Map and Territory: Representing Ancient Thought

These are the ten most read articles on this blog through the four weeks between October 11 - November 10, 2016. Three of them were posted in September and October 2016. Nine of these articles deal with the categories of understanding we bring to bear on ancient cultural ideas. These categories have a huge bearing on our capacity to understand what we are looking at.

'Shar Kishati' and the Cult of Eternity.There is no dispute that there was a concept of eternity in antiquity, long before the Greeks. But if we don't register that it was a fully-formed rational concept, rather than a muddled notion about what might lie beyond the here and now, then we cannot understand what eternity represented in antiquity. We say that the concept of a wholly transcendent eternity could not have been part of a rational understanding, because there could have been no such understanding of it before the advent of philosophy in Greece. So we read antiquity in terms of our own understanding. This article explores the role and function of a 'cult of eternity' in the civilizations of antiquity. It was a chapter in the draft of The Sacred History of Being written in 2003-4.

Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas).The telos is another idea whose significance in antiquity is scarcely understood. It is an abstract concept, which often surfaces in ancient literature. It is not understood as an abstraction however, since the logic behind its importance is more or less invisible to us. As a result the telos is again treated as a muddled notion about the nature of the world, rather than a rational concept which has consequences for our understanding of antiquity. 

Plato's Point of View (and why we think he doesn't have one). What did Plato think about the nature of reality? I wrote this article as a consequence of a discussion with a reader. The study of Plato is riven with two principal approaches (discussed in The Sacred History of Being), each of which enshrines preconceptions - the first presumes that Plato's canon is a record of research, and the second that the canon contains a coherent body of doctrine, though it is difficult to understand what that doctrine is, because of the discursive and often wayward form of the Platonic dialogues. Each of these schools of thought  have in common that they treat the dialogues as reflecting a process of teaching. What was Plato teaching? How human beings ought to think about the world? How human beings might gain an understanding of a supersensible reality underlying physical reality?

In fact Plato proceeds from an understanding of the world of ideas (which transcend physical instances) to the world of physical reality, rather than the other way around. This understanding of the world of transcendent ideas is based on logical argument. The doctrine is based on a logical understanding of ideas and their relationships with each other, considered apart from their instantiation in physical reality. This means the contemplation of the ideas apart from scalar and spatial properties. 

Physics and the Origins of the Universe discusses the limitations on physics by the exclusive use of the efficient cause as an explanatory mechanism. In antiquity there were four principal causes available to explain reality, including the idea of the telos (the final cause). The idea of the plenum formed an armature for the four causes. 

Questions and Answers isolates a number of issues which are discussed in The Sacred History of Being.

Sameness and Difference in Plato discusses the need for reality to come to a relationship with itself, if a physical world of multiple entities is to come into Being. This idea is the basis of the interest in the undefined dyad in antiquity.

The Sweet Song of Swans is an article (presented as an extract from the rather long chapter in The Sacred History of Being) which discusses Plato's writing process, and the use of stylometry in the modern analysis of his work (principally by those who wish to find development in the sequence of dialogues), and how Greece came to be the home of philosophy, after classicists denied the description 'philosophers' to the ancient Egyptians.

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology considers the recent work of Marc Van De Mieroop, Philosophy Before the Greeks, published in October 2015, which interprets three principle classes of Babylonian literature entirely in structuralist terms. By doing so, the author argues that reality and truth existed for the Babylonians only in the texts. So a problematic way of understanding cultural production, devised at the turn of the twentieth century by a single scholar, and obviously not known by the Babylonians, becomes the lens through which Van De Mieroop 'understands' Babylonian thought.

Looked at from this point of view, questions leap out, such as,  what is the place of the Babylonian gods? Where is the logic of the Babylonian worship of their gods? Where are the ritual actions? Where are the sacrifices? Why did they do anything at all, beyond the reading and interpretation of the texts? 

Cultural Parallels and False Narratives is an article which explores the problematic nature of religion in the first millennium BCE, and how little is present which we would now regard as religious. How the change happened in later centuries is explored. Ancient religion is compared with current Hindu thought and practice, which has remained more or less unchanged since the first millennium BCE.

Thomas Yaeger, November 10, 2016

[Post revised, December 5, 2018]

 

How Old is Philosophy?

