Members-only podcast episode
Seaford on Soul, Ritual, and Money
This is a special podcast episode for SHWEP members only
Already a member? Log in here to view this episode
(As with the main episode to which this is the companion, apologies for the poor sound quality. I was just getting the hang of my technology when this conversation took place)
‘There are in the ancient world – perhaps even in the modern world – two powerful things in the universe: one is money, and the other is ritual.’
The work of Richard Seaford encompasses the whole of early Greek culture, and he has published extensively on mystery-cult, early philosophy, the Athenian dramatists, and much more. A thread running through all of his work is a fascination with the ways in which the social and material circumstances of cultures shape the way people in those cultures think. In this extended conversation the key figures of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Plato are discussed vis à vis the concepts of the interiorisation of ritual and the monetisation of society. Apply some comparative discussion of Upanishadic and Brahmanic texts from an Indian region undergoing a similar process of moving from a gift-exchange economy to a currency-based one, and you have a very provocative insight into the ways in which the ideas of formative thinkers both of the Mediterranean and the Sanskritic spheres were born.
We move on from the earlier discussion of why the idea of a unified, central locus of consciousness – the soul – arises at a given time in both Greece and India, to a wider discussion involving other early philosophic concepts, including Heraclitus’ difficult idea of logos, Parmenides’ strongly abstracted notion of being, ‘ethicised indiscriminate reincarnation’, and the Indian concept of karma. Professor Seaford brings in concepts which are rarely considered in the context of this material, but which are there in the texts, such as ‘monetary account’, ‘private property’, and ‘debt’. Not everyone will agree with his analysis, but everyone’s ideas should get a good rinsing-out from his socially-embedded perspective on the history of ideas.
Bernie Lewin
September 8, 2019
Has Emile Durkheim been reincarnated a Greek Scholar? That’s what I thought while listening to this podcast. Only, Durkheim’s armchair anthropology on the Australian aborigine was far too subtle and sympathetic to the beliefs and rites of his subjects. This time around we have an absolutely robust socioeconomic analysis with no slippage into evaluation on some flimsy scale of truth.
We learnt that the philosopher’s ‘psyche’ is constructed out of money. The Pythogoreans simply divert numbers from trade. Why else would you say that ontological composition of the universe were numbers. (It’s demonstrable usefulness in astronomy had nothing to do with it.) Apparently they didn’t get the idea of abstract numbers from earlier civilisations. (So the story behind the origins of that ridiculous name ‘earth-measuring’ are baloney.) Previous civilisations didn’t need mathematics for things like the pyramids (nor, presumably, for earth-measuring). Sure, they needed numbers, but they don’t need the idea that numbers are separate from the stone or the wood or whatever it is. (So, it must have been that the Egyptians and Babylonians had one set of number names, counters, calculators, and notations for stone; they had another set for counting related to wood; they had a whole other sets for the earth-measuring…and so forth for whatever else).
The methodology behind these discoveries is so simple that it is absolutely incredible that other scholars have not applied it. Consider for example theories of the inner-self. Howsoever it is constituted, the inner-self is always an introjection of social relations. It’s certainly not something natural. Otherwise there would be no dispute about it. So, all you need to do is ask this one question: What social relation is being interjected? And not just for the psyche. This method can be applied to all other subjects of dispute, no less to notions of ‘being’.
There are two aspect to the question of ontology. The first is a no-brainer, everyone knows what ‘being’ is, (just like everyone knows what ‘piety’ is, and ‘justice’ and ‘goodness’ etc). The other aspect of the question is the convoluted arguments and inventions of philosophers. Take Parmenides for example. As an aristocrat he relied on currency staying the same. That is why his ‘being’ is always the same. Money either is or is not. So too being! (Parmenides did not understand that money only has value through circulation, and that even aristocratic wealth and affluence is maintained by transactions, including his own.)
You see this is not about ideas having a social life, not about how they come and go, thrive or wither, according to socioeconomic influences. No. The absolute social origin of all this meta-physics is absolutely fundamental for understanding it. Even without the Durkheimian methodology, the historical coincidences and metaphorical associations between the social phenomena and the metaphysical ideas are blindingly obvious. Which leaves the question of why they have been overlooked by scholars for so long. There is only one explanation. The fact that the philosophy at the foundations of Western culture is only an epiphenomenal mirroring of the particular social relations of that far of time is, well, rather vulgar.
Earl Fontainelle
September 8, 2019
I almost feel like there is a slightly sarcastic tone to your comment, but I’m sure I’m imagining it.
(NB: do check out our interview with Robert Bolton, a counterbalancing approach to all the materialism (even ‘dialectical’ materialism) in this episode)
Kenneth Selens
May 28, 2020
Talking about ubiquity… I can’t help but think about early Christianity strands that speak of building your treasure in heaven, seeds from heaven having various abilities of agricultural output, and then the antithesis of, I guess you would call it carnal, mammon. And this is in a culture that is much more ambiguous about pre- and post-mortem existence, at least explicitly.
Weronika Kamler
March 15, 2021
Found it 😊
Zoltan Mahler
December 20, 2022
While the point of the Seaford’s talk is obviously to present HIS argument on the emergence of “the soul” in the Western intellectual tradition, he is not entirely fair because he does not even mention some alternative hypotheses that have been advanced by others to explain the landslide intellectual developments that took place in Greece in the “axial age” – such as the one about alphabetic literacy or the argument from politics. True enough, he deals with them in his books (extensively critiquing the political argument of Lloyd, and mentioning Goody’s on literacy in passing), but it would have been only fair to listeners to learn that there are other candidates apart from money.
While I generally distrust monocausal explanations, I must say Seaford’s argument seems to be entirely cogent and well-presented. Nevertheless, let me add a word of caution, quoting a pertinent passage by the eminent classicist, the abovementioned G. Lloyd: “If the history of ideas is always highly problematic …, the study of major transformations in belief-systems is much more intractable, even when we have direct access to extensive first-hand evidence. If the reconstruction of the events, let alone of the causes, of a well-documented twentieth-century political revolution is, to a greater or lesser degree, a subjective and selective matter, the discussion of what happened, and of why it happened, in a revolution in thought is liable to far less effective control; and where, as in our case, the revolution in thought is deemed to have occurred in the distant past, the situation is all too obviously a desperate one. We are reduced to speculation, and the best we can hope to do is to scrutinise possible suggestions as closely as we can.” (Magic, Reason and Experience, p. 234-5)
Earl Fontainelle
December 20, 2022
Amen, Dr Lloyd, and thank you, Zoltan, for bringing this quote to our attention.
I agree that even if Seaford’s theory is part of the story, it cannot possibly be the whole story. Stuff is too complex.