the ins and outs of the greek mind

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The Ins and Outs of the Greek MindIn and out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self by Ruth PadelReview by: J.-P. Vernant and Suzanne M. DeRobertArion, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter, 1997), pp. 161-167Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163643 .

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The Ins and Outs of the Greek Mind

J.-P. VERNANT

translated by Suzanne M. DeRobert

Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic

Self (Princeton University Press, 1992), xx+210 pages, paper, $12.95

XX.UTH PADEL'S work begins with the statement of a

paradox: on the stage of fifth-century Athens tragedy rendered

public in the form of a spectacle revealed to all a drama whose true

subject was lifted from the non-visible, the hidden, the interior?

intimate thoughts of the protagonists, distant sins buried in the

past, secrets, domestic dramas sealed within households. The

whole of this dense and fruitful work can be read as a reflection

that, while it departs from this problem, progresses and broadens

by linking several mutually illuminating themes which no one has

previously discerned as closely connected: first the manner in

which the Greeks thought of the inside and the outside, with the characteristics that pair them as opposites even as they ensure their

interconnection; second, how the Greeks represented their own

interiority, the presence deep within them of what we call the mind: emotions, passions, impulses, desires, judgement, irration

ality, in short, all that makes a human being a self, an individual with a particular destiny; and finally, the priority which the mod ern interpreter must accord to tragedy not only because of the par

ticular interest it brings to the "inner man" but also because the

genre's deep roots in the common soil of Greek culture draw on

other forms of expression, be they literary, scientific, or religious. For the person who seeks to penetrate a mental system?its coher

ence as well as its tensions, its ambiguities and dissonances?in

many respects as different from our own as that of the Greeks,

tragedy offers a realm of inquiry whose heuristic value is

unrivaled.

A mental system different from our own. The author returns to

this point many times in her study; it is at the very heart of her



I?2 THE INS AND OUTS OF THE GREEK MIND

research. One of the originalities of Padel's work is in fact to break

very deliberately with the naive and naturalistic idea that the

Athenians of the fifth century were "like us," that their culture is

directly accessible to us, and that in order to understand them it

suffices to use the same frameworks for reading which govern our

own experience of the world and ourselves. Are these frameworks

valid and appropriate? If Ruth Padel braves this difficult question without simplifying and without schematizing, it is certainly not

by chance. It seems to me that she is better armed with all the req uisite skills than anyone to do so. To discern what certain men

were to themselves in their own time and their own civilization

presupposes a double movement?a double talent as well?of

opposite directions. It is first necessary, as in any scientific proce

dure, to distance oneself from the object in order to clearly grasp its otherness with respect to ourselves; on the other hand, it is

equally necessary in any effort to understand the object to render

it familiar by assimilating ourselves to it as much as possible. Padel approaches the reading of these texts from the point of

view of both a philologue and a poet. As a philologue, she traces

the precise meaning of words across their diverse uses to uncover

the boundaries of the semantic fields whose organization implies a

shaping of the real, a classification of things utterly different from

those to which we are accustomed. As a poet, she is sensitive to

other, more expressive, aspects of the language. She permits the

same texts to resonate and come to life in such a way as to enter

fully into the play of associations, affinities, and comparisons that

echo for the modern mind the close relationships which in ancient

times linked domains we think of as radically separated today. Hence the importance Padel accords to the question of metaphor. When we refer to the "ebb of emotions," or the "tempests of pas

sion," we know these are simply ways of speaking. None of us

would be led to conclude that emotions are liquid or that passions are meteorological phenomena. But the assiduous study of ancient

texts reveals that before the fourth century, the Greeks had no

such sense of metaphor, which is to say that they had no such trope

linking two different notions which spring from entirely incom

patible categories. That which is metaphoric in these documents

must be taken literally, not simply as a way of speaking, but as a

way of thinking. In these instances, metaphor does not express the

fictive passage from one type of reality to another, entirely differ

ent reality; rather it suggests their full and real co-naturality.



J.-P. Vernant 163

How is this possible? For the fifth-century Greeks, she writes, "Emotional and intellectual events are not merely describable in

the same terms as physical movement: they are physical move

ment" (44). Which is to suggest that in poetic (epic, lyric, tragic),

medical, and philosophical texts, as well as in religious documents, the line of demarcation between the psychic and the physical, the

subject's interiority and the external world, is not found where we

draw it: there is no spiritual on one side, material on the other.

"We are made, body and mind, of the same stuff as the World out

side us" (43). The physical and the psychic are carved from the

same matter; if our mental life is entirely contained within the

organs and their liquids, exhalations, and canals that grant pas

sage between the inside and the outside?whether they are in

motion or at rest?then these physical realities are not made of

inert matter, but of animated and living forces. In this sense, our

physical nature, our phusis, is beyond us; it is no more separable from the demonic and the divine than it is from the psychological.

