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 14th 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 2nd 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].
[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.
