On Synthetic Philosophy and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations in Aristotle and Tainter.

Building on work by Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment and Jeffrey Friedman (2019) Power without Knowledge, I have argued (recall here; and earlier here) that the advanced division of epistemic labor (hereafter: hyper-specialization) creates the conditions for the need/demand for synthetic philosophy. For, with hyper-specialization (those working in) the sciences risk not understanding each other; and, no less likely, those that need to govern or use the sciences may be faced with the same problem, albeit worse. Synthethic philosophy provides (at least some of) the integrative glues that help manage these problems.

As an aside, while AI may become (or is—things are moving fast) a tool in facilitating (say) synthetic philosophy, it generates the same kinds of (black box) problems: even the experts generally lack understanding of how AI systems, particularly machine learning models, reach their decisions. So, while it is not impossible that AI will displace particular synthetic philosophers, it won’t undermine the need for synthetic philosophy.

Be that as it may, it is incredibly tempting to treat the problem of hyper-specialization as parochial, that is, as a problem of (ahh) ‘modernity’ with its hyper-specialized sciences and fine-grained intellectual divisions. In our age, specialization isn’t finished until the second post-doc. I know that’s a temptation because it shaped the narrative I told back in 2019 when I first articulated my conception of synthetic philosophy. This temptation makes synthetic philosophy a by-product of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress.’ Since one can trace the phrase ‘synthetic philosophy’ as a self-description back to post-Darwinian philosophers like Herbert Spencer, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Peirce the temptation is reinforced (see here for some background).

But, as regular readers know, in teaching Plato’s Republic, I came to the surprising (to me) conclusion that the problem of hyper-specialization is diagnosed by Socrates. (I defend that interpretation here.) And so hyper-specialization is the natural effect of any civilization complex society. (I avoid using ‘civilization,’ because this tends to presuppose an evaluative commitment to its superiority over the (ahh) ‘uncivilized.’ Here I am only interested in its descriptive content.) If it’s in Plato, I am surely not the first to diagnose this.

Last week, Steve Davies recommended Joseph Tainter's (1988) Collapse of Complex Societies to me. It’s been cited nearly five thousand times, but I had not registered it. Tainter aims to provide a general model of the rise and fall of polities with social complexity.

To simplify greatly, Tainter treats the diminished marginal returns from investments in social complexity as one of the leading indicators of civilizational collapse. One of ways in which social complexity manifests itself is — you guessed — the advanced division of epistemic labor, especially in bureaucracy (to manage information), the engineering sciences (especially devoted to water-management, food management, and weapons development), medicine, and the mathematical sciences, especially astronomy and geometry.*

Now it is central to Tainter’s argument that social complexity is relatively new in human history—something that’s relatively distinctive of the last 4500 years.+ It’s not omnipresent in this period, but recurring. So on his view, what is called ‘modernity’ is definitely not unique.

So much for set up.

That multiple civilizations rise and fall is itself not a thought unique to modernity. As Tainter recognizes, it’s explored not just in Timaeus, but also in the opening books of Plato’s Laws, although somewhat oddly he ascribes the explanation of the Republic to the collapse of the Kallipolis to the Laws (p. 74). I have (recall) discussed the relevant material (Laws, Book 3, 677a-678a), when I built on and corrected Adrienne Mayor’s (2000) The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times, so I won’t repeat myself today (see here).

Crucially, in Laws, Plato’s Athenian Stranger assumes that there have been repeated cycles of floods and other catastrophes that destroy whole civilizations. And that after the desolation it takes about a thousand or two thousand years to return population numbers and social complexity to levels before the destruction. The Stranger posits a kind of historical hiatus between different civilizations. The destruction of civilization also involves a kind of structural forgetting of the techniques (and arts and sciences) that enter into it.

