2.5. The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece
THEY HAVE CALLED IT the Dorian invasions. And classicists will tell you that indeed they could have called it anything or everything, so groping our knowledge, and so dark these particular profundities of past time. But continuities in pottery designs from one archaeological site to another do fetch a few candles into this vast and silent darkness, and they reveal, albeit in flickering fashion, the huge jagged outlines of complex successions of migrations and displacements that lasted from 1200 to 1000 B.C.1 That much is fact.
The rest is inference. Even who the so-called Dorians were is unclear. In an earlier chapter, I have suggested that the beginning of all this chaos may have been the Thera eruption and its consequences. As Thucydides at the last edge of a verbal tradition describes it, “migrations were a frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers.” Palaces and villages that once held fealty to Agamemnon and his gods were looted and burned by other bicameral peoples who, following their own admonitory visions, probably could not communicate with nor have pity on the natives. Survivors were slaves or refugees, and refugees conquered or died. Our greatest certainties are negative. For all that the Mycaenaean world had produced with such remarkable uniformity everywhere — the massive stone architecture of its god-ordered palaces and fortifications, its undulant frescoes of delicate clarity, its shaft-graves with their elaborate contents, the megaron plan of its houses, the terra-cotta idols and figurines, the death masks of beaten gold, the bronze and ivory work and distinctive pottery — all stopped and was never known thereafter.
This ruin is the bitter soil for the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. And the difference here from the huge Assyrian cities stumbling on into a fumbling demon-ridden consciousness out of their own momentum is important. In contrast, Mycaenae had been a loose and spread-out system of divinely commanded cities of smaller size. The breakdown of the bicameral mind resulted in an even greater dispersion as all society broke down.
It is even plausible that all this political havoc was the very challenge to which the great epics were a defiant response, and that the long narrative chants of the aoidoi from refugee camp to camp worked out into an eager unity with the cohesive past on the part of a newly nomadic people reaching at lost certainties. Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. Arid this unique factor, this importance of poetry in a devastating social chaos, is the reason why Greek consciousness specifically fluoresces into that brilliant intellectual light which is still illuminating our world.
What I shall do in this chapter is to conduct you on a tour through all the early extant literature of Greece. It is unfortunately a short list of texts. Beginning with the Iliad, we shall travel consecutively up through the Odyssey and the Boeotian poems ascribed to Hesiod, and then into the fragments of the lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh century B.C. and a little beyond. In doing so, I shall not be giving you any running description of the scenery we are passing through. The several good histories of early Greek poetry can do that better than I. Instead I shall be directing your attention to selected things as we pass by that are of particular interest from the point of view of our theory of consciousness.
But before we do so, we must make a few preliminary excursions, particularly into a more thorough analysis of mindlike terms in the Iliad.
LOOKING FORWARD THROUGH THE ILIAD
In an earlier chapter, I made the statement that the Iliad was our window upon the immediate bicameral past. Here, I propose that we stand on the other side of that window and peer forward into the distant conscious future, regarding this great mysterious paean to anger, not so much as the end point of the verbal tradition that preceded it, but rather as the very beginning of the new mentality to come.
In I.3, we saw that the words which in later Greek indicate aspects of conscious functioning have in the Iliad more concrete and bodily referents. But the very fact that these words come to have mental meanings later suggests that they may be some kind of key to understanding the manner in which Greek consciousness is developed.
The words we shall look at here are seven: thumos, phrenes, noos, and psyche, all of them variously translated as mind, spirit, or soul, and kradie, ker, and etor, often translated as heart or sometimes as mind or spirit. The translation of any of these seven as mind or anything similar is entirely mistaken and without any warrant whatever in the Iliad. Simply, and without equivocation, they are to be thought of as objective parts of the environment or of the body. We shall discuss these terms fully in a moment.
Now the first question to ask is why these entities are in the poem at all. I have earlier stressed the fact that the major instigations to action here are in the voices of the gods, not in the thumo, phrenes, etor, et al. The latter are entirely redundant. In fact they often seem to get in the way of the simple command-obedience relation between god and man, like a wedge between the two sides of the bicameral mind. Why then are they there?
Let us examine more closely what would have happened at the beginning of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. In I.4, we found that the physiological cuing of an hallucinated voice, whether in a bicameral man or in a contemporary schizophrenic, is the stress of some decision or conflict. Now, as the voices of gods become more inadequate and suppressed during this social chaos, we may suppose that the amount of that stress necessary to occasion an hallucinated voice would be raised.
It is quite likely, then, that as the bicameral organization of mind began to diminish, the decision-stress in novel situations would be much greater than previously, and both the degree and duration of that stress would have to become progressively more intense before the hallucination of a god would occur. And such increased stress would be accompanied by a variety of physiological concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning sensations, abrupt changes in breathing, a pounding or fluttering heart, etc., responses which in the Iliad are called thumos, phrenes and kradie respectively. And this is what these words mean, not mind or anything like it. As the gods are heard progressively less and less, these internal response-stimuli of progressively greater stress are associated more and more with men’s subsequent actions, whatever they may be, even coming to take on the godlike function of seeming to initiate action themselves.
The evidence that we are on the right track in these suppositions can be found in the Iliad itself. At the very beginning, Agamemnon, king of men but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briseis away from Achilles, who had captured her. As he does so, the response of Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict or put into two parts (mermerizo) whether to obey his thumos, the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory king or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his mighty sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action (1:188ff.) and tells Achilles what to do.
I mean to suggest here that the degree and extent of these internal sensations were neither so evident nor so named in the true bicameral period. If we may propose that there was an Ur-Iliad, or the verbal epic as it came from the lips of the first several generations of aoidoi, then we can expect that it had no such interval, no etor or thumos preceding the voice of the god, and that the use and, as we shall see, the increasing use of these words in this way reflects the alteration of mentality, the wedge between god and man which results in consciousness.
Preconscious Hypostases
We may call these mind-words that later come to mean something like conscious functioning, the preconscious hypostases. The latter term means in Greek what is caused to stand under something. The preconscious hypostases are the assumed causes of action when other causes are no longer apparent. In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a man who acts, but one of the preconscious hypostases which causes him to act. They are thus seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness. What we shall see is that the frequency and the meaning of these terms gradually change as we go from text to text from about 850 to 600 B.C., and how in the sixth century B.C. their referents join together in what we would call the subjective conscious mind.2
I would like here to translate and expand what I have just said into a clearer statement by suggesting that this temporal development of the preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases:
Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations.
Phase II: Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations.
Phase III: Subjective: When these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have moved from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur.
Phase IV: Synthetic: When the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection.
The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of transition between these phases.
The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the breakdown period. It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of gods and their hallucinated directions. The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only external perception.
The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more complicated matter. And much more interesting. It is due to the paraphrand generator of metaphor described in 1.2. In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known metaphier which is similar to it in some way. Usually there are simple associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates being called paraphrands. Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that they are new in their association with the metaphrand. And this is how we are able to generate the kind of ‘space’ which we introspect upon and which is the necessary substrate of consciousness. This is really quite simple as we shall see shortly.
And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also. I suggest that as the subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al. become established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as ‘containers’ or ‘persons.’ But this synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted in a new concept of self.
Before looking at the evidence for these matters, let us first investigate the preconscious hypostases and their Iliadic meanings in these phases with more detail. In the general order of their importance in the Iliad, they are: