Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas)

There are many ideas from both the ancient world and from much more recent times which have died a death, so that it is virtually impossible for us to understand these concepts, even within their original contexts. Not all of these ideas are of equal value – some reflect only minor aspects of the world view of their time, or illustrate some particular application of a way of thinking in a single culture or place. Others however are of vital importance, not only for an understanding of the functioning of a culture in its own context, but also in establishing something of our own intellectual ancestry, and relation to our antecedents.

An example of one of the more important ideas which became lost, but mercifully has been recovered in modern times, is the neo-platonism which underpinned much of the thought of the  English renaissance. This was recovered largely by a single scholar in the 1920s (H Grierson), who rescued the metaphysical poets from the category of writers for whom (according to Dr Johnson’s understanding) ‘metaphor’ was the principal obsession. This discovery and re-evaluation stands behind the work of the Warburg Institute in London, between the immediate pre-war years, and the late 1950s, when the full extent of the importance of neo-platonism in the English renaissance was revealed by a number of scholars, including D. P. Walker and Frances Yates. Eventually the detailed understanding of these ideas resulted in the rediscovery of the importance of other related and interacting ideas in circulation within the same intellectual communities, including Hermeticism, pan-sophism, etc.

One of the reasons why ideas become lost is that they are so pervasive within a society that they remain largely unspoken, unarticulated, and undebated. It is not only the complextity of ideas, or their controversial nature, which may consign them to oblivion, but it might also be as a consequence of their success. At the point where an idea is no longer articulated, it is in grave danger of being forgotten, misunderstood, or translated into something quite other than its original shape and meaning.

An example of the latter, where a word undergoes a radical change of meaning, is the word ‘rational’. For us this word connotes thought free from an overarching body of institutional or religious ideas, yoked only to logical and methodical processes based at root on common sense and commonly agreed values which conform to a vaguely understood humanist agenda, which (it is believed) all reasonable human beings can agree on. 

But in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word retained a quite different meaning. It meant that an idea or argument had a proper place within a philosophical or religious picture of the world (a notion at the core of the adoption of neo-platonist ideas by writers and artists in the English renaissance). Because it had its logical place, it could be considered rational, in a manner similar to the understanding of the rationality of a sequence of notes configured to belong correctly within the overall structure of a musical composition. 

In that sense Descartes picture of the world is a rationalist picture, in that it places its details within an overarching framework.  His principal innovation from the point of view of posterity is that he placed the idea of what is rational in a purely philosophical model of the world, rather than a religious one: God was effectively banished into a sphere of his own. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century the term ‘rationalist’ came to mean something quite different - it meant free-thinking, and required to be outside the confines of an essentially religious framework of ideas and preconceptions, relying on nothing more than the human capacity to think clearly, and to build on the work of other thinkers similarly untrammelled by what was now considered to be a wholly irrational pattern of thought. The mathematician Edmund Halley, for example, is reported to have said that the doctrines of Religion were unintelligible, and that Christianity itself was an 'imposture'. 

We can see the meaning of words and technical terms shifting around us all the time, if we take the trouble to notice. Sometimes these changes can cause real difficulties for our understanding when we find them in an unfamiliar context. We now find ourselves in a quandary when we are thinking about ancient Greek religion, which the scholar E.R. Dodds thought contained many expressions of the irrational (his most famous book is 'The Greeks and the Irrational’), since to the Greeks it is likely that the ‘irrational’ components of their religion were regarded as properly ordered, and in their proper place. The sacrifice of animals (for example) is clearly irrational within the context of a modern city-bound existence in which secular humanist values seem unquestionable. But I do not think it helps us to understand ancient Greek religion, or indeed any part of ancient Greek civilisation, to look at these in terms of a modern model of irrational and deviant psychology.

Again, the concept of humanism has undergone a certain amount of shape-shifting over the centuries. In the renaissance it indicated a complex of ideas opposed (to some extent, though not entirely so) to religious ideas of man and his place in the world, and a tendency to put the human (and the human experience) in the centre of things. However, this did not at the time imply any kind of normative agenda about what was truly human and what was not, or a rejection of a rational picture of the world.

This requires some explanation. In some spheres ‘humanism’ referred principally to a way of living and understanding, and belonging to the civilised tradition, rather than to any particular body of ideas which a humanist might hold. A humanist might therefore (for example) study the outward form of speeches of Cicero in order to take on the values and attributes of the great Roman lawyer and orator, on the principle that acquisition of the outward form of a thing has as its corollary the acquisition of its inner core. This procedure is in stark contrast to someone working within the expressly intellectual tradition which Cicero also belonged to, who would study the ideas in his works, rather than focus on the outer form in which they were expressed.

