An Appetite for Knowledge

I have argued elsewhere that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once approached  in terms of conjectures about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These conjectures 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 is real, 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.

The anthropologist and classicist 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 about the nature of Being  remained entirely undiscussed by Frazer.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being.*1

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 articulate 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 the practice of philosophy was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and also in Crete. He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks to be very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  

Aristotle 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 B.C.E.*2  Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras.*3 Aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in the pages of Herodotus (concerning Solon),*4  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. *5

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on the idea of an initial plenum (which is a philosophical concept) using the image of a sage emerging daily from beneath the sea (symbolising primal fulness and abundance), granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts. *6 He also gave information about the Babylonian New Year festival (Enuma Elish), the liturgy for which contained accounts of two creations: the first irrational, and the second one, rational, and which was given its rational character by the chief of the Babylonian gods.*7  Berossus' book was the Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost. But the christian writer Eusebius had access to it as late as the early fourth century C.E, and quoted a number of passages from it which survive in his writings. Recovered Mesopotamian texts, including tablets containing the Enuma Elish liturgy, generally confirm the accuracy of Berossus. 

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. The culture of the modern west rests on this idea.Why in Greece? The idea of the ‘Greek genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard the phrase uttered 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 *8 But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision begun in the enlightenment was wholesale, and created an alternative representation of the origins of European civilisation.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, the philosophe Denis Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopédie, 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 Encyclopédie. 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.

I wrote in the article ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ that 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 modern academic 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  talks about this other logical modality several times, 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.*9

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 up to the middle of the first millennium B.C.E, and beyond.  The doctrine underpins the understanding of the divine as something which can be both transcendent, and immanent, and thus be present in existence. *10 *11 It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.*12

It might be imagined therefore that this doctrine would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in which the doctrine appears have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that his discussion is based on an alternate 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 often presented by Plato – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

I've argued elsewhere that there is, in general, very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms.*13  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 records as being demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. When Plato discusses the soul (in the Timaeus), it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so he argues that 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 by looking to the one true thing.*14 

Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion to the modern mind, since Plato 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 lifeless 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 frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which create the problem, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. That understanding needs to be restored, along with 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 and Magic: Approaches and Theories, which is a survey of modern anthropological thought. *15 The author is Graham Cunningham, a specialist in the ancient Near East and the relevant languages. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. *16 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  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 presumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out. Anthropology as a formal subject 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 can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that a dangerous 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’).*17

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. *18 

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 bring to the party, 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 brought the same thing to the party, as would some of the early Gnostic writers. The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances also 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 much of human culture in terms of a fundamental conceptual error about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

It is assumed by the moderns (in the west, at least) that philosophy is a cultural phenomenon which, in historical terms, follows on from religious thought, and does not precede it. We are sure of this because we are sure we know what religion is, and what philosophy is. We think that religion enshrines a form of knowledge about the world and the universe which is less than rational, and that the devotees of religion are often credulous. Religious thought is often transfixed by the numinous and the invisible, and its responses to these things are unfathomable to the rational mind. We also think religion, to a great extent, developed in response to the ideological needs of social groups, sometimes in conflict with other social groups, which can give very distinctive structures to the myths and rituals which become part of the bedrock of the public show of these religions.We believe this (admittedly oversimplified) picture to be a correct interpretation of what religion is. Modern religion differs from ancient religion only in details.

Whereas philosophy is about a critical and rational understanding of the world and how it presents itself to us. Religion is cast as an un-philosophical and irrational understanding of that reality. The development of philosophy represents progress.

These notions are subject to nuance of course, but this is the core of the enlightenment idea of what these things are.

We assume that religion, as it presents itself to us in the form of the relatively young Abrahamic religions, is not fundamentally different in nature to other religions, either elsewhere now, or in the distant past. We make such an assumption, because there is nothing in our understanding of other religions which suggests to us, at least not with any clarity, that any other process is active in the creation and operation of religion. The dynamics are the same, and the functions are the same.

