Am I In Charge of Me or is my Brain?: Julian Jaynes Edition PART 3

Indeed! “What is mind in the Iliad?” File under: me no know.

So, the earliest written speech that we have access to is cuneform and hieroglyphics from 3000 years ago, which Jaynes says are too ambiguous to talk confidently about the kind of mind that made them. Fair enough! For Jaynes, then, the earliest written language that we are certain enough of in translation is THE ILIAD.

The Iliad, which many of us had to read in high school and now remember nothing about except for questions like “is that the one with the cyclops? No that’s the Odyssey I think,” tells of events which for a long time nobody was sure had actually happened but now more and more I think people are thinking that they did. I think they actually discovered Troy, didn’t they? Amazing mysteries solved? Anyway, these events happened or were said to have happened in the negative thirteenth century, i.e. like 1230 B.C., the Trojan War, Cassandra, Helen, Achilles, Hector, etc., Brad Pitt wearing that loin cloth. Apparently told orally in the form of a long poem that you memorized (and probably added to when you forgot chunks of it) for four hundred years or so, it was finally WRITTEN DOWN around 900 or 850 B.C., maybe by a guy who may or may not have been named Homer, or maybe by a bunch of different people. Very similar to the Bible, also older. We can learn much from you, The Iliad.

(amazing to think of these oral histories. Imagine if we were only just now writing down the events of the Reformation, for example. If for four hundred years people had just been telling each other the story of the Reformation. “many years ago before there were cars or bicycles or antibiotics, there was a man named Martin Luther, and an evil church filled with gold and silver and smoking boxes of incense, and corruption had run rampant all across the world from sea to sea, and one day brave Martin nailed a parchment to a door and on this parchment were written 95 things which I will now recite in rhyme to help me remember them.” There’s no way it would remain accurate, for one thing (whatever “accurate” even means). And it’s amazing to think how subsequent cultures and generations would subtly alter it to make it fit their own perceptions of the world, of human behavior, of religion, whatever. The church would sometimes be the villain, sometimes be the victim, etc. I mean, history is always a little bit like this, but it’s absolutely bonkers to think of a time when there were no written documents whatsoever. How would the story even cohere at all into a single unit?)

So, what is mind in the Iliad? “The answer,” says Jaynes, “is disturbingly interesting.” I would say that “disturbingly” is my favorite of the possible “interesting”-modifying adverbs. Tell me more!

So, there is in general NO CONSCIOUSNESS in the Iliad. There are almost no words for consciousness or mental acts of any kind. In fact, many words that much later come to mean mental things all have DIFFERENT, much more literal/concrete meanings in the ancient Greek of the Iliad. For example: “psyche,” which to us now means something kind of kooky and ephemeral like “soul” or “conscious mind” or “something underneath conscious mind that is somehow defining of our personhood,” in ancient Greek it meant a literal, actual life substance like blood or breath. “He bled his psyche out onto the ground and died.” Another good one is the word “noos” which later becomes the Greek “nous,” which now means something like conscious mind, but in ancient Greek it meant TO SEE.

More of these metaphors! Zeus has the whole world in his noos. Not in his mind, just in his sight. Also, words which later come to mean being conflicted in your own mind about something, in the ancient Greek they just mean literally having two actions to choose between. Behavioristic, rather than mental.

In the Iliad, “the eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to.”

More amazing word stuff: In the Iliad there is no concept of will nor any word for it. Iliadic men have no will of their own, and certainly no concept of “free will.” “Indeed, the whole problem of volition, so troubling, I think, to modern psychological theory, may have had its difficulties because the words for such phenomena were invented so late.” WOW.
Also, “body” is never referred to as a whole. The word for “body” only means “corpse”–the opposite of “psyche”. Individual body PARTS are referred to–Homer “speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.” This totally blows my mind. Or, as Jaynes puts it, “Now this is all very peculiar.”

If there is no consciousness, mind, soul, will, what initiates behavior???

Now he’s gonna talk about the Religion of the early Greeks. Your Zeus and your Hera and your Narcissus and your Diana with the hounds and the moon and Apollo driving the crazy sun in a chariot across the sky, all that stuff.

In the Iliad, GODS DO EVERYTHING. Jaynes gives many examples. There is no conscious thought whatsoever–the gods tell you to do EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO.

“The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods.” My favorite example from the Iliad is:

Achilles: You stole my girlfriend and tried to murder me! WTF
Agamemnon: “Not I–it was Zeus and the Erinyes who put that wildness on me. What could I do?”
Achilles: Ok sorry
(paraphrased)

Even the poem itself is not spoken of as being “written” but rather TRANSCRIBED–Homer transcribed the chanting voice of a goddess who told him the story. Whoa.
So who were these gods “that pushed men about like robots?”

VOICES: like schizophrenics or Joan of Arc hear inside their heads (or outside, whatever). The ancient Greeks heard voices. Basically the ancient Greeks were motivated by hallucinations. Think about this–the Greek god is part of man: the gods are bound by natural laws! They can’t create stuff out of nothing. UNLIKE the much later Hebrew God! Furthermore, “in the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialectic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might occur between two people.” AND ALSO, the Greek gods aren’t scary, they don’t emerge in thunder, they aren’t pompous like the Bible God. The Greek god “simply leads, advises, and orders.” He doesn’t even inspire humility or love, and hardly ever gratitude.

