Analogismoi Four: Phenomenology of Chaos

In both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmogonies, the primordial state of the world is chaotic and that chaos must be overcome.

In both the Enuma Elish and the Egyptian creation myth the primordial state of the world is that of formless watery chaos. For the Mesopotamians it is the internal embrace of Apsu (fresh water/culture/masculinity/order) and Tiamat (salt water / nature / femininity / chaos). Their mingling gives birth to the elder gods. In the Heliopolis Egyptian story that formless watery chaos takes the name of Nu, from which the creator god Atum emerges spontaneously.

Some scholars suggest that the Mesopotamian story with its insistence on a battle between Marduk and the embodiment of chaos, Tiamat, is owing to the volatile nature of the Euphrates while the Egyptian story shows more of a relative peace owing to the calm waters of the Nile. While I do think that there is something to this, I do not believe it to be the full story. The unified kingdoms of Egypt enjoyed a peace and stability that was not fully achieved in Mesopotamia which is likely just or more significant than their respective encounters with waters.

What is important to note is that the people of the ancient near east were focused on how to keep chaos at bay in an increasingly sophisticated world. We will get back to this.

American pragmatism and its twentieth century continental counterpart, phenomenology, are philosophical understandings of the world which prioritize experience over material rationality or metaphysical ideals. The simplest and most clear way of understanding this is that for a materialist, reality can be measured. Something is real if it can be observed, studied and quantified. For an idealist, like Plato for instance, real is the abstract concept — the form — of a thing. So for the materialist a triangle which we can measure is real. For an idealist, the concept of triangle is real and the physical instantiation is something like a mimetic copy. For the phenomenologist, real is that which is experienced — neither the abstract concept of triangleness nor an individual triangle are real in any serious sense without the experience of the triangle by man. In this sense we can also see that things like “love” or “anger” are just as real as things like “tables” and “spoons” for the phenomenologist.

The phenomenological approach to philosophy is, I believe, far more inline with the way our ancestors thought. The world was not a landscape of measurable phenomena which could be categorized, quantified and controlled. The world was a landscape of morality, a sort of moral geography. The attempt to know the self was, in many ways, an attempt to answer the question of what it is we should be doing and how it is we should be acting, who should be in charge and what it means to be admirable. How far one can move a stone with a certain amount of force at a certain trajectory was not as relevant as whether or not one ought to launch the stone. This was an epistemological epoch of meaning, not of matter – of what matters over matter itself.

The Mesopotamians as well as the Egyptians were trying to figure out  who they were and the world they lived in so they could know the proper way to organize themselves such that a harmonious balance would be achieved and chaos would be kept at bay.

So, here is the question: If chaos is the ultimate enemy of the people of the ancient near east, what is chaos?

We can start by saying that chaos is a watery dragon.

For the Mesopotamians the dragon of watery chaos was Tiamat. Tiamat was in an embrace with Apsu before his children killed him and set an angry Tiamat against the realm of the gods until she was slain by Marduk who then established habitable order out of her remains.

For the Egyptians, chaos was also a dragon — a sea serpent. The dragon’s name was Apophis (also called Apep) who embodied Isfet (chaos, darkness and destruction) in opposition to Ra, the sun god, and his maintenance of

ma’at (order). The dragon attacks Ra’s barge every night threatening to disrupt the world’s balance until the sun rises. Like Tiamat, Apophis is a primordial god connected to the waters (in the Egyptian case that is through Nu).

Both Apophis and Tiamat are serpent like monstrous dragons which embody primordial chaos and both stand in opposition to order.

Before you ask, yes….they are real at minimum from a phenomenological point of view.

Let’s see if we can make sense of this.

We live in a world where nearly everything is irrelevant. Our perception breaks the world up, according to our aims, into categories of tools, obstacles and the irrelevant. There are an infinite number of facts in the world. In order to experience anything we need to focus on only those that are relevant and since we are built on a hunting platform relevance has to do with aim (which is why the word sin, in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, are archery terms which mean to miss the mark; het in Biblical Hebrew and hamartia (Gr.ἁμαρτία) in koine Greek respectively).

The irrelevant nature of our experience is what keeps chaos at bay. A floor’s stability is assumed and thus the floor is irrelevant when we are walking on in. If an unexpected hole appears it is jarring and it requires our entire cognitive faculty to react to something which is no longer acting the way it ought to act. Further, this is not a conscious decision on our part. The infinity of facts in the world make it so we can’t possibly decide which are irrelevant and which are not and, as David Hume said, “you cannot derive an ought from an is.” The world lays itself out for you in terms of tools, obstacles and the irrelevant as a product of your aim.

Another example is that of an airplane. f you are anything like me you do not know how an airplane works. If you do know how an airplane works, follow along anyway I am sure you will get the point.

When I fly from one location to another I am not flying on an airplane in a phenomenological sense. I am inside a flying tube. An airplane is a vehicle which has been engineered to fly. While this may be what aeronautical

engineers experience with regard to an airplane it is not what I experience. I experience a flying tube that gets me from here to there. That I am in a flying tube of conveyance is more real for the phenomenologist than the idea that I am in an airplane because I am in no way experiencing an airplane.

As such, on a calm and eventless flight the mechanics of the airplane or the fact that I am thirty thousand feet in the air in a large flying metal tube using a bunch of applied physics that I do not understand does not matter. It is irrelevant and that stability keeps the dragon at bay.

What happens, however, when something goes wrong. The oxygen bags have deployed, the flight starts to get shaky your experience of panic is the reemergence of the dragon of chaos.

This is what these ancient civilizations were trying to figure out. There is a dragon which lurks right behind the corner of everything we do and makes itself manifest the second that the irrelevant perceptions of the world break down and instantly become very, very relevant.

So you ask is Apophis or Tiamat real. Well, the next time you are just making your way leisurely through the world and the things you take for granted no longer work the way you expect them, that terror that you feel….that is the dragon of chaos. That is what it is like when Tiamat attacks.

You may recall that in the post about Tiamat I spoke about the dragon of chaos being the lowest resolution predation category. It is a combination of all the things which present danger to humans while at the same time offering up the most value when successfully confronted. What is interesting is that neuroscientists have long since located the predator detection system in the human brain and it is the exact same cognitive system which is the source of panic and anxiety.

To drive this point home in the most straight forward way, when something ellicits anxiety or panic out of you it is because the world you took for granted has started to act in a way you didn’t expect. That anxiety and panic is produced by the exact same system in the brain which is responsible for predation fear. So, when you are on a plane and all of a sudden it seems like a crash is a very realistic outcome the negative emotion which is produced is the same negative emotion that would be produced in the brain of our ancient ancestor when he is picking fruit from a tree and all of a sudden encounters a poisonous snake, coiled and ready to attack. It is, both phenomenologically and biologically the same thing.

In short, a break down of order leads to a confrontation with the dragon of chaos which is the most general level of analysis of predator. Whether or not the dragon is an actual dragon or just the abstract notion of chaos does not matter one bit. The exact same part of the brain produces the exact same experience for both.

For the American Pragmatist or the Continental Phenomenologist who believes that experience is the ultimate reality, the dragon exists. It is my contention that prior to the scientific revolution this was the natural and innate manner in which humans looked at the world and, while the terminology and methodology is different, is the exact same thing that our ancient ancestors were trying to explain with their cosmogonies.