Money before mind?

Earlier in the week, an unlikely event occured to me: the working hypothesis for my senior thesis - my hunch - I found to have been already put forth (albeit in a limited form) by another historian. As I stated in a previous post, I am researching why some of the greatest ethicists in history lived within a hundred years of each other across the world (particularly in Greece, China, Israel and India) in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. I noticed that coinage arose in those societies at around the same time or a couple of centuries before those philosophers. My hunch was that, with the introduction of coinage, something about the abstraction involved in thinking of wealth apart from useful goods (e.g. cows, land, vases) disharmonized the societies, prompting a similar philosophical response to congruous cultural conditions from the ethicists.

Last Wednesday, I was consulting with my undergraduate advisor, Prof. Marc Kleijwegt, who lent to me his book, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy by Richard Seaford. Judge for yourself how similar the following quote from the book's abstract sounds to my above hypothesis:

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage, which produced the first thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy).

I have not read Seaford's book yet, but I have a feeling it will be crucial to shaping the focus of my senior thesis. As he has "utilized" my ideas, I look forward to observing and perhaps utilizing the methodology he uses to explore Greek philosophy and then reapplying that to ancient Hebrew, Indian and Chinese thought. My senior thesis is shaping up to be a happy marriage between my two interests in college: ancient intellectual history and economics.

The ocean of beauty

Having recently read Plato's Symposium, a phrase kept resounding repeatedly in my head - a metaphor I hardly noticed when reading the text - the words, 'the ocean of beauty', 'the ocean of beauty'. The sound of that pleased me and I began thinking about why I have been drawn to Plato's (and of course, Socrates') philosophy ever since reading the Republic 3.5 years ago. (I know disciplined scholars frown upon such emotional outpourings, but please indulge me, if you will, as I think the allure of these particular ideas is common to many who have "conversed" with Socrates). Below is an excerpt which serves to illustrate the promise of Plato - that is, the attraction of his and Socrates' ideas - from the discussion of love and beauty in the Symposium:

. . . the lover is turned to the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, he gives birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom, until, having grown and been strengthened there, he catches sight of such knowledge, and it is the knowledge of such beauty . . .
First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form . . .
This is what it is to go aright, or to be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stars: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.

Symposium 210d-211d

Plato (rather, the character of the wise woman Diotima) has described the dialectical ascent from loving a particular person's body to loving the beauty common to all bodies to loving all beautiful things to loving finally the beauty common in all things - the Beautiful itself apart from any worldly form. This is 'the great sea of beauty': just imagine what it would be like to behold with the mind or the soul such an infinite ocean! No, not the beautiful mountain scape or a vigorous young visage - no, the very element of delight taken from both, from every beautiful thing ever created, in fact, taken and unified. What could kindle more joy than seeing such a mindscape?

By no means do I mean to elevate Platonism to the level of a religion nor do I think that the Socratic method is flawless (in fact, my inclination is that Plato would have us, in the words of scholar J.M. Cooper, "constantly question everything that any speaker says . . . to engage a person effectively in the right sort of search for truth"). What I mean to say is that while some philosophers offer humanity castles of ideas molded on self-styled sandless foundations, or tempt men with promises of supermen status, or spell out liberation from some perceived oppressor, Plato's promise is pleasing in its simplicity: to see the Beautiful, to possess the Good, to understand Justice, to live a good life, a truly virtuous life.

In his essay titled "Platonic Love" in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, G.R.F. Ferrari writes of the relationship between love and the forms of the Beautiful and the Good:

In view of such passages as [Symposium] 201c and Phaedrus 250c-d, let us say that the beautiful is thought of as the quality by which the good shines and shows itself to us. We can then claim that the ascent to the Beautiful itself [i.e. the path of love described above] is indeed also an ascent to the Good itself, but described so as to bring out at every turn what it is about the good that captivates us. (260)

One can almost swim through these ideas, writhing and wriggling and almost tasting the succulent nature of things. How far, it seems to me, has modern scholarship - with its cutting-edge ideas and methodologies - diverged from Socrates' vision of inner ascent. Why make the mental effort, travel the road, without the promise of transcendant destinations?

