The Classicist Response to Black Athena (Writing to Denise Eileen McCoskey)

[I wrote this mail in response to Denise Eileen McCoskey's article 'Black Athena, White Power', which was published in Eidolon in November 2018. The subtitle for the article is: 'Are We Paying the Price for Classics' Response to Bernal?']

On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 8:40 AM Thomas Yaeger wrote:

Dear Prof. McCoskey, 

Many thanks for writing the article 'Black Athena, White Power', published in Eidolon. It articulates a number of my own thoughts over the last thirty years, about classics and post-enlightenment eurocentric perceptions of ancient civilization. Black Athena made a huge impact on me on first publication, and the book was largely responsible for me moving to London to study in 1989. In London I had the option of studying ancient near-eastern languages and history, as well as Greece and Rome. 

In the end, the controversy over Black Athena made me interested in the mechanics of what makes scholarly arguments acceptable, and unacceptable. That's down to education, preconceptions, and the contemporary cultural context in which the arguments are made. It is no wonder that it can take so long to shift a body of ideas which is long past its prime. 

You wrote: 

...most classicists did not want to take up the difficult and often messy questions that were being posed. They preferred to insist that the Greeks should not, could not be questioned at all,.... In doing so, they reinforced a powerful yet solipsistic image of the ancient Greeks and also classicists themselves as exceptional, self-created and self-sufficient...

This has resulted in the discipline of classics essentially trading in forms of fiction since the middle of the eighteenth century. There is also (as I quickly discovered) a cavalier disregard for evidence which does not support these fictions (there is a lot more of that evidence than is imagined). But the difficulty that classics finds itself in is partly the product of a general will to shape the past in terms of what suits a modern and distinctly western cultural perspective. That also needs to be addressed. This 'general will' involves not only arguing for the supremacy of the Greeks, but the twisting of the history of ideas to support this notion. As a consequence, classics is one of the gatekeepers for two preposterous notions - the Greeks being a wholly autocthonous and self-sufficient cultural entity, and that no-one before them engaged with philosophical abstraction, or had the intellectual capacity to do so. 

My engagement with Black Athena largely revolves around its implications for the general history of ideas, since the linguistic evidence, particularly that published in the third volume, suggests strongly that the Egyptians were as comfortable with abstract thought as the Greeks, and there are plenty of plausible Egyptian loan words connected with abstract concepts in the Greek vocabulary. But the Egyptians were not the only external influence on the development of Greece, and may not have been the most important cultural influence between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.  Ancient Assyria seems to have played a significant role in the early intellectual and political development of Greece, particularly around 700 BCE. 

Much relevant detail is now known about the Assyrian connection. But not to classicists, who usually know little about Mesopotamia. This is not entirely their fault, since one of the most important papers on the subject was published in the proceedings of an ANE conference, and was not written for classicists in any case. I also wrote a paper on the cultural influence of Assyria on Greece at around the same time (2004), using mainly Greek sources (so far only available on my blog, and published only recently). It has been looked at hundreds of times, but has attracted no comments at all, despite the potential implications of the argument for our understanding of the beginnings of Greek philosophy. 

You might want to take a look at these two papers, since they both undermine the notion that Greek civilization was self-made. They also, from the point of view of classics scholars, come from an unexpected angle, and put new information into any discussion about the early development of Greece. 

1. Parpola, S., 2003b Assyria's Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West, - in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111  

2. Yaeger, T., "Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire" https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/10/greece-and-cultural-impact-of-assyrian.html (published October 11, 2018). [Parpola has read this article]. 

My general thesis on abstract thought in the ancient world is: The Sacred History of Being, which was published in November 2015 (The Anshar Press,  ISBN: 9781311760678). It discusses not only the Greek and pre-Greek notions of Being, but also the various obstacles which medieval and modern scholarship has erected which make it very difficult to understand the early history of ideas. https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html

Thanks again for writing such an excellent article. 

Best regards, 

Thomas Yaeger

[Reply received Feb 02, 2019].

Did the Greeks Invent Philosophy?

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 14^th 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 2^nd 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].

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.

Cultural Continuity in the Ancient World, and Bernal's 'Black Athena'

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This text, in its original manuscript form, was the second chapter (original title: 'The Construction of the Intellectual world of Antiquity') of the book The Shrine in the Sea. It dates from June 2004. It did not make it through to the text which was published in 2015 with the new title: The Sacred History of Being. I’ve re-edited and updated the text (May 2018). The text also contains a link to an analysis of the final volume of Black Athena, which takes a linguistic look at possible cultural connections between east and west. 

***

We have already come to terms with the idea that the world of ancient Greece, as it has been presented to us, is to a large extent the product of nearly two hundred years of industrious activity by scholars, and that the evidence for ancient Greece is not particularly well served by this construct.

In particular, philosophy in ancient Greece has been made into a wholly secular phenomenon, with no history in the religious life of the Greeks. The evidence does not bear this out: Harold Cherniss demolished the idea that Plato’s Academy was a teaching and research establishment along the lines of the modern university back in the 1930s, and there are a number of clues which suggest that philosophy has a strong connection with the religious life of Greece. 

Further, the ‘history’ of philosophy created by Aristotle in his Metaphysics is an entity which conforms in format to a number of his other works, in that he begins from ‘common opinion’ and leads his audience in the direction of  ‘true opinion’.  It may have been ‘common opinion’ in Athens that the presocratics and the sophists were pioneers of philosophy, but that is opinion, and not history. We have other materials to work with. This book puts Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern materials together within a new hypothetical model of the intellectual model of antiquity.

It is a serious matter to claim that generations of scholars have not understood important aspects of the subject of their study, and that their methods of interpretation have been riven with systematic fault. This work has much to say about the modern intellectual world, since that is a major part of the problem in our understanding of the past, as well as the ancient mental world itself. In part, this is because the work is an attempt to develop a pattern of discourse suitable for the understanding of antiquity in the modern world. To achieve this, it is necessary to put our relationship with our past into a proper context. Otherwise it is impossible to understand either of these worlds. The enlightenment view of an ancient ‘urdummheit’ underpinning cultural production is here shifted out of place, so that it becomes an intermittent phenomenon in human cultural history rather than a certain continuum, and now capable of casting light on our own times.

The enlightenment agenda (and its products) has been subject to severe criticism since 1987, beginning with Martin Bernal. The community of ancient historians and classical scholars generally reacted with good grace to his pioneering and imperfectly researched analysis of two centuries of classical scholarship: Black Athena: the Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. This was partly because some of the community was already uncomfortable with the history of their subject, and unhappy with the assumptions of cultural superiority (not just of the Greeks over the barbarians) which seemed to be implicit in the way classics operated as a subject.

