Jean-Pierre Vernant

Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007) was the founding figure of the French school of classical anthropology that read ancient Greece as a total psychological and social system. Trained in philosophy and shaped as a student of Ignace Meyerson, he built, over a sixty-year career at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Centre Louis Gernet, and the Collège de France — where he held the chair of Étude comparée des religions antiques from 1975 — the most ambitious twentieth-century attempt to treat the categories of Greek thought as historical achievements rather than transparent faculties. The Origins of Greek Thought (1962) was dedicated to Louis Gernet; Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (1965) collected the programmatic essays; Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1972, with Pierre Vidal-Naquet) extended the method to the tragic stage; Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (1974, with marcel-detienne) opened the study of mētis.

His method, psychologie historique, refused the premise that the faculties of mind are given. “These transformations affect the entire framework of thought and the whole gamut of psychological functions: modes of symbolic expression and the manipulation of signs, ideas of time and space, causality, memory, imagination, the organization of acts, will, and personality” (Vernant 1983). Memory, the person, the will, the organization of inner space: each has a history legible in cult, funerary practice, tragic theatre, and the emergence of philosophy. The archaic Greek is not a classical Greek with archaic beliefs but a differently organized subject — whose psyche is a breath-soul, whose thumos is a faculty of the chest, whose dead are held in the kolossos before they are interiorized as eidōla.

Three of Vernant’s structural readings are load-bearing for the Lineage. The analysis of Hesiod’s myth-of-the-races shows that the five ages are not a chronological decline but a structural cycle from pure dike to pure hubris, organized by the Dumézilian tripartite functions. The analysis of the kolossos and the figuration-of-the-invisible recovers the archaic Greek’s handling of the dead and the divine: a visible surface that signifies an absent, truer presence. The analysis of the origins of philosophy argues that Milesian cosmology did not rupture with religion but “takes over, in its way, from religious thought” by articulating in a new idiom the invisible-behind-appearances religion had already posited.

The Paris school he founded — with marcel-detienne, Vidal-Naquet, and the Gernet inheritance — constitutes the French school of Greek psychology. For the Lineage, Vernant supplies the historical scaffolding beneath every Jungian reading of Greek myth: the demonstration that bruno-snell, ruth-padel, richard-onians, and caroline-caswell extend in philological detail. Where karl-kerenyi and carl-jung read archetypal structure as transhistorical, Vernant reads the categories through which archetypal experience becomes thinkable as assembled in time. The Lineage needs both — the archetype without the history becomes a window without a frame; the history without the archetype becomes a frame around a wall.

Key concepts

• historical-psychology
• kolossos
• myth-of-the-races
• mythos-to-logos
• figuration-of-the-invisible
• invisible-behind-appearances
• tragic-man
• structural-myth-analysis

Major works

• vernant-myth-and-thought
• myth-and-tragedy-in-ancient-greece
• vernant-origins-greek-thought