So you think you have it all worked out? Maybe you do.
In our Western educational matrix, we are taught Logic. It’s considered a branch of Philosophy, which is mostly looking at the mumblings and grumblings of philosophers in ages past. We make a point of favoring one particular ancient culture over others, by giving preference to fellows like Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.
Based on their teachings, we have built a corpus of academic understanding such that we all assume we are pretty much on the same sheet of music when we discuss things “logically.” We even have Rules of Logic and a list of Logical Fallacies. Good stuff, no? By these rules we can debate others and shoot them down when they unwittingly commit a logical fallacy. There is a standard, and we can go to sleep at night knowing the rules won’t change tomorrow. It might not have any great effect on the world at large, but at least we will know what’s true.
Indeed, this becomes our ground for pointing out when the world has gone astray. And how far astray it has gone, indeed! But in so doing, have we not also gone astray? In adopting the likes of Aristotle and his ideas, we have dismissed the vast majority of human history. We have confused a priori with a posteriori (look `em up). We have assumed some things require no prior experience to understand, when we close our minds to the realization Aristotle and his friends were rejecting other paths in proclaiming their own assumptions were self-evident.
For millennia prior to them, mankind had carried philosophical reasoning and rules of logic which worked just fine in this world. But in order to downplay their possible importance, our Western philosophical matrix labels those things “primitive” to the point of saying those other forms of logic are “illogical.” Nice try. If your Western logic is so wonderful, how come we are still so messed up? You can’t claim they didn’t have it any better; saying that is projecting modern problems backward upon ancient times, of which we know precious little. The reason we know so little is because we refuse to understand things from their perspective. We even go so far as to assert ancient thinkers were hallucinating — “they musta been taking drugs” — just because they didn’t come up with answers which fit in our logical frame of reference.
Wrong. It may be true of you, that you would have be higher than a kite to say what they said, but you weren’t there, and you surely do not have grounds to judge their different philosophical assumptions. Way back when men first planted crops and built cities, their assumptions about the world were already very ancient. Yeah, there are records of it, but Western logic rejects that data as confused and unreliable. That’s because it doesn’t sound like a Western descriptions of things. It made sense to them, so the problem is with you, not the record. You have to discern that record on the ground where it stands, not from your remote location.
That last sentence reflects the nature of ancient logic. Just a tiny sliver, but it points out how those people thought about things. The ultimate truth cannot possibly be put in human language, so they simply wrote symbolic descriptions. In other words, ancient logic is first and foremost symbolic. Miss that and you have no clue what they said. Call it a lack of arrogance so common to Western culture; the best ancient philosophers knew they could never quite grasp it with their intellect. If they could, it wouldn’t be all that important. Stuff which really matters will always be just outside our grasp. However, if we keep reaching, there’s an assumption we’ll find something useful, something which helps understand what’s around us and act wisely.
Today, we call that “mystical nonsense.” Maybe it is, but the ancients didn’t try to figure out how to blow up the whole world with a single device. It was not because they weren’t smart enough, nor because they weren’t advanced enough. It was because they couldn’t imagine a need for that, knew they weren’t wise enough to handle such a thing. Nor are we.
