The Grecians, the Griceians, and the Irrational

By JLS
for the GC

Eric R. Dodds (1893-1979) was Oxford professor of Greek and Sather Professor of the Classics at the University of California at Berkeley. In the last chapter of his "The greeks and the irrational" he waxes hermeneutic at freewill. There is an interesting early reference on p. 20 where he notes,

"I should rather say Homeric man does not possess the concept of will
(which developed curiously late in Greece) and therefore cannot possess the
concept of "free will".

"This does not prevented him," Dodds aptly goes on, "from distinguishing
between actions originated by the ego and those which he attributes to
psychic intervention. I should hesitate on the whole to press this point of
Nilsson's, and should prefer to connect Homeric man's belief in psychic
intervention with two ... peculiarities."

_http://nighthauling.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html_

(a) The first is a negative peculiarity. Early Greek (Homeric) man has no
unified concept of what we call "soul" or "personality (a fact whose
implications Bruno Snell has lately called particular attention).

It is well known that Homer appears to credit man with "psyche" (also used
by Plato and Aristotle) only after death, or when he is in the act of
fainting or dying or is threatened with death.

The only recorded function of the "psyche" in relation to the living man is
to leave him.

Nor has Homer any other word for the living personality.

The "thumos" may once have been a primitive "breath-soul" or "life-soul".


But in Homer it is neither the soul nor (as in Plato) a "part of the soul."

It maybe defined, roughly and generally, as the organ of feeling.

But it enjoys an independence which the word "organ" does not suggest to
us, influenced as we are by the later concepts of "organism" and "organic
unity."

A man's thumos tells him that he must now eat or drink or slay an enemy.

The thumos advises him in the course of his action, it puts words into his
mouth.

He can converse with it, or with his "heart" or his "belly," almost as a
man to man.

Sometimes he scolds these detached entities.

(b) A second peculiarity, which seems to be closely related to the first,
must have worked in the same direction.

This is the habit of explaining character or behaviour in terms of
knowledge.

The most familiar instance is the very wide use of the verb "oida," "I
know," with a neuter plural object to express not only the possession of
technical skill but also what we should call moral character or personal
feelings.

Achilles "knows wild things, like a lion".

Polyphemus "knows lawless things".

Nestor and Agamemnon "know friendly things to each other."

This is not merely Homeric "idiom". This intellectualist approach to the
explanation of behaviour set a lasting stamp on the Greek mind: the
so-called Socratic paradoxes, that "virtue is knowledge," and that "no one does
wrong on purpose," were no novelties, but an explicit generalized formulation
of what had long been an ingrained habit of thought.

Such a habit of thought must have encouraged the belief in psychic
intervention.

If character is knowledge, what is not knowledge is not part of character,
but comes to man from *outside*.

When he acts in a manner contrary to the system of conscious dispositions
which he is said to "know," his
action is not properly his own, but has been dictated to him.

Evidently ascribing nonrational impulses to an alien origin is especially
likely to happen when the acts in question are such as to cause acute shame
to their author.

We know how in our own society unbearable feelings of guilt are got rid of
by "projecting" them in phantasy on to someone else.

And we may guess that the notion of "ate" -- divine temptation or
infatuation -- served a similar purpose for Homeric man by enabling him in all good
faith to project on to an external power his unbearable feelings of shame.

-----

Dodds rejects simplistic explanations on the birth of 'freewill' in Stoic
times. After all, Rationalism and the idea of things being "up to us"
thrived in times of not especially political freedom. So, it cannot be that the
constraints on such political freedom was the triggerer.

Yet, --- and the title of his last lecture is "The fear of freedom", "for
a century or more the individual had been face to face with his own ...
freedom. ... Better ... rigid determinism than the terrifying burden of ...
responsibility. ... Panaetius and Cicero tried to check the retreat by
argument, as Plotinus was to do later, but without perceptible effect; certain
motives are beyond the reach of argument."

And so on.