These assurances have now disappeared, and we seem thrust out into the sky of a very new problem. If our impressionistic development of a theory of consciousness in the last chapter is even pointing in the right direction, then consciousness can only have arisen in the human species, and that development must have come after the development of language.
Now if human evolution were a simple continuity, our procedure at this point would normally be to study the evolution of language, dating it as best we could. We would then try to trace out human mentality thereafter until we reached the goal of our
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inquiry, where we could claim by some criterion or other that here at last is the place and the date of the origin and beginning of consciousness.
But human evolution is not a simple continuity. Into human history around 3000 B.C. comes a curious and very remarkable practice. It is a transmutation of speech into little marks on stone or clay or papyrus (or pages) so that speech can be seen rather than just heard, and seen by anybody, not just those within earshot at the time. So before pursuing the program of the preceding paragraph, we should first try to date the origin of consciousness either before or after the invention of such seen speech by examining its earliest examples. Our present question then is: what is the mentality of the earliest writings of mankind?
As soon as we go back to the first written records of man to seek evidence for the presence or absence of a subjective conscious mind, we are immediately beset with innumerable technical problems. The most profound is that of translating writings that may have issued from a mentality utterly different from our own. And this is particularly problematic in the very first human writings. These are in hieroglyphics, hieratic, and cuneiform, all — interestingly enough — beginning about 3000 B.C. None of these is entirely understood. When the subjects are concrete, there is little difficulty. But when the symbols are peculiar and undetermined by context, the amount of necessary guesswork turns this fascinating evidence of the past into a Rorschach test in which modern scholars project their own subjectivity with little awareness of the importance of their distortion. The indications here as to whether consciousness was present in the early Egyptian dynasties and in the Mesopotamian cultures are thus too ambiguous for the kind of concerned analysis which is required. We shall return to these questions in Book II.
The first writing in human history in a language of which we have enough certainty of translation to consider it in connection
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with my hypothesis is the Iliad. Modern scholarship regards this revenge story of blood, sweat, and tears to have been developed by a tradition of bards or aoidoi between about 1230 B.C. when, according to inferences from some recently found Hittite tablets,1 the events of the epic occurred and about 900 or 850
B.C., when it came to be written down. I propose here to regard the poem as a psychological document of immense importance.
And the question we are to put to it is: What is mind in the Iliad?
The Language of the Iliad
The answer is disturbingly interesting. There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying 'in general' because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and "casts strength in his thumos" (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him" (9:702f.). But it is not really an organ and not always localized; a raging ocean has thumos. A word of somewhat similar use is phren, which is always localized anatomi-1 V. R. d'A. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors: An Archeological Survey, c. 1200-c. 1000 B.C. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964).
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cally as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is usually used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize that his brother is not near him (22:296); this means what we mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only centuries later that it comes to mean mind or 'heart' in its figurative sense.
Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over him.
Another important word, which perhaps comes from the doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two parts. This was made into a verb by adding the ending -izo, the common suffix which can turn a noun into a verb, the resulting word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts about something.
Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary quality in their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories which are not true to the original. Mermerizein is thus wrongly translated as to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be troubled about, to try to decide. But essentially it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behavioristic. It is said several times of Zeus (20:17, 16:647), as well as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumosy or sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to.
These words are in general, and with certain exceptions, the closest that anyone, authors or characters or gods, usually get to having conscious minds or thoughts. We shall be entering the meaning of these words more carefully in a later chapter.
There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing curiously late in Greek thought. Thus, Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will.
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Indeed, the whole problem of volition, so troubling, I think, to modern psychological theory, may have had its difficulties because the words for such phenomena were invented so late.
A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in our sense. The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C. comes to mean body, is always in the plural in Homer and means dead limbs or a corpse. It is the opposite of psyche. There are several words which are used for various parts of the body, and, in Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to, and never the body as a whole.2 So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.