Other important concepts have changed radically over the centuries. The concept of the ‘soul’ is now almost unintelligible to almost all, except as a vague notion of ‘essence’. Whereas it used to be a term used with technical precision. (Plotinus is of course unread these days, except by a small band of specialists and some interested lay readers). The Egyptian idea of the Ka clearly bears some conceptual relation to the idea of the soul among the Greek writers, but it has been difficult for scholarship to draw out parallels between the two, since neither of the concepts is properly understood.

Mathematics and Geometry too, had, to the Greeks and others, a strangely intimate relationship with religion and theology, of which we have only the slightest glimmer of an  understanding. Worse, we are generally unable to tackle the problem, since we cannot easily bring ourselves to consider theology as something which has technical aspects. 

We might, for the purposes of scholarship, investigate some pointless minutiae of ancient cultic life, created and maintained by a priesthood with time on its hands, and little capacity for logical and practical patterns of thought (the Sumerians and the Babylonians sometimes referred to the Gods in their documents in terms of numbers, so that such and such a god would be ‘6’, another would be ‘9’ etc, which suggests a very practical relationship with their divinities). But we would not expect it to make any kind of sense to us. 

Yet another idea which we now understand only vaguely, denuded of its former technical importance, is the concept of ‘completion’. There has been very little study of this concept across cultures in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean during the past 150 years of scholarship, which is perhaps a little odd. This is because it is an idea which is found as part of a complex of related concepts in all of these cultures, and might therefore reasonably be considered as part of a framework for useful comparison between these cultures.

Another related idea, of equal importance, which has been completely passed over as a means by which the significance of ancient cultural ideas might be understood, is that of the ‘telos’. Like ‘completion’, the concept of the ‘telos’ is shared across cultures in antiquity, and should allow useful comparisons to be made between disparate cultures. However it too is hardly understood. In fact It is fair to say that it is not at all understood, except as a term deprecated by the sciences ever since the end of the seventeenth century.

But this idea of the telos too has undergone subtle and far-reaching changes in its long history. The concept of the ‘telos’ or final cause in science from the seventeenth century onwards is quite different from that understood in antiquity. In order to illustrate the pervasive and often unspoken influence of this idea in the ancient world, it is necessary first of all to explain what it meant to the ancients, rather than to nineteenth century zoologists keen to avoid (among other things) the final cause as part of the explanation for the variety of animal forms in the world.

Almost all modern discussions of the telos (where these exist) derive ultimately from Aristotle’s consideration of the subject. The telos and the final cause he discussed as part of a suite of explanation for why things are the way they are. So the final cause, the end to which something is moving, or what it is that has caused it to begin to move, is part of the explanation of why it is the way it is, why it is composed of the elements it has, why it is configured as it is, why it is functioning in the manner in which it does, why it has certain inclinations and appetites, and so on. The other components of the suite are the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the material cause. These should not be regarded as wholly distinct in character from the final cause as modes of explanation, since they depend on the same underlying idea. Understanding the other kinds of cause actually helps to understand the idea of the final cause, and so these causes will be discussed also.

Aristotle used the image of the house (oikos) to help illustrate the idea of the telos, though it is not a particularly good example with which to discuss this philosophical idea. The house is something which is built in order to achieve certain things: it has a final form, which, when reached, allows it to be called a house. It is composed of certain things, and when these are assembled and arranged in the proper order, the house is complete. Before it is assembled and its elements are arranged in the proper order, the house has only a potential existence. It might come to be, and will only make sense when it does come to be, but unassembled it has no existence.

In modern times the only cause we allow (at least in terms of ‘cause’) is the efficient cause. In other words the direct action of constructing the house and its elements – the labour of making the bricks, cutting the timbers, erecting the frame, putting on the roof tiles, etc. It is about work and energy: the kilojoules of effort necessary to complete the task

The other causes make more difficulties for the moderns. The formal cause seems to be drawn from another realm of explanation altogether, since it seems to imply that like gives rise to like. Thus a human being gives birth to a human being, and a lion gives birth to lions. This is probably the origin of the idea of formal cause. In the context of the construction of a house, this mode of explanation has to be reshaped considerably. Thus, a brick-maker is the creator and formal cause of the bricks which go to make up most of the fabric of the house. And likewise, the baker is the formal cause of bread. In both these examples, it is obvious that the craftsmen are also the source of the work involved in the making of bricks and bread. 

