Customer Reviews

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book displays an impressive mastery of both the primary sources and secondary literature in both classical Greek philosophy and Asian religio-philosophical traditions. Its arguments are more than plausible, indeed, they are imaginative, courageous and persuasive. I had, until now, been unable to recommend to my students in "comparative world religions" a reliable book from which they could see the possible connections between seemingly disparate traditions. Much that comes under the rubric "comparative philosophy" is rather dated, superficial, or burdened with overweening biases and prejudices (not to mention bereft of historical warrant). I see this work as taking up where other pioneers have left off: Karl Potter, Ninian Smart, B.K. Matilal, for instance, in Indian philosophy, and Herbert Fingarette, Joel Kupperman, David Hall and Roger Ames, most notably, in ancient Chinese philosophy. Those students of ancient Greek philosophy who have read, and enjoyed, their Nussbaum, Sorabji or Hadot, will likewise be moved by this book. Having set an enviable and emulative standard, I hope it portends more works along these lines.

According to a familiar Japanese maxim, "The frog in a well does not know of the great ocean (i no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu). Many Western academics have long been quite comfortable in their Eurocentric well with Greece and Rome to the east, Europe in the middle and the Americas to the east -- all more or less joined together by the Three Great Monotheistic Faiths. Beyond the well lie exotic unexplored lands whose ways of thinking and behaving differ from those of us in the "real" Western world. Few of our universities have departments of philosophy that bother to offer even a survey course in Eastern philosophies; and even fewer really take the issue seriously.

With _The Shape of Ancient Thought_ Professor McEvilley has lowered a sturdy bucket into our Western well and invites us on a philosophical journey into one of these unexplored lands: Ancient India -- discussing the relationships and possible cross-cultural influences between early Western (i.e., Greek and Roman) philosophies and those of India. I completely agree with the unqualified enthusiasm of the six earlier Reviewers who have already taken the trip. I have little to add -- except a postscript.

Those who recognize the strong impact of Buddhism on Japanese literature will surely spot several chapters in the following list worth exploring. For example, Murasaki's appeal to the Mahayana principle of Skillful Means (hoben) in the "Hotaru" chapter of the _Genji monogatari_ as justification for composing "fabrications" leads us back eventually to Nagarjuna, the Madhyamika, and the _Lotus Sutra_. We are just at the beginning of the search for such influences.

Here is a list of the chapters following 36 pages of front matter:
Ch. 1. Diffusion Channels in the Pre-Alexandrian Period
Ch. 2. The Problem of the One and the Many
Ch. 3. The Cosmic Cycle
Ch. 4. The Doctrine of Reincarnation
Ch. 5. Platonic Monism and Indian Thought
Ch. 6. Platonic Ethics and Indian Yoga
Ch. 7. Plato, Orphics, and Jains [Jainism = Jyainaa kyo, Jinakyo]
Ch. 8. Plato and Kundalini
Ch. 9. Cynics and Pasupatas
Ch. 10. Five Questions Concerning the Ancient Near East
Ch. 11. The Elements
Ch. 12. Early Pluralisms in Greece and India
Ch. 13. Skepticism, Empiricism, and Naturalism
Ch. 14. Diffusion Channels in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
Ch. 15. Dialectic before Alexander
Ch. 16. Early Greek Philosophy and Madhyamika [Madhyamika = Chuganha]
Ch. 17. Pyrrhonism and Madhyamika [Pyrrhonism >> Scepticism]
Ch. 18. The Path of the Dialectic [Nagarjuna = Ryuju]
Ch. 19. The Syllogism
Ch. 20. Peripatetics and Vaisesikas [Vaisesika = Vuaishieeshika gakuha]
Ch. 21. The Stoics and Indian Thought
Ch. 22. Neoplatonism and the Upanisadic-Vedantic Tradition
Ch. 23. Plotinus and Vijnanavada Buddhism [Vijnanavada. See Yuishiki, Hosso]
Ch. 24. Neoplatonism and Tantra [Tantra. See Mikkyo.]
Ch. 25. The Ethics of Imperturbability

Concluding Remarks. Then 5 appendices on the Aryans, the Aryan invasion,
Black Athena and Western Xenophobia, the Golden Thigh, Philosophy and Grammar, followed by a List of Works Cited, and a 29-page Index.

This is clearly a masterpiece! However, it may take time for it to be so recognized: many of us are still in wells of one kind or another with lots of other frogs.

