Bringing the Divine to Earth. Writing to the Poet Leona Esther Medlin

I wrote to Leona Esther Medlin on the 26th of January 2018, and headed the letter, 'After the Bronze Age Wreck'. The letter is an update on where I was with my research. The original (rather squibish) article 'The Bronze Age Wreck' was shared only with one archaeologist in May 2013, since it depended very much on an understanding of the arguments in 'The Sacred History of Being'. That book was not published for another two and a half years. 

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The focus of The Sacred History of Being is the presence of the idea of Being in cultures around the Mediterranean from the eighteenth century BCE onwards. Particularly in Mesopotamia. The date was chosen because it marks the earliest appearance in the archaeology of a standard symbol for divine Being in Mesopotamia.

It was obvious from Egyptian iconography (and from elsewhere) that the idea of Being is much older. I chose not to go back before this date however, for the purposes of argument. Or to go anywhere near Egyptian stuff, for obvious reasons.

I found in 2013 that it might be possible to identify the (functional) presence of the idea of Being in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Britain. How? There is no writing. Just lots of big stones in lines and circles. But as Alexander Thom’s surveys from the 1930s onwards showed, the circles betray a profound interest in various Pythagorean triangles, and in whole numbers (the circles are not strictly circular, and the circumferences are expressed in whole numbers). This is a form of writing, just writing in terms of number and geometry.

There are several ways of talking about Being, and one of the terms often used in antiquity to reference Being was ‘totality’. I wrote about this way of thinking extensively in The Sacred History of Being (hereinafter SHB). It was a major part of Pythagorean doctrine, and also in Mesopotamian thought. Plato discusses the idea, and in fact his whole argument about ascending to the Good and returning depends on the significance it was supposed to have.

I also wrote extensively in SHB about the installation of divine statues in Mesopotamia, and the connection between the idea of totality and divine Being. The installation process lasted three days, during which time the statues were pointed at the heavens, which was regarded as an image of eternity or totality. The rite was a rite d’aggregation. The statue did not embody the divine without the performance of this ritual: the statue need to participate in totality to be divine.

After seeing the documentary ‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ in early 2013, it occurred to me that the mathematical and geometrical aspects of stone circles may have served the same sort of function as divine statues in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. The hypothesis was that in their construction the circles embodied aspects of divine Being on earth, and they therefore established a bridge between earth and eternity. 

In just a few days in May 2013 I wrote an extensive essay arguing this case. It had the title ‘The Bronze Age Wreck’. I called it that because the body of ideas which lay behind the building of the megalithic circles was lost to us, apart from a few clues. It seems also to have been lost to those living in the British Bronze Age itself, since the building of the circles more or less ceased around 1400 BCE (I’ve not written about that, but I think I know what happened. For another time).

The essay depended very much on a reading of SHB, so it wasn’t much use to circulate it. What I’m writing now is based on that essay, but readers are not required to have read SHB first.

In November 2016 I wrote another essay, called: ‘Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’. It discussed the archaeological evidence, Plato’s arguments about the heavens as an image of divine Being, and Mesopotamian ritual for the installation of gods, both in heaven and on earth. The essay was published on my website, and it received significant attention. It resulted in a commission in November 2017 to write about these ideas for the journal Time and Mind.

This article of 10.5 thousand words was written and delivered in four weeks, and it has the title ‘Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.’ It was quite different from the first, largely as the result of a conversation with the philosopher Adrian Moore across the year, which moved from ideas of Being in antiquity to Greek discussion and understanding of irrational numbers. This discussion prompted a general review of Pythagorean mathematics, and the sources. In the end, the new article suggested that there was a connection between mathematical and geometrical puzzles and paradoxes, and the idea of a transcendent reality (divine Being) standing behind appearance. The article also argued that Pythagoras travelled widely, borrowing much of what later became known as Pythagoreanism from priestly establishments in Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, and other places. What he was doing involved looking for a universal substructure of number, mathematics and geometry which pointed to the nature of Being.

Shortly after this paper was completed in December 2017, I wrote a post for my website which discussed the two papers on stone circles and Pythagoreanism from 2016 and 2017. It is titled: ‘Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’. It contains the abstract for the paper intended for the journal, and thirteen section headings, but no actual quotations from the body of the text.

Earlier in 2017 I was asked for a copy of a paper – ‘The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World’, published in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica Newsletter in December 2015. The inquirer was Nico Bader, who runs the Pythagoras Foundation in Amsterdam. I wrote to him sometime after forwarding the paper, suggesting that he might be interested in looking at the two posts on the web concerning stone circles and their significance. He found this line of research to be interesting. Yesterday he offered to summarise the argument in these posts for the Pythagoras Foundation’s Newsletter (number 23), which will be published in March. The newsletter (it is a bit more than that) is read by everyone who is seriously interested in Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism. If Time and Mind publishes ‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ in their upcoming issue, both will items will appear in March.

January 26, 2018.

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Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/stone-circles-phenomenology-and.html

Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (now retitled 'Being and Eternity in the Neolithic'): http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/patterns-of-thought-in-late-neolithic.html

‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ (the original BBC Chronicle documentary, broadcast in October 1970, which I didn’t see until early 2013. Worth 50 minutes of your time on a wet Sunday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle/8604.shtml

The most recent Pythagoras Foundation Newsletter: https://www.academia.edu/31783263/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_22_2017.pdf

[The article 'Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain' was rejected  by the editorial board of the journal 'Time and Mind'. It is available here. All about what a pre-pythagorean pythagoreanism might have meant in the context of the British Neolithic. Nico Bader, on the other hand, did follow through with publishing his summaries of my posts. At: https://www.academia.edu/36071620/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_23_2018.pdf]

[Updated May 13, 2020]

Ancient Conjectures, and Fictive Intellectual History

The following text concerns the question of whether or not there was a philosophical basis for the development of religious concepts in antiquity, informing ritual, liturgy, divination, sacrifice, and the worship of images; and therefore, as a consequence, philosophy was not the exclusive possession of the Greeks in the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This argument of course turns the received view of the historical relationship between religion and philosophy upside down: we like to think that the development of philosophy was a practical response to religion as it became an outworn and irrational phenomenon, which preceded a more scientific approach to phenomena and nature. If such a sequence is in fact falsely inferred, and undermined by the evidence, then we have some rethinking to do.

The text references both my book The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the contents of Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). It is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Thomas Yaeger, April 28, 2017 

What has been argued in part one of the book (The Sacred History of Being) is that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once understood in terms of conjecture about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These follow on from the initial question, which is: why is there something rather than nothing? Plato’s argument, following on from propositions made by Parmenides, who declared that we should look only to the one, and that only the one truly exists, is the most sophisticated of all discussions in antiquity concerning why there should be something rather than nothing.

