Nothing seems to be as axiomatic in our thinking about human identity and self-understanding as the following thesis: that human identity and selfhood presupposes a radical difference between the body and the mind. Our mind, soul or psyche is the center of human identity and moral excellence – the most precious part of humanity and potentially immortal, possibly surviving even physical death. Our body or soma is the mortal vessel of our soul; some would even say its prison, which will perish and disintegrate.

The radical antithesis between body and soul is what defines humanity and sets it apart from the immortal gods and the other mortal animals. We are, as the Roman antique philosopher Plotinus called us, amphibious beings. We live simultaneously in both a physical, temporal realm and an immaterial and immortal realm. Our own decisions in this temporal and fleeting world shape our moral character, and thus decide whether we will live with the gods after our time on earth or become something beastlier than the beasts. For hundreds and hundreds of years this view predominated the self-understanding of thinkers in their mythical, religious and scientific thinking about themselves. Some such thinking still determines actual religious worldviews to this day.

But, it will come as no surprise, such thinking and self-understanding developed over historical time. There had to be presumably a time, when humans did not yet think about themselves in precisely those terms, a time, when they so did, and possibly a time, when they will think about themselves in completely different ways. It is precisely this historical development of dualistic conceptions of body and mind, which is the topic of the book by A. A. Long: Greek Models of the Mind and Self.

Long has written an interesting and inspiring book tracing the development of Greek notions of the mind and the human self from Homer through the Hellenistic philosophers and Plotinus. But as Long himself quickly points out in his book, the historical tracing of the notions of the mind and the self is fraught with danger. The first premise of his book, Long states, “is that understanding our selves is the hardest thing in the world … and yet endlessly fascinating because it cannot be finally settled by empirical research. There are no facts to decide, once and for all, whether the mind is part of the body, or whether it is a spiritual substance, or an epiphenomenon of the brain.” (p. 1). The second premise of his book “is that we can continue to discover aspects of our human possibilities or aspirations by means of the Greek material (Long) wants to explore” (p. 2). A sort of Greek renaissance in our understanding of our mind’s nature, and nothing less, is the main goal of the book.

But to do this, we need to tread carefully with historical material and try not to infuse the evidence with our more “modern” understanding. As Long admonishes, intellectual historians have often taken themselves to be studying the development of concepts and ideas and applied some ideas of progress to their work. Concepts, in this way of thinking, started out in a primitive and confused form and by the by gained complexity and clarity in the process. Progress from a primitive to a sophisticated understanding is the necessary path according to this view of looking at history. That way of thinking is no longer fashionable and by now discredited.

Long strongly resists this linear kind of progressive thinking. The development of concepts and ideas is much more complex – seeing some developments in spelling out some elements of concepts, but sometimes also re-invigorating older understandings of concepts in new ways: all benefitting our self-understanding in complex and intricate ways.

In his succinct overview, Long draws out specific understandings of the human mind starting with the Homeric poems in chapter 1. Homeric characters have bodies and they have minds. But Homer’s characters, rather than being described as having a mind or soul that is distinct from their bodies, are what Long calls in his book psychosomatic wholes. Homer would not have understood how one could see the two aspects of human identity as distinct. Rather body and mind are intimately intertwined, so much so, that one cannot seriously understand the one without the other. “Where they (the Homeric figures) think and feel, and what they think and feel with, are as much parts of their general makeup as are their hearts and their guts.” (p. 6).

There is no intimation in Homer of understanding the mind as separate from the body. This is it: human identity, its very core, is this psychosomatic whole. Homeric characters are deeply immersed in their mortality, focused on life in the here and now, acutely aware of their mortality and the unbridgeable chasm that separates them from the immortal gods. When the person dies, to be sure, his psyche leaves his dead body and leaves for Hades. But his psyche does not retain the person’s identity. Actually the person dies with his body. The psyche is just an afterthought of the person, a mere lifeless ghost, a specter of the previous person. Homer tells us as much in the beginning of the Iliad, where he states that the shades (psychai) of countless warriors have been sent to Hades by Achilles’ wrath, leaving “themselves” (that is, their bodies) as carrion for dogs and birds.