"Divinity is part of the fabric of the world and the self" (48). There

are not many disparate universes: the internal world of human

selves and their consciousness; the external world of natural physi cal objects; the supernatural world, with its gods and their powers. There is one unique cosmos in which the internal and the external, the mental and the physical, the natural and the divine all distin

guish themselves, at times in violent opposition to each other, at

times commingling, and at times adapting to one another, but

always in constant communication with each other: conflict and

harmony among realities at once related and opposed, whose

forces act in the same manner upon our bodies and our minds,

within the city or on the worldly stage. Even if some of these ideas

appear absurd to us, as Padel notes, "they do illuminate a mental

ity in which mind and body, metaphorical and literal meaning, divine and human impulse are inseparable" (86).

If the author were to stop here at these rather general affirma

tions, her book would chance falling prey to the criticism G. E. R.

Lloyd recently formulated against the recourse to a notion as

vague and abstract as that of mentality. In truth, Padel proceeds in

the opposite direction. She grounds her work in the concrete,

explores it, and never strays from it. The interpretive model she

suggests is not proposed at the outset of her work; it emerges from

the texts themselves after a rigorous analysis whose particular

merit is to have set in dialogue documents which have traditionally



164 THE INS AND OUTS OF THE GREEK MIND

been treated separately because of their different orientations. The model successfully evokes true "figures of thought" by high lighting parallels in vocabulary, modes of expression, and explica tive sch?mas shared by divining or sacrificial practices, medical

writings, physical theories, epic poetry, and works of tragedy. These figures impose themselves as norms and confer upon the ancient experience of self and the world its distinctive characteris tics. The picture thus drawn is no simpler than the one to which we are accustomed. Neither is it in any way fixed. Rather, in its unity, it is complex, ambiguous, fluid, and mobile.

Without restating the details of the analyses in their entirety, which, because of their very concrete and precise nature, the

reader must follow step-by-step in order to fully grasp, it is useful to focus upon certain points through which Padel's method reveals itself as particularly fruitful. We can begin with the insides, the entrails. The most general term that designates what constitutes

the interior of the human being is splanchna. But this word cannot

be fully understood without taking into consideration what the

splanchna represent in the ritual of bloody sacrifice. As soon as

the animal's throat is slit, its body must be opened and its entrails

exposed so that they may be detached and examined with care.

The hidden splanchna translate, in the victim's body, not only the life which animates it but, by the marks inscribed upon it as upon a slate, what the sacrificer must know about its relation to the

divine; the splanchna are valued as truthful omens. Placed within the obscurity of the body's interior, the entrails outline without

dissimulation the routes which open communication between

mortals and gods. In humans, also, the inside is obscure and hid den. To know what a man is made of?his character, his true feel

ings with respect to others?it would be necessary to open his chest and to observe his splanchna, which will be revealed

according to each case as firm or soft, burning or cold, tense or lax.

We will then know how things stand with him. Feelings, states of

mind, are not only located and hidden within the entrails; they are

the very state of these entrails. Anger is an excessive tension of the

splanchna. The entrails become an object of encoding by a multi

plicity of terms which are often studied and which will not mystify the modern interpreter: kardia, ?tor, h?par, phrenes, prapides,

menos, thumos, psuch?, noos. Padel reexamines the situation,

neglecting nothing of prior research in the field. The medical texts

she uses fully confirm and specify what Homer and the tragedians



J.-P. Vernant 165

already offered. Because these terms designate, without differenti

ating between them, psychic phenomena and organic realities, which have for the most part both an emotional and intellectual

value; because it is often difficult to differentiate the functions of

each and to circumscribe the anatomic element to which it refers;

and because the very same words can refer at times to the liquids

circulating in the body, such as blood or bile, and at times to the

exhalations which collect inside or escape to the outside, it seems

utterly useless to translate this varied and fluid vocabulary into the

very specific words of our psychological categories and our ana

tomical sciences. "No word has a total monopoly over thinking or

feeling. Concrete physical inner organs belong with ideas of psy

chological agency. Intellectual activity is inseparable from emo

tional activity" (39). Must we conclude, with Bruno Snell, that the

ancient Greek individual had no conception of the unity of his

body, nor of the unity of his self? Padel doesn't think so.

