Abstract
Ancient Egypt, Greece, India, and Christendom, among others, historically suggest themselves as veritable treasure-troves for ontological exploration, each having identifiable source events, powerful mythopoeic traditions, and revelations that exploded over a geographical region producing the ethos-aesthetics of a people. Coming at ontology from different angles, these sustained explorations of antiquity, sometimes across the span of more than a thousand years, are among the most powerful human inquiries into existential meaning and truth. This priceless human heritage must not be locked away in the museum of knowledge; it was never meant to be forgotten, but to be remembered and engaged with again and again in a practice of anamnesis. Thus the archeological work incumbent upon us here could justifiably begin by looking at these wisdom traditions and their corresponding ontological foundations.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, (Transl.) Errol Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also, as distinct from the German idealists, Marx too saw the essence of the human as being sensuous activity: “The chief defect of all materialism up to now (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object or contemplation (Anschauung); but not as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which of course does not know real sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects really distinguished from the objects of thought; but he does not understand human activity itself as objective activity.” Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” in German Ideology, p. 197.
- 2.
Science can measure the changes but cannot interpret them.
- 3.
An obvious example is that of gravity; calling it a ‘force’ etc. does nothing to tell us what it is, in and of itself.
- 4.
“The farther science has pushed back the limits of the discernible universe, the more insistently do we feel the demand within us for some satisfactory explanation of the whole. The old, eternal problems rise up before us and clamour loudly and ever more loudly for some newer and better solution. The solution offered by a bygone age was soothing at least, if it was not final. In the present age, however, the problems reappear with an acuteness that is almost painful: the deep secret of our own human nature, the questions of our origin and destiny, the intermeddling of blind necessity and chance and pain in the strange, tangled drama of our existence, the foibles and oddities of the human soul, and all the mystifying problems of social relations: are not these all so many enigmas which torment and trouble us whithersoever we turn? And all seem to circle around the one essential question: Has human nature a real meaning and value, or is it so utterly amiss that truth and peace will never be its portion?” Eucken cited in Peter Coffey, Ontology or the Theory of Being (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918), pp. 39–40.
- 5.
As Schelling has observed, if there was no original separation there would be no need to philosophize in the first place: “Philosophy must presuppose that original divorce, because without it we should have no need to philosophize. [Philosophy] proceeds from that original divorce to unite once more, through freedom, what was originally and necessarily united…And philosophy was made necessary only by that separation—was itself only a necessary evil…[Thus] as soon as man sets himself in opposition to the external world, the first step to philosophy has been taken. With that separation [of the object from intuition], reflection first begins…” In Schelling, Ideas, pp. 10–11.
- 6.
Peter Coffey, Ontology, pp. 22–23.
- 7.
Besides, the question naturally comes up: On what is change projected, for change surely cannot support itself by itself? To put it differently, if by change is meant a succession of phenomenal states, then the very idea of succession contains within it the possibility of the eternal.
- 8.
Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice: Ontological Analysis and Ethical Applications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 73.
- 9.
This does not overlook engagement in empirical knowing; in antiquity, the learning of the arts, logic, and the sciences were simultaneously in the employ of seeking the truth and meaning of existence.
- 10.
Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner, 1953).
- 11.
Further, Anderson issues a similar cautionary: “From this rather literal materialism, it of course follows that modern liberal ontology is also thoroughly secular. In so far as it recognizes the possibility of divinity at all, it objectifies gods as effects of the thoughts and beliefs of human beings, as artifacts of human faith, prayer, and ritual, not as independently existing, “magical” agencies in their own right. It thus feels comfortable relegating all gods and the beliefs that produce them to a second-order realm of experience called “religion,” a sacred space or sphere that is rationally disaggregated from the rest of social life. This idea of a detached, abstract realm of “religion” may well make sense to those who have come to think of divinity itself as a detached, abstract object of belief, like the god of protestant Christianity. But it would have made no sense at all in most premodern or non-western formations, where divinity was somehow immanent in all life’s processes, where life itself would have ceased altogether if the gods who self-evidently controlled it were somehow relieved of their responsibilities.” In Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: the Case for an Ontological Turn,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 120, Issue 3, 2015, pp. 787–810.
- 12.
