9.1 Ancient Psychology

It's philosophy day, what a joy to the world. The chapter is called "What is a Human Being?" The sections I've come up with include.

9.1 Ancient Psychology
9.2 The Rise of the Individual
9.3 The Fall of the Individual
9.4 A Christian Perspective

I don't think most philosophy books tend to cover this topic very much, so this will be interesting.
__________
9.1 Ancient Psychology and Sociology
We largely absorb our default understanding of what a human being is from our environment growing up. These understandings are some of the most basic ways we think about ourselves and others around us--and some of the elements of our thinking about which we tend to be most unreflective. In the West, for example, children are often raised to be individualists who can sharply distinguish themselves from their families and starting point in life. We often think of ourselves as free to determine who we are, whom we marry, and what we want to be.

However, this understanding does not seem to be the default way in which human beings think about themselves. The majority of cultures both in the past and present have not tended to think of themselves in this way. The West cherishes the freedom of individuals to determine their own identity and to have individual influence on society at large. But most cultures in history have valued remaining true to your inherited identity and societal structure, with certain select individuals destined to lead the vast majority of lessers. The contrast between these two perspectives--both largely unreflected upon--has been particularly evident when the West has tried to "help" other cultures in the area of freedom and democracy without apparently taking the distinctions into full account.

The distinction comes into particular play for Western Christians when they read the books of the Bible, which were written in what are sometimes called collectivist cultures, cultures in which a person's identity is primarily embedded in the groups to which you belong, particularly your race, family, and gender. [1] Westerners will tend to read simple words like "I" and "you" with all the assumptions they make when they use these words in reference to themselves and others as individuals. But many of these assumptions will not hold true for what biblical authors and audiences were thinking.

[textbox: collectivist culture, individualist culture]

In collectivist or group cultures, individuals have what is called dyadic personality. A person defines themselves primarily in terms of their external relationships and the way others perceive them rather than by personal self-identification. Men are a certain way and women are another. Jews are one way and Greeks are another. Wealthy people are this way and poor people another.

In reality, of course, people and people groups are much more complex than simple stereotypes. But most human brains can only differentiate things by way of a relatively small number of distinctions. We inevitably learn things and process the world by categorizing things, by putting things into "boxes." [2] In group cultures, these boxes are relatively large and are sanctioned by culture and "tribe." We tend to ignore the things that don't fit in our boxes--or label such people as deviant--while highlighting those things that fit with our preconceived categories. Such boxes thus have an inherent tendency to skew reality, despite the fact that we cannot think without them. [3]

The biblical texts are filled with reflections of the group orientation of its authors and audiences. While Christians affirm Israel as God's chosen people in the Old Testament, the relationship God has with Israel has a number of characteristics that fit with the way other ancient peoples understood their relationship with their chief god. For example, the most likely original wording of Deuteronomy 32:8 pictures Israel's God as "God Most High" assigning the lesser gods to the other nations of the world. [4] Different peoples had different gods as their special patrons. Their gods were part of their identity, went to war with them, and so forth.

The fact that the Egyptians detested shepherds who herded sheep (Gen. 46:34) suggests that the Old Testament prohibition against pork was as much a matter of ethnic identity as anything else, despite the common claim that it had to do with health issues. The surrounding Philistines, Moabites, and Ammonites ate pork, Israelites and Canaanites of the central plain did not. And since gods were part of this identity, to eat pork was thus indirectly to associate with the gods of the surrounding peoples as well. When the Prodigal Son of Luke 15 finds himself feeding pigs, a Jewish audience would have immediately recognized that he had left Israel and, by implication, Israel's God.

The New Testament also reflects group embedded identity, although much of it also undermines traditional groupings. Titus reinforces the stereotype that "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons" (Tit. 1:12). Today we would want to emphasize that every individual from a place like Crete should be allowed to determine by their own actions whether they are a liar or not. We would call such a statement prejudicial. But it is typical of collectivist, "us-them," thinking.

The household codes of Ephesians 5-6, Colossians 3-4, and 1 Peter 2-3 largely embody stereotypically ancient roles for men and women, slaves and free, parents and children. Passages like Galatians 3:28 are far more distinctive and unique in the ancient world: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female." Of course the ancient world also allowed for "deviants." Aristotle, for example, can speak of certain women who are a "departure from nature" in their fitness to lead others (Politics **). Again, today in the Western world we would recognize that such boxes are as much a matter of culture as of nature and would argue that an individual should be defined by his or her actions and intentions rather than presupposing how someone will act or think because of the groups to which they belong.