Plato argues that we should always look to the ‘one true thing’. This is different from saying only the one exists, or only the one is truly real.

J.G. Frazer was very dismissive of Greek questions concerning the one and the many, saying that they constituted ‘popular questions of the day’. The argument of Parmenides remained entirely undiscussed.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being.

This of course is a spectacular instance of intellectual blindness, by which the richness of the intellectual matrix of ancient Greek thought was spirited into nothingness. We like to see Plato’s discussion of Being as the surfacing of a human capacity to grapple with abstract ideas, and the marker of our emancipation from irrational ideas about the world and the gods. For Frazer, Plato was as guilty of intellectual error as any of his contemporaries, as well as his predecessors.

In late Hellenistic times, there seems to have been a very poor grasp of the context of the development of philosophy around the Mediterranean. Nods were made toward the notion that the discipline of philosophy might not have been first developed in Greece, including (tellingly) at the beginning of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers.  Plato after all argued against the idea that this was so in the Protagoras, saying that it was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and in also Crete. 

He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) presented the common sense view that philosophy was first developed in a place where there was a leisured class, with the time and resources to think about philosophical questions. He may have had Egypt in mind, since Egypt had professionalised priesthoods. 

Later philosophers such as Porphyry suggested that key parts of Pythagorean doctrine came west to Greece from Babylon, in the late sixth century (Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras). We have also seen that aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in Herodotus (concerning Solon), and also in Homer’s Iliad (Book 18), where a number of key details associated with the doctrine are run together in close order, without being explained. 

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Egypt, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on an initial plenum, using the image of a sage emerging daily from the sea, granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts.

Not much of this was of use to the Enlightenment agenda, which preferred to look at the development of philosophy in Greece as the first beginnings of a rational understanding of the world. And so the information was deprecated and ignored. The phrase ‘I doubt that’ is a dangerous one in the classics community. It is a way of saying ‘this is not the consensus view of scholars and the profession’. Usually no discussion follows, since the opinion is usually an opinion of the worth (or otherwise) of evidence. Scholars weigh evidence, and they do so (they are convinced) with better tools than were available to ancient scholars. The judgement is fitted to modern requirements. So, as a result, it is clear that it is unlikely that Solon visited Egypt, and that Pythagoras visited Babylon. Tread carefully, or your credibility as a scholar may be in doubt.

Thus, the scholarly consensus is that philosophy is an autochthonous development. Why in Greece? The ‘Greek Genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard it said by people who should know better. But during the high days of the Enlightenment, and the beginnings of what became the fully-fledged discipline of Classics, that is what the scholars wanted. Something pure and out of the orbit of other cultures, which, by definition, had no philosophy or anything which would measure up to something like rational thought.

Sometimes history is built backwards. It isn’t just a matter of looking to the historical record and starting from that. History always has been in part about critical scrutiny of sources and judgements, even among the Greeks. But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision was wholesale, with the purpose of creating a representation of the true origins of European civilisation as it entered the period of the Enlightenment.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopedia, but also about the arts and crafts. The latter may have been wrapped up with myth, folklore, and superstition, but they were still essential to the rational life of man, so these were also added to the Encyclopedia. Everything from the past which served some purpose, or which could be made to serve some purpose within the rational enlightenment model of reality, was critically examined, and reworked to fit what was intended to become a new understanding of man and his place in a new world of reason. A new understanding of how man might live.

As I point out in the chapter ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ there are in fact two logical modalities present in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is mostly (though not always) concerned with the modality which has come down to us as the basis of formal logic. Plato is clearly aware of this modality, but, though no scholar has dared to identify the other modality as logical, it is. It is simply that to us, it does not describe relationships which should be described as logical. Plato thought otherwise, and talks about this logical modality often, in the Republic and in the Timaeus. It is connected with the doctrine of wholes and totalities, and is the basis of explaining how things may participate in other things, which is not a pattern of ideas which fits with Aristotle’s general understanding of logic.

Why is this important? Simply put, it matters because it is the basis of the Greek understanding of how transcendent reality relates to secular and physical existence, which was a matter of great significance in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.  The doctrine also underpins the understanding of both transcendent reality, and the idea of the immanence of the divine. It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.

It might be imagined therefore that this would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in question have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that it is a form of logical modality is not acknowledged, and the conclusions which might follow from treating it as such, do not follow, and are therefore not discussed. It is treated as it is presented – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

As I wrote in the chapter ‘Sweet Song of Swans’, there is very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms. When he talks about transcendent reality, this is treated as some sort of literary fiction, which has no necessary properties of its own. When Plato talks about the Forms, this also is treated as a species of literary fiction, which Plato himself demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. Wnen Plato discusses the soul, it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so knowledge is acquired by the activation of that connection. We have forgotten what we knew (apparently) through the shock of physical birth, but it is possible for us to reacquire this knowledge.  Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion, since he talks about ascending purely in the mind from Form to Form, and then descending back to the world of physical reality, Form by Form, and says this is the only way to acquire genuine knowledge.

How can real knowledge be acquired in this way? Why should Plato argue like this?  How can any of this make sense to us?

It makes very little sense to us, because we have lost the original doctrinal context of his discussions, and we are not that interested in attempting to recover what we can of that context, even for the purposes of a better scholarly understanding of what he is talking about. So the study of Plato languishes in the seminar room, taught and discussed from generation to generation by people who have no clear idea of what Plato meant. Books and papers are published, which clear up a minor detail here, discuss another one there, but do not leave us much the wiser.

 We can understand the range of existing discussion about Plato in terms of what scholars do not or cannot understand about Plato, and their attempts to fit what they think they understand about his work into some kind of modern intellectual and critical frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which are problematic, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

Other than that, reading Plato at least serves to teach us something about how we used to think, and how we may think, even if we understand very little of what he is saying.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. So a major concern of this book is to restore knowledge of it, and a basic comprehension of why it is important. Not just for our understanding of Plato himself, but also for our understanding of his cultural context; the context in which philosophy was understood to be of inestimable value; and also for an understanding of some very strange things about the ancient world, which are all the stranger because (it seems) they made sense in antiquity (sacrifice, divination, idolatry, prophecy, omens, oracles, etc.).

One of the most valued books in my library is Religion & Magic: Approaches and Theories. The author is Graham Cunningham, who is a specialist in the ancient Near East. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. Cunningham’s book covers the whole range of these, at least in terms of summarising the views of those who first suggested those theoretical approaches. He divides the approaches into several sections, which are 1. German pioneers, 2 Early Intellectualist approaches, 3 Emotionalist approaches, 4 Phenomenological Approaches, 5 Structural Functional Approaches, 6 Symbolic Approaches, 7 Recent Intellectualist Approaches, 8 Structural approaches, 9, Cognitive Approaches, 10, and finally Feminist Approaches.