The community of classicists and historians is one which is very dependent on peer approval and the ‘soundness’ of scholarship – of importance in any subject where – either through limited availability of evidence, or through the existence of discontinuities of evidence and interpretation – it is possible for an individual to wander off into territory of no value or credibility to the peer group. 

As a community therefore, the classicists and historians were happier for a scholar to provide the criticism from the outside. If the criticism was sound, its conclusions might be absorbed without the necessity of a reorganisation of the hierarchy of the subject (though this would remain a risk). If incorrect, it could be dismissed as an amateur effort. And even better, the analysis focussed on the now obvious faults in the study of classics and ancient history – the eurocentric racism, and the strange methodology which could promote the judgement and interpretative genius of the scholar above evidence itself. These were things which the classicists and historians would not defend at the time of the publication of Bernal’s book (1987) as they might have done as late as 1945.

On balance therefore, it could have been so much worse. Bernal’s attack was aimed at features of classical studies already overdue for serious overhaul, and several of his charges fell on receptive ground. Its agenda is essentially one which would have been familiar in a sociology department In the late 1960s. It was not written then because no-one within the subject was particularly interested in rocking their academic boat, and it took another twenty years for an interested and able outsider to come along and deliver what appeared to be the coup de grace to a number of the subject’s sacred cows.

Another feature of the Bernal analysis which would have been pleasing to the classicists and historians was that it did not succeed in moving very much around. Though it was concerned with this.  The lasting impression of his study is that the principal problem is the attitude of the classicists to their subject, rather the problem being a combination of attitude and what they had done – wilfully - to the accuracy of our understanding of the ancient world as a whole, through the evaluation and interpretation of evidence.

An exception to this was Bernal’s attempt to establish contact between Egypt and Greece in the 2^nd millennium B.C.E, based largely on a reified reading of Greek myths. In this he seems to have been following the lead of the poet Robert Graves, who read all sorts of myths in terms of charter documents and poetic accounts of actual political events. Additionally, Bernal suggested that a significant part of the Greek vocabulary could be shown to be related to the vocabulary of the ancient Egyptians.

Both of these attempts received serious and generally well-tempered criticism, even if the arguments have not been taken on board. What he was trying to do was to take ancient Greece out of its exalted orbit above all other civilizations, and root it in what he assumed to have been a cultural continuum around the Mediterranean sea from at least the mid-2^nd century B.C.E up until the classical period of Greece in the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C.E. Bernal pointed to the evidence within the texts of the 1^st millennium which suggested cultural continuities with ancient Egypt – all dismissed by the classicists in favour of evidence in texts which could be interpreted as suggesting the opposite.

Bernal’s attempts to establish cultural continuity with the civilizations around the Mediterranean were hampered (the volume looking more closely at the linguistic affinities of Egypt and Greece did not appear until 2006) by the fact that myths are not simply encodings of historical and political change, and that the exchange of words between linguistic groups is, by itself, weak evidence for cultural continuity, though it can indicate significant  cultural connection.  He was correct to guess at the existence of the cultural continuity, I think, but ill-equipped to establish such a thing.

To do this requires moving things around – particularly the relationship of Greek philosophy to its patterns of religious belief and cult practice; and the relationship of Greek patterns of religious belief and cult practice to parallel ideas and activities in the Near East and Egypt. Currently, for classicists at least, the relationship between philosophy and Greek life and religious belief remains numinously and safely vague, despite two centuries of formal research activity in Europe. And the relationship between a philosophical theology and religious belief in the ancient Near East and in Egypt is presumed not to exist at all. This was a taller order than Bernal or anyone in his position could manage.

Letter to a Student

[A response to an email from a student in New York which commented on matters discussed in an article I wrote for the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015, shortly after my first book was published. He has been studying the Italian renaissance, and is interested in the history of esoteric ideas, ancient and modern, and the connections between them. He is also interested in why college courses are set up in the way they are, so that they don't always address the kind of questions which a student might want to explore.] 

***

Many thanks for your mail, and for your comments on the article titled “The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World.” I was put on to the significance (and antiquity) of the Assyrian Sacred Tree by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola, who published an extensive paper on the subject in 1993 ('The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy'). There is much discussion of the Sacred Tree in The Sacred History of Being.

By ‘esoteric texts … that cite Assyrian and Sumerian sources’, I assume you mean modern books on esotericism that mention these sources. You will be aware that you have to use these with circumspection, since some of them (not all of them) use their sources cavalierly, with no real grasp of the materials they are using, or the languages in which they are written.

But there are undoubtedly strong connections between esoteric writings from Mesopotamia, and the later esoteric traditions around the Mediterranean and in Europe. When I was in my early twenties I was reading about esotericism in the Italian and English renaissances. Afterwards I began to read texts from late antiquity, largely because these were referenced by the later writers. The continuity of thought was quite striking.

I worked my way back further. I found a text from the middle of the 14^th century B.C.E. in a collection of ancient Egyptian literature which employed what appeared to be philosophical concepts, which, according to convention, were first aired in Classical Greece. That’s a difference of 900+ years

The literature of the ancient Egyptians: poems, narratives, and manuals of instruction from the third and second millenia B.C. / Adolf Erman, 1927.

From that point on I was hooked.

You will know that Plato recounts in the Timaeus that his ancestor Solon visited Egypt. As did the historian Herodotus. In college both these claims were downplayed as unlikely, as if it was difficult to undertake travel to Egypt at the time. But we were also learning of the extensive commercial connections known between Greece and the eastern Mediterranean in the same period, involving the establishment of permanent trading posts with regular and substantial traffic to and fro. How hard would it have been to get a passage from Greece to Egypt on a cargo ship?

The downplaying of connections between Egypt and Greece, has been going on for a long time – at least since the beginning of the European Enlightenment. Most college professors are following a well-travelled track, which they assume to be a rational response to the evidence. As a consequence, they aren’t much interested in counter arguments, and evidence which suggests they are on a false track. They structure their courses accordingly. They aren’t being dishonest. They are just living and working in a discipline which employs a model of the past which (they think) has more plausibility than is the case.

I’ve discussed the origin of this problem at some length in my book. In the end, this question became almost as interesting to me as the study and interpretation of ancient texts. It turns out that human beings are (generally speaking) less curious creatures than we like to think, and that there are some things out there which they would rather avoid.

Others have radar for arguments which are on a different track, as you clearly have. So yes, I would be happy to correspond with you about various matters of interest. Subject to available time of course.

