Julian Jaynes

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism and Madness

Introduction

I am still in the middle of reading Wouter Kusters’ phenomenal Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. This book is a must read for all interested in philosophy, mysticism and madness, and those who are open to the disturbing closeness, even overlap, of all three, like Kusters’ ideas that: Philosophy is controlled madness; Madness develops its own philosophy, which is not necessarily mad; Monist philosophies push you to mysticism, which can take a turn into madness when you see too many connections; Madness could be cured with a better, less verbal and imaginary mode of mysticism. The book is a true cornucopia of well-developed crossings and relevant to all interested in the emerging practice of philosophical counseling.

I read a big chunk of the book in mid-January at a six hour transfer at Mumbai airport, tired and high on caffeine in a sea of strangers, with some staring at me with seemingly benign wonder. Usually I’d feel uncomfortable in such a setting, but the book has a very calming effect, because, I think, the writer has something very important to share; something he knows literally inside-out as he has lived through two psychotic episodes, and takes great care to formulate. He even shares chunks of his psychotic, stream of consciousness thinking, which are funny, absurdist, fascinating, meaningful narratives.

The Instability of Inner Time-consciousness

A special spot in the book is reserved for Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness, one of the deepest reflections on the possibility conditions of conscious experience, and in Kusters’ writing a handy tool to understand both normal and psychotic experiences.

How do we keep consensus reality running in a semi-chaotic flow of events? And what happens when that breaks down and a psychotic manner of meaning-construction takes over? How can we best understand the interplay between memory, the just-passed (retention), the present, the just-to-come (protention) and expectations in the construction and change of reality? Kusters makes good use of the idea that much can be learned from things going wrong, like Heidegger’s broken hammer and the unfortunate cases Merleau-Ponty looked into to understand behavior at its most basic moments of constitution.

Descriptive phenomenologies of madness and curative existential psychotherapies have earlier been developed by Merlau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Thomas Szaz, Ronald Laing, Ludwig Binswanger, Meddard Boss, Viktor Frankl and quite some others, and Kusters can probably be placed in this category. Arguably he moved the investigation a couple of notches further.

For another step into understanding the genesis of madness I would connect the issue with Kant’s faculty of the productive imagination, which does not result necessarily in sane, justified knowledge, and actually could explain the highly productive, but not necessarily intelligible imagination operative in madness.

This highly intriguing and explanatory faculty got muffled away in the B version of the Critique of Pure Reason, only to be saved by Heidegger but for a few years just after he wrote Being and Time and developed a phenomenological reading of Kant.

Recently the faculty of productive imagination made a come-back with the work of Saulius Geniusas. Paul Ricoeur connected it with narrativity, the very effective epistemic device involved in identity-formation, a theme mentioned by Kusters and to which I devoted my master thesis.

Jaynes’ Take on Madness

The subject matter also connects with an impromptu paper I delivered a week earlier at this yearly philosophy conference which was started in 1925 by Nobel laureate Tagore and philosopher and first president of India, Radhakrishnan. One of its themes was the restoration of the ecosystem. This year it was hosted by the Mahatma Gandhi University, Wardha, Maharashtra, where Gandhi had his ashram from 1936 till his assassination and where he proclaimed the ‘Quit India’ movement. We visited the enchanted place, which was silently inspiring.

I titled my presentation, for which I got ten minutes, “The Future of Consciousness: Is Krishnamurti its Prophet?” It incorporates the ideas of Julian Jaynes, who also has some profound insights about the connection between madness and religion.

For Jaynes a lot of religious practices and manners of madness are triggered by a regression in (or by) the brain to an earlier ‘architecture’ he named bicameral, which was prevalent in the Bronze Age. This architecture had us humans obey Auditory Command Hallucinations (ACH) either originating in ourselves or in our superiors like kings and priests. It was the gods talking to us like in Homer’s Iliad with little to no space for disobedience and deliberation.

According to Jaynes the ACHs originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and travel over the corpus callosum to the other side where its messages are received as if coming from outside. Ergo him naming it ‘bicameral’.

This ‘mentality’, ‘mind-set’, or ‘architecture’ increasingly disappeared with the onset of our modern sense of consciousness around 1,500 to 1,000 BCE, with its socially constructed, introspectable, inner mind space, in which metaphorical room we move around a fictive me in different scenarios in order to think through and feel out possible courses of action.