All of these approaches were developed and used without any meaningful distinction being made between ancient cultural phenomena and cultural phenomena of modern times. I write carefully here, since there are unpleasant assumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out entirely. Anthropology was founded in the early nineteenth century, and the presumptions of the time are necessarily locked into the work of the pioneers. Many of these presumptions are still implicit, and can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that an unfounded equation was early made between the cultures of antiquity and the world of the primitive and the savage in the modern world (which the Classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson referred to as ‘running folklore to the death’).

So Cunningham’s book covers two centuries of thought about culture, civilization, religion, magic and ritual. All premised on the assumptions, understanding and categories of knowledge of those living and working in those two centuries. Nothing about those matters is covered from earlier centuries. It is as if the study of human culture, human thought, and the nature of man himself, began only in Hegel’s study, and nothing of worth came before Hegel.

I could digress here, and lay out what came before in detail, but that is for another time. I will allow myself to say that Plato had something else to add to the pot, which is not covered in Cunningham’s survey; the Neoplatonists (who thought of themselves as Platonists, but we will not let them be what they are) would have had added the same thing to the pot, as would some of the early Gnostic writers.

 The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances understood what Plato was writing about, at least for the most part, and would be shocked that, not only do we not understand Plato, but that we have chosen to explain human culture in terms of a fundamental stupidity about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

In short, religion is seen by all anthropologists and sociologists  in negative terms (at least professionally – what they choose to believe in private is a separate matter), as something baleful and poisonous to human culture and human thought, except to the extent that religious belief provides social cohesion, ideology, and rules of social behaviour.....

The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World

[These are extracts from 'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World', one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The essay was first published in the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015. The entire text of the essay is now available from this site, since the Ritman Library site has been taken down. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

The ideas of an ur-Reality in both Assyria, and in the writings of Plato, are strangely similar.

"....Plato’s Republic tells of the craft of passing from the contemplation of one Form to another, entirely intellectually, and without distraction, with the intention of eventually arriving at the contemplation of The Good. The man returning from this journey comes back with knowledge beyond the scope of any wisdom to be found on the Earth.

The Platonic discussion of the Forms is treated by modern scholars as a species of literary fiction. Meaning it has no detectable connections with cultural activity in Greece, or in any other part of the civilised world in the two millennia before the Common Era. But Plato is very clear that it is important to look to the ‘One Thing’, the ur-Reality which underpins the world of the here and now. So he is talking of a conception of God, which gives rise to all other things which may be understood by the mortal mind, though the ultimate abstract conception of Reality may lie forever beyond human understanding.

In Assyria, the excellence and perfection of the king’s skills, described in Ashurbanipal's Annals (late 7th century B.C.E.), and in letters to the king, were understood to place him in proximity to the god Ashur. He is thus at the limit of what a mortal may do and be; as Ashur is at the limit or zenith of Reality itself. Ashur is Reality itself. That the Sacred Tree may stand in for the king suggests that it was understood also as an esoteric and symbolic representation of the idea of limit, taken to the nth degree, and also of Reality itself."

The article suggests that both bodies of thought are rooted in the same concept of an ur-Reality.

The point? Philosophy is much older than we think it is, and its origins can be found in ancient divine cult. Divinity was a philosophical concept, rather than the product of human credulity. We can trace this concept in time by studying a technical aspect of the concept of the divine, which is the ancient preoccupation with limit. 

[Feb 7, 2016]

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The Ritman Library is also known as the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, and is based in Amsterdam. [The BPH has received a substantial donation from the author Dan Brown, and they have decided to entirely revamp their web presence. The Ritman Library pages are no longer available (since late 2019), and the BPH is now renamed as 'The Embassy of the Free Mind', (updated March 23, 2020)]

Two relevant posts which might be of interest are available on this blog - the first is an extract from an article in The Sacred History of Being on the subject of the Assyrian Sacred Tree and its significance; the second is a discussion of the idea of limit in the Roman social and cultic context, The Divine and the Limit.

Thomas Yaeger, December 31, 2015.

Six Chapters from The Sacred History of Being

The first five chapters of my upcoming book are available to read by following the links below. A further chapter, which discusses George Berkeley's understanding of the Nature of Reality, is also available in the list.

Information about the publication status of SHB can be found among the Resource pages (right hand side of the blog pages).

[The Sacred History of Being was published by the Anshar Press on November 2, 2015]


Preface

Part One

A sense of the past
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the idea of Being
The West and the Other
The Golem
Change and what is permanent
Recurring Questions
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
Hume and Kant on Reality

[Post updated on October 1, 2017]

The Arrival of the idea of Being

We can never recover the first instance when it occurred to someone that the character of living experience might be determined by the nature of reality itself, and that this exalted reality had a quite different nature to that manifested in the world of sense and experience. In other words, that the nature of reality was something quite other than that which could be determined by common sense. However it is possible to show that this kind of insight is not uncommon, and that it even can occur to a mind entirely unprepared for it by education, either in the present day, or in the past.

Many accounts of these odd insights into a different order of reality are presented in terms of mystical experiences, in which some aspect of the divine is encountered, or a strange exultation is experienced, or the entirety of the world is seen to be encompassed by a single grain of sand. But not all perceptions of the other nature of Reality present themselves in such poetic images.

This is a study of an idea: an idea which (I argue) underpins much of religious belief both in the present and in the ancient past, and the relation of religious ideas to the practice of philosophy, principally in the form of dialectical inquiry. This, expressed in one of a multitude of ways, is the idea of ‘the end’, the ‘telos’, of ‘completion’, and the nature of the ground of reality. The reality which simply is, and which does not move – and cannot move without breaching its integrity, is in essence the completion of completions, the end of ends, and was so understood. This is Being.

What is the essence of this theory of Being, from the point of view (first of all) of the historians of philosophy? Essentially they argue that it is a development of the concept of existence apart from its specific instances. That is, what it is to be, or to be real, in the abstract.[1] The appearance in text of the abstraction of the idea of Reality from specific, concrete instances, is read by modern scholarship as the first indication of the capacity for pure abstraction, so that for the first time it is possible to talk about things – concepts – which can have no specific instance, such as Being, Reality, Beauty, Justice, etc., but which, conceptually speaking, can be understood as lying behind specific instances. These questions are first clearly evidenced in the works of the Greeks: among the Presocratic philosophers, and most fully developed in the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle.

