Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Prehistory
187 Plays9 days ago
In this episode, Megan and Frank discuss the philosophical dimensions of prehistory. What and when is the “prehistoric”? How was prehistory "discovered", and what explains our fascination with it? Is ancient archeology safe from our biases? And how did archaic man’s meaning-making differ from our own? Thinkers discussed include: Colin Renfrew, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Mircea Eliade, and Wittgenstein.
-----------------------
Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
-----------------------
Bibliography:
Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind - Colin Renfrew
Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Cave of Forgotten Dreams - Official Trailer | HD | IFC Films
Bewitched by an Elf Dart: Fairy Archaeology, Folk Magic and Traditional Medicine in Ireland - Dowd
A Secular Age — Harvard University Press
Theory and Observation in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology - Currie & Killin
Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem - Killin & Pain
An Ape's View of the Oldowan - Wynn & McGrew
Neuroscience, evolution and the sapient paradox - Colin Renfrew
Sapient paradox: Why humans got stuck in prehistory -Gossip Trap- Big Think
The Myth of the Eternal Return | Princeton University Press
Eliade_Mircea_The_Sacred_and_The_profane_1963
Wittgenstein - Notebooks, 1914 - 1916, 2nd Edition | Wiley
-----------------------
Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
-------------------------
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
License code: AAO0Q7IZMGVTLFJH
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Philosophy on the Fringes'
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. On today's episode, we're talking about prehistory.
00:00:15
Speaker
What and when is the prehistoric? Is ancient archaeology safe from our biases? And how did archaic man's meaning making differ from our own?
Personal Updates: Breaks and Projects
00:00:39
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes after an overly long break for episode 21, where we're covering prehistory today. So, Frank, anything ah anything you want to start us out with? Well, I guess we should maybe say what we've been up to. so what have you been up to, Megan?
00:00:56
Speaker
Even though we haven't been releasing podcasts, what have you been doing? Gosh, yeah it's been what two months. And actually, and and people should know because this is this isn't a lie. We've had this episode prepared for about a month and a half. Yeah.
00:01:10
Speaker
We've had it prepared for about a month and a half. And then right when we got it finished, we sort of began our so our ah series two of winter illness extravaganza, which I think everyone kind of went through.
00:01:22
Speaker
But I think we got hit with like three or four sicknesses kind of in a row. um We did have some unexpected traveling that we ended up having to do You gave a talk. and i've And we've been writing the episodes for The Great Courses version of this podcast. Right. We've been. Exactly. Exactly. um And there is new material in that. So podcast fans of the podcast will have new stuff to listen to when those come out as well.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah. So we've been doing a lot of things, trying to stay healthy and just unfortunately just did not get around to recording this until now. But here we are. We're back. ah We've both been i think we've been trying to do things in the new year for our betterment as people do. Right. Yeah. I've been off Twitter a lot.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I've been reading fiction. I've been reading Moby Dick. Yeah. Great stuff. Yeah. I've I haven't been off Twitter, but I did delete Instagram, which I think for me, I also feel like maybe for most women, it was like like I guess like as a woman, this was so beneficial to my mental health.
00:02:20
Speaker
yeah It was just great. I love not being on Instagram. Honestly, it's been the best thing. And and I've also been trying to read more fiction. So, yeah, we've we've basically been sick reading, traveling and writing.
00:02:34
Speaker
And now we're talking with all of you lovely people. So I guess let's jump into this material. because There's as usual, there's a lot. So we should probably start with a definition of prehistory. So what is prehistory? Well, it seems like if we're going to talk about prehistory, we should talk about history. Dinosaurs.
00:02:52
Speaker
Well, we'll get to that. But we should talk about what a history is first, right? It seems more logically fundamental. Prehistory is before history. So what's history? And here, you know, we can
Understanding History vs Prehistory
00:03:03
Speaker
we can talk about various definitions. You might think of history as just the past events themselves. You might say that She and I have a long history together. That is, a lot of stuff happened.
00:03:14
Speaker
ah You can also think of history as not the events themselves, but the writing about the events, and chronicling about the events. And then you can think of also history as not just the mere chronicle of events, but like the scientific study of past events.
00:03:30
Speaker
So in our episode on myths, we talked a lot about Herodotus and Thucydides. ah the founders of the scientific approach to history in the West. So, you know, what what makes their writing scientific? Well, they're looking for the causes of things. They're trying to come up with a rational approach to the study of the past So those are three possible definitions of history. You know who kind of works with this with the structure you laid out? Who? Hegel. Oh, Hegel. Yeah, ah Hegel.
00:04:00
Speaker
ah Sort of. It doesn't exactly match your... Megan's the Hegel expert in our household because she taught Hegel recently. love it. I taught Hegel one time, yes which does actually make me the expert in our household, which is just you, ah two and a half year old and a baby. a real A real blind spot in my philosophical development. I really, really, really don't know anything about Hegel. yeah Sorry.
00:04:22
Speaker
Well, certainly, you know, he's interested in history and what. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's famously the the the philosopher of history in a sense. He thinks of everything as deeply historical.
00:04:33
Speaker
In fact, this is what Kierkegaard takes issue with with him. But that's beside the point. So Hegel kind of puts history as as a science, as an activity anyway, into three different categories. And I'm not going to spend long on this. I just think it's kind of interesting how it almost tracks what you said.
00:04:48
Speaker
So original history, Which isn't for him in the events itself, but it is just like the really basic jotting down of what happens. So if you're like keeping a diary or you're like a scribe and you're just writing down what happened, you're doing original history. So just like chronicling it basically at the time that it happens. Yeah, that's my second definition, our mere chronicling. Mm-hmm.
00:05:10
Speaker
And then there's for him reflective history, yeah which is where you do it kind of how like you might imagine a Ph.D. dissertation that like you're you're thinking of like a category in history. so you might think of like, ah you know, antebellum, whatever, whatever is during the whatever reformation.
00:05:30
Speaker
I'm not a historian. Yeah, clearly. But you get what I'm saying, right? You would have a topic, an area that you study, yeah and you would reflect on it as like a kind of self-contained thing. Yeah, you're collecting a lot of facts. You're doing it diligently. You're looking for coherent explanations of things.
00:05:45
Speaker
Exactly. Right.