Caroline Arbuckle, “From pyramid to Coffin Texts” In cnersundergraduatejournal, 2012, p. 1.
- 13.
“Owing to the practice of piracy, in which the Ionians and Carians were active, the Egyptians were forced to make immigration laws restricting the immigration of the Greeks and punishing their infringement by capital punishment, i.e., the sacrifice of the victim. Before the time of Psammitichus, the Greeks were not allowed to go beyond the coast of Lower Egypt, but during his reign and that of Amasis, those conditions were modified. For the first time in Egyptian history Ionians and Carians were employed as Mercenaries in the Egyptian Army (670 B.C.), interpretation was organized through a body of interpreters, and the Greeks began to gain useful information concerning the culture of the Egyptians. In addition to these changes, King Amasis removed the restrictions against the Greeks and permitted them to enter Egypt and settle in Naucratis.” In George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p. 33.
- 14.
“We are told in the Timaeus of Plato, that aspirants for mystical wisdom visited Egypt for initiation and were told by the priests of Sais, “that you Greeks are but children” in the Secret Doctrine, but were admitted to information enabling them to promote their spiritual advancement. Likewise, we are told by Jamblichus of a correspondence between Anebo and Porphyry, dealing with the fraternal relations, existing between the various schools or lodges of instructions in different lands, how their members visited, greeted and assisted one another in the secret science, the more advanced being obliged to afford assistance and instruction to their brethren in the inferior Orders. (Jamblichus: correspondence between Anebo and Porphyry) (Plato’s Timaeus) (W. L. Wilmshurst on meaning of Masonry).” Ibid., p. 26.
- 15.
“According to Pietschmann, the Egyptian Mysteries had three grades of students (1) The Mortals i.e., probationary students who were being instructed, but who had not yet experienced the inner vision. (2) The Intelligences, i.e., those who had attained the inner vision, and had received mind or nous and (3) The Creators or Sons of Light, who had become identified with or united with the Light (i.e., true spiritual consciousness). W. Marsham Adams, in the “Book of the Master”, has described those grades as the equivalents of Initiation, Illumination and Perfection. For years they underwent disciplinary intellectual exercises, and bodily asceticism with intervals of tests and ordeals to determine their fitness to proceed to the more serious, solemn and awful process of actual Initiation.” Ibid., p. 24.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 17.
George James, op. cit. p. 24.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 20.
Maulana Karenga, Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 177.
- 21.
Henri Frankfort and John Wilson cited in Karenga, op. cit., p. 192.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Karenga writes: “Lichteim has noted ‘The last millennium of pharaonic civilization, the time from the end of the New Kingdom to Egypt’s conversion to Christianity, is a complex period consisting of several distinct phases.’ With the death of Ramesses XI, Smendes assumed the throne and initiated the Third Intermediate Period, the first phase of the Late Period. Smendes called himself ‘powerful bull, beloved of Ra, whose arm is strengthened by Amen so that he may exalt Maat.’” This title, Grimal (1992, 312) contends, was to “effectively declare himself the heir of the Ramessid line. And, of course, the effectiveness of this claim is grounded in his declaration of his charge to ‘exalt Maat.’ After his death the country is split in two with power divided between the High Priest of Amen and the pharaoh.” In M. Karenga, op. cit., p. 104.
- 24.
This appears in Chapter 4 of the Instructions of Amenomope, a literary-religious product of the Ramesside Period (ca. 1300–1075 BC). The original papyrus is in the British Museum which published the entire hieroglyphic transcription and translation in 1923.
- 25.
Karenga, op. cit, p. 156.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 181.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 183. Karenga mentions the work of the Black liberation activist Malcolm X: “Ethically speaking, standing up and being active means being creative in word and in deed, bringing good into the world and lessening evil (Khunanpu B 1,24 1 ff). Modern Maatian ethics, building on the ethical teachings of Malcolm X (1965) finds in his ethical formula of right-doing, “Wake up, clean up and stand up” a fruitful extension of the original Maatian concept. Malcolm’s three-pronged ethical imperative is one of coming-to-consciousness, morally grounding oneself and then engaging in moral practice to bring good and lessen evil in the world.”
- 29.
Adolf Erman, A Handbook of Egyptian Religion (Transl.) A. S. Griffiths (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907).
- 30.