Graham Cunningham’s postscript makes it clear that religion is generally understood by anthropologists to be a relic of an earlier time where rational thought was absent. Certainly in terms of what we would recognise. Somehow religion is still with us, because large parts of the human race believe in the importance and efficacy of belief in the divine: that belief in the reality of the divine is something which is essential to the religious life, and the religious understanding of reality. *19

Yet this is not what ancient writers tell us. They tell a different story, as I’ve suggested, and one which is not represented by any current anthropological approach. That different story is that religion in the ancient world was not about belief, but concerned both knowledge and conjecture about the nature of the divine; and about the nature of reality itself.*20

I prefer to write about ancient religion in terms of divine cult. I distinguish the two for clarity - religion is often understood in the modern world in terms of sociological and ideological functions. And indeed religion has these functions: it often provides social cohesion, ideology, and useful rules of social behaviour. But to attempt to explain the core of divine cult in such terms is presumptive. If the core of a divine cult involves rational conjecture about the nature of reality itself, we will not easily find this out, even if the evidence is screaming this at us. In antiquity the ritual practice of divine cult was often a private affair, rather than a public one, which implies an important division between the performative function of ritual, and the outward show. Ritual and observance were the important things. The public show might echo the thought behind the cult in some respects, and offer clues to its significance and nature, but it is not the cult itself. *21

The association of knowledge with the core divine cult (and, consequently, a confirmation of the  connection of the cult with the divine itself), gave the rituals of ancient religion (both private and public) their efficacy, and patterned their meaning. But this did not involve belief.  Belief is something which is not supported by credible argument, or is a step beyond the limits of an rational argument.  That is not what was involved in ancient discussion of questions concerning the divine. Can you have knowledge without rational modes of thought? And what did the ancient writers mean by knowledge of the divine, and by equating knowledge with the divine? Clearly, it is not possible to have actual knowledge of something without rational modes of thought. But what rational thought is, is another one of those things which we are quite clear about in modern times, even if the evidence points to a different conclusion, and exists in teeming quantities.

___

 1. Frazer wrote this in his prize essay of 1879 on the 'Growth and Development of Plato's Ideal Theory'. Published finally in 1930. I'd found this essay after noticing that there were odd features in the structure of The Golden Bough. I wrote about this in J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016), and also in the more compact essay 'Frazer and the Association of Ideas', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
2. In his 'Life of Pythagoras' Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras travelled extensively around the Near East and Egypt in the service of Cyrus. Discussed in 'Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity'.
 3. In the Timaeus. Discussed in 'The Platonic Theory of Being' (full text with notes). Originally published in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
4. Discussed in 'Solon in the Court of Croesus' (extract). The full text is a chapter in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
5. Discussed in 'Working Wonders: Hephaestus and the Armour of Achilles'. A retitled chapter from The Sacred History of Being (2015), originally titled  'Being in Homer'.
 6. Discussed in 'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind', which is one of the appendices to The Sacred History of Being (2015).
7 Discussed in 'The Babylonian Creation': an extract from the chapter 'Creation' in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 8. Modern scholars are well aware of this. Ancient historians arranged information, but also questioned it. The Assyrians seemed to have a similar attitude to their materials - the chronicles associated with Ashurbanipal's reign exist in more than one version, with events recorded in a different order.
 9. Discussed in 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens' which is a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
10. Consequently this ought to be a matter of interest to Christian theologians, owing to the importance of the idea of the incarnation of the divine in the Gospels. For centuries the incarnation has been presented as a mystery (to both believers and theologians), without any kind of theoretical basis. But the theoretical basis is present in ancient literature, in various places. It even surfaces in a text in the Nag Hammadi documents.
 11. The logical basis of the incarnation is discussed in 'The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth', a chapter from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
12. Discussed in 'The Transcendental understanding of Reality', and in 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.'  from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
13.  'The Sweet Song of Swans'. The full text of this chapter, which concerns (among other things) the modern creation of the Greeks as the originators of philosophy, was published in the The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 14. In the chapter 'Plato's Theory of Vision', from The Sacred History of Being (2015). This extract concerns the discussion of the cosmos as “a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible.”
 15. Cunningham, Graham, Religion & Magic: Approaches & Theories, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
 16. That there are so many conflicting views might suggest that perhaps few, or even none of the approaches are correct, but are simply the product of the failure to grasp the sophistication of ancient thought.

