The "Great Chain of Being," from Ramon Lull's De ascensu & descensu intellectus, 1512.
Arthur Lovejoy explored the long history of the idea of Being (particularly the associated idea of plenitude) in the cultural history of the West, from Plato to modern times, in The Great Chain of Being. In the process he created the discipline of the History of Ideas, which stands to some degree in opposition to the History of Philosophy. The latter is in thrall to the intellectual frame which was established by the Greeks and the scholars and compilers of the Hellenistic world, which has been endlessly refined since the renaissance, and significantly revised since the later rise of the research university in the mid to late eighteenth century. This intellectual frame is now protected by classics and philosophy departments worldwide. The History of Ideas by contrast is a discipline which has no a priori interest in maintaining the current status of any body of ideas, since it seeks to place ideas in their proper context, whatever their current context may be.
This book is an essay in the History of Ideas.
It differs from Lovejoy’s extensive essay in that it inserts the idea of Being
into the period extending from the middle of the second millennium BCE up until
Plato and Aristotle, which is nominally the point at which the idea of Being
begins as a subject of articulate discussion. The reason for inserting this
idea into a period where it is not supposed to belong, is that the evidence for
the existence of this idea is in fact clearly present, and in volume, and the
existing arguments against the presence of an articulate idea of Being in
antiquity before the advent of Greek philosophy are outdated and essentially
baseless. Much ink and argument has been expended to keep the early first
millennium intellectual world free of a coherent idea of Being, but the
evidence indicates that this is an idea which was integral and underpinning to
concepts of essential importance to Mesopotamian civilisation.
When the followers of Arthur Lovejoy entered
the territory of the European renaissance in the middle years of the twentieth
century, they found the territory practically deserted, except for art
historians and literary specialists. They were not threatening established
academic disciplines and reputations with this incursion, and as a result, have
repaired much of the damage to our understanding of this critical period of our
intellectual history, which had suffered centuries of neglect.
By contrast, the study of ancient civilization
is laden with a number of established academic interests – classics, history,
anthropology, philosophy, etc. The territory is relatively crowded. History in
particular is a discipline with a heavy interest in interpretation, since it
employs an approach to evidence which (historians believe) has a universal
applicability, and so they are defending a methodological approach, as well as
the interpretation of the evidence.
Plato is supposedly the first to rigorously
engage with the idea of Being. He is one of our best sources for the
understanding of ancient ways of thinking, and it is useful to read him
carefully, and to follow the consequences of his arguments, since he wished to
be understood, even if he expressed himself through necessarily obscure and
technical language. Some of the esoteric doctrines turn out to be present in
his text, once key aspects of his argument are properly grasped. This is true
particularly in connection with his idea of the Forms, and his theory of
knowledge.
It can be shown that his arguments about the
Forms or Ideas are connected with the practice of the worship of divine
statues, which connection should long ago have been made by scholarship. All
direct documentation of the ritual for the installation of cult statuary in
Greece has perished, even if we have, in cryptic form, an account of the rationale
from Plato. However, through extraordinary good fortune, rituals and incantations for the installation
of cult statues in Assyria and Babylonia survive, so it is possible for us to
examine these to understand how these cult objects fitted into a social
structure focussed on knowledge of the divine (as was the case in both Greece
and Assyria).
Assyria is, for a period of around a hundred
and fifty years, the best documented civilization in antiquity. From it we have
an invaluable record of the actual conduct of a ritual installation conducted
by Esarhaddon, one of the last kings of Assyria. This tells us many things
about how the process was understood, which otherwise we would have to guess
at.
Idolatry has been very poorly served by
historians and scholars of antiquity until recently. It seems in general that
scholarship has been content to treat idolatry as a part of the ancient world
which not only does not make sense to us, but was probably also an incoherent
and wholly credulous nonsense to the ancients. In other words it is seen as the
product of a primitive stupidity (urdummheit),
bearing no relation to anything approaching reason, and we should not expect to
make much of it. However Wittgenstein warned against this approach to evidence,
particularly in connection with J. G. Frazer’s widely read (and critically
outmoded) interpretation of ancient systems of belief. He suggested that
perhaps if we understood the context of the beliefs, we would understand how
these beliefs might represent what, at the time, would have been an
intelligible response to that context. In any case it is arrogant of us to
assume, a priori, that those who
have quite different belief systems from ourselves, are foolish and misguided.
The idea of Being and its associated ideas
represents a noumenal frame which can (and should) underpin an understanding of
the phenomena of ancient religions in the Mediterranean and in the near East. By this I mean that the idea of Being was
common to a number of cultures in this area in the millennium and a half before
the advent of the common era. The suggestion is, that it is possible to build
phenomenal public religious structures, with distinctive and distinct imagery
and liturgy, on the basis of a very similar set of discussions of the noumenal
basis which a theory of Being provides. In other words, a number of cultural
features which are held in common in states such as Greece and Assyria, such as
polytheism, idolatry, sacrifice, divination, and so on, have their origin and
their source of meaning in the common grasp of a theory of Being by the
priestly classes around the Mediterranean and the near-east.
