2021/5/29, Sat.

　女神が告げるふたつの道の一方は、「ある [﹅2] とし、あらぬ [﹅3] ということはありえないとする道」であり、それが真理へとみちびく道である。もうひとつの道は「あらぬ [﹅3] とし、だんじてあらぬ [﹅3] とするべきであるとする道」になる。これは探究するすべもない道であって、ひとをドクサへとみちびく。あらぬ [﹅3] もの、無については、およそ知りようもないからである（断片B二）。
　「ある」のまえに通常は「それが」等とおぎなうことが多いけれど、伝承されたテクストには、「ある」（エスティン）としるされているばかりである。解釈者たちはそれ [﹅2] を、存在するものと解し、ひとつのもの（一者）とも考えてきた。断片B三には、「おなじものが考えられ、ある [﹅2] とされうる」（伝統的な読みでは「考えることとある [﹅2] こととはおなじことである」）とあり、断片B六では、「ある [﹅2] ものがある [﹅2] と語り、考えなければならない。なぜならそれがある [﹅2] ことは可能であるが、あらぬ [﹅3] ものがある [﹅2] ことは不可能だからである」とある。どの脈絡を辿ってみても、それ [﹅2] がなんであるのかは、あきらかでない。――存在者があり [﹅2] 、世界がある [﹅2] 。無ではなく、なぜか、（end33）存在者が存在している。さまざまに存在するものがあり、それらは、ひとしく存在しているといわれる。おのおのの存在者はそれぞれにある [﹅2] かぎりでは、すべて存在とよばれる。その意味では、むしろ、それが存在であるもの、存在自体だけがある [﹅2] 。パルメニデスを捕らえたのは、このひどく単純で、けれども深い驚きの経験だったのではないだろうか。
　（熊野純彦『西洋哲学史　古代から中世へ』（岩波書店、二〇〇六年）、33～34）


