relation to the whole.
3. How this reversal came about is complex, and the process is not yet complete. The ancient world view is essentially a teleological perspective, in which the final cause of everything has an impact on all significant things in the world. In this world view, facts are intimately associated with values.
4. Teleology has been expelled from our sciences, because it is regarded as a baseless principle, and not a real cause at all.
5. Losing the teleological perspective from modern science is generally regarded as a great advance, freeing us from superstitious notions about purpose, whether in evolution of animals and other creatures, and also frees us from reading the hand of the gods in events. In our world, though artists and poets frame things otherwise, there is no moral connection between facts in themselves, and values. The deficiency is supplied by law and a rational understanding of society. It is the real purpose of the European enlightenment.
6. However the success of the enlightenment enterprise creates a difficulty for us in understanding the ancient world. It makes it incomprehensible to us in its own terms, and it has become a very strange place.
7. To simplify the difficulty, the enlightenment scholars imagined they could discern the real driving forces in ancient society, which were not necessarily clear from the texts and the archaeological evidence. This meant grading the evidence from antiquity in terms of its real meaning, and giving precedence to particular interpretation. This process became an important part of classical scholarship.
8. Latterly, ancient history largely has been taught in terms of Marx’s economic model of reality (even if Marx was not often mentioned), in which everything is explained in terms of material and economic pressures operating on society. I was taught the history of the ancient near east entirely in this way. Many interesting aspects of the ancient world consequently were downgraded in importance, and some were not mentioned at all (we shall return to some of these). Since all ancient societies were deemed to be explicable in terms of this materialistic model, assessment of each culture was reduced to ‘how well did they do?’ Moral judgements were not encouraged.
9. We need to look at how ancient societies understood themselves. A number of ancient writers concerned themselves with what we need to understand, including Plato and Aristotle. .Some of the details can be reasonably inferred, and can be added to the picture if they both inform the evidence, and are supported by the evidence.
10. It has been noted that ‘completed action’ is of great importance in the ancient world, principally in the context of ritual. Why is this? It implies that ‘incompletness’ is a negative thing. Completeness was a characteristic of the gods. This is true whether we are considering the head of a pantheon, or the lowliest member of it. All are regarded as complete in themselves. It is a characteristic of divinity.
11. We are used to thinking that it is the detail, the narrative of the ritual which ought to have been considered efficacious by those participating in the ritual. The detail and the narrative are important, but it is the completion of detail and narrative which are regarded as achieving the desired result.
12. The Sumerian god Ea is the god of the waters of the Abyss. He is depicted in iconography as sitting enthroned in the deep. He is in the same place as the subject of his lordship. The kings of Babylon had themselves depicted sitting on the rolling sea in a ritual context, in order to, as we would have it, be associated with Ea, his responsibilities and characteristics. Thus their kingship is connected with the world of the divine.
13. This however is to see the image within the ritual as a metaphor. It is much more than a metaphor. If the ritual is performed correctly and completely, not only is the king standing in the place of the god, the completeness establishes an essential identity with the god.
14. This is a hard idea to follow.  We should recall that much of the cultural trajectory of the 1^st millennium BCE in the Mediterranean and the Near east revolved around the pursuit of political hegemony, which would be achieved through overturning control of the highly theocratic Assyria. The Persians took it, and then Alexander. And Alexander styled himself a god.  To run Assyria was to represent the will of the divine on earth.
15. Modern historians see this pursuit as the seeking of the trappings of divine kingship, which can then be used as part of the propaganda of the hegemony, thus buttressing it. But this is to slip past what might have been the understanding at the time, among ruling elites.  There was a long-standing discussion in the ancient world about whether or not a man could be a god, and how that transition might be effected.
16. We need to look at the range of causes understood in the ancient world. We have good detail about the causes understood by the Greeks, through Aristotle. These were: formal, material, efficient, and final. The final cause is the ultimate teleological explanation. The formal cause, in the case of a statue, would be the idea of the statue, the material cause would be the wood, bronze or ivory out of which the statue is to be made, the efficient cause is the sculptor who gives the form to the statue, and the final cause is the reason or end for which the statue has been created.
17. Each of these causes contributes to the completion of whatever it is that is being made. The final cause of an entity might not be framed in terms of an ultimate final cause – Aristotle describes the bricks of a house existing for the purpose of creating a house – but its completion would conjoin it with the ultimate final cause. We know that the completion of a sacred building was treated as a very serious matter, on a par with the proper completion of a performed ritual. Likewise the decommissioning of a sacred building was as important an act as its creation (in Mesopotamia very often marked by completely backfilling the structure).
18. These ideas stretch back to the Bronze age and most likely far beyond, even if their formalization in writing dates from the fourth century BCE in Greece. The perfecting of objects, whether through refinement of their form, their material, the craftsmanship of their execution, their size (microliths and megaliths), through the purpose of the object, or through the birth and death of living things, can be identified in both archaeology, and references in texts.
19. Aristotle in ‘On Coming-to-Be and Passing Away’ gives an interesting perspective on the relation of mundane reality to a more enduring reality. Forms come to be and pass away into something else. There are areas of stability, but essentially all mundane things he understood as alterations of something else.
20. In his ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ it becomes clear that his teleological perspective means that moral action has implications for the status of the agent. He concludes that a principal characteristic of the gods is contemplation, and that the end result of achieving the intellectual virtues is a state of contemplation by the agent. We can take this characterization of the gods with a pinch of salt, in that it would not have offered much incentive for his pupil Alexander, but Aristotle does suggest that this is at least a form of emulation of the divine.
21. Looking at the two works together, we can see that in his former work his view is that mundane reality is woven out of a supersensible reality which is transcendent .And he argues in the second  that the end of the moral life is a state of immobile contemplation.  Which again is a state which transcends mortal existence.
22. This transcendent reality, it seems, does not have any obvious relation to mundane existence, since it is beyond change, and does not allow action. It is the supersensible reality from which mundane reality somehow emerges as a subset of possibility.
23. It is only possible for this to happen (according to this line of argument) if the transcendent is connected in some way with the world of the mundane. Living form, judgement and decision are only possible in the mundane world, through common properties with reality itself. The importance of the connection with the supersensible world cannot be overestimated, and this is achieved through completions. 

