The Archaic

The Past in the Present

Paul Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136633676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Archaic takes as its major reference points C.G. Jung's classic essay, 'Archaic Man' (1930), and Ernesto Grassi's paper on 'Archaic Theories of History' (1990). Moving beyond the confines of a Jungian framework to include other methodological approaches, this book explores the concept of the archaic.

Defined as meaning 'old-fashioned', 'primitive', 'antiquated', the archaic is, in fact, much more than something very, very old: it is timeless, inasmuch as it is before time itself. Arch?, Urgrund, Ungrund, 'primordial darkness', 'eternal nothing' are names for something essentially nameless, yet whose presence we nevertheless intuit.

This book focuses on the reception of myth in the tradition of German Idealism or Romanticism (Creuzer, Schelling, Nietzsche), which not only looked back to earlier thinkers (such as Jacob Boehme) but also laid down roots for developments in twentieth-century thought (Ludwig Klages, Martin Heidegger). The Archaic also includes:

• studies of the Germanic dimension of the archaic (Charles Bambach, Alan Cardew)
• a discussion of the mytho-phenomenological approach to the archaic (Robert Josef Kozljani?)
• a series of articles on Jung's understanding of the archaic (Paul Bishop, Susan Rowland, Robert Segal).

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This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, anthropologists and phenomenologists, as well as students of psychology, cultural studies, religious studies, and philosophy, as it seeks to rehabilitate a concept of demonstrable and urgent relevance for our time.

Part I

Theorizing the Archaic

Chapter 1

Introduction

A Brief History of the Archaic

Paul Bishop

In the Beginning was …

The word ‘archaic’ derives from the Greek arkhaios (άρχαĩος), which in turn is related to the word άρχή (or archē), meaning ‘principle’, ‘origin’, or ‘cause’.¹ As the word is used, it covers a wide range of meanings, from the political to the metaphysical.² For instance, arkhaois is used in Plato’s Laws when Megillus refers to Homer’s ‘legendary account’ which ascribes ‘the primitive habits of the Cyclopes to their savagery’, or when the Athenian stranger talks about ‘an ancient tale, told of old’.³ Then again, in Theaetetus, Socrates speaks about ‘the ancients, who concealed their meaning from the multitude by their poetry’,⁴ while in Cratylus he refers to ‘the earliest times’ and to ‘the ancient word’.⁵ Elsewhere arkhaois acquires the sense of ‘original’ or ‘primordial’, as when Aristophanes tells Eryximachus in the Symposium that ‘the way to bring happiness to our race is to give love its true fulfilment: let every one find his own favourite, and so revert to his primal estate’.⁶ Conversely, in his Politics Aristotle uses the term in a negative sense, when he remarks that ‘old customs are exceedingly simple and barbarous’, and observes that ‘the remains of ancient laws which have come down to us are quite absurd’.⁷ In his Rhetoric, however, he notes that ‘what is long established seems akin to what exists by nature’.⁸ To clarify this ambiguity about Plato and Aristotle’s understanding of the archaic, we need to examine more closely the term ‘archē’.

The notion of the archē is found in the works of the earliest philosophers whose works have come down to us, usually referred to as the pre-Socratics. For Thales of Miletus (c. 625–c. 545 BCE), hailed by Aristotle as the founder of natural philosophy, the ‘archē’, the ‘first principle’ or ‘material principle’ of all things, is – water.⁹ For Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610–c. 545 BCE), the ‘archē’ is the apeiron, the ‘limitless’ or the ‘infinite’; acording to the sixth-century neo-Platonist Simplicius of Cilicia, Anaximander was the first to introduce the term ‘archē’ in its technical sense, holding that ‘it is neither water nor any of the so-called elements but some different infinite nature’,¹⁰ and the term is also found later in Philolaus of Croton (c. 470–c. 390 BCE), associated with the school of Pythagoras.¹¹ Behind the abstract concept of the archaic apeiron, the sole surviving fragment of Anaximander conjures up something momentous and awe-inspiring: ‘And the things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time’.¹² So when Anaximander’s younger contemporary, Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 585–c. 525 BCE) speaks of the ‘archē’ as air,¹³ we might think of this less as the element we breathe and more as the life-giving breath of the soul.