I concur with your decision to read my book once you graduate. I wrote in the preface that, though it is a scholarly work, it is not a text book, and that it would be less career-threatening to read it after credit courses are safely over.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

Ancient Conjectures, and Fictive Intellectual History

The following text concerns the question of whether or not there was a philosophical basis for the development of religious concepts in antiquity, informing ritual, liturgy, divination, sacrifice, and the worship of images; and therefore, as a consequence, philosophy was not the exclusive possession of the Greeks in the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This argument of course turns the received view of the historical relationship between religion and philosophy upside down: we like to think that the development of philosophy was a practical response to religion as it became an outworn and irrational phenomenon, which preceded a more scientific approach to phenomena and nature. If such a sequence is in fact falsely inferred, and undermined by the evidence, then we have some rethinking to do.

The text references both my book The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the contents of Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). It is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Thomas Yaeger, April 28, 2017 

What has been argued in part one of the book (The Sacred History of Being) is that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once understood in terms of conjecture about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These follow on from the initial question, which is: why is there something rather than nothing? Plato’s argument, following on from propositions made by Parmenides, who declared that we should look only to the one, and that only the one truly exists, is the most sophisticated of all discussions in antiquity concerning why there should be something rather than nothing.

Plato argues that we should always look to the ‘one true thing’. This is different from saying only the one exists, or only the one is truly real.

J.G. Frazer was very dismissive of Greek questions concerning the one and the many, saying that they constituted ‘popular questions of the day’. The argument of Parmenides remained entirely undiscussed.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being.

This of course is a spectacular instance of intellectual blindness, by which the richness of the intellectual matrix of ancient Greek thought was spirited into nothingness. We like to see Plato’s discussion of Being as the surfacing of a human capacity to grapple with abstract ideas, and the marker of our emancipation from irrational ideas about the world and the gods. For Frazer, Plato was as guilty of intellectual error as any of his contemporaries, as well as his predecessors.

In late Hellenistic times, there seems to have been a very poor grasp of the context of the development of philosophy around the Mediterranean. Nods were made toward the notion that the discipline of philosophy might not have been first developed in Greece, including (tellingly) at the beginning of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers.  Plato after all argued against the idea that this was so in the Protagoras, saying that it was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and in also Crete. 

He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) presented the common sense view that philosophy was first developed in a place where there was a leisured class, with the time and resources to think about philosophical questions. He may have had Egypt in mind, since Egypt had professionalised priesthoods. 

Later philosophers such as Porphyry suggested that key parts of Pythagorean doctrine came west to Greece from Babylon, in the late sixth century (Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras). We have also seen that aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in Herodotus (concerning Solon), and also in Homer’s Iliad (Book 18), where a number of key details associated with the doctrine are run together in close order, without being explained. 

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Egypt, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on an initial plenum, using the image of a sage emerging daily from the sea, granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts.

Not much of this was of use to the Enlightenment agenda, which preferred to look at the development of philosophy in Greece as the first beginnings of a rational understanding of the world. And so the information was deprecated and ignored. The phrase ‘I doubt that’ is a dangerous one in the classics community. It is a way of saying ‘this is not the consensus view of scholars and the profession’. Usually no discussion follows, since the opinion is usually an opinion of the worth (or otherwise) of evidence. Scholars weigh evidence, and they do so (they are convinced) with better tools than were available to ancient scholars. The judgement is fitted to modern requirements. So, as a result, it is clear that it is unlikely that Solon visited Egypt, and that Pythagoras visited Babylon. Tread carefully, or your credibility as a scholar may be in doubt.

Thus, the scholarly consensus is that philosophy is an autochthonous development. Why in Greece? The ‘Greek Genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard it said by people who should know better. But during the high days of the Enlightenment, and the beginnings of what became the fully-fledged discipline of Classics, that is what the scholars wanted. Something pure and out of the orbit of other cultures, which, by definition, had no philosophy or anything which would measure up to something like rational thought.

Sometimes history is built backwards. It isn’t just a matter of looking to the historical record and starting from that. History always has been in part about critical scrutiny of sources and judgements, even among the Greeks. But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision was wholesale, with the purpose of creating a representation of the true origins of European civilisation as it entered the period of the Enlightenment.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopedia, but also about the arts and crafts. The latter may have been wrapped up with myth, folklore, and superstition, but they were still essential to the rational life of man, so these were also added to the Encyclopedia. Everything from the past which served some purpose, or which could be made to serve some purpose within the rational enlightenment model of reality, was critically examined, and reworked to fit what was intended to become a new understanding of man and his place in a new world of reason. A new understanding of how man might live.

As I point out in the chapter ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ there are in fact two logical modalities present in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is mostly (though not always) concerned with the modality which has come down to us as the basis of formal logic. Plato is clearly aware of this modality, but, though no scholar has dared to identify the other modality as logical, it is. It is simply that to us, it does not describe relationships which should be described as logical. Plato thought otherwise, and talks about this logical modality often, in the Republic and in the Timaeus. It is connected with the doctrine of wholes and totalities, and is the basis of explaining how things may participate in other things, which is not a pattern of ideas which fits with Aristotle’s general understanding of logic.

Why is this important? Simply put, it matters because it is the basis of the Greek understanding of how transcendent reality relates to secular and physical existence, which was a matter of great significance in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.  The doctrine also underpins the understanding of both transcendent reality, and the idea of the immanence of the divine. It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.

It might be imagined therefore that this would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in question have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that it is a form of logical modality is not acknowledged, and the conclusions which might follow from treating it as such, do not follow, and are therefore not discussed. It is treated as it is presented – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

As I wrote in the chapter ‘Sweet Song of Swans’, there is very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms. When he talks about transcendent reality, this is treated as some sort of literary fiction, which has no necessary properties of its own. When Plato talks about the Forms, this also is treated as a species of literary fiction, which Plato himself demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. Wnen Plato discusses the soul, it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so knowledge is acquired by the activation of that connection. We have forgotten what we knew (apparently) through the shock of physical birth, but it is possible for us to reacquire this knowledge.  Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion, since he talks about ascending purely in the mind from Form to Form, and then descending back to the world of physical reality, Form by Form, and says this is the only way to acquire genuine knowledge.

How can real knowledge be acquired in this way? Why should Plato argue like this?  How can any of this make sense to us?

It makes very little sense to us, because we have lost the original doctrinal context of his discussions, and we are not that interested in attempting to recover what we can of that context, even for the purposes of a better scholarly understanding of what he is talking about. So the study of Plato languishes in the seminar room, taught and discussed from generation to generation by people who have no clear idea of what Plato meant. Books and papers are published, which clear up a minor detail here, discuss another one there, but do not leave us much the wiser.