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.

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move

The Plato we have we look at differently from the way he was understood in antiquity. For most of the middle ages all that was available to scholars was the first part of the Timaeus. So it is not the case that a way of understanding Plato has been handed down to us, except via the neoplatonists. But the neoplatonist understanding of Plato is deprecated as a way of understanding his work, with the consequence that modern scholars approach Plato virtually naked, with a very modern set of intellectual baggage. This can be a problem.

I wrote in SHB that:

In parallel with the changing scholarly assessment of Egyptian civilisation in the eighteenth century, Greek philosophy itself was undergoing a re-evaluation. This was essentially the first since the renaissance, when Plato was generally understood to be writing about theological matters, rather than purely philosophical questions. Now Plato needed to be co-opted into the life of reason.

Karl Friedrich Herman (1804 1855) wrote what von Wilemovitz-Moellendorff regarded as an important 'Life of Plato.' This life was 'the first to understand the development of Plato's thought.'

Well there you have problem number one: the idea of a development in Plato. So, what Plato was writing about had nothing to do with a background in cultic life, and therefore he could be approached as a writer on all fours with modern philosophers. Modern philosophers, principally after the foundation of the University of Gottingen, do research, and what they do is a secular activity.

Martin Bernal wrote that:

Gottingen can well be considered the embryo of all later, modern, diversified and professional universities. It was established in 1734 by George II, King of England and Elector of Hanover, was well endowed, and as a new foundation was able to escape many of the medieval religious and scholastic constraints that persisted in other universities. With its British connections it was a conduit for Scottish Romanticism as well as for the philosophical and political ideas of Locke and Hume.