In her view, a unity of the interior world exists: each being con

stitutes a self furnished with an identity. The example of Odysseus is sufficient proof. But this unity, this identity of the human sub

ject, is not of the same order as it is to the modern mind. It is the

unity of a multiplicity, the identity of an always moving being,

completely analogous in us to those identities presented by an

external world at once unique and divided among antagonistic forces, at once constant and fluid. The unity of an intimate con

sciousness is not established in contrast to the dispersion of the external world, to its fragmentation in space; rather, it is homolo

gous to the unity of the cosmos, and it implies passage in both

directions between our insides and the outside, the physical and the divine. Our organs, our minds are permeable; they are unceas

ingly assailed by influxes which often weaken them, occasionally

strengthen them, but always transform them.

It is this fundamental vulnerability of the human being, mind

and body intertwined, that explains to doctors the suffering of ill

ness, and to the tragedians the disturbances and the calamities

brought about by the invasion of passion. For the former, either

the irruption of external forces or the predominance within us of one force over the rest, destroys the equilibrium of forces which

constitutes health and is threatened by the turbulence of the exter

nal world. Likewise, in the realm of political theory, it is the iso nomia ton dunameon which assures the health and stability of the

city, just as it is the rational equilibrium linked to self-mastery,



166 THE INS AND OUTS OF THE GREEK MIND

which in tragic heroes is vulnerable to passion, whose impact is

described in the same terms as those used in medical writings. One

may state generally that for those who lived in the fifth century, the

world of incessant change that surrounds us now would appear

dangerous: most of the maladies that afflict us come from the out

side. We suffer the modifications, the disruptions brought about

by external movements. But these movements are also a precondi

tion for knowledge; they open our minds, provoke our curiosity, incite us to meditation: "Our vulnerability is the source of treas

ured knowledge" (68). These tensions, contradictions, ambiguities?arising both in

ternally and externally?are brought into play by tragedy, which

strongly emphasizes certain characteristics just barely sketched

elsewhere in Greek culture. The awareness of a threat?animated

and non-human, inscribed in the very being of the external world

and ready to penetrate us?is dramatized in tragedy by a character

overcome completely by emotions, manifested as wild beasts and

demonic forces. His innermost self surrenders to the forces outside

of himself, which both move and constrain him. As though he is a

stranger to himself and his own actions, he becomes his own nega

tion. In the tragic sense, this otherness of self is related to every

thing that conflicts with the law or recognized norms (the visible, the luminous, knowledge, the pure, the stable, the masculine).

Padel excels at finding within these texts the aspects of the

splanchna?the intimate self, the mind?that assimilate these ele

ments when they are subjected to the tide of emotions, to the

unfurling of passions, of darkness, of the Night, with its cortege of

sinister children; to Hades, the subterranean world traversed by infernal rivers, as the splanchna are by the flow of evil elixirs. The

entrails, where the black blood darkens further under the influ

ence of passion, are also close to the female womb (one of the

meanings of the word splanchna). This internal body part, inti

mate and hidden within the body of the woman, yet open to pene tration from the outside, is obviously ambivalent: the womb can

produce life by nurturing the seeds of a new existence, but it is also

revealed as a destructive power in its secretion of impurities. The

interiority of tragedy is predominantly feminine. The mind within us is also open, accessible to that which would assault it from the

outside, invested by the criminal stain of ate. It is true that the

mind is equally creative, active?with its knowledge, its discourse, its independence. But of these two Greek models of the mind?the



J.-P. Vernant 167

receptive, passive and the active, source of plans and decisions?

tragedy strongly favors the former. Passivity and femininity pre vail. After the fifth century, the perspective of philosophers will

tend to shift to the active image of the male mind.

Among the analyses that illustrate and concretize these observa

tions, two are particularly rich and enlightening. The first bears

upon Agamemnon's decision to sacrifice his daughter. The text

(Agamemnon 219-21) has been the subject of many a scholarly commentary. Yet very few have demonstrated with such insight how the wind that misguides the judgement of Agamemnon is at

once exterior and interior. The winds that govern the eventual

departure of the fleet provoked externally by a god and stirred up

internally by the secret desire of the king, determine his impious decision, appearing as though they have been sewn together in the

fabric of the same textual imagery. The second observation, which concerns nature, statutes, and the role of the Erinyes in tragedy,

especially in The Eumenides, constitutes the crowning achieve ment of the work. Certainly, more than any other nocturnal

power, these implacable avengers, these dog-like goddesses unleashed in a pack on the trail of the parricide, hallucinating his

sin-stained mind, serve as an illustration of the confrontation and

complicity between the outside and the inside, the human and the non-human. But Padel manages to draw from the site at Athens

where they were worshiped?after their transformation in

Eumenides into guardians of the city, its lands, its men?as well as

from their presence rendered visible to all in the public space of the

theater, the last word of her study: "Athene's city earthed Apollo's vision of the foulness of mind, and made from it the paradox of

darkness illumined, the inside brought out. Tragedy, like its own

vision of the self, was where the terrible could also, for a while,

be good."



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