This is a sample chapter from The Sacred History of Being:

‘…protect with merciful patience

Him who stumbles yet on so strange a path’ [1]

Through a statement by Protagoras about the history of the sophists, Plato seems to suggest that the concept of the philosopher or sage was very old, rather than an idea contemporary with the presocratics or the sophists.  

Philosophy is very ancient among the Greeks, and particularly in Crete and Lacedaemon; and there are more sophists there than in any other country. They dissemble, however, and pretend that they are unlearned, in order that it may not be manifest that they surpass the rest of the Greeks in wisdom (just as Protagoras has said respecting the sophists); but that they may appear to excel in military skills and fortitude; thinking if their real character were known, that all men would engage in the same pursuit. But now, concealing this, they deceive those who laconize in other cities. [2]

This rather startling pronouncement perhaps supplies an explanation of Plato’s admiration of the Spartans. To us his admiration has always seemed rather improbable, since we have followed the account of the Spartans written by Xenophon which reveals nothing which supports the idea that the Spartans were superior in philosophy – nor even that they were interested in the practice. [3]

This is a puzzle. Why should the Spartans want to keep their pursuit of philosophy secret? The reason given by Plato is rather lame – why should they be concerned if all men pursued philosophy? What advantage could they gain for themselves by restricting public understanding of their practice of philosophy? The clue is perhaps in the use of the word ‘wisdom’ in connection with the Spartan practice of philosophy: we are accustomed to keeping philosophy and religion apart in the study of the past; however ‘wisdom’ is a concept which appears in antique sources in the context of both philosophy and religion. If the practice of philosophy among the Spartans was in some way connected with their religion, and perhaps their model of reality, this would perhaps supply an explanation of their reticence, and the general reticence of Greeks in discussing religious matters. [4]

If so, it would appear that we owe our knowledge of the practice of philosophy in Greece to the fact that in Attica, in the middle years of the first millennium B.C.E., the practice of philosophy was somehow prised free from its religious context, in that we have a very public show of philosophy from the presocratics onwards. That philosophy was understood to be, however, not entirely beyond the scope of the arbitration by the religious authorities, is shown by the charges brought against Plato’s master Socrates, and the severity of the judgement against him. [5]

The question of the nature of mind in the past, and whether or not it can be understood as having a principal interest in the nature of reality, or being the means of securing practical needs, can be considered in different ways, using different analytical models. We necessarily start from a position of relative ignorance, due to the elapse of time, the paucity of evidence, and changing patterns of belief about how the world works.  We create theories and frames of reference which help us to understand the evidence which we have. We create different theoretical frameworks, because we do not share the explanatory models of the ancient world (where we know them), and no single model suffices for the evidence. But these theories, though they are supposed to arise to some extent from a consideration of the evidence, often arise from distinctly modern agendas, both scholarly and unscholarly.

Necessarily we make certain assumptions. It is more or less axiomatic that the ancient mind was, before Aristotle, incapable of sound logical understanding of anything, as we would understand it, at least in practice, and certainly incapable of a scientific understanding of the forces at work in both the world and the human psyche. As a consequence, modern theories, formed with a logical rigour, clarity, and a scientific approach to the evidence, are, it is assumed, necessarily superior tools for the analysis of the evidence than, say, an attempt to understand the ancient mind from inside ancient intellectual structures, however such an understanding might be achieved.

I believe this assumption to be unwise. This study, in contrast, attempts to understand ancient patterns of thought in something like the terms in which these ideas would have been understood in antiquity. This necessarily involves a good deal of difficulty, and a great deal of unpicking of the intellectual history of man - the baggage we have acquired since the invention of writing alone, a period of around 5,000 years, is very great.

On the face of it, to attempt to understand ancient patterns of thought within their original context, would seem to be impossible. And indeed, if we had no clues to how this might be achieved, it would be impossible. However, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we have many clues available to us, where we can recognise them. We are less disimilar in essential nature from our ancestors than we think, though the way in which our essential nature is given cultural expression in modern times appears to be entirely at odds with the cultural production of the ancient world. The similarities we – as a culture - do not dwell on, since they do not fit within our description of our own cultural agenda.

