Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern So-

cieties by G. E. R. Lloyd

Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 136. ISBN 978–0–19–
965472–7. Cloth $45.00

Reviewed by
Paul T. Keyser
Google, Inc. (Chicago)
[email protected]
This volume is the latest, and worthy, installment in Lloyd’s long project, in
progress since his Magic, Reason and Experience [1979] or even his Polarity
and Analogy [1966], to understand ancient mentalities, especially in the
realm of natural science. The five chapters of this slim volume engage their
material and the reader with verve and vigor, and deepen Lloyd’s work in
confronting ancient mentalities, particularly Greek and Chinese.1
In this book, Lloyd announces his intent to strike a balance, as he did regard-
ing cognition in Lloyd 2007, ‘between cross cultural universalists and cultural
relativists’, in particular here to illuminate ‘what we may call cosmologies’
[1]. Lloyd examines the terms of the debates, the character of the arguments,
and the nature of the evidence, for two of what philosophers sometimes
label the ‘Big Questions’, namely, what it is to be human [ch. 1] and what it
is to understand the world around us [ch. 3]. Chapters 2 and 4 seem to this
reader ancillary to those goals; chapter 5 sums up.
His data include not only ancient China and ancient Greece, as before, but
also ancient Mesopotamia and modern anthropology of Amazonia (as in
Lloyd 2007, e.g., 143–149). In transgressing the modern disciplinary bound-
aries, Lloyd has shown himself to be a bold scholar (and fortune favors the
bold). He has gone to the (considerable) trouble of learning Chinese and also
1 Recent works by Lloyd mining that vein include: Disciplines in the Making: Cross-
Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation [2009], Cognitive Varia-
tions: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind [2007], Ancient
Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Sci-
ence and Culture [2004], and his joint effort with Nathan Sivin, The Way and the
Word [2002], which is reviewed in Keyser 2004.

© 2014 Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science issn 1549–4497 (online)
All rights reserved issn 1549–4470 (print)
Aestimatio 11 (2014) 1–12
2 Aestimatio

the special discourse of anthropology when already a senior scholar: few

scholars of any age in any field take such trouble; fewer still manage the jour-
ney with such aplomb. There are risks attendant upon such transgressions,
both the risk of misunderstanding the less-familiar language as well as the
risk that the natives of the transgressed field will dismiss the transgressor
as a poacher. Lloyd is a genial Herodotus of modern academia, traveling
widely, absorbing broadly, and returning with marvels. He would be the
first to proclaim his results provisional and to acknowledge the concomitant
necessity of revision.
Lloyd’s first chapter, ‘Humanity between Gods and Beasts?’ serves to open
the discussion with a well-chosen issue. Well-chosen because we can be
nearly certain that the query regarding the nature and place of humans in
the world in which we find ourselves has been raised in some form in every
human culture that has ever existed. It is a query demonstrably present in
ancient Greek and ancient Chinese sources, and has been a focus of recent
attention in anthropological debate.
Moreover, the nature and place of humans in the world has previously
been a focus for Lloyd himself, albeit with different goals. In his Cognitive
Variations [2007], ch. 3 (‘The Natural Kinds of Animals and Plants’) addressed
the possibility of discovering a definitive taxonomy of animals or of plants.
Just as the boundaries between species of animals vary according to different
models, so does the boundary between humans and ‘other’ animals. Whether
in the Greek thinker Aristotle, the Chinese work Huainanzi, or the reports
collected among the Itza’ Maya of Guatemala (as read by Lloyd 2007, 46–49),
the same system that classifies animals then extends to demarcating all of
them from us: ‘humans regularly emerge at the top as quite special animals’
[Lloyd 2007, 55]. Earlier, in his Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections [2004],
ch. 11 (‘Human Nature and Human Rights’) also explored this issue, seeking
to elucidate the varying bases for making moral claims, in so far as those
bases relate to claims about the ‘nature’ of human beings. Here Lloyd’s focus
was on the boundaries within and without which moral responsibility could
be assigned, especially male versus female and in-group versus ‘barbarian’.
Within ancient Chinese culture, humans were distinguished from animals
by having moral sense [yi: Lloyd 2004, 158–159] and yet barbarians were
qualified in many ways as being like animals [2004, 161], so that ‘[s]uch
tolerance as the Chinese showed to other groups came primarily from an
 Paul T. Keyser 3

