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uncommon as to make us suspect that it could have been added by the later generations of aoidoi. But starting from such small beginnings in the Iliad, it soon comes into the very center of our topic. And this is
Noos
Up to now, we have been dealing with large, ummistakable internal sensations that only needed to be named in times of turmoil and crisis, and which then took their names from objective external perception. Noos, deriving from noeo = to see, is perception itself. And in coming to it we are in a much more powerful region in our intellectual travels.
For, as we saw in an earlier chapter, the great majority of the terms we use to describe our conscious lives are visual. We 'see'
with the mind's 'eye' solutions which may be 'brilliant' or 'obscure,' and so on. Vision is our distance receptor far excellence.
It is our sense of space in a way that no other modality can even approach. And it is that spatial quality, as we have seen, that is the very ground and fabric of consciousness.
It is interesting to note parenthetically that there is no hypostasis for hearing as there is for sight. Even today, we do not hear with the mind's ear as we see with the mind's eye. Nor do we refer to intelligent minds as loud, in the same way we say they are bright. This is probably because hearing was the very essence of the bicameral mind, and as such has those differences from vision which I discussed in 1.4. The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind.
This shift is first seen somewhat fitfully in the Iliad. The Mycenaean objective origin of the term is present in objective statements about seeing, or in noos as a sight or show. In urging his men into battle, a warrior may say there is no better noos than a hand-to-hand battle with the enemy (15:510). And Zeus keeps Hector in his noos (151461).
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But the second phase of internalization of noos is also evident in the Iliad. It is located in the chest (3:63). How curious to us that it was not placed in the eyes! Perhaps this is because in its new role it was becoming melded with the thumos. Indeed, noos takes on adjectives more suitable to the thumos, such as fearless (3:63) and strong (16:688). And Odysseus dissuades the Achaeans from putting their ships to sea by telling them that they do not yet know what sort of noos is in Agamemnon (2:192).
And one of the most modern-sounding instances occurs in the very first episode, when Thetis, consoling the sobbing Achilles, asks him, "Why has grief come upon your phrenes? Speak, conceal not in noos, so that we both may know" (1:363).9 Apart from this, there is no other subjectification in the Iliad. No one makes any decisions in his noos. Thinking does not go on in the noos, or even memory. These are still in the voices of those organizations of the right temporal lobe that are called gods.
The precise causes of this internalization of sight into a container in which the seeing can be 'held' will require a much more careful study than we can go into here. Perhaps it was simply the generalization of internalization which I suggest had occurred earlier in those internalizations correlated with large internal sensations. Or it may have been that the observation of external difference in the mingling of refugees, as mentioned in II.3, demanded the positing of this visual hypostasis, which could be different in different men, making them see different things.
Psyche
And so finally to the word that gives psychology its name.
Probably coming from the term psychein = to breathe, it has become internalized into life substances in its main usage in the 9 A further exception to what I am saying can be found in the comparison of the swiftness of Hera with the swiftness of a man's nous wishing in his phrenes to be in distant places he has once visited (15 : 8of.). On the peculiarity of such an expression in Homer, see Walter Leaf, A Companion to the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 257. This is obviously a late incursion.
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Iliad. Most often, psyche seems to be used in just the way we would use life. But this can be very misleading. For 'life' to us means something about a period of time, a span between birth and death, full of events and developments of a certain character.
There is absolutely nothing of this sort in the Iliad. When a spear strikes the heart of a warrior, and his psyche dissolves (5:296), is destroyed (22:325), or simply leaves him (16:453), or is coughed out through the mouth (9:409), or bled out through a wound (14:518; 16:505), there is nothing whatever about time or about the end of anything. There is in one part of Book 23 a different meaning of psyche, a discussion of which is deferred to the end of this chapter. But generally, it is very simply a property that can be taken away, and is similar to the taking away, under the same conditions, of thumos or activity, a word with which psyche is often coupled.
In trying to understand these terms, we must refrain from our conscious habit of building space into them before this has happened historically. In a sense, psyche is the most primitive of these preconscious hypostases; it is simply the property of breathing or bleeding or what not in that physical object over there called a man or an animal, a property which can be taken from him like a prize (22:161) by a spear in the right place.
And in general, that is, with the exceptions I discuss at the end of this chapter, the main use of psyche in the Iliad does not progress beyond that. No one in any way ever sees, decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything in his psyche.
These then are the supposed substantives inside the body that by literary metaphor, by being compared to containers and persons, accrue to themselves spatial and behavioral qualities which in later literature develop into the unified mind-space with its analog CP that we have come to call consciousness. But in pointing out these beginnings in the Iliad, let me remind you that the contours of the main actions of the poem are as divinely dictated and as nonconscious as I have insisted in 1.3. These precon-
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scious hypostases do not enter into any major decisions. But they are definitely there playing a subsidiary role. It is indeed as if the unitary conscious mind of the later age is here in the Iliad beginning as seven different entities, each with a slightly different function and a distinction from the others which is almost impossible for us to appreciate today.
T H E W I L E S O F T H E O D Y S S E Y
After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems freshly and consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! There are of course some scholars who still like to think of these two huge epics as being written down and even composed by one man named Homer, the first in his youth and the second in his maturity. The more reasonable view, I think, is that the Odyssey followed the Iliad by at least a century or more, and, like its predecessor, was the work of a succession of aoidoi rather than any one man.