Bernal writes about one of the founders of the University of Gottingen, Kristophe August Heumann. He says that: “As a pioneer of the new professionalism Heumann established a scholarly journal, Acta Philosophorum, in the first issue of which, in 1715, he argued that although the Egyptians were cultivated in many studies they were not ‘philosophical’.

This claim – which his contemporaries Montesquieu and Bruckner… did not dare to make – was both striking and daring in the light of the strong ancient association between philosophia and Egypt." Bernal mentions that 'three of the earliest four references to philosophia are associated with Egypt'. Isokrates specifically associated philosophy with Egypt (Bousiris, 28).

Bernal points out that modern scholars have difficulty in accepting this ancient association, and mentions one author, who, writing in 1961, consistently translated 'philosophia' as the civilisation of Egypt' (Black Athena p 216) .

Further, he writes that: “Heumann’s categorical distinction between Egyptian ‘arts and studies’ and the Greek ‘philosophy’ is rather difficult to comprehend, as his definition of the latter was ‘the
research and study of useful truths based on reason.’ Nevertheless its very imprecision made, and makes, the claim that the Greeks were the first ‘philosophers’ almost impossible to refute."

It is in fact not so difficult to comprehend, when Heumann's view is considered in its cultural context. At the time this distinction was made, Newton's mechanical philosophy and mathematics were in the ascendant. A reaction had long since set in across Europe against magic, alchemy, astrology, and other pseudo-sciences of the time. Leibniz, Newton's rival in mathematics, had, toward the end of the seventeenth century begun to distance himself from both people he knew in these fields, and from the kind of language they used to describe and understand ideas and phenomena. He became modern. 1

Egypt, being undoubtedly a place of magic and other unreasonable practices, experienced collateral damage. It could no longer be seen by proponents of reason as a place of philosophy, since philosophy was to be understood as the exercise of human reason, and not something which could co-exist with magic, prophecy, divination, etc. Irrespective of the fact that magic and the other unreasonable practices co-existed with philosophy in Greece.

So there has been a very strong effort by scholars, particularly since the enlightenment, to break with earlier understandings of both the basis of Greek philosophy, and its relationship to other cultures in the ancient world. In the interest of establishing the life of reason.

Hence SHB is, as a work of scholarship, as near anathema as it is possible to imagine, since one of its principal aims is to break up the post-enlightenment consensus about what philosophy is, where it came from, and its cultural context, by showing its roots in a ‘cultus deorum’ - among those who speculated on the nature of Divinity, the Creation, and the nature of Reality itself. In short, among those who sought to answer the question, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’

I will now turn to the kind of argument Plato used in addressing the nature of reality itself. Some of the most interesting passages are well known, but apparently impenetrable to the modern mind. They come from three dialogues in particular – the Timaeus, the Sophist, and the Republic. Other important information is scattered through other dialogues, but it is possible to understand Plato’s thought on the basis of these three dialogues alone (though reading the Theatetus as well is recommended).

I’m now going to quote from the chapter in SHB on Plato’s theory of Being:

The Timaeus contains a famous passage which discusses the manner in which the forms are conjoined with body:

...it is not possible that two things alone should be conjoined without a third; for there must needs be some intermediary bond to connect the two. And the fairest of bonds is that which most perfectly unites into one both itself and the things which it binds together; and to effect this in the fairest manner is the natural property of proportion. 2

The context of this passage is an attempt to explain water and air as intermediary between fire and earth, but what Plato is giving us is more general: a theory of participation which has been the root of the western tradition in art and architecture ever since:

For whenever the middle term of any three numbers, cubic or square, is such that as the first term is to it, so is it to the last term - and again, conversely, as the last term is to the middle, so is the middle to the first.

