Julian Jaynes
Every so often a book emerges from
the fringes of the academy proposing a radical change in our understanding of
the world. These books explode into public consciousness and often disappear
like a passing fad. But occasionally some work lingers in the back of our
minds, it makes an impression that we can’t shake.
Such a book was Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind. Although dismissed by many, there remain a number of
scholars who still write of it with admiration and, indeed, there exists a
Julian Jaynes Society, dedicated to the study of his works.
Jaynes claimed Vygotsky as his
greatest influence and like Vygotsky he felt that the origins of human
consciousness were rooted in social history. Jaynes claimed that consciousness
was of relatively recent origin and that ancient peoples lacked consciousness.
The most common objection to Jaynes
is the apparent absurdity of the idea that ancient people were not conscious.
How could pre-modern people possibly not be conscious? If dogs and other
animals are conscious how could whole civilizations be populated by unconscious
people?
Jaynes’s answer is startling, he
accepts that animals are not conscious. He agrees that human intellectual life
“is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is a fact. It
is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a
right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.”
Note how this contradicts the general tendency of modern cognitive ethology to regard animals as conscious. Jaynes had a low opinion of animals that did not reflect well on him. While Darwin presented evidence for continuity between the human and animal mind, Jaynes held that the chasm between humans and animals was “awesome.” Jaynes thought Darwin was naïve. In a curious piece of reasoning Jaynes rejected a hypothesis that the reticular activation system (RAS) of the brain might be implicated in consciousness, merely because humans share the RAS with other animals. This hypothesis may well be false, but what is of interest here is the faulty reasoning Jaynes used to reject it. Because his baseline assumption was that animals are not conscious, he believed consciousness could not rest on any feature we share with our nonhuman relatives.
Most people understand consciousness
to be the individual’s sense of awareness, sentience, that ability to have
experience. The fact that is like something to be a person (or a bat, as
philosopher Thomas Nagel noted). As
David Chalmers has pointed out, understanding the mechanisms of
consciousness, indeed, how such a thing is even possible, is a deeply hard
problem, to date unsolved. From this vantage point, Jaynes’ contention that
ancient people were not conscious seems absurd. Most people agree that animals
have consciousness. Jaynes even acknowledges that animals have emotional lives
“marvelously similar” to ours. But how is it possible to have an
emotional life without consciousness?
A careful reading of Jaynes shows
that he meant something else altogether. For him consciousness might be better
described as the modern volitional self. That sense that we have free will and
are acting in the world with agency. It is precisely this sense of agency that
he claimed was lacking in the writings of ancient authors. What we find in
ancient works, such as the Iliad, is
that people take actions upon the instructions of the gods. These mandates were
often spoken, and individuals saw themselves as carrying on divine
instructions. Jaynes noted that the ancients heard the voices of the gods and
he likened the phenomenon to the audio hallucinations experienced by people
with schizophrenia. Note for example, that Eve does not make a decision to eat
the fruit of the tree, but instead, is instructed (”beguiled”) to do so by the
serpent. This story is from the J text of the of the Pentateuch, believe to be
its most ancient source.
Jaynes pointed to a poverty of language about internal mental states in the Iliad. We learn of Achilles’ actions but not of his mind. The world is controlled by the gods.
Jaynes called this ancient state of
being - “bicameralism,” upon the idea that the distribution of language
functions across the brain’s right and left hemispheres was implicated in the
hearing of divine voices, that is audio hallucinations.
We cannot directly interrogate our ancestors,
we cannot have them fill out psychological inventories, nor can we take
psycho-physiological measurements. We do, however, have some of the words that
they wrote. By examining ancient texts we can make inferences about the
authors. Comparing, for example, the Iliad
with the Odyssey, many scholars have noted the much greater emphasis on introspection in the Odyssey. While the heroes of the Iliad,
act under the tutelage of the gods, the Odysseus of the Odyssey is shown to be introspective, even experiencing regret.
Diuk and colleagues attempted to quantify
this shift using a computational technique for identifying themes in text
called latent semantic analysis. Sure enough, looking at both Greek and
biblical texts, they found a rise in introspective language over time.
For example, when they compared the Tanakh (the Hebrew Testament), with the
Christian Testament and Augustine’s Confessions.
In accordance with the hypothesis of rising introspection, the older Tanakh showed the least introspection,
while the most recent text, the
Confessions, showed the most.
