Archē

In this week’s Main Project article, Epilogue: On Shepherds and Shepherding,  I make several references to the ancient Greek concept of the archē (Gr. Ἀρχή). It is hard to overstate the importance of understanding this concept for understanding how it is that the western philosophical tradition began, how the shift from polytheism to monotheism occurred, how the modern mind of man emerged, what is going on in the New Testament and, of course, reading the content of this website.

To begin, the word archē originates in the Ancient Greek religion. Archē was originally identified as one of the Boeotian muses recognized in Delphi. With time, she was recognized as one of the nine Olympic Muses, the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, as the muse of origins and beginnings — the inspiration which serves as the underpinning font of potential in which all human endeavors begin (I can’t stress enough to keep that in mind in the weeks to come).

Let’s look at the literal translation. Archē can mean “origin,” “ancient,”  “first principle,” or “fundamental substance.” It is the direct translation of the prefix for the English word archeology  arkhaiología (Gr. ἀρχαιολογία) which is the combination of arkhaîos (Gr. ἀρχαῖος) and logía (Gr. λογία) meaning the study of original or ancient causes. In this sense we see the word archē in “archaic,” “archetype,” and “archive.” However, this doesn’t even begin to cover even its literal usage. We also see archē in words like “monarch,” from the greek monos combined with the suffix archē to mean “one ruler” just as it is in “oligarchy,” patriarchy,” “hierarchy” which, from the Greek hieros (Gr. ἱερός), means “the sacred ruler” as well as the title “archon,” a sort of magistrate or local ruler. 

So we can add to the word not merely its connotation of being ancient fundamental bedrock principles, not just the inspiration at the outset of all endeavors, but also ruler as in someone(s) or thing(s) that has primary authority and sovereignty. It is that which causes and that which governs.

It is important to really try to understand how the same word for the necessary inspiration and potential of all things is also the fundamental principle which guides it and connects it to all other things in the cosmos. We also see archē used to translate the Old Testament (Philo) Hebrew B’rêshîth (“In the Beginning…”) to explain the moment just prior to the creation where the world was a chaotic mess of potential.

While this seems to be quite a bit of work for one word, we are only scratching the surface.  Archē is a term of immense philosophical importance to the Greeks dating back to the first philosopher, Thales. In the 6^th century BC, on the Ionian Coast of Asia Minor, in a city called Miletus, the recognized founder of philosophy, mathematics, science and deductive reasoning argued that there was a single material substance from which all of nature originate. The archē is the undergirding potential which is common through the multiplicity of the universe as a single thing the way there is something in an acorn that connects it to the oak tree.

For Thales that substance was water. The idea that there was a unified and unifying material (rather than a divine multiplicity) substance underpinning the whole of the cosmos was a radical departure from the paganism and polytheistic conception of the world of the day and represents a radical shift in the overarching and governing epistemic nature of man.

After Thales, his students Anaximander and Anaxagoras continued his work arguing for other substances which may constitute the archē and later, in Ephesus, a philosopher named Heraclitus suggested that the archē was fire and that it was controlled by opposing forces which constituted its logos. We also see Pythagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles trying to work this idea of an archē  out — the later arguing that the archē was organized and made rational by the opposing forces of love and strife. Discussion about the underpinning archē and the forces which acted upon it was at the absolute bedrock of centuries of philosophical inquiry.

Within a couple of centuries, in Athens, Plato would promote his idea of the Forms, eternal abstractions from particular and imperfect physical objects, with the pinnacle of the hierarchy of forms being that of The Good. Thus, for Plato, the concept of the archē became associated with metaphysical rather than material concept — another enormous step in the evolution in how we see our cosmogony, our minds and, indeed, our gods — the pagan gods now being seen to be a product of the archē and the forces working upon it themselves. As with embodied knowledge or dramatic renderings (i.e., animal sacrifice, stories of gods and heroes, etc.) the long process of psychologizing, internalizing and articulating this knowledge is well on the way and we are fortunate to have a vantage point spanning millennia in order to see it.

It is so important here to note that by the time of Plato (3^rd century BC) the debate was not if there was a single universal archē serving as the primordial potential and inspiration for, and unifying spirit of, all being. Rather, the debate was about what the nature of the archē is — material, psychological, divine, metaphysical.

One of the most important take aways here is that God and Man are co-evolving with the pagan gods being shepherded together under a monistic (whether material or metaphysical, God for the Hebrews and the archē for the Greeks) principle to which they are subordinate while the fractionated thinking of the people are also being unified in a way that is allowing for a more rational and sensible understanding of the the self and world. Further, we are seeing this unification of a multitude on the social level with the various city states coming together to form Greece and the various near eastern tribes organizing themselves into Empires.

What we see here is a drastic epoch eclipse where the fractionated psyche of man, mirrored in his pagan beliefs, is being herded together and unified. The notion of the archē marked the birth of Western philosophy and science, shifting explanations of the world from mythological pluralistic polytheism to rational unified accounts first material and later metaphysical.