If the school of Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–c. 496 BCE), including Philolaus, pointed the way to a mathematization of the world through the importance attached to harmony and number, other thinkers were avowedly more mysterious. In the thought of Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540–c. 475 BCE), known as ‘the Obscure’, the ‘archē’ is not water, not air, but fire: fire, ‘ever-living, kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures’,¹⁴ the universe itself being ‘generated from fire and consumed in fire again, alternating in fixed periods throughout the whole of time’:¹⁵ a symbol of the principle of becoming that characterizes Heraclitean thought. Conversely, Parmenides of Elea (c. 540/515–c. 470/445 BCE) advanced as ‘archē’ the concept of being: evoked in his didactic poem ‘The Way of Truth’ in the fragment preserved by Simplicius:

[…] Being, it is ungenerated and indestructible, whole, of one kind and unwavering, and complete. Nor was it, nor will it be, since now it is, all together, One, continuous. […]

And since there is a last limit, it is completed on all sides, like the bulk of a well-rounded ball, equal in every way from the middle. For it must not be at all greater or smaller here or there.

For neither is there anything which is not, which might stop it from reaching its like, nor anything which is in such a way that it might be more here or less there than what it is, since it all is, inviolate. Therefore, equal to itself on all sides, it lies uniformly in its limits.¹⁶

Subsquent thinkers sought to mediate between the ‘archē’ as water, air, or fire, or the ‘archē’ as being or becoming. For Empedocles of Acragas (c. 495–c. 435 BCE), there are four ‘archai’ – earth, air, water, fire – held together by the twin powers of Love and Strife; for Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500–c. 428 BCE), an infinite number, called chrēmata (‘primordial things’) or spermata (‘seeds’), held together by nous (‘spirit’); while for Leucippus of Milet (c. 450 BCE) and Democritus of Abdera (c. 470–c. 370/360 BCE) there were only two things: the ‘full’ and the ‘empty’,¹⁷ or ‘atoms’ and ‘space’.¹⁸ (For the atomists, what determined events was a spontaneous and indeterminate ‘swerve’ in the fall of the atoms – the ‘clinamen’, an idea taken up by Epicurus and, later, Lucretius.) If some Pythagoreans believed the specks of dust one sees floating in a beam of sunlight, others what moves the dust, to be souls, Democritus compared the motion of the atoms to ‘the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows’,¹⁹ and bound up with this materialist conception of the archaic-as-atoms-and-emptiness were two important ideas: the formulation of a law of causality (‘Nothing happens in vain but everything for a reason and by necessity’),²⁰ and an ethics (‘true happiness is the purpose of the soul’, for ‘happiness is procured by beautiful things’).²¹

Among the early Greek thinkers, it was the Ionic natural philosophers of Miletus, the school of Pythagoras, and the Eleatic school – rather than the atomists, such as Leucippus and Democritus – who exercised the greatest influence on later Greek thought, represented by Aristotle and Plato. In the Platonic dialogue called Parmenides, Socrates engages directly with the thought of predecessors; in Plato’s Phaedo and Phaedrus, ‘archē’ retains the more abstract sense of ‘principle’, and in the Republic it also means ‘rule’ or ‘beginning’.²²