This book does not deviate significantly from the contemporary scholarly idea that a theory of Being concerns existence apart from specific instances, and also key questions about the nature of reality in the abstract. It does however differ from the view of the historians of philosophy in that it does not read the first appearance of explicit discussion of the nature of Being and of Reality as the marker of its first discussion. Rather such evidence is just what it is: the first explicit discussion which we have available to us – created in a very specific set of circumstances. There is suggestive evidence that questions of Being were already current in the ancient world, and that the writings of the Greeks sometimes show their debt to these earlier sources.

Though framed as a historical study of its subject, this study is not intended to be definitive: we must walk before we can run, and such a history would be premature [2]. It is instead an exploratory survey of the cultural importance and pervasive scope of the idea of the end as a technical concept, a concept with a grammar and syntax of its own, which can be traced back (in iconographic, literary, and metrical terms) beyond the earliest direct documentary evidence. As a pioneering work, it is subject to errors of interpretation and detail, as all such works are. However, it would be disastrous for the progress of scholarship if the fear of making errors were to prevent the discussion of difficult subjects. I am sufficiently confident of the soundness of the general thesis to present it here, in a form refined by nearly thirty years of study.

By 1987 I understood that there was an important connection between the idea of kingship and completion in both Mesopotamia [3] and in Egypt [4], and was intrigued by the fact that completion was similarly an important idea in Greek philosophy, and, in the writings of both Plato and Aristotle, was also associated with kingship. Yet philosophy was supposed to be a Greek creation, without significant parallel conceptions in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The importance of the concepts of completion and the limit in antiquity are inadequately explained by the scholarship of the past two centuries. The presence, the ubiquity of these concepts, reflected in some way at all levels of society, and across the whole range of ancient civilisations in the Near East and in Europe, implies the ubiquity of a teleological model of the world. In Greece itself, it is possible to trace the existence of this model at least as far back as Hesiod and Homer, which means the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.E., some four or five centuries before Plato and Aristotle, in whose works the concepts of completion and the telos form the backbone of many arguments.

For both Plato and Aristotle, the idea of completion is firmly associated with idea of the telos, and both ideas are involved in the definition of the Good, which is how these philosophers referred to the concept of absolute Being.[5] It is of course possible to accord importance to limits and ends without the presence of a teleological view of the world in support, and therefore the presence of a theory of Being. Even in such profoundly secular times we mark our passage through life with moments of explicit boundary crossing and transformation. However, where the terminology of limits and ends is used in a way which adapts the concepts to people, actions, objects, buildings, etc., then something more profound is involved.[6] Aristotle, for example, would speak of bricks existing for the final cause which was the house they complete; and Plato famously said that an individual existed for the sake of the end, and not the end for the sake of the individual. The context of this kind of usage, where these concepts form part of a coherent implex[7] of technical ideas, is what is of interest here.

A problem which has to be confronted however, is the axiomatic presumption of the scholarly, philosophical and theological communities that the concept of Being was not significantly understood before Socrates, and the assumption that it first receives forensic public discussion in the pages of Plato.[8] For instance, Henri Frankfort (et al.) in Before Philosophy, makes no mention at all of the concept of Being, or of a theory of Being, until the close of the book, where the legacy of the human intellectual adventure is being discussed. The index features three mentions of ‘Being,’ all referencing this final section. [9]

The reason why it is presumed that man thought about the world without a theory of being before the rise of classical philosophy is twofold – firstly, since the nineteenth century, there has been a general presumption that man has been refining his intellectual faculties, with the corollary being that the cognitive act of abstraction was less well developed in antiquity than it is now. Thus conceptions in antiquity were necessarily of a concrete nature.

Secondly, there is in existence apparently no theoretical discussion of theological matters (at least identifiable as such) of the kind which we find in the pages of Plato, or in the theologians of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. This absence is taken, of itself, to indicate that in the early first millennium B.C.E. the philosophical discussion of theology, or matters related to theology, (such as the characteristics of ‘the One’, or ‘the Infinite’, etc.) was not practised at all, and that in all probability, was beyond the intellectual capacity of ancient man. [10] In short, the presumption of the presence of a theory of Being behind ancient discourse upon the world, in the form of myth ritual, symbol and icon, has no place in our approach to an understanding of antiquity. Not even as a hypothesis.

There is an important blind-spot in philosophical writings of the modern period however. This blind-spot can be characterised as an unwillingness or inability to address the possibility that reality might best be understood as a paradoxical matrix, in either contemporary discussion, or in earlier times. Writers in the 17th century say things like: ‘it is obvious that nothing can come from nothing’, and seem happy to rest on the assumptions of common sense. [11]

The essence of this common-sense approach is the assumption that the Aristotelian laws of logic – that a thing is itself; that a thing is either itself or something else; and that a thing is not something other than itself – are applicable in discussion or theorizing about the nature of the ur-reality underpinning the world of everyday experience, of description, including mathematical description, and that the world of everyday common sense experience and our understanding of it is in no way affected by the ur-reality and its properties. [12]

This is a strange assumption, and must seem so to anyone familiar with the religions and philosophies of the east which have their origins in antiquity. But the assumption is there. Plato's work does not enshrine paradox. We assume that we know this for sure because of Plato's demolition of the contradictions apparent in the argument of Parmenides about the One. If he demolished these arguments, he himself cannot have held such views about the nature of reality, in any shape or form. Yet he says very similar things in various parts of his extensive canon. He also explicitly says that certain characteristics of the forms allow them to 'pass into one another'. 

Pass into one another? It is obvious that this doctrine is not at all compatible with the Aristotelian laws of thought. Scholars have not been very alert to the fact that Plato is sometimes playful and mischievious by seeming to hold different views in different dialogues. It isn't simply,  as has been asserted, a matter of our lack of knowledge of the chronology and the development of his thought over time. He is trying to get us to think about what he is saying. What he appears to be saying is that, at one and the same time, ideas of the nature of reality are demolished by the use of logical argument, and yet these same ideas are nevertheless the case. 


