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How Ontology Eclipsed Ancient Science

And why it matters today

S.A. Orwin O'Dowd

Science in the generic sense of Aristotle's 'scientia' is routinely taken to be a matter of seeking explanations for things, or in a more formal language, 'causal accounts'. Some two centuries ago, Bernard Bolzano thought he had recovered the key to 'scientia' in Aristotle's Greek, in a distinction between proofs which demonstrate 'that' something is, and those showing 'why'.

Bolzano was not well known in his day, but his longer-range influence is now reckoned as very considerable. Indeed, some now place him behind the mainstream of philosophy in recent times, the Analytical philosophy, itself too diffusely influential to be called a school. Through this same tide we have seen a steady proliferation of claims to scholarly authority, and with these, of domains of study labeled 'science'.

Yet unrivaled in visibly riding this tide is Ken Wilber, for by his readily comprehensible way with 'dimensions' he maps out in the most generous way what Bolzano presented as 'grounds' for proofs that demonstrate 'why'. Yet with the 'post-metaphysical turn' of his most recent work, Wilber would now extend his vision on a third dimension to encompass amongst others phenomenology, which was formally envisaged by Dilthey and Husserl as a 'descriptive' venture, and that means not seeking the 'why' but merely 'that'!

A revealing irony

All is not well in phenomenology, not least since Martin Heidegger took an 'ontological turn' and reinvented himself as a theologian. Ontology has long served theology in the matter of ultimate grounds of things, whether in terms of Being or Creation. Consistently, the cavalcade of academic authorities is now drawn into a vortex around the vision of the Big Bang, serving at once as an ultimate ground of scientific explanations and a substitute for Creation as traditionally conceived.

For the God-fearing, the skeptical, and all sensitive to moral hazards, its worth taking a critical look at this Heidegger character. German by birth, he joined the Nazi party to save his academic skin, and took the guilt to theology to emerge as a figure of European reconciliation. Such are the things, as Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked, a cleric may 'have to do', but their relevance is thankfully limited.

Heidegger is also notable for an academic disaster: setting out to do his PhD on Duns Scotus he took as his text a work properly due to Thomas of Erfurt. As the scandal broke, Heidegger withheld from publication the second volume of his masterpiece Sein und Zeit, and headed for the hills of ontology. Deepening the mystery, we know precious little about Thomas, for the library at Erfurt was burned down in the sixteenth century, amidst the troubled beginnings of Reformation.

Thomas of Erfurt was evidently a teacher of language, a speculative grammarian of the style termed Modist, for holding that a word may signify variously according to diverse modes of signification. Evidently the Modists had some affinity with the Parisians of the Via Antiqua, who took their leads from the ancient grammarians Priscian and Domitian, while revising their texts. Lost within Heidegger's unfinished masterpiece is thus a forgotten fragment of antiquity. This is not all, for Erfurt also left commentaries on the Categories of Aristotle and Porphyry's Isagogue, but with the author 'defined' as a grammarian, they lie unread.

The grammarians and mathematicians of antiquity were self-supporting and itinerant teachers known generically as Sophists. They became the butt of criticism at the Academy of Plato, and ever since have enjoyed scant notice or regard in the halls of academe. Yet we have enough record of the ancient Greek astronomy to discern that they followed the humbler path of the 'that' and the practical 'how', and indeed left us the idea of 'phenomena' which Euclid picked up as a title.

Professional misunderstanding

For a closer view we can now turn to Aristotle, who left us an example of demonstration in astronomy, still furiously misunderstood in the name of ontology. In this example Aristotle gives the way the moon is lit by the sun as the figure or evidence of its place in the heavens. This reflects a real moment in the history of astronomy, for once the rays of illumination are placed as geometrical lines in a triangle, at the moment when the angle of illumination is 90 degrees one can estimate the distance of the sun in terms of the distance of the moon.

Writing on the eve of the millennium on a web site offering enlightenment (http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com//index.html), Texan academic Bryan Register took this example as his text. In blissful ignorance of the history of discovery, and in pursuit of explanation as now widely serves academic authority, he willfully misread Aristotle and concocted an explanation that isn't there! Bryan would have the place of the moon as the 'explanation' of how it is lit by the sun, but that is not the way of discovery. He warns us that he may no longer hold the position expressed there, but that doesn't increase one's confidence in this academic 'enlightenment'. Least of all can we afford to trust what these academics have to say of antiquity!

Bolzano, for that matter, offered no evidence from Aristotle that he valued the 'why' above the 'that'. Bolzano's own search for grounds of proof lead to what is now called deductibility in proof theory, which is a very different topic to explanation. Formal statement of theories and deduction of consequences is valued in physics and elsewhere as a safeguard against error, and not as witness to any ontological claims. Indeed, it remains the skeptical view that science will not and cannot answer ultimate questions.

On into the new millennium, academic claims to insight are increasingly challenged by living masters of ancient traditions. They are impressive individuals and stand out clearly from the run of New Age punters and ontologists of latter-day 'sciences'. It now matters which path we follow in pursuit of integrated understanding, and the prospects now in view are surprising to many. There is a substantial body of academic opinion that views Antiquity as a time dominated by great theocracies which indulged in much superstitious nonsense to keep the masses in thrall. I consider that the height of prejudice and stupidity, for a simple and powerful reason. Ancient societies could not afford such indulgence: they had governments for much the same reasons that we do, and if they did not work efficiently, they fell soon enough.