Mysteries and Evidence of Prehistory
00:05:47
Speaker
And then there's philosophical history. And he thinks of this as more a science than the other two. And it's where you're kind of less concerned with just like recording the literal events that happened and more concerned with thinking about the ideas that that pushed it along and and and guided and into his next stage, which, ah i mean, obviously is, I mean, for anyone who knows anything about Hagel, is what he's interested in. Yeah, so this is like the laws of history, something like that. Precisely. Okay, so I do know something about Hagel. So, you didn't even know Yeah. and
00:06:21
Speaker
ah Right, so he so that's how he he puts, like, history as a chronicling activity into those three different categories. And they don't perfectly match, like, your categories, but, I mean, they're kind of similar. Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:33
Speaker
Okay, so sometimes the word history refers to past events themselves. Sometimes the word history refers to, you know, the time from when people started writing about past events or the writings themselves of the past events.
00:06:45
Speaker
And sometimes history is like a scientific study. It's like a field of study about past events. So given those different ways we use the word history, what might prehistory be?
00:06:56
Speaker
Well, it doesn't really make sense to think of prehistory. the The word history isn't functioning in prehistory in the first way we talk about it. It's not functioning as just a way to refer to the events themselves, because otherwise that'd be saying like before events happen. Yeah, the events before the events or something. Right. I would love to know what happened before events happened. That's like when God created the universe. Exactly. Yeah. This is like, you know, big bang. Like, what what are we talking about here?
00:07:21
Speaker
So that's not what we mean. We might think of prehistory as ah where history functions as the second understanding of history did, where it just refers to when people started writing about past events. So prehistory is what happened before people started recording the events that happened. And I think that is generally what we mean when we talk about prehistory. I think so. I think so. i mean, you could have a definition of history, prehistory, where you mean and before Herodotus and Thucydides came around. But that's kind of weird, idiosyncratic. and
00:07:51
Speaker
Generally, what we mean is events before there was written language, before people started recording things about the events. Right, right, right. Because that might include like thing like bronze age people. We don't normally talk about them as like prehistoric. No, right.
00:08:07
Speaker
Right. Good. So prehistory then is kind of like a relative term. Right, because different societies and invented writing at different times, right? it was It was invented later on in some places than others. And so ah there like one culture's prehistory might be earlier or later than another's because they invented writing earlier or later.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of ah indigenous peoples in the United States actually didn't have a written language for like a really long time because they had such a rich oral tradition and tightly knit communities. They didn't really need one. yeah Might not need one. And so their prehistory right lasted longer than, say, prehistory in Mesopotamia.
00:08:47
Speaker
Right, exactly. Okay, Megan, so this is philosophy on the fringes. We talk about strange topics, near-death experiences, astrology. ah What's weird about this topic? doesn't seem really weird.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know if I would describe it as weird so much as I would mysterious. um There's a lot about prehistory that's really, really mysterious. That's why people are so interested in it. yeah um We have small things from people who lived, you know, 30, 40, 50,000 years ago.
00:09:19
Speaker
And they're just they're so small. They're little tools or handprints or small paintings. and we're going to get into this and talk about it. Just tiny remnants of things that let us know that like whole human lives were going on.
00:09:31
Speaker
But not much, because obviously it's really hard for something to survive that long. Yeah. um For artifacts or markings to survive that long. And I think it's just a kind of extreme curiosity that it ignites in us, like knowing so long, so long ago that it's really hard to think in those kinds of terms.
00:09:49
Speaker
There were people living entire, full, rich human lives with like the kinds of experiences that we have. And I think it it makes us curious about it, but also maybe a little frustrated because there's only so much we can know.
00:10:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. i think we want to know a lot about these people who lived 30,000 years ago. ah But the the the evidence base is very limited. right there They left some traces, but not a lot. And so they presumably they formed friendships.
00:10:15
Speaker
they They loved. right they They struggled. They they created arts. right And we want to know about that, but we like we can't because there's not that much they they left behind. They left some things behind, so there's like a taste of what how
Sophistication of Chauvet Cave Art
00:10:27
Speaker
they were. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's also sort of like...
00:10:30
Speaker
It's strange how we go about, i mean, and this is, you know, this is what the episode will be about basically, but strange how how we go about figuring out the things that we do know or at least think we know, right? Like ah the method for doing prehistory is unique i in in a lot of ways to the method for doing history. It involves maybe some extra factors and a lot of input from psychology and and like evolutionary biology. Well, archaeology is going to be the probably the the main source of of evidence. Right. Yeah.
00:10:59
Speaker
yeah Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, mean, I think that there's a lot that's maybe not weird, but definitely mysterious and definitely, definitely yeah on the fringes of academic philosophy. If you don't think that prehistory is weird and strange, then we recommend watching, should talk about this now, this documentary by Werner Herzog, who I love. Werner.
00:11:18
Speaker
Werner, the German filmmaker and and the noted eccentric. Noted. Noted. noted i noted it Yeah. he He has a documentary called Cave of Forgotten Dreams from about like 10 years ago. It's so good. we're watching where Where he you takes you inside the kate is ah ah caves in in southern France. The cave is Chauvet.
00:11:40
Speaker
Inside of which are these cave paintings from like 30,000 years ago. The oldest ones we have, think I think. Not the oldest ones, but they're they're some of the oldest in like Europe. like there're there There's older ones. The oldest complex ones. Yeah, they're very they're very complex. like that's That's what's interesting about them.
00:11:55
Speaker
And yeah, if you if you watch the documentary, like you will see like the the the mysteriousness and the air of strangeness that prehistory can elicit. Because these are people living 30,000 years ago that are doing what we would call art. They're doing art Yeah, I mean, I think it's uncontroversially art. Are we getting more into this later, or should we just talk about it? We should talk about yeah. Okay, yeah. So in Chauvet, am I saying this right? Chauvet.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, in the Chauvet cave, we stumbled upon, I think it was through it was through kind of like a cave in, like a rock slide or something. yeah It opened up ah what had been an opening to the cave, and people were able to go inside, and they found a a large cavern that was just sort of covered in in tons of artwork.
00:12:41
Speaker
Mostly animals. Right. So like lions, rhino. right A lot of handprints, too, though, um really intentionally placed ah handprints um placed for the effect. And what they think is that it was a temple, a place of kind of religious significance. Yeah. If I remember. It's more of the going hypotheses. Yes.
00:13:00
Speaker
um There was a ah spring there, but it doesn't seem like anybody really lived there. but ah but But what got me, I guess, i'm I'm sort of like a, I'm not even really a hobbyist, but I like art. I appreciate art. And they're these are very artistically sophisticated. These aren't the kinds of like stick figures that you think of, I think when you think, or like when I think of cave drawings, I think of like stick figures and they're like, kid is painting on the cave wall or someone's you know depicting a battle.