When the evidence is put back into its proper cultural context - from which it was wrenched by an enlightenment agenda some two hundred years ago, after some two thousand years of intermittent attrition  -  the craft of the sage appears in its proper place: his craft has always been the practice of philosophy, and that philosophy and the consideration of philosophical questions, have been an essential part of the discussion of reality and the world for many centuries.

---

[1]  Stefan Georg 1868-1933, from Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘The Book of the Hanging Gardens’ [trans. by Richard Stokes]

[2] Protagoras 342a-b

[3] The remainder of the passage is also illuminating: ‘ For there are some that in imitation of them [the Spartans, or Laconians] cut their ears, have a cord for their girdle, are lovers of severe exercise, and use short garments, as if the Lacedaemonians surpass in these things the other Greeks. But the Lacedaemonians, when they wish to speak freely with their own sophists, and are weary of conversing with them privately, expel these laconic imitators, and then discourse with their sophists, without admitting any strangers to be present at their conversations. Neither do they suffer any of their young men to travel into other cities, as neither do the Cretans, lest they should unlearn what they have learnt. But in these cities, there are not only men of profound erudition, but women also. And that I assert these things with truth, and that the Lacedaemonians are disciplined in the best manner in philosophy and discourse, you may know from the the following circumstance: For if any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him, for the most part apparently despicable in conversation, but afterwards, when a proper opportunity presents itself, this same mean person, like a skilled jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short, and contorted; so that he who converses with him will appear to be in no respect  superior to a boy. That to laconize, therefore, consists much more in philosophising, than in the love of exercise, is understood by some of the present age, and was known to the ancients; they being persuaded that the ability of uttering such sentences as these is the province of a man perfectly learned. Among the number of those who were thus persuaded, were Thales the Milesian, Pittacus the Mitylenaean, Bias the Prienean, our Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian, Miso the Chenean, and the seventh of these is said to be the Lacedaemonian Chilo. All these were emulators, lovers, and disciples of the Lacedaemonian erudition.’ [342b-343a]

Protagoras also informs us that the Spartans…’assembling together, consecrated to Apollo the first fruits of their wisdom, writing in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi those sentences which are celebrated by all men, viz. “Know thyself”, and “Nothing too much”’. He tells us this in order ‘to show that the mode of philosophy  among the ancients was a certain laconic brevity of diction’ [343b]

[4] Of course it is always possible that this is an elaborate jest on Plato’s part: attributing a philosophical inclination to a people famous for a disinclination to the mental life. Yet many Spartan pronouncements are very famous (those in the preceding footnote included), and of course the Cretans are memorialized in the philosophical conundrum ‘All Cretans are liars: I am a Cretan’. If we imagine the history of Greek philosophy without any of the works of Plato and Aristotle, then the intellectual products of the Athenian world up to that time do not look markedly different from those in other parts of the Greek world (the sage pronouncements of Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximander, etc). In terms of form, (short and pithy) they have a resemblance to the utterances of sages in the Near East (though of course the focus on the physics and metaphysics in their statements does distinguish them, despite the obvious borrowings from Near Eastern accounts of creation, in their attribution of fire or water as the principal material of creation. That focus however may have much to do with their survival being dependent on having been extracted for inclusion in the dialogues and treatises of Plato and Aristotle).

[5] Socrates was forced to drink the poison Hemlock after being found guilty of both corrupting the youth of Athens and atheism. The first charge is related to the second in that he was sowing doubt among the youth of Athens about the existence of the gods. In other words, the sin of Socrates was seen among his peers as one committed against the religion of the Athenians.

Theme of the Sacred History of Being

The Sacred History of Being has as its radical thesis that knowledge was at the heart of ancient religion, both in Greece and the ancient Near East. And that the source of all knowledge was understood to be Being itself. 

 Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria, whose artefacts are currently being destroyed by the 'Islamic State'. 

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the established fact that the Greeks invented philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this. 

This can now be shown to be a faulty understanding, resulting in many absurdities. The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate ‘notions’ about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. 

The Sacred History of Being unpicks this log-jam in the history of ideas, largely the legacy of classical scholarship from the late eighteenth century onward, so that it is possible for us to allow the texts which survive to mean what they mean.

***

The text of The Sacred History of Being was completed in November 2014. Initial publication will be in eBook format (PDF)  Publication was originally due on the 10th August 2015, but formatting issues have resulted in a delay. Uptodate info on publication is available from the Resource Pages section.