Homeric Greece: Individualistic or Barely Conscious?

(by Joe)

In The Geography of Thought, a study of cross-cultural variation in cognition, Richard Nisbett asserts that the ancient Greeks had a “strong sense of individual identity [and] personal agency” (2003: 3). Almost thirty years earlier, in his notorious epic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes claims almost the exact opposite, that the Homeric Greeks were in fact barely conscious, unthinkingly following the orders of auditory verbal hallucinations whose origin was thought to be the gods (1976: 67-83). So who's correct?

Now, Jaynes is, to say the least, controversial, but his book has inspired many, including myself (albeit indirectly, through Daniel Dennett), and so I think we ought to give it at least some consideration. Recently there have been some attempts to revitalise Jaynes' theories, most notably by Gary Williams (2011; and on his blog). As far as I can tell, one aspect of this is to highlight the philosophically unorthodox way that Jaynes tended to use the word 'consciousness'. Williams accuses Ned Block of foisting “his conceptual schema and terminology onto Jaynes” and then critiquing him “for not making sense of his distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness” (blog). With that in mind, lets look at the contradictory elements of The Geography of Thought and The Origin of Consciousness a little more closely.

Nisbett writes:

there is no doubt that the Greeks viewed themselves as unique individuals, with distinctive attributes and goals […] This would have been true at least by the time of Homer in the eighth or ninth century B.C. Both gods and humans in the Odyssey and the Iliad have personalities that are fully formed and individuated. (2003: 3)

In vivid contrast, Jaynes writes:

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. […] In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. (1976: 72)

It's worth considering the context in which each of them are writing. Nisbett wants to establish a distinction in the cognitive processes of the individualistic west and the collectivist east, grounded partly in the differences between ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy. Jaynes is trying to trace the emergence of (access) consciousness in “the breakdown of the bicameral mind” - the moment when humankind realised that the voices they were hearing, the voices that guided their every action, were in fact their own internalised speech.

In fact, Jaynes identifies the period between the historical event of the Iliad and its first being written down as the era of the breakdown of the bicameral mind (1976: 82-3). It is this later, Homeric time that Nisbett is interested in, something that might help us reconcile the two accounts. In discussing other cultures, such as the Chinese Middle Kingdom or Europe in the Middle Ages, Nisbett tends to agree with some of Jaynes' conclusions, at least in regard to surface concepts of personal agency. However I doubt that Nisbett would want to say that European or Chinese peasants were actually devoid of agency, but rather that they were less philosophically aware of it than we are today.

So perhaps in Jaynes' defence we might want to say that some version of his theory of the bicarmel mind might have held at the time of the historic events depicted in the Iliad, but that by the time it came to be written down 300 years later the 'breakdown' had occurred. Jaynes writes that “Greek culture very quickly became a literature of consciousness” (1976: 83-4), and we might regard the supposedly non-conscious nature of the Iliadic heroes to be reflection of their own experiences, not those of the aoidos transcribing the story. This would allow us to retain both Nisbett's account of the Homeric Greeks as individualistic and Jaynes' account of the Iliadic Greeks as not even possessing conscious minds (at least in his particular sense of the word). 

Jaynes, J. 1976. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicarmel Mind.. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Nisbett, R. 2003. The Geography of Thought. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Williams, G. 2011. "What Is It Like to Be Nonconscious? A Defense of Julian Jaynes." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10/2: 217-239.