 We can understand the range of existing discussion about Plato in terms of what scholars do not or cannot understand about Plato, and their attempts to fit what they think they understand about his work into some kind of modern intellectual and critical frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which are problematic, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

Other than that, reading Plato at least serves to teach us something about how we used to think, and how we may think, even if we understand very little of what he is saying.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. So a major concern of this book is to restore knowledge of it, and a basic comprehension of why it is important. Not just for our understanding of Plato himself, but also for our understanding of his cultural context; the context in which philosophy was understood to be of inestimable value; and also for an understanding of some very strange things about the ancient world, which are all the stranger because (it seems) they made sense in antiquity (sacrifice, divination, idolatry, prophecy, omens, oracles, etc.).

One of the most valued books in my library is Religion & Magic: Approaches and Theories. The author is Graham Cunningham, who is a specialist in the ancient Near East. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. Cunningham’s book covers the whole range of these, at least in terms of summarising the views of those who first suggested those theoretical approaches. He divides the approaches into several sections, which are 1. German pioneers, 2 Early Intellectualist approaches, 3 Emotionalist approaches, 4 Phenomenological Approaches, 5 Structural Functional Approaches, 6 Symbolic Approaches, 7 Recent Intellectualist Approaches, 8 Structural approaches, 9, Cognitive Approaches, 10, and finally Feminist Approaches.

All of these approaches were developed and used without any meaningful distinction being made between ancient cultural phenomena and cultural phenomena of modern times. I write carefully here, since there are unpleasant assumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out entirely. Anthropology was founded in the early nineteenth century, and the presumptions of the time are necessarily locked into the work of the pioneers. Many of these presumptions are still implicit, and can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that an unfounded equation was early made between the cultures of antiquity and the world of the primitive and the savage in the modern world (which the Classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson referred to as ‘running folklore to the death’).

So Cunningham’s book covers two centuries of thought about culture, civilization, religion, magic and ritual. All premised on the assumptions, understanding and categories of knowledge of those living and working in those two centuries. Nothing about those matters is covered from earlier centuries. It is as if the study of human culture, human thought, and the nature of man himself, began only in Hegel’s study, and nothing of worth came before Hegel.

I could digress here, and lay out what came before in detail, but that is for another time. I will allow myself to say that Plato had something else to add to the pot, which is not covered in Cunningham’s survey; the Neoplatonists (who thought of themselves as Platonists, but we will not let them be what they are) would have had added the same thing to the pot, as would some of the early Gnostic writers.

 The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances understood what Plato was writing about, at least for the most part, and would be shocked that, not only do we not understand Plato, but that we have chosen to explain human culture in terms of a fundamental stupidity about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

In short, religion is seen by all anthropologists and sociologists  in negative terms (at least professionally – what they choose to believe in private is a separate matter), as something baleful and poisonous to human culture and human thought, except to the extent that religious belief provides social cohesion, ideology, and rules of social behaviour.....

Camera Obscura: Aristotle, Marx, and Ptolemy

This text constitutes the introduction to an essay I wrote for a university competition in 1992. The essay was titled: Mirrors of the Divine, and subtitled Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History. The main part of the essay was built on three pieces of text I'd written during my course. 

The first of these texts looked at the origins, definition and significance of the Polis within the Greek model of the world. 

The second part looked at the Assyrian understanding of the significance of the Mesopotamian Adapa Myth for the role of the king in both the Assyrian state, and  in the royal Assyrian court. This was titled Standing in the Place of Ea: the Myth of Adapa and Assyrian Kingship in the Sargonid Period. It was in fact a truncated version of my E Paper essay on Assyria, minus the footnotes. The paper also floated the idea that there were parallels with Aristotle's notions of kingship in Mesopotamian texts concerning the king, though I did not make heavy weather of it. This paper is now on this blog, in its full form, complete with the original (extensive) footnotes.

I would make some changes to it now, on the basis of what I've read since, and an exchange of mail with a leading Assyriologist, though I think the overall argument remains sound. Some of the letters referenced in the paper have been re-edited and published in new volumes. Though these volumes are on my shelves (The State Archives of Assyria series), I haven't replaced the translations with new versions and references, since the new versions don't suggest required alterations to any of the interpretations I made of these letters. 

The third part of the main body of the essay was a study of the proskynesis debate in the court of Alexander. This was about the adoption of Persian customs as Alexander took over Persian controlled territories, including bending the knee to kings, which was not a Macedonian or Greek custom. I interpreted this dispute in the context of Alexander's conquest of an empire which understood its king to be 'king of kings', 'king of the four quarters', and 'king of the world.'

Of course the essay didn't win the prize, which was no surprise then, or now. I began the essay by taking aim at the sociological underpinnings of the modern study of history, which wasn't going to make many friends. But by that time I'd come to the conclusion that the sociological approach was itself a real obstacle to our understanding the evidence. One of the reasons I'd chosen to study history was to fathom why our understanding of the past seemed so convoluted, and sometimes just plain blind to what was in the record.  

I wrote the introduction very quickly, since I was rapidly approaching my final exams at the time. I've improved the English rendition where necessary, but the argument is as it was.

***

Is it the case that we are blinded to the importance of

certain kinds of evidence by our preconceptions? There is a

tendency among classical scholars to treat the rise of Greek

civilisation and its formal institutions (such as the polis) as

the rise of civilisation itself. This is not to say that classical scholars 

are entirely unaware of developments in the near east during 

the third and second millennia B.C., but that there is in their minds 

a feeling that somehow Greece is the only case worthy of study; 

the paradigmatic case to which all earlier

civilisations might have aspired, but could never have reached.

Greece is the successful case, the one in which intellectual and

 cultural patterns reached a perfection worthy of their interest;

 only in Greece were institutions developed which possessed an

 excellence of their kind, and it is the excellence of the object

of study, the soaring nature of the Greek achievement, which

justifies its isolation as an academic field.

Ancient historians, on the other hand, have a twofold problem:

 their subject tends to follow the demarcation lines set by the

classical scholars (and the archaeologists concerned with Greece

and Italy), so that both those concerned with classical

 civilizations and the Near Eastern specialists have more

difficulty than is necessary in drawing on the insights of 

 other areas of scholarship. Further, the disciplines of history and
 archaeology in general have imported the methodology and
attitudes of other intellectual fields; particulary from sociology.
The effect of this importation has reinforced the trend in historiography
away from bad nineteenth century habits, such as an undue emphasis on

the role of the individual, and an unhealthy concentration on the

interests and views of those who exercised power in the periods

in question.

These are pressures which may distort our apprehension and

 understanding of ancient civilizations. In the former case, the

problem is that the worth and significance of the object of study

 has to a large extent already been decided; in the latter case,

 the movement away from an unsatisfactory approach to historical

 problems has resulted in a number of key questions not being

asked and being rendered virtually unaskable.