It is interesting to speculate that this very simple mode of explanation lies behind the creation of a large number of craft gods – when the human race began to engage in the creation of things other than offspring, this simple rule would necessarily be augmented to include human handiwork. The augmented explanation requires that the brick-maker, the baker, the weaver, be agents or vessels of the formal cause of each of the crafts. And so they become emblematic of their crafts in the abstract. In ancient Assyria, a number of religious officials had titles which were craft related, and the training of the crown prince for his future kingship involved the development of skills in various crafts ('with the bakers he did the baking' which we find in the annals of Ashurbanipal, who became king of Assyria in the late 7th century BCE).

Before the Classical period in Greece,  we have no evidence for the discussion of the four causes as causes. This absence of evidence however is not evidence for the absence of the causes as explanatory modes. For example, the four causes underpin the scene in Book xviii of the Iliad, where Hephaestus is working metal to create statues animated by the gods. He is a craftsman, and is depicted as highly energetic in the practice of his craft. Some of the objects he makes are by the very nature of their design able to enter the councils of the gods, and to return of their own accord. So the final cause (the telos), efficient cause, material cause, and the formal cause are all implicit in this scene.

Three of the four causes which refer to processes (the telos, the efficient and the formal cause) are implicitly attested often in the cultural record. The telos or the end is a common concept in ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, most often expressed in the context of mythological, religious and theological texts ('the King is in his Horizon' is a not uncommon trope in Ancient Egypt). Both the material and efficient causes are ideas which have to be clearly known to any culture which has to muster, organise and calculate manpower and effort, and material resources. Also the organisation of agriculture, metalwork, glassmaking, breadmaking, weaving, and the other crafts. The fourth, the material cause, is also implicitly present in ancient writings, since the function of a thing is largely co-terminous with both the material with which it is made, and the form after which it is modelled.. All these things were part of the responsibility of kings in the ancient Near East and Egypt, and elsewhere. 

Since  much of the activity in the ancient world is about the amassing of materials, the creation of precious and sacred objects, the organisation of work, and the ritualised association of things created by means of the first three of the causes, with the fourth, the telos, or what is divine, we can see the material, the formal, the efficient and the final cause in nearly all aspects of ancient civilisation. 

These causes were understood, in essence as outlined by Aristotle, long before his time. We do not need to find texts in Assyria or Egypt which discuss these causes in the way that Aristotle did. We will not find them, because the structure of society was different in those places, with a much more stratified nature, with knowledge and esoteric thought at the top of the structure. Explanation was rarely written down (though ritual and liturgy sometimes were).  Instead, we need to interpret the evidence which is presented to us in order to understand what is actually there to be seen. 

Of the four causes, only the final cause absolutely requires philosophical insight for its understanding. Hence the idea of the final cause is the most interesting from the point of view of developing an understanding of the world of ideas in antiquity: if the idea of the telos is present, then philosophical discussion of the nature of reality is also present. The idea of the telos makes no sense unless it is understood, and it presents a number of problems for anyone attempting to understand the concept. Gaining understanding, and the solving of logical problems, is what philosophy was all about. 

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (I)

Most arguments in physics take for granted a frame of space and time, and the reality of physical existence. Such things need to be explained, not assumed for the purposes of description and analysis. Otherwise physics is a multi-million dollar parlour game (I stood inside the fantastically complex Atlas detector in CERN three times, while it was under construction. The cafeteria cutlery was magnetised, which was impressive).

I covered a wide range of subjects in writing The Sacred History of Being (hereafter ‘SHB’ as my friends now generally refer to it). Not everything the book explores is reflected in the blog postings however.  This range is not the consequence of a lack of focus, but because the implications of the core argument impact on many subjects, including logic, mathematics, physics, cosmology, religion, etc. I was also interested in why we had arrived at where we are, culturally speaking, so that the central argument of SHB can seem to be without meaning.