effortless sense of their own superiority’ [2004, 164]. Greeks too viewed
barbarians as somewhat subhuman, e.g., being classified by Aristotle as
‘natural slaves’ [Pol. 1.3–4, 1253b–1254a]. Thirdly, the nature and place of
humans in the world was a particular interest of Lloyd’s teachers, Vernant,
Detienne, and Vidal-Naquet, around the years 1972–1975, as Lloyd notes
in the work under review [8n1] right at the beginning of this first chapter.
The interest continues among many scholars and philosophers, as Lloyd
notes [29], citing, e.g., Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals [1993],
an investigation of ancient thought on the nature and status of animals as
cognitive agents.
Thus, Lloyd’s choice of opening topic here is over-determined and familiar.
Yet Lloyd does not merely re-present old ideas in new clothes (as some
senior scholars have done): rather, somewhat like rotating a kaleidoscope
while viewing the same scene, Lloyd shows us yet another aspect of the
multifaceted issue under study.2 Lloyd here [8–14] swiftly reviews various
attempts in the ancient Greek (and modern Euro-American) tradition to find
a distinguishing criterion that would securely differentiate animals from
humans and shows how each in turns fails to be as rigid and reliable as
its proponents claim. He points out how that unresolved debate caused
the European conquistadors of the Americas to doubt the humanity of the
humanoid beings dwelling there—just as the natives were in doubt about the
humanity of the invading species [11]. I would just note that the problem had
already been raised in (Late) Greco-Roman antiquity by Augustine, who in
The City of God 16.8 queried whether ‘monsters’ are human and concluded
that if they have souls, however they look, they must be human. He does not,
however, provide a recipe for determining whether such beings, hypothetical
to him, actually do have whatever a soul is. Lloyd’s review of the Chinese
evidence reiterates his thesis in Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections [2004,
158–161], that humans are beings with moral sense—which raised issues of
differing moral systems—or, according to other Chinese texts, that humans
all share certain basic needs [17].
Turning to anthropology for further data about humans versus animals
[17–21, 26–29], Lloyd makes use of the work of two students of Amazonia.
One is Viveiros de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist (influenced by Roy
2 Lloyd indeed emphasizes precisely that point, referring to the multidimensionality
of the phenomena [36–37]: cf. 2007, 41, 56–57.
 4 Aestimatio

Wagner), whose field-work in 1981–1988 concerned the Araweté (a tribe

of the Tupi-Guarani people), and who aimed to demonstrate that it is their
cosmology, rather than their ecology, that is constitutive of their society: the
Araweté believe that they will become divine once they are slain and eaten
by the gods.3 The other is Descola, the French anthropologist, whose field-
work in 1976–1978 focused on the Achuar at a moment when competing
Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant missionaries were active among
the Achuar, and who aimed to mediate between the ecological and sym-
bolic schools of anthropology.4 The two systems of Descola and of Viveiros
de Castro, as Lloyd explains, provide radically different analyses [21]. But
the dichotomy presented may be somewhat false. On the one hand, these
analyses treat only two groups in one area—that is two more than we had
when looking ‘only’ at ancient China and ancient Greece. Yet perhaps the
apparent dichotomy would be ameliorated by considering similar analyses
of, say, African or Siberian peoples. Then again, each anthropologist began
his work with an explicit agenda so that care is needed when reading out of
their work conclusions that do not accord with their agenda: such readings
are a mediated interpretation, analogous to reading a modern scholar’s in-
terpretation of, say, Aristotle, or of, say, the Huainanzi, rather than reading
each of those ancient works directly. Moreover, the two anthropologists
share a significant common formation: both were working within the (then-
dominant) anthropological scholarly tradition of structuralism.
Nevertheless, Lloyd makes sensitive use of the data by turning back to the
Greek and Chinese evidence, and considering the issue of differing ontolo-
gies [21–26]. In particular, he points out how the (eventually-dominant) four-
element theory of the Greeks and the five-phase (wu xing) theory of the
Chinese cannot simply be reduced to one another. But from each point of
view, the other can be understood. That is—and this is a point Lloyd has
stressed more than once—the models are not wholly incommensurable. In-
deed, if different models were wholly incommensurable, how could anyone
ever change their mind about models? How could Aristotle have developed
a novel classification of animals and plants [Lloyd 2007, 53–54]? Likewise,
we might ask, how could Dalton and others have developed the (modern)

