Paleolithic Politics

The Human Community in Early Art

Barry Cooper

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268107154
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Using his background in political theory and philosophical anthropology, Barry Cooper is the first political scientist to propose new interpretations of some of the most famous extant Paleolithic art and artifacts in Paleolithic Politics. This book is inspired by Eric Voegelin, one of the major political scientists of the last century, who developed an interest in the very early symbolism associated with the caves and rock shelters of the Upper Paleolithic, but never finished his analysis. Cooper, who has written extensively on Voegelin's theories, takes up the enterprise of applying Voegelin's approach to an analysis of portable and cave art. He specifically applies Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness, his concept of the compactness and differentiation of consciousness, his argument regarding the experience and symbolizations of reality, and his notion of the primary experience of the cosmos to images previously regarded as pedestrian. Cooper demonstrates the political significance of the earliest expressions of human existence and is among the first to argue that political life began not with the Greeks, but 25, 000 years before them. Archaeologists, prehistorians, and political scientists will all benefit from this original and provocative work.

PART I

A Voegelinian Prelude

CHAPTER 1

Paleoscience and Political Science

In the last decade or so of his life, Eric Voegelin developed an interest in very early political symbolism, the symbolism of persons living in what we conventionally refer to as the Stone Age or the Ice Age. In a sense, Voegelin was simply pushing his interest in Altertumswissenschaft into ever-earlier societies. Long before the agriculture-based cosmological empires of the ancient Near East discussed in volume 1 of Order and History were the Neolithic societies. These were increasingly sedentary social and political groups consisting of villages and towns, initially confined to western Asia, Anatolia, and the Levant. Antedating the European and Near Eastern Neolithic societies were the several hunter-gatherer or foraging societies of the Upper Paleolithic (50–12 KYA).¹ Toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic, sometimes called the Mesolithic or Epipaleolithic, depending on the area of Eurasia being discussed, an increase in sedentism was often accompanied by a transition from hunting and foraging to domestication of animals and plants. Whenever the transition began—and the evidence suggests it took place at different times in different places—the focus of this book is on the earlier “pretransition” period.

Such a focus introduces several qualifications in time and space to our analysis. First, our focus is chiefly on Europe. We make this limitation because (1) when Voegelin was interested in the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic during the later 1960s and 1970s, much less was known of contemporary developments in Asia and Africa; and (2) to attempt to integrate the recent African and Asian discoveries with European ones would greatly lengthen an already long study but add little to the theoretical problems of interest to political science. Furthermore our concern is with European symbolism rather than the economic or, broadly speaking, the material changes in Upper Paleolithic societies. We will, of course, discuss in passing such questions as changes in climate and economic and technological strategies, but the focus of this book is on the symbolic life of very early European humans.

The structure of this “Voegelinian prelude” is straightforward. In the next section we consider the central place of narrative in contemporary archaeology, paleoanthropology, and the other paleosciences upon which political science must rely for evidence. Narratives raise problems that paleoscientists conventionally discuss in terms of “nature” and “culture.” Accordingly, the second section, “Nature and Culture,” deals with this question. We argue, however, that the problem of nature and culture raised theoretical or philosophical questions that, in the context of paleoscience and the subject matter of anthropogenesis, could be personified by Kant and Darwin. Kant’s arguments in particular introduced the categories of philosophical anthropology, which we discuss in the section titled “Philosophical Anthropology.” From Kant’s day to the present, philosophical anthropology has been a central element in modern political science.² Central to Voegelin’s philosophical anthropology was the concept of the compactness and differentiation of consciousness. He began to apply this distinction to the very early political symbolism of Europe following his encounter with Marie König (discussed in chapter 2). In short, the argument regarding the relationship of paleoscience to political science was not too dissimilar to that of history and political science. As Aristotle said, history discussed “singulars,” which is to say contingent events, individuals, and their stories. In this respect it was less philosophical than poetry, which, as philosophy, is more concerned with universals (Poetics 1451a36–b11). Both paleoscience and political science are constituted by narratives, but the narrative of political science also aimed to reflect on narrative as such. Political science to a greater extent than paleoscience requires a philosophical and also a social anthropology.

