Thomas Yaeger's Blog: Historicism

Showing posts with label Historicism. Show all posts

Friday, 10 May 2019

The Interpretation of Ancient History

[This is the introduction for Echoes of Eternity, originally due summer 2019, but rescheduled for May 2020.]

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

I’ve occasionally submitted work for competitions, and Echoes of Eternity (as it now is), grew out of an extended essay I wrote in 1991-2 for a university prize offered while I was a student at UCL. It didn’t win, and at the time I didn’t imagine that it would. This is because I began with an essay critical of historicist approaches to the study of the ancient world, and particularly that form of historicism which appears in the writings of Marx. The historicist approach was very widespread in the University of London at the time, and so I regarded writing the essay mainly as an opportunity to blow off some steam which had been building up during the preceding three years.

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 at UCL.

What was the point of the essay beyond the opportunity to criticise modern historical methods? One of the reasons I chose to study ancient history was to understand ancient cultures within their original contexts. Which means gaining an understanding of how they themselves understood the world in which they lived, and in which they functioned. Before arriving at UCL I’d already absorbed Wittgenstein’s criticism of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, which was to the effect that it is arrogant to presume that the ideas of other peoples are absurd or wrong-headed, simply because they do not make sense to us. Wittgenstein argued that if we understood their ideas in their original context, they might turn out to make a great deal of sense.

Modern scholars of ancient history would respond by saying that is exactly what they are doing – it is just that we now understand that the important drivers shaping ancient societies and cultures are material and economic, and are the universal drivers, operating in all times and places. Study those things, and you will understand the cultures.

And so much of the original context of ancient evidence is lost or ignored by modern historians of the ancient world.

However I am not at all arguing that the study of material and economic forces is unimportant. Studying those things is just as important as the other things which are available for study, such as religious ideas and rituals, literature, philosophy, mythology and art. But I grew tired of the argument that for example, the Romans of the 1^st century B.C.E. understood their deep history and culture more poorly than we do, because they did not possess the proper context in which to analyse the limited historical materials they had available to them.

The importance of material and economic forces derives from the Marxist philosophical perspective, which is the bedrock philosophy of many historians (though many would deny that they are Marxists in outlook – I once heard an eminent historian say that he was ‘Marxian’ in outlook, rather than a Marxist). The sociological approach to ancient history is based ultimately on Marx’s philosophy.

Marxism contains a useful concept for dealing with things which do not fit the model. That concept is ‘false consciousness’. The philosophical analysis of Marx is assumed to be correct, and so any body of thought which doesn’t square with that analysis is presumed to be wrong, and the product of a false consciousness. According to this way of thinking, the Romans lived in a false consciousness of who and what they were, and why they did what they did. For the whole of their history.

Any body of thought which uses such a catchall concept in which to spirit away what doesn’t fit with its own conceptions, isn’t a properly functioning model of reality. It can’t be, because it already presumes its own truth.

The original four sections of the essay from 1991-2 survive here, though they have been revised and re-englished (‘Synoikismos’ first appeared in Understanding Ancient Thought in 2017). They are ‘Camera Obscura’, ’Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis’, ‘Kingship in Ancient Assyria’, and ‘Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander’. The subtitle of the essay,‘Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History’, was chosen because of the importance of the teleological perspective in antiquity, and particularly in Greece, and the fact that our principal source of detailed discussion of the concept is Aristotle. Aristotle did not however invent the concept (I have heard a specialist in both Greece and Aristotle rather foolishly suggest that he did).

What I was doing with the three sections which followed on from the opening criticism of the historicist approach, was showing how (firstly) the evidence for the development of the Athenian polis suggests a background of philosophical and religious ideas out of which the practicalities of the polis were woven; (secondly) how the extensive evidence we have for the religious and moral background to Assyrian Kingship shows that the conception of what the king represented was essentially teleologically understood, some three centuries before Aristotle, and shaped by a body of religious ideas which are available to us in Assyrian records. it explores the Assyrian emphasis on excellence and perfection, which anticipates ideas later discussed by Aristotle; (thirdly) how the principle source for the life of Alexander (Arrian’s Anabasis) constructs its argument according to a teleological frame, in which the principle protagonists represent different points of view about whether or not a man can become a god in his lifetime. This was not merely an artistic conceit, since the argument illuminates the desperate contradiction which underlies the idea of deification of the living if Aristotle’s teleological interpretation of divinity is correct (argued in the Nicomachean Ethics), which is that the gods, who are at the apex of the creation, can only contemplate, and are utterly incapable of action.

