I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying.
***
To: [as appropriate]
Dear [as appropriate]
For the past two hundred years or so, works
exploring the earlier history of ideas in Europe
and the Near east, have been happy to settle on a consensus. This consensus is
that the articulate discussion of the idea of Being began with the Greeks –
particularly in the writings of Plato. There are earlier references to Being,
in the Bible and elsewhere, but these references are deemed not to be the
product of the kind of intellectual clarity which Plato and the Academy brought
to discussion of the subject. This earlier notion of Being is treated as the
focus of belief and of worship, rather than as an articulate concept.
While this allows the Greeks to retain
their status as the originators of philosophy, and the religions which grew up
in the Near east to retain faith as their (modern) focus, the foundation of
this distinction is false.
Recent study of the pattern of religious
practice in ancient Rome, and also in Assyria and Babylonia, shows that beyond
a certain point, religion no longer
resembles what we in the modern world understand to be religious. The work
of the late historian Simon Price has shown that observance and ritual was of
key importance in Roman religion, whereas belief in the gods was not. Similarly
in Mesopotamia , belief in the gods was not a
requirement in society, but the observance of ritual was important. Further, it
is a commonplace among specialists in Mesopotamian civilization that the gods
and their respective temples were often referenced in documents by numbers
rather than by name.
The principal importance of observance and
ritual in these and other cultures does not mean that there is no intellectual
model standing behind observance and ritual. But it is not a model which depends
on the existence of belief.
The importance of observance and ritual in
the ancient world can be shown to follow from an articulate understanding of
the idea of Being. An understanding which treats Being as a conjecture rather
than any kind of certain knowledge.
My book is a study of the idea of Being,
which extends the history of the idea into the middle of the second millennium
BC, and shows that the articulate understanding of the concept was present in
Mesopotamia as far back as the 14th century BC.
The book discusses those aspects of Being
which underpin observation and ritual. It identifies key texts in both
pre-classical Greece and Mesopotamia which illustrate this concern with the
aspects of Being. It also pursues the parallel between the restricted
properties of Being which are the focus of the medieval Kabbalah and the sets
of properties which were deemed to be appropriate to describe the head of the
Babylonian pantheon.
The final part of the book explores the
significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and is an extended discussion of a
1993 paper by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola. This paper opened up the
possibility that the sacred tree stood for the articulate concept of Being, and
that the articulation of the idea was identical in most respects with the model
of Being represented by the Kabbalah. The symbol of the tree is well known, and
it can be traced in palace reliefs to the 14th century BC, thus
establishing an upper date for the concept of Being.
The book also reviews the views of Plato,
who supplies us with some very old discussion about the nature of reality.
There is a long-standing problem for scholars with Plato, in that he could not
provide a logical argument for the reality of commerce between the world of
Being, and the world of appearance. At least not in terms of likely
explanation. But then he was clear that in speaking of the divine, that was not
possible. At the upper end of the divided line (in the Republic), only
conjecture is possible. So the discussion of the apparent world as a copy of
the divine world is no more than a likely story. The real argument for the
reality of commerce is not directly discussed.
However it emerges from an
analysis of the development of the modern ontological argument, which, by the
time it is being discussed by Berkeley and Kant, results in the conclusion
objective reality is an illusion (something Plato was insistent about). Berkeley
The suggestion is made that this is the
solution to the question of commerce with the divine (the transcendental) left
unresolved by Plato. There is no copy of the divine world. All appearance
represents slices through the nature of divinity. About which stories can be
told.
The commerce with the divine world is
achieved through those things which are common to the divine world and the
world of appearance. These are (what we might call) transcendental
intersubjectivities, which have already been identified as the property sets of
Being, which are in common in both worlds.
***
The classicist Lewis Campbell made much the same suggestion in a footnote to his translation of Plato's Sophist in the 1860s. He was right. It appears however that, around 150 years later, many classicists would still rather not know what Plato was talking about.
No comments:
Post a Comment