Several methods have been devised, more or less unconsciously,

in order to isolate Greek civilization and its institutions from

 contamination; these need not be listed or discussed here. What
is important is that the polis is often treated as though it is a specifically

 Greek phenomenon, to be understood only within the Greek context;

 and that it is necessarily something which arose from that

particular context alone. Comparison with other cultures is

regarded as illegitimate beyond certain limited bounds. Either

connections are de facto not there, or in cases where connections

 are very apparent, obvious conclusions are often treated as a priori
unsound, if they threaten the autochthonous model of Greek civilisation.

What is allowed is the retrojection of the supposed universal laws which
underpin the development of human society, and which must have

 underpinned all social and political structures since their first

creation. Scholars look for these, and the precise details of the

cultures under scrutiny do not so much give rise to theories as

 to their place and meaning, as lend support to the universality

 of the retrojected picture of cultural development.

  

Much of our view of the development of Greek (Athenian) politics

between the 7th and 4th centuries comes from Aristotle; from two

works on politics: the Politics itself, known from antiquity, and

from the Athenian Constitution, recovered from Egypt at the end

 of the last century (1890s). The Politics tells us of what sort of

political ideas could be thought in the context of the fourth

 century in Athens (particularly in conjunction with the Republic

of Plato, the Statesman etc,). It also gives some comparative

information about other constitutions, such as the Cretan, the

 Spartan, and of particular interest, the Carthaginian. Other

sources are few: apart from inscriptional evidence, there is

little apart from the writings of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and

 Thucydides to draw upon for the early development of the Greek

conception of the polis. Each of these sources has to be used

with care, for the very simple reason that the writers themselves

often did not fully understand the evidence they were trying to

explain.

In the case of Aristotle for instance, it is most often understood by 

scholars that he portrays the polis as (in practice) a development 

towards democracy (which was not seen as positive by

Aristotle). Whereas (for Aristotle, in the Politics, at least)

the true struggle is the need to balance the conflicting

interests of the rich and poor: seemingly what has always

 underpinned the development of society and its institutions. The

recognition of the necessity of observing the true nature of this

struggle is taken to be a mark of Aristotle's empirical approach

 to data.

That the reforms to the institutional arrangements within the

archaic polis might have been intended to broaden democratic

participation, or even to balance the forces at work within its

structure, these possibilities are currently rejected by historians, who 

see instead a series of reforms designed to support established power (or

insufficient evidence either way). This approach appears to

provide an adequate explanation for the major reforms for which

 we have evidence: the reforms of Solon, Cleisthenes, and to a

lesser extent, that of Ephialtes.

Thus, the developments are understood to be broadly explicable

in terms of what are taken to be “universals” (i.e., this is how

human beings behave when the chips are down): in terms of the

human interest in power and the creation of ideological

 constructs to support the pursuit of power and its maintenance.

Naturally it is not a matter of dispute that what human beings

do in critical circumstances and in daily life is shaped by their

surroundings and events (amounting to at least one half of a

dialectical equation). It is often argued however, that the

pattern of ideas in which men operate is the product of their particular 

circumstances: the various forces, physical, social, economic; and is

 therefore to be understood as an extension of

the material dynamic on which the society is based: i.e., we

should concentrate our attention on those factors which

contribute to the make up of human culture and institutions which

are universally true and which operate in all the different kinds

 of organisation which can be created. In other words, we should

 study the material dynamic.

This way of looking at things seems to be axiomatic.  Though in

 fact it bears as much necessary relation to the actual practice of

historians as the theoretical pattern of scientific methodology

does to the way scientists actually work. However, the

theoretical basis of the methods of modern historians does have

an effect on the way things are done. This is because the model

is fundamentally beyond testing. 

Though few historians are now marxist in any significant sense, 

part of the legacy of the marxist input into the development of the

modern study of history is a thoroughgoing materialism among

scholars. The acceptance of the material basis of reality is so

complete that it seems beyond question that Marx's observation

must be right, that the evidence must bear out the truth of the

material interpretation of the world, even if all the evidence

 appears to point in the opposite direction. Hence Marx's use of the

metaphor of the  ”camera obscura”: if we don't see how it fits, we

haven't looked hard enough. If the picture looks as if it is

 upside down, then it is not the case that the theory is wrong,

it is just that we have failed to get to grips with the

complexity of the reality presented to us. This means that,
whether or not the materialist interpretation of history is in fact true,

it cannot be tested, certainly as long as we are prepared to

admit limitless complexity in the interpretation of the evidence.

We might usefully compare this situation with the career of the epicyclic

 interpretation of planetary motions. The system arose as the

result of a suggestion by Plato to his pupil Eudoxos that he

 devise a mathematical description which saved the evidence. This

he did, employing circles because, since the planets were divine,

and since what is divine is necessarily possessed of perfection

and completion, no other motion would be appropriate for them.

 This model of the world survived the renaissance (being used by

Milton as the frame for ”Paradise Lost”, despite the fact that he

was well aware of developments in the understanding of planetary

motion) precisely because it provided a satisfactory description

of what was happening in the sky. 

In one sense, this example is the inverse of the problem with the 

materialist interpretation of history, for the  Ptolemaic system 

arose according to its nature in order to preserve an idea, the idea 

that circles, perfection and the divine are inextricably linked with one

 another. Whereas the materialist interpretation of history arose

as a reaction, if not to a prevailing orthodoxy, then to a

 pattern of ideas, and was supposed to destroy a political arrangement

 in the world which he regarded as inextricably linked with these

 philosophical notions. By inverting these, and revealing that they were
the product of false consciousness, it followed

that the political structures must fall (once everyone understood that 

his analysis was correct). 

In another sense however, the situation is the same: materialism, 

shorn of its marxist connotations, is still a pattern of ideas, and has 

become associated with our understanding of history. Therefore it

 functions  as an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies are not in the

business of hacking at their own validity during every minute of

 their existence.

Of course it is not necessary to have to abandon a materialist
perspective in order to deal with a quite different model of reality
 which appears to have been normative in antiquity, from the near east

to the Mediterranean lands. We can regard their alien "mindset"

as the input of the irrational; we can look at this (from the

point of view of the universality of the material dynamic) as the

intrusion of error and misunderstanding of the ideological

function of roles and structures, if their behaviour and

understanding is not consistent with the material dynamic.

In fact their perception was the inverse of materialism, as

Marx's materialism was consciously an inversion of

Hegels'exaltation of the world of spirit: they saw their culture

as an ephemeral manifestation of the divine with the divine

condition as the target. The truly real belonged somewhere else

in the universe, and mankind, the earth and all visible and

tangible things were bad copies and third rate adumbrations of

the genuine article.