00:13:28
Speaker
But these were these were beautiful. yeah Yeah. Really, you have to see them to understand. i mean, we do our best to describe it. like For instance, some techniques they use, but they exploited the the the rocks themselves to almost give the animals a kind of three-dimensional aspect. And Or and and is' it to make it seem as though they were in motion. They drew them in such a way to make a seem though they were in motion. They'll give a horse like 10 legs to make it look like it's like, yeah you know. I the idea is like when you had your torch in the cave, it would really look like the animals were moving.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, and it really does. I mean, you can really see that in the documentary. We'll obviously link to lots of pictures um of these cave paintings. But um just the the the technique itself was just like absolutely amazing. Like more understanding of depth perception than I feel like you see in a lot of like high Gothic art and stuff.
00:14:16
Speaker
um So that was, um yeah, so it was really arresting. And I think that it gives you you, know, that's the kind of thing that makes you want to understand more about how these people lived.
00:14:27
Speaker
And the people studying them in the documentary, even they express these kinds of sentiments that they had to they to take a break. They had to leave because the experience was so awesome, so awe-inspiring. They needed a moment to catch their breath.
00:14:40
Speaker
and yeah That's sort of how I feel too when I think think a lot about prehistory. it gives me a kind of kind of vertigo, right? There's a thousand generations of people who have lived and died doing similar things that we do.
00:14:51
Speaker
And we're still able to reach back and connect with them through these things they left behind, which is pretty great.
Prehistory's Impact on Human Understanding
00:14:56
Speaker
But prehistory is sort of, I guess, maybe ironic given its content, but it's kind of new as a field of study, right?
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, prehistory was discovered not so long ago. um So in preparation for this podcast, I read a book called Prehistory, The Making of the Modern Mind. read almost all of it. didn't finish I should probably finish It's weird to read a book and like not read the last like chapter or two. I should finish that book. got i got distracted. I literally just tweeted about how about how finishing a book just because you started it is like doing the sunk cost fallacy. I tweeted that like an hour ago. But I think there's some good stuff. there you know There's probably great stuff at the end.
00:15:34
Speaker
ah ah So this book is by Colin Renfrew. So he was he was until very recently because he died the most distinguished living archaeologist. And here's what Colin here's what he has to say.
00:15:44
Speaker
about Prehistory good quote let's read it and full ah two centuries ago prehistory did not exist the very notion of preistory in the sense of a broad stretch of time going back before the dawn of written history had not been formulated There was absolutely no notion that the human past involved tens of thousands of years of development and change.
00:16:06
Speaker
In Europe, many scholars followed the arguments of the 17th century cleric and biblical scholar Archbishop Usher, who had calculated that the earth was created in the year 4004 BC. Many of the great literary traditions, whether in Europe, Western Asia, India, or China, had likewise no place for any such notion of deep time, going back tens of thousands of years.
00:16:27
Speaker
Okay, so wait, this is sort of beside the point, but I do actually have a question about this. ah So, okay, obviously I you know understand like the whole like young earth thing from like fundamental like theological stuff. now That obviously was around a while um in like the West, but why in Asia, India, and china China? Those are all Asian countries, but why in Asia? Yeah.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. i think I think it just seems superfluous, right? The gods or the god created the universe. Like, why would there be this giant stretch of time between us and the creation? it just seems, like, unnecessary. That's that's that's my guess. ah Unnecessary for what? Unnecessary. I mean, yeah, you just don't need you I don't know. it's like Because the the story's about us. It's not about some weird creatures that are like us. Well, maybe it was about them, and it's just that we're just like the... you Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm really not sure. It just didn't occur. It just seemed too big. Like, it it was it was not something you could conceive of.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, like it's just something you wouldn't conceive of unless it's right in front of your face. You know, why didn't most cultures think of the universe as super duper duper big like we do? right Like, they didn't think of it as stretching millions of light years across or anything like that.
00:17:39
Speaker
I guess that's not that crazy, because I guess why why would you believe people live 40,000 years ago unless you unless you have reason to believe it wouldn't maybe be the thing that you should default to. Yeah. OK, so.
00:17:51
Speaker
But once we found out that was true, voila. And how it was discovered is a really interesting story. I mean, won we won't belabor the point here. Like, you know, evolutionary biology had and geology had a lot to do with it, like uncovering fossils, right? you know, Darwin's theory required that the Earth be really, really old, right? And a lot of geologists the 19th century were trending toward that that view, right? Mm-hmm.
00:18:14
Speaker
so mean So those sort of things played a really big role. But I think also what played big role is like discovering some of the tools and the artifacts of ancient people, ancient ancient hominids, these things like arrowheads and stone axes.
00:18:26
Speaker
And this is one one aspect of this book that was super duper interesting to me um was that ah people in like the 18th century had ah had discovered the these sorts of arrowheads and and stone axes, but they didn't think of them immediately as being the tools of ancient people. They had other hypotheses. Right.
00:18:44
Speaker
ah Yeah, they were um they were from elves. That was one hypothesis, right? So one hypothesis was that these stone tools were from fairies. The arrowheads were fairy darts or elf shot.
00:18:56
Speaker
um And these are sort of things that would cause and cure illnesses. um That was what they thought or that they were thunderbolts that fell to earth. They had these kinds of naturalistic um explanations for the stone tools. They thought they were they were ah natural artifacts. Yeah.
00:19:12
Speaker
You know, that's not I remember when I was a kid, um we lived in southern Michigan and we lived right by the river. And we would always like to go and look for like beads in the river. like, you know, old like Native American beads. Sometimes you can like find like stone beads.
00:19:31
Speaker
But what we were told by the nature guides, I have no way of knowing if this is really right, but what we were told by the nature guides at the nature park was that actually river rocks can form in such a way that look just like beads. They are, you know, like wheel shaped with little notches in it. It looks like a hole through the middle because of just so something about the way the river's water flows around bends and stuff.
00:19:55
Speaker
So it's not, ah sometimes it looks like beads, but it's not. So I guess it kind of makes sense to be like, well, there's like stones and all these weird shapes, you know, who maybe maybe this was formed naturally, you know, who who knows?
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. So they they weren't being stubborn or or stupid when they didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that these were the tools of ancient people. But I think nowadays, if I showed you a picture of like a bunch of arrowheads or like or or stone tools, you would immediately think, oh, yeah, those are like ancient. Those are ancient stone age tools or something like that. Like we would see them and as ancient tools, but they didn't see them as those.
