Ow, my brain.

These advances in human cognition

Might have met with Homeric derision

To part body from mind

Might be thought unkind

But it’s worthy of great recognition

As one might expect considering the subject matter, I had a lot of thoughts about this reading... and I really enjoyed it, but I had serious difficulty articulating all the concepts effectively. So I'm going to give it a shot, but I feel very scattered about this one...

For as long as human beings have been able to conceptualize their own mortality and speculate about what happens after death, they have been looking for language to define abstract concepts. However, expanding language to incorporate these concepts led to people changing their thoughts about things that they had previously taken for granted, like the relationship of their limbs to the rest of their bodies.

The crucial cultural invention that accelerated the articulation of abstract concepts was the development of religion. In starting to conceive of an invisible divinity and attribute to it causation of events and concerns beyond their ken, humanity began to need the language for things they could not see and touch. The necessity of imputing supernatural (or as Snell would articulate it, in fact, quite natural) powers to these divine beings started humanity on the path to finding a concept of their own individual spirits, which led to language to distinguish the ‘self’ from the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’.

In observing the transition from Homer to Heraclitus and how this articulation evolved, it was particularly insightful to read the Snell, who forced a re-examination of basic ideas that the reader would take for granted because of the filter of culminated Western thought. As Snell says, “It has long been observed that in comparatively primitive speech abstractions are as yet undeveloped, while immediate sense perceptions furnish it with a wealth of concrete symbols which seem strange to a more sophisticated tongue.” In translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, readers are given a text that has been translated for literary beauty and readability more than literal accuracy, so many of these sense perceptions as articulated by Homer are read with all the implied abstraction of contemporary English rather than the intended meaning of the author for that meaning would be almost indecipherable to the modern reader, so it becomes very difficult to imagine how the abstractions we take for granted were foreign to Homer.

One of the most crucial evolutions in thought between Homer and Heraclitus can be defined here: “[Heraclitus’] rejection of external guardian spirits (F60) has profound consequences: we make our own destinies. In a world of flux and hidden stability, of war and hidden peace, we choose to be one of the sleepers or to wake up.” In moving past externalized guardian spirits and focusing on self-determination and self-awareness, Heraclitus begins to create both accountability and sovereignty and internalize the rich unseen outer world. People are not just reactive in action, but proactive, and it is in proactivity that we push civilization forward.