§20. Back to Babylon
Humanity's experience with disinterested observation may have begun when our ancestors' gaze first broke from biological signals. Before then we were like dogs or pigs with their snout to the ground, absorbed in what they find there.
We started to look at things we can only see, like the stars, sublimely out of reach. However, it would be a mistake to equate the practice of observation, even close, carefully recorded observation, with empiricism, as we see in the case of antiquity's most devoted observers, the Babylonians.Babylonian gods wrote messages to human beings using nature as a writing tablet. Reading and interpreting divine signs is the foremost concern of scholarly learning in the cuneiform tradition. In this context, “Babylonian” means the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian literate culture of southern Mesopotamia, from late fourth millennium Uruk, when cuneiform originated, to the first century ce, when the script finally went out of use. From the second half of the second millennium, Babylonian cuneiform was the lingua franca of palace elites from Egypt to Persia. The masters of this first writing and perhaps their patrons believed that the universe contains messages from the gods about the future, which competent clerks can read like cuneiform. The scribes, possessing the secret of writing, conceive a new idea of wisdom, which lies in understanding written texts, a writing that is everywhere, but accurately parsed only under their scrivening.158
According to a Babylonian Diviner’s Manual, “The signs on earth as well as of the sky bear signals for us; heaven and earth bring us omens; they are not separate from one another; heaven and earth are interconnected.” The scope of observations deemed relevant seems endless, including river levels, commodity prices, strange births, planetary conjunctions, and political events.
The scribes preserved accurate, detailed descriptions of the internal anatomy of sacrificial animals. Specialists watched the sky for omens, and their observations led to the discovery of celestial patterns and techniques of astronomical prediction. An archive in Babylon recorded observations of the positions of moon and planets every night for eight hundred years.159Yet their procedure was not as empirical as we might think, because the diviners did not first observe ominous phenomena and then consult empirically compiled lists for an interpretation. Instead, they knew their lists by heart and tried to match what they observed with a text they knew. “Only the divination manuals and traditions counted. If he could find no ‘word’ about it, the phenomenon was irrelevant.” The only observations of interest confirm what is in the lists, which are not controlled by observation. They were compiled as formal exercises articulating cuneiform grammar, exploring the graphematic system, practicing syntax, and drawing cosmological conclusions.160
Their so-called omen texts are lists of “if, then” statements, but no empirical connection is assumed. The correlations they present are not observed, but are instead based on orthography, homophony, analogy, and polarity. “If the anomaly has the face of a lion (nesu), there will be a harsh king and he will weaken (enesu) that country.” A dream in which a man eats a raven (arbu) portends income (irbu). A scholar of this material explains that we should not read the omen statements as: If A is observed, then B will take place. The way to read them is: If A is observed, then B might take place without appropriate countermeasures. For instance, this passage of the Diviner’s Manual: “Should no sign counteracting the sign have occurred, or it had no cancellation, or no one could make it pass by, [or] its evil consequences could not be removed, [then] it will happen.”161
The practice expresses a scribe’s interest in authoritative texts rather than an empirical philosopher’s interest in learning from experience.
Entries in the omen lists do not arise from observation. They are generated by internal principles of syntax, of which these lists are exercises and models. One item from a list of ominous births reads: “If a woman gives birth to a lion/wolf/ dog/pig/bull/elephant/ass/ram/cat/snake/tortoise/bird.” There is nothing observational about the series, which is neither a record of observations, nor a fantasy of what might be observed. It is a formal exercise, yet the mere fact that once “written in stone” (as all of their writing was) it lasts forever and can be read makes it numinous. The lists rigorously follow two rules. First, refine concepts by qualification: sheep, male sheep, white male sheep, three-year- old white male sheep. Second, explore ideas in series of concrete options: injury to the eye, the nose, the ears, face, fingers. An ominous sign appears on the right, on the left, on the top, at the bottom, in a man, a woman, child, free, slave.162The procedure logically permitted the consideration of a solar eclipse at midnight and a goat threshing grain. If you can write “eclipse at noon,” then you can write “eclipse at midnight.” If a man can enter a threshing yard, then a woman can, a child can, a goat, a demon, a black demon, three black demons, from the left, from the right, and so on, and so on. The possibilities are determined by syntax, nothing else matters, nothing else controls the lists. Despite making abundant use of observation, the business is not empirical, partly because it is impossible for an observation to rebound on the text and force a correction or even start a new record, but principally because theirs is not an experience from which they learn. On the contrary, it is experience organized as if to defeat learning. The indifference to observations unanticipated by a text deters rather than fosters the growth of experience and empirical knowledge.
Greeks made little use of Babylonian achievements because they did not understand them.
Not only could they not read the script, they did not understand what the Babylonians were trying to do with their writing, which was not what Greeks did with theirs. Unlike their alphabet, cuneiform was not invented to record speech, and was never used to facilitate disinterested analysis. The Greeks raised theory (from theorem, to witness, a disinterested gaze) to a high art. Responding to the question why it is better to be born than not, the philosopher Anaxagoras said, “For the sake of viewing the heavens and the whole order of the universe.” Heraclides of Pontus, a member of Plato's Academy, compared “the life of man” to the games at Olympia: “For this festival some men trained their bodies and sought to win the glorious distinction of a crown.... But there was a certain class, made up of the noblest men, who sought neither applause nor gain, but came for the sake of spectating and closely watched the event and how it was done.”163Those are the philosophers. They love disinterested seeing, especially one kind of seeing, one special spectacle: they love the sight of truth. It is in these terms that Plato differentiates philosophers from technicians, whether poets, rhetors, artisans, or physicians. Philosophers on his model are interested only in episteme, what Latins called scientia. This episteme is theoretical knowledge of truth, which is how the philosophers understand the ancient ideal of sophia, wisdom. There were competing ideas throughout the ancient world as to the quality of wisdom. The Pythagoreans, culminating with Plato, offered a new answer. Wisdom is the theorematic science of truth, the truth of being, what veritably is and does not change. That is the goal of wisdom because, as Aristotle explains, the theorematic intellection of truth “is in itself precious.”164
Technics is not such knowledge. Aristotle would have found Epicurean canonic intolerable. Techne and episteme are poles apart and have nothing to do with each other, concerning different objects on different planes of reality.
While technics works with approximate measures and mixed materials, science apprehends immutable essences. To bring science down to the level of material interaction is not to usefully apply a theory; it is to desecrate our closest approach to the divine. For philosophical theorists, spectators of immaterial spectacles, to know a thing is to fix it, stop it, hold it, rise above its changes. Only then can one see things whole and understand truthfully.On Aristotle’s account, thought demands that the phantasm on which cognition depends be undisturbed and tranquil. Thought and knowledge are not movements but the termination of movement, the soul in repose, the mind calmly possessing its object. “For it is by the soul coming to a standstill from natural turbulence that something becomes understanding (phronimon) or knowing (epistemon)—and this is also why children cannot acquire knowledge or pass judgment according to their senses as grown men can, for they are in a state of great turbulence and movement.”165