The Myth of the Bicameral Mind
A review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976 and 1990)
I was enthralled by the opening chapters — a discussion of “consciousness” that leads to an analysis of The Iliad, highlighting the difference between the mindset of the characters vs. what is common today. It was refreshing to come upon a clear presentation of what I had long thought. The characters in The Iliad are not modern men in ancient dress. Their concepts of causation, fate, and justice were very different from ours. And they had a bizarre relationship with their gods.
Jaynes explains key homeric words that have no equivalent in today’s English: thumos, phren, noos, psyche, kradie, etor. There was no simple way to express what we now mean by “mind” or “consciousness” or “self.” I was hearing echoes of Orwell’s 1984 — if you can’t say it, can you think it? I also heard echoes of William James, who questioned the assumption that the same laws of physics we experience on Earth also prevail throughout the universe, at vast distances. The assumption that human nature has been unchanged for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years might also be unwarranted.
I was hooked, and for two days I could do nothing else but read this 469-page tome. At the beginning that was a pleasure rather than a chore because the writing is clear, the argument is convincing, and it’s told with momentum.
Then hubris sets in. The author comes up with a formula that he claims explains widely different phenomena. Still I keep reading because he scatters fascinating little-known and unexpected facts throughout. It’s the grand scheme, not the details, that feels faulty.
He claims that up until about 3000 years ago, man had no consciousness and was not self-aware. He rambles on about the left and right sides of the brain. He assumes that up until that time the separate sides had separate roles (hence “bicameral”). The right side issued orders, literally speaking with a voice of authority. And the left side implemented those orders, without questioning, without hesitation or self-doubt. The voice of the right side was treated as the voice of a god.
The evidence that Jaynes provides is often fascinating in and of itself. For instance, in assigning separate roles to the two brain hemispheres, he notes that stroke victims with severe damage to the left hemisphere cannot talk, but sometimes can sing. My father had such a stroke. The right side of his body was paralyzed, and he couldn’t talk, but he could sing, and could even peck out tunes on the piano with his left hand. With that validation from my personal experience, I was tempted to accept many of the other details the author cites.
But those nuggets of information do not add up evidence. The pieces don’t necessarily fit together. I’m reminded of Atlantis the Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly a book I cherished as a teenager. That book puts together myths and legends from the Old World and the New World and jumps to the conclusion that they all describe a single cataclysmic event.
Jaynes applies his concept of the “bicameral mind” to all of history and religion, to oracles and Old Testament prophets, and poetry, and to hypnotism and schizophrenia as well. He finds evidence of it everywhere and everywhen. But he fails to ask, much less to answer the obvious question: if the mode of human thought changed radically in Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, and even India about 3000 years ago, during the Bronze Age, it is plausible that through darwinian competition the new mode might have spread throughout the interconnected civilized world. But what about isolated peoples who were never influenced by them and who never developed written language? If the theory holds true, then among the remote tribes carefully studied by anthropologists in the twentieth century, there should have been some indication of this very different “bicameral” way of thinking. Why not?
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PS — I just read The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony (2007)
Jayne’s claimed that there was no self-perception, no idea of the self before about 1200 BC, the time-frame he gives for the breakup of the “bicameral mind.”
According to Anthony (p. 340). “The initial expansion of the Indo-European languages was the result of widespread cultural shifts in group self-perception. Language replacement always is accompanied by revised self-perceptions a restructuring of the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and reproduced.”
The origins of Indo-European were in the millennium 4000–3000 BC.