Interestingly enough on this very point Aristotle disagrees in Metaphysics 12. It’s really a fantastic passage and I quote it in full:

A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times, and bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth, to the effect that these heavenly bodies are gods, and that the Divine pervades the whole of nature. The rest of their tradition has been added later in a mythological form to influence the vulgar and as a constitutional and useful expedient; they say that these gods are human in shape or are like certain other animals, and make other statements consequent upon and similar to those which we have mentioned. Now if we separate these statements and accept only the first, that they supposed the primary substances to be gods, we must regard it as an inspired saying and reflect that whereas every art and philosophy has probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again, these beliefs of theirs have been preserved as a relic of former knowledge. To this extent only, then, are the views of our forefathers and of the earliest thinkers intelligible to us. (1074b), translated by Hugh Tredennick (slightly modified)

According to Aristotle the root of a myth, which is kind of the post-civilizational-collapse or echo of philosophy, is the mechanism that allows some elements of knowledge to passes through a historical hiatus (or dark ages). So, subsequent civilizations do not need to start entirely from a blank slate if they know how to decipher myth. [In fact, a view of myth like this is mocked by Socrates when he talks to Phaedrus with the cicadae singing in the background.]

Recently, an excellent young scholar, Lea Cantor (2022) discussed the passage in her prize- winning essay, “Thales – the ‘first philosopher’? A troubled chapter in the historiography of philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 30:5. She considers two options:

The first reading of houtoi suggests earlier Egyptian and/or Babylonian thinkers. Indeed, in De Caelo, Αristotle recognizes that both Greeks and “barbarians” have intuitions that celestial bodies are divine (DC I.3, 270b5–24).54 He also specifies that Egyptians and Babylonians observed the stars “from the remotest past” (ἐκ πλείστων ἐτῶν), noting that they transmitted their astronomical insights to the Greeks (DC II.12, 292a7–9). On the second reading of houtoi, he might instead have in mind thinkers from civilizations which were then no longer in existence, since there is no indication that he took the Egyptians, Babylonians or Zoroastrian Magoi to have proposed a concept of an unmoved mover. In either case, however, he apparently had in mind not only philosophical predecessors to Thales, but also non-Greek philosophers. (p. 737)

For Cantor’s argument in her paper, the final, concluding sentence of the quoted passage is key. And nothing I say contradicts it.

However, I think there is a third option: it’s also not impossible that Aristotle assumed that in the very remote past, Egyptians and (more likely) Babylonians might have been themselves different civilizations than the one familiar to then contemporary Greeks. In fact, (as I have argued in a scholarly place) there is good reasons to assume that the measures used in Babylonian astronomical (and price) data were constructed in order to assure a backward compatibility with civilizations that (long) pre-dated existing Babylonian data. Since astronomy is so important to the wider context of Aristotle passage it is not wholly ad hoc to attribute familiarity of this fact to him.

Now, it’s true that there is no reason to believe that Aristotle is taking himself here to refute Plato’s Laws.** (Although it’s pretty clear from the Politics that Aristotle had read it and was irritated by it.) But, equally clear, for Aristotle, too, it seems highly likely there had been many complex societies with their own internal logical of development in the distant past: “every art and philosophy has probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again.” (Tainter, alas, seems not to have been alerted to it in Aristotle.)

I always kind of assumed that the Stoics were the true theorists of the eternal rise and fall of civilizations (see the final passages of Seneca in Natural Questions 7 for a spectacular instance). But it’s pretty clear that both Plato and Aristotle also thought social complexity could be gained and lost over immense time spans. Plato’s and Aristotle’s awareness of it fuels their wonder, and informs their political science.

To what degree we should attribute to Plato and Aristotle awareness of the need for synthetic philosophy is best left for another time; to be continued.

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*Tainter does not focus on delineating the ways hyper-specialization might arise. But presupposes it familiarity.

+His narrative starts de facto with Sargon of Akkad. Some other time I reflect on how Biblical this account is.

**In wider context his official target is Eudoxus. Although given his relationship to Plato, it’s not silly to assume that Timaeus is being subsumed under the criticism.