Williams Corrects Snell on Homeric Wholeness

The corrective is now discipline. Snell’s canonical thesis — that because Homer lacks soma and a single soul-word, the Homeric Greeks lacked the concept of a unified body and a unified self — is read by Bernard Williams as a category error. “Not finding in the Homeric picture of things a certain kind of whole, a unity, where he, on his own assumptions, expects to find one, Snell inferred that what the early Greeks did recognise were merely parts of that whole. In doing this, he overlooked the whole that they, and we, and all human beings have recognised, the living person himself” (Williams 1993, ch. 2). When Priam in Iliad 24 wants Hector’s body back whole, he wants Hector — “the wholeness of the corpse… was not something acquired only in death: it was the wholeness of Hector” (Williams 1993).

The progressivist reading — Homeric characters “childish,” “primitive,” “defective in morality, and, at the limit, incoherent” (Williams 1993) — “crumbles in face of the authority of the poems themselves” (Williams 1993). Padel concurs on the linguistic point: “Languages can display an ebullient variety of terms for multiple aspects of a central object in their cultures’ lives… but their culture does not lack the concept” (Padel 1994, p. 45). The Homeric plural self is therefore not a failed unity but a different grammar of personhood. This matters for the Jungian inheritance: if the plural is read as defect, the complex-psyche becomes a regression; if the plural is read as a complete but differently-ordered personhood, the complex-psyche is recovered as an authentic structural alternative to the monotheistic ego.

Sources

• bernard-williams: Snell overlooks “what is in front of everyone’s eyes”
• bruno-snell: Homer lacks a word, therefore lacks the concept
• ruth-padel: multiplicity of terms ≠ absence of concept
• jan-n-bremmer: early Greeks “could easily say ‘I wish’ or ‘I thought’… must have had a general sense of psychic coherence”