17. Discussed in 'Running Folklore to the Death', an extract from section 13 of J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016).
18. I've discussed Eriksen and Nielsens' A History of Anthropology (2001) in the chapter 'Before Anthropology', which book illustrates that modern anthropology is sometimes about how things ought to be, rather than a profound engagement with the evidence. They do however give a useful account of what came before Hegel. Published in Man and the Divine (2018).
 19  We tend to inject our presumptions about the past onto the evidence, as if common sense is a servicable tool in understanding it. It takes more than that. Discussed in 'Beyond the Religious Impulse'. Published as a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). See also 'Distinguishing Belief and Faith', in Man and the Divine (2018).
20 A close look at Assyrian divination reports makes it clear that there was nothing mystical or vague about Assyrian queries about the future. The queries to the Sungod (Shamash) were expected to provide accurate information in response. This is because the diviners and scholars formulating the questions understood the universe to be rooted in a plenum. In which case,  all things which might be, already exist in the plenum. The diviners were therefore asking the Sungod for information which was available to the god. Twenty divinatory queries are available on the page 'Who will Appear before the City?' The concept of the plenum and its connection with the Mesopotamian story of the creation is discussed in the chapter: 'The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon'; further discussion of  the concept can be found in  'Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence', both from Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

21. Discussed in 'Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

Draft version, October 29, 2019. Final version, All Hallows Eve, 2019. Updated 11 January 2020. TY. 

Popular posts on Mind, Knowledge and Perception

What has been most accessed over the fourteen months since this blog began?

1. 'Physics and the Origins of the Universe' has been accessed 5113 times since it was published on the 4th of February this year. It concerns the limitations of modern physics, which cannot provide a theoretical explanation of how the visible universe came to be. It cannot do this because the discipline of physics recognises only one cause: Aristotle's efficient cause. Aristotle had however four principal modes of cause at his disposal. One cause is not enough to provide any kind of theoretical or mathematical origin of the physical universe.

2. The much older article 'The Idea of Being in Israel', published in late April last year, has been accessed 2673 times, which is remarkable given the arcane nature of the subject (the idea that there was a philosophical aspect to the development of theological ideas in Israel). 

3. 'Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives' is a look at Augustine's definition of what religion is. When Augustine's definition is compared with Cicero's notion of religion dating from the 1st century B.C.E, they are clearly defining quite different ideas. By contrast, if Cicero's definition of cultus deorum' is compared with the Hindu notion of cult and observance in religion, they seem to possess a similar notion of what religion is. This article has been accessed 1910 times since it was published in late September 2015. 

4. 'Distinguishing Belief and Faith' explores the implication of the idea that religion is about 'binding together' (in faith), which is Augustine's definition, and not Cicero's. Ancient religions didn't require faith as such, since they are about knowledge, rather than a necessity to have an unchanging collective view about things which were then,  and still are, beyond human understanding. Alan Watts' explanation of the difference in outlook between a proper and open religious sense, and the closed mind of the believer, is referenced in this article, which has been accessed 1720 times since the 2nd of May 2015. 

5. The article 'Sameness and Difference in Plato' has been available only since the 14th of June this year, and has already been accessed 1508 times, which is around 46 accesses per day. Again, the subject is rather arcane, concerning how the ultimate Reality (as described by Plato),  which by definition does not move and is not subject to change, has to possess a relationship with itself, if a physical reality containing things which are subject to change is to have existence. The article suggests that this is the foundation of the ancient notion that the physical world is a species of illusion. It is illusion because it contains motion and change. 

6. 'The Divine and the Limit' looks at the strange nature of Roman religious observance, which shows an engagement with abstract ideas as represented in space and time (extremity, limit, beginning, ending, gateways, doorways, roads, the past, the future, etc.). This interest in abstract ideas resembles the interest that Pythagoras had in such things. But this aspect of Roman religion was understood to derive from Numa Pompilius, who is supposed to have lived some two centuries before Pythagoras. The god Janus, who looked both forward and backward at the same time, was invoked first in oaths and liturgy - even before Jupiter, the notional head of the Roman pantheon of gods.  The article has been accessed 1430 times since May 2015.

7. Modern historical writing about the ancient world is steeped in ideas developed by Marx and his successors who created the modern subject of sociology. Many aspects of the ancient world are either of no interest from the Marxist point of view, or are reframed in such a way that they can be discussed within a Marxist model of society, which understands the world to be determined in terms of material and economic dynamics. Even ideas are determined by these dynamics, so ideas in themselves are of very little interest. The article 'Marx and Historicism' discusses where Marx got his model, which ultimately was from the Platonist Proclus, last head of Plato's Academy, via the German Idealist George Hegel. Marx and Engels just turned Hegel's dialectical model upside down. Accessed 923 times since April 2015. 

