Plato and Cosmic Mind

I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying. 

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To: [as appropriate]

Dear [as appropriate]

For the past two hundred years or so, works exploring the earlier history of ideas in Europe and the Near east, have been happy to settle on a consensus. This consensus is that the articulate discussion of the idea of Being began with the Greeks – particularly in the writings of Plato. There are earlier references to Being, in the Bible and elsewhere, but these references are deemed not to be the product of the kind of intellectual clarity which Plato and the Academy brought to discussion of the subject. This earlier notion of Being is treated as the focus of belief and of worship, rather than as an articulate concept.

While this allows the Greeks to retain their status as the originators of philosophy, and the religions which grew up in the Near east to retain faith as their (modern) focus, the foundation of this distinction is false.

Recent study of the pattern of religious practice in ancient Rome, and also in Assyria and Babylonia, shows that beyond a certain point, religion no longer resembles what we in the modern world understand to be religious. The work of the late historian Simon Price has shown that observance and ritual was of key importance in Roman religion, whereas belief in the gods was not. Similarly in Mesopotamia, belief in the gods was not a requirement in society, but the observance of ritual was important. Further, it is a commonplace among specialists in Mesopotamian civilization that the gods and their respective temples were often referenced in documents by numbers rather than by name.

The principal importance of observance and ritual in these and other cultures does not mean that there is no intellectual model standing behind observance and ritual. But it is not a model which depends on the existence of belief.

The importance of observance and ritual in the ancient world can be shown to follow from an articulate understanding of the idea of Being. An understanding which treats Being as a conjecture rather than any kind of certain knowledge.

My book is a study of the idea of Being, which extends the history of the idea into the middle of the second millennium BC, and shows that the articulate understanding of the concept was present in Mesopotamia as far back as the 14^th century BC.

The book discusses those aspects of Being which underpin observation and ritual. It identifies key texts in both pre-classical Greece and Mesopotamia which illustrate this concern with the aspects of Being. It also pursues the parallel between the restricted properties of Being which are the focus of the medieval Kabbalah and the sets of properties which were deemed to be appropriate to describe the head of the Babylonian pantheon.

The final part of the book explores the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and is an extended discussion of a 1993 paper by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola. This paper opened up the possibility that the sacred tree stood for the articulate concept of Being, and that the articulation of the idea was identical in most respects with the model of Being represented by the Kabbalah. The symbol of the tree is well known, and it can be traced in palace reliefs to the 14^th century BC, thus establishing an upper date for the concept of Being.

The book also reviews the views of Plato, who supplies us with some very old discussion about the nature of reality. There is a long-standing problem for scholars with Plato, in that he could not provide a logical argument for the reality of commerce between the world of Being, and the world of appearance. At least not in terms of likely explanation. But then he was clear that in speaking of the divine, that was not possible. At the upper end of the divided line (in the Republic), only conjecture is possible. So the discussion of the apparent world as a copy of the divine world is no more than a likely story. The real argument for the reality of commerce is not directly discussed. 

However it emerges from an analysis of the development of the modern ontological argument, which, by the time it is being discussed by Berkeley and Kant, results in the conclusion objective reality is an illusion (something Plato was insistent about). Berkeley’s solution to the question of the persistence of appearance beyond our perception, is that appearance is perceived by cosmic mind. Our perceptions are part of the perception of the cosmic mind.

The suggestion is made that this is the solution to the question of commerce with the divine (the transcendental) left unresolved by Plato. There is no copy of the divine world. All appearance represents slices through the nature of divinity. About which stories can be told.

The commerce with the divine world is achieved through those things which are common to the divine world and the world of appearance. These are (what we might call) transcendental intersubjectivities, which have already been identified as the property sets of Being, which are in common in both worlds.

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The classicist Lewis Campbell made much the same suggestion in a footnote to his translation of Plato's Sophist in the 1860s. He was right. It appears however that, around 150 years later, many classicists would still rather not know what Plato was talking about. 