- then the middle term becomes in turn the first and the last, while the first and last become in turn middle terms, and the necessary consequence will be that all the terms are interchangeable, and being interchangeable they all form a unity. 3

Why is it a necessary consequence that all the terms are interchangeable? Each of the terms bears a relation to the others, a proportionate similitude, and each can become first, middle and last terms in an extended sequence, but they are not the same as each other. They are conjoined with one another, but in sequence. They bear likeness to each other in the proper sequential order but not otherwise. It depends on the arrangement. Given the proper arrangement, one may pass through the sequence and establish degrees of similitude between all the different terms. But they are still not the same. They participate in each other, but their proportionate similitude is not identity, and that is essentially what Plato is claiming here.

I think that there is no doubt that this is what Plato means, and it is up to us to explain it. Clearly it underpins the description of the activity of the philosopher in the Republic, where it is said that the process of argument:

...treats assumptions not as principles, but as assumptions in the true sense, that is, as starting points and steps in the ascent to something which involves no assumption and is the first principle of everything; when it has grasped that principle it can again descend, by keeping to the consequences that follow from it, to a conclusion. The whole procedure involves nothing in the sensible world but moves solely through forms to forms, and finishes with forms. 4

What Plato is arguing is that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

End of the section from SHB. When Plato speaks of ‘something which involves no assumption and is the first principle of everything’, he is speaking of the root of creation, as well as an intellectual apprehension of Reality itself. Plato sees a parallel between the acquisition of knowledge of what lies behind the world of appearance, and the inverse process by which that world of appearance is created, though he speaks only of an intellectual descent: ‘when it (the mind) has grasped that principle it can again descend, by keeping to the consequences that follow from it, to a conclusion. The whole procedure involves nothing in the sensible world but moves solely through forms to forms, and finishes with forms.’

Another section from SHB, which explores the attempt to define what Reality itself is in the Sophist:

… the ideas, formerly aloof from the world of sensibles and incapable of interaction turn out to be entities capable of participation in each other. And thus, like objects apprehended by opinion, are compounded both of Being and Not-being.

At 244c the Eleatic stranger asks whether the Real is "the same thing as that to which you give the name one? Are you applying two names to the same thing...?" And continues: "it is surely absurd for him Parmenides to admit the existence of two names, when he has laid down that there is no more than one thing..." Thus in attempting to define the One Parmenides cannot state it at all "without recognising three real things." 5

At 244d the Stranger questions the notion of the reality as wholeness: is "whole" other than the one real thing or identical with it? For

... if it is a whole - as indeed Parmenides says 6 "Every way like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, evenly balanced from the midst in every direction; for there must not be something more nor something less here than there" - If the Real is like that, it has a middle and extremities, and consequently it must have parts, must it not? 7

The Stranger observes that if a thing is divided into parts it may have the property of unity in terms of an aggregate of its parts, "being a sum or whole". However, "the thing which has these properties cannot be just Unity itself... Unity in the true sense and rightly defined must be altogether without parts." 8

Thus, how are we to define the Real - is it one and whole? The property of unity is not unity itself, and alternatively, if the Real is not a whole by virtue of having this property of unity, while at the same time Wholeness itself is real, it follows that the Real falls short of itself... and further... all things will be more than one since Reality on the one side and Wholeness on the other have now each a distinct nature. 9

The Real cannot come to be if wholeness does not exist, for "whenever a thing comes into being, at that moment it has come to be as a whole; accordingly, if you do not reckon unity or wholeness amongst real things, you have no right to speak of either Being or coming into being as having any existence." 10 The Eleatic stranger (probably representing Plato himself) concludes by observing that "countless other difficulties, each involved in measureless perplexity, will arise, if you say that the Real is either two things or only one." 11

In the Timaeus the fully knowable is defined as the eternal and the unchanging, i.e., that which fully "is". However the discussion at Sophist 248-249d seems to jettison this definition. The Eleatic stranger observes that the Idealists (the "Friends of Forms," 248a) distinguish between "Becoming" and "Real being": the definition of the former involving the sensible world, and the latter communing via the soul through reflection. And whereas Real being is defined as unchanging, Becoming is subject to change (the word used is koinonein: "to be in touch with". The same word is used of our communion or participation with both change and the changeless).