We, on the other h and, find it difficult to deal with this way of
looking at things. What I am concerned with in this essay is their
perception of how things operated and

how that ”perception" influenced their actions and decisions; their

institutions and beliefs. I.e., to examine the superstructure of

the dynamic (which, unlike the Marxists, they took to be its root).

The principal difficulty with ancient evidence is that it belongs

to a world which was understood to function teleologically: that

is, the evidence was produced by people who saw their world as

being suspended from the divine, and who, when attempting to

explain events, chose their facts according to the requirements

of this model of the world. We, in attempting to understand the

production of ancient cultures and the textual evidence of

ancient authors, make of it what we can, and look for evidence

which remains valid whatever kind of model of reality is being

employed. But to know that we do this successfully, we have to

understand the nature of the model which filters both the

character of ancient cultural production and the selection and

arrangement of data in ancient texts.

I argue that we cannot easily disengage "neutral" evidence from

what remains: indeed that very little "neutral" evidence remains

at all, and that to piece together evidence which seems to

support, say, a developmental and evolutionary picture of events,

which in fact belongs to a teleological argument, is to misuse

the data.  There is no great public neutral reality in ancient

history, beyond the fact of the textual and archaeological

remains (and even that is often problematic). All the evidence is

shaped by both material laws (in antiquity understood as the

strictures of necessity and craft) and the input of contemporary

intellectual apprehensions of what it is that reality means.
Thus, in order to get to grips with antiquity we have to grasp

both ends of the dialectical interplay: the material dynamic and

the intellectual model of the world, the ancient teleology.

The fact that historians can provide a plausible description of

what is going on using a paradigm essentially based on the

perceived reality of the Aristotelian efficient cause (rather

than the final cause), does not mean that the events have been

understood and explained. A description is just that: it has no

essential connection with what is actually happening (just as the

Ptolemaic cosmology was a description and not an explanation,

with no essential connection with the real processes operating

in the solar system). If we allow endless epicyclic emendations

because the basic theory is assumed to be axiomatically correct
and therefore explanatory, we have confused description with 
explanation. To explain antiquity we require to take cognisance
 of  all of the real forces at work. 

A Berlin Conversation (Part Two)

An extract from a dialogue between Dr. Ralf Ganz, and Dr. Sadiq Kishati, on questions which might might be asked about the history of ideas, and cultic life in the ancient world. The dramatic date of the discussion is March 2003. The location is a university office, next to the Unter den Linden in Berlin, within sight of the famous equestrian statue of Frederick II, King of Prussia.

Sadiq: The thing which is really difficult for us to understand, is that we do not want to understand the past, and the way it was constructed in the ancient mind. And that our perceptions of what is real are based on the categories which are in mind.

.

Ralf: Really? You think so? So much effort has been expended on the understanding of the ancient world! The universities of the world have departments devoted to the subject! Do you think that those who work in those departments do not want to know their subject in detail? Do you think that they do not know their subjects in detail? I am surprised at you, since most of the classicists and ancient historians I have met are honestly interested in their subject, and would not be remotely interested in working within a framework which was essentially a fabrication.

Sadiq: I agree with you about those who work within university departments focussed on classics and ancient history. There is a great deal of ambition on display, but they would not be likely to endorse a fabrication, if they understood that was what they were dealing with. They are not dishonest.

Ralf: But you say that we do not want to understand the past, and the way things were constructed in the ancient mind. If they are honest scholars, they will not endorse fabrication, as you say. So I am at a loss to understand how you can maintain we are disinterested in the actual shape of the ancient world.

Sadiq: That’s because you imagine that what is in their minds is the consequence of an engagement with the evidence.

Ralf: Of course it is. It must be. When they come into the subject, it is because they love the subject, and the pursuit of further detail and understanding.

Sadiq: So no-one ever denigrated or destroyed evidence which didn’t fit what they thought they already understood? Or falsified evidence to support what they thought they knew to be true? We are watching these processes going on around us right now. Not all of these processes are visibly happening within university departments, but we are talking about a spectrum of attitudes and behaviours, which can become prevalent at certain times. Sometimes these things happen, usually because there is a contemporary consensus that the evidence needs to be reconsidered and re-evaluated. All evidence is subject to reconsideration and re-evaluation. As Nietzsche said, there are no such things as facts, only interpretations.

Ralf: I’m inclined to disagree with Nietzsche. Some facts are just plain facts.

Sadiq: If only. But I am afraid it is not true. There are many ways to look at facts. Sometimes facts tell a different story from the one they were once believed to tell. Remind me of facts which are just plain facts. I know about facts such as the inverse square law, and the law of gravity, which appear to be incontrovertible. But tell me about facts in ancient history which have no possible alternative interpretation, to the one which is current.

Ralf: Most of what I know is built on the facts which I understand! They fit within their context, and illuminate our understanding of the ancient world.

Sadiq: So you cannot imagine them being turned upside down, and being used to tell a different story?

Ralf: That would be hard to imagine. Though I accept of course that the process of re-evaluation of our interpretations is an important part of the study of antiquity.

Sadiq: So we are talking about a question of degree in the certainty or uncertainty of the meaning of facts.

Ralf: Agreed. But the overall frame in which these facts are understood limits the degree to which they may be uncertain.

Sadiq: That may be so. But how did the classicists and the ancient historians come by this frame? Was this frame built exclusively on the basis of incontrovertible facts, or in some other way? If the frame was not built on incontrovertible facts, then both the evidence and the overall frame are open to question.

Ralf: Well it is clear that the overall frame of our understanding was not based entirely on the archaeological and literary evidence which has been dug out of the ground over the past hundred and fifty years or so. We already had a frame of understanding from sources which were always accessible, such as historical, philosophical and literary writing from Greece, and from Rome, and the literature of the Old and New Testaments.

Sadiq: Granted. But that frame is one which was built by looking backwards. We see the ancient world through those conflicting models of the world. We make what sense we can of the ancient world from these different accounts and understandings. It is hard to stand aside from these. You are acknowledging that our understanding is not based on the material and the literary evidence alone, but the accumulated and agreed understanding which has been developed since the fall of the ancient world. So it isn’t just about the evidence, and the physical and the literary remains, but about the state of the human mind in the centuries following.

Ralf: Alright. So tell me what is missing from our understanding of the ancient world. I might also ask why it is missing, and why we are so determined not to see it, as you are suggesting.

Sadiq: It might be fairer to say that we see what we expect and want to see in antiquity. It is not that we are consciously determined not to see certain things, but that we simply do not see them, since they are not what we expect to be there. The matter is complicated by the fact that the ancient model of reality has no counterpart in the modern world, so, unless the scholar is aware of this fact, and much of its detail, what was important to the ancients makes no sense at all.