In general, during the past two hundred years,
scholarship has accepted that the creation described in Plato’s Timaeus
involves a copy of reality, which contains the universe of movement and change.
This argument was always a tease by Plato, indicated by his labelling it as a
‘likelihood’. It is however possible to show, through close analysis of Plato’s
argument, that he tells us what he really holds about the nature of reality,
and the relationship of the moving image of it to that reality. Which is that
there is only subjective apprehension of
aspects of Being, and nothing is fundamentally separable from Being. This
interpretation is explored, in particular for its important implications for
the theory of Forms, his neglected theory of vision, and the perceived
relationship between epistemology and ontology in the ancient world. It
explains a large number of things in the evidence which remains, which
otherwise have no explanation, such as the emphasis on the power of the word,
and the power to call the gods into existence.
Plato’s view of reality as ultimately
subjective has a close parallel in the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley’s seventeenth
century view, in which, similarly, there is no objective reality which can be
established beyond our capacity to perceive.
So, this is a radical book. It sets out to critique our view of the
ancient past, which is essentially a complex consensus reality - reducing to
meaninglessness many crucial and endlessly repeated details - through criticism
of some of the many preconceptions and assumptions we use to understand the
evidence. It also seeks to sketch out an alternative construction of the intellectual
world of antiquity in both Greece and Assyria.
It isn't a book to be read by students studying for examinations. Though
students of these subjects might like to read it afterwards for a significantly
different background perspective.
The plan of the book is relatively simple. It
is divided into three main parts. The first part explores the ontological
argument from the early modern period (Bishop Anselm) up to Immanuel Kant in
the eighteenth century. Ontology is really about the study of reality, rather
than about providing a proof of the existence of God, which is what the
ontological argument is now understood to be. The point of the survey is to
show that most of the discussion relating to the proof of the existence of God
is poorly argued, and often based on loose and unreliable definitions. These
arguments also don't deal credibly with the nature of reality, for the reason
that the ideas of God under discussion aren't understood to have a bearing on
the nature of reality itself. This is true even for Kant (for whom I have
enormous respect), who understood better than most that the question of what
reality is, depends on what the available categories of our understanding bring
to the inquiry.
Discussion of Being and the nature of reality
itself was much more sophisticated in the ancient world than anything produced
since, though not written up as formal argument. Exploration of argument about
the nature of Being in ancient Greece is the subject of the second part. The history of Plato scholarship (only around
two centuries old) is also critically examined. Currently split into two camps,
the first arguing his thought developed over time, and the second arguing he
was writing around a consistent but impenetrable doctrine, which is not
explained in the texts. The former ignore many of Plato's statements and
arguments in order to make their case. The latter are usually fighting a
rearguard action, since it is hard to define what they are defending.
A third position is considered, based on a
formulation which appears in Plato's Timaeus, whose implications have
not been explored properly. This
formulation, in conjunction with discussion elsewhere in Plato's work, about
whether reality is one or two, necessarily
promotes the idea that Plato was writing about a reality that is wholly
transcendental in nature. That is, there is no real distinction between the
ineffable and unchanging nature of Being, and the world of movement and change,
the knower and the known, and that consequently, the latter world is an
illusion. What is new here is the analysis of Plato's arguments, which provides
support for the third position.
This has a bearing on Plato's discussion of the
Forms. Both camps have made nothing of a key remark in the Sophist where
the Forms are directly and unequivocally connected with divine statues. [1] The home of
gods, but apparently devoid of thought or movement on earth. This remark
connects Plato's discussion of Being with the ritual and theology of both
Greece and the near East, and suggests (as Plato himself did) a great age for
the practice of philosophy.
The role of Being in the 1st millennium BCE in
both Greece and Assyria, and the evidence for it, is the subject of the Third
Part.
A few notes on spellings. This is a
cross-disciplinary work, which quotes from a wide variety of sources. Greek
text has been kept to a minimum, and has been transliterated into roman
letters, so it can be pronounced as it appears. A dash over a vowel indicates
that it is long. Thus an 'ō indicates the omega, which is a long vowel, as in
'zōon.' Pronunciation of Sumerian and Akkadian words is not settled and secure,
and since I've quoted from different writers, the same names appear in slightly
different forms, such as Apsu/Abzu. I chose not to normalise these throughout
the text. Shamash, here rendered in
roman letters, will sometimes be found spelled 'Šamaš.' So 'š' is vocalised as 'sh'. Other letters found in
Akkadian are: 'ḫ' which is pronounced as
a roughly vocalised 'h', close to the 'ch' sound in 'loch'; 'ṣ' is a dental sibilant, which should be
pronounced 'ts' as in 'tsar'.
There is a bibliography at the end of the book.
Articles consulted are referenced in the footnotes.
Thomas Yaeger, Edinburgh, February 2015.