00:20:32
Speaker
I'm looking at these pictures right now that you have. Like, a lot of them, yes. I'm like, okay, that's clearly an arrowhead. But some of them, I don't know. Is that an axe head? Is it not? I mean, you have to admit, some of these are vague.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I do. ah But some of them are not, right? Sure. So, yeah. So, let's go with the the ones that are and not ambiguous. Yeah, yeah. Some of them's like that that definitely like speared an elf. Yeah. For sure.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah. So, those, you would see those as tools, but they they they would not, right? yeah Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay, so needless to say, kind of the discovery of prehistory was ah a huge shift psychologically, I think, for people. I mean, there's in my, I teach a 19th century philosophy class and people grappling with the reality of um What Charles Taylor, another philosopher, a 20th century philosopher, he's still alive, still writing great stuff, what he would call deep time, people grappling with this realization that the universe is unimaginably old. So the earth is and even life is really unimaginably much older than we thought it was.
00:21:37
Speaker
um Had a real existential impact on people. And it really kind of marked a paradigm shift in how we thought about everything that we observed in the natural world. um Taylor has some great quotes on on this phenomenon that he calls deep time.
00:21:52
Speaker
um He says that we are overawed by its greatness, meaning just sort of like the ancientness of everything. And it's mountains, deserts, oceans. We sense a vastness, which is alien and strange, which dwarfs us, passes our understanding and seems to take no heed of us, um which I think is is is really like the the core of why it kind of unnerved people, um because it seems like we disappear as individuals in like the vastness.
00:22:20
Speaker
If if human life is 4000 years old, then then We can kind of still see ourselves on the timeline. If it's as old as it is, then then we can't, really. We sort of disappear.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, that section of the book, he he talks about deep time in conjunction with the idea of the sublime. The idea that ah you know when you look out at at a thunderstorm, it's beautiful, but also scary. That mixture of beauty and and something and terror.
00:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, the volcanoes. Yeah, volcanoes too. or the And prehistory can sometimes elicit that that kind of reaction. So in that quote, like Taylor kill talk is is talking about how prehistory sort of structures the way we see things. And I think going back to the the Arrowhead thing, the the fact that like we now have this notion of prehistory and deep time, that allows us to to see some of those more convincing examples of Arrowheads, not the ambiguous ones.
00:23:13
Speaker
ah see them immediately as like stone tools, whereas our predecessors would not see them as that way. And this ah this is an idea from the important idea in philosophy of science called the the theory-ladenness of observation.
00:23:25
Speaker
Basic idea being that there's not really a sharp distinction between your theory or interpretation of things and your observation of things. like we I think So unthinkingly, we sometimes think there's a sharp distinction. There's observations and theory. Theory is supported by observation. We make theories based on our observ observation. Yeah, and ah and the observations are treated as kind of neutral, right? They're they're they're sort of they're just sort of there. We're just recording what we see see. But really, that's an oversimplified picture. And most philosophers of science would accept this this basic point. You don't really just see things. You see them as something. Right.
00:23:57
Speaker
ah so So, yeah, so so we see them we see those stone tools as stone tools, whereas you know our predecessors didn't see them as stone tools. They saw them as as something else, even though they had access to them.
00:24:10
Speaker
So how it is that we we come up with new theories and new paradigms, it's a complicated story. But it's not just an immediate jump from a ah ah basic, theory-less, kind a neutral observation to a new a new theory.
00:24:24
Speaker
I mean, I think the thing that illustrates that are those like, you know, those like stupid things on Facebook. They're like, oh, look at this image. Do you see yeah two people kissing or a vase? Yeah. And and that sort of shows how like what we observe can shift depending on what we're expecting to see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's similar to that, too. Like, yeah, your expectations can can change what you see.
00:24:44
Speaker
Your beliefs can change what you see. And in cognitive science is called cognitive penetration. Right. So we have this background belief that, hey, prehistoric peoples existed and their lives were kind of like thus and so.
00:24:55
Speaker
Then we might look at a rock and all of a sudden observe it to be an arrowhead where we would not have otherwise. And it's obviously so. And how could they not think it was obvious? exactly But there was a lot of theory in the background that they didn't have that that we do have. Sure.
Cognitive Archaeology and Ancient Mindsets
00:25:10
Speaker
All right, so we hinted at the beginning of the episode that the the tools of the prehistorian are going to include maybe some different um and different items than the tools of just like ah someone doing regular history.
00:25:24
Speaker
um And one of those tools maybe is something called cognitive archaeology. do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so cognitive archaeology is a a sub-discipline of archaeology.
00:25:36
Speaker
And the goal of cognitive archaeologists is to use the material remains, things like stone tools and the like, to make inferences about ah people's thinking, or the ancient people's thinking, like are their cognitive states, are their desires, their cares, their motivations, their thoughts, values, their religious beliefs, too, basically to understand the prehistoric mind.
00:25:58
Speaker
ah So I find this like the most exciting aspect of prehistory because, you know, it's it's it's cool to look at the ancient arts, but we also want to know like what it means. right what Did it have religious significance?
00:26:11
Speaker
were the Were the paintings used in rituals of of some sort to ah help them go about their lives? or We want to know those sorts of things. And that that's the most exciting aspect of prehistory, I think.
00:26:23
Speaker
And that's perhaps the most difficult aspect of prehistory. you can you know You can dig up the the remains of their settlements and catalog what they did. You can maybe make pretty reliable inferences about what what they um but sorts of foodstuffs they consumed, but try to know what they thought and how they thought and what they believe. like That's really, really difficult. And some people will think it's not even possible that it will always be subjective, that our kind of pre preconceptions will always color the way we think about ancient ancient people, people who lived 40,000, 50,000 years ago
00:26:54
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I mean, that sort of reminds me of, a I remember in college when I was taking literature classes and, um you know, I've kind of talked to people about them, maybe people who were skeptical of literature as an enterprise. I'd be like, well, you're you're just reading into this. Why do you think yeah that such and such is symbolism for thus and so? um You know, the author never said that. So so why think that? and But I think...
00:27:22
Speaker
It was maybe like an uncharitable ah ah reconstruction of their argument. But I think that, you know, most people recognize that actually literature is this art form where people are, you know, intentionally being intelligent about it, trying to communicate ah with other people in a particular way. And insofar as we assume and and and I think no, because we have biological evidence of this is so that ancient humans, at least a lot of different kinds of ancient humans were a lot like us.
00:27:50
Speaker
we should assume that they had the same interests in this in complex, deep communication with others and and did so in part through art stuff. Especially when you're talking about the era in which the the the cave paintings in Chauvet were created, like 30, 40, 50,000 years ago.
