|
|
|
20 June 2005 |
|
|
|
There is a tendency in discussions of consciousness to talk as though nobody had any particular ideas about the mind before Descartes 'invented' the soul and 'introduced' dualism into European thought. When we consider the idea of the soul at all in connection with consciousness, we generally adopt a kind of neo-Cartesian conception of it: a simplified Christian view of the kind which was accurately, if insultingly, summed up by Gilbert Ryle with the phrase 'the ghost in the machine'. This isn't really fair even to the Christian tradition, which ranges from extreme mysticism, like that of Meister Eckhart (who thought human souls superior to those of angels, and spoke of passing on to a plane beyond God) to the resolute materialism of Hobbes, (who believed that even God was corporeal). Non-christian traditions get even shorter shrift. This neglect of ideas from older sources is is not actually altogether unreasonable: you wouldn't go searching through ancient Chinese or Hittite texts for the solution to a modern engineering problem, so why should you expect the same sources to provide anything of more than historical interest on consciousness? The trouble is, the mental clichés which remain unchallenged at the back of our minds may make it difficult to think in new ways about the problem, confining us to the same old narrow tracks we have so often traversed before; trying to get our minds round some of the varied ideas of the past may help us see a wider range of possibilities. The scale of what we may be missing is made clear by the sheer difficulty of grasping properly other conceptions of the mind: even the Greeks, in spite of their colossal influence on the way we think, are very difficult to get right in this respect. The word psyche and its derivatives are ubiquitous; but in spite of having been translated as 'soul' for hundreds of years, it doesn't really mean that, or 'mind' either; in fact there isn't a single English word which exactly equates to it. It comes from a word meaning 'breath', and means something like 'a source of animation'. One way of illustrating the difference is to note that in English the question of whether animals have souls, or minds, is a reasonable one which different people, for different animals, would answer in different ways. To an ancient Greek, asking whether animals have psyches would have seemed absurd, approximately equivalent to asking whether animals are alive. |
||
|
|
||
|
Ba When it comes to the case of the Ancient Egyptians, we are in a much worse position. The Egyptians were practical people, not generally much interested in abstract matters (not even maths, beyond what was necessary for effective building projects) and with relatively little taste for dissent and argument. Our picture of their views, moreover, has had to be constructed from whatever hieroglyphic texts remain. |
||
|
| ||
| One thing which is abundantly clear is that the ancient Egyptian conception of the soul and personal identity was not a simple matter: we're dealing with at least five distinct elements in addition to the body, the khat . The first noteworthy point is how little there is of obvious philosophical interest about the khat. The Egyptians went to enormous lengths to mummify and preserve it, and it was considered capable of reanimation; it had a role as host to other elements of the person, but it seems fair to say that the Egyptians essentially thought of the khat as an inert vessel in much the same way as later dualists did. They would have thought that Descartes had missed many of the important points about the soul, and they would have thought the importance he attached to the pineal gland as the site of the vital interaction between soul and body was ridiculous - the Egyptians regarded the entire brain as little more than packing for the skull - but they would have been quite at home with his general position on the body. | ||
|
| ||
|
The first of the soul-like elements in the Egyptian system is the ka . The word 'ka' is often said to be untranslatable, which raises an interesting question. If the word is untranslatable, and is known to us only from hieroglyphics - our translations of hieroglyphics - how do we know what it means at all? 'Ka' has often, in practice, been translated as 'double', though it seems this is misleading. It is sometimes represented as a smaller image of the individual concerned, sometimes as a pair of arms reaching upwards, either detached or on top of the head of the individual concerned. It has been suggested that the word is a kind of pun on a similar Egyptian word meaning 'you', which presumably would carry the suggestion of the ka being the essential you. It is a life-force, not altogether unlike the psyche, and like the psyche it was not unique to human beings: animals and plants had their own ka, too. Apparently Egyptians sometimes spoke of having a snack or a drink for your ka, rather in the way that people might speak of refreshing the inner man, or of keeping your spirits up, perhaps. The ka was not just a quantity of life-energy, however - your ka is specific to you, bestowed at birth. I think it's plausible to see the ka as being, like the psyche, the thing that gives you the power of moving. Surrounded as we are by machines which move in complex and controlled ways, we have lost any sense that the power of spontaneous movement is particularly remarkable; but in ancient times it must have seemed obvious that this was a quality which distinguished people and animals from everything else, and required some special explanation | ||
|
| ||
