The Greek Origins of Belief

MANY philosophers and psychologists assume that belief is a property or (both occurrent and disposition)al state which like having ten toes or walking upright has characterized human beings for as long as there have been such creatures.' On the other hand, some' challenge this assumption on the grounds that (i) the idea of having beliefs is a theoretical notion dreamed up at some time in the past as an attempted explanation of certain aspects of human behavior, and (ii) scientific work now increasingly shows that the theory in which this notion is embedded (folk psychology) like the phlogiston theory of combustion and the demonic possession theory of madness before it is mistaken. Therefore according to the latter thinkers, strictly speaking there are not, and never were, such things as beliefs, nor any property, state or activity that deserves to be called "believing." In this essay I shall argue for a third alternative that it is unnecessary to insist that the notion of belief (a) either applies to every human at every time, or (b) has never applied to any of them, because (c) belief is not a category universal to humans, like having a chin or being capable of speech, but a cultural achievement like the discovery of agriculture or the use of fire. Thus, I maintain that human beings only began to believe things at least in the strict or full sense of the word after certain historical events had made it possible for them to do so. Nevertheless, even though belief is not an inborn capacity but something we have invented, it still is appropriate to think of it as partially revealing what human beings are like, since the human nature we now possess is not something settled once and for all by innate factors, but also has been molded by certain historical experiences.

The methodological principle I follow in this essay is similar to Locke's "plain historical method." That is, my claim is that once one sees clearly how believing originated, one also obtains an effective means of understanding the nature of belief itself. To this end, I propose to take as a guide but also to reinterpret in a fundamental way certain speculations of the psychologist Julian Jaynes about the origin of consciousness in [17].

Most people agree that a remarkable event of a mental nature took place in the Greek world on the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean at about the lime of Thales in the sixth century B.C. What I mean is that at that place and time a new way of thinking seems to have been inaugurated, which many (including ourselves) are still employing more or less well and faithfully today. What exactly was the change in question? Jaynes' idea is to interpret this event3 as the discovery or invention in historical times of consciousness, in the sense of a stream of inner, reportable experiences. According to him, all people living before the period we are talking about were nothing more than unconscious automata. The minds of these "pre Greek" humans were divided into two relatively separate and independent parts (hence Jaynes' phrase "bicameral mind"), which either were identical with, or caused by, states and processes in the right and left cerebral hemispheres respectively. In the case of one of these primitive thinkers, all communication between his two mental realms took the form of commands pronounced by hallucinatory voices. Jaynes says these voices always originated from the non linguistic or (usually) right brain/mind, and were heard by the left or linguistic brain. The latter, left brain then was constrained to obey and put into effect all such commands referred to as "the voices of gods" in ancient texts and inscriptions in an automatic, unconscious manner. However in early Greek times all this changed, because some people then became able to control their thought and action freely, by means of explicit self consciousness. The crucial thing was that each of these' newly liberated thinkers learned how to develop a mental representation of himself as both agent and passive recipient of experiences. The focus provided by this inner "self symbol" then acted as a core around which the person was able to integrate and unify his two previously separate unconscious "half brains" into a single, conscious mind (cf., e.g., [17]:216 22).

Do informed people agree with Jaynes? The answer is that the scholarly world, almost universally, has denounced his speculations as mistaken, misleading and fantastic.6 I am no exception to this general rule, since I also intend to denounce them in much the same terms in the following. But before doing that, I want to point out a strength in Jaynes' position which seems to me largely to explain the fact that even those who think of his views as obviously wrong, often still find them fascinating and worth considering. It is that Jaynes takes account of an important point which most other theorists overlook viz., that complex, "higher" animals differ from simple ones like amoebas in that the natural kinds, or sets or projectible properties which make these creatures what they are may not be present from the beginning (e.g., from birth), nor inevitably come to be simply as a result of growth and maturation. Instead, some aspects of these natural kinds may reveal themselves, or come to be effective, only if certain events take place in the lives of the individuals in question.

To see this, consider the example of the horse. Some (vide, e.g., [14]) call this animal "God's gift to man" on the grounds that it confers enormous benefits on human beings and brings no great corresponding disadvantages as well, almost as if it had been "made" with its future human masters in mind. Yet it would be just as appropriate to say that man was God's gift to the horse, because horses, unlike many other animals, respond to domestication in a particularly positive way i.e., live longer, grow larger, are generally more healthy, contented, etc. in' this state than when living wild (cf. [11]:390 and [30]:49). If Homo sapiens never had appeared during the history of the earth and, as a result, horses never had been domesticated, then although horses still presumably would possess the potentialities which make them especially suited for domesticated life, these properties would have remained general rather than specific, and dormant rather than actualized. Therefore, the particular natural kind which constitutes horses as the animals they are, in fact is more developed and fully expressed by virtue of the historical accident that horses happened to have been subjected to domestication than would have been the case if this never had occurred.

We can make a similar point also about human beings. It is not true, as is sometimes claimed (e.g., in [21]:76 7), that the sheep or dog was the first animal that man brought under domestication, since this title belongs to man himself. Thus we can suppose the same sort of "conditional development" took place in the case of humans as we noted already for horses. In other words, it is plausible to suppose that human beings would lack many of their present properties if they had been exposed to historical and cultural influences significantly different from/ those they in fact experienced. And just as with horses, this is not true in a merely trivial sense=as in the fact that no person could be an airplane pilot if airplanes had not been invented, or desire to travel to New Zealand if the state of New Zealand had never been founded but also in the sense that humans would not have developed many of the important general capacities which they now possess in the absence of certain historical events. Thus, Jaynes' thesis that human consciousness depends on particular historical occurrences' is not necessarily absurd for at least two reasons. First, the development of the species Homo sapiensanalogously with that of many other higher animals has taken place in a series of "jumps" determined by certain special opportunities, training, stimulation, etc., as well as by gradual (Darwinian) approximation and accommodation to an ecological niche. Second, an acculturated, educated person is usually "more himself ' in particular, expresses human nature in a fuller, more determinate waythan one who lives in a relatively primitive, undeveloped state.

I shall have more to say about these matters later. But let me now address the question why, in spite of the preceding observations, I nevertheless agree with those other commentators who say we are not entitled to accept Jaynes' theory at face value. One reason is that it seems to me that Jaynes' view obliterates the very thing it originally was supposed to explain viz., our pre analytic understanding of consciousness by drawing the line between "conscious" and "unconscious" at a different point than that which most people would accept. For example, not many would agree with Jaynes that (i) the vast majority of all humans who ever lived were totally unconscious, or (ii) that the same is true of all non human animals! To put the same point another way, the distinctions of commonsense psychology have at least a prima facie validity, so that any theorist who rejects them needs to explain why. Further, I think it is important to remember that people's use of a common sense psychological term is causally determined by, and in this sense "gets at" something real, although not perhaps any one thing, nor a fortiori the particular one thing that those who employ this term suppose.9

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