This work is a splendid achievement. I came to it as a reader with a very strong background in the history of Western Philosophy, and only a very sketchy familiarity with Indian Philosophy. McEvilley has seemingly mastered all the primary texts in both traditions, and he discusses a vast array of secondary literature, by Western and Indian scholars, in a very fair-minded and thorough fashion. This book fully deserves to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand ancient philosophy.
He also discusses historical matters, especially pertaining to the Hellenistic kindoms of Central Asia, that were quite illuminating. I certainly had no idea that cities like Gandahar, in what is now Afghanistan, were Greek-speaking centres for many centuries. That region: Khorasan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and the southern parts Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once one of the centres of world civilization. Many educated readers might be familiar with the history of the Khwarazmian renaissance, associated with names such as Al-Biruni, Omar Khayyam, Al-Tusi, Al-Khwarazmi, Ibn Sina, and so forth. Those thinkers are often cited as the among the glories of Islamic civilization - in fact they represented the last gasp of Hellenistic civilization in that region, finally re-arising after the catastrophe of Islamic conquest. When the cities of Khorasan were again utterly destroyed by the Mongol invasions, that civilization was unable to recover, and the slow cancerous rot of Islamic anti-intellectualism snuffed out any further hope of revival. The decline of that region's intellectual life, from the early period McEvilley describes to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, is a dismal trajectory to contemplate.

The Shape of Ancient Thought, no doubt, will send shock waves through the academic historical community, but I would like to address its impact and importance to alternative communities with which I've worked and studied for over two decades. As an exhibiting artist, educator of visual culture, and someone who has been schooled in some of America's premier arts institutions, I suggest that Tom McEvilley's book is an indispensable resource that the arts community has long awaited. All throughout reading The Shape of Ancient Thought I continually caught myself wishing I had been schooled with this book in my founding years. It has taken me nearly twenty years to come to, flesh out, and grasp the diverse philosophical tenets within this book. And still I had much to learn and enjoy in reading it.
The Shape of Ancient Thought concisely, and in this case 731 pages is concise, organizes the views that not only shaped past thinkers, but unveils a mutually dependent history that (for better or worse) has shaped our current environment. The student of visual culture (and if I may add the student of higher education in general) should have a handle on these ancient philosophical ideas and practices without which digesting much of the current tropes becomes a difficult task, or goes uneaten. To understand more fully, to be apart, and to participate in today's current cutting edge discussions a scholar as well as an arts professional needs to have filtered through the basic yet voluminous ideas that McEvilley collects in this book, but maybe more emphatically, that Tom McEvilley proposes the cross pollination of ancient philosophy, and in signposting the course, the reader is better prepared to do their own combinational work in today's demanding climate.

I recommend this book for the following reasons:

1) I am not aware of any book which matches McEvilley's scope.
2) The book is a fantastic read for all lovers of thought
3) It is a must for students of philosophy, history, and comparative studies.

Yet, I wouldn't go as far as five or four stars, because of the following:

1) The book is only as good as it is exceptional. More books along the same topic are necessary for a good comparison
2) Regardless of comparisons, it is poorly structured
3) Dates are rarely provided
4) No discernible thesis, or when thesis is made, is unsupported by evidence, and/or thesis does not match arguments (i.e. thesis is contrary to what arguments actually communicate).

***

Because of the book's flaws, it is open pray to any form of "centrism" out there. If you're fed up with Eurocentrism or Indocentrism, you're unlikely to make new conclusions. McEvilley's central claim consists of the observation that Vedic culture must have somehow filtered through to Ionia, and Attica, but a near total absence of dates contrasts entirely with his well documented account of Greek influence on Vedic thought. Basically, McEvilley offers some vague hypothesis, undocumented, inchoate, and speculative of Indian influence on Greece, but documents uncontested Greek influence on Astronomy, logic, and Buddhism. Not to assail the fellow, but this approach is questionable. Had McEvilley provided crucial dates for Indian thought, his out of India notion would be on shaky ground. Failing to do so, he is likely to arm those wary of "Eurocentrism" with very faulty and poor notions about cross-cultural history, while perplexing those wary of "Indocentrism".

The mastery this book shows of both primary and secondary sources in several languages is awesome. It is clear that it is the product of a life's work. Not only does it demonstrate an East-West connection that was previously almost unknown and that is terribly important for the future, it also presents a working-through of the most basic ideas of philosophy and the most basic mechanisms of human thought. These are topics that have been neglected heretofore as a result of political and social factors that this author seems above and beyond. It is an awesomely beautiful exposition of ancient thought and the origins of philosophy as a force in civilization.

Thomas McEvilley, 'The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies.' New York: Allworth Press, 2002. ISBN 1581152035. Hardback, 731 pp. Illustrated with b/w plates, maps, and with a detailed bibliography and index.

The orthodox position regarding the early Greek philosophers might be thought of as a view which likes to see Ancient Greece as a self-contained clearly demarcated autochthonous entity, and the Greeks as more or less like us in meaning by 'philosophy' what our orthodox professors such as Guthrie, Kirk, Raven, Barnes etc., mean by the term.