3 See Rival 1993, Chernela 1994, and Schmidt 1997 for reviews of Viveiros de Castro’s
work.
4 See Riviere 1987, 1995; Meggers 1999; and Fisher 1999 for reviews of Descola’s work.
Paul T. Keyser 5

atomistic model? And as Lloyd proposes, we can attempt to describe other

people’s lived experiences, ‘their worlds …so different from the one we
usually take for granted, and yet not totally beyond our reach’ [26]. Lloyd
succeeds in showing how the question of humanness is a genuine problem
and advocates that we regard that problem as an opportunity to broaden
our investigations [29–30].
As noted, Lloyd rejects radical incommensurability [see esp. 2, 5–6, 24–26:
cf. Lloyd 2004, 13; 2007, 159–160], and rightly so I would say. Now, taking
the position that even profoundly differing models can be mutually compre-
hensible requires one to confront the question of how people can change
their ideas and, thus, the associated problems of error [ch. 2] and of the limits
of language to express ideas [ch. 4]. If all models are equally valid or if no
analysis of any model is possible, then no error can ever be detected: and
conversely, to claim that models may be compared and comprehended is
to claim that they can be evaluated and that errors may be found within
them. To revise is to acknowledge error and master it. (And error, contra
the Stoics and other like-minded thinkers, comes in degrees in this our for-
ever un-perfect world.) Thus, in ch. 2 [see also 3, 119], in order to manage
our response to error, whether our own or others’, Lloyd advocates three
methodological principles [cf. Lloyd 2007, 56–57]:
(1) attempt to employ actors’ categories [35–36];
(2) practice a charity of interpretation as advocated by the philosopher
Donald Davidson and others [36]; and
(3) recall that interpretation is provisional and thus be open to revision
[36].
The claim that differing models can be comprehended is a claim that lan-
guage suffices to communicate: as Lloyd remarks,
I have yet to hear of an anthropologist who returns from the field announcing
that she could understand nothing about the people she was studying. [24:
emphasis in original].
Thus, in ch. 4, Lloyd treats issues of mutual understanding between cultures,
or even between actors within the same culture acting from within different
frameworks by offering three insights. He introduces ‘semantic stretch’ as a
covering term for various kinds of metaphor or manners of using terms [86];
this is a stronger form of the well-known technique of allowing for varying
6 Aestimatio

semantic ranges of words. The deployment of this method will have similar
effects to making use of actors’ categories and charity of interpretation: that is,
analysis will be more open to understanding and less focused on refutation.
Second, he foregrounds the effect of the audience upon the discourse [81–84],
what he called in Demystifying Mentalities [1990, e.g., 9–12, 126–131] ‘the
contexts of interpersonal exchange’, and what is now commonly called the
discursive context. As he notes, most Chinese writers on science addressed
the emperor and spoke in the guise of a wise but submissive advisor (that
is also true of many Latins and some Greeks of the Roman Empire, as has
often been noted [see Keyser 2010, 870–874]). These diverging discourses
are not sealed off from one another, no more than divergent concepts are
wholly incommensurable [88]. Finally, he reprises his advocacy of allowing
for multiple modes of analysis, i.e., the ‘multidimensionality’ of the data, as
when one analyses color terms now using hue, now using luminosity, or as
when one analyses substances of the world now in the Greek manner of
elements, now in the Chinese manner of processes [36–37, 90–91: cf. Lloyd
2007, 41, 174].
The focus of the book is its longest chapter, i.e., ch. 3 (‘Ancient Understand-
ings Reassessed and the Consequences for Ontologies’), which addresses
ancient science specifically in the sense that Lloyd (and this reviewer) use
the phrase. Lloyd here restates his often-made case that there is such a thing
as ‘ancient science’ [3–4], as he did, e.g., in Ancient Worlds [2004, ch. 2] and
in Disciplines [2009, ch. 9]. In the latter, his formulation was particularly
vivacious [159–160]:
How can we begin to understand how it was that—suddenly, or over a period
of time—humans, who had had (on this view) no science at all up until then,
came to practise this mode, or modes, of inquiry? It is crucial here to get clear
how strong a claim for innovation is being made, and in what regard. Did the
breakthrough (however understood) depend on new cognitive capacities, or
merely on the new deployment of already existing ones? Either way there are
problems. If we take the first option, what sense can we make of the idea of
acquiring new cognitive capacities, and were they just confined to the scientists
in question or did they somehow become more generally available? On the
latter option, if the capacities were always there, why were they not used?
The hypothesis, that science somehow sprang full-grown from the brow of
the Renaissance is, in short, absurd and no more likely than any theory of
spontaneous generation or special creation. In the current work, Lloyd fo-
Paul T. Keyser 7