  • 一一時二〇分離床。この日は瞑想できた。といって、どんなぐあいだったかおぼえていないが。上階に行って食事は炒飯だった。新聞からは例によって国際面。英国の元首相上級顧問みたいなひとが、ボリス・ジョンソンおよび英国政府は当初、新型コロナウイルスを軽視していたと議会で暴露証言したらしい。このひとはたしか、なんとかカミングスというなまえだったようなきがする。昨年末だったかにボリス・ジョンソンとの不和で職を辞したらしいのだが、彼いわく、政府高官らは当初、コロナウイルスの影響をかるくかんがえてあまり深刻にとりあつかわず、スキーにいったり会食したりしていたと。また、二度目のロックダウンのときには、ボリス・ジョンソンが経済的縮小をきらって、ロックダウンをして経済が停滞するよりは死体の山がつみあがるほうがましだ、みたいなことをいったという。ジョンソン側はとうぜん否定。どんなものであれ、この問題の決断をかるくあつかったことはまったくないと。ちなみに今日（三〇日）にテレビで一瞬みかけたところでは、ボリス・ジョンソンは婚約者と挙式したとか。よくみえなかったのだが、あいては三三歳とか画面にでていたような気がする。外見をみてもたしかにけっこう年の差がありそうな、わかい女性だったとおもう。
  • また、フランスとルワンダが歴史的和解、ともおおきくでていた。九〇年代のルワンダ虐殺において、フランスが気づかぬうちに虐殺者のがわに立ってしまっていたということをマクロンが率直にみとめたと。ただ虐殺への直接的な関与は明確に否定し、正式な謝罪もしなかったが、ルワンダ側は歓迎している。ルワンダはもともとベルギー領だったらしく、フランス語教育もなされていてフランスとのむすびつきはつよかったらしいのだが、虐殺以降は関係が冷え、内戦を鎮圧したポール・カガメ現大統領がフランス語教育から英語に転換したり、あとフランス語の国がおおくあつまる中部アフリカ連合みたいな組織からも距離をおいたりしていたという。ルワンダ内戦はもともと権力をにぎって国をおさめていた少数派のツチ族にたいして多数派フツ族が反乱を起こしてジェノサイドを犯した事件で、カガメ大統領はツチ族の出身であり、たぶん内戦鎮圧からいままでずっと政権をにぎっているのだろう。彼がフランスとの接近にのりだしたのは、たしかやはり経済的利益をとって、みたいなことが書かれていた気がする。この記事のすぐ下には、ドイツもまた、ナミビアで一九世紀末だか二〇世紀初頭だかにおいて起こした虐殺に責任があることをみとめ、謝罪し、賠償金のたぐいを支払った、とあったとおもう。そちらはあまりちゃんと読まなかったのだが。
  • （……）
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  • 書見。『ギリシア悲劇Ⅱ　ソポクレス』（ちくま文庫、一九八六年）の終盤。498からよんでいて、これはもうたぶん最後の「コロノスのオイディプス」にはいっていたはず。このときはまだとちゅうまでで、帰宅後、夜に読了した。この日は三時から勤務で、二時すぎにはでなければならなかったので、一時半ごろに書見を切ったはず。それからトイレにいき、放尿したついでにトイレ用の「マジックリン」とトイレットペーパーで便器を拭いておき（便座の穴の縁のきづきづらいところが意外とよごれている）、もどってきがえ。紺色のベストすがた。この昼間はけっこう暑かった。空は白く、晴れではなかったのだが。
  • しかし二時をまわって出発したときには雲がすくなくなって青さが露出しており、日なたも道をひろくなめていて晴れと言ってよい天気になっていた。かなり暑いものだからマスクをつけていると苦しいので、最初は顎のほうにずらして口と鼻を露出させた状態でいった。すれちがうひともないし。街道に出たところで顔を覆った。ちょうど対向者もあったし。ただ、その女性がちかづくまえに通りをわたったので、そばですれちがうことはなかったが。そうしてひかりのなかをあるいていく。路傍の空き地の草むらからは蝶がうかびあがり、空は青く、ツバメが通りのうえを飛行する影が地をすべったり、ほかにも宙を住まいとするともがらたちが上空、ちいさな黒点として何匹か連れ立ちながらわたっていく。今日も（……）公園のまえあたりで工事をしており、先日とおなじようにそのてまえで裏道におれてはいっていく。風がけっこうながれていて、それをうけとって揺れるほどのやわらかさがあるあたりのものは、家々をつつむ庭木であれ、二階のちいさなベランダにつるされた洗濯物であれ、路傍にはえたほそい下草の群れであれ、線路をこえたむこうに鎮座する森の樹々であれ、すべてゆらゆらと揺動していて、さわやぎの感がうまれて、一〇分そこそこあるいてからだもあたたまったのか、マスクをつけていても多少楽である。
  • そのほかの往路のことはわすれた。勤務（……）
  • （……）
  • （……）
  • （……）
  • 退勤。今日は行きにあるいたからかえりはいいかとおもって、電車をとった。駅にはいって乗車し、まもなく発車。最寄り駅でおりると午後五時まえのひかりがまぶしく降りつけて、近間の屋根のひとつは一面白くおそわれて、銀紙につつまれた板チョコのようになっている。自販機でコーラの二八〇ミリリットルを買って駅をでた。あたりの木や葉の緑色をながめながら坂道をおりていき、下の道にでて公団まえをいきながら、視線は彼方の、いましがた電車にのってそのまえをとおってきた丘や市街のほうにのびてながれる。すぎてみあげれば晴れ空に直上はみだれなく水色があきらかで、雲がほんのかすか、底にかくれてなじんでいるようにみえなくもないが、背後で山のあちらにむかいつつあるひかりの白さがまだわたっているものか、どちらなのかがわからない。
  • 帰宅後、きがえなどすませたあと、二七日の日記。食事は父親ももう一日泊まってくるだろうからかんたんでいいというので、母親にまかせてサボってしまった。しかし父親はけっきょく帰ってきたのだが。ベッドにころがってしばらく書をよみながらやすんだあと、ちっともはたらいていないのにつかれをかんじて、臥位のまま目を閉じて少時休息していた。それで七時。
  • 夕食時のことは忘却。夕食まえに本をよみおえたのだったか？　それとも夕食後だったか。不明だが、食事は麻婆豆腐など（……）。
  • 『ギリシア悲劇Ⅱ　ソポクレス』（ちくま文庫、一九八六年）を読了し、書抜きも少々。J.J. Johnson『Dial J.J. 5』をながした。Miles Davisの曲である"Blue Haze"で、ピアノがずいぶん味わい深いような、ブルージーだけれど上品なやりかたをしているなとおもって、Garlandほど柔弱ではないしだれだったか、Hank Jonesあたりか？　としらべてみると、Tommy Flanaganだった。ドラムはElvin Jones。ここにElvin Jonesいたのか、とおもった。J.J. Johnsonはやたらうまい。

As Daniel Dennett points out, our adoption of the intentional stance is so much a part of who we are that we have a hard time turning it off – especially after someone dies. A loved one’s death, he writes, “confronts us with a major task of cognitive updating: revising all our habits of thought to fit a world with one less intentional system in it”. And so we talk about our deceased loved ones as if they’re still around, telling stories about them, reminding ourselves that they would approve of our decisions.