A group culture is more oriented around external honor and shame rather than internal guilt for violating your own values. [5] Westerners tend not to notice statements in the Bible like, "I am not ashamed of the gospel" (Rom. 1:16), Jesus scorning the shame of the cross (Heb. 12:2), God crowning humanity with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5), or sex with an aunt uncovering the "nakedness" of an uncle (Lev. 18:14). Even the "blesseds" of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 are about receiving honor from God despite the shame or apparent foolishness of earthly peacemaking or poverty. We have changed the meaning when we read them in terms of individual happiness.

So what is a human person, as far as most of the world in most times and most places throughout history is concerned? The predominant answer has been that there are different types of persons depending on their groups. Ancient Jews divided the world into Jews and non-Jews (Rom. 1:16). Greeks divided the world into Greeks and barbarians (Rom. 1:14). There are slaves and free individuals. There are men and women. There are the rich and everyone else. We would argue that the default understanding of the human person, in so far as how people understand people, has historically been to define them externally in terms of the key groups to which they belong.

That is not to say, however, that we do not find expressions of common or universal personhood, especially in what we might call wisdom or proverbial type literature. "All people are like grass, and all human faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fail, because the breath of the LORD blows on them" (Isa. 40:6-7). "Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune." [6] Yet even in the proverbial wisdom of the ancients, we generally find people divided up into types like "righteous" and "wicked," with little sense of the possibility for someone to change from one to another or little allowance for mixture.

Before we leave the ancient concepts of personhood, we should mention some of those ancients who did look at human nature in ways that at least initially seem a little more familiar to the modern Western understanding. At the time of Christ, most people in the world did not actually believe in any kind of meaningful, personal afterlife for individuals. If the abbreviation R.I.P is somewhat well known today ("Rest in peace"), a common Roman epitaph translates as "I was not. I was. I am not. I care not."

And when we read the ancient Greek epics of Homer and the Latin Aeneid, we primarily find an underworld where shadows wander mindlessly, lacking the flesh and blood necessary for them to think. [7] This is presumably the same understanding of the afterlife we find in the Old Testament when we read statements like, "human beings die and are laid low; they breathe their last and are no more... they lie down and do not rise; till the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused from their sleep... If their children are honored they do not know it..." (Job 14:10, 12, 21).

Nevertheless, even in Homer's Illiad we find the beginnings of a special place among the dead for special people, the Elysian Fields (**). And some Greeks in the 500's did start to believe in an immortal soul that could survive death, although their view was not quite the way we tend to think of it. Ancient Persians also seem to have held some sort of view of future life for the dead at about the same time. One of the oldest known Greek philosophers to think something of this sort was Pythagoras (ca. 520BC), who is best known for the Pythagorean theorem in geometry.

Pythagoras is known for believing in some form of reincarnation. A famous anecdote in Xenophanes says that "once when he passed a dog that was being mistreated, Pythagoras pitied the animal and told the person, 'Stop! Don't beat him! For he is the soul of a friend whom I recognized immediately when I heard his voice." A little more than a century later Plato also held to the "transmigration of the soul." For Plato there is a fixed number of souls in existence. Plato spoke of the body as a "prison house" of the soul (**), from which the soul was freed at death. At death we drink from the river of forgetfulness (Lethe) and eventually our souls return to enter different bodies of various animals.

For most Greek thinkers, however, the soul is often not completely distinguishable from the more animal part of a person, particularly whatever life force it is inside that keeps you alive. For example, Democritus (**) taught that a person's soul was made up of "soul atoms" that disintegrated with the body at death. He believed in a soul but did not believe in an afterlife! The soul was simply that which gave your body life that went away at death.

The Jewish thinker Philo has a similar view of the soul, but could speak of the spirit inside a person as the "soul's soul" (Her. 55). However, at times he seems to differentiate various destinies for the dead. For example, the wicked seem to go to the lowest Tartarus, as in some Greek literature (Praem. 152). Others seem to be transformed (Sacr. 8).

In the end, what we find is that most ancients--as perhaps most moderns--spent little time contemplating what a human being actually was. People identified what a person was primarily by the groups to which they belonged. They had some sense of affinity with the animal realm and probably did not distinguish themselves from it as much as many of us are prone to do. On the other hand, they sharply distinguished themselves as mortals from the gods, whose power and immortality implied that a person should know their place in the world. Pride was one of the worst of sins, which simply tempted the gods to come and show you exactly where you fit in the vast scheme of things.

[1] See especially Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey, Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

[2] Cf. Piaget's theory of learning.

[3] See chap. 17 and postmodernism.

[4] The Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed that the ancient Greek translation of Deuteronomy 32:8 was actually more original than the Hebrew texts we had prior to 1947. They read, "When [the Most High] ... separated [humankind, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of] the children of God" (The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible ***).

[5] Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology...

[6] Confucius

[7] In the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus has to give blood to the "shade" of the prophet Teiresias so that he can think and speak to him.