Archilogon 058 - 7. Dogma - 5. The Myth of Progress

Video transcription

To modern eyes, Platonism resembles a blanket too short to cover both Theology and Mathematics: draw it over Theology, and Mathematics is left exposed; draw it over Mathematics, and Theology is left exposed.

Those who have followed the Archilogon’s account thus far will know that our reconstruction has required no irrational elements to explain the principles of Pythagorean doctrine. We must therefore establish whether we have imposed upon the ancients a rationality foreign to their thought, or unearthed the authentic reasons that layers of myth and theology had concealed.

This question is not merely philological. It concerns a deeply entrenched prejudice in our understanding of History: the Myth of Progress.

According to a widespread view, human culture has followed an evolutionary path from the Irrational to the Rational, from Myth to Philosophy, from Religion to Science. Rationality would thus be a historical achievement, progressively refined by successive generations.

What, precisely, does it mean to say that humanity “progresses”?

Scientific and technological progress is undeniable: our civilisation possesses knowledge, tools and practical capabilities that the ancients could scarcely have imagined. The problem arises when scientific progress leads us to conclude that modern people are more “rational” than ancient people. This is an unwarranted interpretative leap.

Science has no exclusive claim to rationality, and rationality is not something that an age distributes uniformly among those who live in it. The collective accumulation of knowledge is not the same as individual understanding.

A society can build extraordinarily complex technological devices without most of its members understanding their principles. It can preserve vast libraries without necessarily producing individuals capable of understanding the works they contain. The immense manifestations of irrationality in contemporary society should warn us against identifying technological progress with a general evolution of consciousness.

The truth is that the 'rational' and the 'irrational' coexist in every age. Plato’s Divided Line explains why individuals who belong to the same society and receive the same instruction can attain profoundly different levels of understanding. The Divided Line is an epistemological hierarchy that operates within society, irrespective of the historical period.

In tracing general trends, Historiography constructs an average that takes no account of individual capacities. Historians work with surviving documents, yet what a society preserves, and what we subsequently recover, does not encompass everything it has produced. The quantity and quality of the available documents do not automatically measure the depth of understanding they embody. Moreover, the demands of political, economic and religious institutions influence which records are selected and transmitted.

It is therefore mistaken to reconstruct the history of thought on the prior assumption that its more rational formulations must necessarily be “later” than its mythical or religious ones.

In his studies of Pythagoreanism, Leonid Zhmud challenges precisely this prejudice:

“This attitude rests not on facts, but on the assumption that everything religious must be older than everything scientific. The history of scholarship on Pythagoreanism consistently reveals a kind of duality in the approach to the material: far greater trust is nevertheless placed in the late evidence for Pythagorean ‘religion’ than in the early evidence for Pythagorean ‘science’.”

A mistaken historiographical hypothesis can become a criterion for selecting evidence in advance. If we assume that mythical thought necessarily precedes rational thought, we shall be inclined to regard mythical accounts as original and scientific ones as secondary, even when the evidence suggests a more complex situation. Prejudice thus risks “producing” its own proof.

It would be equally arbitrary to generalise that every myth has a rational origin. Yet we must question the idea that the mythical form of an account is sufficient to establish its origin.

A mythical narrative may arise from poetic imagination, popular belief or the personification of natural phenomena. But it may also preserve, in symbolic form, the results of earlier conceptual work. In this latter case, what appears primitive in form may be the residue of more refined and complex thought.

In his analysis of mythical thought, Ernst Cassirer writes of Astrology:

“Certainly, the conception of the physical and spatial Cosmos that Astrology presents to us with such completeness and rigour does not represent the beginning of mythical thought, but is merely a late achievement of the human spirit.”

The issue is not to deny that mythical representations can acquire a systematic configuration over time. This can certainly happen. The question is whether the process must necessarily move in this direction.

A mythical representation can be rationalised, but a rational system can also lose its intelligibility and survive only as a mythical representation. Historical movement is possible in both directions.

Let us consider Cassirer’s example, Astrology, independently of its predictive claims. Take any sign of the Zodiac: Capricorn, for instance.