See Carl Jung, “Psychology and Religion: West and East” In Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
- 31.
See Plato, Apology.
- 32.
Dylan Van der Schyff, On Being and Becoming: Ancient Greek Ethics and Ontology in the Twenty-First Century (Burnaby, British Columbia: Simon Fraser University, 2010), pp. 3–5.
- 33.
Sri Aurobindo, “Essays in Philosophy and Yoga” In The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 13 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1998), pp. 216–220. Text rearranged.
- 34.
“τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀiεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται.” Heraclitus, Fragment 2, In George T. W. Patrick, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1889), p. 2.
- 35.
Sri Aurobindo, op. cit. p. 221.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
“ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην, ὁτέη ἐκυβέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων,” Heraclitus, Fragment 18.
- 38.
“συλλάψιες· ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα” [The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one], Heraclitus, Fragment 10 as per the DK listing.
- 39.
Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 223. Further, “Heraclitus saw what all must see who look at the world with any attention, that there is something in all this motion and change and differentiation which insists on stability, which goes back to sameness, which assures unity, which triumphs into eternity. It has always the same measures; it is, was and ever will be. We are the same in spite of all our differences; we start from the same origin, proceed by the same universal laws, live, differ and strive in the bosom of an eternal oneness, are seeking always for that which binds all beings together and makes all things one. Each sees it in his own way, lays stress on this or that aspect of it, loses sight of or diminishes other aspects, gives it therefore a different name—even as Heraclitus, attracted by its aspect of creative and destructive Force, gave it the name of Fire…Heraclitus’ affirmation is not simply that the One is always Many, the Many always One, but in his own words, “out of all the One and out of One all.” Plato’s phrasing of the thought, “the reality is both many and one and in its division it is always being brought together,” states the same idea in different language.” Ibid., pp. 234–235. This idea of constant flow between unity (Absolute) and multiplicity (Nature) can be seen in its rational development in F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1803/1988).
- 40.
Dylan Van der Schyff, op. cit., pp. 20–21.
- 41.
Plato, Phaedo 100 c, d, e. Available in the public domain under Project Gutenberg @www.gutenberg.org. It must be noted that Plato makes it a point to record conversationally that he himself was ill, and was not present at this last meeting with Socrates in the prison. The implication seems to be that the account was produced from hearsay rather than direct testimony.
- 42.
Ibid., 99 e.
- 43.
“Then would you not avoid saying that when one is added to one it is the addition and when it is divided it is the division that is the cause of two? And you would loudly exclaim that you do not know how else each thing can come to be except by sharing in the particular reality in which it shares, and in these cases you do not know of any other cause of becoming two except by sharing in Twoness, and that the things that are to be two must share in this, as that which is to be one must share in Oneness, and you would dismiss these additions and divisions and other such subtleties, and leave them to those wiser than yourself to answer.” Ibid., 101 c.
- 44.
Dylan Van der Schyff, op. cit. p. 13.
- 45.
Plato, Gorgias, p. 493. Available in the public domain under Project Gutenberg @www.gutenberg.org.
- 46.
Van der Schyuff, op. cit. pp. 70–71.
- 47.
Mara Lynn Keller, “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries,” Rosicrucian Digest, No. 2, 2009, pp. 28–42.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 31.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 50.
Friedrich Max Mueller, What Can India Teach Us? Available in the public domain under Project Gutenberg @www.gutenberg.org.
- 51.
“Atha Yoganusasanam,” Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, Ch. 1, verse 1.
- 52.
This has little to do with the bodily contortions that go by the name of ‘yoga’ everywhere. The latter is better understood as the most elementary part of hathayoga that a seeker must engage with, in order to cleanse and prepare her/his body for the higher tasks.
- 53.
