Organ-Function Distinction

Snell’s most precise methodological move is to refuse the common scholarly translation of thumos, noos, and psyche as “parts” of the soul. He reserves parts for the Platonic tripartition, in which discrete faculties are components of a presupposed whole. In Homer, he insists, no such whole has yet been posited: “thymos, noos, and psyche as well are separate organs, each having its own particular function” (Snell 1953, p. 14).

The distinction is between organ (a quasi-physical seat or locus) and function (the activity that organ performs). Homer’s psychic vocabulary preserves both ends of the relation simultaneously. Thymos is at once the seat of motion-and-emotion and the act of being moved; noos is at once the organ of perception-and-image and the perception or image itself. The two senses are not yet differentiated. The English fall-back, Snell observes, would have to be: “what we interpret as the soul, Homeric man splits up into three components each of which he defines by the analogy of physical organs” (Snell 1953, p. 15).

For the depth tradition the distinction matters because it names what Jung‘s autonomous complex re-discovers: a psychic agency that is not a faculty of an ego but an organ-and-function in its own right, with its own seat, its own initiative, its own characteristic activity. The complex is not what the ego does. The complex is what the complex does. Snell shows that this was the natural psychic grammar before the Platonic consolidation taught Europe to reroute every act through the “I.”

Relationships

Primary sources

snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953, pp. 14–15)