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The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 8 THE ANCIENT WORLD

Author: Iain McgilChrist Publisher: London, UK: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2010 Review Date: Status:💥

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THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE IN CLASSICAL GREECE

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In or around the sixth century BC a radical change in the way we think about the world seems to have occurred, which is conventionally seen as the beginnings of philosophy (according to Bertrand Russell, ‘philosophy begins with Thales’).33 Although many speculations were made over the next few hundred years, obviously leading to differing, sometimes opposed, conclusions, I would venture to say that the starting point in each case was one underlying perception: an intellectual sense of wonder at the sheer fact of existence, and, consequently, a conviction that our normal ways of construing the world are profoundly mistaken. In hindsight, one could call this an awareness of radical inauthenticity, and I believe it stems from the achievement of a degree of distance from the world.

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33. Russell, 1946, p. 25.

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In the light of what we know about the hemispheres, one could predict that this might lead in broadly one of two directions. It could lead to a turning away from the conceptualisation of experience, an attempt to rid perceptual phenomena of their customary accretions of thought, which render the world inauthentically familiar: a return from the re-presentation of reality towards an active openness to the ‘presencing’ of what is. In other words, a return to the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world. Or it could lead in the opposite direction, to a discrediting of the testimony of the senses, now seen as the root of deception, and a turning further inwards to the contemplation of the contents of the mind alone. In other words, not to a return to the right-hemisphere world, but on the contrary a rejection of it, since it now comes to be seen as intrinsically inauthentic, and therefore as invalid.

I believe we see both processes, but that they follow a progression. At first we see an equitable balance, governed by an awareness of the primacy of the right hemisphere, but with time the balance shifts ever further towards the triumph of the left.

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The most familiar point of commonality in pre-Socratic philosophy is an attempt to reconcile a sense of the apparent unity of the phenomenal world with its obvious diversity. This suggested that there should be some common originary principle, or arch , from which all things came: the multiplicity of appearances, phenomena, being a reflection of the mutability of the primary substance, which underlies everything and could metamorphose between different states. This project could (in my view, falsely) be seen as monistic: I would see it, not as a reduction of the many to the one, but as a way of accounting for division within unity, while at the same time respecting the reality of both.

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Russell’s ‘first philosopher’, Thales, like his successors in the Milesian school, of which he was, in the early sixth century, the founder, was a dedicated observer of the natural world: he made discoveries in astronomy – he is said to have correctly predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC – and used mathematics to address problems in engineering. He posited that the primary principle of all things, that from which they originate and to which they return, was water, a conclusion which it is assumed he derived from the obvious transitions of water between solid, liquid and gaseous states, and its omnipresence in living things.

However, Anaximander, Thales’ pupil, took things much further. He posited that all things arise from, and ultimately return to, an originary principle that he called the ‘unbounded’ or the ‘indefinite’ (apeiron). This carries with it the suggestion of something that cannot be qualified, and therefore must be approached apophatically (apeiron literally means undefined, or unlimited), and that has neither beginning nor end, and therefore is an endless source, from which things eternally arise and to which they eternally return, forever in process, rather than an arch that simply occupies a static point in time, or acts as origin of a chain of causation. Although not accessible to direct perception, the apeiron nonetheless accounted for phenomenal aspects of the world.

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Central to the idea of the apeiron is that it must be able to contain within itself, without their mutual annihilation, all opposing principles: no other candidate for the role, as Anaximander rightly saw, such as water, or any other conceivable physical element, could fulfil this condition (for a start, water cannot give rise to dryness). These opposing principles within the apeiron, according to Anaximander, are of crucial importance. They balance one another, and it is this giving and taking, this ebb and flow of opposites, that gives rise to all things, since, as he puts it, they ‘pay retribution to one another’ for their trespasses on each other, according to an inescapable logic in things: ‘When things perish, they return whence they come to be, in accordance with necessity, for they give to each other recompense for their injustice according to the ordinance of time’.34

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In contrast with his pupil Anaximenes, whose candidate for the arch was another element (in his case, air), Anaximander yields a number of insights: into the necessary, both productive and destructive, nature of the coming together of opposites; into the primacy of what is neither definite nor finite; and into the nature of the arch as process, rather than thing – all, in my view, insights into the right-hemisphere world, though the process of philosophy, reasoning about the causes and nature of the world, and trying to systematise it, may itself come from the left hemisphere.35

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Though fragments are all that remain to us of Heraclitus, as with the other pre-Socratic philosophers, significantly more of them survive, and those that have survived have a taciturn, apophthegmatic, and often paradoxical, quality that has made them an endlessly rich resource for interpretation over the centuries. This very fact has been held against Heraclitus by those who see understanding as necessarily determinate, transmissible through clarity, a commodity to be exported and imported, rather than something fruitfully undetermined, perhaps inevitably incomplete, requiring an individual process of exploration, and evoked from within us by a response to the suggestive possibility in the text. (Once again let me emphasise that I do not imply that ‘anything goes’, only that whatever it is that does go is unlikely to be neatly conformable to everyday language.)

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Heraclitus’ exact dates are unknown, but he flourished in the late sixth century BC. He came from Ephesus, an opulent rival city to the north of Miletus, and he cared little for the philosophy of the Milesians. He had a poor opinion of the dmos (the masses), had no pupils or followers, and, according to Diogenes Laertius, characteristically deposited his book as a dedication in the great temple of Artemis, where the general public would not have had access to it.36

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36. Diogenes Laertius, 1964, IX, §5.

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Heraclitus held that the nature of things is intrinsically hard to seek out using the tools with which we would normally equip ourselves for the task. Our natural assumptions and our common ways of thinking will lead us astray, and we need to be both wary and indefatigable in our seeking after truth. ‘He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected’, he wrote, ‘for it is trackless and unexplored’;37 the nature of things, and therefore the truthful evocation of them, is such that it ‘neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign’.38 The Heraclitus scholar Charles Kahn writes that the ‘parallel between Heraclitus’ style and the obscurity of the nature of things, between the difficulty of understanding him and the difficulty in human perception, is not arbitrary: to speak plainly about such a subject would be to falsify it in the telling, for no genuine understanding would be communicated’.39 The point is not that the nature of things is contradictory, but that the attempt to render them in language leads inevitably to what we call paradox, and the attempt to avoid paradox therefore distorts.40

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37. Heraclitus, fr. VII, Diels 18 (I use Kahn’s notation (1979), but give Diels’s numbers for reference. Translations from Heraclitus are Kahn’s unless otherwise stated).

38. ibid., fr. XXXIII, Diels 93.

