Book: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Find Online:https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/books/ooc/
Date Last Read: In progress, last finished September 2016
This is the first book that Richard ever recommended to me, and it's now my favorite book of all time. I can't overstate how transformative it was to read this. My goal with subsequent re-reads is to take better notes!
The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning of action in novel situations.
CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.
But within a century, the Incas had conquered all before them, perhaps thereby weakening their own bicamerality, as did Assyria in another age and another clime.
But I suggest that given man, language, and cities organized on a bicameral basis, there are only certain fixed patterns into which history can fit.
According to a sixteenth century observer, "the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even men. "
Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events
… this should be interpreted as an assimilation of the person's inner directing voice, derived perhaps from his parents, with the voice or supposed voice of the king.
The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of subjective consciousness.
Man was trapped in his own civilization.
It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior.
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
Because the personal gods are silent, they must be angry and hostile. Such logic is the origin of the idea of evil.
…which first appears in the history of mankind during the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
What is interesting to me in this speculation is the possibility that as consciousness develops, it can develop in slightly different ways, and the importance of the writing of Herodotus to the later development of Greek consciousness would make an interesting project. My essential point here, however, is that history is impossible without the spatialization of time that is characteristic of consciousness.
The new poetry expresses the person in that present, the particular individual and how he is different f rom others. And celebrates that difference. And as it does so, we can trace a progressive filling out and stretching of the earlier preconscious hypostases into the mindspace of consciousness.
Consciousness and morality are a single development.
How can one know oneself? By initiating by oneself memories of one's actions and feelings and looking at them together with an analog ' I ', conceptualizing them, sorting them out into characteristics, and narratizing so as to know what one is likely to do. One must 'see' 'oneself' as in an imaginary 'space,' indeed what we were calling autoscopic illusions back in an early chapter.
All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = l i fe over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do. T he word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun
Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. The entire history of religions and of politics and even of…
Let no one think these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. T he entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.
Why were these books put together? T he first thing to realize is that the v e ry motive behind their composition around Deuteronomy at this time was the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality of a subjectively conscious people. T h is is what religion is.
T e ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness
we are approaching the greatest teaching of the entire O ld Testament, that, as this last of the elohim loses his hallucinatory properties, and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the nervous system of a few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something written upon tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable by al l, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, universal and transcendent.
But of much greater interest is the occurrence of the spontaneous divination f rom immediate sensory experience that in the end becomes the subjective conscious mind. Its interest here is because it begins not in the man-side of the bicameral mind but in the bicameral voices themselves
Our view of human history here must be that of a furthest grandeur. We must try to see man against his entire evolutionary background, where his civilizations, including our own, are but as mountain peaks in a particular range against the sky, and from which we must force ourselves into an intellectual distance so that we see its contours aright. And from this prospect, a millennium is an exceedingly short period of time for so fundamental a change as from bicamerality to consciousness.
Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.
For in spite of all that rationalist materialist science has implied since the Scientific Revolution, mankind as a whole has not, does not, and perhaps cannot relinquish his fascination with some human type of relationship to a greater and wholly other, some mysterium tremendum with powers and intelligences beyond all l e ft hemispheric categories, something necessarily indefinite and unclear, to be approached and felt in awe and wonder and almost speechless worship, rather than in clear conception, something that for modern religious people communicates in truths of f e e ling, rather than in what can be verbalized by the l e ft hemisphere, and so what in our time can be more truly felt when least named, a patterning of self and numinous other from which, in times of our darkest distress, none of us can escape — even as the infinitely milder distress of decision-making brought out that relationship three millennia ago
Let us recall the almost universal belief of these centuries in an absolute dualism of mind and matter. Mind or soul or spirit or consciousness (all these were confused together) was a thing imposed from heaven on the bodily matter to give it life. A ll the newer religions of this era were allied about this point.
It is only if consciousness is learned at the mercy of a collective cognitive imperative that we can take hold of these questions in any way.
They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of excerption and the constraints on narratization and conciliation.
And the whole is like a network or metaphor matrix of four-way inner-related distinctiveness that binds the individuals together and holds them in a culture
It was Thomas Day, whose new and syntactically vigorous translation of the Iliad is eagerly awaited, who first recited or rather sang epic Greek to me as it should be done. For the theory here, see W. B. Stanford, The Sound of Greek (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and play the record inserted in the back cover
The forms are still there, to be worked with now by the analog ‘I’ of a conscious poet. His task now is an imitation or mimesis 19 of the former type of poetic utterance and the reality which it expressed. Mimesis in the bicameral sense of mimicking what was heard in hallucination has moved through the mimesis of Plato as representation of reality to mimesis as imitation with invention in its sullen service.
For if our contemporary mentality is, as most people suppose, an immutable genetically determined characteristic e vol v ed back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before, how can it be so altered as in hypnosis? And that alteration merely at some rather ridiculous ministrations of another person? It is only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating consciousness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly.
On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be? If under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject?
“The sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me. It seemed to be charged with all p o w e r; not me r ely to symbolize God but actually to be God. Phrases like: “ Light of the World, ” “The Sun of Righteousness that Setteth Nevermore,” etc., ran through my head without ceasing, and the mere sight of the sun was sufficient greatly to intensify this manic excitement under which I was laboring. I was impelled to address the sun as a personal god, and to evolve from it a ritual sun worship.
Bernard S. Aaronson, “Hypnosis, responsibility, and the boundaries of self,” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosisy 1967, 9: 229-246
Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions
In this period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrationalisms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause. In the frustrations and sweat of laboratories, it feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did the Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry Sinais of parched fact for some rich and brave significance flowing with truth and exaltation
Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately. And this can happen on a non-conscious l e v e l, as I have tried to describe in driving a car.
Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this v e ry moment.
Here we introduce analogy, which differs f rom metaphor in that the similarity is between relationships rather than between things or actions
Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with its spatial successiveness which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way than as a space.
T he basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a functional mind-space. T he denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and H u m e, what is introspectable
With the prodding of Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C., 14 we invent new words or really modifications of old words to name processes or symbolize actions over time by adding the suffix sis and so be conscious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a knowing; genesis, a beginning; emphasis, a showing in; analysis, a loosening u p; or particularly phronesis, which is variously translated as intellection, thinking, understanding, or consciousness. The se words and the processes they refer to are new in the sixth and seventh centuries B . C . 1 5
Self-awareness usually means the consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases