The Key To Seeing Into the Past

One guiding question when reading ancient texts is, "What did they mean?" We, as readers, make certain assumptions - some of which we ourselves aren't aware of - about how the authors of those texts thought, how they experienced the world, and what the world itself is like. From there we ask our basic question, "What does this mean?"

This may seem tediously obvious. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for you, dear reader, this blog was established in part to question that tediously obvious approach to ancient texts - and consequently, to question that approach to the history of human consciousness itself.

Nowhere is this approach more painfully obvious than in academic philosophy, where many fundamental texts are in fact ancient ones. The discussion about what Plato meant, in texts he wrote two thousand five hundred years ago, starts with the question "What did he mean?"

What are some of the unspoken - even unthought - assumptions informing, like intoxicating vapors from the subconscious, the character of the thinking that asks that basic question, and ponders the tentative answers? They are numerous in detail, but some of the most fundamental are:

- Plato was a man like all human males
- Plato was a human being and behaved according to the same sorts of biological, social, and psychological 'laws' as human beings do today, even if he himself nor his culture knew what those laws were
- Athens was a human society in the usual sense of any society of today
- The land, the animals, the clouds, the Agean Sea, were of the same substance and of the same significance as those same things today

Especially in academic philosophy, as I knew it as a graduate student and so far as my continued acquaintance with it indicates, these are assumed, and what is primarily discussed - except in some very specialized discussions - are Plato's beliefs. About god, about the nature of political arrangements, about the working of the human mind, about the nature of water and sky and fire, the stars and sun and planets.

Now I'm going to introduce (it will be an introduction for some who are reading this - hi Meg!) an alternative approach to reading ancient texts, and consequently of understanding the authors of those texts. Another, very different, guiding question one can ask about those texts is, "What kind of thinking would account for this text?" How might one think, how might one perceive the world, how might one experience reality, such that the one would produce this text, would tell this story in just the way that it was told?

The more profound, or interesting, or suggestive way, of putting this is, "What sort of consciousness would produce such a text, such a story?"

This approach, at least initially, doesn't question the assumptions I just listed above; it simply doesn't assume them. This approach doesn't take issue with the assumptions individually. Instead, this guiding question directs one's thinking in such a way that one will end up finding out just what was the nature of Plato's experience of social and political realities of Athens of the time, and consequently something about those realities themselves. Not Plato's beliefs about them, but the substance of them.

I'm going to jump over to a different ancient text, the Old Testament, to flesh this out, because one of my first and most profound experiences of using this alternative guiding question involved a story in the Old Testament. Actually, that's not putting it exactly accurately, because I wasn't employing the question consciously, but more like groping for understanding.

The story is the making of the statue of a calf out of gold. That story - among many others - in the Old Testament simply didn't make sense to me - it didn't have any resonance for me. It didn't enlighten anything else in my life or experience when I read and studied it. Asking, "What does this mean?" was simply a non-starter for me. It was a dead question.

In a flash, I asked, or at least sensed, the question, "What kind of thinking would account for this event?" Specifically, for me, what would account for these people thinking that something that they had just then cobbled together, with their own hands, with their own gold, had an existence or power apart from their own hands? Why on earth would they worship something that they had themselves just put together from lifeless stuff?

BTW, don't get hung up on the particular example, though I would think that it isn't just an idiosyncrasy of mine that makes this story unintelligible to me. If you've never thought this about the story of the golden calf, think of some other story from an ancient text.

So, one day, I'm reading a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biograhia Literaria, where he's discussing this very story, or maybe about the Old Testament in general (I can't direct you to the passage, and I don't think it's essential), when I'm thinking my usual 'what the fuck' about the golden calf, when it occurs to me: maybe their perception of their immediate reality was so different from mine, that it was not only possible, but usual, for them to not be consciously aware of what their own hands were doing? What if they were so focused on the coming into being of the idol itself, that they were fundamentally unaware that their own hands were making it?

In asking the question, I let go of the usual approach which is fixated on beliefs - what did they believe about the nature of idols, for instance. The problem with that fixation (which is a consequence of the bundle of assumptions I listed above) is that it can't even entertain the possibility that those people - human consciousness as expressed by those people at that time - weren't even capable of entertaining any beliefs about anything. They had no beliefs about idols; they simply (or much more simply than we can usually imagine) experienced the rising up of this idol.

Another way of putting this, a more broad statement, is to say that the people of that time and place simply did not experience their physical bodies with anything like the specificity and locality that we take for granted today. They really weren't aware that they themselves were cobbling this blob of gold together. They really were unaware, in a very important sense, of the workings of their own hands.

But enough philosophy for one day; we'll return to this line of thinking in the next post. In the meantime, let's enjoy this evening together, as we in fact experience it today, in all it's glorious, material, physical specificity.