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The hiddenness or necessarily implicit quality of Nature requires a particularly alert flexibility on the part of those who go to approach her. ‘Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure’;41 and openness is required by the seeker of wisdom, as well as enquiry into many different things: ‘men who love wisdom’, he wrote, ‘must be good enquirers into many things indeed’, for ‘Nature loves to hide’.42 He held that ‘one could not reach the ends of the soul though one travelled every way, so deep is its measure [logos]’, (possibly ‘so deep is what it has to tell us’).43 Heraclitus shared Thales’ view that ‘all things are full of gods’44 : for him all things are full of soul, and there is no sharp divide between mind or soul and the world of matter.45 Bruno Snell says that Heraclitus, who was ‘the first writer to feature the new concept of the soul’, in speaking of its depth was drawing on a history of archaic poetry containing such words as bathyphron, deep-pondering, and bathymetes, deep-thinking. ‘Concepts like “deep knowledge”, “deep thinking”, “deep pondering”, as well as “deep pain” are common enough in the archaic period. In these expressions, the symbol of depth always points to the infinity of the intellectual and spiritual, which differentiates it from the physical.’46

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39. Kahn, 1979, p. 124. Similar points have been made about Heidegger, who learnt so much from Heraclitus, and were indeed made by Heidegger about himself.

40. Kahn quotes Hölscher: ‘Paradox ist seine Rede, weil seine Wahrheit paradox ist’: Hölscher, 1968, p. 141.

41. Heraclitus, fr. LXXX, Diels 54.

42. ibid., fr. IX, Diels 35; fr. X, Diels

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44. Aristotle, De Anima, I.5, 411a7.

45. Kahn, 1979, pp. 128–30.

46. Snell, 1960, pp. 17–18.

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43. ibid., fr. XXXV, Diels 45 (translation adapted from Snell).

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Heraclitus’ response to the misleading nature of re-presentation, to the way things seem, is not to go further in that direction, away from phenomena, but to look again at what our experience tells us. In other words, he does not advise a turning inwards in order to discover the nature of reality, but a patient and careful attention to the phenomenal world. Most people, he says, make the mistake of prioritising opinion, their ideas, over experience, over ‘things as they encounter them’.47 Thus ‘whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this I prefer’. Elsewhere he writes that ‘eyes are surer witnesses than ears’, in other words that what we experience is more certain than what people say about what they experience.48 But experience is not enough on its own. It needs understanding; and most people are not in a position to understand what they experience: ‘eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language’.49

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47. Heraclitus, fr. IV, Diels 17.

48. ibid., fr. XIV, Diels 55; fr. XV, Diels 101a. In a deliberately provocative (because probably aimed at the astronomers of the Milesian school) expression of the primacy of phenomena, he is even reported to have said that ‘the sun is the size of a human foot’, and that ‘the sun is new every day’: ibid., fr. XLVII, Diels 3; fr. XLVIII, Diels 6.

49. ibid., fr. XVI, Diels 107.

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For Heraclitus logos, the ultimate reason, cause, meaning, or deep structure of the world, is not some power that lies somewhere behind appearances, as it later would become, but is what Kahn calls a ‘phenomenal property’, evidenced and experienced in reasoned thought and responses to the world.50

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50. Kahn, 1979, p. 102.

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If we are enabled to attend to experience, rather than to our pre-conceived ideas about experience, we encounter, according to Heraclitus, the reality of the union of opposites. Appreciating this coming together, wherein all opposing principles are reconciled, was the essence of sophia (wisdom, the root of philosophy) for Heraclitus.51 Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence.52 His famous pronouncement that ‘war is father of all, and king of all’, is the most celebrated expression of the creative power of opposition, of the fact that opposites do not cancel one another, but (here he seems to me to be in agreement with Anaximander) are the only way to create something new.53 Thus, as Heraclitus says, high and low notes are both needed for harmony, and we would have no life without the coming together of male and female.54 ‘They do not understand’, he says, ‘how a thing agrees, at variance with itself: it is a harmoni like that of the bow or the lyre.’55 To get near understanding this, one needs to know that harmoni can be understood in each of three senses: a fitting together (as of cut surfaces that are ‘true’), a reconciliation (as of warring parties), and an attunement (as of strings or tones); equally one needs to appreciate that the bow and the lyre consist in nothing other than strings that are, and must be, under tension, where the stable complex whole is balanced and efficient not despite, but because of, a pulling in opposite directions. Perhaps Heraclitus’ most elegant compression of meaning lies in his aphorism: ‘the name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos); its work is death’.56

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51. ibid., p. 21.

52. Heraclitus, fr. XLIX, Diels 126.

53. ibid., fr. LXXXIII, Diels 53.

54. ibid., fr. LXXXI, Diels A22.

55. ibid., fr. LXXVIII, Diels 51.

56. ibid., fr. LXXIX, Diels 48.

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The taut string, its two ends pulling apart under opposing forces, that for bow or lyre is what gives its vital strength or virtue, is the perfect expression of a dynamic, rather than static, equilibrium. This holding of movement within stasis, of opposites in reconciliation, is also imaged in Heraclitus’ most famous saying, that ‘all things flow’.57 Stability in the experiential world is always stability provided by a form through which things continue to flow: ‘As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them … One cannot step twice into the same river’.58 The river is always different, but always the same. Ultimately, of course, rivers themselves, not just the waters that flow through them, come and go: in this too our bodies are like rivers. But stasis, the opposite of change and flux, is incompatible with life, and leads only to separation, and disintegration: ‘even the potion separates unless it is stirred’.59

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57. Known to us from Plato’s report: Cratylus, 401d.

58. Heraclitus, fr. L, Diels 12; fr. LI, Diels 91.

59. ibid., fr. LXXVII, Diels 125.

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Heraclitus is sometimes included amongst those who thought that the arch was one of the elements, in his case fire. This is because of his saying that ‘all things are requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods’.60 However, if it is to be thought of in this way, it is in Anaximander’s sense, as an endless process (requital), rather than as a ‘cause’, or occupying a point in time. Fire is also unique amongst the elements in not being in any sense a thing or substance, but a pure process, pure phenomenal energy (in fact Heraclitus’ meaning may be an intuition of the interchangeability of matter and energy); it also perfectly illustrates the power both to create life and to destroy it. In all this it manages to capture what the apeiron has over a substance such as water or air, while not itself being absent from the phenomenal world in the way the apeiron has to be.

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60. ibid., fr. XL, Diels 90.

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Heraclitus seems to me to have grasped the essence of the balance between the hemispheres, while remaining aware of the primacy of the right hemisphere’s world.

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In addition he sees the logos as something ‘shared’, reciprocal, perhaps even reciprocally coming into being, rather than, as he says we tend to see it, something achieved through ‘private’, isolated thought processes;61 and he emphasises that things change their nature depending on context (seawater, for example, is life-giving to fish, deadly poison to humans).62 In one fragment that Kahn regards as authentic but uninterpretable, Heraclitus is remembered for using the term anchibasi , ‘stepping near’: no better term could be found to characterise the right hemisphere’s approach to truth, when contrasted with that of the left hemisphere.63

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61. ibid., fr. III, Diels 2.