8. 'The Nature of Reality' concerns the argument of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who argued, in relatively recent times, the immaterial basis of reality.  The universe which we perceive is held in the mind of God, and not in ours. As a consequence, physical reality, however real it may seem to us, is an illusion. The article has been accessed 913 times since April last year. 

9. Evidence from Mexico and Ancient China suggests that a similar intellectual model may lie underneath the construction of the underground interior of the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan, which may contain a burial, and the tomb of the Emperor Qin at Mount Li in China. Both underground constructions featured representation of the heavens, and featured representation of terrestrial rivers on the floor. In both cases the rivers were filled with liquid mercury. The similar use of highly reflective mercury in both cases, suggests that the terrestrial world may have been understood to  mirror the divine world of the heavens. The article 'Teotihuacan and the river of Mercury' has been accessed 901 times since it was posted on the 25th of April 2015. 

10. 'Knowledge and Belief in Ancient Israel' was posted on the 8th of May 2015, and has been accessed 862 times. A concept explored elsewhere in The Sacred History of Being,  published on the 2nd of November 2015, is that the phenomenal polytheism of the Mesopotamian states of Assyria and Babylonia enshrined a profound and noumenal monotheism, having at its core the idea that it was focused on ‘looking to the one thing’, which was, as in Greece, understood as something without shape, colour or form, The god Aššur represented this noumenal monotheism, even when given shape, colour and form. 

There may always have been such an idea of the divine present in the religion of Israel, or it may have been borrowed later from Mesopotamian sources. As now, the idea is easy to misunderstand, and the Old Testament is full of reference to the objections to cult images. Prohibitions eventually took in religious iconography and religious objects, and later images of any kind. In the end, private religious practice was discouraged, save with a simple altar of earth. The final stage was the removal of private worship of Yahweh altogether, and communion with the god of Israel was centralised in the Temple at Jerusalem.

In Greece and Mesopotamia divine images once functioned as a part of a complex system, a chain of images of Being, to enable intellectual access to the most difficult of all images which might be apprehended by man or god: the one true thing, which is the nature of reality itself, and the source of all knowledge. In Israel, the polytheistic show was entirely removed. The monotheism which emerged in Israel was necessarily no longer about access to knowledge of the divine and its apprehension - a mental discipline - but about belief.

***

Each of these posts is accessible through the links in the table below. 

Thomas Yaeger, July 14, 2016. Links added in text, July 26, 2016.

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (I) 4 Feb 2016	5113
The Idea of Being in Israel 26 Apr 2015, 2 comments	2673
Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives 21 Sep 2015, 2 comments	1910
Distinguishing Belief and Faith 2 May 2015	1720
Sameness and Difference in Plato 14 Jun 2016	1508
The Divine and the Limit 18 May 2015	1430
Marx and Historicism 22 Apr 2015	923
The Nature of Reality (Berkeley) 16 Apr 2015	913
Teotihuacan and the river of Mercury 25 Apr 2015	901
Knowledge and Belief in Israel 8 May 2015	862

Marx and Historicism

In the early twentieth century the discipline of history effectively became subordinate to sociology. This was not a wholly negative development, since it expanded the scope of the subject, and introduced tools and discipline. But it also introduced a narrowness of perspective via an overarching model - essentially a teleological one - which makes it very nearly impossible to discuss many aspects of history. The overarching model is the historicist perspective which places material and economic forces at the interpretative core of historical understanding.


Though few historians are Marxists now, the ultimate source of the current focus of historians remains the Marxist analytical perspective, even if the model is hardly ever referred to or discussed.

Marx used a model of the world which offered the possibility of a new interpretation of the of it and its workings. This model was not created in Marx’s mind out of nothing. He was heavily influenced by the writings of the philosopher Hegel, who created a vast, abstract and scarcely intelligible world system which, as a byproduct, gave a new way in which to understand the nature of history. For Hegel, history was about the realization of the absolute. The absolute would be achieved through dialectical opposition between powers, cultures and interests, resulting in a final resolution, which would effectively result in the end of history.


The system erected by Marx borrowed this structure, and turned it on its head (as he
acknowledged). No longer was the system focused on the realization of the absolute. The absolute was replaced with an ideological target - a world in which the conflict between classes and interests would inevitably result in the resolution of its internal contradictions. It became a political system, aimed at changing things. The Hegelian dialectical process now functioned as a principal aspect of Marx’s theory, and political and social classes formed the opposing forces within the system. The end point of the process was framed in terms of what was politically desirable – the means of production would pass out of the hands of the owners of capital and become the common property of labour. Class struggle would end forever, shortly after the dictatorship of the proletariat was established.


