The Discovery of the Mind: the Greek Origins of European Thought

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THE DISCOVERY OF THE MIND The Greek Origins of European Thought By

BRUNO SNELL

Rector of the University of

Translated

by T. G.

Hamburgh

ROSENMEYER

Assistant Professor of Classics, Smith College

OXFORD BASIL BLACKWELL M CM LIII

PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY A. T. ST.

s

BROOME AND SON,

CLEMENTS, OXFORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

CHAP.

1

2 3

Translator's

Note

...

Introduction

...

...

Man

Homer's View of

5

6

7 8

9

...

11

I

a

13

iv

...

...

...

v

...

...

...

i

...

...

23

in the

...

...

Early ...

... ... ... Zeus and in Greek ... Myth Reality Tragedy ... Aristophanes and Aesthetic Criticism Human Knowledge and Divine Knowledge ... ... Among the Early Greeks ... The Call to Virtue A Brief Chapter from Greek Ethics

Hymn

Pindar's

to

42 71

90 113

136

:

From Myth

to

Comparison 10

...

... The Olympian Gods The Rise of the Individual

Greek Lyric

4

...

...

Logic ...

:

The Role ...

...

...

... The Origin of Scientific Thought ... The Discovery of HumanitaSy and Our ... ... Attitude Toward the Greeks

Art and Play in Callimachus The Discovery of a Arcadia :

...

Index

...

...

191

227 246

264

Spiritual

281

Landscape Notes

...

153

of the

311 ...

...

...

324

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE The present translation is based on the second edition of Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Claassen und Goverts, Hamburg, 1948), with the addition of the essay which here appears as Ch. 7 Human Know:

ledge and Divine Knowledge. The latter was submitted to the translator by Professor Snell in

manuscript form. Several chapters of the original work had previously appeared in the following publications :

Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch. Ch.

ly

2, 3,

4, 5,

6,

Neue Jahrbuecherfuer Antike, 1939. Das Neue Bild der Antike, 1942. Die Antike, 1941. Antike und Abendlandy 1947. Die Antike, 1944. Die Antike, 1937.

10, Philosophischer Anzeiger, 1929. II, Geistige Welt, 1947. 13,

Antike und Abendland, 1945.

Thanks are due to Sir Maurice Bowra, Mrs. D. Burr-Thompson, Mr. Casper J. Kraemer, Jr., Mr. R. Lattimore, and Mr. E. V. Rieu, for their permission to quote from their translations.

The translator wishes to express his special gratitude to Professor T. B. L. Webster of University College, London, who read the first draft of the translation and suggested many valuable changes.

T.G.R.

INTRODUCTION European thinking begins with the Greeks. They have made what it is our only way of thinking; its authority, in the

it

:

is undisputed. When we concern ourselves with the sciences and philosophy, we use this thought quite independently of its historical ties, to focus upon that which is constant and unconditioned upon truth; and with its

Western world,

:

we hope

unchanging principles of this life. On the other hand, this type of thinking was a historical growth, perhaps more so than is ordinarily implied by that term. Because we are accustomed to regard the Greek way of thinking as obligatory, we instinctively or should we say help

to grasp the

—project naively?

—

it also into thought processes of another order. Since the turn of the eighteenth century our growing awareness of evolutionary patterns may have contributed to the elimination of such rationalist concepts as the ageless,

unchanging ^spirit'. Yet a proper understanding of the origins of Greek thought remains difficult because all too frequently we measure the products of early Greece by the fixed standards of our own age. The Iliad and the Odyssey which stand at 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. To trace the course along which, in the unfolding of early Greek culture, European thought comes into its own, we must first of all understand that the rise ofjhinking^mong. the Greeks_was nothing less than a ^evolution. They did nolpby means of a mental equipment already at their disposal, merely map out new subjects for discussion, such as the sciences and philosophy. They discovered the human

mind. This drama, man's gradual understanding of himself, is revealed to us in the career of Greek poetry and philosophy. The stages of the journey which saw a rational view of the nature of man establish itself are to be traced in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, and in the plays. The discovery of the intellect cannot be compared with the discovery of, let us say, a new continent. America had existed long before Columbus discovered the New World,