Over this orthodox landscape the American scholar Thomas McEvilley has arrived like a thunderbolt of Indra with a burst of brilliant light that enables us to see clearly for the first time things that without him we might never have seen.

As a classicist who is competent, not only in Greek and Latin but also in Sanskrit and several other languages, and who is conversant, not merely with the history and primary texts of an isolated and clearly demarcated 'Greece' (which never existed except in the minds of the orthodox), but with the larger Indian-Mesopotamian-Egyptian-Greek complex, he has devoted thirty years research to bringing before us a massive and comprehensive account of the philosophies that burgeoned and grew within that complex.

It was a complex in which an enormous amount of movement took place with innumerable people of various sorts engaged in travel by both land and sea - statesmen, ambassadors, emissaries, couriers, merchants, bankers, financial agents, healers, soldiers, sailors, scholars, students, priests, missionaries, religious mendicants, holy men, wonder workers, tourists, sightseers, etc.

It was also one in which people still retained their natural curiosity about others, their ways of life and beliefs, and would have been eager to listen to the wise and informed no matter what region of the earth they hailed from. This open-mindedness, naturally enough, led to a great deal of cross-fertilization of ideas which McEvilley, a man who happily is similarly open-minded, sets out before us in detail. What he shows us is that, while it is undoubtedly true that Indian thinkers learned certain things from the Greeks, it is equally true that the Greeks learned some very important things from the Indians.

By all means read Guthrie and Kirk and Raven and Barnes and the rest of the tribe of the Orthodox, but be aware that - imprisoned as they are in the cave of wishful thinking with its ceaseless and seductive whisper - autochthonous ... autochthonous ... autochthonous - they are giving you only an incomplete and distorted picture of what ancient Greek thought was really about. For the bigger and truer picture you will most assuredly need McEvilley's truly magisterial study, a study which throws a dazzling and brilliant light over what has hitherto been the somewhat dim and distorted landscape of the orthodox.

In spite of the advances in archaeology our knowledge of world history is really a terra incognita and this work bravely sets sail into some of its most notable uncharted waters. In the process the author brings a degree of critical acumen to a subject where mistakes of understanding are probable due to the complete absence of a proper methodology for such a venture. Our image of Greece and the Greek Enlightenment too often filters out the significance of such as Pythagoras and Orphism, the taboo issue of reincarnation, indeed the mysterious strains in Plato, and the clear echoes of the world of Indian philosophy and yoga. The sheer scale of the endeavor is impressive and this work is an instant addition to one's resources on world history, which is not a full endorsement of the results as such. The work is such a compedium of interesting problems and research puzzles. Questions of diffusion haunt all efforts to assess the enigma of antiquity, and not the least problem is the very definition of 'philosophy' as this stretches between the terrain of rationalism to the domain of the Indian sutras, beside the charvakas, materialist monism, and secular humanism of the full spectrum of post-Upanishadic tradition. The author deals tactfully with the gnarled issue of Sumerian versus Indic diffusion, in a context of near Occidentalism overtaking Orientalism in the modern world's ironic recursion of one and the same mix of New Age mystics and rationalist philosophers. The verdict of the cylinder seals is a fascinating part of the argument. The great riddle of the source of the great yogas seems increasingly to find some evidence of a source in the Sumerian milieu, a point many would protest in a period of claims for India as the source of all civilizations. Once might cross Arabia twice on a camel and never see a sufi, let alone his unity with the yogi, and in the same way the exteriorization of the Indian spiritualities does not necessarily entail a visible diffusion of like to like. Thus the riddle remains most probably in some unseen aspect of the Sumerian world that also spawned a myth of Abraham.
This work breaks new ground in areas where crackpot thinking would be all too likely. I would, however, consider the lack of any consideration of a still more intractable riddle, that of the Axial Age, which might clarify the inability of diffusionist arguments to fully succeed here. More is going on than simple diffusion of 'ideas'. In general, proof of diffusion still falls short of explanation, and in a simpler case, Greek Archaic sculpture shows obvious affinities to the Egyptian, yet this does not explain the timing or later development. In the same way we must wonder if the effects to be explained proceed as 'thoughts of a philosopher' as much as the 'self-consciousness' of the 'philo-sophist' or 'man of consciousness'. In Heraclitus we see the spectrum in mid range, half yogi, half philosopher, and the Indian echo, however mysterious still, is somehow transparent.
Fascinating book in a treacherous field. One might disagree but the focus on these problems is essential, however difficult their answers.