But over time, this psyche, a mere ghost, developed in Greek thinking to being the center of consciousness and the core of human identity, even surviving the death of the body, and actually the soul began to signify the most important part of human beings which can attain immortality. How did this radical shift come about? By the end of the 5^th century BCE, Greek authors and thinkers viewed the soul as distinct from the body and possibly surviving the death of the body. Plato’s views on the essence and nature of the soul influenced subsequent writing, thinking and culture over more than a thousand years. Why did this shift from Homer to Plato happen?

Long’s book is a search for an answer to this intriguing question. And Long outlines his answer to that question in his third chapter titled “Bodies, Souls, and the Perils of Persuasion”. Long argues that the rhetorician Gorgias and his fellow sophists were a major catalyst in Plato’s formative thinking leading up to the dualistic conception of body and soul. The sophists argued that any audience could be manipulated by a supremely effective speaker to believe anything the speaker wanted them to believe. A soul was simply too weak to resist persuasive speech or the attraction of bodily beauty. As drugs could control the body, persuasive speech could exert control over the soul. As long as the speaker employed effective rhetorical means, anyone’s opinions could be turned. The sophists built a whole business case out of their knowledge and insights and made good money selling their skills to rich Greek citizens. Anyone can understand how important such skills might have been in Greek polities ruled by common assemblies.

Plato reacted to the Sophists’ teaching, so Long argues in his book, by developing his extreme dualism pitting the powers and excellence of the philosophical soul against the demands of the body – actually inversing the balance of powers. Plato’s philosophy demanded of persons to attend to the excellence of their souls in this life and the afterlife, and to abstain from the bodily pleasures and worldly pursuits of happiness. Thus he mounted a strong defense of philosophy (based on the teachings of this mentor Socrates) against rhetoric as taught by the Sophists. And it was this defense of philosophy that brought Plato to his extreme dualism that he subsequently worked out in more and more details in his works, drawing out more and more of its implications leading to the possible immortality of the soul.

Is Long’s argument persuasive? It does not show conclusively why and how Plato reached his conclusions and why the shift in understanding our mental self changed from Homer to the dualistic picture. Long bases his argument on the analysis of one of Gorgias’s work: The defense of Helen. He does not argue in any detail why he singles out Gorgias’ work as the most representative and conclusive for the development of Plato’s theory. Furthermore, he does not explain in any detail why the movements of the Sophists emerged in the 5^thcentury BCE. Obviously any analysis would have to describe the complex facts of Greek history, culture and thinking that came together at this precise time to explain why the mental setting made it possible to conceptualize the human mind in drastically different ways than before. As it stands his argument is interesting and engaging. But it does not move beyond a guess. The shift in the self-understanding of the human soul and its immortality came at a time in the evolution of Greek thought (around the 6^th and 5^th century BCE) at which new ways of thinking about the human afterlife based on orphic and Dionysian rites flooded in from the East. A full understanding of the shifts in the thought about Greek soul belief would have to look deeper into the historical and societal changes taken place around that time in the Greek city-states.

But this notwithstanding, Long’s book is an insightful overview of antique Greek thoughts about the human nature and the human soul. It is written in an accessible style that opens up the discussion to a wide variety of readers interested in the topic. Taken with this purpose in mind, it does a very fine job in accompanying the reader through the labyrinth of views on the soul developed within the cosmos of Greek thinking. Taken further than that, some crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing and not everything Long writes can clarify the issues he himself poses.

© 2015 Harry Witzthum

Harry Witzthum, Ph.D. did his doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield (UK). His research interests comprise the philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophy of language, and cognitive science.  He currently lives in Switzerland.