Greek Models of Mind and Self

A. A. Long

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674967342
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This lively book offers a wide-ranging study of Greek notions of mind and human selfhood from Homer through Plotinus. A. A. Long anchors his discussion in questions of recurrent and universal interest. What happens to us when we die? How is the mind or soul related to the body? Are we responsible for our own happiness? Can we achieve autonomy? Long asks when and how these questions emerged in ancient Greece, and shows that Greek thinkers' modeling of the mind gave us metaphors that we still live by, such as the rule of reason or enslavement to passion. He also interrogates the less familiar Greek notion of the intellect's divinity, and asks what that might mean for us.Because Plato's dialogues articulate these themes more sharply and influentially than works by any other Greek thinker, Plato receives the most sustained treatment in this account. But at the same time, Long asks whether Plato's explanation of the mind and human behavior is more convincing for modern readers than that contained in the older Homeric poems. Turning to later ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism, Long concludes with an exploration of Epictetus's injunction to live life by making correct use of one's mental impressions.An authoritative treatment of Greek modes of self-understanding, Greek Models of Mind and Self demonstrates how ancient thinkers grappled with what is closest to us and yet still most mysterious—our own essence as singular human selves—and how the study of Greek thought can enlarge and enrich our experience.

1

PSYCHOSOMATIC IDENTITY

WHAT IS THE nature of human beings? According to Plotinus, who asked this question, we humans live our lives simultaneously at two quite distinct levels.¹ One of these levels is obvious to everyone and not in doubt, no matter how we explain the details of human life. This obvious life is our everyday embodied experience, with our immediate desires, hopes, fears, thoughts, memories, expectations, and hourly activities. This is a life or being in time that everybody knows directly. The other level of life, according to Plotinus, is unobvious because it is everlasting and not accessible to normal consciousness. This other level, unlike the first one, is not our immediate, embodied experience. It is a purely intellectual life that consists timelessly in the contemplation of eternal truths. Plotinus infers that we have this further life on the basis of purely theoretical, nonempirical considerations that have to do with understanding how and why there can be truths, as there are in mathematics, that never change and that transcend all particular points of view. What Plotinus calls the “we” (or the human self) straddles two levels, making us, as he says, “amphibious” or double. According to this conception we live simultaneously in both a physical, bodily, material, and temporal dimension and in a spiritual, immaterial, and immortal realm. For Plotinus, human beings are fully themselves, fully experience what it is to be human, only at this higher incorporeal and intellectual level. According to him, we should try, here and now, to identify ourselves with the life of the everlasting intellect, letting go of the body and embodied consciousness as much as possible. Thus, to Plotinus, human nature is uncompromisingly dualistic, with body and mind essentially different things.

In this respect, as in so many other ways, the outlook of Plotinus is a complete contrast with the sensuous immediacy and concreteness of Greece’s epic poet, Homer. When the Iliad and Odyssey were first written down in about 700 BCE, close to a thousand years before the birth of Plotinus, the two poems became at once the earliest and the greatest literary creations of ancient Greece. The heroes of these epics, Achilles and Odysseus, are intensely conscious of their present embodied and time-governed existence, and they are equally conscious of their social identity and high rank as warrior chieftains. These heroes have no inkling of a second level of timeless being, a higher intellectual and immortal level, such as Plotinus envisioned. For Achilles and Odysseus, what matters—as it continues to matter for all of us, nearly thirty centuries later—is how one fares here and now, in the succession of days, what one feels and what one desires, how one succeeds and where one fails. Achilles and Odysseus envision nothing like immortality or an amphibious self divided between body and mind. The life of the Homeric heroes is an intensely physical existence, and it will be completely and irrevocably over when they die. Indeed, one of Homer’s most characteristic terms for human beings is “mortals” (brotoi) to contrast us with “immortals” (athanatoi), meaning gods. Yet, something of the Homeric human being will persist after death, something that Homer calls the psyche.

Is this psyche an entity or a nonentity? One is tempted to call it a nonentity because it is insubstantial and ghostly, a lifeless replica of the living person, consigned to inhabit Hades, the dark and gloomy underworld of shades. Yet, in spite of its insubstantiality, a Homeric psyche is not nothing: it is the ghost of someone in particular, someone who has already lived a particular embodied life. When Homeric persons expire, they breathe forth their psyche once and for all. The life that they have lived is finished, as shown by the corpse that the psyche leaves behind. So, at the beginning of the Iliad we are told that the shades (psychai) of countless warriors have been sent to Hades, leaving “themselves” (that is, their bodies) as carrion for dogs and birds.² Similarly, the shade of an unburied hero asks Odysseus to “bury me,” where “me” refers to his corpse.³ Here is a huge difference from Plotinus. In one of the greatest contrasts in intellectual history, the disembodied, ghostly, lifeless Homeric psyche will be transformed into the bearer of human life and identity at its truest, best, and most real, according to the Platonic tradition that Plotinus represents.