Brendan Purcell is one of the few scholars who has written on the question of human origins who has also discussed the necessity of discussing philosophical anthropology. The reason for the centrality of philosophical anthropology is almost self-evident: we have to sort out what we mean by “human” so that when we discuss the question of human origins we have some notion of what we are looking for.³ Early in his 1966 book, The Drama of Humanity, a title that evoked a series of lectures given by Voegelin in 1967,⁴ Purcell drew an epistemological distinction between natural science and philosophy. The former, he argued, was “the systematic asking of questions and seeking of verified answers within the various domains of data in the material world,” whereas the latter was “the systematic asking of questions and seeking of verified answers both with regard to the nature of inquiry as such, as well as with regard to the content of all inquiry from the viewpoint of existence as such.”⁵ In light of that distinction one might say that paleoscience rested on certain assumptions that could be made more or less explicit, but that this science or complex of sciences did not raise questions of a philosophical nature. If, inevitably, questions of a philosophical nature nevertheless arose, they were usually qualified as speculative extrapolations based on limited paleoscientific evidence.

NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECIES

Narrative constitutes a bridge between philosophical anthropology and the less reflective but more empirical discourse of paleoscientists. Narratives are stories, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, stories are a privileged means to convey meanings.⁶ Alan Barnard argued that “the ability to tell a story, to narrate, is an important part of what it means to be human.”⁷ A common paleoscientific narrative, for example, concerns the transition between, or replacement of, late archaic humans, chiefly Neanderthals, and (or by) early modern humans, sometimes called anatomically modern humans or Sapiens. The paleoscientific evidence is enormously complex and increases with almost every scholarly publication on the subject matter, but to be meaningful the data depend on the narrative into which the evidence is woven. As Wolpoff whimsically observed, “Data does not speak for itself. I have been in rooms with data, and listened very carefully. The data never said a word.”⁸ The larger story this book aims to tell concerns the genesis of human being as storytelling being. Central to this story is the production of what we conventionally call art.

Like all stories, the discussion of stories aims to be persuasive because it gives a plausible account of evident realities. Sometimes paleoscientists with deeply positivist commitments borrow from Kipling and call such efforts “just-so” stories. To persons who are quantitatively inclined, one might point out that the plausibility of a narrative can also be expressed in terms of what the French mathematician Henri Poincaré called a spectrum of probabilities. That the accounts of Neanderthal-to-Sapiens history or of Upper Paleolithic documentary production, especially the production of “art,” whether parietal (cave) art or mobiliary (portable) art, also convey an intelligible meaning ensures these stories are not simply fiction.⁹ The problem, which recurs throughout this book, is to describe the grounds for stories of historical anthropogenesis.

We begin with a simple example. In the preface to his book on hunting, Matt Cartmill wrote: “This book is about the connections that various people have tried to draw between hunting and being human. It deals above all with the hunting hypothesis of human origins, which is the story of how some apes became human when they took up weapons and began to kill. The killer-ape story has roots in older tales, and so this book is in part a literary history. But it is also a book about science, because scientists have been the chief tellers of that story.”¹⁰

Although the story of “man the hunter” has been widely criticized,¹¹ Cartmill was certainly correct to emphasize the importance of paleoscience as storytelling, and that, in effect, scientific hypotheses were plotlines. Cartmill was not, however, the first to recover the approach of an earlier archaeological tradition.¹² A couple of years earlier, Misia Landau developed a “general theory” of paleoscientific narrative. For Landau, any account (even physics) of a sequence of events that manifests a meaning is a narrative. This commonsensical identification of narrative and story is clearly distinct from specialized postmodern uses of the term. With respect to the present problem, Landau wrote that “every paleoanthropological account sets out to answer the question: what really happened in human evolution?” And they all address terrestiality, bipedalism, encephalization, and the development of technology, politics, and religion—though not always in the same order.¹³ Paleoscientific analysis and common sense would conclude that questions concerning bipedalism and encephalization are scientific in the conventional sense of the term. Landau argued that the scientific accounts also constitute a meaningful story. And the plausibility and persuasiveness of the scientific account depends on the plausibility and persuasiveness of the story of which it forms a part. Science, as Aristotle said, also relies on rhetoric.

The usual evolutionary story is that (1) the nonhuman primates were relatively safe, usually because they lived in trees; (2) one of them was somehow different from the others, which introduced the “hero” of the story; (3) the hero was dislodged because of environmental or other changes; and (4) left the safety of the trees and departed on a new terrestrial adventure where (5) the hero was tested and triumphed, which was explained by (6) the “guidance” of Darwinian natural selection or an equivalent factor or force that (8) transformed the hero from primitive animal to civilized human so that (9) the hero could be again tested and again triumph, even though his or her triumph was accompanied by anxieties that summoned further action, generally referred to as “culture.”