The Eleatic stranger recalls an earlier proposition that the "sufficient mark of real things is the presence in a thing of the power of being acted upon or of acting in relation to however insignificant a thing." 12 The Friends of Forms do not accept this argument and reply that: "a power of acting and being acted upon belongs to Becoming, but neither of these powers is compatible with Real being." 13

Thus apparently is distinguished the material world subject to causal relations from the world of Forms and those objects which participate in them, clearly by acausal means; the division would seem to be absolute.

The Friends of Forms acknowledge that the soul knows, and that Real being is known, it is agreed; and then the stranger asks if it is agreed that

knowing or being known is an action, or is it experiencing an effect, or both? Or is one of them experiencing an effect, the other an action? Or does neither of them come under either of these heads at all? 14

It can of course be neither action or effect, as the text makes clear, 15 if the Friends of Forms are to avoid contradicting their earlier remarks, for: if knowing is to be acting upon something, it
follows that what is known must be acted on by it; and so, on this showing, Reality when it is being known by the act of knowledge must, in so far as it is known, be changed owing to being so acted upon; and that, we say, cannot happen to the changeless. 16

Cornford's translation of the remainder of 248e is unsatisfactory, since it obscures one of the most interesting allusions in Plato. It may be translated thus:

Before God - that we might be easily persuaded that truly motion, life, soul and wisdom are not completely real - neither life itself nor thought, but revered and sacred, it has no mind, if it put on existence unmoved. 17

The allusion, semnon kai hagion, is, as Campbell noted in his edition of the Sophist, to the statues of the gods. This phrase might be written off as of no great moment, but I think it unwise to do so. Reality has been spoken of as revered and sacred, using a phrase of specific application to the images of the gods. We catch here (I think) a glimpse of the true scope of this argument and its consequences: it concerns the logic underpinning the patterns of understanding among the Greeks. 18

End of this section of SHB. The absurdity of the argument concerning the gods (that they cannot move) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (discussed elsewhere) is now perfectly clear. What is being discussed in the Sophist is the nature of a Reality which completely transcends the world of appearance, and so can be considered to be the root from which the physical creation emerged. This reality is the telos; the Ur-Reality. Its nature, properties and attributes have been established by logical argument. The result however is paradoxical. It must remain one to be itself (elsewhere Plato ‘conjectures’ that the world of appearance is a copy of the Ur-Reality. That too cannot be the case, without compromising the nature of the Ur-Reality). It cannot move because it is the undifferentiated all. But without movement there is no mind. Without movement there is no life.

Yet there is thought and life. So at the least, the created world enshrines a paradox.






1 This phenomenon is discussed in Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion, ed. by Allison P. Coudert, et al, Kluwer, 1998.
2 Tim 31b-c
3 Tim 31c-32a
4 Rep. 511b-c
5 Cornford, F.M. Plato's Theory of Knowledge, p221.
6 Frag. 8.43
7 244d-e
8 245a
9 245c
10 245d
11 245e
12 Soph.248c.
13 Soph. 248c
14 248d
15 There is a minor textual problem concerning the identity of the speaker at this point in the dialogue which does not affect the sense of the argument - see L. Campbell, Sophistes, p128
16 248e.
17 Soph. 248e-249a. Lewis Campbell comments, in addition to noting the allusion to the statues of the gods, that there is a striking passage in the Laws (967 a-e) ‘where it is said that the deepest study of astronomy, instead of encouraging the notion of a blind necessity, leads directly to the supposition of a celestial mind or minds.’ Sophistes and Politicus, Oxford, 1867, p129. Reprinted by the Arno Press, New York, 1973.
18 We are not generally accustomed to imagine that belief is something for which sound arguments can be supplied, though christian religious history provides numerous examples of the use of philosophy to support the foundation of these.

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]