62. ibid., fr. LXX, Diels 61.

63. Kahn, 1979, Appendix I, p. 289. The fragment in question is included in the corpus by Diels (122), though not by Kahn. The conversation on Gelassenheit in Heidegger’s late Feldweg-Gesprächen originally bore the title ‘Anchibasie’; he suggests that we should understand the term as in-die-Nähe-hinein-sich-einlassen (‘letting oneself into a tentative closeness with’ whatever it may be).

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Let us move on to the early fifth century BC, in Elea, a Greek colony on the southern coast of Italy, where Parmenides founded his own school of philosophy. Parmenides was a priest of Apollo: his main work is a poem that survives in fragmentary form, and is explicitly opposed to Heraclitus (and, on different grounds, to Pythagoras). The important message enshrined in its double structure – The Way of Truth versus The Way of Belief – is that the phenomenal world is a deception. Thought is all that there is: ‘for thought and being are the same thing’.64 What can be thought must be, and what cannot be thought cannot exist. What follows from logic, however much it flies in the face of experience, must be true. However, contradiction, a conflict within the system of language and reason, is taken as a sure indication of error.

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That there is movement is certainly a thought most of us have, and so one would have thought that, by Parmenides’ logic, it must be true. But apparently not: motion turns out to be an illusion. ‘All that exists’ cannot move, because then it would move into the void, where nothing exists – a logical impossibility. (If this is reminiscent of Zeno, that is because Zeno was a pupil of Parmenides.) So everything that is remains so, timeless, undifferentiated and unchanging. All is stasis, and the process of becoming is forever banished. The phenomena of movement and change are illusory appearances. In its prioritising of a logical system over truth to phenomena, in its refusal of ambiguity or contradiction, in its achievement of certainty and stasis, this philosophy shows its allegiance to the world of the left hemisphere. Heidegger, it must be said, adopts the view that ultimately Heraclitus and Parmenides were saying the same thing; but he achieves this, it seems to me, by a sort of sleight of hand, rescuing Parmenides’ Being by finding it ultimately in the being of all actually existing beings, so that the two are reconciled.65 If true, it demonstrates only what I have argued for in Part I of this book, that left-hemisphere paths will, if followed far enough, lead inevitably to the world as recognised by the right hemisphere.

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64. Parmenides, 1898, fr. DK B3 (trans. A. Fairbanks).

65. Heidegger, 1959. I am also aware of Peter Kingsley’s view (2001) that Parmenides is a misunderstood mystic. I am in no position to evaluate his position authoritatively, though I note that it has generally not been well received by those who are.

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As Plato in his dialogues Parmenides and Sophist reveals, Parmenides’ position leads to many unpalatable consequences. Effectively the complete sundering of the worlds of experience and of ideas leads to the consequence that ‘we do not participate in knowledge itself’66 (the opposite of Heraclitus’s claim that the logos is shared). So philosophers do not participate in knowledge (a self-undermining position) and none of us can partake in the reality of being (another). The impossibility of difference as well as sameness brings all discourse to a halt.67 None of this would matter so much if self-undermining positions were not expressly excluded by Parmenides (and by Socrates), and if rational discourse was not held by both to be the way to truth.

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66. Plato, Parmenides, 134c (trans. S. Scolnicov).

67. Plato, Sophist, 259e.

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In the Theaetetus, Socrates points out that Parmenides was the only one of ‘the wise’ to deny that all is change and motion.68 Yet, despite this, Parmenides had a huge influence both on Plato, and, through him, on the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Plato’s belief that knowledge must be unfailing and general led to the position that we cannot know things that are changing or particular. In the left-hemisphere sense of ‘knowledge’ this is true. For Plato that knowledge then becomes reality: the realm of the Forms, disembodied, ideal and universal abstractions, of which actual, physical sensory objects of experience are but shadows. The need for certainty and clarity, coupled with the law of the excluded middle, blinded us to the possibility of what came to be seen as paradox. From this time forward, Greek philosophy is dominated by the assumptions and modes of operation of the left hemisphere. And by the time of Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle writing in the third century BC, Heraclitus’s riddling, epigrammatic style had become simply – a sign of mental illness.69

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68. Plato, Theaetetus, 152e.

69. According to Diogenes Laertius (1964, IX, §6), Theophrastus blamed the ‘half-finished’ nature of Heraclitus’ work, and its apparent ‘inconsistencies’ on melancholia ( ): I am grateful to Edward Hussey and Chris Pelling for help in interpretation of the phrase . Heraclitus became known as ‘the melancholy philosopher’, probably on the basis of Theophrastus’ comments, and Democritus as ‘the laughing philosopher’, a tradition that may begin with his essay Peri euthumies, ‘On cheerfulness’ (Diogenes Laertius, 1964, IX, §13). For whatever reason, the tradition persisted, with notable treatments in literature by Juvenal, Rabelais and Burton, and in painting by Bramante, Rubens, and (in an interesting portrait of himself painting his self-portrait) Rembrandt. There is, if nothing else, an appropriateness, in terms of hemisphere asymmetry, since Heraclitus’ philosophy is, as I have suggested, expressive of the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world, and Democritus’ philosophy of the left hemisphere’s.

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The very fact of having a philosophy at all was one of the many changes to be brought about by the advent of necessary distance. Drama, at least as conceived by the Greeks, is another, and as Nietzsche saw it, a demonstration of the necessary balance of Apollo and Dionysus.70 This distance has nothing to do with the ironising distance, or Verfremdungseffekt, espoused by modern dramatists, and indeed works to the opposite end. It enables us to feel powerfully with, and thus to know ourselves in, others, and others in ourselves. ‘Man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself,’ as Snell says; and it is in drama that we find that echo.71 The ‘process of the tragic chorus is the original phenomenon of drama’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘this experience of seeing oneself transformed before one’s eyes and acting as if one had really entered another body, another character’.72 In tragedy, we see for the first time in the history of the West the power of empathy, as we watch not just the painful moulding of the will, and of the soul, of men and women (the constant theme of tragedy is hubris), but the gods themselves in evolution, moving from their instincts for vengeance and retributory justice towards compassion and reconciliation.

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70. Drama is ‘the Apolline embodiment of Dionysiac insights and effects’: Nietzsche, 1999, §8, p. 44.

71. Snell, 1960, pp. 200–1.

72. Nietzsche, 1999, §8, p. 43.

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And it is also in drama that opposites that can never be reconciled in the explicit discourse of philosophy come to be, nonetheless, reconciled, through the implicit power of myth.