cuses on ‘Greece, China, and Mesopotamia especially—the relevant Egyptian

data are in shorter supply and those from India are of very insecure date’ [48].
His caveats are valid but much work has been done to elucidate the sciences
of the two cultures omitted here; in a longer book (and one can always wish
for a longer book from Lloyd), they would find their natural place. He raises
several arguments for considering there to have been scientific works in the
three cultures that are in his focus. One is to point out that contemporary
science proceeds by what one might call creative destruction, continually
revising its results, which is to say, that modern science in essence presup-
poses the possibility of refutation [47]. He surveys in some detail the results
of several generations of work by scholars on Mesopotamian astral sciences
[48–50], likewise what we have come to know about Chinese mathematical
and astral sciences [51–56], and then the recent consensus regarding Greek
mathematical and cosmological arguments and disputes [56–61]. From that
last survey, Lloyd elicits six points about Greek science [61–63]: namely,
(1) ancient theorists seem intent on excelling rivals;
(2) each offers an account that claims to see through the appearances
to a hidden reality;
(3) the accounts concern ‘nature’;
(4) despite radical disputes, the actors perceived themselves as address-
ing common issues (i.e., a denial of incommensurability);
(5) their views on nature are correlated with their views on human
customs; and
(6) they disagreed regarding teleology and each ontology implicated
morality.
For all three cultures’ sciences, the prospect of disconfirmation is raised [50,
52–53, 56–57, respectively].
In his remarks on Mesopotamian sciences, Lloyd makes the unfortunate
claim that ‘Neugebauer …showed …nothing but contempt for astrology’ [48].
That claim is not crucial for the development of Lloyd’s thesis and is incor-
rect. Otto Neugebauer in fact vigorously advocated the study of astrology in
‘The Study of Wretched Subjects’ [1951], reprinted as the leading article in
his self-edited Astronomy and History: Selected Essays [1983, 3]—the title of
the article is deliberately ironic, as an attentive reading of the article shows.
Moreover, he produced (with H. B. van Hoesen) Greek Horoscopes [1959], a
careful and thorough edition and translation of all the Greek (and Latin) horo-
8 Aestimatio

scopes then known, both literary and papyrological. Neugebauer focused

his work on the mathematics of ancient astronomy, which surely advanced
our understanding of Greek and later astral sciences and their relation to
Mesopotamian astral sciences. That focus is narrower than Lloyd’s but many
productive scholars of Greek sciences have had analogously narrow focuses:
whether on the Hippocratics or on Aristotle or on Archimedes, and so on.
(To be sure, this is the only error that I have spotted in this book.)
Then in ch. 5 (‘Philosophical implications’), Lloyd examines the degree to
which his investigations have clarified the chief interpretive issues in his
book. Furthermore, he attempts to relate these results to contemporary
‘strategic’ problems, a goal also in view in his earlier works, especially in
his The Delusions of Invulnerability [2005]. There we find ch. 1 (‘The
Pluralism of Philosophical Traditions’) [esp. 32–35], in which he argues that
the history of philosophy can be a resource for current critical evaluation and
that we ought not to relegate philosophy to the academy. In ch. 2 (‘Learned
Elites: Their Training, Openness and Control’), Lloyd finds seven factors
important for success whether in Greece or China [54–56] and relates them
to the contemporary academy [57–61]: our problems are as theirs were
but on a larger scale. The chapter on ‘Audience and Assemblies’ [ch. 3, esp.
81–86] studies how scholars and scientists can publish and receive productive
criticism in different cultures and systems, as well as the role of political
debate in their activities. (Chapters 4 (‘The Delusions of Invulnerability’), 5
(‘The Frailties of Justice’), and 6 (‘Models for Living’) are similar in import
but do not touch greatly or directly on science per se.) In the work under
review, Lloyd highlights four problems. The last of these, which he labels
‘realism and relativism’ [94, 102–105], relates closely to his first chapter on
the ontologies of humans and animals. Animals, he argues, really do differ
but when various cultures (including our own) attempt to construct a valid
classification of those differences, various factors intrinsic to the culture or
the animals render the classifications ragged at their edges. Procedures and
styles of inquiry mean that there is no final taxonomy; but some taxonomies
of any given kind are more accurate than others. That is, neither pure
realism nor pure relativism can give a useful account: we need both.
Besides that last problem (‘realism and relativism’), Lloyd addresses three
other strategic problems:
(1) incommensurabilities [93, 105–111],
Paul T. Keyser 9

