The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
Homer’s words, phren and thymos, do not appear in the modern sense of
anatomy, yet they reveal the state of equilibrium and balance that was unique
with the Greeks. Those terms are indispensable to us in trying to trace the trend
of their mind. The duality of diaphragm (phren) and heart (thymos) is that of
breath and pulsation. Yet the breathing of the air and the pulsation of the blood
belong to each other as the systole and diastole of the circulation. As between
blood and breath, heart and diaphragm, the consciousness of the Greek swayed
between mind and understanding, image and reasoning, fantasy and argument.
Their thinking was in truth nearer to the respiration than to the brain. The
thought was not yet isolated from the world. It did not die within the brain,
but it lived within heart and lungs. It is for this reason that the Greeks felt the
center or seat of their souls to be in the breast.
One can hardly find a more illuminating passage on this subject than the
words of Aristotle in his book On the Soul where he describes how, during
the half millennium from Homer to his own days, people thought about this
question: Thinking, both speculative and practical, is regarded as akin to a form
of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other, the soul discriminates and is
cognizant of something which is. Indeed the ancients go so far as to identify
thinking and perceiving. For example, Empedocles says: “For ’tis in respect
of what is present that man’s wit is increased”; and again, “whence it befalls
them from time to time to think diverse thoughts”; and Homer’s phrase “For
suchlike is man’s mind” (Od. XVIII/136) means the same. They all look upon
thinking as a bodily process like perceiving, and hold that “like is known as well
as perceived by like.” 13
That thinking in the sense of the Greek soul was never the abstract brain
functioning of the modern intellect is shown by another statement of Aristotle
who himself reached, for his time, the closest possible approach to abstraction.
He wrote in his Metaphysics: “We think that knowledge and understanding
belong to art rather than to experience.” 14 Aristotle, who declared that love of
wisdom (philosophia) is an art, and that wonder is the true origin of thinking,
was aware of the fact that thinking was a kind of perceiving. “If thinking is like
perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what
is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that.