All the rest of the chapters (parts two and three) are additional, and were written between 2003 and 2020.

‘The Greek Ontological Model in the 1^st Millennium B.C.E.’ dates from 2004, and suggests that Plato was not constructing his philosophy according to a programme of research of his own, but was working within something like an agreed and traditional ontology, connected to ideas of the divine, which is discussed. Understanding this allows us to make sense of a number of earlier philosophical writings which are often fragmentary.

‘Post-Enlightenment Plato and That which Cannot Move’ explores this argument in terms of the actual texts of the dialogues. The world view which emerges is clearly paradoxical, and Plato and his predecessors cannot be understood unless the paradoxicality of his outlook is recognised and embraced. The paradoxical nature of reality is what he wished to convey. From the enlightenment onwards, there has been a concerted effort not to see this. Written in 2016.

‘Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire’ is a discussion of the Mesopotamian input into the development of philosophy in Greece from the late eighth to the mid-sixth seventh centuries B.C.E. The Assyrians captured Athens (according to Abydenus, who was a pupil of Aristotle), and they were there long enough to build a temple, and cast statues of the gods in bronze. Originally written in 2004, and now updated.

‘The Threshold in Ancient Assyria’ looks at the carpet style designs used to decorate the thresholds and entrances to Assyrian royal palaces, with their designs of alternating lotuses, open and closed. Is this just decorative design, or do they tell us something about how the Assyrians conceived of the transition between one state and another? Also written in 2004.

‘Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East’ explores the relationship between iconography in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the transcendentalist patterns of thought which lie behind the deliberate breaking of symmetries. Written in 2018.

Part Three begins with ‘The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth’, This short chapter explores the meaning of one of the most puzzling passages in the New Testament, and shows that it has its origin in a profound philosophical idea, related to the ‘holiness code’ found in Leviticus, though it is now used to justify temporal power. Written in 2019.

The three chapters which follow concern what we can know of intellectual life in the British Neolithic and early Bronze Age. I was essentially conducting a dialogue with both myself and the evidence while writing these, so they represent research in progress. Consequently there is substantial repetition of things discussed along the way. I’ve left the texts as they are, since they show how I got to the position outlined in the third chapter.

‘Being and Eternity in the Neolithic’ explores some aspects of the late British Neolithic which suggest the presence of a transcendentalist view of reality. Written in 2017.

‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ is an extensive chapter, which builds on the idea that the builders of the megaliths had a transcendentalist and essentially proto-pythagorean outlook on the nature of reality, and that this outlook shaped their cultural production. Pythagoras reputedly spent 22 years studying in Egypt, and much of what we term as ‘pythagorean’ is therefore likely to be a great deal older. This chapter examines the ancient fit of the ideas which are associated with Pythagoras. Written in December 2017.

‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’ explores the Neolithic and Bronze Age interest in whole numbers, mathematics, geometry, the idea of the infinite, and of infinite series. The chapter concludes that the measure of the megalithic yard expresses the ancient perception that the infinite and the finite are necessarily conjoined. Written in February 2020.

‘What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died’ is an extract from a letter written to a specialist in ancient astronomy written in early 2019, in response to questions about how the decline in the interest of astronomy and related mythology happened, as Christianity took hold. Written in 2019.

‘Marxism and Historicism’ discusses the fact that the Marxist understanding of reality is a deliberate inversion of Neoplatonist understanding, as mediated through Hegel’s use of the writings of Proclus, who was last head of the Athenian Academy. Written in 2015,

All of these chapters, including the two on Marxist ideas in the study of history, illustrate the important role played by philosophical ideas and abstractions in the cultural production of a number of civilizations. These ideas arise ultimately from conjecture about the nature of eternity, and questions relating to the divine – what it is, and what it means for mortals. The Greek word for these puzzles was ‘aporia’. What I am suggesting in these chapters is that such puzzles played a significant role in the development of thought about the nature of the divine, as well as about the nature and importance of liturgy, art, and ritual practice, and the development of many other details which we associate with the rise of civilization.