The Destruction of Ancient Astronomy

There is a tide in the affairs of men./Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/
Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./
On such a full sea are we now afloat,/And we must take the current when it serves,/
Or lose our ventures./ (Brutus to Cassius, in Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224)

Of course that didn’t work out well in the end, since they chose to fight Octavian at Philippi, and lost. The point is however that everything has a tendency to follow an arc through time, and it is very difficult to preserve an insight or a way of thinking over an extended period. Or an empire. Or anything at all.  And sometimes the tide is in favour of your opponents.

We can look at what happened as a disaster of sorts. But it is also something of a miracle that so much survives, in some shape or form. The astronomy was still intact in the civilizations of South America when the Spanish arrived, followed by the missionaries, and there is still information circulating in the populations, as the writer and anthropologist William Sullivan found out (The Secret of the Incas). Despite the efforts of the Spanish priests to root it out. 

Why did the Christians take against astronomy and astronomical lore? There are two ways in which to look at this question. 

The sky, imagined as a moving image of god, or eternity, is one, and what it is. This seems to have been a deeply rooted idea from time immemorial, and it surfaces in the writing of Plato, and in the later Platonists. The oneness of the image is perhaps the main reason for its identification as an image of god. Another is that it was understood to be forever beyond our reach. But in addition, it contains other images, some of which were identified and described as gods. Not all of them were anthropomorphic deities, but by virtue of their presence in the heavens, all of them had a kind of divine status.

So, the heaven represents what is one and divine, and at the same time contains a plethora of gods. For the Christians, and not just the early ones, that must have been a disturbing thing to contemplate.

Polytheism is one of the most difficult things for human beings (in the modern west) to deal with, both within academia, and in the population at large. Historians and theologians argue that polytheism arose before monotheism, and that it represents an earlier and more barbarous form of religion. And yet, the idea that they both have their reality somewhere in a moving image of God is there in the sky above us.

Scholars will argue that polytheism shows that early man was not thinking of the divine in terms of a single overarching abstraction, which could be imagined to be responsible for the creation, for existence, for generation, etc. And yet, if the myths concerning the gods who belong to a polytheistic pantheon are explored, we find evidence of abstract thought, ideas of creation, the generation and ordering of earthly reality, etc. Instead, it will be argued that the polytheistic gods are representations of things which were important in human society, and which needed to be placated. Therefore they can be interpreted as personifications of natural forces (the existence of storm gods is usually regarded as a clincher), or representations of tribal gods or totems, later integrated into a pantheon which reflects the society built up from earlier and looser groupings.

None of that is impossible, and in many cases, that might be the best explanation. But it is a lazy way to look at intellectual and social history, when there is in existence clear evidence that monotheistic and polytheistic patterns of thought once both belonged to the same model of reality.

One of the most ancient of questions is ‘why are there many, if there is one?’ Thousands of years of theological and philosophical thought were shaped by that question. Considering that the one (or Being itself) is the only truly real thing, does not force us to deny the existence of multiplicity. But it does create a problem, in that it is not easy to find the explanation for multiplicity. One of the ancient arguments was that since only the one was truly real, the world of physical reality was an illusion – a set of subjective perceptions of Being which stand between us and an understanding of Being itself. 

This multiplicity also can be interpreted as the product of the divine’s understanding of itself. In which case, we are part of the working out of what the divine is. Mythology and polytheistic conceptions can be understood as the articulation of that working out.

The point here is that the idea of many gods is deeply disturbing to many human beings, and not just for doctrinal reasons. It is disturbing because there is a deep seated, rarely formulated, and mostly unconscious conception in us that reality (however that is understood) must be itself, and itself alone. The corollary of that is that multiplicity enshrines falsehood and error. Add to that the general view that we are getting smarter over time (the myth of progress, which J.B. Bury wrote about in the twenties) and that we left error behind when (in the west at least) we embraced monotheism instead of polytheism (the concept of the trinity notwithstanding).

This body of ideas spills out into political and social notions (not always in a bad way – many socio-political creations in antiquity owed their origin to discussions of the nature of the divine, and its manifestation in physical reality. The unification of the poleis in Attica is a case in point – the administrative, political and liturgical functions of the state were expressly modelled on the natural divisions of the year).