There was in Athens a special cult of Prometheus, the god of technical skill and intelligence (though not of wisdom).73 It will be remembered that it was Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to mortals: in the terms of this book, the emissary taking to himself the power of the Master. It was said that Zeus had planned to destroy humankind, and that Prometheus’s gift brought them hope of power to resist. For this crime, Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a rock, where every day his liver would be torn out by a bird of prey only to grow again in time for the next day’s torment to begin. In his play Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus sympathetically represents Prometheus’ fate, although, through the device of the chorus, he is enabled to remain ultimately ambiguous in his stance. He puts into Prometheus’ mouth this justification of himself as the deliverer of humanity:

Before they were like babes, but I roused them to reason and taught them to think … though they had eyes to see, they saw in vain; they had ears, but could not hear; but like forms in dreams, they spent their entire lives without purpose and in confusion … until I showed them the risings of the stars, and their settings, hard to discern. I invented for them Number, chief of all devices, and how to set down words in writing, Memory’s handmaid, and mother of the Muses …74

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73. Prometheus’ name means ‘forethought’, which might seem to suggest the frontal lobes. However, as Aeschylus has him say, ‘I caused men no longer to foresee their death … I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness’ (Prometheus Bound, lines 249–51, trans. P. Vellacott): the combination of foresight with inability to foresee death, a state of optimistic denial, could only be left frontal. His name could also signify ‘cunning’, which again would go with representing the capacities of the left frontal lobe. Born a Titan, he realised that the Olympians would win in the struggle of the Titans and the Olympians, and sided with the Olympians, thus initially evading the punishment meted out by Zeus to the other Titans. His greatest punishment, which however he did not foresee, the punishment that Zeus stored up for him, was to see humankind suffer, to suffer so badly that they would rather desire death than life, and yet to be powerless to help them. For Prometheus, empathy is his nemesis, the punishment he didn’t foresee; for that other Promethean figure, Faust, empathy (at least according to Goethe’s version of the myth) is his salvation, the reward he had not foreseen.

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74. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, I, lines 443–4, 447–50 & 457–61 (trans. I. McG.).

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It is Prometheus, in other words, who brings numeracy and literacy. Although in Aeschylus’ play, Hermes, as the messenger of Zeus (the ‘Master’s emissary’), is sent to pile on the agony to the unrepentant Prometheus, in some versions of the myth Hermes himself is credited with bringing fire from heaven, and he is in some respects Prometheus’s alter ego. Like Prometheus, Hermes was associated with the invention of weights and measures, and with literature and the arts. Importantly from the point of view of this book, he was also the god of merchants and tricksters, corresponding to the Egyptian Thoth, the god of sciences and technology, who was also the god of writing (Plato, in the Phaedrus, considered Thoth to have been its inventor, and deplored its advent).75 Prometheus, too, ‘founder of the sacrifice, was a cheat and a thief’, writes Kerényi: ‘these traits were at the bottom of all the stories that deal with him’, the image of those who steal the divinity that lies round about them, ‘whose temerity brings immeasurable and unforeseen misfortune upon them’.76

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75. Hagège, 1988, p. 74.

76. Kerényi, 1991, p. xxii.

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Aeschylus, whose works were written in the first part of the fifth century BC, is generally accepted to be the founder of Greek tragedy, and was certainly so designated by A. W. Schlegel: ‘Aeschylus is to be considered as the creator of Tragedy; in full panoply she sprung from his head, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter.’77 What is more, Schlegel considered Prometheus Bound to be the essence of tragedy: ‘The other productions of the Greek Tragedians are so many tragedies; but this I might say is Tragedy herself.’78 Ironically it is not certain that Aeschylus himself wrote the play (although the consensus appears to be in favour);79 but certainly, if tragedy recounts the history of its hero’s downfall from the height of glory to the depths of despair through the consequences of hubris, this play, along with Milton’s Paradise Lost, must count as the epitome of tragedy.

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77. A. W. Schlegel, 1886, p. 79.

78. ibid., p. 93.

79. Mark Griffith, in the introduction to his edition of Prometheus Bound (1983), writes: ‘it has certainly been regarded as Aeschylean since the third century BC, and no doubts as to its authenticity are recorded from ancient authors or in the scholia to the play. Most modern scholars have seen no good reason to doubt the traditional ascription …’ (p. 32).

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Aeschylus was a brave soldier, who fought at Marathon and Salamis, and took part in the rout of the Persians; indeed he was so proud of this that his epitaph referred to his participation at the battle of Marathon, but not to his pre-eminence as a playwright. He was also a man with profound respect for the religious mysteries. He was an initiate at Eleusis, and it shows how seriously the mysteries were taken that, despite the esteem in which he was held, he almost lost his life for having supposedly disclosed aspects of the mysteries in his Eumenides.80 As a youth he tended vines, and, according to Pausanias, on one occasion fell asleep in the vineyard; in his dream, Dionysus, god of wine, appeared to him and exhorted him to write tragedy. The plays he wrote were performed as part of the competitive spectacle at the festivals of Dionysus, which had then not long been established.

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80. The story of Aeschylus being put on trial for profaning the mysteries may, however, not be reliable: Lefkowitz, 1981, p. 68.

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Aeschylus was, then, a Dionysian; not just in the technical sense, but in the Nietzschean sense. His intuitive and imaginative art, ambiguous as Dionysus himself, ‘the ambiguous god of wine and death’, came to him via divine inspiration, announced to him in his sleep, and was inextricably bound to the world of religion and its mysteries. As Sophocles said of him, ‘Aeschylus does what is right without knowing it’: there cannot be a clearer statement of his debt to the workings of the right hemisphere.81 Aeschylus’ description of the fate of Prometheus is profoundly moving and compassionate, yet also recounts the pain that comes on man from his hubristic attempt to seize and use what belongs to another realm in order to make himself powerful because, as Schlegel puts it, Prometheus is ‘an image of human nature itself’.82

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81. A. W. Schlegel, 1886, p. 95.

82. ibid., p. 93.

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Gnothi seauton: know thyself. These famous words were sculpted over the entrance to the temple of the oracle at Delphi. The oracle itself, speaking through a woman who was in a state of intoxication from breathing the vapours arising from the infusion of sacred herbs, was a way of setting aside the ever too ready grasp on the world of the rationalising intellect, and opening it to the intuitions that arise from interpreting ambiguous utterances in an atmosphere of devotion – a sort of self-revealing Rorschach blot, rather like the Chinese book of poetic, and purportedly divinatory, utterances, the I Ching. It seems to me that in Aeschylus’ tragedy of Prometheus, the mind is coming to know itself, ‘without knowing it’: it is the mind (in fact the brain) cognising itself. The tragedy of Prometheus is a tale of two hemispheres. And, in more general terms, the Greek invention, or discovery, of tragedy, based as it is on the ever recurrent theme of downfall through hubris, represents the paradox of self-consciousness: the beginnings of the mind coming to know and understand its own nature.

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84. de Kerckhove, 1988a.