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[1] The study of Being is often referred to as ‘ontology’. It has two aspects – discussion of the nature of Being itself, and discussion of the ways in which we might understand the nature of Being. For those of an idealist tendency, it is often used to mean the study of the properties of Reality.  In modern times what we casually refer to as having existence (the raven, the cat, the table, etc.) have no real existence to the idealist, since these things do not (and cannot) have the properties and characteristics attributed to what might be referred to as the ground of true Being – the underlying Reality behind a world of appearances.
[2] Much of the evidence discussed in this book concerns the 1st millennium B.C.E. Professional historians and archaeologists are well aware that the history of the 1st millennium is a great deal less clear and certain than the lay public thinks, and therefore currently it would be extremely difficult to produce a satisfactory narrative account of the history of ideas in the 1st millennium B.C.E.
[3] The Akkadian term for king is ‘šar’, which also is a technical term indicating a completion. Herodotus was familiar with the Babylonian ‘Saros’ measure.
[4] Completion is a concept which appears in Akhenaten’s ‘Hymn to the Aten’, in connection wth both the birth of a chick from its shell, and the rising of the sun above the horizon on its daily voyage around the sky. Divinity is indicated in Egypt by the enclosure of the royal name in a cartouche, which is a representation of a length of rope, similar to that used to mark off an enclosure, a temenos, the foundations of a temple or city, or anything which has real being or existence.
[5] ‘Being’ was discussed as an abstract concept using the term ‘ontos’. All instances of Being were understood to be subsumed in the Good as the supreme end, for which all other ends exist. As such individual instances of Being were formal resemblances of the absolute Being upon which they depend for their reality.
[6] A modern illustration of the difference might be the way we refer to a head of state. We would have no difficulty referring to this person as the ‘head of his country’, or as ‘the political apex of his people’. We might also speak of him as ‘first among equals’, without quite understanding the origin of that phrase. But we would not speak of him as ‘perfected’, as ‘completed,’ or even 'the image of the divine.' Neither would we speak of him as the final cause of various actions and statuses in other individuals. Yet this is precisely how the ancients often speak.
[7] The use of the term ‘implex’ is borrowed from Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill, Macmillan, 1969. The authors used this term to refer to a body of concepts related to each other, but difficult to separate in a sequential or narrative structure. Rather they related to each other in the way in which a series of variations on a theme might form part of a fugue.
[8] The same is held to be true of the idea of infinity. The reason we have any discussion of these ideas from Greece at all is the result of a rare separation of philosophy and religion in Attica.
[9] Frankfort, Henri, (Mr & Mrs); Jacobsen, Thorkhild; Wilson, John.A., Before Philosophy, Chicago, 1946 [original title: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man]
[10] In the late nineteenth century and up until at least the last third of the twentieth century, this historic absence of the philosophic discussion of the divine was often seen within the frame of human evolution, so that the absence was explained in terms of our subsequent biological development toward a capacity to think in abstract terms. There never was any biological evidence for this, and no-one would mount such an argument today. Nevertheless, the idea of an intellectual development within historic time remains, at least as a cultural phenomenon. There was also a racist presumption that the Orient differed from the Occidental nations in their capacity to do philosophy at all. Within such a model of reality, there is both a disincentive to look for traces of philosophical thought in the ancient East, and an ever-present need to downgrade whatever traces are actually found. I recall a few years ago an Egyptologist stating that a symbol which had for some time been taken to indicate an unlimited number (i.e., the idea of infinity) meant no such thing, but rather a concrete conception of a limited (but very large) number. He was probably correct to say this. But it was clear that his purpose was to dismiss the idea that the Egyptians could have conceived the abstraction of infinity. The enlightenment notion of the primitive stupidity of ancient peoples took root before a single hieroglyphic text was deciphered, and it is at least a little odd that the judgements of scholars without access to a single word of ancient Egyptian are often borne out by subsequent research.
[11] John Locke is the case in point, who wrote this in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690); he regarded it as common sense that nothing could be generated from nothing. William Law expressed a similar sentiment. In both cases the assumption is that the Aristotelian laws of logic hold in a realm which is defined as transcendent of our own. This is a rather big and somewhat illogical assumption.
[12] Aristotle himself identified that insight involved the transcendence of a paradoxical situation, so that passing beyond an apparent contradiction resulted in understanding.

The Transcendental understanding of Reality

I’ve settled on the term ‘transcendental’ to indicate a pattern of thought in antiquity which understands reality itself (whatever that may be) as a principal concern, and as something which, as it is, transcends mundane earthly reality.

Within this pattern of thought however, earthly reality has properties and characteristics which have counterparts in the divine world. If 'God is Great’ for example, there are earthly examples of greatness, and so greatness is understood to be a property held in common between the worlds. What is held in common was understood by those of a transcendentalist persuasion to offer a connection between the worlds.

In essence the transcendentalist outlook holds that Being, or the ultimate reality, is both transcendent and immanent.*1 This means that this transcendentalist view of the world represents a paradoxical understanding of reality, in that the divine both transcends mundane reality, but is also at the same time present in every aspect of that reality. The connections between reality itself and earthly reality are not obvious, and often not easy to discover. The undiscoverability of the connections is an index of the distance between the worlds. Yet it is possible to discover connections between the worlds. Reading the mind of the divine was a major concern in antiquity, since interpreting divine intention conferred knowledge and earthly power.

Using the term ‘transcendentalist’ loosely echoes Immanuel Kant’s eighteenth century view of man’s place in the world: while everyone else was arguing for the pursuit of the experimental method, he was arguing that our understanding of the world depended on the categories of human understanding and judgement, at least as much as it did on what seemed to be outside us. And that we should understand those categories properly in order to develop a genuinely scientific understanding. His transcendental philosophy was based on the idea that we needed to get away from the idea that there necessarily was a world outside. He argued this way, since whatever reality actually is, it is complicated, since we can’t know what anything is in itself, only how it appears.

This didn’t translate or develop into a radical Kantian understanding of theology however, and he simply argued that his transcendental philosophy left sufficient uncertainty about the world for religious faith, and a notion of god. He imagined (as nearly everybody in those days did) that faith and belief in god were eternally part of man’s religious apparatus.*2 It isn’t the case.

I’m suggesting here that the core of Kant’s argument, that reality necessarily transcends our understanding, was something of a common currency among elite circles (the ones with the time and liberty to think) all around the world in antiquity. The contemplation of reality and its perplexities was the way they achieved a transcendental understanding. And, such contemplation was not in any way dependent on either faith or belief. That transcendentalist understanding is best understood as having been built on a thorough scepticism.