In his 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, psychologist  Julian Jaynes puts forth the idea that ancient humans operated with a fundamentally different mental structure than modern humans, lacking the introspective, self-aware consciousness we experience today. He says that their minds were “bicameral,” which means divided into two chambers, with one part issuing commands and the other obeying, often experienced as auditory hallucinations perceived as the voices of the gods. We can think of this as one side of the brain being in the dreamlike subconscious and transmitting that dream in fragmentary form to the other side of the brain which unifies it and adds a normative cognitive structure to form consciousness in the form of mental cohesion.

For Jaynes, the right temporal lobe generated commands or instructions which were then transmitted to the left hemisphere as auditory hallucinations to be categorized and made sensible. He points specifically the the end of the Mediterranean Bronze Age (c. 1000 BC) supporting his claim with evidence from historical texts such as The Iliad which lacks references to introspection or mental processes compared to the much later work The Odyssey.

The emergence of consciousness, characterized by introspection, self-awareness and the ability to reason and narrate one’s own actions, replaced the bicameral mind and in turn replaced external nature gods with an internalized God with whom we can dialogue. It is of crucial significance that God, for the ancient people, was something which could be dialogued with. For the early Greeks, much of what we now consider part of our mind, our feelings of love, anger, hunger, pride, lust, bravery, etc. were external forces, i.e., gods. For modern man those forces have been brought into the self. We can talk for hours on how to explain it, but the most readily available explanation is the image of the shepherd.

Whether Jaynes is right or wrong is still a source of scholarly debate, but we do know that his theory does nicely map onto the hemispheric understanding of the human brain. The right hemisphere which controls spacial awareness, creativity and imagination as well as emotional processing seems to produce what we can think of as a dream, the dream of an artist.

The dream produced by the right hemisphere is transmitted through the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere, the center for language, speech, logic  and analytic thinking, in order to be processed into intelligibility. This cognitive functioning is something which is very nicely mapped onto one of, if not the original archetypical human pattern of creating order and a known world from a chaotic unknown world characterized by humans and before that our common ancestor dating back some four billion years even to the universal common ancestor (a topic which deserves its own essay).

We can think of the two hemispheres like this: The left hemisphere is in the safe and known part of the world while the right hemisphere goes out into the unknown and brings back what it finds for the left to then incorporate, update and understand as the known having grown. The thing about this that works so perfectly is that it is the exact same cognitive circuitry (which can be easily observed through MRIs) used for exploration and safety. This is to say, our earliest ancestors who knew only the tree and the fire as safe spots and ventured into the unknown to face dangers with the hopes of bringing something of value back were using the exact same part of the brain which we use to take something we don’t understand and incorporate it into the body of that which we do understand. And….of course it is this way. How else would it be? Evolution is, above all, a conservatory force. We already have those circuits in place, we just evolved to use them differently.

This step, the announcement of the archē by Thales, signifies an enormous step in the intellectual evolution of man. This concept of the archē as that principle, whether natural or metaphysical, which underpins the cosmos and is responsible for both the creation and governance of everything in the universe will drastically change the course of man in the west. It must be noted, finally, that this was not some obscure knowledge. Amongst the educated in the ancient Greek world this was a major source of discussion and as the discussion became more and more sophisticated as the ancient pagan gods receded more and more into the background as the new rational world emerged.

So pervasive was the idea of the archē that nearly all of the surviving philosophical works from the period after the 6^th century BC directly focus on it and, as we will see, it is a concept that remains a focal point of all human intellectual endeavors even to this day. What is the archē is one of, if not the, most fundamental philosophical and scientific questions of the last three thousand years.

There is no difference between Thales’ attempts to understand the cosmos as the product of a material archē over twenty-five hundred years ago and current work by physicists on the “Theory of Everything” as a hypothetical framework which attempts to unify the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force into a single theoretical framework and thus explaining all physical phenomena in the universe, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest structures like galaxies, using one set of principles and equations. We are still up to the same business as Thales was twenty-six hundred years ago.

Finally, let us take a look at the various connotations and uses of archē so we can get a handle on its meaning and the minds of the people who put so much effort into figuring it out. Its religious connotation for the Greeks is in the form of a muse who serves as a kind of inspirational potential. You can think of this in terms of the decision to do anything. For instance, while you are doing nothing you might be struck with something which demands your attention. You can then act on that inspiration. The inspiration itself makes manifest that which requires attending to and informs and governs the entire process of attending to it from start to finish.

From a linguistic standpoint, archē is the ancient and original foundation, the pattern and cause of all things, the unity which not just underpins but is responsible for the production of the unity. Further, it is that which regulates and controls the multiplicity form whose creation it was a necessary precondition.

Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, the archē is the fundamental unity of the cosmos, the mind and the state. It is both the why and how of  humans, peaches, stars, tribes, nations and filth are connected into a single sense. Later philosophers might call it being as such. It is the golden thread that runs through and holds together all of reality making it a unified whole.