Literature and Science

The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words what words were never intended to convey. For all words are abstractions and stand for those aspects of a given class of experiences which are recognizably similar. The elements of experience which are qunique, aberrant, other-than-average, remain outside the pale of common language.

How does new meaning emerge from already given, present, words?

The following passage is an excellent summary of the development of human understanding of psyche, or rather, psyche itself:

Going back to the beginnings of our own literary tradition, we find that in Homer's day, a human being had no unitary soul. His psyche was merely the shadowy thing that feebly squeaked and gibbered in the world of the dead. In the world of the living, a human being was simply an uneasily cooperative society of somato-psychic factors—a parliament in which the nominal prime minister, Noos or Reason, was constantly being outvoted by the spokesmen of the opposition parties of Animal Vitality, Emotion, and Instinct. And it was not merely with Phren, Thumos, and the Liver that Reason had to cope; there were also the gods. Supernatural intervention was constant and generally malicious. One of Zeus's numerous daughters was Ate, whose name, in the Homeric poems, means "the state of mind-body that leads to disaster." Ate amused herself by playing havoc with rational man's best-laid plans and noblest intentions. And when it wasn't Ate who made the mischief, it was one of the high gods personally intervening, so that some unfortunate human being might suffer undeserved pain or perpetrate some act of suicidal idiocy.

But divine interventions were not invariably malicious. Inspiration by one or another of the Muses was an actual experience, and from time to time, some god or other would intervene to help one of his favorites. Moreover, there was something called Menos, the state of mind-body that leads to success. Entering a man, Menos enormously increased his native capacities, making it possible for him to achieve what had hitherto been impossible.

Contact with Indian gymnosophists to the east or, as some contemporary scholars believe, contact to the north with the shamans of the Central Asiatic steppes led to the abandonment of the Homeric view of human nature. The debating society of somato-psychic factors gave place to the dualism of a soul confined, as in a penitentiary or a tomb, within a body, whose inert matter it informed and animated. The notion of a detachable psyche imprisoned in a muddy and decaying soma gave birth to the notions of original sin and, concurrently, of an undiluted spirituality, to which there could be no access save through a course of physical mortifications. Orphism and the Pythagoreans prepared the way for Plato, and, reinforced by Persian dualism, the new theory of human nature entered our cultural history on the carrying wave of Christianity. Medieval theology enriched this theory of human nature by incorporating into it the hypotheses of Aristotelian science. Vegetative, animal, and rational, the soul was a trinity in unity; and this trinity in unity informed a body, which was a variously mingled four-in-one of hot, cold, moist, and dry—of sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic.

This medieval threesome within a foursome was even more liable than the old somato-psychic debating society had been to supernatural interventions. To Homeric superstition, Persians, Jews, and Christians had added their repulsive fantasies of unremitting assaults by innumerable fiends, of diabolic infestations, of pacts between would-be magicians and the denizens of that solidly material hell, in which, according to the most reliable theologians, ninety-nine hundredths of the human race were predestined to suffer everlasting torment.

We begin with the primitive monism of Homer's debating society of somato-psychic factors. We move on to the Scythian shamans, with their mediumistic techniques of "traveling clairvoyance," and from shamanism to the Orphic, Pythagorean, and Platonic theories of man as a detachable, autonomous, unitary soul boxed up in a corporeal prison-tomb. From these, we pass to the Christian hypothesis of man—a hypothesis that fluctuated between an almost Manichaean dualism and a kind of residual monism, expressing itself in the obscure eschatological doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Unmitigated dualism comes in with Descartes, and for more than two centuries remains the theory in terms of which men of science and, with few exceptions, men of letters do their thinking about the human organism and its relationship to the external world. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of psychology as an independent science and of psychiatry as a medical specialty