Philosopher

THOUGHTS ON THE HORITE COMPLEX

Some thoughts on the Horite Complex

The bulk of my thinking here about the Middle East culturally is from about five volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History of the Middle East that I keep poring over. Each time different details pop out. It is a big picture covering a huge time frame of developments in the area. More specific studies to the Hurrians are a couple of volumes titled Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians edited by Morrison and Owen. Volume 2 contains a lot of excavation material that is incredibly interesting.

Really interesting also is The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East by Alberto Green; Biblical and Judaic Studies Volume 8. It traces through time the changing iconography of the weather god in Mesopotamia, the highlands of Anatolia, the upper country of Syria, and Canaan along the coast. His take on it all is summed up in subheads of his last chapter as: The Storm-God as a Force of Nature; The Storm-God as the Foundation of Political Power, and the Strom-God and the Evolving Religious Process.

I am slowly plodding through the Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Mallory and Adams for the second time. It sleeps in the day on my bedside table. Like the Cambridge stuff it is over-rich in inspiring details.

It is in this spirit that I want to share with you some of my own wanderings, through labyrinths both above and below the ground, and recount some of my voyages, encounters, and strange discoveries as I have explored this concept myself,  as though it were not just a psychological complex but a landscape with an atmosphere. One stretching way beyond the frame we are going to set up as we prepare to paint a picture of this thing we are calling the Horite Complex.

The name itself suggests that it is a psychological term, like Freud’s Oedipus Complex, but in fact it is not. It’s a phenomenological term. But it is a term arrived at after no small amount of psychological investigations. I would like to lure you down that path, not because psychology has some privileged point of view on these things. Not because what we are examining is some sort of strictly mental phenomena. No we are going to examine it simply as a phenomena. That is something that has happened, is still happening and may continue…or not.

In this sense, psychology is just another science among sciences, like astronomy, sociology, economics, archeology, anthropology, etc,., What these sciences offer is rational explanations for things. If the thing is taken as an object, a thing in itself, that’s one thing. If it is person you want to understand, that seems to be something else. 

Whether you are an archeologist, a sociologist, an anthropologist, or an economist, your systematic way of explaining things is always being applied to “something”, some phenomena, let’s call it.  It is this” something”,  this life-experience, this phenomena that calls out for examination along with the whole Life-World that it inhabits.

Whether you are considering the pot of flowers upon the table, or the “troubles” vexing your youngest daughter, or the Three Hundred Years War in Europe there are various sciences at your disposal for coming to some sort of rational understanding of the thing.  If possible we would want to use them all, if something really mattered. Wouldn’t we? And so we will. I know it seems grandiose and maybe delusional, to say we are setting off on a psycho-philosophico-socio-economico-theologico-mythico-geographico-..logical analysis of the Horite Complex, but we are. I think this will become evident as the analysis unfurls.

What makes it problematic is that trying to use all these sciences at once is a little like trying to look at some object from every angle at once. Even if it were possible, it’s not practical. So do we then just choose one because it offers the kind of explanation that we are looking for? Or the one that seems most appropriate for our investigation based on the nature the ‘object’ of our study. Or the ‘subject’ we chose to study? The question of how we can study ourselves is one that Husserl’s phenomenology revolves around

 Before we could choose the best “lens” for examining and explaining our object or subject of interest, however, don’t we already need to know what it is? I mean whether it is a subject or an object to begin with for instance? Do we need to ask a physicist? Or do we need to ask a psychiatrist to explain it to us? And can they, or is it even appropriate for them to try, to use the same methods, that is, the methods of the physical sciences?

If all these sciences involve explaining something encountered in the life-world, then the understanding they arrive at should be congruent if you think about it. Something happens. Say a young man is caught trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill and ends up getting shot. A psychologist might give us a lot of reasons for what drove the guy to do it. But so could an economist. And then there are the sociological aspects to consider. Even the chemist might tell us there was a chemical imbalance in the poor guy and we can’t blame him for what he did.

Since all sciences involve explaining things encountered in the life-world then the understanding they produce when considering the same thing should not be in contradiction. They should mesh into one picture. All the explanations arrived at by the various experts may have been in play to varying degrees when the guy stole the bread.