Working on or with the gods (theurgy) is often thought of these days as some obscure form of theological insanity practised by the neoplatonists and a few other groups in the dying days of the Roman empire. However close examination of Mesopotamian theology shows that this view is wrong. It’s an idea deeply embedded in Mesopotamian civilisation, and in their stories of creation.*3

It is also built into Plato’s account of the creation of the cosmos.*4 The practice of theurgy is a corollary of the transcendentalist outlook, since if reality is transcendent of us, but we are also paradoxically part of it, then human will and intention are important to the way in which the world is framed.* 5

According to this way of thinking, there are processes which we can use to enhance what we have in common with divinity. Most often this was expressed in terms of gaining knowledge of the divine, since the supreme divinity was necessarily the fount of all knowledge (both Plato and the Mesopotamians concur on this point). If theurgy is an important component in early religious practice, it tells us something about how much knowledge was prized at the time, and also something of the scope of that knowledge. Unlike homeopathic magic, which theurgy sometimes resembles, the practice of theurgy is entirely dependent on an understanding of Being for its use. *6

1 This idea is a principal marker for the presence of an understanding of Being in a culture. It is hard to imagine how such a view could arise except as the result of sophisticated logical discussion of the nature of reality. The idea defies common sense, and is counter intuitive. No-one has so far provided a satisfactory explanation of how such a perspective might arise. The view that the divine is at once transcendent and immanent is not much discussed by scholars, despite the fact that it is clearly present in much of the evidence. It is even present in Christianity, but it is shied away from, and left as a divine mystery. Christ is clearly God incarnate ('the kingdom of God is within you'), but instead he is presented by the Church as the 'son' of God, since there are too many problems for (what is in reality) a secular organisation in dealing with the idea of an incarnate god. They were less shy about this paradox in the bronze age.
2 Kant wrote his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone in 1793, without realising that, having written the Prolegomena to any future Metaphysic (1783), and The Critique of Pure Reason, (1781) he had come close to retracing man's early intellectual steps. He was interested in early man, in a Rousseau-ish kind of way, and in 1783 had published a short essay on the subject – 'The Conjectural Beginning of the History of Mankind'. This was principally concerned with exploring the earliest development of manners and morals, rather than that of the abstract reason.
3 It can be found in the Enuma Elish ('When on high', which is the liturgy of the Babylonian New Year Festival). There are two creations described in this text – the first is a purely chaotic creation. The second is explicitly an orderly and rational creation, subject to the will of Marduk, the head of the pantheon of gods. We have this important document more or less entire (across different versions), which is useful.
4 In Plato's Timaeus.
5 In The Secret of the Incas by William Sullivan, it is argued that the Incas were attempting to turn back the precession of the equinoxes, in order to preserve a heavenly bridge which they imagined gave them access to the divine world. The subtitle of the book is: 'The War against Time.' They came to the view that they could turn back time because of a transcendentalist understanding of reality, and the place of the Incas within it. It is a completely counter-intuitive outlook.
6 J.G. Frazer doesn't deal with religious or magical ideas which might be associated with the concept of Being in the whole massive expanse of The Golden Bough. His background was in classics, and what he was doing throughout his huge enterprise was interpreting the pre-Greek human understanding of the world in terms of a fundamental error – that things were associated with each other through contact and resemblance (contagious and sympathetic magic). For him magic is a plain mistake, and he does nothing in The Golden Bough to indicate that there was ever any other view of the matter in human history. Frazer wrote The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory as far back as the 1870s (though the essay was not published until 1930), so he had already dealt with Plato, arguing that he had converted a subjective understanding of the world into an objective one. He had therefore a perception of the double track of subjective and objective ideas in Plato, but as a disciple of John Locke, he was never likely to grasp the transcendentalist nature of Plato's arguments.

Theme of the Sacred History of Being

The Sacred History of Being has as its radical thesis that knowledge was at the heart of ancient religion, both in Greece and the ancient Near East. And that the source of all knowledge was understood to be Being itself. 

 Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria, whose artefacts are currently being destroyed by the 'Islamic State'. 

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the established fact that the Greeks invented philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this. 

This can now be shown to be a faulty understanding, resulting in many absurdities. The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate ‘notions’ about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. 

The Sacred History of Being unpicks this log-jam in the history of ideas, largely the legacy of classical scholarship from the late eighteenth century onward, so that it is possible for us to allow the texts which survive to mean what they mean.

***

The text of The Sacred History of Being was completed in November 2014. Initial publication will be in eBook format (PDF)  Publication was originally due on the 10th August 2015, but formatting issues have resulted in a delay. Uptodate info on publication is available from the Resource Pages section. 

The Nature of Reality (Berkeley)

I’ve chosen to look initially at the philosophical outlook of Berkeley through public criticism by Bertrand Russell.*¹ He was born in Ireland in 1685, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin when he was twenty-two years old. What was peculiar about his philosophy was that he denied the existence of matter, and in fact the reality of the objective world. He argued that material objects had existence only in so far as they are perceived by the viewer.

The obvious criticism of this theory is that if perception is the only thing which gives objects their reality, then when we are not looking at them, they should not exist.

‘To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no-one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a weighty argument for the existence of God.

His principal philosophical concerns were expressed in a small number of works written before he was twenty-eight years old. These concerns resemble remarkably those of ancient priestly interest which is a focus of the middle chapters of this book. His works were ‘A New Theory of Vision’ (1709); ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge’ (1710); and ‘The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous’ (1713). The last of these is the one which presents the argument against matter. Russell considers that the first of these dialogues and the beginning of the second present the main aspects of the theory, and supplies a useful summary of the argument. This summary is reproduced here. Russell feels that Berkeley:

‘advances valid arguments in favour of a certain important conclusion, though not quite in favour of the conclusion he thinks he is proving. He thins he is proving that all reality is mental; what he is proving is that we perceive qualities, not things, and that qualities are relative to the percipient.’²

There are only two characters in the dialogue, Hylas and Philonous,*³ The former represents educated common sense, and Philonous, represents Berkeley himself. Shortly after the opening remarks,

‘Hylas says that he has heard strange reports of the opinions of Philonous, to the effect that he does not believe in material substance. ‘Can anything,’ he exclaims, ‘be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter?’ Philonous replies that he does not deny the reality of sensible things, i.e. of what is perceived immediately by the senses, but that we do not see the causes of colours or hear the causes of sounds. Both agree that the senses make no inferences. Philonous points out that by sight we perceive only light, colour, and figure; by hearing, only sounds; and so on. Consequently, apart from sensible qualities ther is nothing sensible, and sensible things are nothing but sensible qualities or combinations of sensible qualities.’

Philonous now sets to work to prove that ‘the reality of sensible things consists in being perceived’, as against the opinion of Hylas, that ‘to exist is one thing, and to be perceived is another’. That sense-data are mental is a thesis which Philonous supports by a detailed examination of the various senses. He begins with heat and cold. Great heat, he says, is a pain, and must be in a mind. Therefore heat is mental; and a similar argument applies to cold. This is reinforced by the famous argument about the the lukewarm water. When one of your hands is hot and the other cold, you put both into lukewarm water, which feels cold to one hand and hot to the other; but the water cannot be at once hot and cold. This finishes Hylas, who acknowledges that ‘heat and cold are only sensations existing in our minds’. But he points out hopefully that other sensible qualities remain.