vi

INTRODUCTION

but the European way of thinking did not come into being until it was discovered; it exists by grace of man's cognizance of himself. All the same, our use of the word discovery' can, I think, be defended. The intellect was not ^invented', as a man would invent a tool to improve the operation of his method to master a certain type of physical functions, or a are arbitrarily determined; inventions As a rule, problem. the to are purpose from which they take adapted they No cue. their objective, no aims were involved in the intellect. In a certain sense it actually did the of discovery exist before it was discovered, only not in the same form, not qua intellect. At this point we encounter two terminological difficulties. The first arises from a philosophical problem: in spite of our statement that the Greeks discovered the intellect we also *

assert that the discovery was necessary for the intellect to come into existence. Or, to put it grammatically: the intellect is not only an affective, but also an effective object.

must be obvious to anyone that we are here using a metaphor; but the metaphor is unavoidable, and is in fact the proper expression of what we have in mind. We cannot It

speak about the mind or the intellect at back on metaphor.

all

without falling

All other expressions, therefore, which we might employ to outline the situation, present the same difficulty. If we say that man understands himself or recognizes himself, we do not mean the same thing as is meant by understanding an object, or recognizing another man. For, in our use of the terms, the self does not come into being except through our comprehension of it.^ If, on the other hand, we say that the intellect reveals itself, we regard this event not as a result of man's own doing but as a metaphysical happening. This again differs in meaning from the statement: 'A man reveals himself, i.e. he drops his disguise; for the man is the same after the change as before it, while the intellect exists only from the moment of its revelation onward, after it makes its appearance through an individual. If we take the word 'revelation' in its religious significance the same is true once more: the epiphany of a god presupposes that he exists, and that his existence is by no means dependent upon the revelation. The intellect, however, comes into the world,

INTRODUCTION

VU

it is ^effected ', in the process of revealing itself, i.e. in the course of history. Outside of history, and outside of human life, nothing could be known of the nature of the intellect. A god reveals himself in all his glory in one single moment, while the intellect grants us only a limited manifestation, always dependent on the individual and his personal characteristics. In Christian thought God is intellect our understanding of God is beset with grave difficulties, and the reason for this is a view of the intellect which was first worked out by the Greeks. By using the terms 'discovery' and 'self-revelation' of the intellect we do not mean to commit ourselves to a particular metaphysical position, or to make predictions about a pure ;

intellect existing by itself beyond, and prior to, history. The two terms here convey more or less the same idea. The latter might perhaps be used to advantage in speaking of the early period, when a new understanding was gained in the form of mythic or poetic intuition, whereas the word 'discovery' is more appropriate for the philosophers and scientific thinkers. But there is no firm line of demarcation between the two.^ There are two reasons why we should prefer the

former expression in a historical survey such as this. In the first place, the important thing was, not that a datum be clearly apprehended, but that the new insight be communicable. History acknowledges only what bids fair to

become common property. As we shall see, many a commonplace had to be discovered before it could become an ingredient of colloquial speech. Conversely, discoveries may be forgotten, and especially in the world of the intellect discoveries are remembered only at the cost of constant hard labour. During the Middle Ages many ideas fell into disuse, and had to be re- discovered; happily the task was facilitated by the presence of the classical tradition. Secondly, we speak of 'discovery' rather than 'revelation' because, as we shall learn again and again in the course of our survey, man has to pass through much suffering and toil before he reaches an understanding of the intellect. TrdOei ^ladosy 'wisdom through suffering', holds for the whole of mankind, though perhaps not in quite the same sense as for the single man who has learnt the lesson of his troubles and protects himself against further suffering. Mankind too may learn its

INTRODUCTION

viii

by protecting itself against suffering, for that actually bar them from the acquisition of further wisdom. The second terminological difficulty which obstructs our way raises a problem of intellectual history. Although we say that the intellect was not discovered, and did not come into being, until after the time of Homer, we realize that Homer conceived of the thing which we call intellect in a different manner, and that in a sense the intellect existed also for him, though not qua intellect. This means that we use the term intellect' to interpret something and the

lesson, but not

would

—

*

otherwise we could not speak —whichcorrect, had previously been construed in another

interpretation

discovery

of

is

fashion, and therefore existed in a different dress; how, we This ^something' shall see in our discussion of Homer. simply cannot be grasped in our speech, since each language has its own interpretation, fixed in advance by its words. Whenever we wish to explain thoughts which were recorded in another tongue, we come to the conclusion that the foreign word means this and again that it does not mean it. The stranger the other tongue, and the further we are