There are two principal logical modes present in antiquity:  Aristotle’s laws of thought, upon which most everything since has been built, up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (things became interesting with Cantor’s work relating to the infinite and transfinite groups, and with Russell’s paradox). And the other is a mode of logic present in Plato, but also connected with Pythagoras, and with the Babylonians, from whom Pythagoras is supposed to have received it, when he was present at the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE. The second modality has not been the focus of thorough scholarship over the past two hundred years, and is scarcely recognised for what it is. These two modalities are so different from each other, that they provide radically different understandings of the world. Taking account of the second modality was a major part of SHB. I still haven’t dealt with it properly.

We have turned our understanding of the world upside down during the past three hundred years in the west, without really knowing what we were doing, and what the consequences would be. What that means is that the ancient picture of the world was always built on the idea that there was a question behind its understanding. That question is one which has often been repeated since – it is ‘why should there be anything rather than nothing?’ The question goes nowhere in the modern world, because we have no way of answering it.

In the ancient world, a possible answer would be that our physical reality exists as part of a plenum; as a consequence of the reality and the properties of that plenum. Arthur Lovejoy wrote a book on how important that way of looking at reality was for the history of western culture from the ancient Greeks up until relatively recent times (The Great Chain of Being, published in 1936). In a sense SHB is designed to knock the bottom out of the notion that the idea of a plenum, a plenitude, or Being itself, began with the Greeks. It used to be the natural place to start. Now our understanding is different. A premise of the argument is that the idea can be traced back at least until the 14^th century B.C.E. So I wrote a kind of prequel to Lovejoy’s book.

Why a plenum? The power of this idea is that it allows us to accept that there is nothing, rather than anything, at the root of our reality. It is just that it so transcends the common sense idea of nothing, in that it is neither something, nor nothing. It has no presence, and no absence: it is just what it is. A field of possibility, if you like. Undefined, and without limit.

This is the essence of the teleological world view, in which the end and the beginning, the idea of limit itself, is a matter of some significance. This idea was dominant in antiquity. It is very prominent in Aristotle’s writings, but he did not invent it. Solon expresses the idea very clearly in the account of his conversation with Croesus in Herodotus, some two centuries earlier. It underpins the Assyrian picture of the world, and also the Babylonian account of the creation, as expressed in the liturgy of their New Year Festival, the Enuma Elish (‘When on High’).

Originally the idea of the telos was intimately associated with the gods, and with religious cult. The gods were understood to be a product, a consequence of the telos, and of the initial plenum. Later, this association was less well understood, so that the concept of the telos became reified into an intellectual frame in which things had purpose, function, and value (one of my teachers of philosophy once said that ‘a teleological universe is one in which fact and value interpenetrate’, meaning that everything has a meaning in such a universe). For Aristotle, in his writings, everything was ‘rowing towards its end’. Without the idea of an initial plenum, the idea of the telos is insupportable and without meaning. It isn’t a secular idea, though nevertheless it does have a range of presences in time and space, since reality does not adjust itself to suit our point of view. If it is there, it continues to function.

We have let all of the transcendent nature of the telos slip, and we deprecate what we currently understand as teleology, outside religion, poetry and literature, because it is a view of the world which sees purpose and direction in processes and things, which cannot be present. It has for us no meaning, no significance. It lasted longest in biology, perhaps because of Aristotle’s massive legacy for the study of the subject, but it is now nowhere to be seen in any of the sciences. At least not explicitly.

I could take an excursion here into Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, since we are talking about the final cause. I will stay on course by saying that one of the four causes is the efficient or physical cause. This is now, since Newton, the only cause the west recognises. This is physical force, physical determinism, energy, power, action and reaction, etc. Why only the efficient cause? Because Newton made such a good job of his explanation of the universe in terms of the mathematical description of the consequences of physical force, and of inertia. His work was so profoundly impressive that even the Divines wanted to be part of the new dispensation, in which the universe could be understood in terms of a certain uniformity, a clockwork precision. They presented this uniformity as evidence for the existence and controlling power of god, which was not of course Newton’s intention. This uniformitarian view of the universe has persisted (in various forms) until the present day. The efficient cause rules.

So, when a physicist or a cosmologist is asked: how did the universe come into being, it is hard to give any kind of answer beyond the ‘Big Bang’. The efficient cause always presumes a mover, and when the beginning of the universe is considered, there is no obvious prime mover. And in any case, identifying a prime mover simply moves the question of the start another stage back (‘it’s turtles all the way down!’).The idea of the ‘Big Bang’ exists only because an expanding universe suggests that a primordial explosion might have taken place. It’s an inference. It isn’t a very sophisticated notion, and doesn’t have exclusive explanatory rights. Why did it explode?  What was there to explode, and why was it there? What was there for it to explode into?

