The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature
by
by
Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Translator)
Revelation Gone Wrong
Consciousness is a term of variable meaning. It cannot be pinned down in an unambiguous definition. Like ‘time,’ it is something we think we know about as long as we don’t take it seriously. Snell takes consciousness seriously. And what he finds is not a biological but a sociological source for what we presume is our most private possession. Consciousness, that is to say the recognition of mind, is a cultural phenomenon. It does not exist except it is recognised by those around us.
According to Snell, mind is a “metaphysical happening.” In a sense, he says, such an event is indistinguishable from a religious revelation. It seems to come from elsewhere, not in response to human striving but as an unexpected “grace.” It has no proximate cause but simply appears and is then accepted as real, true, and obvious.
But the discovery of mind is not a consequence of divine action. It is a result of the use of language. It is the communal facility in language which provokes a recognition of something which is ‘there’ but not before it is named and connected to other names within the language. Then mind appears among us as something which has always been.
We casually conceive of mind as a property of individuals. But this is only because we have no where else to physically place it. We presume it is something private and intimately our own. Of course it is not. It only exists among us. The place in which it exists is literature. And, according to Snell, its appearance, its birth, can be dated more or less precisely to the Homeric epics.
In other words, mind is a story we tell ourselves:“Outside of history, and outside of human life, nothing could be known of the nature of the intellect.” Consequently the story we tell ourselves about what mind is constantly evolves. What we mean by consciousness, mind, soul, or intellect (ψυχή = undifferentiated psyche, the force which keeps human beings alive) is not what Homer meant. But it is he who began the conversation about them. And “the ancient legacy is stored in us, and we may recognize in it the threads of our own involved patterns of thinking.”
These stories, nominally about the self but actually about a society or culture, are imaginative but not fantasy: “the discoveries of the Greeks which constitute our topic, affecting as they do the very essence of man, take shape as vital experiences.” It is the transformation of experience into language that creates the culture in which mind can exist at all.
This transformative process is not without pain. We pay a price for the culture of mind: “πάθει μάθως, ‘wisdom through suffering’.” This shows most clearly in religion. “In Christian thought God is intellect; our understanding of God is beset with grave difficulties, and the reason for this is a view of the intellect which was first worked out by the Greeks.”
The idea of ‘grace’ for example in Homeric narrative is that of the gods filling characters with irresistible emotion. “The Homeric hero stands free before his god; he is proud when he receives a gift from him, and again he is modest in his knowledge that all great things accrue to him from the deity.” Christianity takes this up but changes the connotation to one of enabling individuals to do good. It thus has all sorts of problems reconciling this with the other Christian idea of free will which is essential to its idea of sin.
Even more fundamentally, Christianity highjacked the Greek notion of πιστις, faith. In Homer the appearance of the gods give heroes confidence, faith, not in the gods but in themselves. The gods are just there. They may be ignored but they self-evidently influence events. There is no dogma and therefore no need for belief which has the status of opinion rather than principle. Consequently “the problem of faith never became an issue.”
Although Snell does not analyse this moment in any detail, it seems to me a critical part of the discovery of mind. Homer’s narratives were stories, not things to be considered as other than that. St. Paul’s redefinition of faith transformed some stories into truths. Since such truths as he claimed were entirely beyond human intellect, they are superior to intellect. Intellect must submit to them as a matter of faith.
It is at this point that the discovery of mind in Western culture makes its most painful turn. Essentially it idolises the language it has used to discover itself. Christianity imposes dogma, statements that are incontrovertibly true, upon the culture of mind. It makes mind an individual, isolated thing which is elemental and accountable only to God. We are still, very painfully indeed, trying to escape from this burial of mind under a mountain of the language that created it.
Consciousness is a term of variable meaning. It cannot be pinned down in an unambiguous definition. Like ‘time,’ it is something we think we know about as long as we don’t take it seriously. Snell takes consciousness seriously. And what he finds is not a biological but a sociological source for what we presume is our most private possession. Consciousness, that is to say the recognition of mind, is a cultural phenomenon. It does not exist except it is recognised by those around us.
According to Snell, mind is a “metaphysical happening.” In a sense, he says, such an event is indistinguishable from a religious revelation. It seems to come from elsewhere, not in response to human striving but as an unexpected “grace.” It has no proximate cause but simply appears and is then accepted as real, true, and obvious.
But the discovery of mind is not a consequence of divine action. It is a result of the use of language. It is the communal facility in language which provokes a recognition of something which is ‘there’ but not before it is named and connected to other names within the language. Then mind appears among us as something which has always been.
We casually conceive of mind as a property of individuals. But this is only because we have no where else to physically place it. We presume it is something private and intimately our own. Of course it is not. It only exists among us. The place in which it exists is literature. And, according to Snell, its appearance, its birth, can be dated more or less precisely to the Homeric epics.
In other words, mind is a story we tell ourselves:“Outside of history, and outside of human life, nothing could be known of the nature of the intellect.” Consequently the story we tell ourselves about what mind is constantly evolves. What we mean by consciousness, mind, soul, or intellect (ψυχή = undifferentiated psyche, the force which keeps human beings alive) is not what Homer meant. But it is he who began the conversation about them. And “the ancient legacy is stored in us, and we may recognize in it the threads of our own involved patterns of thinking.”
These stories, nominally about the self but actually about a society or culture, are imaginative but not fantasy: “the discoveries of the Greeks which constitute our topic, affecting as they do the very essence of man, take shape as vital experiences.” It is the transformation of experience into language that creates the culture in which mind can exist at all.
This transformative process is not without pain. We pay a price for the culture of mind: “πάθει μάθως, ‘wisdom through suffering’.” This shows most clearly in religion. “In Christian thought God is intellect; our understanding of God is beset with grave difficulties, and the reason for this is a view of the intellect which was first worked out by the Greeks.”
The idea of ‘grace’ for example in Homeric narrative is that of the gods filling characters with irresistible emotion. “The Homeric hero stands free before his god; he is proud when he receives a gift from him, and again he is modest in his knowledge that all great things accrue to him from the deity.” Christianity takes this up but changes the connotation to one of enabling individuals to do good. It thus has all sorts of problems reconciling this with the other Christian idea of free will which is essential to its idea of sin.
Even more fundamentally, Christianity highjacked the Greek notion of πιστις, faith. In Homer the appearance of the gods give heroes confidence, faith, not in the gods but in themselves. The gods are just there. They may be ignored but they self-evidently influence events. There is no dogma and therefore no need for belief which has the status of opinion rather than principle. Consequently “the problem of faith never became an issue.”
Although Snell does not analyse this moment in any detail, it seems to me a critical part of the discovery of mind. Homer’s narratives were stories, not things to be considered as other than that. St. Paul’s redefinition of faith transformed some stories into truths. Since such truths as he claimed were entirely beyond human intellect, they are superior to intellect. Intellect must submit to them as a matter of faith.
It is at this point that the discovery of mind in Western culture makes its most painful turn. Essentially it idolises the language it has used to discover itself. Christianity imposes dogma, statements that are incontrovertibly true, upon the culture of mind. It makes mind an individual, isolated thing which is elemental and accountable only to God. We are still, very painfully indeed, trying to escape from this burial of mind under a mountain of the language that created it.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ May 09, 2020
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