—

removed from its thought, the greater is our dilemma. And when in the end we try to reproduce the alien thoughts in our own tongue and that is the task of scholarship—we

—

have a choice of either resigning ourselves to vague improvisations, or first finding certain approximations and then subtracting from them where they fail to correspond to the ideas which they are designed to represent. This is a negative approach, but in it lies our only hope of staking out the limits of the foreign material. At bottom, of course, we must be convinced that despite these complications the strange thoughts are intelligible to us, and that there is a vital meaning in what we have delimited, although we may not be able to define its precise significance in our own words. need not be unduly sceptical, particularly when the foreign material is Greek. For here we come face to face with our own intellectual past; in fact, the sequel may show that those very ideas which we shall first emphasize precisely because they are so unusual are in reality perfectly natural, and certainly more obvious than the immensely intricate notions of our own day and age. Perhaps we shall be able

We

INTRODUCTION

ix

to establish contact with Greek thought, not only through the medium of historical recollection, but also because the ancient legacy is stored in us, and we may recognize in it the

own involved patterns of thinking. therefore, in the chapters to follow we shall venture to say that Homer's men had as yet no knowledge of the intellect, or of the soul, or therefore of many other things, we do not thereby mean that his characters were not capable of joy, or reflection, and so forth. merely want to stress that they did not conceive of these matters as actions of the intellect or the soul and it is in this sense that they did not know the two. As a further consequence it appears that in the early threads of our If,

We

;

*

period the character' of an individual is not yet recognized. Here again 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 intellectual form as character, i.e. as individual intellect and individual soul. Of course there was ^something' which occupied the place later conceded to the intellect, or the soul; but to ascribe the latter to the Greeks without qualification would make us guilty of confusion and lack of precision. For the existence of the intellect and the soul are dependent upon man's awareness of himself. In questions of this sort terminological exactitude is a necessary requirement, even more so than in other scholarly discussions. Experience has shown how easily the issue may become obscured beyond repair. To isolate the specifically European element in the development of Greek thought, we need not set it off against Oriental elements. Doubtless the Greeks inherited many concepts and motifs from the ancient civilizations of the East, but in the field which we have been discussing they are clearly independent of the Orient. Through Homer we have come to know early European thought in poems of such length that we need not hesitate to draw our conclusions, if necessary, ex silentio. If some things do not occur in Homer though our modern mentality would lead us to expect them, we are entitled to assume that he had no knowledge of them, particularly if there are several such *gaps' of the same order. Sometimes the gaps are counterbalanced by certain positive phenomena which at first strike us as strange, but which,

INTRODUCTION

X

in combination with the

gaps,

form a consistent pattern.

In addition, the gradual unfolding of the Greek world permits us to trace, step by step, those seeds which ultimately-

produced the European notions of intellect and soul, and thereby made possible European philosophy, science, ethics, and finally religion. Our perspective of the Greek accomplishment is not that which served Classicism. Instead of describing a perfect culture, lying beyond the confines of history, we hope to indicate an achievement whose importance lies in its historical setting. Such an investigation need not terminate in relativism; it is well within our power to say whether the product of a particular era is great or small, profound or History is not an superficial, influential or ephemeral. infinite flux, an endless oscillation; the human spirit is restricted within a small range of possible manifestations, new departures are notably rare, and their forms severely

limited.

