I.D. Greeks 0005

I would like to start a discussion of oral tradition and oral mentality as distinctly opposed to written mentality. One hypothesis I would like to throw out is that there is an unconscious and essentially insidious implication within writing. It is an assumption of immortality through leaving written remains behind you after death even when this is explicitly renounced, a kind of having both ways at the same time, the soul of Karl Marx living on in DAS KAPITAL. This is actually amplified in Postmodernism despite its supposed adherence to Marxism. Jacques Derrida makes it explicitly clear that he even regards speech and any other kind of orality as ontologically and inescapably writing, that inscription, and therefore endurance through inscription even in oral traditional memorization, is its fundamental reality.

Alphabetization, i.e., an alphabet with both consonants and vowels, far more definitively fixes a composition into a specific place and time with the greatest exactness possible, that is, until the advent of the motion recording camera which coordinates sound with acts, a supposed record of ‘exactly’ what happened. The convincingness of the camera is overwhelming. However, when we stop and think about how the film or camera is used, we know very well we know not only that it can deliberately or unintentionally lie, and even lie more effectively, than any other media.

The extreme fixation of true alphabetization was only possible with the Greek and then Latin alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet served only as an oral memory prompter until A) Hebrew writing started becoming translated into Greek, and B) vowel markings were made ‘traditionally’ acceptable by those Jews – and only those Jews – who accepted the Massoretic text as the only legitimate expression of the holy scriptures of Judaism. This, amongst many other groups – many of whom died out -- excluded the Samaritans. The Greek translation of the scriptures has been constantly and consistently denigrated as extremely inaccurate until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls when it became physically apparent that it was the Massoretic text that was truly open to question. Part of this claim of inaccuracy in the beginning of the millennium was the conflict over the Greek texts of the Old Testament quoted in the New Testament that the orthodox Jews denounced in their controversy with early Christianity. But even the Christians, especially after St. Jerome, began to give heavier weight to the Massoretic Hebrew text and essentially sidetracked the earlier Greek translations. Now that situation has completely changed.