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Money has an important function which it shares with writing: it replaces things with signs or tokens, with representations, the very essence of the activity of the left hemisphere. I would suggest that they are aspects of the same neuropsychological development. The same developments that lead to the word being more ‘real’ (for the left hemisphere) than the reality it signifies occur with money. Richard Seaford asserts that monetary currency necessitates an antithesis of sign and substance, whereby the sign becomes decisive, and implies an ideal substance underlying the tangible reality.103 It is interesting that, much as Skoyles had seen the alphabet as the prime mover in a new way of thinking, Seaford sees money as being the prime mover of a new kind of philosophy, and one can certainly understand why, given that this formulation of Seaford’s bears an uncanny resemblance to Plato’s theory of Forms. As the reader will by now imagine, I would not favour seeing either the alphabet or currency as the prime movers, but as epiphenomena, signs of a deeper change in hemisphere balance evidenced in both.

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103. Seaford, 2004, esp. pp. 136–46.

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Money changes our relationships with one another in predictable ways. These also clearly reflect a transition from the values of the right hemisphere to those of the left. In Homer, artefacts of gold and silver may be aristocratic gifts, and are associated with deity and immortality, but are not money: in fact, significantly, unformed gold and silver, as such, had negative associations.104 Before the development of currency, there is an emphasis on reciprocity. Gifts are not precise, not calculated, not instantaneously enacted or automatically received, not required; the gifts are not themselves substitutable, but unique; and the emphasis is on the value of creating or maintaining a relationship, which is also unique.

581

With trade, all this changes; the essence is competitive: the exchange is instantaneous, based on equivalence, and the emphasis not on relationship, but on utility or profit.105 As Seaford points out, money is homogeneous, and hence homogenises its objects and its users, eroding uniqueness: it is impersonal, unlike talismanic objects, and weakens the need for bonds, or for trust based on a knowledge of those with whom one is exchanging. It becomes a universal aim, corrupting even death ritual, and threatening other values as it transcends and substitutes for them; and it becomes a universal means, including to divine good will or to political power. It ‘breeds an unlimited greed’.106 The late development of the polis brings about these changes and leads to the development of coinage.107

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104. ibid., pp. 30–33.

105. ibid., pp. 68–9.

106. ibid., pp. 149–65.

107. ibid., p. 67.

581

So it was not just the alphabet, but currency, which arose in the Greek world. What is more, both arose out of the possibilities offered by trade. Braudel refers to both the alphabet and currency as ‘accelerators of change’:

582

for currency, the need for it had been felt before it appeared … It was in about 685 BC that authentic money (coins made of electrum, a mixture of gold and silver) appeared for the first time in history in Lydia, the rich realm of Croesus … But most specialists think that a true monetary economy was not in place until the fourth century BC and the achievements of the Hellenistic period. In the eighth and seventh centuries, this stage was still a long way off. Nevertheless, throughout the Aegean, things were stirring. Having been long cut off from the eastern world, Greece now made contact with it again through the cities on the Syrian coast, in particular Al-Mina. The luxury of this area dazzled the Greeks, whose way of life was still modest. Along with artefacts from Phoenicia and elsewhere – ivories, bronzes and pottery – Greece began to import a new style of living. Foreign decorative art came as a contrast to the stiff geometrical style. With works of art came fashions, the first elements of Greek science, superstitions, and possibly the beginnings of Dionysiac cults.108

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108. Braudel, 2001, p. 264.

582

There are several things to note here. First, writing became a tool of command, trade, communication – and ‘often of demystification’. Its movement is towards power or the means of power, yes; but also already, for better or worse (and sometimes, undoubtedly, it will be for the better) towards the explicit at the expense of the implicit – the direction of the left hemisphere.

583

But this passage is fascinating for a completely different reason: the way it charts, if one thinks about the dates, a progression through the Greek world. First, there is the reference to Al-Mina, a trading post at the mouth of the Orontes, probably founded in the ninth century BC, though it had been a point of commerce with the Mycenaean world since the fourteenth century BC. Of this, Braudel elsewhere comments:

It was to be a crucially important colony, representing as it did the first opening up of Greece to Syria, Palestine, the neo-Hittite and Aramaean states, Assyria, Urardhu and all the caravan routes of the continental Middle East. The city was moreover largely populated by Phoenicians. It is not therefore surprising that it is increasingly seen as the city where Greece met the east; it was here that the Greeks became acquainted with the Phoenician alphabet, here too that the orientalising phase of Greek art originated, the first challenge to the geometric style.109

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109. ibid., p. 246.

583

From the earliest period, there was cross-fertilisation of the Greek mind with influences from the East (also a significant element in the genesis of pre-Socratic thought).110 The elements that are here identified – art that was no longer ‘in the stiff geometrical style’ beloved of the left hemisphere, the ‘first elements’ of Greek science, namely the deductive method (not the theorising or system-building which came later), ‘superstitions’ and the ‘beginnings of the Dionysiac cults’, that is, religious mystery – all speak of influences of the right hemisphere.

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110. See West, 1971; and West, 1997.

584

currency began circulating in the seventh century, but was not much used; it was only really widespread by the fourth century.111 In terms of hemispheric balance, an early right-hemisphere influence stands in equipoise with influences of the left hemisphere; then seems to give way, at least measured by the two critical areas of writing and currency, by the fourth century to left-hemisphere preponderance – around the time when the world of the pre-Socratic philosophers ceded to the world of Plato.

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111. The earliest coins date from the late seventh century or early sixth century, according to Seaford, 2004, p. 129

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112. Braudel, 2001, p. 146 ff.

588

Braudel believed, as did de Selincourt, that ‘everything worthwhile [in Greek culture] had been accomplished’ by the time Plato and Aristotle came on the scene, in the fourth century. This would certainly be the view of Heidegger, as it had been that of Nietzsche, according to whom the highpoint was the age of Aeschylus, when Apollo and Dionysus were reconciled, the time of the birth of tragedy. In Nietzsche’s view, in the end ‘the ambiguous god of wine and death yielded the stage to Apollo and the triumph of rationality, to theoretical and practical utilitarianism as well as democracy, which was a contemporary phenomenon’, symptoms of the ageing of Greek civilisation, and foreshadowing the depressing spectacle, as he saw it, of the modern Western world.120 Without necessarily espousing the extreme view of Nietzsche on the role of the Apollonian, this analysis seems to me essentially correct.

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120. Braudel, op. cit., pp. 287–8.

593

The right hemisphere is prophetic or ‘divinatory’, however, and can see where this will lead.

593

Its prophecies are enshrined in the myth of Prometheus. Where did it lead?