The questions have expanded, without the possibility of answers, which is often a sign that the critical model in which something is being examined is crippled.

We can conceive an alternative kind of physics which considers initial cosmological conditions, the idea of creation, the properties and attributes of the plenum and of the creation of visible reality, and the implications of the two opposing logical and inferential frames promoted by Plato and Aristotle.

I’m drawing up something on Plato and Aristotle’s respective modes of logic. I outlined Plato’s views on the logical relations of the Forms with each other in SHB (he’s only interested in the abstract cases), but I haven’t written much about Aristotle’s laws of thought. We think of them as enshrining common sense. 

But Aristotle practiced sophistry (he wrote a text on sophistical refutation - De Sophisticis Elenchis). What he is saying therefore depends on the context in which he is saying it; on who he is talking to and why. Aristotle’s writings on the soul (De Anima) mirror Plato’s closely, which suggests that they are not far apart in their understanding, but chose to come to different conclusions elsewhere. The absurd conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics, where it is concluded that the gods are unmoving, and limited to contemplation, is a case in point. It would have looked profoundly odd at the time, since it means that the gods cannot act. 

[a text correction and a link added, November 4, 2017]

Eight Books

(A response to Neil deGrasse Tyson's list of eight great books). 


In December 2014 Maria Popova's excellent site Brainpickings published a list of Neil deGrasse Tysons 'Eight books that every intelligent person should read'.  Tyson suggests that: 'if you read all of [these] works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world'. The list is an interesting one, and he is right up to a point. But his list is based on a reading of the world founded on a number of assumptions, some of which emerge in his comments on the books he recommends. I give his list (and his comments) here:

1. The Bible (public library; free ebook), to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself
2. The System of the World (public library; free ebook) by Isaac Newton, to learn that the universe is a knowable place
3. On the Origin of Species (public library; free ebook) by Charles Darwin, to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth
4. Gulliver’s Travels (public library; free ebook) by Jonathan Swift, to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos
5. The Age of Reason (public library; free ebook) by Thomas Paine, to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world
6. The Wealth of Nations (public library; free ebook) by Adam Smith, to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself
7. The Art of War (public library; free ebook) by Sun Tzu, to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art
8. The Prince (public library; free ebook) by Machiavelli, to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.

I focus here on Tyson's principal assumption. His second choice, Newton's The System of the World, is chosen because it teaches us that the universe is 'a knowable place'. Up to a point this is true. Aspects of it have some kind of intelligibility for us - we can treat it as an objectively real thing which can be measured and described by mathematics (which is what he means). But it isn't the case that it is actually known by us. We know its regularities, and we can define these (and we have). And that capacity to understand its regularities and uniformities is indeed crucial to the development of the Western world in the centuries since Newton. The efficient cause has become so important to us that the other causes which were recognised in the ancient world are now seen to have no explanatory power at all, and consequently are ignored.   

All of Tyson's choices are about force and struggle, which is what  the real nature of the world becomes when you are confined only to an understanding which is based on the efficient cause. It doesn't matter if it is understood in terms of money, political power, military power, or even reason itself - the efficient cause is the underlying explanation. So his list is probably a wise one, given the universe in which he understands himself to live. 

The power of Newton's approach was such that even seventeenth and eighteenth century divines felt compelled to embrace something of this new way of looking at the world. The uniformitarian outlook was the result. Science could explain and describe the orderliness of the cosmos, as it presents itself to us, and this orderliness became the proof of the role of God in the world. This was nonsense then, and is nonsense now.

The orderliness is the consequence of the force of gravity, which Newton managed to describe so precisely, that he was able to deduce that it was a universal force, as capable of determining the motions of the planets in the heavens, as it was in determining the behaviour.of objects in motion on the earth.

But, we know nothing of what gravity is. We know what it does, and understand (in terms of mathematical description) its association with matter. But we don't know why it is there (though clearly if it wasn't there, we wouldn't be in a position to discuss it). We don't know why any of the apparently objective world is there, rather than not. Such questions of course are beyond the remit of the modern mathematical approach to physical reality that Newton inaugurated, and so are questions which are rarely addressed. This reluctance is probably wise, but it does represent an implicit admission that the universe is not a knowable place. No matter how far we press the efficient cause as an explanatory mechanism for what goes on, and no matter how far we explore it with the power of mathematics and physics, the universe will not actually be made known to us. We can have knowledge of it, but not actually know what it is. Not as long as we remain confined to an approach based on the efficient cause. 