The political and theological development of the Hebrew kingdoms in the first half of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. is mostly unknown to us, since the texts were redacted in the 5^th century B.C.E., and reflect the views of the winners of the hegemonic struggle. But we can tell from the later history the general outline of the trajectory of change. Early on there seems to have been a considerable amount of freedom of religious worship in the Hebrew kingdoms (these were also modelled on the natural divisions of the year) until they came into severe conflict with Assyria. After that political and religious power became ever more concentrated in Jerusalem. One god, one power, one place of religious observance, one source of the law, etc.

Christianity, gifted to us partly as the consequence of a similar concentration of power in ancient Rome (another story), took over the idea of a single omniscient god, who was also able to become flesh and blood and walk on the earth (and on water too, which image reflects Babylonian iconography). All the other gods became, in the end, falsehoods, demons, devils, and in the pages of Tertullian, a species of fornication, which he reckoned to be the principal nature of sin, which embraced all others.

Hence the antipathy to astronomy, and the gods from cultures who foolishly embraced a multiplicity of them. Despite the fact that, the Christian scriptures, as well as the Hebrew ones, are full of astronomical and mythological imagery, and characters who were once understood to have their essential reality in the sky. 

The Double Nature of Reality

One chapter in The Sacred History of Being is particularly difficult to understand as presented. It is the way it is because it concerns an argument by Plato concerning the nature of reality, and whether or not divine things can have a presence in the world. It also concerns how such a presence should be understood. The chapter is an assemblage of Platonic argument,  scattered through a number of dialogues. I'm not aware of any other attempt to reconstruct Plato's discussion of the nature of reality, so the job needed to be done. 

The chapter can be understood as a reconstruction of how Plato might have discussed the nature of reality with those of his students deemed to have the ability to grasp the esoteric understanding of Being. It is a reconstruction based on references in his writings, which documents in detail the sources I used.  This documentation allows the argument to be discussed critically by those who have not been on the same path as I have over the past twenty years or so. 

Though the chapter is a difficult read, it is not that difficult to explain. In conversation with a reader recently, I provided a short explanation of the nature of the chapter, and its significance for the overall argument of The Sacred History of Being. It concerns the belief that divinity could be present in inanimate objects, and whether reality itself is necessarily one. And the consequences which necessarily follow from such discussion. 

I wrote:

The chapter which explores Plato's theory of Being is the most difficult chapter in the whole book, without question. But it is crucial to an understanding of the overall thesis. I recommend skipping forward to read the postscript, and the chapter on Pythagoras and Totality, which explain  something of the context and significance of Plato's argument.

I can however tell you what the significance of Plato's argument is, once all the pieces are put together (which is what I did in that chapter). One of the central mysteries of the ancient world is how and why did they believe that inanimate objects could be considered to be divine? Modern anthropologists are forced to argue that they believed this because of intellectual error. The chapter shows that in fact the belief that an inanimate statue could house the divine was based on a logical argument, which Plato references at various points in his canon (most crucially in The Sophist). The logical conclusion of the argument is simply that the world in which we live has a double nature. The world is a plenum which presents to us a partial picture of reality (because we are finite creatures and not infinite). The real world (the fulness, or the plenum) cannot move without compromising its nature. So reality is not subject to change. There cannot be a finite world and an infinite one, which would also compromise the nature of the plenum.

The conclusion which must be drawn, though not overtly and clearly expressed by Plato, is that on purely logical grounds, the finite world is an illusion, and a representation of the unmoving plenum which appears to contain movement. That is its double nature. It is both infinite and finite at the same time.

This is the reason why it was possible to understand an unmoving statue as a god: because it is both infinite and finite at the same time.

The overall argument of the book is to this effect - hence the examination of Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues toward the end of the book.

So the ancient belief in the divinity of statues was not the result of careless thought or a primitive stupidity, but the result of careful argument about the nature of reality itself, in both Greece and Assyria, and elsewhere. This places philosophical thought (dialectical argument) at the root of religious cult, rather than a separate and unrelated discussion of abstract questions, with no bearing on thought concerning the gods.

I hope this helps with your understanding of the argument.

Best regards,

Thomas 

[Post title changed to 'Plato's theory of Being',  January 2, 2018. Changed again, this time to 'The Double Nature of Reality', January 17, 2020.]

A Berlin Conversation (Part Two)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadiq: Do words always mean the same thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ralf: I understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadiq: I do.