How did this happen? What shifts in human imagination and aspiration were at work in this remarkable transition from a body-centered being in time, with death as the end of actual human existence, to a spiritual, bodiless immortality as humanity’s ultimate destiny? In this book, I will sketch some possible answers to these questions, but my goal is more analytical than it is historical. Rather than differentiating between Homer’s Bronze Age culture and the late Roman Empire of Plotinus, I chiefly want to explore ideas that figure in a selection of Greek models of the self, starting with Homer and ending with Stoicism. My explorations will illustrate changes through time in the representation of human identity and selfhood, but I will also emphasize continuities and connections. Models of mind and selfhood, as observed in my Introduction, do not evolve in a tidy, linear path. Discarded concepts are sometimes revived or restructured, and every model, to be effective, must respond to the familiar, fundamental, and unchanging facts of subjective experience that transcend particular times, places, and cultures.

Plotinus himself provides a fascinating instance of the kind of continuity or connection I have in mind. In a famous passage from the Odyssey (11.601–2), the wandering hero, who gives his name to the epic, has a vision of the shades. At one point, describing his experience, he says:

Next I saw the shade (eidolon) of mighty Hercules. But he himself takes delight in feasting with the immortal gods.

Plotinus comments (Ennead 1.1.12):

Homer seems to separate Hercules from his mere image. He puts his image [or shade] in Hades, but Hercules himself among the gods; treating the hero as existing in the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.

Here Plotinus updates Homeric mythology by interpreting it as an indication of his own dualistic system with its stark distinctions between soul or mind and body. Hercules, with Zeus as his father and Alcmene as his mother, had been traditionally perceived as a demigod—a composite of the human and the divine. This complex parentage explained how Hercules, the man, could die and pass to Hades as a shade, while his divine essence (what Homer calls “Hercules himself”) joined the immortal gods. In this traditional story Plotinus saw the kernel of his own remarkable doctrine already described—the idea of an amphibious or bifurcated identity for everyone, divided between a mortal body and a higher self, a self that is everlasting and focused entirely on the life of the mind.

When Greek philosophers reflected on ethics and theology, they found much to criticize and reject in Homer. But Homeric epic was so powerful and entrenched in Greek culture that no major philosopher could completely escape its influence, even a philosopher as abstract as Plotinus. Homer was an inescapable catalyst for all ancient philosophy, especially the notions of mind, self, and identity that I will discuss in this book. The poems of Homer not only set the stage for my project, they also provide recurrent themes for subsequent authors to develop, react against, or even appropriate, as we have just seen.

Homer, of course, did not pose abstract questions by asking, as Plotinus did directly, about the nature of human beings. The Homeric epics are intended to appeal to our emotions, not our intellects. But all Greek philosophers recognized Homer’s richness for anyone’s inquiry into the foundations of human identity. Around the time of Plotinus, an author (incorrectly identified as Plutarch) wrote a work on Homer in which he attempted to show, through a series of quotations, that Homer was the source of many specific doctrines of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Pythagoras, Aristotelians, and Stoics. Plutarch, as this author is called, makes much of his case by reading between the lines in ways that no one today would find convincing.⁴ But his points are sometimes quite appropriate: he correctly notes that Stoic philosophers followed Homer in their account of the way life, breath, and heart are connected, and he shows that Homer could distinguish between fate and human responsibility for actions performed deliberately.⁵ Plutarch goes quite astray in making Homer the source of all Greek philosophy, but he was right to align many Homeric contexts with ideas that subsequent philosophers had elaborated. One representative of this practice is Pyrrho, the eponymous founder of the version of skepticism called Pyrrhonism. We are told that Pyrrho had a habit of quoting Homeric passages to corroborate his own views on the uncertainty of everything.⁶

My interest in Homer, for the purpose of this chapter, is twofold. I want to illustrate and explain Homer’s understanding of what we today call human physiology and psychology. In this part of the discussion my focus will be on objective features of human identity that belong to all human beings as a species. My second interest in Homer concerns notions that involve value and subjectivity, notions about the character and activity of an individual life—the things that make a life worthwhile or wretched, within or beyond an agent’s control, intelligent or senseless. These notions pertain to Homeric contexts such as the anger of Agamemnon and Achilles, Odysseus’s strategy in reclaiming his kingly position at Ithaca, and Penelope’s steadfast refusal to accept rumors concerning Odysseus’s death.