00:28:04
Speaker
If you find a ah flute from 40,000 years ago, they have some of these, ah you can make a lot of inferences about the people who made that flute, or At least some basic claims about what capacities they had, what cognitive capacity they had, what their concerns were. If they made a flute, they must at least care about music, right? Right, right. Their cognitive abilities must be such that they have a good working memory, they can plan for the future, right That sort of thing. So you can make some basic inferences about the the cognitive preconditions that are required for creating certain artifacts.
00:28:37
Speaker
Right. but But it's true that sometimes people do read into things. um So one one example of this are these Venus figurines. so you you know You know these these figurines, right? magan These um he sorts of... what what are i mean you Describe them for our listeners. These Venus figurines.
00:28:52
Speaker
They are small, intricate carvings of plus size and extremely fertile looking ah female figures. That's a great way to put it. That's why I asked you. Thank So the Venus figurines, you look them up if you haven't seen them.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, so these are there we found a ah a fair amount of these. i think a couple hundred of these scatter about um Western Europe. And ah so some people ah ah infer from these figurines that that in the Stone Age, there must have been some religion where a goddess, a monotheistic goddess, was supreme, right? The great goddess theory.
00:29:28
Speaker
And this was a time in which they would the societies were more egalitarian, know, women weren't subordinated to the patriarchy, everyone worshipped this great goddess, a single goddess, right?
00:29:38
Speaker
And then this this sort of great goddess religion was eclipsed when be the the Indo-Europeans invaded Europe with their patriarchal sky gods and all of that. So so there's ah there's a theory out there to and kind of explain these these figurines.
00:29:54
Speaker
And basically, it's all made up. I mean, we can't you can't know all of that just on the basis of ah these figurines. maybe that Maybe these figurines do represent a fertility goddess, but there's no reason to think that it's monotheistic, no reason to think that the society was fully egalitarian or or or matriarchal or anything like that. yeah That's all that's all just sort of Maybe they just wanted like to make more babies. Yeah, there's there's lots of theories about it.
00:30:21
Speaker
So there's one theory that that, again, not substantiated, but is interesting. like The idea ah well, these were made by women who were depicting themselves, looking at themselves while lying down. So I guess if you like you kind of look at yourself lying down, you kind of look like that. I don't know. That doesn't that didn't seem plausible to me. But that that's out there. That's a theory out there. Maybe I'll try that later. Yeah, right. they will you Will you look like that? I don't know. I don't think so. um
00:30:50
Speaker
But ah we have so actually so cognitive archaeology has um revealed, I think, some things that that that we do so still take to be true. and And one of the things actually was discussed in the Cave of Forgotten Dreams documentary, which is that some species of humans made art and others didn't.
00:31:12
Speaker
Mm hmm. And I think so Homo sapiens made art. Yeah. um Yeah. But they said the Neanderthals did the Neanderthals. As far as we know, they said that they didn't. And it's interesting because apparently in that area of France, there were Homo sapien groups and Neanderthal groups that kind of lived near each other yeah and did like interbreed and such.
00:31:33
Speaker
But it but as as far as they know, they that we don't have any like relics or paintings or musical instruments from the Neanderthal groups. So that was interesting to me. It kind of, I think, points to a difference in their um like cognitive architecture and maybe how similar or dissimilar to us they were.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah. And perhaps then it makes sense to say art is one essential characteristic of humanity. or You want to know what human beings are. um Maybe that' that's one of them. Right. Yeah. That's essential to us. And and it was all the way back then from the the groups that we came from as well.
00:32:08
Speaker
right, so we've talked about examples of finding things that are obviously tools, obviously arrowheads or axe heads or flutes or obviously paintings of horses on a wall. and And those to us are very clearly examples of sophisticated humans doing things that humans do, um making tools, making art, stuff like that.
00:32:27
Speaker
But obviously, surely there are things that fall on the fringes, things where it's like, Is this really a tool or is it kind of like the maybe artistically large ball of poop that my cat rolls up in the litter box, you know, when his litter box is too full or something like that? Like things that we're not quite sure are like the products of humans or whatever, ah but we think they might be. So in those cases, how does like the prehistorian go about doing her work?
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, so this is where things get like pretty controversial and pretty pretty um complicated, right? Because, yeah, so we have stone tools or things that look like stone tools from millions of years ago, from ancient hominids that were not we're not humans, right? So distant distant ancient cousins of human beings or or ancestral species.
00:33:15
Speaker
and one And one question is, like were were the species that made these tools, the ancient hominids that aren't humans, um were they more human-like or were they more ape-like? Yeah. That's the basic question. Right.
00:33:27
Speaker
So yeah, so that's that's the question. And and there's like lots of disagreement about that. People people argue over whether these tools require the kinds of sophisticated cognitive capacities like forward planning, working memory, decision-making capacity, or whether they could have just been done with basic like trial and error in an unthinking sort of way And so we have here an instance of classic problem from philosophy science or the under underdetermination problem. right You have this bit of evidence, the stone tools from millions of years ago, and you have two possible explanations. They were made by you hominids with with cognitive capacities similar to ours, or they're made by hominids that with cognitive capacities similar to chimpanzees. right Because we know non-human animals make ah tools too. Mm-hmm.
00:34:15
Speaker
And so one kind of tool that some cognitive archaeologists try to employ in order to break this kind of stalemate is a kind of parsimony reasoning. What's the simpler sort of explanation? And it's interesting to see this kind of thing crop up in the wild or in science itself because parsimony is a a topic that philosophers talk a lot about.
00:34:37
Speaker
So here's one instance of a person sure some of our listeners have heard of, ah Daniel Dennett. He's weighed in on this sort of question. So he says, one should attribute to an organism as little intelligence or consciousness or rationality or mind as will suffice to account for its behavior.
00:34:52
Speaker
It's a nice thing for an illusionist to say. And then ah in in the literature itself, like in the cognitive archaeology field, this sometimes goes by win by the name of Wynne's mantra, this scientist Wynne, who says, look, make no more assumptions that are necessary for explaining a phenomenon. You can explain the creation of these stone tools from couple million years ago as as just simply due to an ape-like kind of cognition.
00:35:18
Speaker
why think of it as being resulting from cognitive capacities that are similar to ours. All right. So, yeah. So just parsimony, Occam's razor. if If i chimpanzee could have made that, then we shouldn't assume that it something smarter than a chimpanzee made that or more a human-like in its thinking than a chimpanzee made that because we don't need to.