Sri Aurobindo, “Essays on the Gita,” In Collected Works, Vol. 13 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1976). Further, in continuation, Aurobindo observes, “In its outer appearance the truth of existence is solely what we call Nature or Prakriti, a Force that operates as the whole law and mechanism of being, creates the world which is the object of our mind and senses and creates too the mind and senses as a means of relation between the creature and the objective world in which he lives. In this outer appearance man in his soul, his mind, his life, his body seems to be a creature of Nature differentiated from others by a separation of his body, life and mind and especially by his ego-sense—that subtle mechanism constructed for him that he may confirm and centralise his consciousness of all this strong separateness and difference…There is, however, something in man’s consciousness which does not fall in with the rigidity of this formula. In this inner reality the truth of existence is no longer Nature but Soul and Spirit, Purusha rather than Prakriti. Nature herself is only a power of Spirit, Prakriti the force of the Purusha. A Spirit, a Self, a Being one in all is the master of this world which is only his partial manifestation. That Spirit is the upholder of Nature and her action and the giver of the sanction by which alone her law becomes imperative and her force and its ways operative. That Spirit within her is the Knower who illuminates her and makes her conscient in us; Purusha or Being is the immanent and superconscient Will that inspires Nature in her workings.”
- 54.
Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 153.
- 55.
“Yogah cittavritti nirodhah.” Patanjali, pp. 1–2.
- 56.
Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 156.
- 57.
“Tada drastuh swarupe avasthanam.” Patanjali, pp. 1–3.
- 58.
Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 159.
- 59.
The Bhagvat Gita.
- 60.
Patanjali, pp. 1–17.
- 61.
Ibid., pp. 1–14.
- 62.
Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 165.
- 63.
“sukha duḥkha puṇya apuṇya / viṣayāṇāṁ bhāvanātaḥ cittaprasādanam.” Patanjali, pp. 1–33.
- 64.
“kṣīṇavṛtteḥ abhijātasya iva maṇeḥ grahītṛ/ grahaṇa grāhyeṣu tatstha tadañjanatā samāpattiḥ.” Ibid., pp. 1–41.
- 65.
“avidyā asmitā rāga dveṣa abhiniveśaḥ pañca kleśāḥ.” Ibid., pp. 2–3.
- 66.
“Vasamsi jeernani yatha vihaya, navani grhnati naroaparani/Tatha sharirani vihaya jeernani, anyani samyati navani dehi.” The Gita, pp. 2–22.
- 67.
Explanations in language or representation can only go so far. The attempt is rather to get to the experience of it.
- 68.
“Dehi nityam abadhyoayam, dehe sarvasya Bharata….” The Gita, pp. 2–30.
- 69.
“yatha deepo nivatastho, nengate sopama smrita…” [As is the flame undisturbed by wind, thus is the mind of the yogin]. The Gita, pp. 6–19.
- 70.
“pariṇāma tāpa saṁskāra duḥkaiḥ guṇavṛtti/virodhāt ca duḥkham eva sarvaṁ vivekinaḥ.” Patanjali, pp. 2–15.
- 71.
“ahiṁsā satya asteya/brahmacarya aparigrahāḥ yamāḥ.” Ibid., pp. 2–30. Also, in 2–34 we find, “vitarkaḥ hiṁsādayaḥ kṛta kārita anumoditāḥ lobha krodha moha pūrvakaḥ mṛdu madhya adhimātraḥ duḥkha ajñāna anantaphalāḥ iti pratipakṣabhāvanam.”
- 72.
“śaucha saṅtoṣa tapaḥ svādhyāya/īśvarapraṇidhānāni niyamāḥ.” Ibid., pp. 2–32.
- 73.
“swadharme nidhanam sreya, paradharma bhayavaha.” The Gita.
- 74.
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, in Four Books. Bk. 1, Ch. 12. Available in the public domain @www.ntslibrary.com.
- 75.
Ibid., Bk. 1, Ch. 13. Available in the public domain @www.ntslibrary.com.
- 76.
Ibid., Bk. 2, Ch. 19.
- 77.
Paul, Letter to the Romans, 2:29.
- 78.
Ivan Illich, Rivers North of the Future (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005).
- 79.
Paul, Romans, 3:9.
- 80.
Ibid., 3:10–11.
- 81.
Ibid., 3:20.
- 82.
Ibid., 3:21.
- 83.
Ibid., 3:24.
- 84.
Paul, I Corinthians, 3:29.
- 85.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 28.
- 86.
I Corinthians, 3:29.
- 87.
Agamben, op. cit., p. 63.
- 88.
Illich, op. cit., p. 156.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Illich, op. cit., p. 136.
- 91.
Ibid.
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Roy, K. (2019). Being in Antiquity. In: Education and the Ontological Question. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11178-6_2
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