Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [208]
This, for instance, is the major problem with the cult classic of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.36 His bold thesis was, that originally, before the Odyssey was written, the Greeks could not distinguish between internal and external processes easily because they had not yet developed the phenomenon of the bicameral mind, with each hemisphere concentrating on one aspect of cognition. Because of this, they easily mistook their own internal voice and cognitions as the voices of gods. He also said that the change to a bicameral mind took place between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which seems to him to be a clearly definable moment in historical time. (Actually, it is not. He did not take into account that the two books were being created and edited simultaneously, over a long period of time.) Since then, only transitional or abnormal personality types have approximated this state. This is a bold, interesting, and wrong hypothesis in any number of important ways. But it is also fascinating speculation that anticipates more scientific experimentation.
A number of other scholars have traced the emergence of self-consciousness to a variety of other time periods, some as late as the Middle Ages, the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, or even the Victorian novel. It now seems clear that these scholars outlined instead some important cultural change in self-consciousness, not the basic phenomenon, which must be much older than historical time.37 In the nineteenth century, many novelists-Henry James jumps to mind immediately-stressed the necessity of coming to more full consciousness, portraying the difficulties of characters who were insufficiently aware of themselves or the motives of their contemporaries. Psychological novels like those of Henry James are sometimes held up as the effect of the West’s finally having achieved full self-consciousness. For the purposes of this study, we have seen that major milestones were passed in the philosophical writing of Plato. We shall see, in later chapters, more milestones in the writings of Plotinus, and Augustine respectively. None of them invented self-consciousness per se, but each changed or added an important aspect to the description of our self-consciousness so as to resolve various intellectual problems. Each valorized personal experience in a new way and keyed into our interior lives more completely than his predecessors to explain an intellectual problem that he had encountered in his philosophy.
What we need to take from this discussion is that only great conceptual changes in religious, social, philosophical, and artistic life-in short culture-do affect how we understand ourselves, an axiom that seems little in need of demonstration. Self-consciousness builds on our biological consciousness by explaining the self in a socially meaningful way. The notion of the immortality of the soul had just such an effect on how we value our own self-consciousness. The notion of the soul and its immortality helps us understand who we are and why we think we are important. By positing that the soul was immortal, the Greeks were also positing that self-consciousness-or, better, memory, our learning, experiencing and changing mind-is a transcendent and valuable phenomenon that outlasts our earthly existence. By defining the afterlife as a resurrection of the body, apocalypticists also suggested what