An interview with Thomas Yaeger

As published at Smashwords, August 24, 2017. It is an updated version of the one which was uploaded in November 2015.


What are you working on next?


I've just finished 'Understanding Ancient Thought' (published August 20, 2017), which is intended as a companion of sorts to 'The Sacred History of Being' (published in 2015). It is much more discursive in style, and (I think) an easier read. I'm now working on a volume which looks at the same body of ideas, but within a later time frame. It is an interesting story of survival: all the way through the neoplatonists and up to the Italian renaissance. And not much written about since then. It should be available around summer 2018.

What is the story behind your first book?


There are two stories about it. The argument of 'The Sacred History of Being' runs counter to much modern speculation about the origins of philosophy. This isn't down to me being contrarian and vexatious for the sake of it, but because when you look closely at the evidence, the consensus model doesn't hang together properly. The book is both an analysis of what is wrong with our agreed picture of the origins of philosophy, and a preliminary attempt at a reconstruction of a history of the subject which is more likely, and which makes more sense of the evidence.

The second story is how I came to write the book. It started from very little things: I'd been interested in philosophy for many years, and was familiar with Plato and Aristotle, the Sophists, and Greek philosophy in general, I found in a book on Ancient Egyptian literature by the eminent German Egyptologist Adolf Erman, a translation of Akhenaten's Hymn to the Aten, which invoked the idea of completion. I was familiar with that idea from Aristotle, where the concept is a key part of his understanding of how the world is put together. But Aristotle belongs to the 4th century B.C.E. Akhenaten belongs to the *14th century* B.C.E. That's a thousand years or so of difference. How could this be?

That was the start of the project, though I had no idea at the time that I was already in motion, and no clue as to where the project would take me. I had no map. I ended up studying ancient history in London, in order to have a map. There is a story to be told about that. I've addressed part of that story already on my blog and in the course of the book, but a full account of the twists and turns on the way to the writing of The Sacred History of Being might be useful to other researchers who find themselves starting on something completely new.

Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?


I grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's a place which has had its fair share of writers. R.L. Stevenson came from Edinburgh, and wrote about dual or conflicted personality more than once, and the city itself is a bit like that. It has a dark side. So what you see often isn't the whole of what is there. How complicated things can turn out to be when you start to unpick them! I learned that while living in Edinburgh.

What motivated you to become an indie author?


I wanted to cut out a number of filters that usually stand between writers and the public. I worked as a magazine editor for five years, and also contributed articles to a number of other magazines, So I know the importance of copy-editing. But I wanted to avoid editorial compromise with the structure and focus of the book I was in the process of writing. Taking the indie route gave me that level of control.

What is the greatest joy of writing for you?


Research. And figuring things out. A lot of things emerge from the act of writing up research. As D'Arcy Thompson pointed out, when you assemble pieces of information, they will tell stories about each other. So you find out things that you didn't know were there.

Who are your favorite authors?


In fiction: George Orwell; Hermann Hesse; Robert Graves; Lewis Carroll; and Frederik Pohl.
In non-fiction Michael Harrison (author of 'Fire from Heaven'.), partly for his style of writing, Thomas Kuhn (the Structure of Scientific Revolutions); Jean Seznec; Alan Watts; Cicero; and Carl Jung (particularly for his book on 'The Nature of the Psyche'). 

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When did you first start writing?


I started to create small comics when I was at primary school. At secondary school as part of a project I wrote a thirty page essay about Rembrandt, and later for my own interest I wrote a gazetteer of the solar system, which was about fifty pages long. I remember also working with someone at school on a paper about statues in Edinburgh, which was fun to research. We found out how good the Central Public Library was as a resource for all things Edinburgh. There was other stuff too.

Describe your desk


It depends on what I'm doing at the time. The basic kit is a laptop, printer, a jar of pens and pencils, and a radio/cd player. It is a gatefold table, and if I'm consulting a lot of books I will fold it out to accommodate them. In the winter there will be a lamp next to my desk.

What inspires you to get out of bed each day?


Coffee.

When you're not writing, how do you spend your time?


Listening to music or watching movies, particularly film noir from the 40s and 50s. Cooking is a pleasure. Food and movies with friends

.Published 2017-08-24.

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology

'Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia' - Marc Van De Mieroop. Princeton University Press, October 2015. 