Similarly, when they examined Greek texts, they discovered, again consistent with Jaynes’ hypothesis, an increase in introspective themes during the Greek golden age.
“In a sense, we have become our own gods” - Jaynes
Jaynes postulated a specific set of
anatomical and functional foundations for bicameralism. He pointed to a region
of the brain’s left hemisphere, Wernicke's area, involved in both written and
spoken language. He hypothesized that there is a matching region in the right
hemisphere and that these two symmetric structures communicate through a bundle
of neurons called the anterior commissure. According to Jaynes, the right
hemisphere is the source of auditory hallucinations, the voice of the gods.
While the left hemisphere hears the voices and follows their instructions.
While interesting, Jaynes central
thesis does not rest upon his neurobiological speculation. What is central is
the argument that ancient people experienced a consciousness radically
different from our own.
Indeed, Jaynes proposed that our
ancestors perceived the world in ways that psychologists would now describe as
schizotypal. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder where an individual loses
connection with objective reality. Schizophrenia is not a “split personality.”
That is a common misunderstanding. Rather, people with schizophrenia experience
delusions and hallucinations.
We have a tendency to view mental
disorders as discrete states, either you are schizophrenic or you are normal.
But in reality many disorders are simply extreme versions of conditions we all
have. Schizotypy refers to schizophrenic like traits short of full blown
schizophrenia. Many people walk among us, hold down jobs and raise families,
yet still experience some of the symptoms of schizophrenia. These people may
experience audio hallucinations or have strange delusive beliefs. There are a
number of questionnaires used by psychologists to gauge a persons level of
schizotypy. Typically these questionnaires consist of lists of schizophrenic
symptoms from sources such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
American Psychiatric Association. Respondents are asked if they have
experienced any of these symptoms. It turns out that many people exhibit as
least some of degree of schizophrenic like traits.
There is interesting research on
schizotypy. People who score higher on measures of schizotypy also are more
likely to have beliefs in the paranormal or conspiracy theories. On the other
hand, creative people tend to have higher schizotypy scores.
Thus, the notion that large segments
of the population could experience hallucinations of speaking gods, is not that
far fetched. If society was organized to normalize and legitimate these
experiences then these hallucinations might play an important role and
determine what constitutes normal consciousness.
Along a similar line, there has also been a shift in the role that dreams play in society. In ancient times dreams were thought to be of such great importance they, if Biblical accounts can be believed, could sway the policy of a Pharaoh. It seems that for our ancestors the hard distinction we now make between dreams and the waking state was less certain. Today, dreams are mostly seen as a personal or ephemeral concern.
The shift from the ancient to the
modern mind seems to have occurred too rapidly to be explained by a genetic
mechanism. However, as we have seen, the work of Vygotsky and Luria suggests
that shifts in social structure can produce changes in mentalities. It seems we
have moved from a society that prioritized and incentivized schizotypal
thinking to one where schizotypy is more marginalized. Schizotypal thinking did
not go away but it became a more private affair, not something that received
social sanction.
Jaynes was not alone in seeing some
kind of fundamental shift in human consciousness at the dawn of history. We
have already discussed Norenzayan’s hypothesis of the big gods. Norenzayan,
Jaynes,Henri Frankfort, Bruno Snell, Karl Jaspers, and Hajime Nakamura all
found evidence of an ancient disjuncture in human awareness. These thinkers
were not in complete agreement on the details and the data are still too
fragmentary to resolve the differences between them. But a review of their work
strengthens the fundamental contention that there has been substantial
cognitive change since antiquity.
Frankfort
Archaeologist Henri Frankfort argued
that ancient thought was mythopoeic. While modern scientific thought tries to
resolve the disparities between individual perspectives through a process of
repeated observation and experimentation, mythopoeic thought put anecdotal
experience at the center. The ancients experienced the external world not as
inanimate but as alive with conflicting supernatural forces. Humans were
dependent on these forces and their survival dependent on aiding the beneficent
forces and placating those hostile to well being.
One important consequence of
mythopoeic thought was that there was “no sharp distinction between dreams,
hallucinations, and ordinary vision.” The boundary between
dreams and everyday reality was more porous.
Thus, we might gain some access to
the ancient mind by examining our dreams. We are clearly conscious in our
dreams (a fact that serves as additional evidence against Jaynes’ idiosyncratic
use of the word “consciousness”), but most of us do not have the same sense of
volition that we have in our waking state. In dreams we are swept along through
a tide of uncontrollable events. This may be how our ancestors experienced
their waking states.
