From The Right Came Voices
Gerald Jonas, , March 13, 1977, 255.
Excerpt: Things are not what they seem. This is the great message of all art and science, indeed of all thought worth the name. But what if thought itself is not what it seems? This is Julian Jaynes’s point of departure in a book that will enlighten and Infuriate any reader who gets past the forbidding (hut characteristically precise) title and meets the author halfway.
Jaynes is a filtyish professor of psychology at Princeton University. He is also, on the evidence of this book, a polymath and monomaniac who takes all knowledge as his province and squeezes it down into a corroboratory footnote to his central argument. Which is that consciousness is a kind of fraud that we have played on ourselves. Far from being the hallmark of human existence, the senseof‐self that we get when we become subjectively aware of our thought processes is a relatively recent invention—no more than 3,000 years old. Before that, people did not think as we do. To be precise, they did not. …