But to what extent, if any, is the bicameral form of thinking still active and alive in educated people in Western culture such as Jung? If this bicameral form of thinking is still active and alive in educated people in Western culture today, then it is presumably involved in producing dreams when we are asleep, and in producing visual and auditory hallucinations when we are awake.
Let me now set forth a different framework for considering the breakdown of the bicameral form of thinking and the historical emergence of consciousness that Jaynes discusses. In the book RUIN THE SACRED TRUTHS: POETRY AND BELIEF FROM THE BIBLE TO THE PRESENT (Harvard University Press, 1989), Harold Bloom makes the following observation that is relevant to Jaynes's discussion: "Frequently we forget one reason why the Hebrew Bible is so difficult for us: our only way of thinking comes to us from the ancient Greeks, and not from the [still residually bicameral] Hebrews" (page 28). Bloom explicitly refers to "Greek thinking and Hebrew psychologizing," and suggests that the two modes of thought and expression seem irreconcilable because they represent two antithetical visions of life. But I would say that the thought and expression in the Hebrew Bible represent what Jaynes refers to as the bicameral mind.
In the book JESUS AND YAHWEH: THE NAMES DIVINE (Riverhead Books, 2005), Bloom further elaborates his point about how deeply Greek thinking permeates the thinking of educated people in Western culture today:
"Whoever you are, you identify necessarily the origins of your self more with Augustine, Descartes, and John Locke, or indeed with Montaigne and Shakespeare, than you do with Yahweh and Jesus. That is only another way of saying the Socrates and Plato, rather than Jesus, have formed you, however ignorant you may be of Plato. The Hebrew Bible dominated seventeenth-century Protestantism, but four centuries later out technological and mercantile society is far more the child of Aristotle than of Moses" (page 146).
Basically, I agree with Bloom that educated people in Western culture today are dominated by the Greek tradition of thought. As he says, the origin of our Western sense of self is dominated by the Greek tradition of thought. However, if Jaynes is right about the bicameral mind of our human ancestors, including, I contend, the residually oral ancient Hebrews and early followers of the historical Jesus, then the bicameral mind that Jaynes discusses represents a deeper layer of the human psyche today. But does this make any difference? If it does, what difference does it make?
In the book ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (Methuen, 1982), Ong perceptively discusses Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind:
"[T]he early and late stages of consciousness which Julian Jaynes (1977) describes and relates to neurophysiological changes in the bicameral mind [involving the right and left hemispheres of the brain] would also appear to lend themselves largely to much simpler and more verifiable description in terms of a shift from orality to literacy. . . . The 'voices' [of the Gods supposed coming from the right hemisphere of the brain, according to Jaynes's theory] began to lose their effectiveness between 2000 and 1000 BC. This period, it will be noted, is neatly bisected by the invention of the alphabet around 1500 BC and Jaynes indeed believes that writing helped bring about the breakdown of the original bicamerality [involving the two hemispheres of the brain]. The ILIAD provides him with examples of bicamerality in its unselfconscious characters. Jaynes dates the ODYSSEY a hundred years later than the ILIAD and believes that wily Odysseus marks a breakdown into the modern self-conscious mind, no longer under the rule of the 'voices." Whatever one makes of Jaynes's theories, one cannot but be struck by the resemblance between the characteristics of the early or 'bicameral' psyche as Jaynes describes it -- lack of introspectivity, of analytic prowess, of concern with the will as such, of sense of difference between past and future -- and the characteristics of the psyche in oral cultures not only in the past but even today. . . . Bicamerality may mean simply orality. The question of orality and bicamerality perhaps needs further investigation" (pages 29-30).
As far as I know, the question of orality and bicamerality has not been further investigated since 1982. For example, it is not investigated in the essays gathered together in the book REFLECTIONS ON THE DAWN OF CONSCIOUSNESS: JULIAN JAYNES BICAMERAL MIND THEORY REVISITED, edited by Marcel Kuijsten (Julian Jaynes Society, 2006).
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