(2) objectivity [93, and 94–97], and

(3) truth [93–94, 97–102].
Regarding objectivity, we cannot, insists Lloyd, impose our framework upon
the ideas or frameworks of others; but when dealing with any alien frame-
work, we must use the one we have to think with. The dilemma, suggests
Lloyd, is evaded if we recall that any given framework (our own, say) ‘is no
monolith’ [95], that each such framework was acquired through education,
and indeed that each of us has acquired a slightly different version of the
framework, where moreover, the acquisition of a framework is ipso facto
the acquisition of knowledge and conceptual tools new to the acquirer. Thus,
as we study other frameworks, we can revise and augment our own: the
same kind of progress that we made as children we can all still make. As
for truth, we cannot, insists Lloyd, rely on any naïve correspondence theory
of truth, since we have no direct access to any unmediated reality; and yet
mere consistency does not suffice, given the many examples of internally-
consistent models that were eventually demonstrated to be false (or, as Lloyd
says, ‘palpable nonsense’ [97]). Various criteria were proposed or deployed
in ancient Greece and China, and this dilemma, suggests Lloyd, is evaded
if we follow that lead and allow for various criteria of truth appropriate to
varying situations. He cites the example of the ratio of the circumference to
the diameter of the circle, which must be more precise for a mathematician
than for a builder: that is, he advocates criteria that yield the ‘approximately
true’ [101]. What is known to be true, is known to be true up to some limit.
(Indeed, modern science exerts considerable effort to specify precisely its
limits of accuracy.) As for incommensurability, the dilemmas posed by Kuhn
regarding conceptual shifts are not so dichotomous as represented by him
and others [106–107]: not only is it clear, e.g., that ‘Galileo had a fair idea of
what Aristotle meant’ but modern readers manage to grasp the concepts of
both (despite being separated by several further paradigm shifts). Likewise,
the views of the anthropologists Descola and Viveiros de Castro do pose
a challenge to views developed in the Greco-Roman tradition (or for that
matter in the Chinese tradition) but ‘they would hardly pose the kind of
challenge they do if they were simply incomprehensible’ [108].
Those problems are indeed worthy of further debate and study but it may
be that they are not three separate problems. In each case, underlying the
dilemmas exposed by Lloyd, is a common tension: between what is (par-
10 Aestimatio

tially) known in one model or framework or paradigm and what is (partially)

known in another. History shows that those tensions do get resolved, espe-
cially when a given model is confronted with a competing model or else is
confronted with new evidence that serves to call portions of the model into
question. That process can readily be understood as a kind of evolutionary
meta-model of the development of science, as I have argued [2013]. That is
no criticism of Lloyd, who was the original inspiration for the development
of that approach in his early works Magic, Reason and Experience [1979,
226–267] and The Revolutions of Wisdom [1987, 50–171]. That I have taken
that further than he has done is not, I hope, incommensurable with his work.
That his work has inspired attempts to grasp the multidimensional nature
of ancient science by many scholars is a testament to the enduring worth of
Lloyd’s work, even when, nay especially when, his provisional framework
is challenged in its turn.

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