The findings of a scientist or a scholar are made in an atmosphere of peaceful contemplation, whereas the discoveries of the Greeks which constitute our topic, affecting as they do the very essence of man, take shape as vital experiences. They assert themselves with a violence which is

not merely arbitrary or accidental; the historical situation

on the one hand, and the forms in which the mind may understand itself on the other, provide the dynamic setting

new self-realization of the intellect. In the course of our discussion it will become evident that certain basic mental patterns exercise a varied control over men's minds for the

their imprint upon the manner in which man takes cognizance of himself. Both the historical aspects and the systematic side of this process must be illuminated in an intellectual chronicle such as this. The difficulties of our enterprise are obvious, for it is impossible at one and the same time to demonstrate the system which emerges from the stream of time, and to trace the history of the various motifs which together form a system. Under the circumstances, a collection of essays would seem to be the most

and leave

appropriate medium, with

now one

interest,

now

another

inviting the attention of the reader. The systematic aspects of our inquiry will be emphasized in chapter lo; in chapters

INTRODUCTION

XI

1-6 they are purposely relegated to the background, to allow the historical features to enjoy the limelight. I do not propose to furnish a presentation or interpretation of the poets and philosophers, nor do I wish to offer an introduction into the wealth and originality of early Greek art, or any other educational aim, but a close inquiry into the realm of intellectual history. On occasion it will be necessary to use abstract terminology, if we wish to formulate our findings in such a way that their correctness or falseness may be tested only by means of facts, and not by other interpretations. To place our investigation on the firm footing of demonstrability, it seems to me we have no other course but to reduce the problem of the evolution of Greek culture to the question What did the Greeks at any given time know about themselves, and what did they not (or not Much that is valuable and important must yet) know?^ remain beyond the scope o:^ our discussion, a victim of our chosen procedure. For the mental processes by which a man :

knows something, by which he recognizes something new, require to be ferreted out and recorded in ways which would not be applicable to his emotions, his religious sentiments, his feeling for beauty, or his ideas of justice. The fundamental facts of his mental operations may be explored only by a long series of patient comparisons. Actually, the issues at stake are often simple, even naive; but the need to elicit and grasp firmly the essential distinctions will at times lead us into regions remote and abstract. In order to highlight the crucial stages in the intellectual evolution of the Greek world, I have confined myself as far as possible to the citation of a few textual passages some of them will be repeated several times as the changing context demands. Also I have tried to direct the brightest beams upon the most significant stages. As is to be expected, we begin with Homer's view of man. Since Homer's position is the one furthest removed, and therefore least familiar to us, it has been necessary to describe the strangeness of that epoch in some detail as a result the first of the present studies does not quite fit into the general framework of the book. It was felt, however, that an explanation of some of the concepts of early Greek thought, i.e. some words of the Homeric vocabulary, was called for. The treatment of some difficult ;

;

INTRODUCTION

Xll

questions concerning the meaning of words is responsible for the fact that the chapter contains more professiona scholarship than the later sections. The chapter about the Olympian gods shows that the religion of Homer is, as ii were, the first blueprint for the new intellectual structure which the Greeks erected. The historical pattern is firsi

analyzed in the decisive achievements of the great poets: the creation of the lyric, the origin of tragedy, and the transitior

from tragedy

to philosophy; Aristophanes' criticism o1 the last tragedian, illustrates the meaning of thij Euripides, transition. In the following sections, on the Call to Virtue on Comparison, and on the Creation of Scientific Thought we shall see how the Greeks produced philosophy with itj views of nature and man. The sketches on Humanitas and or Callimachus raise the question how the findings of the intellect became the general property of civilization. The last chapter,

using Virgil's Eclogues as a model, tries to sho\^ to be transformed in order tc

how what was Greek had

become European. Most of these studies have been delivered as addresses in the course of the past nineteen years some of them have been published in various journals but they were from the very beginning designed to appear together. Here and then ;

;

changes have been made, particularly in the oldest piece (ch. lo), and, wherever it seemed necessary, notes have been

added to reinforce the

text.

CHAPTER

I

HOMER'S VIEW OF

MAN

Since the time of Aristarchus, the great Alexandrian scholar, has been the rule among philologists not to base the

it

interpretation of Homeric words on references to classical Greek, and not to allow themselves to be influenced by the usage of a later generation when investigating Homeric speech. To-day we may expect even richer rewards from this rule than Aristarchus hoped to glean for himself. Let us explain Homer in no terms but his own, and our understanding of the work will be the fresher for it. Once the words are grasped with greater precision in their meaning and relevance, they will suddenly recover all their ancient splendour. The scholar too, like the restorer of an old painting, may yet in many places remove the dark coating of dust and

varnish which the centuries have drawn over the picture, and thus give back to the colours their original brilliance. The more carefully we distinguish between the meanings of Homer's words and those of the classical period, the clearer grows our vision of the gulf which lies between the two epochs, and of the intellectual achievement of the Greeks. But aside from the interpretive-aesthetic approach to the richness and beauty of the language, and the historical approach to the history of ideas, there is a third side to the