In the late fifth century BC, Socrates’ pupil Plato was born. Plato’s written works date from the early fourth century, and in these dialogues, real or imagined, between Socrates and one of the many who came to him inquiring after truth, Socrates demonstrates to his inquirer the falsity of the premises from which he started, by leading him to a contradiction that follows logically from those premises. Plato’s influence on the history of logic, mathematics, and moral and political philosophy cannot be overestimated, despite the fact that his works were lost from view for over a thousand years until the Renaissance, available only in partial reports and commentaries translated into Latin via Arabic. His legacy includes the (left-hemisphere-congruent) beliefs that truth is in principle knowable, that it is knowable through reason alone, and that all truths are consistent with one another.

595

By the time of Socrates, the Heraclitean respect for the testimony of our senses had been lost. The phenomenal world yields only deception: the ideas of things come to be prioritised over things themselves, over whatever it is of which we have direct knowledge. Plato’s doctrine of the eternal Forms gives priority to the unchanging categorical type (say, the ‘ideal table’) over the myriad phenomenal exemplars (actual tables in the everyday world), which are no more than imperfect copies of the ideal form. It is true that Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, who was a true scientist, and probably the most brilliant polymath the world has ever known, interested in, as far as possible without preconceptions, observing and understanding the natural world, and ever mindful of the importance of experience, effectively reversed this, finding the universal in and through particular instantiations. But, alas, the spirit of Aristotle did not survive with his works. Instead they became, in an inversion of that spirit, a sort of Holy Writ of the experiential world for 1500 years – rendering his thought about experience, provisional as it was, static, unchanging, and idealised as infallible,

595

There were tendencies in the very fabric of Greek language and thought that inevitably favoured abstraction and idealisation. Snell makes the point that the Greek language, by inventing the definite article, could take an attribute of an existing thing, expressed through an adjective – that it was ‘beautiful’, say – and turn it into an abstract noun by adding the definite article: so from beautiful (kalos) to ‘the beautiful’ (to kalon).126 In a clever and audacious, one might say hubristic, inversion, the left hemisphere now seems to imply that what is purely conceptual is what is real, and what is experienced, at least by the senses, is downgraded, and amazingly enough actually becomes the ‘representation’! Thus in The Republic, Plato writes:

The stars that decorate the sky, though we rightly regard them as the finest and most perfect of visible things, are far inferior, just because they are visible, to the true realities; that is, to the true relative velocities, in pure numbers and perfect figures, of the orbits and what they carry in them, which are perceptible to reason and thought but not visible to the eye … We shall therefore treat astronomy, like geometry, as setting us problems for solution, and ignore the visible heavens, if we want to make a genuine study of the subject …127

This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years.

1066

126. Snell, 1960, p. 229.

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127. Plato, Republic, 529d–530c (trans. H. D. P. Lee).

596

The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’128 Degeneration, by this account, begins relatively late in Greece, with Plato, and involves the inability to trust what is implicit or intuitive. ‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols:

one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this.

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128. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 202.

129. Nietzsche, 1954, aphorisms 5, 6 & 10, pp. 476–8 (emphasis in original).

596

With the loss of the power of intuition,

rationality was then hit upon as the saviour; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or – to be absurdly rational.129

597

And if this seems to be just the pardonable excesses of Nietzschean furor, the ravings of an inspired madman, consider these words from Panksepp the neuroscientist:

Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith … It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts130

(and cf. Friedrich Waismann above, p. 157).

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130. Panksepp, 1998, p. 335.

597

In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

598

Great philosopher that he undoubtedly was, Plato is not quite straightforward in this respect. Even Plato had intuitions he could not dismiss. What is quite moving, even tragic, in the true sense (because it involves Socrates’ hubristic trust in his own dialectic powers), is to see Socrates/Plato torn between his own intuitions and the awareness that he is no longer at liberty to trust them. Plato was originally a poet and it was his association with Socrates that impressed on him the need to forsake poetry for dialectic. In The Republic Socrates fulminates against the works of

tragedians and other dramatists – such representations definitely harm the minds of their audiences … representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth … all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us a superficial representation … So great is the natural magic of poetry. Strip it of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to … the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and … his art is something that has no serious value.

599

The work of painters and artists of all kinds, including poets are ‘far removed from reality’, and appeal to ‘an element in us equally far removed from reason, a thoroughly unsound combination’. Art is ‘a poor child born of poor parents’, appeals to ‘a low element in the mind’, and has ‘a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters’. Poets are to be banished from the Republic.131 All those involved in creative arts deal in deceit: the metaphor is a lie. Calculation (logic) is to be preferred to imagination: denotation to connotation. Being a poet also involves imagining one’s way into many things, and ‘is unsuitable for our state, because there one man does one job and does not play a multiplicity of rôles’: so much for Heraclitus’ insight that one needs to inquire into many things, not just one, if one is not to be led astray.132 Plato’s proscriptions on music, like so much else about his Republic, remind one of a Soviet-style totalitarian state. There is no need of a wide harmonic range; most rhythms and modes are outlawed; flutes, harps and ‘harpsichords’ are banned, as are all ‘dirges and laments’; and there will be need only of two kinds of music, the kind that encourages civil orderliness, and the kind that sternly encourages us to war.133 All has been reduced to utility in the service of the will to power.134

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133. ibid., 398–400.

134. Cf. Lenin’s words about the arts in relation to the state, p. 412 below.

600

But at the same time, Plato himself needs to use myth in order to explain things that resist formulation in language or dialectic: the allegory of the Cave, or the ring of Gyges, for example. In fact Plato appears ambivalent, and gives hints, particularly in the Symposium, that the realm of the Forms attracts us in a way that transcends the logical; and that those who have intuited the Form of the Good, and the Form of the Beautiful, are compelled to pursue them, and to try to convey them to others, exactly as I have suggested the ideals towards which the right hemisphere is drawn act upon it, contrasting these with the purely abstracted forms of things which are created by the left hemisphere. While awaiting death in prison, Socrates’ daemon (conscience) visited him and repeatedly told him to make music.135 ‘Whatever urged these exercises on him’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘was something similar to his warning voice’:

it was his Apolline insight that, like some barbarian king, he did not understand the noble image of some god and, in his ignorance, was in danger of committing a sin against a deity. The words spoken by the figure who appeared to Socrates in dream are the only hint of any scruples in him about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science?136

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135. Plato, Phaedo, 60e5 ff.

136. Nietzsche, 1999, §14, p. 71.

600

But there is no doubt that it is ultimately the left-hemisphere version of the world that Plato puts forward, for the first time in history; puts forward so strongly that it has taken two thousand years to shake it off.

And so it is that perhaps the most profound legacy of the Greeks, their myths, come to be seen as ‘myths’ as we now use the term, false histories. But here is Malinowski on the true nature of myth:

These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them.137

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137. Malinowski, 1926, p. 39.