00:35:41
Speaker
we ah We would need some reason to think that a more evolved or cognitively sophisticated being made it, and we haven't been given that reason yet. Yeah. So that's at least like one way you might try to you know deal with the the the paucity of evidence. are You just sort of proceed by making as few assumptions as as possible. Sure. I mean, to some extent, we kind of do that today in like primatology yeah still. Right. But like we're still trying to figure out the cognitive architecture of other kinds of primates um like chimps and gorillas, because because we know that evolutionarily they're similar to Yeah, we can't get inside their minds. So the best we could do is like conduct these kinds of experiments and make inferences about their their their mind. Yeah, we do that. And in that domain as well, this this this idea comes up. So I think that quote I read is from Dennett ah is about this is about the the chimpanzee theory of mind. But OK, let's let's give so some ethical pushbacks that maybe it doesn't matter for primates that died you know millions of years ago, but it might matter for primates who are alive today that we don't attribute to them the lowest possible kinds of intelligence or whatever possible. No one's saying they can't feel pain. The question is like, do they ah do they ascribe other belief states to other chimpanzees? they do they
00:37:03
Speaker
do they think do they Do they think, oh, that chimpanzee has a false belief? No, no, but let's say that we assume, we you know, we do this thing Dennis says we should do with, you know, chimps or gorillas, whatever, and just assume, you know, as little as as is necessary to explain what they do.
00:37:20
Speaker
But actually, they they can perceive and feel a lot more than they can express. And and we just hurt their feelings all the time. um Yeah. I mean, you know, how cautious do you want to be? I mean, I don't know.
00:37:32
Speaker
What is morality demand of us when it comes to, like, moral caution with respect to the feelings of potentially cognitively complex primates? I guess you just got to do an expected utility calculation.
00:37:44
Speaker
What's the probability that they have all these feelings? How bad would it be were I to make them feel bad? And I mean, there's not that many of them, sadly.
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah. But anyway, just something to think about. You know, there there may be ethical reasons not to do that. Yeah. So one problem that comes up in the study of prehistory, or I guess some people call it a paradox, which is always music to the philosopher's ears. We love paradoxes.
00:38:11
Speaker
It's called the sapient paradox.
Exploring the Sapient Paradox
00:38:14
Speaker
And this came up in the Renfrew book that you read. Mm which is this question about the arrival of complex behaviors that humans exhibit now that arose relatively late in comparison to our evolved ability to undertake them. Yeah, exactly. So basically, like, we have this advanced technology now, large scale political but organization and social organization. And this is all pretty advanced.
00:38:48
Speaker
And it's also very new, historically speaking. And the kinds of minds that beings need to pull this stuff off are not new or not as new as these human developments. So basically, why did it take us so long to have these advancements?
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, just to put some numbers on this, right so there's lots of different estimates about when human beings evolved, right? You can find estimates of like 400,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. But the the fact of the matter is that you don't really see things like, you know, the agricultural revolution and permanent settlements and, you know, complex societies until like, you know, 10,000 years ago, like 8,000 years ago, stuff like that. though Those cave paintings were from 30,000 years Mm-hmm.
00:39:33
Speaker
ah But humans evolved in their form with their with their capacities like at least 100,000 years ago. So the question is like, what were they doing ah for all this time? Why did it take so long to to exhibit the behaviors that we recognize as characteristically human, right? yeah Essentially human. That's the question. That's the sapient paradox.
00:39:55
Speaker
And there's this one really wild proposed solution to it called the gossip trap solution yeah to the paradox, which I don't know.
00:40:05
Speaker
i guess you listeners can weigh in. I think this is ridiculous. We should describe it first. I'm I'm gonna just start off by saying I think this is ridiculous. But anyways, the the the gossip trap solution to the sapient paradox says, well, what held us back as a species is developing spoken language.
00:40:26
Speaker
um Basically, once we develop spoken language and the ability to communicate orally with one another, we became so fixated on gossiping, on analyzing ourselves and others, paranoid about what other people would think of us, curious about what other people are doing.
00:40:43
Speaker
and and and we it really kind of held us back and made us too nervous maybe to be the kind of like fearless, bold leaders that one would need. So they didn't want to try agriculture because they were too worried what their neighbors would think. Yeah, what is he goingnna what what is prehistoric Bob going to say that I'm, you know, taking the kernels off this corn and putting it in the dirt?
00:41:04
Speaker
That's crazy. That's probably like an uncharitable reconstruction of this. I think one key element is that it the of the gossip trap solution is that The societies were so small scale, they kind of were stuck there. because so So it's easier to be innovative and take risks and stuff when you're in like a large anonymous society, right? Where your neighbor's not constantly watching. so the idea that societies shrink once you start talking...
00:41:29
Speaker
No, they they were they started out small. like they Obviously, the society started out start out small. And they kind of stayed that way because ah like could they could watch each other too much and and and analyze each other's behavior and yeah things like that. Yeah.
00:41:42
Speaker
Everyone starts to look shifty. Yeah. Okay. And so how we got out of that is is like the question. Maybe it was just by chance or something like But the a large impediment was living in such a small scale society where everyone can sort of analyze your behavior. You don't want to step out of line. You want to violate social norms. don't want to anything new because you want to have a good reputation. And that's why, although we had the capacity to do these innovative things 100,000 years,
00:42:06
Speaker
ah we we didn't Well, there are two other solutions to this paradox that I just personally think are better. Hit us with them. Okay. So the first one is just maybe we just didn't need these advancements. Yeah. ah Necessity produces advancement. Is that is that like a saying? the Necessity says is the mother of invention. That's what it is. i was close. and The mother. The Venus figurine of yeah invention. Yeah. See, and we just didn't need it before because, like you said, we were small societies. And then maybe some invite I think they think environmental changes yeah brought on the need for like larger scale agricultural pursuits. and you know, we couldn't just like hunt our way to our meals anymore, gather our way. We had to actually grow them.
00:42:49
Speaker
grow the foods and stuff like that, um maybe breed the animals. and and And we needed to do those things. And so we did them, but we didn't need to do them before. So we didn't do them, you know, i who, you know, goes and writes a paper if they don't need to for a college class.
00:43:06
Speaker
Well, we do, but most people don't. So, you know, they do that because they need to do it. So that, I think, seems like I'm sure there are problems with it, but that's the solution I've always heard. Yeah, I guess one very popular solution, right? Like, like yeah we didn't get agriculture because until they there was, like, ah climactic need for it. I think Renfrew wants to say it's a little more complicated than that. Like, I think he wants say part of the story is ah has to do with, like, different ideas that arose. So you what you've given is a, like, kind of materialistic idea.