I used to know Tom in graduate school long ago, when he began this book (Hi, Tom). Having discovered through the graduate school of hard knocks that reality is not what we present it to be, Tom found himself involved in the philosophy of "the happening." We usually prefix such discoveries with non-, such as the non-friend, non-justice, the non-state, etc. What actually happens may be quite different from what is thought or said to be happening, which is about half of what the Buddha was saying. When Tom began this book, his field was being described as the study of "the influence of Buddhism on Greek philosophy". Following an independent course, Tom had something of a happening, but he lacked the power to bring it to our attention. Who were the first real Buddhists? I'm not going to spoil the story by trying to upstage Tom, but he brings every resource of a bright and independent mind and a career of classical scholarship to the answer. The editors are right, this book is destined to change the field, and perhaps that is why 30 years were required to do the job right.

I stumbled onto this book, when, reading Heidegger, I became interested in the advance of scientific thought in early Greek philosophy, and read some good reviews on Amazon that stirred my interest.

I was disappointed. I don't feel Thomas McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought gives an honest account of the development of ancient human thinking. Instead he has a personal agenda to downsize the importance of Greek philosophy and to promote the idea of influence of Indian thinking on the progression of Western civilization.

Now let me get this straight. I personally don't care about this sort of a pissing contest. As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter if major contributions were made by European thinkers or Indians, or Pygmees or Inuit for that matter. But you should get your facts and arguments right.

McEvilly opens the book with the assertion that Indian thinking has had a profound influence upon Greek philosophy by way of diffussion channels;

"...The records of caravan routes are like the philosophical stemmata of history, the trails of oral discourses moving through communities, of texts copied from texts, with accretions, scribal errors, and incorporated glosses and scholia. What they reveal is not a structure of parallel straight lines - one labeled "Greece" another "Persia" another "India" - but a web in which an element in one culture leads to elements in others." P.1

And ends it with the conclusion that there was a:

"...massive transfer of ideas and methods of thinking, first from India into Greece in the pre-Socratic period and again from Greece back into India in the Hellenistic." P.642(my italics).

In the 640 or so pages between this assertion and the conclusion he totally fails to give one convincing piece of evidence for the first massive transfer of ideas and methods, from India to Greece!

1. There is no real evidence that an Indian philosopher ever wandered into Greece or had direct contact with Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, or that an Indian text entered into the Greek pre-Socratic discourse.
2. His chronology of Indian thinking is totally vague, making the extensive comparison between Upanishad texts and Greek pre-Socratic texts interesting on the level of ideas, but rendering any claim about it's influence on Greek thinking highly uncertain and questionable.
3. The one "proof" he comes up with is based on a subjective interpretative reading of Heraclitus that he thinks shows Heraclitus based some of his system on an earlier Upanishad system. (Now I came in close contact with Heraclitus during a course in metaphysics during my philosophy studies with the renowned Dutch philosopher Cornelis Verhoeven, and I must say that almost any reading of this highly dark and poetic thinker, from whom only fragments of his work remain - not nicknamed "The Riddler" for nothing - is possible. The one that McEvilly comes up with was new to me and stretched my imagination though!)
4. McEvilly constantly focuses on the metaphysical ideas, downplaying the protoscientific, political, anti-establishment ideas that were so new and radical in pre-Socratic thinking. Greek thinkers were in opposition to accepted religion and other dogmas (and eachother!), were as Indian thinking developed within the framework of religion. A very important difference in philosophical attitude that McEvilly fails to give enough attention.
5. He totally skips Aristotle, leaping from Plato to Plotinus. Why is this? Is he afraid this would show the marked difference were Greek philosophy developed from radical ideas to proto-science in just over 200 years , where Indian philosophy did nothing of the kind? If you claim that Indian philosophy stood at the root of Western culture, this is especially painful, because it was Aristotle's work that inspired the renaissance.

Summing up:
This book is biased towards the importance of Indian philosophy, ignoring the unique characteristics of ancient Greek philosophy. Argumentively it is heavily flawed, this makes it an irritating read.
If you are interested in the pre-Socratic philosophers don't read this book. Even the Wikipedia gives more detailed and complete information on this subject.
The book does hold a value as a comparative study between Indian and Greek Philosophy on the level of ideas (specifically metaphysics).
Furthermore, contrary to his conclusion, it shows that there was probably NO serious influence from Indian thinking on Greek thinking. India was just too far away and too isolated for this to have happened.
The Greek imagination was most probably sparked by a combination of influences. Their contact with different cultures with totally different mindsets then their own - most notably Persia and Egypt - which would have made their own ideas debatable, being the most important. A heroic/arrogant aspiration to be some kind of warrior/philosopher, which shows a unique personality treat of Greek philosophers being another.
To some this review might seem harsh, given the amount of work that no doubt went into this book. If McEvilley would have made a more modest claim, more in line with the evidence. Presenting the book as a comparison between Greek and Indian thinking and making some careful assumption about a possible influence I would have been possitive. But if you conclude that there was a massive transfer of ideas and methods, from India to Greek without any evidence to back it up; you're asking for it. That one made me laugh though, I give him that!