The Greeks and the Irrational
E.R. Dodds (1951)
University of California Press

"There are a number of passages in Homer in which unwise and unnaccountable conduct is attribute to atē .... atē in Homer is not itself a personal divine intervention .... not does the word ever, at any rate in the Iliad, mean objective disaster .... atē is a state of mind - a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial or temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external 'daemonic' agency.... we may class all instances of nonalcoholic atē in Homer under the head of what I propose to call 'psychic intervention.'" (DODDS-1951, p. 5)

With regard to 'psychic intervention' in the Archaic Age, Dodds proposes to "look at some post-Homeric usages of the word atē (or its prose equivalent θεοβλάβεια) and of the word daemon.... Atē still stands for irrational as distinct from rationally purposive behavior.... Its seat is still the thumos or the phrenes [fn52: θυμός: Aesch. Sept. 686, Soph. Ant. 1097; φρήν, φρένες: Aesch. Supp. 850, Soph. Ant. 623], and the agencies that cause it are much the same as in Homer: mostly an unidentified daemon or god or gods..." (DODDS-1951, pp. 37-38)

"[T]he precise theological interpretation [is that] which makes of atē not merely a punishment leading to physical disasters, but a deliberate deception which draws the victim on to fresh error, intellectual or moral, whereby he hastens his own ruin .... There is a hint of this in Iliad 9, where Agamemnon calls his atē an evil deception (ἀπάτη) contrived by Zeus." (DODDS-1951, pp. 38-39)

"Here the psyche is the living self, and, more specifically, the appetitive self; it has taken over the functions of the Homeric thumos, not those of the Homeric noos. Between psyche in this sense and soma (body) there is no fundamental antagonism; psyche is just the mental correlate of soma. In Attic Greek, both terms can mean 'life' .... and in suitable contexts it can mean 'person'.... In fifth-century Attic writers, as in their Ionian predecessors, the 'self' which is denoted by the word psyche is normally the emotional rather than the rational self. The psyche is spoken of as the seat of courage, of passion, of pity, of anxiety, of animal appetite, but before Plato seldom if ever as the seat of reason; its range is broadly that of the Homeric thumos. When Sophoclose speaks of testing ψυχήν τε καὶ φρόνημα καὶ γνώμην [fn20: Soph. Ant. 176. Cf. 707 f. ... and Eur. Alc. 108.], he is arranging the elements of character on a scale that runs from the emotional (psyche) to the intellectual (gnome) though a middle term, phronema, which by usage involves both." (DODDS-1951, pp. 138-139)

"[It] is significant that Empedocles ... avoids applying the term psyche to the indestructible self. He appears to have through of the psyche as being the vital warmth which at death is reabsorbed into the fiery element from which it came (that was a fairly common fifth-century view). The occult self which persisted through successive incarnations he called, not 'psyche', but 'daemon' .... the function of the daemon is to be the carrier of man's potential divinity and actual guilt.... The complementary aspect of the doctrine was its teaching on the subject of catharsis - the means by which the occult self might be advanced on the ladder of being, and its eventual liberation hastened.... The notion of catharsis was no novelty; as we saw earlier, it was a major preoccupation of religious minds throughout the Archaic Age. But in the new pattern of belief it acquired a new content and a new urgency: man must be cleansed not only from specific pollutions, but, so far as might be, from all taint of carnality - that was the condition of his redemption." (DODDS-1951, p. 153) [PSA: Suitably tempered, this is not all that different from Aristotle's explication of the orthos logos at EE VIII.3]

"[T]o Socrates arete was something which proceeded from within outward; it was not a set of behaviour-patterns to be acquired through habituation, but a consistent attitude of mind springing from a steady insight into the nature and meaning of human life. In its self-consistency it resembled a science; but I think we should be wrong to interpret the insight as purely logical - it involved the whole man." (DODDS-1951, p. 184) [PSA: the contrast here is with Protagoras, who held that arete is merely a matter of habituation and correction; note the connection between Socrates' "whole man" and the Aristotle's "meta logou".]