The road less traveled

The farther you look back in history, the closer you live to natural necessity, the more pragmatic the temper becomes. In this spirit William James left us both Varieties of Religious Experience and Radical Empiricism. The strange tale of Thomas of Erfurt tells the same story, for what was once sought there for phenomenology came off the Via Antiqua from the sophistry of old. Likewise, we have from antiquity as recalled by Boethius, the division of knowledge as Theory and Practice, which M. Alan Kazlev preserves in his formal challenge to Ken Wilber (see his posting here, Redefining Integral).

Due to the systematic prejudice of academia we know rather little of ancient teaching. But we do know that through the long history of Vedas they were accompanied by vedangas, auxiliary disciplines like grammar and etymology which served the continuity of the tradition. Mathematical teaching similarly supported the ancient astronomy. It seems likely that such teaching came into the Mediterranean from the Indo-Hittite culture through the related Pelasgian and Etruscan languages, in Greece and Northern Italy respectively. Aristotle then mentions ancient teachers of logic, ethics and the first philosophy.

Much of what we have on record from antiquity takes the form of myths and legends, now handed on with mute incomprehension of their place and function in ancient societies. To me it is obvious from the graphic and often racy style that their principal function was entertainment. Attesting this are the heroes once depicted in the great broadband in the sky and identified with constellations, whence the image of 'stars' which still graces the luminaries of the entertainment world.

Yet just as we also have the Discovery Channel, the Metamorphoses of the Roman Ovid is a telling of myths in which each figure at last resolves into a natural phenomenon. Significantly, Ovid ends with a brief statement of the Pythagorean philosophy, which places it as the more systematic ancient witness to nature. Some of the ancient imagery was then preserved in Christian tradition, so that what we call St Elmo's fire can be related back to the twin gods Greek sailors called Dioscouri.

Sir Francis Bacon made a very serious study of antiquities, not as an idle pastime, but because as Chancellor of the Exchequer he wished to promote learning, discovery, patents and the revenues they bought to the treasury. After Bacon the Freemasons evidently took a lead in such matters, aided by their very substantial tradition. Yet their company fell to a dispute between Ancients and Moderns, on points of philosophy briefly reviewed by David Hume before he turned his skeptical wit against them both.

The mining of ancient wisdom has in fact been a growth industry in Europe for hundreds of years. It served the Renaissance royally in law and navigation, and Newton boldly attributed universal gravitation to Pythagoras and his predecessors. Attention then turned to China through the reports of Jesuit missionaries, but Bolzano, ironically, was back on the trail blazed by Renaissance scholars.

A moment of truth

If the interest has seemed to slacken in more recent time, it was with the warnings of Benjamin Jowett and Franz Brentano that the ancient Greek language had eluded them in its philosophical subtleties, in the translation of Plato and Aristotle respectively. For the Analytical philosophy to then take modern language as the standard of reason was reactionary, but when the Primitivists then turned against the Ancient heritage in favor of tribal roots, they merely unleashed new waves of interest in shamanism, mystical experience and altered states of consciousness. Just when the trail might finally seem exhausted, we encounter living masters of ancient traditions, taking the debate to new levels of sophistication.

When M. Alan Kazlev now adds to the Theory and Practice of the Ancients the ranges of Enlightenment and Divinization, he covers what we have retrieved of Buddhism and Confucian lore in earlier centuries, and of Shamanism, Gnosis and the like in the wake of the Primitivists. Ken Wilber's enterprise, in sharp contrast, is in truth addressed to the fractured ways of academia, specifically the proliferation of marginal 'sciences', latter-day ontologies. It does not offer a way of integrating the vast heritage of humanity, and true to form, his Integral enterprise must now compete with the Integrative process under way in the health sciences. As various critics are now suggesting, the Integral storehouse appears stocked with rather superficial, reductive periphera of Modernism.

To this one may well prefer mainstream science, but due in no small part to the fascination with ontology, a modern education is a rather poor foundation for understanding science! As a body of concepts serving to link rigorously key observations gathered over long periods of time, science is in truth a thoroughly conservative endeavor, yet curiously layered by occasional disruptions, like the face of the Earth. This ultimate fragility has long fascinated the Catastrophists, and there have been notable casualties along the way. The original Pythagorean movement was dispersed with violence, and a millennium later Hypatia was murdered, having formally founded the science of psychology with the device called a psychrometer!

In living memory, Richard Thomson at the Bhaktivedanta Institute was hounded for merely daring to address the ancient astronomy through Indian sources (Journal of Scientific Exploration 11.2: 193-200, 1997). I have something confrontational to say to the academic bigots who now stand guard over the traces of ancient science: I bothered to calculate the meridian of Roma in the Sanskrit Surya-Siddhanta, and it is not the Rome of your ethnocentric delirium, but the Canary Islands! From there the trail winds on to Cajun country in the Deep South. There is, then, a substantial moral hazard in serving as the New Age cover for academic ontologies, as Ken Wilber manages to do. Recent events in his camp betray the moral cost, for all with some sense of such things. We may get see the English language loose pole position in this contest to Spanish, but such outomes are never fated, unless in the hearts of those who choose them. This brings us, finally, to the fragility and fatalities of life and language. It is all too easy to follow Aristotle's halting translators and proudly identify with the ancient physiologoi as a 'physical philosopher', an ontologist of the physical. That way lies the vortex of the Big Bang, while language itself suggests that the discipline of physiology might lie closer to the root. On this trail is the remarkable Finn Matti Pitkanen, who lives much like an ancient sage and writes of the economy of nature within life, that curious circumstance by which we, in the imagery of the English and Germans, 'live on borrowed time' and 'owe Nature a death'. Pitkanen is a good deal clearer than Heidegger on 'being unto death', and touches sides with homeopathy, which draws him into the Integrative stream.

Which would you bet on as a First Philosophy?