How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
We can add to kings and lords such items as technology and scientific invention, and we shall find that the same thing remains true: there is a very small part of history which is felt subjectively to be of supreme importance to us. As Dr Johnson says, ‘publick affairs vex no man’ and the news of a lost battle never caused any man to ‘eat his dinner the worse’. Conversely, the news of a scientific breakthrough or some immense discovery never makes any man eat his dinner the better.
This state of amphibiousness between society and the individual, between history and biography, is an odd and uneasy kind of existence. But we have to accept it, and in any process of education we have to prepare young people to live in both worlds—to live as best they can in their individual world and, if possible, to take an intelligent interest in the historical one. They probably can never feel the historical world subjectively as they should—or perhaps they shouldn’t; I think it is a great blessing that we don’t feel it subjectively most of the time. Anyhow, they should be aware of it intellectually and objectively, so as to be able to be useful citizens. For this is always the problem of human beings—to realize amphibiousness and to know that they must make the best of this world and of that.
I will conclude this brief sketch of our amphibiousness with a passage which has always touched me very much, from a strange late Elizabethan poet, Lord Brooke:
Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound:
Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sicke, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes?
Passion and Reason, selfe division cause.
The Problem of Human Nature
In the last lecture we discussed the rather curious relationship between the individual life and the public, historical life of man. In the lectures which follow I shall talk about the individual. I shall try to pose and answer the question, Who precisely are we? What sort of creature is the human being? Are we, as Descartes said, a completely individualized ego, whose essence is consciousness, and who is related only to one part of matter within the body? And is matter entirely of another class of reality, having as its essence only extension? Or are we, as modern empiricists are inclined to believe, a monistic mind-body? Is the self completely insulated from all other selves, or is there some kind of psychic medium in which all selves bathe, so that the individual is not totally cut off from other minds?
I want to start with the manner in which people in the past have thought about human nature. The terms in which they discussed the problem are of course very different from the terms in which we discuss it; they dealt with fundamentally the same facts in terms of different frames of theoretical reference. Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile making this historical detour because when we examine what people have thought in the past about the nature of man, we find that it does throw a great deal of light on the problem.
I shall begin with the theory of man as we find it in the well-spring of Western civilization, that is to say, in the Homeric poems. The best way of starting is to read a passage from the nineteenth book of the Iliad, where the terrible quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is made up. Agamemnon apologizes to the enraged Achilles for having taken away his girl, Briseis, and explains why he did it. He says,
I was not to blame. It was Zeus and my lot and the Fury that walks in the darkness, that blinded my judgment that day when I confiscated Achilles’s girl. What could I do? At such moments there is a power that takes command, Ate, the eldest daughter of Zeus, who blinds us, the cursed sprite that she is, flitting through men’s heads, corrupting them, bringing down now this one, now that one. Why, even Zeus was blinded by her once, and Zeus is known to stand above all men and all gods.
Instead of regarding this as a way of shirking responsibility, Achilles accepts the explanation wholeheartedly and says, ‘how utterly a man can be blinded by Father Zeus!’
The creature Ate which Agamemnon speaks of in this passage is a very interesting personage. In the later Greek tragedians the word ‘Ate’ stands for disaster in general, but in the Homeric poems ‘Ate’ means the state of mind that leads to disaster—the kind of infatuation, the moral blindness, the fact of being carried away, which leads men to do things against their better judgment and even against their rudimentary interests.
We see here that what we should call unconscious urges and drives is explained in the terms of the ninth century b.c. as intervention from without by supernatural forces. In a word, the whole theory of Homer is based upon the idea of demonic or divine possession. The gods either intervene directly or else they intervene by some agent such as Ate—who is herself a divine being—and they cause us to do preposterous and dreadful things.
Besides the bad interventions, there are in Homer also good interventions, where the supernatural powers suddenly come and help us. The word menos occurs very frequently in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, it means power, strength, the accession of some new insight or ability, the capacity to do something difficult or impossible. Menos will suddenly come upon a man in battle, or it will come upon him in counsel, giving him wisdom and intelligence. Even animals are capable of menos; a horse can suddenly have a great deal of menos and gallop at a much greater rate than it could before. So we see that the two sides of what we shall call the unconscious self are represented by two kinds of supernatural interventions.
In Homer, an intervention may be either by some known god—Zeus, or Zeus’s immediate agent, or Athena, or any of the other gods—or else it may be by some supernatural being whom one doesn’t know. In this case the intervention is spoken of as being caused by a daimon, an anonymous god of some kind. The daimon idea comes right down into Classical Greece. Socrates’s monitions—the little voice that he heard, telling him to avoid doing things which he ought not to do—was the voice of a daimon, a divine being. An interesting aspect of what Socrates has to say about these irrational interventions coming from what we call below the threshold of consciousness is the idea that there are several kinds of madness.
There is a natural madness due to disease and there are two kinds of supernatural madness: the destructive madness brought about by Ate, or by one of the gods who wishes to bring us down, and the helpful madness, which Plato divides into four categories—the prophetic madness (as illustrated by the Oracle of Delphi); the Dionysian ritual madness of the orgiastic catharsis; the poetic madness; and the erotic madness. Socrates says in one place that ‘the greatest blessings come to us by way of madness’, provided always that the madness be given to us by divine gift.
It is worth remarking that the idea of supernatural possession went on exercising a tremendous influence on men’s minds, and was accepted as a rational explanation of many peculiar forms of human behaviour, until well on in the seventeenth century. I happen to have made a study of this matter as it occurred in the seventeenth century; I wrote a book on the celebrated case of the Devils of Loudun, which is a story of the so-called possession of an entire convent of nuns. One sees in reading the theologians, the moralists, and even most of the doctors of the period, that the idea of demonic possession seemed absolutely obvious in those days. Until one has an adequate theory of the subliminal self, the idea of possession is completely logical and sensible. It seems to be about the only way in which these strange phenomena can be explained.
It is interesting in this context to see how the Greeks dealt therapeutically with many of the psychological problems which we treat either with drugs or by psychotherapy. Anxiety states, they found, could be dealt with very satisfactorily by getting people to participate in the Dionysiac orgies, which were great dances that went on for hours and hours until people went into a kind of ecstasy and even fell down in a state of exhaustion. Later on came the corybantic dances, which were diagnostic as well as cathartic. As far as one can make out, the point of the corybantic dance was first of all to listen to certain types of music, each of which expressed the personality