I love this! I’ve read so many Greek myths and never really put my finger on why they are so weird, but this is all true!!! When God appears to Moses or somebody, there’s a lot of awe and flinging oneself on the ground and saying “O Great One” and stuff. But when Zeus appears to somebody, it’s like “Oh hey, what’s up, can you give me a magical arrow that will always find its mark?” and Zeus is like “I guess.”

In fact, the hero-god relationship was, Jaynes argues, similar to and the progenitor of the ego-superego relationship we’re now more familiar with. Damn! The strongest emotion a hero feels toward a god is amazement–like what we feel at a “Eureka!” moment where our own brain surprises us.

“The gods are what we now call hallucinations.” Athena comes to Hector as his uncle, then as his brother. He trusts her in this familiar form; asks her to hand him a spear in a duel, but then turns and the spear is not there. Hallucinating! “The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.”

BOLD!!!!!!!!!

Ok The Bicameral Mind:
“the picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other.” Kind of amazing and sad, right? Thinking of Hector as this hallucinating robot. THIS is the bicameral mind (as opposed to our own subjective conscious minds). The bicameral mind obeys hallucinations told to it; it cannot “see” what to do for itself.

Then he delves into all the possible objections to his theory, and I didn’t really find the objections OR his responses to the objections that satisfactory. Like, some people think the Iliad is just the creation of one man (“Homer”), with no historical basis, even doubting Troy ever existed. Ok then Jaynes is like “but we have proof now that Troy existed, and thus many intermediaries must have passed the story on for hundreds of years until Homer wrote it down.” Ok. Or, well, how can this thing, created so much later, be an actual document of what negative 13th century Mycenaeans were like? Jaynes says, yes, details are exaggerated; and certainly as an oral poem chanted for hundreds of years obviously things were changed and added (makes me think of plainchant). But his argument isn’t about historical facts, but rather about language and initiation of action by gods, which are not “archaeological” matters but rather “psychological” ones. Uh, whatever.

Also, maybe we are making too much out of what might just be literary style? Yes, to us the gods seem unnecessary to the action, but maybe they are just poetic devices to present normal consciousness in concrete terms? Ok, but, Jaynes says, the Iliad is only about action, never about mind, and the characters have no problems with gods. So to say it’s just a device is like saying Joan of Arc told her inquisitors about her Voices merely to make it all more vivid to the people who were condemning her.

I don’t totally get these objections or his responses to them. The most unsatisfactory objection/response, for me, is the fact that the Iliad presents a HEROIC INDIVIDUAL, whereas we tend to think of that narrative emerging as late as the 19th century. Jaynes doesn’t address this, he only addresses the problem of chaos–in order for a society filled with bicameral minds not to descend into utter chaos (every person following their own crazy hallucinations), there would have to be amazingly rigid hierarchization of who followed what voices. So then if this was true (as historical documents prove it was–the hierarchical nature of ancient Greek life I mean, with each man following a man higher up, all the way up to kings who followed gods), then how come the Iliad presents the heroic actions of this one individual? Uh, it’s because the Iliad is composed of different chunks written at different times.

I AM GETTING UNSATISFIED AND CONFUSED AND BORED! REEL ME BACK IN JULIAN JAYNES PLEASE

Ok he gets me back in the next section, in which he argues that the Iliad is awesome because it was, in his opinion, written down during a transitional time between the bicameral and modern conscious mind. And he says you can tell this by the fact that there are parts of the Iliad that DO deal with subjective consciousness, BUT they are all the parts that scholars agree were added LATER.

So for example there’s this part that everyone agrees was added later, where Achilles says “hateful as Hades to me is the man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” So, that’s obviously dealing with conscious mind. But it’s ALSO a part that has been established as having been added by a later generation of dude. Wow!

Or, my favorite example is that there are exactly two moments in the Iliad where a character “talks to himself” (something the bicameral mind can not do). And these two parts, everyone agrees they were added later, by the same person. But, crucially, NOT MUCH LATER. Because in both cases, immediately after talking to himself, Hector and Agenor (respectively) each say the exact same thing: “But wherefore does my life say this to me????” They are both astonished by the act of talking to themselves! So Jaynes argues that this shows that whoever added this in later is sort of like in this amazing transition time between bicameral/conscious minds, where people are starting to have consciousness but are still tied to old ways of organizing the world. I love that so much. “But wherefore does my life say this to me?” WOW.

(So much like Karl wondering who reminded him to get onions at the store. “Then this other voice said “onions.” Who said that? It wasn’t me…” OMG does Karl Pilkington have a bicameral mind??? Somebody call Ricky Gervais because this could be big)

thus the Iliad “stands in the great turning of the times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations occurred.”

If I know my own consciousness at all, which I doubt, I imagine that I will probably never finish reading this book.

Sincerely,
My Analog I