00:43:34
Speaker
explanation of the rise of agriculture and complex society. I'm the Marxist for the day. Yeah, that's a kind of like Marxist explanation. You're explaining, you know, social structures and different ways of viewing the world, different ideologies in terms of material conditions.
00:43:50
Speaker
So that's kind of Marxist explanation, which is very common in prehistory, right? so So it's very common to be like, oh, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. That after we had an agricultural society that we would have, you know, the the need for a military. You're going to stay put.
00:44:03
Speaker
Well, you need people to protect your society from people who try to take your stuff. It makes sense to have a division of labor and and specialized jobs, record keeping. You need all this stuff. well this You need somebody in charge to settle disputes.
00:44:16
Speaker
We have more information on the material conditions than we do on like, you know, the the great ideas of the time. but I think a a lot of prehistorians and people want to make an inference that the the conditions led to the political changes and the social changes. Yeah.
00:44:32
Speaker
But I think Renfrew wants to say that it's a little more complicated, that actually the causality is a little bit reversed, that different ideas led to ah kinds of changes. Interesting. yeah Interesting.
00:44:44
Speaker
Well, there's all there's you know always the third option, another great choice, which is that, in fact, we had advanced this far until we went to war with the aliens. Yeah. Yeah. Save that for another episode.
Archaic Perspectives on Time and History
00:44:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:57
Speaker
So Frank didn't only read one book in preparation for this podcast. He also got really into a historian that I was actually a fan of before he got into his work, but I think now you're a bigger fan than I am, um of Mercia Eliade, I think you read his book, The Myth of the Eternal Return. Is that right? Is that the title? Okay.
00:45:19
Speaker
Yes. And the sacred and the profane. Yeah. This is partly why I didn't finish Renfrew's book. I just got distracted by reading Eliade's other two books. um So, yeah, there's a lot that I could say about this. A lot of it would be irrelevant. I guess in some respects, I'm still stuck on myths. I know I'm still stuck on those things.
00:45:37
Speaker
Anyway, so one one concept of his that is is relevant to our discussion is this idea that like archaic man. So he he writes a lot about people in like ancient civilization, like the Mesopotamian civilization and and ancient ancient Hindu civilization, but also ah those in the realm of prehistory, like the Australian aboriginals.
00:45:58
Speaker
So one idea that's relevant to our discussion is this idea that those folks had this kind of aversion to history. In his terms, he calls this the the terror of history.
00:46:10
Speaker
They had a kind of anti-historical attitude. So just a few quotes from him to to substantiate this point. So he says, the man of archaic cultures tolerates history with difficulty and attempts to periodically abolish it.
00:46:26
Speaker
History regarded as a succession of events that are irreversible, unforeseeable, possessed of autonomous value. Those are sort the things that they don't like. Archaic humanity, as we shall presently see, defended itself to the utmost of its powers against all the novelty and an irreversibility which history entails.
00:46:43
Speaker
ah What is of chief importance to us in these archaic systems is the abolition of concrete time and hence their anti-historical intent. So they found history kind of terrifying. They didn't they didn't like to think of themselves as ah as each event as kind of unique and important and and and separate from a kind of archetype. i mean they They don't they like the idea of like unique events. like In an event, if it has meaning and genuine reality, it should be it should be in reference to an archetype, like ah something something that a god did or or a hero did or something something like that.
00:47:17
Speaker
The idea of things just happening and being unique, that is something that he, in his view, found them to terrifying. in them to be terrifying So i I haven't read that work of his, but as you know, I did read The Sacred and Then Profane, um a really influential work of his where he distinguishes sacredness and and and profaneness as two different like spheres of human action and sometimes literal physical spaces as well.
00:47:45
Speaker
And so it sounds like what you're saying is that he sees ancient man as only having a concept of ah of the sacred and the concept of the profane is maybe something he sees as coming later.
00:47:57
Speaker
I think what he would say, I guess there there are times and in which he says something like that, that like every every act, like even like hunting, right? When you're hunting, you're not just hunting, you're you're doing what the the god did. when you're doing agriculture, you're not just growing stuff, you're doing what the the god of agriculture did, you're imitating them in a way. So so there's no days that are just like sand falling through the egg time or passing time doing things that don't really matter. It's not there's not really even a sense of passing time at all. It's it's always like you're always like embodying something eternal. Yeah. At at all times. Yes, exactly. Right.
00:48:35
Speaker
sort of for So he says that the that what he does, what Archaic Man does, has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others. Those others being the gods or gods.
00:48:47
Speaker
or heroes. So to the extent there there are events that are ah purely profane, like that that just belong to history as such and aren't instances of ah of a celestial archetype, um those lack a definite reality or maybe they're sinful or they they don't have meaning. Yeah.
00:49:04
Speaker
So Eliotti is writing at a time where archaeology is still kind of in its infancy. um And a lot of the tools that we use to study archaic man are in its infancy.
00:49:17
Speaker
um So is he is he like on the cutting edge of this research or like where are his ideas about archaic man coming from? So he views them as just derived from the texts and and and so in some cases, archaeology. But but a lot of ah he quotes a lot in the myth of the eternal return. He quotes a lot from like the the the ancient Vedas, the the Hindu ah sacred texts.
00:49:36
Speaker
okay um So, yeah, he views them. And sometimes he doesn't really give as many examples as you might think his generalizations require. um But he he'll he'll yeah he grounds them in examples where he does these kinds of comparative religion thing. So that's so. Yeah. So he's really mostly working with non prehistoric man, like with historic man. But he called. But it's it's ah he in some cases, his sources are like ancient aboriginal or oral traditions.
00:50:03
Speaker
Well, and also a lot of ancient but non-prehistoric, obviously, texts are, or like, purport to be writing about prehistoric peoples, right? So, like, a lot of, um like, the Pentateuch and stuff.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah. Right. But I found this this interesting because it reminded me of ah a few lines from ah Wittgenstein's notebooks. So the 1914, 1916. These form the basis of the Choctatus. Our baby was chewing on this book earlier today. Yeah.
00:50:31
Speaker
So i I read this in 2011 Argentina. And I remember i remember there's some there's some passages from this that are a lot more mystical than the stuff you find in the Troctatus. So the Troctatus is a few elements of mysticism, but there's there's some stuff he left out in the notebooks. um The Troctatus end is like the most mystical thing ever written. but yeah but Yeah, he retains the mysticism, but there's some stuff he left out. Yeah, yeah.