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, no fewer than six different uses of ‘archē’ in the sense of ‘beginning’ are distinguished, of which the first defines the term as ‘that part of a thing from which one would start first, for example, a line or a road has a beginning in either of the contrary directions’ and the sixth as ‘that from which a thing can first be known’.²³ His fourth definition understands ‘archē’ in a non-immanent sense as ‘that from which a thing first comes to be, and from which the movement or the change naturally first begins, as a child comes from its father and its mother, and a fight from abusive language’; while, in the fifth definition, ‘archē’ is related not only to politics, but also to aesthetics, as ‘that at whose will that which is moved is moved and that which changes changes, for example, the magistracies in cities, and oligarchies and monarchies and tyrannies, are called archai and so are the arts, and of these especially the architectonic arts’.²⁴ As we shall see, its relation to the aesthetic returns in more modern interpretations of the archaic, so Aristotle’s observation that ‘the nature of a thing is a beginning, and so is the element of a thing, and thought and will, and essence, and the final cause – for the good and the beautiful are the beginning both of the knowledge and of the movement of many things’, is one we should remember.²⁵

Elsewhere Aristotle refers to the pre-Socratic philosophers as the arkhaioi, and to the originative principles of pre-Socratic philosophy as archai;²⁶ in his Physics, he discusses whether the number of archai is two (identified as matter and form) or three (identified as matter, form, and privation);²⁷ and in his Posterior Analytics, he investigates the relation between the archai and science (episteme), positing each of the archai as ontologically and epistemology prior to the sciences, arguing that, in the case of some subjects, an individual ‘archē’ is specific to a particular epistēmē:

I call the basic truths of every genus those elements in it the existence of which cannot be proved. As regards both of these primary truths and the attributes dependent on them the meaning of the name is assumed. The fact of their existence as regards the primary truths must be assumed; but it has to be proved of the remainder, the attributes. […] Of the basic truths used in the demonstrative sciences some are peculiar to each science, and some common, but common only in the sense of analogous, being of use only insofar as they fall within the genus constituting the province of the science in question.²⁸

Thus, as Richard McKirahan observes, whilst ‘archē’ is, in one sense, a ‘relative term’, it is, in another sense, ‘absolute’, for ‘a fact is basic whether or not anyone happens to recognize it as such’.²⁹

Now Aristotle’s conception of the archai was bequeathed to his successors, including the Stoics and the neo-Platonists. For the former, the dual archai of which Aristotle had spoken were identified as matter (or a passive principle) and God (considered as an active principle); while for the neo-Platonists, and in particular Plotinus (205–c. 269/70), the archai are (as in Plato and Aristotle) identified with the early philosophers or ‘the ancients’.³⁰ Nevertheless, in Plotinus the ‘archē’ acquires the specific meaning of the ‘original’ form of the soul,³¹ ‘the nobility and the ancient privilege of the soul’s essential being’,³² and ‘the ancient staple of the soul’.³³

At the same time, in Plotinus the ‘archē’ acquires a new and cosmic dimension as the One. According to Parmenides’ account of the One in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, ‘the One is both all things and nothing whatsoever, alike with reference to itself and to the others’.³⁴ Correspondingly, for Plotinus ‘the One is all things and no one of them’, and ‘it is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that being may be brought about, the source must be no being but being’s generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation’.³⁵ Of the three first principles or archai, also known as hypostases – namely, the One, the Intellect, and the Soul – it is the One, the ‘archē’, that is both the source of human beings and their goal, their telos, towards which they (and, indeed, all things) strive.³⁶

In Plotinus we can see that the archaic, in the sense of ‘archē’, has taken on mysterious, even mystic, overtones. But the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Part I Theorizing the Archaic
• Chapter 1 Introduction A Brief History of the Archaic
• Chapter 2 ‘Archaic Theories of History': Thucydides, Hesiod, Pindar The Originary Character of Language
• Chapter 3 Genius Loci and the Numen of a Place A Mytho-Phenomenological Approach to the Archaic
• Chapter 4 The Archaic and the Sublimity of Origins
• Chapter 5 The Idea of The Archaic in German Thought Creuzer – Bachofen – Nietzsche – Heidegger
• Part II Jungian Approaches: Context and Critique
• Chapter 6 Archaic Man
• Chapter 7 Jung and Lévy-Bruhl
• Chapter 8 Jung ‘Performing' the Archaic Response to ‘Jung and Lévy-Bruhl'
• Chapter 9 The Archaic: Timeliness and Timelessness
• Index