I read this book after reading Yaeger's Sacred History of Being. It is a more demanding text, since it concerns a number of arguments about ancient and primitive thought in the work of the classicist Sir James Frazer. But it casts a lot of light on the origins of the Sacred...
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I read this book after reading Yaeger's Sacred History of Being. It is a more demanding text, since it concerns a number of arguments about ancient and primitive thought in the work of the classicist Sir James Frazer. But it casts a lot of light on the origins of the Sacred History of Being (it was formally published in 2016, but was written way back in 1993).
Frazer doesn't mention Plato much in the course of his later work, which was largely anthropological. He developed some views of his own about the nature of human thought, built on John Locke's principle of the association of ideas. This enabled him to build a theory about magical thought and practice, which argued that magic was based on ideas of sympathy and contagion. And no more. This is a key part of Frazer's monumental Golden Bough. Yaeger is aware however that magical ideas in the european renaissance were based on another principle (the establishment of contact with divine powers, or Being itself), which can be traced back to classical times (at the least), and found it puzzling that there was no discussion in The Golden Bough of what pre-enlightenment authors said about magic.
Frazer did write about Plato in a prize-winning essay when he was a student in the late 1870s, and the (extensive) essay was finally published in 1930 (The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory). Yaeger's book is largely a critical deconstruction of that rarely discussed essay, in the light of Frazer's later work. Frazer was entirely dismissive of the idea of Being in his essay, writing Being off as something which 'could not have anything predicated of it'. He regarded Plato's work as a body of research, in constant development (as many did at the time), and so was interested in stylometric study of his works to establish the order in which they were written. It was hoped that this would throw light in particular on the development of Plato's idea of the Forms. It didn't. Scholars are still divided between those who think Plato was doing research, and the others who think he was expounding a body of doctrine which is still obscure to us. Frazer however declined to discuss Plato's Parmenides in the course of his essay, which, given the subject, is a little odd. His conclusion was nevertheless that the 'ontology' Plato was discussing was in fact not an ontology at all, but an epistemology transformed into a false ontology. Plato made a mistake.
Yaeger thinks that Frazer was wrong about Plato mistaking an epistemology for a genuine ontology, and he explains why. He also argues that he was wrong about both the principal basis of magical thought throughout much of cultural history, and about the impossibility of saying anything useful or interesting about Being. In which case, if he is correct, Frazer spent a long career writing fiction.
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