Thomas Yaeger, May 10 – September 20, 2019. Updated May 5, 2020.

Sunday, 5 May 2019

Echoes of Eternity

Much of the cultural production of the ancient world, east and west, was based on the idea of reflecting aspects of the divine in human life and thought. Many social structures and institutions were based on this approach. The model for these things was was astronomy and the heavens, and the heavens were conceived of as a moving image of eternity, and eternity was understood to be coterminous with the Divine. Since it moved, it contained life and thought, and repaid the attention of man. We still live, work and think inside what is a scarcely changed neolithic temple, which is the sky.

The final word count is around 56 thousand words. Two of the chapters - 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E', and 'Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain', are quite large pieces of work (6k and 10k words respectively). The introduction and a chapter each from the three parts of the book are available via the list below.

The chapter list:

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

Part One

Camera Obscura: Marx, Aristotle & Ptolemy

Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis

Kingship in Ancient Assyria

Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander

Part Two

The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move

Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire

The Threshold in Ancient Assyria

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East

Part Three

The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth

Being and Eternity in the Neolithic

Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain
The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

Marx and Historicism

Publication date, June 30, 2020.

TY, May 5, 2019. Details updated May 27, July 5, and September 6 and 17, October 1, November 26, December 12, 2019, May 5 2020, and June 14 2020.. Updated October 10.

Monday, 21 November 2016

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.

Friday, 21 October 2016

A Berlin Conversation (Part One)

An extract from the book Destroy Nineveh! Wiping Out the Past (forthcoming). The conversations in the book concern how we often contribute to the destruction of the past through the means by which we try to make sense of it. The conversations are set between 2001 and 2016, in and around Berlin. The book is in six parts, and three extracts are available via this blog.

TY, October 21 2016.

***

A seminar room at Humboldt University in Berlin, less than ten days after the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001. The room is one of those reconstructed after the immense damage to the fabric of the university, during WW2. To reach it you have to go up the main stairs from the ground floor in the main building, and pass a quotation on history by Karl Marx, in letters of gold incised in black marble, who was a student of the university. Since for most of the post WW2 period, the university was in East Berlin, the rebuilding of the university was controlled by the communist party – hence the prominence of the Marx quotation. The quotation is ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’

Round the seminar table are around eight students, in addition to Dr. Sadiq Kishati, and Dr. Ralf Ganz. Dr Kishati is chairing a discussion, which should have been exclusively concerned with the nature of history, historical inquiry, the interpretation of evidence, and the models and paradigms in which history can be understood. However the event of September eleventh has naturally intruded on the thoughts and discussion of the participants.

Dr Kishati asked if those around the table had heard about the remark about the twin towers, made by the avant-garde musician KarlHeinz Stockhausen. Some had, some had not. So Kishati repeated Stockhausen’s statement, which was to the effect that the assault on the twin towers was one of the greatest works of art ever made. ‘Naturally this has caused uproar, since the ‘work of art’ involved the death of thousands of people’. ‘It sounds an incredibly insensitive and inappropriate things for anyone to say, especially by an established artist, as Stockhausen is’ was the response from the far end of the table. Another student said ‘but then, he thinks he comes from a planet revolving around the star Sirius’. There was laughter in the room.

Dr Kishati waited for the laughter to subside. ‘So he says,’ was his response. ‘But I wonder what you think he meant by the remark, however ill-judged it might have been to say it so close to the event?’ There was a short pause, and then a graduate student named Wolf Holliger began to speak. “It was a deliberate attack on something which cannot be directly attacked by a subversive organisation. Not in purely military terms. The World Trade Center buildings are emblematic of global capitalism. You can’t easily attack the idea of global capitalism, but you can attack something which symbolises it’. Kishati responded, saying, ‘so you think Stockhausen meant by describing the assault as a work of art, that it was a symbolic attack?’

Holliger responded in the affirmative. ‘And that makes it a piece of art – in Stockhausen’s mind at least, since art works with symbols, symbolic constructions, and symbolic acts. Plus the fact that it was captured on many cameras, meaning that the event has been represented in terms of images.’ ‘Indeed’, said Kishati. ‘And images which will haunt our imaginations.’ Kishati paused for a moment, and Doctor Ganz took the moment to remark that ‘the attack was clearly conceived in terms of spectacle, in a place occupied by millions of people who would see and experience the attack. It wasn’t about removing the function of the World Trade Center in global capitalism, but about showing that someone really hated either capitalism, or the US, which is the engine of global capitalism. Which means that since the function of the attack was symbolic, rather than representing a real and damaging attack on global capitalism, it might be considered as a piece of art.’