So back to our question about the crisis of Western Civilization? What is this Horite Complex? At first glance it seems that it is some sort of psychological phenomena. Or is it just the way I named it that sets us up for that? There are certainly a lot of economic and sociological factors to consider.

We are left, I think, like the painter standing in the great outdoors, wondering exactly how to frame this thing that stretches out like a vast landscape, one that both surrounds and envelops us. It is in this sense that in the broad landscape of modern sciences I am going to grab the psychological brush to start with, but with a fistful of other brushes in my other hand which I will be dabbing at the canvas as we move along.

So in the broad landscape of modern sciences I am going to set my perspective frame in the field of psychology and ask how do we understand the Horite Complex psychologically?

Before hitting the canvas however, let’s consider our brush.  What is psychology and what does it mean to take a psychological approach?

For one thing, it is not that old compared to other sciences, like physics for instance which has a much longer history.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche was probably Europe’s first cultural psychologist. He was certainly the first western philosopher to call himself a psychologist and also the first to provide psychological portraits of his philosophical predecessors as part of his effort in understanding them.

In his first published work The Birth of Tragedy we find our first real clues, I think, to what we ourselves are trying to understand. His earliest insights into the origins of philosophy in tragedy and the origins of tragedy, not in some greater than life tragic figure, but in the Chorus, not in the Apollonian image, but in Dionysian music and song are profound. In a way this insight into the relation of tragedy and philosophy is much more important than the things Nietzsche is most remembered for, like Zarathustra, the Eternal Return of the Same, and the Superman stuff. The fact that music and song are the cradle of all talking and talking is the parent of reason is significant, I think, and jives with some of the latest thought about how children learn. Music and song are also fundamental to remembering. Like singing the ABCs.

These insights into the nature of Ancient Greek culture would not have been possible if Greek culture, including manuscripts,  had not been “re-discovered” by Europeans.

Nietzsche’s understanding of the downfall of Tragedy and the rise of Philosophy in Greece as the triumph of the Apollonian image of reason over the celebration of Dionysian tragedy leads him to proclaim himself the world’s first “tragic philosopher”, who is going to become the living union of these two contraries, these two antagonists. In this attempt he ends up casting them as eternally opposing life-forces instead. His insight concerns a transition from the age of tragic drama to the age of philosophy in early Greece. But then he treats them as sort of a-temporal forces in opposition to each other; contradictions in life itself that must be held together by some commanding authority. 

It was not possible for Nietzsche to put the rise of these opposing (competing) forces in Greece that he had identified into any further historical perspective at the time.  That history was yet to be uncovered. Those horizons had not yet come into view. However we are now in a position, after much digging and translating of old manuscripts, to recognize that this battle (contest) between the Apollonian and Dionysian goes back a long way and it is not the battle between two eternally opposing forces.

This celebration of life as tragedy and philosophy as the cure, it turns out, is not even really Greek.  It was inherited by the Greeks from Anatolia. It migrated to Greece along with bronze weaponry from the land where Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher living in Anatolia would one day proclaim “War is Father of All Things” and “the Kingdom is in the hands of a Child.” Catchy phrases that sort of sum up the Mycenean ethos. He is also the first Greek thinker to pose explicitly the notion of life as conflict between a couple of contradictory forces and the struggle between the two being the force of life itself (a Mithraic concept that came from even further east).

When Greece was first rediscovered, it was obvious that the Roman culture they were more familiar with, owed almost everything to, borrowed almost everything or inherited almost everything from these original Greek people. This led to the idolization of Greek philosophy as the “original” version, which then becomes translated into Latin terms. Roman culture, including its pantheon of gods and goddesses, could almost be said to be a plagiary of Greek culture. A cover song as it were.

Now, after over a hundred years of exploration and research, it turns out that the Greeks were not any more original than the Romans. Just as you could say that the Romans adopted a Greek pantheon of gods and gave them Latin names. We now know that the Greeks adopted their pantheon of gods from Anatolia and gave them Greek names. The earlier pantheon had Hurrian names and the earliest known temple to Jupiter/Zeus/Teshub is located on the slopes of the Taurus Mountains near the modern border of Turkey and Syria. This geographical detail is of importance.