I will rest this thought with a passage from the Judeo-Christian tradition, to which I am drawn even more than to Platonism but for similar reasons of promise, about Wisdom's banquet:

Wisdom has built her house,
   she has hewn her seven pillars,
She has slaughtered her animals, she
           has mixed her wine,
   she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she
           calls
   from the highest places in the town,
"You that are simple, turn in here!"
   To those without sense she says,
"Come, eat of my bread
   and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
   and walk in the way of insight."

Proverbs 9:1-6

Reflections worth reading

I was at a library book sale this spring and chanced upon a modest-looking paperback book titled, Reflections on History and Historians (1986) by Theodore S. Hamerow. The author was a retired professor who had taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a pleasant discovery for a Badger like myself. I read the book in the following few days, immensely enjoyed it, and have decided to write a bit about it here (a cursory glance on JSTOR revealed two mediocre academic reviews of Hamerow’s work in the late 1980s, of which I liked the one in The Public Historian much more than the one in The Journal of American History).

Although he is reflecting on the decline of his profession at the end of a distinguished personal career, Hamerow is able to supplely illustrate “the crisis in history” by reserving judgment and giving each voice its due expression. He narrates well the rise and decline of the historical profession (a painful journey for an aspiring historian like myself) from the days of amateur aristocrats like Edward Gibbon, to the giddy professionalization of the craft in the late 1800s, through the failed (but valuable) experimentation after the Second World War, and up to the present epistemological dilemmas of the field today. After allowing due time for all other opinions to be heard (the pessimists and the optimists, the cliometricians and the traditionalists) Hamerow offers his own insight into the future of history departments at universities around the globe:

It certainly does not imply that history is about to disappear from the college curriculum, the way theology or rhetoric disappeared. But it does seem that history as an academic discipline is approaching the position reached by the classics sixty years ago or by philosophy forty years ago, that is, branches of knowledge, once regarded as essential, which are still included among the course offerings of any respectable college as evidence of a commitment to higher learning, but no longer with a wide appeal to students and teachers. Such disciplines gradually come to perform a ceremonial rather than a practical function in the academic community, a little like caps and gowns worn in commencement processions. History is beginning to move in this direction, and while it still has a long way to go before it reaches the exoticism of Greek and Latin, the similarity to the process by which the classics arrived at their present situation is too close for complacency. (28)

Hamerow comments further that the humanities, by becoming the status symbol of the dominant class in earlier centuries, doomed themselves in the contemporary world which no longer sees “learning as a means of achieving personal cultural fulfillment but of pursuing collective social justice” (31). History pales in comparison to social sciences like sociology and economics at playing the new game.

Hamerow’s greatest insight, though, is one which seeks to explain the raison d’être of history. That is, Hamerow frees us from the unnecessary marriage of historians to institutions:

That is what Handlin meant in reminding us that “the historian . . . will find something to say as a historian only through the creative tension that arises from exercising the full power of his imagination and understanding against the unyielding evidence that survives the past. He can continue to do so as an individual even if the crisis in the discipline should leave him without a community of investigators of which to be part.” In the present winter of their discontent, historians would do well to ponder that. (204)

In other words, the chauvinism that academic historians frequently show towards popular amateur writers of history is generally unfounded: history—truthful stories about the past—have always and will always exist to fulfill the instinctual yearning of human communities to remember years gone by. Institutions are only secondary.

I also enjoyed and took into consideration Hamerow’s comment that “[m]ost members of the profession do not concern themselves with theory, and those who do are generally no better historians than those who do not” (205). It is a pleasant and, after consideration, intuitive idea that “the nature of historical learning . . . [is] spontaneous, almost instinctive.” The last paragraph of the book reads like a manifesto for the discipline of history which can be carried as a standard soundly into the 21^st century. In the closing sentence, Hamerow evokes for the final time the father Herodotus’ justification of history:

Our ultimate purpose in studying it, however, will remain one expressed long ago at the first dawning of historical consciousness: that the deeds performed by men shall not be blotted out by time, and that the great and marvelous works of Greeks and barbarians shall not be without fame. (243)

To a young student of the past, at least, Theodore Hamerow’s articulate, funny and insightful reflection on the vocation of history is as refreshing as it is sobering.

