Jan Assmann was a gentleman and a man of great genius and insight. Inspired by my mother's love for the subject, Egyptology became a lasting fascination of mine. I discovered only very recently that this great man had passed away. He was an inspiration to me and I'm deeply saddened. I cobbled together here, in celebration of his remarkable insights, this essay touching on the importance of life.
The late, great Egyptologist Jan Assmann noted that for the ancient Egyptians (who often get either totally ignored or at any rate passed over in accounts of the foundation of ‘western’ philosophy and culture) the ultimate reality was characterised by the principle of ‘Life’ rather than ‘Being’. Instead of the ‘eternal being’ which became the mainline focus of Greek and European/West Asian philosophy- and to a certain degree Indian philosophy and theology too- Egyptians conceived of ‘continuing life’ (life as understood as the ‘living cosmos’).
They had already, even a millennium before Akhenaten and the Amarna monotheistic revolution, conceived of a unity of source for existence (papyri from the middle kingdom spoke of ‘God’ in the singular; a divine unity from which both deities and the world including humanity were generated). One wonders what might have been had the Greek philosophers (who sometimes explicitly stated their indebtedness to Egyptian religious ideas) taken ‘Life and Time’ rather than ‘Being and Change ‘ as the fulcrum for philosophical speculation. True, western philosophy is far from monolithic. Dialectical philosophy from Heraclitus to the present day concerns dynamism and change. However, Henri Bergson perhaps came closest to reviving a philosophy of life as such in the west.
What might the advantages of thinking about life and time as the prime constituents of reality over such static or quasi-static notions as ‘being’?
Life concerns an immediacy of experience. It is thus more concrete and less abstract than ‘being’. We know life. Life comes with knowing. Without life, there is no philosophy. Without life in fact there can be no ‘world’ as something objectified. Furthermore, life in human life furnishes philosophy with contours drawn from experience of practical necessity. Bergson got a handle on this when he denied the reality of ‘non-being’ in the absolute sense. For Bergson, the problem of “why is there something (being) rather than nothing (non-being)?” arises from misapplication. The misapplication in question is of our analogising encountering a lacking of something specific in life, in other words, wanting something else in place of what is at hand. We use of our practical intelligence to attain that something. We develop new tools, previously not in existence (non-being) to achieve ends. If we misapply this experience of non-being to things in general, we eventually come up with a notion of absolute non-being as opposed to absolute being.
For Bergson, as for Buddhism, questions of being and non-being are really beside the point, if they are afforded meaning at all; understanding the characteristic of this existence, rather than speculating on it’s impossibility is appropriate. For Bergson it is duration, the actual flow of experience which is the inner aspect of a world (or cosmos) pulsing with life and innovative change. For Buddhism, it is karmic force in dependent-origination from which the illusion of separate, independent discrete “self” and “world/others” arises. Both acknowledge impermanence. Both reject the tendency of the intellect to reify abstracts.
Furthermore, when life is considered, the problems of ‘the one and the many’ also pale into relative redundancy. Life is neither definitely a ‘one’ nor a ‘many’; it can be seen to include aspects of both, or reflect either depending on the context.
Abstracts generally (even dialectal analyses) are products of the intellect- that part of consciousness that deals with relationships between phenomena. Thus, from the intellect arise such great and taxing problems as the mind/body question. If life were considered, rather than being, this problem becomes merely one of defining experience(s). We differentiate our basic experience according to sets of dualities- mind/body, internal/external, subjective/objective, self/world, being/doing. However, by contrast, tarrying with ‘life’ we can understand experience as an active, unifying principle prior to differentiation, the world as an active whole, continuous with experience, and being as productivity/creativity – and time. All aspects of ‘Life'. Would this not be a more practical (if not profound) direction for philosophy?
Where and when abstracts are granted exaggerated status we can see pitfalls; imprudence and absurdity which appear when we place these intellectual tools and products above and sometimes against the actual living reality of experience. Life then becomes as a contingent which can be readily sacrificed to realise the abstract and ideal, however “materialist” a veneer with which ideology may cloak itself.
This is not – certainly not – to deny the vital importance, much less the existence, of the intellectual aspect of life, nor the beneficial nature of ideology and systematic thought. That would be nothing if not inconsistent! In fact, as has been stated above, both the mental and material are themselves simply designated aspects of experience. But life should never be denigrated in fundamental importance to make room for theory.
The Egyptians sacralised, even deified, life as the supreme ultimate. The Egyptian God of the gods was the Lord of Life. The desacralising of nature may well have been necessary for the great advances of modern science. No sensible person should deny the beneficial nature of those advances, nor the development of the better aspects of modern consciousness that arose in tandem with them. Neither can they be simply discarded.
But it may well be time, may be of the most pressing urgency, to return at least some of the sacredness back to nature and life. We should return a sense of awe and veneration to Life as that reality from which, and in which, we and our intellectual activities and achievements appear and are sustained.
To finish with a fitting quote from a Ramesside era coffin text
“Your being is the endless plenitude of time, your image is unalterable duration, all that happens springs from your planning will”1
“The Search for God in Ancient Egypt” Jan Assmann, translated by David Lorton, Cornell University Press, 2001
The need to return to a sacred view of life.
We can never truly return to any state or condition, since by the very nature of time and experience, any circling back involves deep and significant change. The notions, understandings, and very relationships that formed that original sacredness cannot be reinvigorated.
Mankind has taken an extremely convoluted journey since those days, characterized by an amazing ignorance, and a perverse lust to reduce the symphony of life to a state where the miraculous becomes insipid and banal.
Perhaps its not fair to so generalize. Certainly there are those who deeply perceive the will and communication inherent in life. Yet any cursory examination of the current condition reveals a blatant terror based hatred, typified by the actions of those most privileged in society.
Rather than a return to the sacred, I see the requirement to be a simple lifting of the deep ignorance, the ego based isolationism that exposes itself again and again in every manifestation of this modern world.