The Hebrew text is now ‘supported’ and ‘supplemented’ by the Greek text. The Greek text is selectively used to justify the relative accuracy of the Hebrew text. But this ignores the problem of the true oral tradition behind the ‘Hebrew’ text that actually maintained an understanding of it and kept it a living tradition, but only relatively, and that in a very loose sense, fixed, defined. The Greek text does, though, definitively prove the ‘Hebrew’ tradition was not firmly fixed in any sense, the context of the “Dead Sea Scrolls” (many of which were not near the Dead Sea and certainly do not reflect the views of a single community and definitely not a narrow period of time) prove that the understanding of the Hebrew language as such was becoming a dead language and had to be heavily supplemented with Aramaic retellings and commentaries as well as Greek translations. Hebrew was becoming a traditional artifact, the understanding of which had to be ‘preserved’ in other languages. That the so-called ‘Old Testament’ was born from an oral tradition with all the aspects of oral traditional thought is plainly evident in the many ‘repetitive’ formulas in the text and the many glimmers of vastly different traditions, including polytheistic, not entirely edited out of the text, but stand clearly out if the text is read as it is without a constantly re-editing and censoring point of view. This is because when the text was fixed and defined at its various stages, elements that were acceptable at the time and considered harmless were preserved. And at the next stage of editing the received text was regarded as authorative and correctable only in ‘technical’ details which did allow for reinterpretation but only within a limited purview because of the sacred authority of the received text. Those “glimmers” became artifacts passed over as ‘quaint’ and ‘primitive’ expressions of thinking that became more ‘evolved’ and ‘developed’ as the text is read. So that, as a cohesive whole, the book of Exodus is more authoritative than the book of GENESIS, and the other books of the TORAH, in turn, more authorative than EXODUS and used to give it its ‘true’ interpretation instead of letting it stand by itself with all of its loose ends. And the TORAH in turn was the most concentrated, edited, and authoritative text used to interpret all the other books of the so-called BIBLE. In spite of the fact it had numerous contradictory artifacts within it, the TORAH was edited and traditionally used in such a fashion they could be integrated or ignored in the overall view presented at any specific point in time. But as that point of view changed from ‘editing’ to ‘editing,’ the supplementary books of less authority added to the TORAH were also included and edited from different points of view. And being less authoritative were subject to less editing and less rearrangement to accord with the current point of view. Thus, if these texts are read as they stand, without an imposed external point of view, they say radically different things not only from current ‘tradition’ but also each other and even the TORAH itself. The BIBLE, in its actuality, is literally what the Greek word “biblos” means, a “collection”, a “library”, and not a unified, systematic text in any sense whatsoever. It contains a universe of vastly different and fundamentally contradictory points of views if each text (and this even includes the NEW TESTAMENT) is read standing by itself and interpreted only within its own context. The authority of a FIXED text has frozen, but not eliminated, many different oral traditions and many different stages of that oral tradition. What is the point of all this? Oral tradition is a literally living tradition kept alive and recreated in actual performances. The points fixated by oral memory are defined by a vastly different point of view and ‘set of values’ than a fully fixed, fully alphabetical text. The audience’s reception defines the oral ‘text’ as much as the rhetor’s words recited. The rhetor ‘plays’ to the audience. The rhetor does not lay down the law regardless of how the audience feels about it but wants to ethusiate them, bring them out of themselves as he himself is “brought out” as the rhetor in Plato’s ION describes it. The increasing fixation of the Hebrew text contradicted this to some degree, preserving many things that otherwise would have been forgotten. But this was a process of a very slowly changing point of view over a long period of time that both criticized and corrected but also preserved the earlier and contradictory points of views because, to a certain degree, they had become ‘sacred’ and therefore unchangeable, i.e., could not entirely be excluded without sacrilege according to the very values and rules of the editor. It is a contradictory and dialectical process of contradictory but unexcludible points of view. The ancient is sacred but unacceptable in the ‘precise’ form handed down. Therefore a synthesis is evolved of both ‘text’ and the ways of reading it that is in turn subject to a dialectical and historical process.

I do not want to go further into that. It is just a lead in to a more important hypothesis, that Christianity became the first truly, fundamentally, through and through written religion. Yet, again, each writing by itself, since the text is fixed by its sacredness, can express a vastly different point of view, and those different points of view can only be unified by a forced, authoritative, single reading.

Sanskrit and Prakrit and Pali rely considerably upon the need for memorization and recitation, something even Orthodox Judaism has tried passionately to keep alive while still having a definitive text. With the ancient Indian languages, as I understand it, they cannot function at a literate level with any one to one correspondence between word and object or action or gesture as English can to a great degree. To a degree, they seem to hearken back to the ideogram by composing words as combinatory thought units, whole complex sentences encased in one word. Also, the number and numerous variations in their syballary ‘alphabets’   require a far greater reliance upon memorization than the Latin alphabet we have inherited. All this becomes immensely amplified when we consider Chinese or ancient Egyptian where it is notorious that no two translations from the traditional forms of those languages agree, and sometimes disagree to a very wide extent. Now, though ancient Greek in its written form, is much more ‘fixed’ than even Sanskrit (?), yet its basic verbal mode dependent on participial variations does recall the more obvious Sanskrit thought-units and many times the verb or the participle contains the core understanding of an ancient Greek sentence as opposed to the simpler, but less evocative and connotative, balance of noun and verb in English. This is purely speculative on my part.

The main thesis I want to propose for discussion is the tremendous and fundamental difference between purely oral thinking that I propose, unlike Derrida, does not at all inscribe permanently on memory, and writing-type thinking with its fixed precision and exclusion of meaning and implicit moral and religious values that are always necessarily present if not explicitly examined – and still to some extent inescapable even when made explicit. Homer and the Presocratics are clearly oral thinkers coming into a written context. Plato seems to be torn between both. And definite echoes of oral thinking and values are still to be found in Aristotle. The texts of these thinkers to a large degree are still going through a process of editing and correction, while still retaining ‘sacred’ artifacts, exactly like the editing of the BIBLE.