‘Ok’ said Dr Kishati, ‘We’ll take that as our starting point for today’s discussion. Mainly because the event can be understood as a representation of something beyond the act itself. Which is an aspect of the meaning of history. I think we have just witnessed something of immense historical importance, not just for the United States, not just for global capitalism, the people of the world, but, in the long-term at least, also for the perpetrators.‘

Kishati reached into a folder sitting on the table slightly to his left, and took out two or three sheets of papers. ‘We might begin be asking ourselves what our understanding of history is, given that there is an element of spectacle involved in it. Does anyone want to attempt a definition?’ He looked around the table, and saw no takers. Then after a few seconds, another graduate student, named Jan Schmollen, shifted in his chair, and began to speak. ‘Well we know it is about ordering information. It is also about asking questions, in consequence of the need to order information’

Kishati smiled. ‘That’s quite correct. Historical writing as we understand it began with the Greeks, and their word for it was ‘historia’, and it always implied both ordering and questioning patterns of information. Other earlier cultures wrote about events also, but it isn’t always clear the basis on which they are recording events. They are almost exclusively official and royal accounts of the actions and deeds of kings. However accounts written at different periods of a reign might relate past events in quite different ways, which is difficult for us to understand. The point does not seem to have been consistency, and what they understood to be to be true is often unknown to us.’

‘One Egyptian pharaoh – or rather his scribes - wrote about a campaign in Syria in which he fought a great battle against the Hittites. He described it as a victory. This was the first contemporary account of the event to come out of the ground when scientific excavation had begun. Unfortunately for the pharaoh, eventually a Hittite account of the same battle emerged from an excavation, and related things differently, suggesting that the Egyptian king was lucky to escape with his life. It would be easy to assume that there was a heavy element of propaganda in the Pharaoh’s account of the battle, and quite possibly also in the Hittite account. At this distance it is hard to say what the difference in the accounts means. But they are quite different, so whatever the objective was in writing about the battle, it wasn’t about what we might imagine to be an objective account. They may have had no such concept.’

Kishati paused, and adjusted his spectacles on his nose. ‘However, the origin of historical writing might have been quite similar. The word ‘historia’ joins together a number of ideas which we do not automatically connect in modern times. Such as the importance of blood, which is often referred to in antiquity. By this I mean the importance of the family and family connections. This concept was often extended to social groups such as the gens, the clan, or the tribe. It was an important idea in Greece, in ancient Rome, and also in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. The beginnings of historia therefore can be understood in terms of a response to the importance of social ordering which was understood in terms of blood relations.’

‘Ancient times were often violent times. There could be internecine warfare, war between tribes, or between groups of tribes. It could be war against an alliance, or a war to make an alliance possible; a war for resources, for trade, a war to enforce justice and rights, or to establish or reinforce power and prestige. Any number of things in fact. Often there would be several grievances wrapped together. And almost always the gods were understood to be involved in the struggle, as we can see strikingly illustrated in Homer’s Iliad. I will return to this aspect of what history is a little later.’

‘The point I’m making is that change was often an important aspect of life in antiquity. Change could happen because of the nature of personal relationships. Marriages, dynastic relationships, personal and tribal enmities, changes in climate, bad harvests, changes in regional power, the demand for tribute, and so on.’

Kishati paused for a few seconds. ‘Change needs to be explained, because it happened all around, and often it was an unpredictable phenomenon. The same is true today, but we use a different set of models and approaches in order to explain things which happen. We think our modes of explanation are generally more powerful and accurate than those in use in the ancient world, and in fact we use our tools retrospectively to understand what was going on in antiquity.’

‘We wouldn’t for example argue that if something bad happened in antiquity, it was because the gods were displeased for some reason. We wouldn’t look for some fault in ritual observance, nor would we look at a list of omens for a clue as to the intentions of the divine, as the Romans did. We wouldn’t look at the entrails of a sacrificial animal in order to gain an insight into the cause of the ill-fortune.’