In short, we keep them around. But not physically because, as [Pascal] Boyer points out, dead bodies are a problem. “Something must be done” with them. Indeed, “religion may be much less about death than dead bodies”. For this reason, some suggest that the earliest forms of supernatural agents were the departed, the ghosts of whom are minimally counterintuitive: like us in almost every way, except for the disappearing through the wall thing.

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Closely related to the idea of agency is what Dennett refers to as a cards-up phenomenon. Agency detection carries with it certain risks: do you know about that bad thing I did? How can I be sure you know, and how can I be sure about what you think about me because of it? These are complex questions and human beings aren’t good at managing all the options. What’s needed for learning how to navigate these muddy waters is for everyone to be taught the rules of the game by placing all of our cards face up on the table. The teacher, then, is something of a full-access agent: they see everything and can instruct us accordingly.

The original full-access agents, says Dennett, were our dead ancestors. But eventually, the seeds of this idea became more formalised in various theologies.

“Humans are not very good at behaving just because you punish them for not behaving,” says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, “otherwise we would all be driving well under 70 on the motorway.” The real problem isn’t how bad the punishment is, but how risky it is to be caught. If the risk is low, he says, we’re prepared for the punishment.

This would have been a major issue in prehistory. As hunter-gatherer groups grow, they need to be able enforce a punishment mechanism – but the greater the size of the group, the less chance there is of being found out.

Enter full-access agents: “We don’t see what you do on Saturday night, but there is somebody who does, so beware,” as Dunbar puts it.

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As I argued in the first part of this series, morality predates religion, which certainly makes sense given what we know about the very old origins of empathy and play. But the question remains as to why morality came to be explicitly connected with religion. Boyer grounds this connection in our intuitive morality and our belief that gods and our departed ancestors are interested parties in our moral choices.

“Moral intuitions suggest that if you could see the whole of a situation without any distortion you would immediately grasp whether it was right or wrong. Religious concepts are just concepts of persons with an immediate perspective on the whole of a situation.”

Say I do something that makes me feel guilty. That’s another way of saying that someone with strategic information about my act would consider it wrong. Religion tells me these Someones exist, and that goes a long way to explaining why I felt guilty in the first place. Boyer sums it up in this way: “Most of our moral intuitions are clear but their origin escapes us… Seeing these intuitions as someone’s viewpoint is a simpler way of understanding why we have these intuitions.” Thus, Boyer concludes, religious concepts are in some way “parasitic upon moral intuitions”.

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But the problem created by increased sociality is its maintenance, as Dunbar explains. Before our ancestors settled into villages, they could simply “move from the Joneses to the Smiths’ group when tensions arise”. After settlement, however, they faced a very serious problem: “how to prevent everybody from killing each other”. Enter grooming.

The bonding process is built around endorphin systems in the brain, which are normally triggered by the social grooming mechanism of touch, or grooming. When it comes to large groups, says Dunbar, touch has two disadvantages: you can only groom one person at a time; and the level of intimacy touch requires restricts it to close relationships.

Recent data caps wild primates’ daily maximum grooming time to about 20 percent of their activity. Dunbar calculates that this cap limits group size to fewer than 70 members, which is significantly less than the group capacities of modern humans, at about 150. The problem, then, was to find a way to trigger social bonding without touching. Laughter and music were good solutions, which Dunbar says create the same endorphin-producing effects as grooming by imposing stress on muscles. Language works, too, a theory Dunbar has explored at length in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Because these effects can be achieved sans touch, social bonding can happen on a much larger scale.

Dunbar’s argument is that religion evolved as a way of allowing many people at once to take part in endorphin-triggering activation. Many of the rituals associated with religion, like song, dance, and assuming various postures for prayer, “are extremely good activators of the endorphin system precisely because they impose stress or pain on the body”.

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But these sporadic dances only worked until our ancestors began to settle down. Once hunter-gatherers began to form more permanent settlements, around 12,000 years ago, something more robust was needed to encourage populations to behave prosocially towards each other. Especially given the enormous newfound stress that comes with living in such large and inescapable groups. Trance dances could happen in these larger communities with some regularity – say, monthly – but what is needed are more regularised rituals to encourage social cohesion.

