Did the Greeks Invent Philosophy?

In addition to many non-specialist readers here who (I think) find the heretical line of argument in my posts interesting, there are also readers of this blog who are specialists in relevant fields, including classicists, archaeologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, etc. I’m grateful for their interest, and the often well-informed comments and exchanges, both here and via email. But sometimes specialists are more interested in defending academic turf, than in the elucidation of their subject. I’ve recently had such an experience.

I chose to publish first in ebook format, via my own imprint, the Anshar Press. Partly because I anticipated a grim slog trying to find a publisher or an agent willing to take on a project which rejects several scholarly constructs which we use to make sense of our intellectual history. The most important of these constructs is the notion that the Greeks invented philosophy. The corollary of this is that there is no intellectual history worthy of the name before the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

This construct is a notion, and not a fact. It is not a fact because the evidence does not support it. If it is not supported by the evidence, why do people believe it?

Such a long tale to tell! So many interlocking reasons! I unpicked much of this construct in The Sacred History of Being (2015). A close reading of both Plato and Aristotle shows that the Greeks had a quite different understanding of what knowledge is from ourselves. They also had a quite different notion of how knowledge is acquired from ourselves, and Plato and Aristotle broadly agree about how it is done. It has nothing to do with the human senses, and physical experience. All knowledge was understood to exist in a supersensible and wholly transcendent realm. The soul was thought to mirror that transcendent realm, and therefore to offer connection with it. The upshot of this way of looking at things is that knowledge is accessed directly by the mind rather than the senses.

In the modern world we have turned this upside down entirely. We assume (and that is all that it is, an assumption) that all knowledge is necessarily mediated through sensory experience. It is understood through the categories of thought employed by the human reason, which (we imagine) reflect (in some way) the structure of the objectively real physical reality which exists outside our minds. This is a scholarly construct (one might even describe it as a scholarly compact) which has become a given since the European Enlightenment.

So we read Plato and Aristotle upside down, and effectively reject those parts of their writings which do not fit with our own way of understanding things. Our understanding of the main components of classical philosophy is therefore quite different from the understanding of philosophy in the Athenian Academy, and so scholars study classical philosophy outside its proper context. Worse, scholars have no idea what the proper context is, or why it might be important. As a result, many aspects of classics and the history of philosophy are necessarily problematic.

Something happened in addition to the development of a post Enlightenment over-reliance on common sense ideas about how we know things, and make sense of them. We lost a key ancient idea. That idea is the idea of the plenum. The plenum is that state of reality, conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time. Though it embraces the reality of space and time, it has no existence in space and time. It has no size, no location, and no properties other than being the wholly transcendental reality in which physical reality can exist. It does not move, it is not subject to change, it does not think in any way we could properly comprehend. It is what it is.

This is the idea behind Plato’s discussion of the form of the Good, and of a transcendental reality. It is an idea which has been understood (by some) for much of European history, and since classical times. But it has been much less understood since the Enlightenment. This is because it is an idea which runs counter to common sense, and which cannot make sense to us in terms of the realities of the world of things which have physical existence. Even if such a thing did exist, and was conceived to exist, it has been imagined that it would have no impact on the world of the senses and physical existence. As a consequence, it is, for the most part, treated as a matter of no importance.

This view is a mark of the poverty of the modern mind, even among the intellectually able. As I said, the plenum is that state of reality, which was once conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time, in which we have our existence. We may not be able to measure it, weigh it, discuss its form, etc., but if such a thing is responsible for the generation of the physical world, the concept deserves our attention. It was Plato’s principal concern. He was always looking to the ‘one thing’. And that one thing could be apprehended by the mind.

The Plenum can spoken of in different ways. It can be called transcendental reality, reality itself, Being, The One, Totality, etc. When I came to write The Sacred History of Being, I chose to use the term ‘Being’ through much of the text, because that was one of the terms Plato used. But I explored the different ways in which Being can be referenced. So a major purpose of writing the book was to explore the scope of a key idea in classical philosophy in something like its original context, and to restore its understanding. It remains a difficult concept to master, but we do ourselves no favours in not knowing what it means, and why it was such an important concept.

That restoration by itself makes the book potentially a valuable contribution to making sense of classical philosophy, and its actual origins. Provided of course that I have done the job properly, and not littered the text with misunderstandings and errors. Altogether, I spent nearly twelve years on constructing the text. I took the task seriously.

My background is unusual, in that in addition to my interest in Greece, philosophy and the history of ideas, I also studied Mesopotamian languages, history and culture. I was struck very early on in my studies by the range of evidence which suggested strongly that the Assyrians and Babylonians had a clear conception of the Plenum, and the idea of Being, and that there was a connection with their religion. One king even included the title ‘King of Totality’ in the string of epithets which described his importance. I realised that there was a level of cultural continuity between Greece and Assyria in particular in terms of ideas of the nature of reality, and also in terms of an understanding of moral action.

So, not only was The Sacred History of Being restoring clarity to our picture of classical philosophy, it provided something of a comparative cultural context for the emergence of philosophy in Greece. A comparative context which could be followed in Assyria back to the 14^th century B.C.E.

Occasionally I send off letters to publishers offering to submit work which they might be interested in publishing. Sometimes they say yes, and ask to see the manuscript. That’s fine, whether they accept the manuscript for publication or not - they bothered to look at the work. You might think that a book such as The Sacred History of Being would generate a lot of interest among academic publishing houses which focus on philosophy, classics, religion, ancient history, etc. I noticed in April that a major academic publishing house had on their list a book which covered some of the later territory of The Sacred History of Being.  I drafted a letter describing my book and its scope, and included a commendation of the work from an eminent scholar (I’ve edited that out). I sent this mail to the appropriate editor at the publishing house on the afternoon of the 2^nd of May this year, and offered to send the manuscript to them in PDF.

What happened? I got an email the very next afternoon, declining to look at the book, after consultation with other list managers. My work ­– possibly the most interesting manuscript they could receive in a month of Sundays – was rejected, sight unseen, by three people (specialists in classics, religion and philosophy). What was the reason given? The book did not fit the list. Which is standard code for ‘we don’t want your book’. What the real reasons were for the rejection I am afraid to imagine.

The point of posting the exchange is not to embarrass anyone, so I’ve blurred names and other information which would identify the publishing house. The point is that it is extremely difficult to get a hearing for radical scholarship from major publishing houses. And that manuscripts can be (and sometimes are) rejected without being looked at at all. Rejecting books with radical arguments without even a cursory review suggests that defending existing scholarly turf is a major part of the game. That’s not what it is supposed to be about. 

[click to expand the images].

I did expand on what some of the difficulties facing my project might be as far back as 2005. I drafted, slightly facetiously, a publishers internal memo outlining why such a book should not be published. You might want to take a look at that, since not much has changed since then. Keeping the Enlightenment Agenda Alive.