‘Not only that, we would not look seriously at their contemporary understanding of the event, or their attempts to clarify and rectify the problem. All these things are simply nonsense, and so they are studiously disregarded by us. We look at the event and its context, and look for the kinds of causes which we expect to be operable in the modern world, and interpret accordingly. We look for the material, political and social causes which lie beneath most if not all public events.’

‘In doing so, we have effectively removed a key concept from consideration in the ancient world, which they understood to be intimately involved in change, and which they considered to be one of the causal factors of great importance to the conduct of human life.’

‘We have removed the divine. And we have removed the gods. That is an important step in making events, and the human story in antiquity, intelligible to us. But it means that we are not using the materials available to us to analyse the ancient world in terms which they themselves would have understood. They would have some grasp of what sense we make of their world, since essentially what we do is analyse the past in terms of Aristotle’s concept of the efficient cause, which is what we are doing when we explain things in terms of a materialist conception of the world. But they would have thought of this as a very limited mode of explanation, which is why they employed another three principle causal mechanisms. These other causal mechanisms are the formal, the material, and the final causes.’

‘There is no need to discuss the other causal mechanisms in any detail, at least not at the moment. We think we do not employ them, though we do. We simply do not single them out as causal mechanisms. It is important however to be clear that, though there is a material cause available to Aristotle, that is not the same thing as what we now understand as part of the materialist conception of the world. When we look at antiquity in terms of that conception, we are looking mainly at the efficient and physical cause of change. That is what we think lies beneath all change, though it may not be obvious to us unless we explore the evidence in detail.’

‘The upshot of the materialist conception of the world can be understood in different ways. One of these is the implicit assertion that everyone in antiquity was wrong as far as their understanding of the true forces acting in their world is concerned. That’s quite an assertion. We aren’t saying that they understood some aspects of their world, but hadn’t yet found their way to a modern interpretation of their reality. We are saying that they were for the most part plain wrong, and about most things. A world populated by gods, demons and spirits, replete with magic and ritual, and the worship of divine images, the sacrifice of animals, and the ritual examination of the entrails of sheep and other animals, in order to understand the will and intention of the gods, is a world of nonsense. And as it is nonsense to us, it was nonsense then too, though, for whatever reasons, they failed to understand this.’

Ralf Ganz looked over to Kishati, and said: ‘I think you are talking about false consciousness’.Kishati looked across the table, and smiled. ‘I am indeed talking about false consciousness. Which is one of the explanatory mechanisms invoked by the creator of the materialist conception of the world, Karl Marx, to explain how it is that we find so many different modes of understanding among the human population. Most of which are nonsense, as we know.’

‘The idea of course is that whatever people actually believe about their world, they are actually functioning within an array of societal and physical forces which we understand in terms of materialism. That is Marx’s great advance, and his legacy to the modern world.’

Ganz looked over again, and began to speak. ‘That insight did not arrive all of a piece, and it is perhaps worth spending a few minutes about its origin’. Kishati signalled that he was happy to hand over to Ganz.

‘Most of you at this university will know that Marx’s doctoral dissertation was on the Greek philosopher Democritus, who was the inventor of an ancient form of materialism, which sought to understand reality in terms of the interplay of small objects which he called atoms. So we got a material conception of the world, and the very beginnings of atomic theory from the same person. So Marx was interested in materialism from his days as a student.’

‘The actual route by which we got Marxist theory is actually quite complicated, and involves an engagement with a body of ideas apparently wholly at odds with a materialist understanding of the mechanics of change in the world. The explanation for this may be that since Marx was looking, not just at the mechanics of change in the world, but wanted to create a doctrine in which man could be the principal agent of change, rather than an intellectual framework which merely provided an explanation of change.‘

‘Firstly, it is important to know that Democritus did not necessarily make a radical break with other Greek ideas about the world in creating his materialist theory. It is perfectly possible to understand it within a Parmenidean picture of the world, in which only one thing is ultimately real, and that one thing does not change, and is wholly transcendent of physical reality. But the physical world is filled with a near infinity of things, and Parmenides did not deny the evidence of our senses, except to say that the world of the many is a species of illusion.’

‘We do not dwell on that way of looking at things however, and prefer to understand the world in terms of an uncritical acceptance of the existence and reality of matter, and the physical forces which are associated with it. That is the principal difference between materialism in antiquity, and modern materialism.’