Research interests

As I am considering options for graduate school in history, I have been reflecting on what exactly interests me about the ancient world. After a bit of brainstorming, I wrote a statement which generally describes my research interest:

" I am interested in the ideas of antiquity and also how they have been transmitted and interpreted through history. The influences on and formation of early Christian ideas I find particularly fascinating, especially the role of Greek and Roman philosophy and Near Eastern religion, as well as the exchange of ideas between ancient civilizations. Finally, I believe the study of ancient history can inform that of American history—especially in the realms of politics and ethics—as our country has harkened back to ancient ideas since colonial times. "

‘The Movement of the Mind’: History as Communal Memory

The following is a recent essay I wrote for an history scholarship discussing the relevance of studying history-in particular, ancient history-to contemporary life. Please feel free to comment on or disagree with my characterization of the discipline and its practitioners:

" Americans, pragmatic as we are, struggle to see the meaning in studying history. Henry Ford, a most American entrepreneur, once said that “the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today.” In our age of assembly lines, silicon chips, and personal digital assistants, is there any use in studying the past? Yes, there is! Studying history has overtly practical purposes, such as understanding other societies in order to form foreign policy and also becoming familiar with the context of famous works of art, literature, and law. This essay, though, is going to focus on a different light that history sheds on contemporary life. Apart from purely pragmatic uses, the study of the past offers us a well of tradition and ideas to shape our cultural identity. The historian, then, serves as a preserver of this well of communal memory among otherwise disconnected generations of people.

" Before the 20^th century, history was studied and taught to educate citizens in the cultural inheritance and morals of their land. In the mid-20^th century, postmodern philosophy prompted historians to condemn such “metanarratives,” stories by inevitably biased authors that consciously or unconsciously sought to convert hearers to some belief system of the author’s. This—how to separate meaning from the person conveying the content—is an epistemological dilemma which modern historians have yet to resolve. As it were, that modern historians shy away from telling meaningful stories about the past as they once had done has had the effect of diminishing the historical identity of our culture and leading to a cynical disjointedness of modern people from their ancestors.

" In just over a hundred years, everyone living today will not be walking the earth. In two hundred years, people we will never meet in our lifetimes will be taking care of our homes, farms, businesses, libraries, gardens, and ideas. Generations of people come and go and there is only one reason why we call ourselves by the same name “Americans” as the colonists called themselves two hundred years ago: memory. Not only the memory of neurons and synapses, but, given the duration of time, the memory of storytelling and books: communal memory. Scholar Fr. Pat Reardon, in a recent lecture at the University of Wisconsin, pointed out that the correct answer to the question of ‘who am I?’ is, “I am who I am because I remember who I am.” If one has no recollection of their past—their upbringing, experiences, and relationships—then they can not testify to who they are (witness patients of amnesia). What holds on the personal level also applies to society at large. G.K. Chesterton once wrote of communal memory, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” And herein is the crux of why history is important to person and culture: our predecessors were people much like ourselves who have transmitted to us tools for living and gems of understanding which our society can choose to ignore at the same peril of an individual who chooses to forget his memories. In this way, as it always has, history can shed light on the present.

" If we are to accept history as communal memory, then what is the job of the historian? Renowned scholar of antiquity Chester Starr once wrote, “It is the conviction of the present writer...that the historian must always come back to the movement of human emotions and the human mind in his deepest probings of the forces moving man’s history.” Historians are the preservers and conveyers of old emotions and ideas; they are the mouthpiece for the dead in Chesterton’s democracy. History today is enriched by relatively new disciplines such as archaeology, statistics, and computer science. While these fields primarily observe the material remains of human life, it would be a mistake for historians to not deepen their inquiry into the most important forces behind the story of man: ideas. As beautiful as the Parthenon is to behold, humanity would not suffer its loss as much as it would the erasure from its collective memory of ancient Greek ideas about democracy; as marvelous and venerable as the Old City in Jerusalem is, it is not comparable to the enduring treasures within the Hebrew Scriptures.

" Robert Putnam writes in his book about the decline of American communities, Bowling Alone, that “fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live.” Whether the cause of the fragmentation and isolation of American communities is a lack of historical identity or something else, our society could profit from the deep well of communal memory that has sustained it for many generations until today. To this end, historians should not shy away from telling good and truthful stories of ancient ideas that can continue to inspire. Even the pragmatic carmaker, who we should remember regardless of his advice on history, could have appreciated a good idea. "