Map and Territory: Representing Ancient Thought

These are the ten most read articles on this blog through the four weeks between October 11 - November 10, 2016. Three of them were posted in September and October 2016. Nine of these articles deal with the categories of understanding we bring to bear on ancient cultural ideas. These categories have a huge bearing on our capacity to understand what we are looking at.

'Shar Kishati' and the Cult of Eternity.There is no dispute that there was a concept of eternity in antiquity, long before the Greeks. But if we don't register that it was a fully-formed rational concept, rather than a muddled notion about what might lie beyond the here and now, then we cannot understand what eternity represented in antiquity. We say that the concept of a wholly transcendent eternity could not have been part of a rational understanding, because there could have been no such understanding of it before the advent of philosophy in Greece. So we read antiquity in terms of our own understanding. This article explores the role and function of a 'cult of eternity' in the civilizations of antiquity. It was a chapter in the draft of The Sacred History of Being written in 2003-4.

Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas).The telos is another idea whose significance in antiquity is scarcely understood. It is an abstract concept, which often surfaces in ancient literature. It is not understood as an abstraction however, since the logic behind its importance is more or less invisible to us. As a result the telos is again treated as a muddled notion about the nature of the world, rather than a rational concept which has consequences for our understanding of antiquity. 

Plato's Point of View (and why we think he doesn't have one). What did Plato think about the nature of reality? I wrote this article as a consequence of a discussion with a reader. The study of Plato is riven with two principal approaches (discussed in The Sacred History of Being), each of which enshrines preconceptions - the first presumes that Plato's canon is a record of research, and the second that the canon contains a coherent body of doctrine, though it is difficult to understand what that doctrine is, because of the discursive and often wayward form of the Platonic dialogues. Each of these schools of thought  have in common that they treat the dialogues as reflecting a process of teaching. What was Plato teaching? How human beings ought to think about the world? How human beings might gain an understanding of a supersensible reality underlying physical reality?

In fact Plato proceeds from an understanding of the world of ideas (which transcend physical instances) to the world of physical reality, rather than the other way around. This understanding of the world of transcendent ideas is based on logical argument. The doctrine is based on a logical understanding of ideas and their relationships with each other, considered apart from their instantiation in physical reality. This means the contemplation of the ideas apart from scalar and spatial properties. 

Physics and the Origins of the Universe discusses the limitations on physics by the exclusive use of the efficient cause as an explanatory mechanism. In antiquity there were four principal causes available to explain reality, including the idea of the telos (the final cause). The idea of the plenum formed an armature for the four causes. 

Questions and Answers isolates a number of issues which are discussed in The Sacred History of Being.

Sameness and Difference in Plato discusses the need for reality to come to a relationship with itself, if a physical world of multiple entities is to come into Being. This idea is the basis of the interest in the undefined dyad in antiquity.

The Sweet Song of Swans is an article (presented as an extract from the rather long chapter in The Sacred History of Being) which discusses Plato's writing process, and the use of stylometry in the modern analysis of his work (principally by those who wish to find development in the sequence of dialogues), and how Greece came to be the home of philosophy, after classicists denied the description 'philosophers' to the ancient Egyptians.

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology considers the recent work of Marc Van De Mieroop, Philosophy Before the Greeks, published in October 2015, which interprets three principle classes of Babylonian literature entirely in structuralist terms. By doing so, the author argues that reality and truth existed for the Babylonians only in the texts. So a problematic way of understanding cultural production, devised at the turn of the twentieth century by a single scholar, and obviously not known by the Babylonians, becomes the lens through which Van De Mieroop 'understands' Babylonian thought.

Looked at from this point of view, questions leap out, such as,  what is the place of the Babylonian gods? Where is the logic of the Babylonian worship of their gods? Where are the ritual actions? Where are the sacrifices? Why did they do anything at all, beyond the reading and interpretation of the texts? 

Cultural Parallels and False Narratives is an article which explores the problematic nature of religion in the first millennium BCE, and how little is present which we would now regard as religious. How the change happened in later centuries is explored. Ancient religion is compared with current Hindu thought and practice, which has remained more or less unchanged since the first millennium BCE.

Thomas Yaeger, November 10, 2016

[Post revised, December 5, 2018]

 

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]