How do these two topics fit together—objective identity on the one hand and, on the other hand, subjectivity, individuality, and value? To answer this question I need to develop a theme that will be important throughout the book—the distinction already mentioned between body and soul or, to be more precise, the distinction often expressed in Greek between soma and psyche, which is the word that gave rise to our modern term psychology. Homer has both these words. As we saw in my opening remarks on Plotinus, Homer uses psyche to refer to the breath or spirit that leaves persons when they die and that persists as a ghost in Hades. Soma is Homer’s word for the lifeless corpse that the psyche leaves behind. Do living humans, then, in Homer consist of a soma that contains a psyche? The answer may seem to be obviously yes. For how else could it make sense to say that death occurs when you breathe out your psyche, leaving a corpse behind? But the linguistic facts are a bit more complicated.⁷

Many languages and cultures make sharp distinctions between the living body, meaning our anatomical parts and structure, and something they call the soul or the spirit. According to this distinction the soul or spirit is taken to be the source of embodied life and, in particular, the seat and cause of thought, feeling, and consciousness. Such a distinction between body and soul became the standard practice of ancient Greek philosophers, and it soon made its way into the general culture. We could accurately describe the Greek ethical tradition from Socrates onward as a focus on care of the soul as distinct from care of the body. As we shall see in later chapters, models of self and personal identity in Greek philosophy take a distinction between soul and body to be basic to an understanding of human nature in general and also to an understanding of the mental and moral differences between people. Many Greek philosophers (Aristotle is a partial exception) have what we may call a thing-like view of soul or psyche. In general, they assign a definite location within the body to psyche, sometimes by dividing it into specific parts. In so doing, they treat psyche in much the same way as we moderns do when we speak of the head or the brain.

We might expect that Homer anticipated this seemingly natural distinction, but most scholars say that he did not. The chief reason for their denial is that Homer does not speak of a living body or a living soul when he uses the words soma and psyche. He confines his use of these terms to contexts of death rather than life, with soma referring, as I have said, to the corpse, and psyche to the breath of life that people lose when they die. Thus at the beginning of the Iliad (in a passage cited above), we read that “the wrath of Achilles hurled countless sturdy psychai of heroes to Hades, and left the men themselves as carrion for dogs and birds.” How, then, does Homer describe the nature of living persons?

In what follows we shall see that living persons in Homer are bodies through and through. Like the dead “men themselves” resulting from Achilles’s anger, in Homer’s conception the human identity is completely bodily or physical. Does this mean that Homer has no notion of the soul, or of a soul? This too is widely assumed. The assumption would be correct if the conception of a soul must be expressed by the single term psyche, as it generally is in Greek from the time of Plato. The assumption would also be correct if the conception of a soul must be of something immaterial, as it is for Plato and Plotinus. But both of these assumptions are false. Psyche is not the only word in Greek that signifies the cause of life, and the seat of thought, feeling, and consciousness. Furthermore, whether the soul (whatever its name) is material or immaterial became a subject of disagreement among ancient philosophers. Many of them, including Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers, took the soul to be as material as the body. The falsity of these two assumptions permits us to repeat the question. Does Homer, notwithstanding his body-centeredness, have a notion of the soul or of a soul, and does he have a word or words to signify that notion?

The answer is a strong affirmative. Homer has a very rich vocabulary for identifying the constituents of human beings. This vocabulary includes words for the external and internal parts of the body, words for the limbs or physical form in general, and words for the location and the instruments of thoughts and feelings, or for conscious life in general. Two of these latter words became standard in ancient philosophy—nous (spelled noos in Homeric Greek), commonly translated as mind or intellect, and thumos, commonly rendered as spirit or temper. In addition, Homer uses other words that refer directly to the heart or another internal organ for the location of thought and feeling, especially the words phren (or phrenes), kradie, and etor. Scholars have often wondered why Homer has these multiple words for referring to the location or instrument of human thought and feeling. Why does he not always use the same word, a word like mind or soul in English, or Geist or Seele in German?

This turns out to be an inappropriate question, for even in modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Translations and Citations
• Introduction
• 1. Psychosomatic Identity
• 2. Intimations of Immortality
• 3. Bodies, Souls, and the Perils of Persuasion
• 4. The Politicized Soul and the Rule of Reason
• 5. Rationality, Divinity, Happiness, Autonomy
• Epilogue
• Ancient Authors and Thinkers
• Notes
• Index