Ralf: You think so? You think they were essentially different from us in terms of their response to the world?

 Sadiq: The human capacity to denotice what should not be there, or to reinterpret what should not be there as something else, is something which has not been the subject of a great deal of study. Physically we are the same, with the same brains, but we do not all have the same kind of brain. The brains which prosper now, are not those that prospered in the past. Over the past two thousand years there has been a selection process, which can be seen in the development of what we understand to be rational. What is rational to us now would not have seemed rational in classical Greece, or in Egypt or Babylonia.

Ralf: That is a strange assertion to make. Surely the rational is always rational. It can’t be at one time itself, and at another time the opposite of itself!

Sadiq: Do words always mean the same thing?

Ralf: It is true meanings change. But it is hard to imagine such an enormous change in the meaning of ‘rational’

.

Sadiq: It is easy to explain. We use the word ‘rational’ as a synonym for what is reasonable. We think of ourselves as creatures of reason, who use reason to understand the world, and to enable us to act reasonably in it. What we mean by this understanding is that we respond to experience with logic, so that our actions can be explained and defended as reasonable.

Ralf: Which is what I understand as ‘rational’ behaviour. To respond illogically to experience would be to behave unreasonably, which is to be irrational.

Sadiq: That is how we use these words. There are several ways in which we can explore this confusion of concepts. One is to look at our history. We imagine that the European Enlightenment, which occurred in the late eighteenth century,  ushered in the life of reason. Those who were part of that most significant of cultural developments imagined that as well as recasting the world as something which could be shaped and understood in terms of human understanding, also thought that this was a process which was happening for the first time in human history, and that all earlier models of reality, all prior human thought and behaviour, was sunk in unreasonableness and folly, and was for the most part incompatible with any kind of logical understanding.

Ralf: And they understood that what was happening was a form of liberation from falsehood for mankind.

Sadiq: Indeed, that is how it was understood.  But what were the falsehoods? What was unreasonable about the past, and about the contemporary cultures beyond the reach of the enlightenment?

Ralf: That is not hard to answer. The whole range of religious belief in the world, unsubstantiated by any critical understanding of the concept of what might constitute a god, or a multitude of gods, or any understanding that the very idea of divine beings, singular or plural, might be a fiction, entirely unsupported by argument based on sound logic.  Also the vast expanse of human credulity, invested in ideas of magic and ritual, false associations, unsupported notions, and general ignorance about the nature of the workings of the world.

Sadiq: Indeed. That is a good answer. And it was the enlightenment plan to change all of that. The world could be understood in terms of human reason, and it could also be reshaped by human reason. That is still where we are, though the agenda does not closely resemble what it was when the life of reason began sometime before the French Revolution.

Ralf: And you say that this agenda is not rational?

Sadiq: We should distinguish between the meaning of the term, and the cultural and philosophical agenda with which it is now associated.

Ralf: I understand.

Sadiq: The enlightenment agenda may be a reasonable one, or it may not. We will come to that question later. But it is worth noticing that at its heart, the agenda enshrines an assumption, which is that the world and reality can be understood in terms of reason. The task of reforming human thought follows on from this as naturally as night follows day.

Ralf: If the life of reason is based on the power of logical analysis, then it is hard to imagine how that assumption is false. Logic is something which was developed in the ancient world in order to enable us to understand experience. It is based on experience and observation.

Sadiq: Indeed, and codified by Aristotle. But there is no a priori and unquestionable reason why the world should necessarily make sense to us, as human beings, even if we are equipped with an ability to understand much of what we experience with the aid of the tools of logical thought.

Ralf: I would argue that since the use of the tools of logic has enabled our current understanding of the world, and enabled us to build on that understanding, it is reasonable to assume that the assumption at the core of the enlightenment agenda is axiomatically true. The world can be understood by the human mind.

Sadiq: There are few patterns of ideas for which the natural world and the human mind cannot find sufficient degree of evidential and logical support to ensure some level of cultural survival. Which is why the range of ideas loose in the world is so great. Some of the beliefs which men entertain exist and prosper only because the degree of critical thought which is brought to bear on them is wanting. But that is not true for all patterns of understanding which we might consider not to be intelligible in terms of Aristotle’s formulation of logical thought. Some of the finest minds have entertained these ideas in the past. And that requires explanation.

Ralf: Some ideas are irrational, as you suggest. Either the ‘finest minds’ you mentioned were insufficiently critical of these ideas, or they disrespected logical thought.

Sadiq: Possibly. But it is a leap to suggest that they were bereft of the power of reason, and irrational. What you are saying is that you are firmly convinced that the way to understand reality and the physical world is through the use of logical thought.

Ralf: I suppose that I am. Other patterns of thought are bereft of any credible logic. Someone who believes that a lock of hair establishes contact with the original owner, and believes in the possibility of having some degree of influence of that person, is not thinking logically, as we would understand it. Likewise, a collector of nail parings for the same purpose is similarly deluded.

Sadiq: I would not disagree with you for a moment about that. Such people are not thinking logically. Though they are thinking.

Ralf: They are, but both their assumptions about how things relate to other things, and how those connections can be manipulated, are without reason.

Sadiq: Are they without reason? What they think are logical connections are clearly illogical to the critical mind, but the idea of such connections have been reasoned in some way.

Ralf: I see you are now trying to divorce the idea of reason from logic.

Sadiq: I am. The point is, that reason pertains to thinking, and not all thinking is reasonable. Logical thought is reasonable, but that is just one kind of thought.

Ralf: So you say that even the idea of reasoning itself isn’t naturally and necessarily about logical thought.

Sadiq: That is what I’m saying. I’m not differentiating them just because it is possible to do this, but because the difference may be of some importance in establishing how we understand the world.

Ralf: Let me see if I can summarise where we are. You have differentiated Rationality and Reason, saying that what is rational is not what we habitually think of as rationality, but is something which differs from it. And you have said that the meaning of the term ‘rational’ in the phrase ‘rational thought’ has changed over the centuries - particularly since the rise of the enlightenment. So, though we describe ourselves as being rational beings, we are not necessarily rational beings in the sense which was understood before the enlightenment. By which I think you mean from the renaissance onwards.

Sadiq: I do.

Ralf: So we need to discuss that later. What we mean by describing ourselves as rational beings is that we use the faculty and power of reason, which is something quite different from what used to be understood as ‘rational thought’.

Sadiq: In essence, yes.

Ralf: You made this distinction on the basis that reasoning is a species of thinking, but not all thinking involves proper reasoning, as in the cases you mentioned - collecting locks of hair and nail parings. So you regard proper reasoning as the species of thinking which is based on logical thought.