Marc Van De Mieroop’s book is an exploration of how the Babylonians understood and processed their reality in the 1^st and 2^nd millennia BCE, long before the Greeks developed the apparatus of logical thought which we now associate with philosophy in the 5^th century BCE.  Van De Mieroop chooses to call the Babylonian understanding of reality, which he describes in detail, ‘philosophy’. However what he is describing is, as he describes it, so far removed from what is understood in the west as philosophy, that it may be perplexing for the reader looking for the wider context of the development of the discipline in antiquity. It does not take Greek philosophy as its starting point, which might have seemed to be the obvious starting point. Instead, it proceeds with a phenomenological analysis of a variety of scribal processes, found in legal, omen and literary texts. The subtitle of the book is ‘The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia’, so it will seem to someone picking up the book that we must be in cultural and intellectual territory familiar to us. We are not.

The book is divided into five parts and nine chapters. The first part is called ‘An Essay in Babylonian Epistemology’ and has one chapter, ‘At the Time of Creation’. This draws on the Enuma Elish (when on high), which is the liturgy of the Babylonian New Year Festival. Using this document, Van De Mieroop establishes his starting point, and the approach to the subject which he is going to take. Which is to argue that for the Babylonian scholar the text (and the process by which texts were created) was primary.

Part II, ‘The Order of Things’ (Les Mots et les Choses) has two chapters – the first gives a short history of the importance of the word lists in Babylonia; the second (chapter 3) is called ‘Constructing Reality’.

Part III ‘The Writing of the Gods’ has two chapters: ‘Omen Lists in Babylonian Culture’, and the second: ‘The Structure of Knowledge of the Universe’. This part of the book explores the idea that the Babylonians treated omens not just as divinations of the mind of the gods, but as encounters with a species of divine writing, which scribes and diviners could read and understand. This is a valuable part of the book, which ties together both the processes involved in scribal understanding of omens, and their understanding of the significance of the texts they produced in response to the omens.

Part IV is titled ‘The Word of the Law’, and the first of its two chapters look at the ancient law codes from the perspective of his argument. This chapter does illustrate clearly that the same kind of processes found underlying the construction of the literary and omen texts, also lie beneath the construction of the legal texts. The seventh chapter is ‘The Philosopher King’. It might be imagined that this chapter might contain some kind of comparison with Plato’s notion of the importance of knowledge to the Philosopher King, and how that knowledge might be acquired. Plato’s concept of the Philosopher King is mentioned briefly, but only to dismiss the idea that Plato was in the same cultural territory as the Babylonians, since Plato deprecated writing.

Part V, ‘A Babylonian Epistemology’ also has two chapters. The first gives an account of his understanding of Babylonian epistemology over historical time, from the middle of the 2^nd millennium BCE onwards, until the cuneiform script ceased to be used or understood in the early years of the common era. The final chapter is titled: ‘The Conceptual Autonomy of Babylonian Epistemology’ and sums up Van De Mieroop’s argument that, for the Babylonians the text, and more importantly, the cuneiform script, was primary, and that processes by which the texts were created, whether literary, legal, ominous, or lexical lists, did not derive their importance from reference to things outside the texts and the script. The Babylonian construction of reality existed within the texts, and was generated by the process of writing.

Van De Mieroop therefore is not seeking to establish the philosophical nature of Babylonian thought by means of a comparison of Babylon literary, legal and divination texts and their contents, with similar documents from Greece, where these exist. In fact he does not engage in significant comparison with the intellectual output of Greece at all. ‘Philosophy before the Greeks’ is therefore a title which means, in the context of this study, something quite different to what it seems to mean. 

It is also the case that he does not attempt to define what philosophy is directly within the Babylonian context, but instead explores the concept through numerous examples, revealing a number of structuralist procedures employed by the scribes, and allows the logic and the consistency of scribal activity to emerge from these examples. We learn a lot about these processes, including instances where the processes contradict both human experience, and physical possibility. His conclusion from these is that they show that whatever meaning the resulting texts had was considered to reside in the texts, and so physical reality and possibility was not seen by Babylonian scholars as a legitimate constraint on the construction of these texts. 

***

"Philosophy before the Greeks is a sophisticated, erudite, strikingly original, well-argued, and richly documented study that will stand alone in ancient Mesopotamian studies." - Benjamin Foster, Yale University. That is a barbed accolade.

The first chapter of the book is available from Princeton University Press, at:

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10616.pdf

[See also my first short post about this book, in December 2015, at:

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/van-de-mieroop-m-philosophy-before.html]