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

Sadiq: In essence, yes.

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

 Sadiq:  Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sameness and Difference in Plato

Part of The Sacred History of Being is devoted to a substantial discussion of the Ontological Argument. This may seem to be a rather odd inclusion in a book which is essentially about the idea of the plenum, and the presence of that idea in ancient history, at least as far back as the 14^th century before the common era. The reason the discussion is there is because philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages. As a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, cannot deal credibly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature. The ontological argument, as formulated from the Middle Ages onwards, contains within itself the essence of the problem. Which is why I subjected it to a critical examination.

Essentially philosophy, as a craft and a discipline, is broken in the modern world. It spends a lot of time running around in circles, chasing its own tail, and is unable to resolve important questions. Philosophy is of course, by its very nature, difficult to do well, since it concerns itself with questions which are fundamental to our understanding of both ourselves and the world. However some of the difficulties encountered by philosophers over the past thousand years or so are problems with the presumptions of philosophy itself, not the complexity of the materials with which it works.

A striking feature of Plato’s discussion of the divine is his equation of the divine (ho Theos) with reality itself. He also speaks of the divine in the singular, within the context of a polytheistic culture. Why does he do this?

The answer is that he understood the idea that behind the world of appearance was an undifferentiated plenum. Unlike many modern philosophers, who take physical existence as a given, and do not ask fundamental questions about what physical existence is, and how it came to be, the question of how it came to be was something which was referenced not just in Plato’s Timaeus, which overtly addresses the question, but was a concern which surfaces in his other dialogues. The nature of the creation therefore was understood to have a bearing on many other questions which the philosopher ought to consider.

A key part of the concept of the plenum is that it represents our human understanding of how the world must have been before anything came to have physical existence. Modern cosmological models of the creation of the universe (such as they are), assume that there was some kind of creation ex nihilo, though the process is necessarily mysterious when looked at from the point of view of physics. The major problem with the idea of a physical creation, is that there is no physics before the creation, no laws of nature, no space, no extension, and no time. There is a complete absence of the principal characteristics of the physical world that we are familiar with. So there is nothing for a physicist to grapple with. Hence most discussion of the creation concerns itself with the hypothetical first microseconds after all these characteristics are imagined to magically and mysteriously appear.

Yet there is no absence at the root of the creation. To say that there is such an absence, is to presume the existence of a presence with which absence can be contradistinguished. There is nothing at all that we can define as an absence. Whatever it is, it transcends the category, ‘absence’. It is neither one thing, or its opposite. It simply is what it is.

How does recognising the transcendent nature of the underlying plenum change the way we must argue about the creation? The definition of the plenum is that, since it is something which cannot be understood as a presence or an absence, it represents instead the potential for such differentiation; in that sense it can be understood as a fullness of what it itself is. It is also the one thing which is truly real, in that it is itself, and does not change its nature. It is beyond time, space and extension. It is eternal, and eternally itself.

How then is the generation of physical reality, with its laws and properties, to be explained? Plato sometimes uses different terminology to refer to the same ideas in his dialogues, which has made some of his meaning opaque, but he does use the idea of the same and the different in connection with the creation of time, using the image of the celestial equator and the ecliptic. According to this image, time began when the two circles were set at an angle to each other.  

In referring to the same and the different, Plato is alluding to what we understand as the Pythagorean notion of the undefined dyad. If reality (the plenum) is one, and the one by itself alone, then, if more than one of anything is to have some kind of existence, the plenum must come to some kind of relationship with itself. So, the plenum (the same) must in some way stand in relation to itself as the different.

This of course is an abstract notion. The plenum is eternally itself, and unchanging. It is also one. If there is to be more than one, or a multiplicity of anything, this can only be in the form of a representation within the nature of the plenum. The representation is not truly real, and any movement within that representation is also not truly real.

This is the origin of the widespread notion in antiquity that the world is illusion, or Maya. The fact that aspects of this illusion can have fatal consequences to individuals, if a rock falls off a mountain, or if people are swept away by a flood, does not undermine the notion that the physical world is illusion, in comparison with the reality of the underlying plenum. Neither does the fact that the physical world is structured according to strict rules, and also functions according to strict rules of what is and is not possible.