Read on Twitter
some informal Voegelin on the empirical problems with universal history, with historiographical stresses from 18th thru 20th c
deja vu with Yoffee
that business about White as communist evangelist delivering the good news from archeology is something else. we have trouble seeing our own ideological blinders, but mid 20th c is far enuf down stream to be pretty damned crazy looking.
in the Voegelin excerpt there is an unusual phrase, "cosmological empires". i too often forget that this is not a common term. here is a good bit on what he means by that
two parts to it, a "cosmological experience" and an associated experience of political order. the first part is what Cassirer calls myth as a symbolic form. also archeologist H Frankfort's consubstantiality. or some mix of Descola's revamped animism & totism. informally:
same kind of categorial looseness hinted at in this discussion of native american archeology https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1092812217291075584?s=20
one of the most important points about this experience is that none of the following are clearly distinguished in language: humanity, world, gods, sources of order.
nice piece here about H Frankfort from Wengrow:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/507074
https://www.jstor.org/stable/507074
Frankfort is still in currency, like this as in this 2007 conference program on divine kings: "the last overarching study of religious aspects of power in ancient Mesopotamia is almost sixty years old (Frankfort 1948)."
https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/religion-and-power-divine-kingship-ancient-world-and-beyond-0
https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/religion-and-power-divine-kingship-ancient-world-and-beyond-0
EV stresses how "In the original cosmological civilizations there is no comprehensive term for cosmos; there we talk only about the realities that we concretely have there, for instance, heaven and earth." cosmos is of course a greek term that early on just means arranged.
as late as 2020 folks are still arguing about when & where cosmos comes to mean for greeks something like an ordered everything, begging the question of a source for its order.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zjCdDwAAQBAJ
https://books.google.com/books?id=zjCdDwAAQBAJ
one of Voegelin's key points is that if all your categories are loose because underneath everything is an extension of your own experience, you can't have isolating concepts for a cosmos, or humans per se, or extra cosmic nous or whatever.
we can look at an intermediate example. if an Anaxagoras is going to get into trouble with the city for insisting the sun is just a fiery rock, there already has to be a strong sense that fiery rocks are just fiery rocks, like streams are just streams.
the 2nd part is the kind of political experience that accompanies that sort of manifest monistic "cosmological" experience that hasn't even developed a need for something like the late greek sense for cosmos that Horky is trying to track the emergence of above.
Yoffee's excellent book Myths of the Archaic State gives a fantastic description here https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1090743422259023872?s=20
for Voegelin, a key point is that political and social order IS cosmic order. and it is mediated, more or less successfully, by the regime. let me pull a bit of Yoffee that speaks to this:
"Kings are owed service because they are the guarantors of earthly law and order; since they communicate with the high gods to ensure the continuity of the cosmos, wealth
must legitimately accrue to them and to an inner elite who create and preserve the overarching traditions..."
must legitimately accrue to them and to an inner elite who create and preserve the overarching traditions..."
"that integrate a differentiated and stratified society. The symbols of this ideology are everywhere – in decorative arts, architecture, monuments, and buildings and in the very construction of space in sites."
but, if the ruler mediates cosmic order, then the bare individual, who experiences herself not as an isolated individual, but rather part of a fluid whole, along with fiery rocks & streams, an individual who perhaps doesn't even have terms like cosmos & soul ...
(in the greek ambit, the origin of psyche, of an individual body it animates, etc, all this is not so clear, much less what might have sufficed for describing experiences before that! i will maybe come back to this https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/)
... well, this person maybe cannot conceive of holding the cosmic mediator to account for the cost of disorder, much less setting herself up as an independent root of order by virtue of some direct, immediate connection. Voegelin's most common example is Egyptian.
Here is an informal presentation. It starts of with a "cosmological" description of crisis and renewal in the symbolic pronouncement of the mediating ruler, Hatsheput
it is followed by a parallel description of failed order from a subject consciousness that cannot, or does not, describe a personal pragmatic position capable of restoring order. the famous dispute of a man with his Ba.
so, a cosmological empire leaves a different sort of trace than what comes after it, where one has resistance centered on a personal & immediate experience of pragmatic ordering correction working directly by social networks. a few significant points:
first, this is not to say there is no cosmological political agency. a good part of Yoffee's excellent bk is about the "myth" that "ancient states were totalitarian regimes ... and imposed “true” law and order on their powerless citizens"
Yoffee explores how intersections of groups in multiple hierarchies equilibrate for a time. EVs question is not whether people did things, but rather under what shared, self-interpretive language they did things. clearly one is at the mercy of evidence & hermeneutics here.
EVs mid 20th c work is almost 100 yrs old by now. and stuff turns up. somebody looks at an old bit of papyrus in a drawer and discovers new Empedocles! EV made every effort to stay in synch with the evidence. i know next to nothing, but am not aware of any problem w EVs accounts.
secondly, as we see with the cosmos tracking, things unfold in complicated ways over very long paths: https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1169304790632976384?s=20
thirdly, as the opening tweet in this thread stresses, these paths are local, even if everything is mixed up by now. EV is not confused on that score. he made an effort on China. there is only so much one guy can do. https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1171456277848809475?s=20
4thly, i can see how there might hover here the scandal of some linguistic cognitive determinism. fine Davidsonian echo from GER Lloyd on that: "no anthropologist [returns] from the field simply to announce that he or she understood nothing about the people they went to study."
on the other hand - as Cassirer (among many) stressed - language, categories & concepts emerge together. every innovative use expresses something newly experienced. some times new ways of talking introduce "things" truly never yet seen.
there is math that excludes the use of variables and then there is something new. there is a logic of syllogism and there is something new. there is before statistics and after. all technical, sure. but then cosmos, psyche, these become technical terms. that is the point.
if you have not been introduced to a vocabulary, you may well have truly never thought that way. some thoughts are common: sky, food, water. some are not. there is no good reason for me to expect to get, say, early Chinese Buddhist thought without a LOT of study & effort.
so there is just no sense denying the general hermeneutical burden and the historicity of thought that goes with it. folks like Lloyd are excellent on how to carefully approach thorny issues of what is common vs peculiar. EV is no less careful.
digression on Lloyd. he is among the best on this difficult topic, imho. as is I Hacking. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/ian-hacking/how-shall-we-repaint-the-kitchen
5th, all we have is the record we have. so writing makes a huge difference. for us. and JUST as critically for the people using it.
https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/961609687966695425?s=20 https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1171108657800650753?s=20
https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/961609687966695425?s=20 https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1171108657800650753?s=20
6th, you have to contextualize maniacally. EV : "One has to distinguish very carefully in what context the word appears. You cannot get anywhere on that question with definitions, but [require] careful analysis of the sources in every single case, [to see] what the words mean."
a small example from Lloyd's 1999 "Mythology : reflections from a Chinese perspective". after noting that the Huainanzi indeed does not exhibit the highly polemical uses of "myth" that one sees on the road to Aristotle, it pays to remember it has a totally different context.
it is not a series of polemical exchanges from a strange setting where one has cultural unity w/out empire or priestly class. it is rather an encyclopedic collection provided to an emperor to help him maintain heavenly order.
another example, from R Bartlett. supernatural is a medieval term that gains currency largely from bureaucratic demands about how to record the miracles required for a growth industry in canonization.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/european-history-1000-1450/natural-and-supernatural-middle-ages?format=HB&isbn=9780521878326
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/european-history-1000-1450/natural-and-supernatural-middle-ages?format=HB&isbn=9780521878326
a supernatural miracle is not like a natural miracle in that we can't layout its natural causes. natural causes can include things like demons. or the astronomy behind eclipses, which tho natural are still obviously divine signs & portents.
well, anyway, this has been a long thread. at the end here (thankfully no doubt!) the take away is you can't just throw around terms like natural or supernatural in a non-modern context without massive qualification.
the folks Aristotle called physiologists talked a lot about "nature" but i don't think they meant by that anything at all close to what we mean by naturalism. i don't think our natural vs supernatural, or cosmos, or selves just lay around all the time for people to notice.
so, in sum, in some recent exchanges i have resisted the extension of nature vs supernature from our 21st c discourse to archaic discourse for reasons laid out in this thread.
wtf, one more cross-ref: https://twitter.com/svateboje/status/1182680747850817539?s=20
