The Porous Self

The tragic protagonist’s interior is not sealed. It is permeable to gods, to passions, to daimons, to the weather of the cosmos. Padel’s core argument in padel-out-mind-greek: “Tragic emotion is represented essentially, therefore, as other in self. A destructive other, sent to change and hurt innards; a god’s most effective weapon.”

The grammar of this interior is invasion from outside. Zeus’s thunderbolt sweeps down. Aphrodite sends “terrible lust” to possess Phaedra’s heart. A spear strikes the phrenes. The erinyes frighten a man “with their raving madnesses.” What modern psychology calls affect, the Greek called daimon — a visitation. “What we think of as our ‘own’ emotions: these are the gods’ best weapon against us” (Padel 1992).

This is not metaphor in the modern sense. The outer and inner kosmos share one fabric (innards-as-kosmos): storms enter the splanchna the way storms enter the sea, because splanchna and sea are continuous. The Greek habit of personification — Hesiod’s birth of Fear and Terror as children of Ares, of Strength and Force as children of Styx — belongs to this same physics. Emotions are not in the self; they are daimons that enter and leave.

For the Seba lineage, the porous self is the direct ancestor of the Jungian claim that the psyche is inhabited by autonomous complexes and archetypal figures. The difference between Agamemnon’s phrenes damaged by ate and carl-jung‘s ego seized by an autonomous complex is a difference of register, not of structure.

Relationships

• splanchna
• phrenes
• ate
• lyssa
• erinyes
• innards-as-kosmos
• daimon
• archetypal-possession

Primary sources

• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1992)
• Iliad 19 (Homer, on Ate and Agamemnon)
• Hippolytus (Euripides, on Aphrodite’s sending)
• Theogony (Hesiod, on personifications)