These questions of knowability are however addressable from a different point of view, and were so addressed in the ancient world. How these questions were addressed in antiquity, and the evidence for the age of such questions, is a major component of The Sacred History of Being. 

The list which follows (my alternative to the Tyson list) contains books which can be profitably read by those who want to know the wider scope of the questions we can ask about the universe, and its knowability, as well as something of the intellectual history of the world: 

1. Plato's The Sophist. To gain an insight into the absolute unfathomability of some aspects of Reality
2 Carl Jung's On the Nature of the Psyche, for an understanding of the apparatus which has a key role in making the unfathomable real.
3. Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. To have some understanding of the importance and scope of abstract concepts in our apprehension of Reality.
4. Robert Temple's Conversations with Eternity. One of those rare modern books that make it possible to gain insight into the meaning of ancient cultic life. On the practice of Divination, east and west.
5. Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. Our connection with the world through Knowledge by Description, and Knowledge by Acquaintance.
6. Machiavelli's Discourses upon Livy. Machiavelli's Prince is based on his study of ancient life and politics through Livy's writings, and one is the mirror of the other. But the Discourses is the better book.
7. Richard Onians The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate. One of the great unexploded scholarly bombs of the twentieth century. Discusses in great detail the other way of seeing, now lost to us, which runs all through the fabric of the ancient world.
8. Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Where Hellenism went in Europe after the fall of Rome, and what it did.

If you need my choice number 9, anything by Mark Twain.

Thomas Yaeger, 24 June 2015

Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality

This is a post from the middle of 2015, some five or six months before the publication of The Sacred History of Being by the Anshar Press. 

***

The text of The Sacred History of Being is now being proofed for publication, chapter by chapter. Seven of the chapters are available on this blog. Recently I’ve been exchanging mail with a friend in the US who knows something of the wider implications of the arguments in the book.

Sometimes unexpected things happen as the result of such conversations. I received an email from her a few days ago telling me that at an open house event for the Philosophy Faculty at Baudouin College in Maine, in connection with her nephew’s graduation, she had described my work to the Head of the Faculty (the "Chair"), partly in connection with some remarks I’d made concerning John Locke and his rejection of the idea that something might arise out of nothing, since that defied common sense  (a common view in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). The Chair of the Faculty is a specialist in John Locke.

My! The Sacred History of Being isn’t yet published, yet it is out there already, engaging people in argument!

She wrote to me a few weeks ago in response to a case I’d made concerning the western rejection of paradoxical ideas:

Interesting points about the east-west division being the consequence of something more profound than colonial bias, i.e. a division between philosophy which embraces paradox and "common sense" understanding/rationalism (I take it that you don't consider Locke's ideas to be true philosophy, that the only true philosophy is one that embraces paradox). I agree that reality is beyond human understanding. It seems to me that accepting that fact threatens a lot of people, especially Westerners, making them feel frightened, powerless, and lacking in control, but that Eastern cultures found ways to deal with it, including as you said, embracing paradox (doing a paper on "Siddhartha" in high school opened my mind to this way of thinking). The West's prioritization of doing business, commercial utilitarianism, is an interesting way to frame it. It seems to me that the West has been drunk for a long time on our seeming power to control the world, most recently via technology, destroying the environment and civilizations in the process, and that we haven't wanted to acknowledge or accept our limits. Unfortunately, the rest of the world seems to be following our lead.

I responded, mentioning that while a student at UCL I had taken the course on the History of Political Ideas,

 during which I had the opportunity to take a close look at John Locke (I may have written a paper). He argued that people are born as blank palimpsests, and that all knowledge is down to the association of ideas, since nothing pre-exists in our minds (Socrates spins!!). That’s the essential basis of  advertising, marketing and brands, and all efforts to seduce us into  accepting models of reality which serve the beguilers, not the beguiled.  He passes for one of the greats.

So, not true philosophy. But ‘true’ philosophy is hard to define.

