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I've been reading Caroline Alexander's translation of the Iliad (she's the author of this article) and have been tremendously impressed. It's apparently at leas

I've been reading Caroline Alexander's translation of the Iliad (she's the author of this article) and have been tremendously impressed. It's apparently at least as accurate as Lattimore (the academic standard) but so much more vivid. Scenes jump off of the page. They're also academically rigorous, important if like me you're interested in subtle meaning in Homeric epic. Highly recommended.

jstanley 3y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I was intrigued so I had a look at the "Look Inside" on Amazon, and came across a passage containing: > the goddess of the white arms, Hera, put this in his mind, and shortly after: > Son of Atreus, I now think that, staggering back, we shall go home again which is at odds with the only thing I have ever learnt about Ancient Greek texts, which is that they had no concept of the mind or of thinking. From this Scott Alexander book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... > So for example, a typical translation might use a phrase like “Fear filled Agamemnon’s mind”. Wrong! There is no word for “mind” in the Iliad, except maybe in the very newest interpolations. The words are things like kardia, noos, phrenes, and thumos, which Jaynes translates as heart, vision/perception, belly, and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. He might translate the sentence about Agamemnon to say something like “Quivering rose in Agamemnon’s belly”. It still means the same thing – Agamemnon is afraid – but it’s how you would talk about it if you didn’t have an idea of “the mind” as the place where mental things happened – you would just notice your belly was quivering more. Later, when the Greeks got theory of mind, they repurposed all these terms. You can still find signs of this today, like how we say “I believe it in my heart”. Of course it's possible that Jaynes is simply wrong, and the Greeks did have a concept of the mind, and a translation that talks about the mind is genuinely more faithful than one that does not.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  It's an overly literal and reductive claim in the first place. There are places where homer clearly uses nous to indicate the "inner workings" of someone's reasoning and planning, separate and different from the actions they take. I can't find a quote right now but look at how misdirection and dishonesty are represented in homer, you'll find some examples of what I'm talking about. They may not have had an explicit concept of a unified entity containing all of reason, imagination, sense perception, and morality, the way we think of the mind now. But they did have an understanding of these processes and an experience of them being interrelated. And also remember that "ancient greece" was a period spanning like a thousand years with hugely varying degrees of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over that period. Scholars of antiquity are very careful about qualifying their claims as to who and when they apply. It's notable that Alexander doesn't take that care. We have a ton of information about how certain philosophers thought at a certain time. But their focus is narrowly technical, they're as much defining their jargon than they are describing how words are used and understood broadly among greeks. We should be careful not to absorb their confidence into our understanding.
- malloryerik 3y ago
  A very quick reply. Yes, I've read Julian Jaynes also, and have thought like you are thinking now. However I'm not sure how one would translate noos -- head? thoughts? feelings? Consider also that French, for example, has no word for "mind" and yet translators clearly don't shy from the word. Now this is different of course, if the point is that the Homeric Greeks didn't have the same idea of consciousness, but I think that idea can come through without ridding oneself of words like "mind." Maybe you'd prefer a word like "perception," but that introduces another burst of unhelpful associations, not least of which is its scientific and precise-sounding tone? Finally, when I read Homer, it seems clear that many characters do have, shall we say, internal deliberations, and that Homer is clear about this. So I tend to feel that Jaynes' interpretations might be best seen as tentative and unfinished.

jstanley 3y ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I was intrigued so I had a look at the "Look Inside" on Amazon, and came across a passage containing: > the goddess of the white arms, Hera, put this in his mind, and shortly after: > Son of Atreus, I now think that, staggering back, we shall go home again which is at odds with the only thing I have ever learnt about Ancient Greek texts, which is that they had no concept of the mind or of thinking. From this Scott Alexander book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... > So for example, a typical translation might use a phrase like “Fear filled Agamemnon’s mind”. Wrong! There is no word for “mind” in the Iliad, except maybe in the very newest interpolations. The words are things like kardia, noos, phrenes, and thumos, which Jaynes translates as heart, vision/perception, belly, and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. He might translate the sentence about Agamemnon to say something like “Quivering rose in Agamemnon’s belly”. It still means the same thing – Agamemnon is afraid – but it’s how you would talk about it if you didn’t have an idea of “the mind” as the place where mental things happened – you would just notice your belly was quivering more. Later, when the Greeks got theory of mind, they repurposed all these terms. You can still find signs of this today, like how we say “I believe it in my heart”. Of course it's possible that Jaynes is simply wrong, and the Greeks did have a concept of the mind, and a translation that talks about the mind is genuinely more faithful than one that does not.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
It's an overly literal and reductive claim in the first place. There are places where homer clearly uses nous to indicate the "inner workings" of someone's reasoning and planning, separate and different from the actions they take. I can't find a quote right now but look at how misdirection and dishonesty are represented in homer, you'll find some examples of what I'm talking about. They may not have had an explicit concept of a unified entity containing all of reason, imagination, sense perception, and morality, the way we think of the mind now. But they did have an understanding of these processes and an experience of them being interrelated. And also remember that "ancient greece" was a period spanning like a thousand years with hugely varying degrees of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over that period. Scholars of antiquity are very careful about qualifying their claims as to who and when they apply. It's notable that Alexander doesn't take that care. We have a ton of information about how certain philosophers thought at a certain time. But their focus is narrowly technical, they're as much defining their jargon than they are describing how words are used and understood broadly among greeks. We should be careful not to absorb their confidence into our understanding.
malloryerik 3y ago
A very quick reply. Yes, I've read Julian Jaynes also, and have thought like you are thinking now. However I'm not sure how one would translate noos -- head? thoughts? feelings? Consider also that French, for example, has no word for "mind" and yet translators clearly don't shy from the word. Now this is different of course, if the point is that the Homeric Greeks didn't have the same idea of consciousness, but I think that idea can come through without ridding oneself of words like "mind." Maybe you'd prefer a word like "perception," but that introduces another burst of unhelpful associations, not least of which is its scientific and precise-sounding tone? Finally, when I read Homer, it seems clear that many characters do have, shall we say, internal deliberations, and that Homer is clear about this. So I tend to feel that Jaynes' interpretations might be best seen as tentative and unfinished.