There is one important exception to
this and that is the experience of lucid dreamers, individuals who are able to
assert control over actions and responses in the dream state. Lucid dreamers
have accomplished in their dream states what modern people have accomplished in
their waking state - the sense of volition. This is a startling possibility, for
it implies that our sense of free will is a historically determined
construction, one that our ancient ancestors did not posses.
Jaspers
In 1947 philosopher Karl Jaspers
published his book, The Origin and Goal
of History. Although the idea had already been proposed by the Scottish
folklorist John Stuart-Glennie, Jasper, apparently unaware of Stuart-Glennie’s
writings, noticed a profound change in the character of human thought during
the period between 800 to 200 B.C.E. He called this epoch “the axial age.”
Axial because it was a turning point, a hinge of history, as some have called
it.
Zoroastrianism in Persia, the Hebrew
prophets, Greek philosophy, Vedanta and Buddhism in India, and Taoism and
Confucianism in China, all have their origins in the axial period. Jasper
suggested that this clustering was not accidental and it ushered in a “breakthrough”
in human consciousness.
He specifically claimed that, in
thought, people of the axial period were closer to the modern mind than to the
mentality of those who came before. He wrote: “We are infinitely closer to the
Chinese and the Indians than to the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The grandeur
of the Egyptian and Babylonian world is unique. But that which is familiar to
us only starts with the new age of the break-through.”
It is hard not to notice the influence of Hegel on Jaspers. One point of departure for Jaspers was his break with the Hegel’s Eurocentrism. The axial age was not a phenomenon distinct to Europe, indeed Europe was on the periphery of the axial age developments. Nor did Christianity represent the pinnacle of historical development, other traditions represented axial breakthroughs that must be seen as co-equal with Christianity. Other writers have extended the axial age to include Mexico
What is the evidence for the axial
age? The Seshat Global History Data-bank, has given researchers the opportunity
to test Jasper’s axial age hypothesis.
The Seshat Data-bank includes
historical and archaeological information from societies across the world for
the period between 4,000 BCE to 1,900 CE. Mullins and colleagues examined the data looking for evidence of axial transformation. They noted that
the evidence presented by Jaspers was largely anecdotal, and often focused on
specific individuals, such as Buddha or Confucius. It is also not clear why
other figures, such as the Pharaoh Akhenaten were not considered axial.
Instead of trying to shoehorn the
transformation claimed by Jaspers into a specific historical period, Mullins
and co-authors looked for “axiality” independent of any time period.
Their results did point to a reality
of axiality, but not confined to the narrow time period proposed by Jaspers,
nor confined to the few geographic areas encompassed in Jaspers’ original
formulation. For example, they found evidence of axiality in Egypt prior to
Jaspers’ dates and in Cambodia after the end of the period suggested by
Jaspers.
Thus, while Jasper’s time frame was probably too narrow, there is evidence for something like the shift he proposed.
“The Olympian gods were laid low by philosophy” - Snell
How then should we characterize the
modern mind? First of all it is volitional, it has a sense of agency that the
ancients seemed to have lacked. We think of ourselves as the authors of our
actions, we have a strong sense of free will.
Second, modern people are
philosophical in the sense that they act in accordance with some system of
truth. The modern mind is a philosophical mind.
In his book, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature,
Classics scholar Bruno Snell made an argument similar to Jaynes. Snell
tells us “the Iliad and the Odyssey, which stand as the source of the
Greek tradition, speak to us with a strong emotional appeal; and as a result we
are quick to forget how radically the experience of Homer differs from our own.” Along the same lines, he wrote “there is no denying that the great
heroes of the Homeric poems are drawn in firm outline; and yet the reactions of
an Achilles, however grand and significant, are not explicitly presented in
their volitional or form as character.”
Snell notes a difference in language
between ancient and moderns, and claims “the stranger the other tongue, and the
further we are removed from its thoughts.”
Snell finds in the writings of Homer
the same concreteness of thought that Luria found among the illiterate peasants
of the U.S.S.R. He particularly notes the poverty of Homer’s language for
describing the mind.
Like Jaynes, Snell notes the
dependence of the Homeric heroes on instructions from the gods, “Homer does not
know genuine personal decisions; even where a hero is shown pondering two
alternatives the intervention of the gods plays the key role.” The
Homeric Greeks understood their internal lives “as the intervention of a god.”
