Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.