"The Greek had always felt the experience of passion as something mysterious and frightening, the experience of a force that was in him, possessing him, rather than possessed by him. The very word pathos testifies to that: like its Latin equivalent passio, it means something that 'happens to' a man, something of which he is the passive victim. Aristotle compares the man in a state of passion to men asleep, insane, or drunk: his reason, like theirs, is in suspense. [fn41: EN 1147a11 ff.] We saw in earlier chapters how Homer's heroes and the men of the Archaic Age interpreted such experience in religious terms, as atē, as a communication of mēnos, or as the direct working of a daemon who uses the human mind and body as his instrument." (DODDS-1951, p. 185)

Speaking of Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus, Dodds states: "[F]or the poet, and for the educated part of his audience, this language [of atē and daemon] has now only the force of a traditional symbolism. The daemonic world has withdrawn, leaving man alone with his passions. And this is what gives Euripides' studies of crime their peculiar poignancy: he shows us men and women nakedly confronting the mystery of evil, no longer as an alien thing assailing their reason from without, but as a part of their own being - ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων .... [Dodds cites Medea 1078-1080] .... [A] conscious rejection of the Socratic theory has been seen, I think rightly, in the famous words that [Euripides] put into the mouth of Phaedra [in the Hippolytus] ... Misconduct, she sayd, does not depend on a failure of insight, 'for plenty of people have a good understanding.' No, we know and recognise our good, but fail to act on the knowledge: either a kind of inertia obstructs us, or we are distracted from our purpose by 'some pleasure.' [Hippolytus 375ff.]" (DODDS-1951, p. 186-187) 

"[T]he most striking evidence of the reaction against the Enlightenment is to be seen in the successful prosecutions of intellectuals on religious grounds which took place at Athens in the last third of the fifth century. About 432 B.C. or a year or two later, disbelief in the supernatural and the teaching of astronomy were made indictable offences. The next thirty-odd years witnessed a series of heresy trials which is unique in Athenian history. The victims included most of the leaders of progressive thought at Athens - Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Socrates, almost certainly Protagoras also, and possibly Euripides. In all these cases save the last the prosecution was successful: Anaxagoras may have been fined and banished; Diagoras escaped by flight; so, probably, did Protagoras; Socrates, who could have done the same, or could have asked for a sentence of banishment, chose to stay and drink the hemlock. All these were famous people. How many obscurer persons may have suffered for their opinions we do not know. But the evidence we have is more than enough to prove that the Great Age of Greek Enlightenment was also, like our own time, an Age of Persecution - banishment of scholars, blinkering of thought, and even (if we can believe the tradition about Protagoras) burning of books." (DODDS-1951, p. 189)

"When Plato took over the magico-religious view of the psyche, he as first took over with it the puritan dualism which attributed all the sins and sufferings of the psyche to the pollution arising from contact with a mortal body. In the Phaedo he transposred that doctrine into philosophical terms and gave it the frmulation that was to become classical: only when by death or by self-discipline the rational self is pruged of 'the folly of the body' [Phaedo 67A] can it resume its true nature which is divine and sinless; the good life is the practice of that purgation, μελέτη θανάτου. Both in antiquity and to-day, the general reader has been inclined to regard this as Plato's last word on the matter. But Plato was too penetrating and, at bottom, too realistic a thinker to be satisfied for long with the theory of the Phaedo. As soon as he turned from the occult self to the empirical man, he found himself driven to recognise an irrational factor within the mind itself, and thus to think of moral evil in terms of psychological conflict (στάσις). That is already so in the Republic: the same passage of Homer which in the Phaedo had illustrated the soul's dialogue with 'the passions of the body' becomes in the Republic an internal dialogue between two 'parts' of the soul [Phaedo 94DE; Rep. 441BC]; the passions are no longer seen as an infection of extraneous origin, but as necessary part of the life of the mind as we know it, and even as a source of energy..." (DODDS-1951, pp. 212-213)

"Certainly it is in this age that the Greek pride in human reason attains its most confident expression. We should reject, says Aristotle, the old rule of life that counselled humility, bidding man to think in mortal terms (θνητὰ φρονεῖν τὸν θνητόν); for man has within him a divine thing, the intellect, and so far as he can live on that level of experience, he can live as though he were not mortal.... But ordinary human living, of course, is not like that. Aristotle knew that no man can sustain the life of pure reason for more than very brief periods; and he and his pupils appreciated, perhaps better than any othre Greeks, the necessity of studying the irrational factors in behaviour if we are to reach a realistic understanding of human nature. I have briefly illustrated the sanity and subtlety of their approach to this kind of problem in dealing with the cathartic influence of music, and with the theory of dreams.... Aristotle's approach to an empirical psychology, and in particular to a psychology of the Irrational, was unhappily carried no further after the first generation of his pupils." (DODDS-1951, pp. 238-239)

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