Philonous next takes up tastes. He points out that a sweet taste is a pleasure and a bitter taste is a pain, and that pleasure and pain are mental. The same argument applies to odours, since they are pleasant or unpleasant.

Hylas makes a vigourous effort to rescue sound, which, he says, is motion in air, as may be seen from the fact that are no sounds in a vacuum.*⁴ We must, he says, ‘distinguish between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or between the sound which we immediately perceive and that which exists without us’. Philonous points out that what Hylas calls ‘real’ sound, being a movement, might possibly be seen or felt, but can certainly not be heard; therefore it is not sound as we know it in perception. As to this, Hylas now concedes that ‘sounds too have no real being without the mind’.

They now come to colours, and here Hylas begins confidently: ‘Pardon me: the case of colours is very different. Can anything be plainer than that we see them on the objects?’ Substances existing without the mind, he maintains, have the colours we see on them. But Philonous has no difficulty in disposing of this view. He begins with the sunset clouds, which are red and golden, and points out that a cloud, when you are close to it, has no such colours. He goes on to the difference made by a microscope, and to the yellowness of everything to a man who has jaundice. And very small insects, he says, must be able to see much smaller objects than we can see. Hylas thereupon says that colour is not in the objects, but in the light; it is, he says, a thin fluid substance. Philonous points out, as in the case of sound, that, according to Hylas, ‘real’ colours are something different from the red and blue that we see, and that this won’t do.

Hereupon Hylas gives way about all secondary qualities, but continues to say that primary qualities, notable figure and motion, are inherent in external unthinking substances. To this Philonous replies that things look big when we are near them and small when we are far off, and that a movement may seem quick to one man and slow to another.

At this point Hylas attempts a new departure. He made a mistake, he says, in not distinguishing the object from the sensation; the act of perceiving he admits to be mental, but not what is perceived; colours, for example, ‘have a real existence without the mind, in some unthinking substance’. To this Philonous replies: ‘That any immediate object of the senses – that is, any idea or combination of ideas – should exist in an unthinking substance, or exterior to all minds, is in itself an evident contradiction.’

At this point Russell points out that the argument has become a logical one, and is no longer empirical in nature. Berkeley has moved on to a discussion involving ideas, as expressed by Philonous a few pages later, where he says, ‘whatever is immediately perceived is an idea; and can any idea exist out of the mind?’.

After a metaphysical discussion of substance, Hylas returns to the discussion of visual sensations, with the argument that he sees things at a distance. To this Philonous replies that this is equally true of things seen in dreams, which everyone admits to be mental; further, that distance is not perceived by sight, but judged as the result of experience, and that, to a man born blind but now for the first time able to see, visual objects would not appear distant.

At the beginning of the second Dialogue, Hylas urges that certain traces in the brain are the causes of sensations, but Philonous retorts that ‘the brain, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind’.

Russell ends his summary of the argument here, and divides Philonous’ argument into two parts. The first is the argument that we do not perceive material things, but only their secondary qualities, such as colours, sounds, etc. These secondary qualities exist in the mind, and are mental in nature. Russell thinks that Berkeley’s reasoning is ‘completely cogent as to the first point,’ but as to the second, ‘it suffers from the absence of any definition of the word ‘mental’. He relies… upon the received view that everything must be either material or mental, and that nothing is both’.

“When he says that we perceive qualities, not ‘things’ or ‘material substances’, and that there is no reason to suppose that the different qualities which common sense regards as all belonging to one ‘thing’ inhere in a substance distinct from each and all of them, his reasoning may be accepted. But when he goes on to say that sensible qualities – including primary qualities – are ‘mental’, the arguments are of very different kinds, and of very different degrees of validity. There are some attempting to prove logical necessity, while others are more empirical.” [p626]

Russell is not interested in Berkeley’s argument after this, as he explained. This is because he has exposed the same looseness of language which we saw employed by the most celebrated exponents of the ontological argument (and consequently the weakness of the argumentation), and the rest of Berkeley’s argument concerns a theological understanding of the world. We however shall press on, since Berkeley’s theological understanding is relevant to the subject of this book, and it also presents an alternative form of ontological argument, which Berkeley claims shows the reality of God.

The Second Dialogue opens with a discussion which functions to clarify whether the essentially skeptical view of Hylas is the correct response to Philonous’ argument. Philonous [p 166] asks to know ‘whether I rightly understand your hypothesis. You make certain traces in the brain to be the causes or occasions of our ideas. Pray tell me, whether by the brain you mean any sensible thing?’ Hylas confirms that this is his view, and that he cannot imagine what else Philonous thought he might mean. Philonous responds by defining that ‘sensible things are all immediately perceivable, are ideas; and these exist only in the mind.’ They both agree that Hylas has agreed to this much earlier in the argument.

Philonous then argues that, since the brain, being itself a sensible thing, ‘exists only in the mind’, and asks if Hylas would agree whether or not it is reasonable to suppose that ‘one idea or thing existing, occasions all other ideas.’ And that if this is his view, how does he account ‘for the origin of that primary idea of the brain itself?’ Hylas replies that he does not explain the origin of our ideas by a ‘brain which is perceptible to sense; rather he understands the brain being ‘only a combination of sensible ideas’, and that the explanation is by means of another brain which he imagines.

Philonous responds by suggesting that things imagined are as truly in the mind as things which are perceived. Hylas agrees. Philonous points out that Hylas has been ‘all this while accounting for ideas, by certain motions or impressions in the brain’ by means of ‘some alterations in an idea, whether sensible or imaginable,’ and that it does not matter which. Hylas is a little shaken by this, and says that he begins to suspect his own hypothesis.

A clue is presented as to where Philonous is going with this argument, since he says that ‘all we know or conceive are own ideas,’ with the exception of ‘spirits.’ And if we do not conceive it, then we ‘talk unintelligibly,’ instead of forming a reasonable hypothesis’. Hylas now crumbles, and says that he ‘now clearly see it was a mere dream’ to argue in terms of motions or impressions in the brain. Philonous responds by saying that ‘this way of explaining things… could never have satisfied any reasonable man’ since ‘what connexion is there between a motion in the nerves and the sensations of sound or colour in the mind?’ He agrees with Philonous that he is satisfied that no sensible things have a real existence. He also agrees the he is clearly a skeptic.

Philolaus then embarks on a long paean to the glories of the sensible world and its orderliness:

‘Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth, to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planet, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas around the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of Nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! How magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault!’

Philonous is appealing here to the heavens as a representation of the divine, whose uniformities point to something beyond the appearance. He says to Hylas that he ‘must call imagination to his aid,’ since ‘the feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumberable worlds revolving round the central fires [the stars]; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms.’