The formation of permanent settlements corresponds with the advent of farming. The agricultural, or Neolithic, revolution, began in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, which is sometimes referred to as the Cradle of Civilisation. Dunbar says it’s in these settlements where history’s first ritual spaces appear, the oldest of which is Gobekli Tepe in south-east Turkey. First examined in the 1960s, the site was excavated from 1996-2014 by a team led by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. In a 2008 Smithsonian Magazine feature, Schmidt referred to the site as humanity’s first “cathedral on a hill”. Gobekli Tepe, which means “belly hill” in Turkish, is a non-residential space that seems to have housed various temples made of pillars. It is estimated to date to about 10,000 BCE.

As historian David Christian writes in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, farming was a mega-innovation, like photosynthesis. That is, farming was a major threshold that, once crossed, set off our ancestors on a whirlwind journey that ran headlong into the complex societies that have dominated our species’ recent history. As population growth surged, mega-settlements saw increased social complexity, and large-scale political, economic, and military networks, says Christian. To accommodate such large groups, earlier ideas about kinship had to be modified “with new rules about properties, rights, ranking, and power”. The result of this ranking was the concept of specialisation, which led to different the stratification of classes. Some were rulers, some were merchants, some were priests.

In contrast to hunter-gatherer religious experiences, the religious rituals of Neolithic humans “focuses above all on one person, the divine or quasi-divine king, and only a few people, priests or members of the royal lineage, participate”, writes the late sociologist Robert Bellah. Importantly, it was during this period that “king and god emerged together… and continued their close association throughout history”.

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Eventually that association came to be challenged in what some have called the Axial Age. Originally coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the term refers to a time of sweeping changes that occurred in the first century BCE in China, India, Iran, Israel, and Greece. It was then, claimed Jaspers, that “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole” and “experiences absoluteness in the lucidity of transcendence”. It was then that our species took “the step into universality”.

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Still, Bellah thinks the concept is worth holding onto, albeit with qualifications. If we set Jaspers aside, it’s still impossible to deny that huge transitions in thought happened very quickly in the first century BCE. When I ask Dunbar if he buys the Axial Age hypothesis, he says, “If by that you mean a phase transition in which suddenly and quickly you have the emergence of religions with rituals and doctrines, the answer is yes.”

So what was axial about the axial age? First, all of the so-called axial breakthroughs occurred outside imperial centres. Bellah says an increased competition between states “created the possibility for the emergence of itinerant intellectuals not functioning within centralised priesthoods or bureaucracies”. Axial figures were able to criticise the centre from the margin. In fact, one historian has called the Axial Age “the age of criticism”.

Bellah says the question that was key during this breakthrough period was, “Who is the true king, the one who truly reflects justice?” So, for example, in Greece, Plato instructs people to look not to the aristocrat Achilles but to Socrates. In India, the Buddha was the one who gave up his claim to kingly succession. And in Israel, the God/king unity was decisively broken with the prophetic tales about YHWH rejecting and installing kings at will. In short, Bellah argues, axiality consists in the ability to imagine new models of reality as preferential alternatives to the ones already in place.

The key to this transition to criticism was the capacity for graphic invention and external memory, without which a bridge from Neolithic to modern humans might never have emerged, according to Bellah. Without the ability to store information outside the human brain, humans would not have been able to develop second-order thinking. And without that, we would never have been able to codify our religious experiences into elaborate theologies.

Surely there were theory and analysis before writing, as Bellah admits. Nor should we overlook the fact that orality and literacy overlap in ways that make it difficult to say that something is only the effect of literary culture. Still, as Bellah notes, we shouldn’t downplay the importance of the written word, which allowed narratives to be written down, studied, and compared, “thus increasing the possibility of critical reflection”.

The kind of thinking that he sees emerging in the Axial Age is theory about theory, thinking about thinking. It’s second-order thinking that leads to a religious and philosophical breakthrough: “not only a critical reassessment of what has been handed down, but also a new understanding of the nature of reality, a conception of truth against which the falsity of the world can be judged, and a claim that truth is universal, not merely local”.

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One of the better somethings, for many people, seems to be religion sans doctrine or hierarchy. Many researchers have noted that at the same time Church attendance in the West has declined, there’s been a noticeable increase in spirituality. Hence, the so-called Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) phenomenon.

Spirituality in this sense has been defined by one researcher as “a personalised, subjective commitment to one’s values of connection to self, others, nature, and the transcendent”. In a 2017 survey [https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/attitudes-toward-spirituality-and-religion/pf_05-29-18_religion-western-europe-05-02/(https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/attitudes-toward-spirituality-and-religion/pf_05-29-18_religion-western-europe-05-02/)] across 15 Western countries, for example, 64% of SBNRs said even though they didn’t believe in God as described in the Bible, they believed in a higher power.