The speculation is that at the end of the Bronze Age many cultures clashed and the authorities led by ACHs didn’t come up with very viable strategies. People had to literally figure things out for themselves, which ‘selves’ had to be constructed from scratch in the process, something we experience also in our own development at around age 5 or 6. This egoic awareness comes with a lot of personal choices and uncertainty, and can be made more certain by applying science and rationality.

It also has a backward-looking inclination aimed at reviving the bicameral mind and its authority through religious practices like divination, ecstasies, oracles, enthusiasms, mediumship, channeling, etc. to trigger variants of command hallucinations, coming from gods, God, angels, masters or other imagined meta-empirical beings. It also derails in forward-looking hyper-individualism, scientism, technologization, ego-centered small-mindedness, neoliberalism, and the current state of global civilization on its way to economic and environmental doom.

Sustainable Future?

And what has this to do with Krishnamurti and the restoration of the ecosystem? Well, I am starting to make the claim that egoic consciousness, as it started just three thousand years ago, has gobbled up all civilizations and tribes (whether bicameral or pre-bicameral) into its egoic mentality and civilizational structure named ‘central civilization’, now in its global phase (Wilkinson, 1987).

This mentality and its social organization has an inbuilt vector towards disaster, which can only be challenged by a wholly different conscious architecture, of which Gautama might have been one of the earliest proponents and Krishnamurti one of the clearest later ones, with who knows how many in between. It might be this architecture which will have the required post-egoic structure and intelligent sensitivity to create a truly sustainable and just society. But that might need another 200+ years to break through to effective scale. Before that, I am sorry to say, brace yourselves.

Sources

Binswanger, Ludwig 1963. Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger. Translated by Jacob Needleman. New York: Harper & Row.

—–, —–. 1993. Dream and Existence. Co-authored with Medard Boss, edited by Michel Foucault, and translated by Keith Hoeller. London: Humanities Press.

Boss, Medard 1963. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis. Translated by Ludwig Binswanger. New York: Harper & Row.

—–, —–. 1965. A Psychiatrist Discovers India. New York: Grune & Stratton.

—–, —–. 1979. Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. Translated by Stephen Conway and Herbert Wehner. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.

Foucault, Michel 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.

—–, —–. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

—–, —–. 2006. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Frankl, Viktor E. 1946. Man’s Search for Meaning. Translated by Ilse Lasch. New York: Beacon Press.

—–, —–. 1955. The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books.

—–, —–. 2000. Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Geniusas, Saulius. 2015. “Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination.” Human Studies, 38/2: 223-241.

—–, —–. 2018. “ Productive Imagination and the Cassirer-Heidegger Disputation“. In Geniusas, Saulius & Nikulin, Dmitri (Eds.). 2018. Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. 135-156.

—–, —–. (Ed). 2018. Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

—–, —–. & Nikulin, Dmitri (Eds). 2018. Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Macquerrie, John & Robinson, Edward (Transl). New York: Harper Collins.

—–, —–. 1997 (1977). Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Emad, Parvis & Maly, Kenneth (Transl). Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.

—–, —–. 1962. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Churchill, James (Transl). Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.

Husserl, Edmund. 1964. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Churchill, James S. (Transl). Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kant, Immanuel. 1978. Critique of Pure Reason. Kemp Smith, Norman (Transl). London: Macmillan.

Kusters, Wouter. 2020. Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Laing, R.D. 1960. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin Books.

—–, —–. 1964. Sanity, Madness and the Family. Co-authored with Aaron Esterson. London: Penguin Books.

—–, —–. 1970. Knots. New York: Random House.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1942. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. New York: Beacon Press.

—–, —–. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry, 5/1: 143-159.

—–, —–. 1979. “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality”. Man and World, 12/2: 123– 141.

—–, —–. 1983-88. Time and Narrative. Volumes 1-3. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Schuller, Govert. 2019. The Possibility Conditions of Narrative Identity. Dissertation; Masters in Research in European Philosophy; Dr. Adrian Davis, Research Supervisor; University of Wales, UK.

—–, —–. 2022. “The Future of Consciousness: Is Krishnamurti Its Prophet?”. Presentation at the Indian Philosophical Congress (IPC), Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha, Maharashtra, 30 Dec 2022.