 Sadiq:  Yes.

Ralf: So is rational thought the same as the species of thought which is based on sound logical principles?

Sadiq: Yes it is. But not necessarily on the same logical principles.

Ralf: That is too much! How can there be more than one pattern of logic? It is either logical or it isn’t!

Sadiq: The two are connected. Meaning that the full array of how things may be logically related to one another is bigger than what we find outlined in descriptions of formal logic. Not everything in reality is subject to the same rules. Though everything everywhere is subject to rules. The science of logic should embrace how things relate to one another in any part of reality which may be the subject of discussion.

Ralf: So you are saying that rational thought is reasoning based on logical principles, but not necessarily the same logical principles which were defined by Aristotle?

Sadiq: Or on a different branch of logical principles, which have not been properly explored, either in the study of antiquity, or in modern times.

Ralf: We need to be very clear here what you mean. It must be the case, if your argument is to make sense, that there was an understanding of this different branch of logical principles in antiquity. But we know nothing about them. How can we know nothing about them if they are present, and as important as you seem to think them to be? Where are they mentioned and discussed?

Sadiq: There are several ways in which we can know that these ideas must have been present. As I have said, we do not want to understand the past, and actively denotice what is present which we would rather was absent.  So that is what we do about the whole of ancient civilisation – we denotice what cannot be explained by the model of reality in which we frame it. Ancient civilisation screams its difference across the centuries.

What is the logic of sacrifice? The presence of the gods in divine images, and the worship of these images? What is the basis of divinatory practice? How could they imagine that they could have contact and conversation with the divine, or even know the mind of the divine? Yet these practices were common across the whole of the ancient world and beyond. We see these things, and acknowledge that they were genuine phenomena at the time. But they do not make any sense to us. Not at all. Until they are reframed in terms of things which we understand, such as social dynamics, economics, propaganda, the ostentatious display of power, and so on. Which is not to say that these interpretations tell us nothing. But we do not sacrifice to the gods now, or worship their images, or converse with the gods. And someone who claims to have conversation with a god or gods is likely to to be locked up for his trouble. So why then, and not now?

Ralf: The answer is surely that the strange behaviour of the ancients was the type of derangement of sense which was the derangement of the time.

Sadiq: You don’t really think that. To us it may look like that, and it is convenient for us to treat the ancient world as a place of near universal derangement, or even stupidity. But there is clearly so much in the ancient world which is not deranged – philosophy, art, poetry, literature, architecture, mathematics, etc. The idea of a general derangement of the faculty of reason will not do.

There is also the fact that many of these things which are not in any sense derangements of sense are connected with those which, according to such a point of view, are born of unreason.  We treat the sculptures created by Greek sculptors as works of art, which indeed they are. But we isolate them from any function they may have had, except in sociological or ideological terms. An art historian does not write about them in terms of their cultural and cultic function, which is of no interest.  The art of the Greeks, in so far as it survives, is also treated partly in terms of aesthetics, and, as their art mostly appears on widely distributed black and red figure vases, which is why those images have survived, partly as material which illustrates mythological themes, and incidents which appear in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Poetry, liturgies associated with the gods, and their literature is surveyed in terms of social and ideological function (in other words shorn of the connection with the world of the divine, which was of great importance); we do not attempt to understand their architecture in terms of divine function, but instead in terms of aesthetics, and the contrast in the uses of space. 

Philosophy too has been entirely removed from its original cultic context, to the point where this is not understood or even recognised, though a number of authors have drawn attention to this, sometimes obscurely, sometimes with a more or less explicit reference. Arithmetic and mathematics has suffered the same fate, though it is clear that it represented another discipline which served the purpose of understanding the nature of reality, and the mind of God.

We don’t need to know any of that, even if that was what they really believed. Why do we not need to know that? Because the divine and the world of the divine was not the main driver of the nature and development of ancient civilisation, whether in Greece or Rome, or in Mesopotamia.

Ralf: That may be the correct response to what you are saying. The Greeks and the others may not have understood the true forces underpinning their civilisation.

Sadiq: It is certainly what the academy thinks now. But the academic institutions were not set up to enable the understanding of ancient civilisation. They were set up to enable ancient civilisation, and in particular the Greek instance of it, to serve a useful function.

Ralf: You are referring to the development of critical scholarship at Gottingen. At least in part.

Sadiq: The University of Gottingen has a lot to answer for.  I think it is clear that there was a logic underpinning the variety of the patterns of understanding in the ancient world, and that this understanding was built on a coherent picture of the nature of reality. But in effect, we avoid the nature of that understanding, and instead impose one of our own devising. So the ancient world is a place in which, whatever logical and cultural consistency it may have had, is a place full of deluded souls, dreaming of something which was false and unreal at the heart of their civilisation.

Ralf: I am not out of sympathy with the idea that the ancient civilisations lived in a world of dreams and chimaerical realities. Even if it seemed to make coherent sense to them, it makes very little sense to us. And I am still at a loss to understand why you think that there was a coherence, a logical basis to the ancient world. Mainly because you have suggested that their logical model, their logical apparatus, was in some significant way different from ours. In which case it is hardly surprising that we not only find it hard to understand, but also find it hard to believe that such a coherent thing existed.

Sadiq: The scholars at Gottingen were not ever concerned about the coherence of ideas which might have existed in the ancient world. They were concerned with an understanding of the ancient world which was possible and credible in the middle and late years of the eighteenth century. The main focus at the time was not the study of Greek philosophy and Greek cult and religion, but on history. The development of source criticism was the result of noticing that a number of historical accounts written by Greek historians and authors differed, in both detail, assumptions, and approach. That is not surprising. Writers in any age are as prone to partisan views as in any other. They also have available to them one or more differing information sources, some of which may be less reliable than others. Sometimes they may have both, and either have to make a choice between them as sources, or somehow reconcile the accounts. They also have their own intellectual and societal baggage, which inevitably has a bearing on what they write.

An example of this is the biographies of Plutarch, most of which are regarded as hagiographical, in that he was concerned to show each subject in terms of an anabasis of their character and soul – in other words, in terms of their moral and intellectual improvement. We might speak of his writing now as a species of edifying literature. He was writing to appeal to audiences in both Greece and in Rome, and paired his biographies, to compare and contrast character in the civilisations of Greece and Rome. That is the structure of his work. And that tells us a lot about how he understood the world, and the way he chose to write about it.

But having such a model is to invite distortion. At least as a modern historian would understand it. Human lives are messy, and do not easily fit the literary model of moral and intellectual improvement. That is not good historical writing by modern standards – though there was plenty of this hagiographical literature around in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often aimed at the young and the credulous.