This is not a metaphorical appeal. Berkeley has introduced the notion that reality as it is represented to us is not simply the more or less complex response of the human brain to sensory data, but is a series of representations which are associated with cosmic ‘all-perfect’ mind:

‘Neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought!’

Both Philonous and Hylas by this point share the view that sensible things exist in mind only. Up to this point however, the view of Hylas has been a profound skepticism about reality, and our capacity to know it. By contrast, here Philonous shows, on the basis of the same evidence, that a quite different conclusion can be drawn, if the intellectual frame is changed. Philonous then attacks the skeptical position in general:

‘What treatment then do those philosophers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those priciples be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this skepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?’ Hylas is not impressed, and is not converted to Philonous’s outlook. He says that his comfort is that Philonous is ‘as much a sceptic as I am’. Philonous disagrees, which strikes Hylas as meaning that Philonous agreed all along to the premises of the argument, but is now denying the conclusion, leaving Hylas ‘to maintain those paradoxes’ which Philonous led him into.

Argument and evidence however do not by themselves lead to single and unambiguous conclusions. We arrive at conclusions only by the properties and processes of mind, and on the basis our notions and expectations. Philonous denies that he agreed with Hylas ‘in those notions that led to skepticism.’ He argues that Hylas ‘indeed said, the reality of sensible things consisted in an absolute existence out of the minds of spirits, or distinct from their being perceived.’ And, consequent to this vue, Hylas is ‘obliged deny sensible things any real existence’. And that, according to his own definition, he is therefore a professed sceptic. But Philonous says that he ‘neither said nor thought the reality of sensible things was to be defined after that manner.’ Instead he says that to him it is evident, for the reasons that Hylas allows, ‘that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit.’ And so he concludes that it is not the case that they have no real existence, ‘but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist’ [Berkeley’s emphasis]. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it.’

This is an interesting proof of the reality of divine Being, which differs from the other arguments we have looked at. Berkeley clarifies that this is not the Christian notion that God knows and comprehends all things. He argues (as Philonous) that ‘men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him.’[p 168]

Hylas objects that this is a footling distinction, saying ‘so long as we all believe the same thing, what matter is it how we come by that belief? To which Philonous replies that they don’t believe the same thing. ‘For philosophers, though they acknowledge all corporeal beings to be perceived by God, yet they attribute to them an absolute subsistence distinct from their being perceived by any mind whatever, which I do not.’ He asks, ‘is there no difference between saying, there is a God, therefore he perceives all things: and saying, sensible things do really exist; and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived by an infinite mind: therefore there is an infinite mind, or God. This furnishes you with a direct and immediate demonstration, from a most evident principle, of the being of a God.’

Again Berkeley returns to the judgement that men make about sense data, which is not always the same, though the evidence is the same. As Philonous he says that ‘Divines and philosophers had proved beyond all controvery, from the beauty and usefulness of the several parts of the creation, that it was the workmanship of God. But that setting aside all help of astronomy and natural philosophy, all contemplation of the contrivance, order, and adjustment of things, and infinite mind should be necessarily inferred from the bare existence of the sensible world, is an advantage peculiar to them only who have made this easy reflexion: that the sensible world is that which we perceive by our several senses; and that nothing is perceived by the senses beside ideas; and that no idea or archetype of an idea can exist otherwise than in a mind.’

Berkeley regarded this as a powerful argument against atheism. Hylas says that ‘some eminent moderns’ entertain a notion of ‘seeing all things in God’, (a reference in particular to the French scholar Malebranche) and gives detail in response to questioning by Philonous. Hylas says that these men conceive that the soul being immaterial, ‘is incapable of being united with material things, so as to perceive them in themselves, but that she (the soul) by her union with the substance of God, which being spiritual is therefore purely intelligible, or capable of being the immediate object of a spirit’s thought. Besides, the divine essence contains in it perfections correspondent to each created being; and which are for that reason proper to exhibit or represent them to the mind.’

Philonous is not impressed with this argument, in that he argues it makes a created world ‘exist otherwise than in the mind of a spirit’. This is because, as he has said, ‘nothing is perceived by the senses besides ideas.’ He does not share the view with Malebranche that there is an absolute external world. According to Philonous, Malebranche ‘maintains that we are deceived by our senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended beings, of all which I hold the direct contrary.’ Hylas thinks however that what Philonous proposes comes near to ‘seeing all things in God’. The response of Philonous is that ‘few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them attentively’ [p169]. He says he is very remote from the view of Malebranche, because Malebranche builds on the most abstract general ideas…though he (Philonous) agrees with holy Scripture, in ‘that in God we live, and move, and have our being’. He explains briefly the difference between his view and that of Malebranche:

‘It is evident that the things I perceive are my own ideas, and that no idea can exist unless it be in a mind. Nor is it less plain that these ideas or things by me perceived, either themselves or their archetypes, exist independently of my mind, since I know myself not to be their author, it being out of my power to determine at pleasure, what particular idea I shall be effected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist in some other mind, whose will it is they should be exhibited to me. The things, I say, immediately perceived, are ideas or sensations, call them what you will. But how can any idea or sensation exist in, or be produced by, anything but a mind or spirit? This indeed is inconceivable; and to assert that which is inconceivable, is to talk nonsense….’

It may be that the objection to the notion put forward by Malebranche is that it depicts reality as something which is perceived as outside the human mind by the human mind, whereas Berkeley does not make this distinction. For Berkeley it is as if his mind is a subset of the divine cosmic mind, perceiving a subset of the ideas in that mind. If he perceives ideas, it is because the cosmic mind wills it.

The ideas which present themselves to Philonous, he argues, ‘it is very conceivable that they should exist in, and be produced by, a spirit; since this is no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless ideas; and by an act of my Will can form a great variety of them, and raise them up in my imagination: though it must be confessed, these creatures of the fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid, and permanent, as those perceived by my senses, which latter are called real things. From all which I conclude, there is a mind which affects me every moment with all the sensible impressions I perceive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I conclude the Author of them to be wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension.

Philonous emphasizes here that he is not saying that he sees ‘things by perceiving that which represents in the intelligible substance of God. This I do not understand; but I say, the things by me perceived are known by the understanding, and produced by the will, of an infinite spirit.’ So his objection is as I suggested, and he is not simply seeing what is ‘in’ God.

Beyond this, the Second Dialogue deals with Malebranche’s occasionalism, which sees the physical world as a place where God has the occasion to create motion and change, and also deals with ideas of substance.

1 Russell, Bertrand, The History of Western Philosophy, Chapter XVI, p 623 ‘Berkeley’

2 Op cit. p624

3 ‘Philonous’ is a composite of two Greek words, meaning ‘lover of mind’.

4 This information must have come from experimental data.