—–, —–. 2024. “The Future of Central Civilization: Historical Cycles and the Path Forward”. Presentation at the 2024 American Monetary Institute Conference, 29 Sept 2024.

Szasz, Thomas 1961. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper Perennial.

—–, —–. 1970. The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

—–, —–. 1988. Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Wilkinson, David. 1987. “Central Civilization”. Comparative Civilizations Review, 17/17: Article 4. Also in: Sanderson, Stephen K., 1995, Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-historical Change, Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, pp. 46-74.

The Cultural History of Inner Mind Space

Introduction.

Following are two sections from the dissertation: “The Possibility Conditions of Narrative Identity“. Though I intended to include much more Jaynesian theory, I think these two sections will be most accessible for Jaynesians. The rest is also pretty compatible with Jaynes. What my dissertation did was to highlight the narrative component of consciousness and identity.

§ 30. Rorty and Trans-generational Narrative Identity Development

Somewhere between a) the long-term evolutionary story of language and narrative cognition, and b) the short-term life-span course of individual identity formation, lies c) the medium-term development of literature itself, including its impact on identity formation.

Anthropologist and Jaynes scholar Brian McVeigh makes a similar point on inserting a medium-term, cultural time-span with its own developmental arc.

Mainstream, conventional research psychology typically utilizes two types of time: (1) developmental, i.e., the trajectory of the human life span; and (2) evolutionary or the unimaginably long passage of many millennia. But I submit that certain research projects demand a third type of temporality measured in several centuries (or in some circumstances several millennia). This mid-range type is better suited for understanding sociocultural adaptation ( McVeigh, 2019: 5).

Here I will lay out the main idea and the contributions from two scholars in the way they highlighted larger or smaller chapters of this story. They are the American philosophers Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Charles Taylor. The leading thought is that our identities have gone through changes in tandem with the changes in oral myths and written literature.

If our identities are thoroughly socially constructed by the formative power inherent in narrative cognition, then it stands to reason that any changes in the plots, characters, evaluative practices and emotional evocations throughout the ages will have a profound impact on the manner we take the world and ourselves to be and what action possibilities would be open.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty wrestled with this issue in her paper “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals” (1976). She perceives an enormous amount of identity variations throughout written history and acknowledges that identity theory is at an impasse, because theorists are very far from a consensus about the criteria by which persons can be identified. She wanted a history of the notion of identity and in her paper offered “a skeleton outline of some of the emotional and social spaces in which each of these move and have their being” (302).

In very short order the development of identity formations throughout western history went from Greek heroic characters, for whom lineage and deeds were paramount marks of identity; to figures who are “defined by their place in an unfolding drama” (307); to persons as dramatis personae who know they are playing roles and have donned a mask and are also a “unified center of choice and action” (309); to inward directed souls and minds slightly detached from the world; to selves with legal rights and societal obligations; and to individuals as “indivisible autonomous units” feeling the dialectic of individuality and community.

She sees connecting links between the different conceptions–the themes of agency and interiority are pervasive–but doesn’t see an “underlying substance” (320). If there is an abiding theme it would be that “humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conceptions of themselves” (323). Her proposed research program to still make some sense of all variations would be to “investigate the biologically adaptive functions of the various cultural grafts: the obsession with unification and choice, salvation and simplicity, isolated integrity and achievement” (323).

In short–and in congruence with the concepts of narrative identity and its evolutionary roots so far presented–Rorty sees persons and individuals (the neutral terms she uses to envelop the entire class of variations) as entities inventing themselves through self-interpretation within a cultural evolutionary context.

In very short, identities are the product of adaptive self-interpretation, which went through a series of changes in at least the last 3,000 years, and its record can be found in literature.

§ 31. Charles Taylor and the History of Inwardness

The second contribution to this mid-range story of the cultural evolution of identity comes from Charles Taylor. In his landmark study Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) he addresses the historical development of how identity was experienced covering more or less the same time-span as Rorty, i.e. early classical Greece to modernity.

Taylor, like Rorty, highlights the themes of interiority and agency and starts his story actually when the “inwardness” had not yet become a part of a person’s experience of himself and life. He observed that in Homer the locus of strength, inspiration, thought, and passions are fragmented throughout the body and were not yet to be ‘found’ in a unified mind located in the head. Taylor brings in the research by German philologist Bruno Snell, who wrote The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought.