Homeric phenomenon which we might call the^philosophicar. It was Greece which produced those concepts of man as an intellectual being which decisively influenced the subsequent evolution of European thought. We are inclined to single out the achievements of the

and

fifth

century for special praise,

them a validity beyond time. How removed from that stage can be shown from

attribute to

Homer

is

language. It has primitive speech immediate sense concrete symbols

far his

long been observed that in comparatively abstractions are as yet undeveloped, while perceptions furnish it with a wealth of which seem strange to a more sophisticated

tongue.

To

cite

one example: Homer uses a great variety of verbs

to denote the operation of sight:

B

opav,

ISelvy

Xevcraciv,

ddpelvy

DISCOVERY OF THE MIND

2

Of thcse, dedadaif o-zccWecj^at, oaaeadaiy SepKeaOai, TraTTralveLV. several have gone out of use in later Greek, at any rate in prose literature and living speech: Sep/cea^at, Xevoaeiv,^ oaaeadaLj -naTTraiveiv. Only two w^ords make their appearance after the time of Homer: jSAeVetv and decopelv. The v^ords which were discarded tell us that the older language recognized certain needs which were no longer felt by its successor. hdpKeodai means: to have a particular look in one's eyes. SpaKcovy the snake, whose name is derived from SepKeadai, owes this designation to the uncanny glint in his eye. He is called *the seeing one', not because he can see particularly well, not because his sight functions exceptionally well, but because his stare commands attention. By the same token Homer's SepKcadai refers not so much to the function of the eye as to its gleam as noticed by someone else. The verb is used of the Gorgon whose glance incites terror, and of the raging boar whose eyes radiate fire: nvp o^daX^jioZGL hehopKCJs. It denotes an ^expressive signal' or gesture of the eyes. Many a passage in Homer reveals its proper beauty only if this meaning is taken into consideration, as is shown by Od, *

5.84 and 158: (Odysseus)

'

ttovtov eii drpvyerov hepKeaKero

SaKpva

*

means

to look with a specific expression ', and the context suggests that the word here refers to the nostalgic glance which Odysseus, an exile from his homeland, sends across the seas. To exhaust the full content of our Xelpcov.

SepKeadaL

—

—

word the iterative aspect also needs to be brought out we should have to become fulsome and sentimental *he was :

ever looking wistfully ,' or: travelled forth across the sea .

.

.

*his fixed

'

;

word

all

glance continually

this is implied in the

one

hepKeuKeTo. presents us with a suggestive image of a certain attitude of the eyes, just as in our language the words *to glare' or *to gaze' describe a particular type though not the same of looking. Of the eagle it may be said that f^vrarov Sep/cerai, he looks Very sharply; but whereas in English the adjective would characterize the function and capacity of the visual organ. Homer has in mind the beams of the eagle's eye, beams which are as penetrating as the rays of the sun which It

—

—

are also called *sharp' by Homer; like a pointed weapon they cut through everything in their path. SepKeodai is also used

with an external object; in such a case the present would mean: *his glance rests upon something', and the aorist:

homer's view of

man

on an object', 'it turns toward something*, on someone'. Convincing examples are furnished above all by the compounds of the verb. I.e. 16.10 Achilles says to Patroclus: you cry like a little girl who begs her mother to take her in her arms, SaKpvoecraa 8e [xlv ttotiSepKerai, 6(j)p'' dveXr^Tai. With tcars shc *looks to' her mother to pick her up. But in English 'look' is a broader term than the Greek word; it resembles the Greek ^AeVctv which in later prose encroached upon the area of SepKeGOm. To sum up, then, the Homeric SepKeuOai does not designate the proper objective of sight, the special function of the eye which is to *his

glance

falls

*he casts his glance

transmit certain sense impressions to the human perception. The same is true of another of the verbs which we have

mentioned

as having disappeared in later speech. TraTrratVetv is of looking, namely a 'looking about' inquisitively, or with fear. Like 8ep/