Orientalism and the Post-Enlightenment Agenda (Writing to Katherine Blouin)

[In 2018 I had some brief conversation with Dr. Katherine Blouin via Twitter. Which prompted the following email]. 

 I thought I should tell you about my work, since I am part of the largely disorganised cohort working for a radical change in our understanding of the role of ancient Greece in the development of western civilization.

My initial background is in classics and philosophy. At UCL I also studied Mesopotamia (languages and culture). This study was across three departments - UCL ancient history (text corpus, with Amelie Kuhrt), UCL department of Hebrew (Sumerian, with Mark Geller), and SOAS for Akkadian language (mainly with Andrew George). As a result I left college with a view of the relationship between Greece and Mesopotamia which was quite different from what I was led to believe while I was there.

 I graduated in 1992. I've been writing on the relationship between Mesopotamia and Greece since then. I arrived late to Said's work, since I was initially in thrall to Martin Bernal's thesis in Black Athena (though I did attend Said's series of lectures at UCL in the fall of 1993).

My main interest is in the history of philosophy. The conventional history of philosophy is pretty much a fabrication, The evidence doesn't support what is said about it, and it isn't actually that difficult to detect the fraud. Which led me to consider why the fraud was easily accepted. The answer turned out to be, as Bernal suggested, the post-Enlightenment agenda. The Enlightenment sought to understand everything in terms of common sense explanations, and not much in ancient philosophy conformed to common sense ideas.

So I've been researching and writing, off and on since 1993, about the origins of philosophy, Greek philosophical writing, and the cultural history of the west.

I was also interested in the role of anthropology in our understanding of past modes of thought. In 1993 I wrote a study of Frazer's essay on Plato, in which he argued that the idea of 'Being' was a barren notion, and nothing useful could be said of it. That is not what they thought in antiquity. So his later work was essentially a reframing of the past with one of its most important concepts entirely written out (formally published in 2016).

Hence I wrote The Sacred History of Being, which was finally published in November 2015. The point of this book was to show two things (amongst others): that the concept of Being was of immense importance before Plato, and that modern arguments about the nature of the Divine did not at all resemble ancient arguments, and so we could not easily understand what the ancients were talking about.

So we have a real problem. I've published a couple of volumes since The Sacred History of Being, which largely serve to illuminate how the ancients understood both physical reality and the Divine. Without a grasp of their radically different way of understanding, much of the ancient world is just unintelligible (oracles, omens, sacrifice, extispicy, etc).

These extra volumes serve as the basis for understanding that most ancient divine cult was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that religious thought already embraced ideas and abstractions which surface in the writings of Plato and others. In Mesopotamia, in Israel, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, etc.

Which brings me to where I am now. I showed in The Sacred History of Being that the Assyrians and Babylonians were capable of abstract thought, and conceived of the Divine as a pure abstraction. They understood the basis of dialectical thought (collection and division) which the Greeks are credited with. They embraced the idea of excellence as the Greeks did, and the concept informed the education of their kings. They understood morality to emerge from the logic of excellence, as the Greeks did. They also conducted public debates on the relative merits of this or that good thing, as the Greeks also did.

 I intend next year to publish a concluding volume in the series which provides the evidence for these Assyrian and Babylonian parallels.

 After that, the jig will be up for the classicists. But I have no expectation that they will take notice of what has happened.

 One of the [key] things they have taken on board from their subject is the pursuit of excellence. They pursue this through what they understand as the rigourousness of the study of their source materials. The context of these materials, and the rest of the world, have relatively no importance for them. So why should they change their views?

Thomas Yaeger, October 18, 2018. [Reply received]