But later Greek thought takes a
radical turn. According to Snell, “by about 600 B.C. these efforts had developed
into a search for uniform principles whereby men hoped to eliminate the
obscurities and uncertainties which best their various fields of vision.” It is this “search for uniform principles” that forms the basis for the
modern mind. It is the beginning of the great dialectical struggle between
different schools of truth that characterizes our world even today.
Among the Greeks we see, in the
difference between Alcmaeon and Parmenides, the great debate that came to
dominate Western intellectual life.
Alcmaeon was a physician and a
follower of Pythagoras, while Parmenides was the founder of the Eleatic school
of philosophy. According to Snell. “Alcmaeon advances - inductively, we
would say - from the perception of the senses, from human knowledge, to the
invisible; Parmenides receives a divine instruction to put aside as illusion
all sense experience and the process of becoming which the sense apprehend.”
Thus, the modern mind brings with it a struggle between two ways of knowing, empirical versus intuitive, or, perhaps, materialist versus spiritual.
Nakamura
Perhaps the most expansive student of
the shift to the modern mind was Hajimae Nakamura, who examined the transition
from mythic culture to philosophy across both Western and Eastern cultures.
Nakamura’s book Parallel Developments asserted that “in
different areas of the world similar problems, even if not similar concepts,
emerged at certain stages of cultural development.” and “the history of
ideas in each cultural area has undergone a similar development with respect to
intellectual problems.”
Nakamura endorsed a stage theory for
the history of ideas: “I would rather not specify how many stages one ought to
admit, though I firmly believe that there have been some stages.”
Nakamura began his exploration with
the Vedic India. He chose this as his starting point both because it was in his
area of expertise, but also because it provided one of the longest unbroken
sequences of documentary records. At each stage of development he makes
comparisons of the Indian data with information from other cultures, including
Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese.
Like the other thinkers we have been
discussing Narkamura notes a disjunction in human thought sometime between 800
and 500 BCE. He tied this shift to the rise of urban culture and trade. These
social changes led to a decline in the power and prestige of the priesthood, an
increase in the influence of money and the merchant class.
These societies, while sufficiently
wealthy to support intellectual work, also experienced widespread uncertainty
and unrest. All this gave rise to a new consciousness. According to Nakamura “a
need was felt for new principles or criteria by means of which one could relate
oneself meaningfully to the new world that was coming into existence.”
With the axial shift we see a decline
in the importance of sacrifice. Sacrifice to the gods was common in the
pre-axial world and sacrificial offerings could include material possessions,
animals, or people. We see this in ancient texts like the Vedas and in the
Iliad.
But with the new consciousness,
sacrifice is questioned and de-emphasized. This fact suggests that the shift to
the modern mind involved both cognitive and ethical change.
The intellectual ferment that
accompanies this period leads not to one new view of the world, but to
competing interpretations of both reality and ethics. Sorokin writes, “some of
the cultures and their mentality may not develop this ethical mentality up to
the level of the integrated ethicophilosophical systems. Others more integrated
cultures develop it. In the former cultures, the division of the actions,
relationships, objects, and events into right and wrong exists, but it is not
welded into a consistent ethical system, with its principles, hierarchy of
values, and their ‘justification.’ For such a step a high degree of analytic thought and a considerable degree of
ethical controversy are necessary. These conditions may not be present in many
simpler societies.”
According to Nakamara, we see
this tension between competing world views in India with different Upanishadic
schools, the pre-Socratics in Greece, and the period of the “hundred schools”
in China. The rise of philosophy allows the development of heterodoxies. The
clash of these world views is a cause of historical change, as human actors
follow the dictates of a particular truth system.
The clash of ideas is also an effect
of the struggle between different human groups such as, nations, classes,
castes, and religions. As Marx pointed out social conditions and positions can
sometimes dictate the adoption of particular world views.
These systems of truth and ethics are
not stable, and their interaction sets up the dialectic that will dominate
culture from the axial period to the present. Sometimes there is bitter
hostility between them, at other points, there are attempts at synthesis. To
date, these tensions have not been resolved. This dialectical process, still
underway, remains a motive force for history. A study of this dialectic will
help us understand how human altruism, while expanded beyond narrow kinship
groups, is often still limited to bounded groups of nations, co-religionists,
or ideological cliques.
Although flawed, the most detailed
analysis of this dialectic can be found in the work of Pitirim Sorokin.
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