| The ka really needs to be considered together with the other main soul element, the ba. The ba is represented by a human-headed bird (again, a pun may be involved, though for us the wings might evoke angels, the dove-like paraclete of the Christian trinity, or ancient Greek harpies). Although the ka is specific to each individual, it is really the ba that contains all the characteristics of the individual, especially the personality. Whereas animals had kas, the ba was something human beings had in common with gods. Although both were to some degree dependent on the khat, the ba was tied to it rather more closely; the ka could wander off even during sleep and after death was the first to move on to a new afterlife. When the person successfully negotiated the judgement which awaited them after death, the ba eventually joined the ka and they merged, forming the final immortal stage of the person, the akh. | ||
|
| ||
| So were any of these elements of the personality considered to be conscious? Not the khat, except insofar as it was animated by the ka and ba, but both of those appear to have had the power of independent thought and action in some degree, and the akh presumably conjoined the two somehow. It's impossible to be sure, but I would guess that rationality and explicit thought were properties of the ba, while the ka had the kind of thinking without words and vivid phenomenal experience which we might attribute to our nearer relatives among the animals. At the risk of oversimplifying, they could perhaps be seen as the conscious and subconscious minds; from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of mind, it's very tempting to attribute qualia to the ka and explicit cognition to the ba. | ||
|
| ||
|
So far the system hangs together quite neatly, but we also need to take on board two other elements which were clearly linked with the ka and ba, but which are much more mysterious. These are the khaibit, the shadow, and the ren, the name. The name, given at birth (at about the same time as the ka, presumably) was considered to have a constitutive role: without it, in any case, the individual could not survive. On a few occasions the Egyptians actually attempted to erase all instances of a dead person's name, in the belief that this would destroy them in the afterlife. The name, in fact, apparently enjoyed a kind of afterlife of its own, distinct from that of the akh. Clearly there is an unobjectionable sense in which someone's name constitutes them; gives them their agreed place in the social system which in some respects is the essential ground for personality and identity. And of course, it can be said metaphorically that a person's name sticks with them through life and lives on after death. But it seems clear that the Egyptians had something more metaphysical, if not magical, in mind; more reminiscent of the tremendous power ascribed to names by the Christian legend of the Adamitic language, the true original language of the Garden of Eden which captured the essential reality of the things it named. One might well ask what the ren actually named; the ka, the ba, the akh, the khat, or some composite which ought, unsettlingly, to include the ren itself. The role and capacities of the shadow are even more obscure: it was linked with the ba and was said to move at great speed, though the ka seems to have been less constrained. It is interesting (again from a contemporary point of view) to notice that both represent forms of intentionality. The name is the means by which the world, or at least other people, shape and target the individual; the shadow is a prime example of the impact the person, in turn, has on the world. If the ba is the seat of cognition, a strong link with the intentionality of the khaibit might be natural, and the alleged speed of the shadow might be the speed of thought itself, which can address distant things instantly. | ||
|
| ||
|
That completes the six essential elements most normally described; but I think it is also worth mentioning the ib, the heart. I said above that the ka and ba united only after judgement; but it was not any of the foregoing elements which faced that judgement. The ib, in fact, was weighed against feathers, and if it failed the test was eaten up, resulting in permanent extinction for the individual. It is tempting to see the ib as the seat of moral responsibility within the Egyptian scheme, and make the judgment after death comparable to the Christian one. However, if the ba is the seat of reason and deliberation, it would naturally be the entity held accountable for the person's acts. My guess is that the ib was in fact put in the scales to establish its weight, not its worth; not to assess whether the person was good, but whether they were morally substantial. A person whose acts had been evil but strongly willed and considered might pass such a test while a harmlessly passive one might fail. It would follow that the ib was not conscious, but more like an attribute of the individual. | ||
|
| ||
|
This does not by any means exhaust the Egyptian vocabulary of personhood, but I think it is enough to be going on with; I am already in danger of trying to bring together systematically views which may not actually have been part of a fully coherent system. A twenty-first century person, after all, might well believe simultaneously in the Christian soul, ghosts, the Freudian subconscious, and the multiple personalities of DID, without ever bothering to work out exactly how the different conceptions fitted together, and the chances are the Egyptians were similarly unworried by the odd complexity of their views. However that may be, and whatever the correct interpretation of the Egyptian system is, I think it is at least clear first, that their ideas were not at all simple, and second, that if they were not Cartesian dualists, it was chiefly because a mere two-part theory could not have done justice to the polyverse multiplicity of the Egyptian soul. | ||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
