The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature

342 Pages·2011·1.66 MB·English

by  Bruno Snell

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridged and unaltered
republication of the work originally published in 1953 under the title The
Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. The translation
is by T. G. Rosenmeyer.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Snell, Bruno, 1896-The discovery of the mind.
Translation of: Die Entdeckung des Geistes.
Reprint. Originally published: New York : Harper, 1960.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Greece—Intellectual life. 3. Greek literature—History
and criticism, 4. Greece—Religion. 5. Thought and thinking I. Title.
B173.S6213 1982
182
81-17286
9780486143460
AACR2

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 - HOMER’S VIEW OF MAN
CHAPTER 2 - THE OLYMPIAN GODS
CHAPTER 3 - THE RISE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE EARLY GREEK
LYRIC
CHAPTER 4 - PINDAR’S HYMN TO ZEUS
CHAPTER 5 - MYTH AND REALITY IN GREEK TRAGEDY
CHAPTER 6 - ARISTOPHANES AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM
CHAPTER 7 - HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND DIVINE KNOWLEDGE
AMONG THE EARLY GREEKS
CHAPTER 8 - THE CALL TO VIRTUE: A BRIEF CHAPTER FROM
GREEK ETHICS
CHAPTER 9 - FROM MYTH TO LOGIC: THE ROLE OF THE
COMPARISON
CHAPTER 10 - THE ORIGIN OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
CHAPTER 11 - THE DISCOVERY OF HUMANITAS, AND OUR
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE GREEKS
CHAPTER 12 - ART AND PLAY IN CALLIMACHUS
CHAPTER 13 - ARCADIA: THE DISCOVERY OF A SPIRITUAL
LANDSCAPE
NOTES
INDEX
A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF
INTEREST
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 Knowledge 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. i, Neue Jahrbuecher fuer Antike, 1939.
Ch. 2, Das Neue Bild der Antike, 1942.
Ch. 3, Die Antike, 1941.
Ch. 4, Antike und Abendland, 1947.
Ch. 5, Die Antike, 1944.
Ch. 6, Die Antike, 1937.
Ch. 10, Philosophischer Anzeiger, 1929.
Ch. 11, Geistige Welt, 1947.
Ch. 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 it what it is: our
only way of thinking; its authority, in the Western world, 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 help we hope to grasp the 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 naively?—project 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 of thinking among the Greeks was nothing less than a revolution. They did
not, by 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, 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 physical
functions, or a method to master a certain type of problem. As a rule, inventions
are arbitrarily determined; they are adapted to the purpose from which they take
their cue. No objective, no aims were involved in the discovery of the intellect.
In a certain sense it actually did 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. It 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 speak about the mind or
the intellect at all without falling back on metaphor.
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.1 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, 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.2 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. π θει μ
θος, ‘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 lesson, but not by protecting itself against suffering, for that would
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 interpretation is
correct, otherwise we could not speak of discovery—which had previously been
construed in another fashion, and therefore existed in a different dress; how, we
shall see in our discussion of Homer. This ‘something’ 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. We 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 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 threads of our own involved patterns of thinking.
If, 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. We 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
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,