601

This kind of truth cannot be apprehended directly, explicitly; in the attempt, it becomes flattened to two-dimensionality, even deadened, by the left hemisphere. It has to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by ritual, in which the gods approach us; or as we begin to approach them, when we stand back in ‘necessary distance’ from our world through sacred drama. So Kerényi writes:

In the domain of myth is to be found not ordinary truth but a higher truth, which permits approaches to itself from the domain of bios [not just life, but ‘the highly characterised life of a human being’, perhaps best rendered, despite the apparent chasm of two millennia, as Dasein]. These approaches are provided by sacred plays, in which man raises himself to the level of the gods, plays too which bring the gods down from their heights. Mythology, indeed, especially Greek mythology, could in some sense be considered as the play of the gods, in which they approach us.138

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138. Kerényi, 1962, p. 28.

601

Eventually myths become a sort of surrogate science, exactly what Malinowski says they are not.

601

And some Platonic myths are of this kind. Thus how did man come to have his current bodily shape? Well, originally he was a head, of course; a head that was spherical – the perfect shape: except that it couldn’t control where it went.

Accordingly, that the head might not roll upon the ground with its heights and hollows of all sorts, and have no means to surmount the one or to climb out of the other, they gave it the body as a vehicle for ease of travel; that is why the body is elongated and grew four limbs that can be stretched out or bent, the god contriving thus for its travelling.139

This myth tells us a lot about the relation between the mind and body that was already emerging. In fact the process is at work even in the fifth century BC, as this creation myth of Empedocles suggests:

On [the earth] many heads sprung up without necks, and arms wandered bare and bereft of shoulders; eyes strayed up and down in want of foreheads. Solitary limbs wandered seeking for union. But, as divinity was mingled still further with divinity, these things joined together as each might chance, and many other things besides them continually arose.140

Fancy that! The mind has now come to believe that the body is an assemblage of separate bits, wandering about aimlessly on their own, and put together by chance. No prizes for guessing which hemisphere that comes from.

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139. Plato, Timaeus, 44d–e (trans. F. M. Cornford).

140. Empedocles, fr. 57–9, as trans. in Burnet, 1892, p. 214.

602

THE ROMANS

603

Most of the great legacy of Rome’s literature belongs to the Augustan era, the first century BC, with Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius and Catullus all writing during a period of fifty years of one another. Undoubtedly there is here a remarkable increase in psychological sophistication, and both touching and witty insights into human nature, its potential greatness and its failings. This period saw not just the expansion and codification of jurisprudence, but the establishment of an ideal of reasonableness and of moral rectitude in art and poetry as well.

603

Virgil and Horace were obviously drawn by what one might see as Scheler’s Lebenswerte: the ideal of the noble Roman emanates from their work. Virgil’s attraction to and idealisation of the natural world,141 the importance of human bonds, both those of amor and those of pietas, coupled with his sense of pity for the passing of human lives and achievements – sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt142 – all suggests an alliance between the right and left hemispheres at this time, in which the right hemisphere primacy is respected.

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141. Geikie, 1912; Fairclough, 1930.

142. Virgil, The Aeneid, I, line 462. This is a hard line to translate: Fagles gives ‘the world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart’, but that misses the idea that there are tears for passing things and what they mean to humanity (compassion, not just misery), which other translators have tried to capture, none quite satisfactorily.

603

Ovid, a man who in his life had reason enough to contemplate the harsh reverses of fate, called his greatest work the Metamorphoses, the title itself suggestive of the Heraclitean flux; and in it once again one sees that standing back from the world which enables the finest spirits both to rise on the vertical axis and to venture out along the horizontal axis into the lived world of the human heart:

There is no greater wonder than to range

The starry heights, to leave the earth’s dull regions,

To ride the clouds, to stand on Atlas’ shoulders,

And see, far off, far down, the little figures

Wandering here and there, devoid of reason,

Anxious, in fear of death, and so advise them,

And so make fate an open book …

… Full sail, I voyage

Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you

Nothing is permanent in all the world.

All things are fluid; every image forms,

Wandering through change. Time is itself a river

In constant movement, and the hours flow by

Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,

Forever fugitive, forever new.

That which has been, is not; that which was not,

Begins to be; motion and moment always

In process of renewal …

Not even the so-called elements are constant …

Nothing remains the same: the great renewer,

Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me

That nothing ever dies… .143

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143. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, lines 160–66, 194–204, 250 & 264–7 (trans. R. Humphries).

604

Yet, alongside its great artistic achievements, which undoubtedly result from the co-operation of both hemispheres, Roman civilisation provides evidence of an advance towards ever more rigidly systematised ways of thinking, suggestive of the left hemisphere working alone. In Greece, the Apollonian was never separate from the Dionysian, though latterly the Apollonian may have got the upper hand. Augustus, who presided over the great flourishing of the arts, was the first Emperor; but as the scale of imperial power grew in tandem with the evolution of Roman military and administrative successes, the Apollonian left hemisphere begins to freewheel. The Roman Empire was ‘characterised by its towns and cities’, writes Braudel:

brought into being by a Roman power which shaped them in its own image, they provided a means of transplanting to far-flung places a series of cultural goods, always identifiably the same. Set down in the midst of often primitive local peoples, they marked the staging-posts of a civilisation of self-promotion and assimilation. That is one reason why these towns were all so alike, faithfully corresponding to a model which hardly changed over time and place.144

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144. Braudel, 2001, pp. 338–9.

605

Rome’s greatness depended more on codification, rigidity and solidity than it did on flexibility, imagination and originality. Speaking of law making, Braudel writes:

Without a doubt, Rome’s intelligence and genius came into its own in this area. The metropolis could not maintain contact with its Empire – the rest of Italy, the provinces, the cities – without the legal regulations essential to the maintenance of political, social and economic order. The body of law could only increase over the ages.147

At first that brought seductive stability. By the second century AD the Roman Empire, according to Charles Freeman, ‘had reached the height of its maturity in that it was relatively peaceful, was able to defend itself and its elites flourished in an atmosphere of comparative intellectual and spiritual freedom’.148

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145. ibid., p. 344.

146. Aristotle does so pronounce at Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a15.

147. Braudel, 2001, pp. 351–2.

606

But it did not last. It may be that an increasing bureaucracy, totalitarianism and an emphasis on the mechanistic in the late Roman period represents an attempt by the left hemisphere to ‘go it alone’. With this in mind, it is worth looking briefly at the development of Roman architecture and sculpture, since as Braudel says, ‘the domain in which Rome most rapidly developed its own personality was architecture.’149 We see its intellectual progress visibly charted there. There is a poetic as well as historical truth in the fact that the imperial vastness of Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.

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148. Freeman, 2002, p. 77.