Readers of Voegelin’s work written during the 1950s and early 1960s will find Landau’s account of the anxious hero a familiar one. In Israel and Revelation, for example, Voegelin introduced the imagery of human existence as participation in a mysterious “drama of being” that was illuminated only by consciousness, and then only partly. As he put the matter there:

At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole. Man’s partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole of which existence is a part. Knowledge of the whole, however, is precluded by the identity of the knower with the partner, and ignorance of the whole precludes essential knowledge of the part. This situation of ignorance with regard to the decisive core of existence is more than disconcerting: it is profoundly disturbing, for from the depth of this ultimate ignorance wells up the anxiety of existence.¹⁴

Moreover, the “process of symbolization” never dispels the anxiety of existence no matter how adequate it becomes as an expression of experienced reality. The reason is simple: the more adequate the symbolization, the more aware humans become that they are participants in a “cloud of unknowing,” to use another familiar enough symbol. That is, the clarity that comes from more adequate symbolization does not clear up the mystery of participation so much as render it more intense. Voegelin remarked in an essay from the late 1960s, “Anxiety is the response to the mystery of existence out of nothing. The search for order is the response to anxiety.”¹⁵ Narrative in this context was one expression of the search for order. There is, in other words, an order to the sequences of paleoscientific narratives just as these same paleoscientific narratives expressed a search for another order, namely, a meaningful answer to the question, “What really happened in human evolution?”

The first problem, the discussion of the sequence of paleoscientific narratives, is relatively straightforward. “Creating narratives,” Rosemary Joyce wrote, “permeated archaeology from the initial moments of investigation of sites through to the production of texts,” which meant something more than “written materials.” Archaeological storytelling both expressed insight and knowledge and constituted an archaeological community—and, indeed, more broadly, a scholarly community. “Narrative in a broad sense,” Joyce continued, “is constitutive of archaeology. The writing of archaeology begins long before an author puts pen to page. . . . Telling ourselves stories as we engage in primary research, we construct already narrativized knowledge, which then appears more natural in its transcription in written texts.”¹⁶

A more interesting question concerns the narratives that try to account for “what really happened in human evolution.” Of course, one can simplify the story. For example, said Landau, “the dominance of Cro-Magnon over Neanderthal, like the struggle between two brothers, which occurs in folktale and myth, may represent the triumph of virtue over turpitude.”¹⁷ Indeed, until recently that was precisely how the “triumph” of migrants from Africa to Europe was presented.¹⁸ Neanderthals, however, have always been in a curious position: until very recently the descendants of the African invaders, modern Sapiens, including thee and me, were unsure whether the ones they “displaced” (to use a conventional euphemism) were human or not. Today, on the basis of biology—Neanderthals and Sapiens interbred—and also on the basis of morphology, paleoscientists mostly agree that we all belong to the same species.¹⁹ Treating Neanderthals and Sapiens as distinct “lineages,” as has sometimes been done, does not usually resolve the issue because the relationship of biological to anthropological categories typically is not addressed by paleoscientists.

Nor does the current general agreement among paleoscientists dissolve the problem. It is still not clear whether Neanderthals and Sapiens are defined by different combinations of unique traits or by unique combinations of different traits. And it is even less clear what is meant by a trait.²⁰ The reason for this essential ambiguity can be specified: for biologists, evolution is understood to be a continuous process, which may or may not conclude with Sapiens, but taxonomy divides this process into discontinuous categories. Accordingly, the two are incompatible. This is especially true “with reference to fossil materials, where the only biological characteristics available for study are the morphological traits of scarce fossils,” which raises a problem of interest to political science.²¹

The theoretical issue concerns the status of species. In the 1859 edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience” and as not essentially different from “variety,” which “is also applied arbitrarily, and for more convenience.” Marjorie Grene and David Depew quote this remark, and they comment: “Surely these are fighting words.” Darwin seemed to deny existence to the subject matter of the book, namely, species: “If the term species is arbitrary, what are naturalists doing when they make distinctions between specimens that seem related or unrelated, and when they worry about whether certain forms represent good species or are merely varieties? What, indeed, was Darwin himself doing during the Beagle years, or afterward, when he asked specialists in London to look into the sorting of his specimens?”²² In response to such remarks the following questions have arisen: Are species real? If so, what is their onto...