Philosophy and the Ancient World

In chapter one of Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Henri Frankfort makes a really good attempt at understanding the rational mindset of ancient humans, particularly inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Frankfort does not do this lightly, realizing that there are no extant treatises on philosophy like the Greeks leave us in Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. In fact, there are virtually no discussions in extant texts from the Ancient Near East describing any sort of philosophical understanding of deities, creation, and humans. However it is presumptuous of us to believe that the Ancients did not think about such things or even that they lacked a so-called “rational” mindset that has so dominated Western thinking for the last 2500 years. The fact is, philosophical questions are, at their core, a way of “speculating” about the nature of the world around us. Greek philosophy has an excellent example in Aristotle and Plato who argue about the “thingness” of objects. In the modern world, philosophical forays into the nature of cosmology and the physical world has largely been taken over by the sciences. Yet even the scientific method is a “speculative” exercise as it has postulates and hypotheses that theorize a reason behind the workings of the world.

The Ancients engaged in similar postulating but their mindset was different than that of the Greeks. Like the Greeks, the Mesopotamian Ancients knew that the world functioned and events occurred because certain forces acted upon other forces. Yet the Mesopotamians (and early Greeks) expressed this not in the form of treatise but of myth. Myth, in this context, is a poetic form of truth and reasoning that attempts to enact truth, rather than simply comment on it. Evidence of speculation concerning cosmology appears in Egypt (e.g. Atum created Geb and Nut: Earth and Sky), Meospotamia (e.g. Marduk rends Tiamat and uses her corpse for the earth), and Greece (Geia mates with Ouranos). The source of these speculations is observation, but also dreams and hallucinations. Through these “visions” ancient man would often see people who were not present or even dead. Symbolism is also a large part of the Ancients’ “speculative” understanding of the world. The coalescence of these parts of a symbol is foundational for ancient societies. When an action was performed on a symbolic object, that action was thought to have real consequences. This leads the author to discuss the notion of causality. The author posits that the Ancients had no way of viewing cause and effect in the same scientific way that we do. They observed an event, such as the rising or lowering of a river, and sought answers through some medium – usually the actions of a god. These divine actions may or may not be an effect of another cause, and so further speculation is needed. This logic also applies to notions of sin/illness and forgiveness, ultimately the place of the cult and religion.

Several preliminary observations can be made based on the Frankfort’s work. The first is a realization that ancient people’s had a complex way of relating to their environment. They sought answers for the many diversified experiences of life and, more importantly, sought a way in which to express their thoughts in a rational and ordered way. They used mythic texts to construct worlds and beings of which they likely had no physical contact. This was done so that events, like the rising of a river or the appearance of a plague, might be explained, and then be dealt with. The second is that speculation about creation gave rise to the types of society, economics, and ethics that these cultures had. Hierarchies of society, both noble and ordinary, were formed on the basis of cosmological speculation.  Economic issues, such as what plants could be harvested at what time of year, or how meat was to be processed and cooked, were all part of a larger understanding of the interactions between deities and creation; humans and nature. Even the ethics, religion, and morality of ancient societies were founded on speculation about illness, disease, and prosperity. Ultimately, mythic texts help the modern reader to see how peoples of the ancient world used their own forms of logic to understand the world and speculate about their surroundings. Indeed, though they are markedly different than the scientific nature of the modern discussion, they are nevertheless a valuable contribution to our understanding of humanity as a whole.