149. Braudel, 2001, p. 344.

606

‘The everyday life of the average man – his whole political, economic, and social life – was transformed during Late Antiquity’, writes Hans Peter L’Orange, whose book Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire is a classic study of the relationship between the architecture and broader values of this period.150 His study brings out one after another the features of left-hemisphere dominance so beautifully, and in ways that are so relevant by analogy with our own situation, that I allow him to speak for himself. ‘The free and natural forms of the early Empire, the multiplicity and variation of life under a decentralised administration, was replaced by homogeneity and uniformity under an ever-present and increasingly more centralised hierarchy of civil officials.’ What he sees as the ‘infinite variety of vigorous natural growth’ was levelled and regulated, into ‘an unchangeable, firmly crystallised order’, where individuals were no longer independent in a freely moving harmony with their surroundings, but became an immoveable part in the cadre of the state. L’Orange refers to an increasing standardisation and equalisation of life, related to the militarisation of society, resulting in a replacement in art of organic grouping by ‘mechanical coordination’.151

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150. L’Orange, 1965, p. 3.

151. ibid., pp. 3–8.

609

Martyrs and ascetics, with their revulsion from the body, replace the classical heroes: all life in the flesh is corrupt. Plotinus’ belief that the tangible reality of nature was a beautiful reflection of the Platonic Ideas cedes to a view of the natural world as ‘only a jungle of confusion where humans lose their way.’160 Myth and metaphor are no longer semi-transparent, but an opaque shell of lies which encloses the real truth, an abstraction at its core.

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160. ibid., p. 30.

610

Towards the end of the third century and into the early fourth century, organic form is replaced by ‘a mechanical order imposed upon objects from above …’161 The figures are equalised, pressed into symmetrical, horizontal lines, ‘just as the soldier to his rank and file … in a peculiar way the figures are immobilised’. There is an ‘infinite repetition of identical elements’, made even firmer by symmetry. ‘In the whole of conceptual life’, L’Orange concludes, ‘there is a movement away from the complex towards the simple, from the mobile towards the static, from the dialectic and relative towards the dogmatic and the authoritarian, from the empirical towards theology and theosophy.’162

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162. ibid., pp. 100 & 128–9.

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L’Orange, 1965,

610

At the local level, a more vibrant and tolerant culture may have prevailed, but increasingly it seems, another culture – strident, intolerant, concerned with abstractions, and with conformity – appears to have taken hold.

In his book The Closing of the Western Mind, Charles Freeman puts forward the view that this was a consequence of the rise of Christianity.164 Once the Emperor Constantine, himself a Christian, decreed religious tolerance of all cults, including Christianity, by the Edict of Milan in 313, he began the process of integrating the Church into the state. In doing so, he also promoted its identification with military success, with secular power, and with wealth. Although this clearly brought a kind of stability for Christians, who for centuries had been subject to persecution, it also led, according to Freeman, to a world which was rigid, less accommodating of difference, more concerned with dogma and less with reason. With the Nicene decree of Theodosius in 381, not only was paganism outlawed, but a certain specific understanding of the nature of the Trinity became orthodoxy: there was no room for disagreement and debate was stifled.

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165. Lançon, 2000, p. 93 ff.

612

The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates.165 For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict.166 That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks. But, as Freeman admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree.167 What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them. Thus Mary Beard writes in a review: ‘The real problem is in Freeman’s stark opposition between the classical and Christian worlds.’168

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166. Freeman, 2002, p. 67.

167. ibid., p. 137.

168. Beard, 2002.

613

For Freeman’s claim is that it was reason that was lost during the ensuing period of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. But it was not. As Beard says, the Christian world was ‘positively overflowing with intellectual and rational argument’. It’s just that they deployed it on a legalistic framework for divinity, rather than on the movement of the planets. What was lacking was any concern with the world in which we live; their gaze was fixed firmly on theory, abstractions, conceptions, and what we could find only in books. And that was not just something to do with Christianity. It was, after all, Plato who said that we should do astronomy by ‘ignoring the visible heavens’, who taught that the imperceptible forms of things were more real than the things themselves: and it was also Plato who, in his Republic, and still more in his Laws, envisaged the first, utterly joyless, authoritarian state, in which what is not compulsory is proscribed. Plato’s distaste for emotion, and mistrust of the body and the concrete world make an interesting comparison with the asceticism of Christianity during what we have come to know as the Dark Ages. The passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.

614

This had not been the tradition of Aristotle, however, who, as Heraclitus had recommended, was an enquirer into many things indeed, a true empirical scientist, always the advocate for the incarnate world; and, as Freeman says, he had an ‘openness to the provisional nature of knowledge’ that made him a great philosopher.169 But, in the period to come, Aristotle’s work too was ‘frozen’, and paradoxically became an authority, removing the need to enquire, rather than being an inspiration to think for oneself. The striking thing about Greek intellectual life had been the tolerance of opposition: independence of mind, in this sense, began with the Greeks.170 But it also declined with them, and eventually with the Romans after them, so that Christianity, which is in one sense the most powerful mythos in advocacy of the incarnate world, and of the value of the individual, that the world has ever known, also ended up a force for conformity, abstraction, and the suppression of independent thought.

1067

169. Freeman, 2002, p. 21.

170. Lloyd, 1987, p. 57.

614

Though the Empire continued to survive in one form or another in the East, it was destroyed in the West. The conditions of intellectual life simply no longer obtained, and knowledge of Greek was lost. There was little in the way of mathematical or scientific advance between 500 and 1100. Not until the tenth century did Greek texts, preserved in Arabic translations, begin to filter back into European consciousness. As learning revived it was very much under the control of the Church, but it is also true that it was largely due to the Church, which preserved and copied texts, and encouraged learning, and whose scholars were open to Greek and Arab ideas, that classical culture made it through from late antiquity to the Renaissance.

615

The decline of the Roman Empire has been the subject of more controversy than almost any other development in Western history. In his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins lists no fewer than 210 concepts that have been invoked to account for it.171 His own formulation is that fiscal decline, with its consequences for an army under-funded by taxation, led to civil wars, which further undermined resources, and ultimately to defeat at the hands of the ‘barbarians’, resulting in a catastrophic collapse of civilisation. I find his argument compelling, though I am no historian. And it does not seem to me to be in conflict with the idea that there was a change in cast of mind – with the influx of a new population that would be inevitable. Only the change of mind had started anyway: it is evident in the fabric of the Empire itself.

1067

171. Ward-Perkins, 2005, p. 32.

617

Out of the history of Greece and Rome come confirmatory and converging lines of evidence that it was through the workings of the emissary, the left hemisphere, that the ‘empire’ of the mind expanded in the first place; and that, as long as it worked in concert with the Master, the right hemisphere, faithfully bringing back the knowledge and understanding gained by it, and offering them to the right hemisphere so as to bring a (now more complex) world into being, an ability which belongs to the right hemisphere alone, the empire thrived. On the other hand, once the left hemisphere started to believe that its dominion was everything, once the wealth it created began to remain obdurately in its own province, as though it could survive on its own, rather than being returned to the world that only the right hemisphere could bring about, then the empire – not the Roman Empire, which the world could do without, but the empire that the hemispheres between them had created, which we cannot – began to crumble.

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Notes