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notes on monetisation and philosophogenesis

All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. - Heraclitus

I'm currently reading Richard Seaford's "The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India: a Historical Comparison." This page is notes, and will be updated as my reading progresses.

pdf

This is a book with a Central Thesis, not just a broad comparative overview - Seaford means to credit the rise of money relations for the transformation of metaphysics in the Greek and Indian worlds in the centuries before Alexander put them into contact with each other.

(As far as background knowledge goes, I have a pretty decent understanding of the Greek context and a pretty miserable understanding of the Indian. Likely this is true for most readers - and since I think the strength of the argument depends on patterns being repeated rather than simply sui generis, as in the Greek case, I don't know if this is the place one should be most suspicious!)

Here is the argument in more expanded form:

there are many similarities between classical Indian and classical Greek philosophy
these include things that are later than their shared Indo-European heritage, but earlier than significant intellectual exchange between the two
both Greece and the Ganges region were experiencing the increasing role of a money economy there
the rise of money as a universal equivalent and form of abstract value "rhymes" (so to speak) with new doctrines of monism, cosmic justice, and the discrete individual soul

This isn't, in analytic philosophy terms, a valid argument, and if it were valid, I don't know if it would be sound. But it's certainly suggestive!

before money

Seaford starts out taking a look at the texts that represent the thought of these regions before widespread money arrives on the scene - where money, for Seaford, means something that serves as a sort of universal equivalent/means of exchange/account and no other purpose.

The societies that produced Homer and the Rig Veda are stratified ones in which exchange takes place, but:

the most common equivalent to money in these societies, used to denominate and conduct exchanges, is cattle - something with qualities of its own, not an abstract, fungible, liquid good
power and property are generally held within kinship groups, rather than the individual

Seaford links these features to a few curious features of them:

the soul is understood as not one thing, but rather, these texts seem to subscribe to something like a Humean "bundle theory:"

The main words in the Rigvega that have been claimed to mean 'soul' or 'mind' or 'self' are prana, asu, jiva, manas, and atman... Prana occurs ten times in the Rigveda, in each case referring to breath, which leaves the body at death. Asu occurs ten times, mostly translatable as 'life,' but it is more than just life, It is the soul which leaves the body and produces death in the case of lasting absence....

manas... embodies the required mental attitude of god or worshipper...

A recent study of its twenty-two occurences in the Rigvega and 48 in the Arthaveda claims to detect a development in which the meaning of atman develops - roughly speaking - from 'vital breath' to 'self.'

Scott Alexander's review of Jaynes' "breakdown of the bicameral mind" discusses much of the same re: Homer

Moreover, this is a metaphysically pluralist world in other respects as well. Different gods do different things, there are many different kinds of substances in the world - in other words, there are not single principles that unite things.

Moreover, the logic of sacrificial offerings parallels notions of reciprocity seen in these societies - you give something to the gods, and they feel obligated (but are not controlled to) offer something to you in turn. (This, perhaps the parallel most important for his thesis, is the least novel - see Marcel Mauss et al.)

And so what we get is something that reflects in some ways what seem to be common features to many pre-modern societies, and in some ways things that may be a common Indo-European heritage, but which are a far cry from Heraclitus or the Upanishads, much less a Plato or Buddha.

Seaford's detailed look at the Indian case

This is what I'm about to go read!

links to wander to

Plato's Republic on Gemini

David Graeber (also interested in the consequences of the rise of money) on Gemini

review of Seaford's earlier book on a similar subject