It is easy to see how the discipline of sociology came into being as a consequence of the enthusiasm for this doctrine in the late nineteenth century. The most damaging aspect of this development however is that the Marxist analytical framework was assumed to be appropriate as an analytic tool for all societies, over all time. It was treated as universally applicable. This was because the hidden mainsprings of human society had been laid bare by Marx – class, economics, and material forces.


Marx himself thought it was universally applicable – and as a result it has necessarily gifted to us the notion of ‘false consciousness’, which is what individuals and classes have when they do not understand the real forces at work in their lives. The real forces are as described by Marx's analysis. False consciousness is a necessary catch-all category for a doctrine which supersedes all other analytical approaches.


One of the positive aspects of the sociological approach in the early twentieth-century was
the deprecation of attempts to understand history in terms of great individuals, and it is true that many things are better understood in terms of the broader forces at work in society. Greek history in the 5th century BCE is better understood in terms of the threat from Persia than it is through, say, an attempt to understand the mind of Pericles. This should not however preclude the worth of attempting to understand Pericles point of view, or the point of view of any other individual who is part of the historical frame.


But the Marxist point of view does preclude this, or at least discourages attention to detail. In connection with the political activity of the Gracchi in Republican Rome, and their participation in social struggle, I expressed to a tutor that I could not understand what was in the mind of Tiberius Gracchus. The response from the tutor was “does it matter?” I was completely floored by this at the time, but I came to understand that this view follows naturally from the idea that decisions are made in response to material and economic forces, and that if you establish those, then you understand what is going on. Years later I found that the tutor was drawing on a remark by Friedrich Engels.


There are many aspects of antiquity which are difficult to understand using this
sociological-historicist approach. The importance of philosophy, sculpture, poetry, and religion for the ancient world is unquestioned, but these things are treated by historians as artefacts illustrating the ideology of civilizations, economies and powers, rather than as ways into understanding how these entities understood themselves. In other words, their main function for historians is to support the analysis determined by the interpretative model. The roles of religion and divine worship in particular are interpreted in either anthropological or sociological terms, and, given that the sociological model is an atheistic model, sometimes even as a form of pathology. In other words, there is very little about religion and ritual which needs to be understood in detail, since these things are irrational in nature, and not subject to rational analysis. Most ancient thought can be classed as false consciousness. As a consequence, philosophy and religion are sundered, even where they are known to have co-existed (Greece), even within individual figures (Plato). Scholars  prefer to interpret religion in terms of sacred space and demarcation, rather than in terms of what the ancients themselves said about it.


The telos is, in its own way, a key part of Marx's world view. Both Hegel and Marx's philosophy are teleological in nature. That is to say that everything within their systems is framed in terms of an end point. Teleology arrives in the work of Marx and Hegel mainly through study by Hegel of the writings of Proclus, who was the last head of the Academy in Athens, some nine hundred years after its foundation by Plato. Proclus has much to tell us about the relationship between philosophy and religion: he practised theurgy, and believed that was possible for man to achieve significant results through the power of the trained human will. Hegel’s system is built to a considerable extent on an interpretation of Proclus’ model of the world (minus the theurgy).


The telos in Proclus is a vital feature of his universe. In that universe, the telos has properties which are required for the proper functioning of that universe. It enables motion and change, which would be impossible without its properties. It also enabled the creation. The telos, in its original form, was the keystone of an intellectual and rational model of the universe, which existed until at least the closure of the philosophical schools in the early centuries of our common era, and the final passing of the pagan world. By contrast, by the time we get to Marx, the telos is merely a political desirable. It has no properties which enable anything else, and Marx is careless about its nature (we have no significant detail from Marx about the nature of the classless society). We have in Marx's work the vague shape of something which once existed, and had an important role in patterns of meaning;   and which was discussed with some intellectual rigour and clarity. The telos of Marx is an empty thing: a twisted parody of the original concept, existing only to justify a political agenda.


There is a fantastic irony here, in that the current sociological-historicist approach to understanding history is based on a Marxist inversion of the teleological model of Hegel, so that it recognises material and and social forces and not mind or thought, and that the Hegelian teleology has its roots in the thought of Proclus, who recognised mind and thought, but did not recognise the importance of the material world.