The sign of Capricorn is not a figure already drawn in the sky. Its symbol was not discovered empirically in that form through observation. It is a symbolic representation associated with a “function” attributed to a particular phase in a cycle of transformation. A mythological reference was subsequently chosen to make this function easier to remember and understand.

To grasp the meaning of this association, we must therefore reconstruct the logic by which the annual cycle was partitioned as a Whole, and the Relations through which its Parts acquired their functions, rather than explore the myth of Capricorn.

The Archilogon explores the possibility that a symbolic system may preserve a formal structure no longer understood by those who use it. When the procedure that generated it is forgotten, the result survives, detached from its underlying reasons, allowing myth to claim it exclusively.

This possibility is particularly significant for the reconstruction of Pythagoreanism.

In The Greeks and the Irrational, Eric Dodds criticises Martin Nilsson for suggesting that the doctrine of the Reincarnation of the Soul has a logical origin:

“Nilsson believes that the doctrine of Rebirth is a product of logic, and that the Greeks invented it because they were ‘born logicians’. We may agree with him that, once the idea of a human soul distinct from the body had been accepted, it became natural to ask where this soul came from, and to answer that it came from the great reservoir of souls in Hades. Indeed, traces of such reasoning can be found in Heraclitus, as well as in the Phaedo. I doubt, however, whether even philosophers can adopt religious beliefs on purely logical grounds. Logic can at most be ‘ancilla fidei’. And this particular belief has also found favour among many peoples who have no innate inclination towards logic.”

Dodds’s conclusion deserves careful examination. In this instance, he regards logic as “ancilla fidei”, a possible handmaiden to faith. Why, however, should we not consider the possibility that a doctrine originally derived from a logical construction was subsequently accepted and transmitted as a religious belief?

The prevalence of a belief among different peoples does not demonstrate that it arose independently of all rational thought. It shows only that the belief can also be accepted without its reasons being understood.

The Archilogon proposes an interpretative reversal: logic is not necessarily “ancilla fidei”. Faith may instead become “filia orba logicae”: the orphaned daughter of logic.

When a conclusion survives but the procedure that justified it is forgotten, its content can continue to be transmitted as an object of faith.

In our reconstruction, the doctrine of the soul’s rebirth finds its foundation in the structure of the Partition of the Whole. We cannot develop the demonstration here; we shall address it in later stages. For now, our concern is to show that its logical origin cannot be ruled out simply because its historical transmission has taken mythical forms.

We must distinguish two lines of enquiry: the historical reconstruction of transmission and the logical reconstruction of necessity.

The first tells us what evidence we possess, how its sources are connected and which transformations we can document. The second asks whether the relations expressed by a doctrine can be rationally justified. Neither can replace the other.

A logical deduction does not prove that a particular author was the first to formulate it. Yet historical testimony, however authoritative, does not establish the logical necessity of the content it transmits.

It is within this space that the Archilogon’s proposal takes shape, exploring the possibility of reconstructing the formal reasons that render certain apparently irrational doctrines intelligible.

The Myth of Progress arises when scientific progress is taken as the measure of the entire development of Reason.

For Plato, scientific knowledge is dianoetic, whereas philosophical knowledge is noetic: it seeks to attain a different logic, which cannot be understood without conscious and sustained effort on the part of the individual. If we regard dianoetic knowledge alone as the fruit of rationality and dismiss noetic knowledge, we exclude Philosophy, in its Pythagorean and Platonic sense, from the process.

It is individuals who attain Noesis, Comprehension, rather than societies as a whole. And in every age, each individual must attain anew, through the exercise of independent thought, an understanding that no age can simply hand over ready-made.

This conclusion, however, exposes Historiography to the opposite temptation. If ancient thought could be more rational than we imagine, should we conclude that the ancients possessed a superior knowledge that has since been lost?

This second, mirror-image myth, the Myth of Decline, proclaims antiquity a glorious “Golden Age”. We shall examine it in the next video.

"To the Principle!"