This exchange has its roots in an earlier argument I’d made about the difficult relationship between east and west which has endured for centuries. Edward Said’s book Orientalism is the one which is the source of the idea that colonial attitudes and the imperatives of colonial power were responsible for negative western ideas about the east. This argument is a little thin, especially if you are looking at the detail of the relationship, over time, and in a number of cultural areas, including philosophy. Referencing Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, which sees the issue in terms of a developing eurocentric racism, I wrote that:

Bernal’s thesis, even to me in 1987, didn’t entirely seem to hold water. But he’d locked on to what had happened to the discipline of classics in  the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and he was spot on about that. Even if his research students didn’t understand the context of some of the details (they did a lot of the work).

 Where I was going at the time was that there was a problem with the interpretation of Plato’s arguments, which didn’t seem to have anything to do with their internal coherence. And it was classicists that were responsible.

I began to think around 1988 that there were characteristics of foreign and ancient philosophies which were the real problem. The west, particularly since Newton, has tended to avoid philosophy which embraces paradox, and instead prefers common sense understanding (John Locke in particular).

So this is a third explanatory framework, which may lie underneath both the colonial imperatives and the eurocentic racism, which might now be understood as expressions of a deep, though ill-defined cultural anxiety about where the west stands in the scheme of things, and how much sense it makes. I expanded on this theme:

Most eastern religions have a paradoxical core, because they understand reality to be beyond human understanding. I understood this when I was relatively young. But it doesn’t please everybody. It doesn’t suit the west.

Plato argues in the same way. But as far as the western tradition is concerned, Plato is the fountainhead of rational thought. And rational thought isn’t based on a paradoxical view of reality. So we have had a meaningless scholarly stand-off for nearly two centuries between those who argue Plato was doing research, and those who think he was expounding a doctrine (though they don’t know what it was).

What these scholars are actually doing is protecting us from Plato. As long as they are arguing within this irrelevant frame about his dialogues, Plato is as dangerous to the modern truths of the world as a stuffed Dodo.

If you put all that together with an antipathy to apparently illogical patterns of thought in the east (read as ethnic credulity and stupidity), and model yourself on the undisputed (and the only) creators of science, mathematics, art, architecture, and civilization itself, you have a heady brew. And of course the development of racist ideas on top, when scientists started to look for physical characteristics in populations that would allow them to place people on a scale of intelligence, or of civilisation. Typology looks scientific, but it always was about labelling and assigning value.

Where does that leave us? Effectively in a place where we have erected a physical and materialistic paradigm of reality which has no root. It does not mean anything, and cannot mean anything, since there is no way to understand how or why it might have come to be. We think we can say that it is here now, and that it wasn't here 14 or 15 billion years ago, so it seems to have exploded into existence out of whatever might have been there before, which we know nothing about. Or maybe it did come out of nothing, but we can't say anything about that at all, so we pass over the question in silence.

Such poverty. But we get on with things. I concluded with a description of the current cultural arc of the west:

We have inherited a number of axiomatic ways of approaching the world since Newton. We measure, we define, we control. What cannot be measured, defined, or controlled is dangerous and irrational. So we strive to get rid of these aspects of reality. What can be  measured, defined and controlled allows us to do business, and do it much better than anybody did it before.

I think that’s what it is about, in the end: doing business. The end point of this cultural arc is the complete destruction of all patterns of thought and belief which aren’t capable of what we define as rational analysis. They are useless at best, and dangerous at the worst. Knowledge will be what can be understood through measure, meaning will revolve around useful definition, and the edifice so created will be subjected to whatever kind of control is appropriate in the circumstances. A wholly commercial utilitarianism.

Like most cultural arcs, the process is unlikely to be completed, so I'm not despondent. How the process will be interrupted, I can't say. We can trace it back in the west as least as far as the Spanish conquest of the Americas. What they wanted was gold, and the souls of the indigenous population. Having custody of their souls through induction into the Catholic Church made it easier for the invaders to operate in strange and sometimes hostile territories. What happened to the social and material culture of the Americans was not a matter of importance; it was described by some of the priests, but it was not understood. As far as the Spanish were concerned, there was nothing to understand.

Since then our history has consisted largely of the struggles between competing empires and their pursuit of commercial gain. It is easier to engage in this struggle if the cultures being overrun and assimilated are thought to be irrational or of no worth.

Imperial struggle does not always result in the complete destruction of patterns of belief and material culture. But sometimes, as we can see happening now in the Near east, the absolute destruction of material culture, and all knowledge of what went before, is on the imperial agenda. The intention is that there will be one winner, and one model of reality. Isaac Newton did not start this process, but by making it possible (and profitable) to understand the objective world as real and a place to be understood through mathematics and calculation, he provided the tools.