Snell remarked on the absence in Homer of words that could happily be translated by our ‘mind’, or even by ‘soul’ in its standard post-Platonic meaning, that is, a term designating the unique locus where all our different thoughts and feelings occur (118).

Snell found in Greek literature that there was a gradual change form the Homeric sense of bodily dispersed passions and thoughts to the Platonic sense of a unitary inner mind.

Plato’s view, just because it privileges a condition of self-collected awareness and designates this as the state of maximum unity with oneself, requires some conception of the mind as a unitary space (119).

Against expectation the language of interiority was rarely used to make moral points (536, n7). That came later. With the Stoics interiority became the locus of the will, which could give or withhold assent by choice (137), and in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus the language of inwardness became more pronounced (537, n4).

With Augustine inwardness becomes even more central and very complex as it became the place of the soul, the will, truth, God and moral development. Taylor observed that Augustine was “concerned not just with a turn away from what is outside, but with a search within” (537, n4) and quoted his famous line: “Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas“, which translates as “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth” (129). For Augustine the inner/outer category becomes central and subsumes the other opposites of “spirit/matter, higher/lower, eternal/temporal, immutable/changing” (128-9). And the unity and wholeness of the self is only to be found in God and not (yet) in itself, which idea culminates in Descartes, for whom interiority is the locus of all thought as thinking substance, res cogitans, as opposed to res extensa, the spatial world of matter and one’s body.

Taylor considers the addition of “moral sources”, which were previously located outside in the well-ordered cosmos as an “epoch-making” and a “radical twist” to Augustinian inwardness (143). Reason rules the passions and dominates a disenchanted world. Reason becomes ‘disengaged’. The good life comes from one’s dignity as a rational being (152). Descartes established a “new conception of inwardness, an inwardness of self-sufficiency, of autonomous powers of ordering by reason” (158) resulting in a move towards mechanism and treating experience as a vorhanden object.

Another big step happened with the empiricist John Locke, who arguably demolished and rebuild the mind as a “punctual self” emptied from innate ideas and teleological impulses, i.e. the Tabula rasa. Locke “reifies the mind” and uses “metaphors to do with constructing and assembling stuff” (166). Ideas are impressions from outside to be treated as inert objects or propositional entities (164-5). Its context was the rise of a disciplinary stance and practices with its “ideal of rational self-responsibility” (167). Enormously important for Locke’s concept of personal identity is the role of reflexivity by which the self appears to itself. “Its only constitutive property is self-awareness” (49).

The story continues with Hume, Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer, who all contributed additions or made rejections to this ongoing concept of interiority. The arc more or less ends in the literary experiments of T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Inwardness is now complemented by decentering (465). The unitary self is no more and the focus is on the “flow of experience” and on language and its structures (465). The context is the ongoing Romantic reaction against mechanism, capitalism and industrialism (460-65). Meanwhile philosophers like Dilthey and Heidegger combat the role of mechanistic-utilitarian categories and turn from an idealized nature to the pragmatic life-world and try to retrieve experience from conventional, instrumental modes (469).

The upshot of this extraction from Taylor is the idea that 1) not only the concept of identity went through many phases, but that all these thinkers both expressed and influenced how identity was experienced at a non-thematic, quotidian level, and 2) that these identity concepts highlighting interiority can be integrated into a narrative identity theory, which Taylor himself subscribed to but not fully fleshed out theoretically (48-9).

Sources

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

McVeigh, Brian J. 2019. “Jaynesian Psychology: Misunderstandings and Methodology”. Document at academia.edu.

Rorty, Amelie O. 1976. “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals”. In: Rorty, Amelie O. (Ed.), The Identities of Persons. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 301-323. Also in: Rorty, Amelie O. (Ed.). 1988. Mind in Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.

The Jaynesian Paradigm and Beyond

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Introduction

The Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind proposed a novel and ingenious theory of consciousness, which is making a come-back in the scientific community. His initial reception was marred by a widespread misunderstanding of his concept of consciousness and the absence of neuro-imaging techniques to test some of his more precise hypotheses. These days, because of 1) brain imaging technologies; 2) the conceptual clarification of his overall theory; and 3) the formation of the Julian Jaynes Society, his theory is having a second birth in a truly inter-disciplinary fashion with many researchers thinking through and testing its multitude of implications (Kuijsten). Continue reading “The Jaynesian Paradigm and Beyond”