00:50:56
Speaker
I forget if this is in the Choctatus or not, but the quote. He says, That is in the Choctatus. Mm-hmm.
00:51:04
Speaker
only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy for life in in the present there is no death death is not an event in life it is not back to the world if by attorney is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-tempmporality then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present that that isn't there but troc toni Yeah, so this is kind of similar to the thing that Eliade is getting at. like Archaic man had his array of celestial and and theological archetypes and tried to imitate those sorts of things in every aspect that he did.
00:51:36
Speaker
um And in that sort of way, he lived in like the eternal present, whereas ah we don't. Yeah, I mean, for Wittgenstein, it's interesting because obviously he's going to see our and attempts to talk about time or or think about our lives in what Eliade would call like profane time or whatever. He's going to see that as like a philosophical confusion. ah that When we purport to be talking about like time or temporality, we're not um we're we're not actually really talking about anything.
00:52:05
Speaker
So so that up to me, that makes total sense that Wittgenstein is saying it. um But it also accords with like... ideas of the mystics as well. And ah so it's easy to, Eliai points out, it's easy to think of archaic man as ah sort of being too conservative or being too unimaginative, too afraid to try to live their own life by trying to only imitate the the archetypes of that are part of their worldview or religious tradition.
00:52:32
Speaker
But he says, like, look, you know, tens of millions of men, quote, were able for century after century to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.
00:52:49
Speaker
So they were kind of protected from the the terror of history, the terror of nihilism, because they had their celestial archetypes to to um appeal to. Oh, Nijus says exactly the same thing um about how he he has a great passage in Genealogy of Morality where he's talking about how, ah ah how come it seems like ancient ancient man could bear pain so well.
00:53:11
Speaker
Well, it's because he, you know, they always considered themselves to have a host of celestial spectators and the, you know, everything they were doing was significant. yeah Now nothing we do is significant.
00:53:22
Speaker
And so everything seems a lot worse. Yeah, even it's not for the good, there's at least a meaning behind it right yeah You're being punished for doing something bad. Right, exactly. Rather than it being meaningless. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. so so So maybe it's not that they weren't like cool enough or brave enough to be like individuals, but that actually like they they they saw that as the more meaningful life.
00:53:42
Speaker
One of like kind of conformity, you might think of it, or just like adherence to like the the forms of reality from whence meaning is derived. And Eliade thinks of this is kind of kind of a Platonic view. is yet He has an interesting view about Plato. He thinks Plato really, what Plato did was he kind of gave a philosophical gloss or made more made more philosophically deep a kind of primitive ontology. He says, hence it could be said that this primitive ontology has a Platonic structure. In that case, Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of primitive mentality. I'm just going to say Plato could be understood as the outstanding philosopher.
00:54:20
Speaker
Full stop. um But, you know, that too. All right. So a lot of times we like to wrap up, you know, the this these episodes with a what have you learned kind of question. And today is no different.
00:54:33
Speaker
So, ah Frank, you seem to get like really into especially research for this episode. So I'm wondering if if the research you did or you know the the things that you learned about ancient humans or whatever, has any of this um changed how you think or feel about being a human in the 21st century?
Finding Meaning in Repetition
00:54:57
Speaker
Or maybe just about being a human in general? Yeah, I mean, I think that the thing that was most like personally interesting to me was the Eliade stuff that we ended with that ah that we that we just talked about.
00:55:10
Speaker
yeah, like, there's something attractive, obviously there's something attractive about, like, forging your own path and doing unique unique things, the kinds of characteristic features of modernity. But also I think i in my and my and the last few years, I've been finding this idea of, you know doing the same thing over and over again and yet, like, finding value in that, like, imitating some kind of you know, following some kind of script, I guess. I'm not sure that's the right way to put it.
00:55:35
Speaker
ah there's still There's still value in that too. It's like appreciating doing the same thing over and over again, which given our lives, it happens a lot, right? Like, you know we wake up, you know, the the kids wake up, we make the coffee, right? It's easy to think, oh, this is so monotonous um doing the same thing over and over again. But like,
00:55:54
Speaker
know, whether you try to adopt the kind of mentality of of archaic man as imagined by Eliade. Well, then it maybe it's not so meaningless. Like, yeah, you're doing you're you're embodying an archetype and there's a kind of deep meaning and structure that. The mother and father archetype. Yeah. yeah I love that. yeah so So I guess like my what I took away from this is like, insofar as it is possible to do this, given the you know secular age in which we live in, and How can I be more like archaic man? I feel like they they have something that I lack and I want that.
00:56:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's and that's like such a great point, because like you were saying that that kind of thing, like doing the same thing over and over, doing the same thing your parents did, your grandparents did, whatever, is like denigrated a lot. You know, like and that's something people you know specifically want to avoid.
00:56:42
Speaker
Custom is for customary people. Yeah. Yeah. I think Mill says something like that in On Liberty in chapter three. That sounds like something that John Stuart Mill would say. ah But but right. What if we thought of it instead as, you know, stepping along the same path that that people have literally since like the dawn of humanity in this way that makes it really meaningful. I love that.
00:57:03
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. And what did you learn, Megan, my dear? like What did I learn? ah Well, I learned a lot. ah Yeah, I guess it. How did you change? Have you changed?
00:57:16
Speaker
Well, I think it made me more aware of something that i I did kind of already think, but it just really like brought it to the fore for me, yeah um which is that like humans are so curious about humans.
00:57:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I have always thought this is true, actually. So like my favorite book, which I read kind of as like an older teenager, is this fairy tale novel called Fantasties. But there's a great poem in it by a poet named Henry Sutton.
00:57:47
Speaker
And it's really short, so I'm going to read it because I think it summarizes my feelings about this topic. It says, Man doth usurp all space, stares thee in rock, bush, river in the face.
00:57:58
Speaker
Never thine eyes behold a tree. Tis no sea thou seest in the sea. Tis but a disguised humanity. To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan.
00:58:10
Speaker
All that interests man is man. Right. And... That seems right. i Like, you know, we we figured out the humans lived 40,000 years ago and now we're like desperate to understand them.
00:58:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I get it. So I think that there's something really important there. So that's what I was thinking about. Strange, mysterious, pretty astrayal.
Conclusion and Teaser for Next Topic
00:58:33
Speaker
That's what we're about. And that is all the time we have for today's episode. Join us next time for episode 22, where we are going to be talking about past lives.