Julian Jaynes

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Julian Jaynes (born February 27, 1920 in Newton (Massachusetts) , † November 21, 1997 in Charlottetown , Prince Edward Island ) was an American psychologist . He became known worldwide through his book "The origin of consciousness through the collapse of the bicameral psyche ".

Life

Jaynes was the first of three children of a Unitarian clergyman who served in his native Newton for 37 years. Fascinated early on by questions about the nature and origin of human consciousness , Jaynes began to study philosophy and literature in 1940 at Harvard University in Boston .

In 1943 he moved to McGill University in Montreal , Canada , where he, disappointed by traditional philosophy , turned to psychology. After a brief period as a lecturer at the University of Toronto in late 1944 , he continued his studies at Yale University in 1945 . Here he obtained his master's degree in 1948 and then worked as a research assistant. He made his career from 1964 at Princeton University , where he taught psychology from 1966 to 1990.

plant

Prior to the publication of his major work, which presents the results of three decades of varied research, Jaynes published only a few behavioral, neuropsychological and historical studies. He even wrote his master's thesis on learning in the interaction between learned and innate behavior after the publication of his book and only at the insistence of colleagues for a formal dissertation, so that in 1978, twelve years after he took up his professorship at Princeton from Yale was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy .

His later work was aimed at explaining and discussing his thoughts and theses on the evolutionary development of human consciousness, which he summarized again in an afterword to the 1990 reprint of his book. They were so provocative for the academically accepted views on this topic that had been developed up to that point that few scientists either wanted or were able to understand them. Jaynes also got into increasing isolation personally. It evidently put a lot of strain on him: in the fourteen years up to his heart attack, he apparently did not even complete a manuscript of another book called The Consequences of Consciousness, which had been announced to the last . Here Jaynes wanted to discuss the consequences of the general change in consciousness, which, according to his results, should only have started in our cultural area around 3000 years ago.

The origin of consciousness

In 1976 Jaynes published his major work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind . In it he attempts to reconstruct the origin and development of human consciousness in the course of human history on the basis of a central thesis indicated in the title: the emergence of consciousness from a structure that he calls the bicameral psyche . He finds traces of this preliminary stage of today's consciousness. a. in Homer and in the Old Testament , but also in phenomena such as hypnosis or schizophrenia .

The main thesis of Julian Jaynes, which he himself calls preposterous ("strange"), says: Consciousness did not develop to a historically verifiable extent until the millennium before the classical Greek civilization , between 1300 and 700 BC. The people before this time had no consciousness, that is in the sense of Jaynes' no autonomous self in the today's sense.

The reception of the theses on consciousness

The intellectual appeal of Jaynes' theses on the development of consciousness lies among other things. a. in the fact that his interpretation of historical texts enables an original look at those psychological phenomena that are now regarded as psychological disorders: he sees hearing voices as a symptom of schizophrenia as a relic, if not a relapse to an earlier stage in the development of human consciousness interpreted.

Jaynes himself aptly formulated the serious intellectual problem in dealing with his theses on consciousness: "For us with our subjectivity, it is impossible to understand what it is like."

Julian Jaynes, despite or perhaps even because of the journalistic success of his book, has apparently not succeeded in getting his theses and considerations taken seriously and scientifically discussed and checked. This may have been due to the fact that his psychological derivations were largely based on documents from various historical sciences, but hardly tried to make use of knowledge from developmental psychology for his theses.

Jaynes was well aware of the radical nature of his findings, as he suggested that he placed them on the same level as the theory of evolution and the theory of relativity . To see mere automata in animals and children was not a popular view since Descartes . Jaynes called himself a " neo-behaviorist ". Pain, for example, is reduced to pain behavior, only that in conscious people the pain behavior is perceived again with the analog self.

In 1984 Jaynes presented his theses at a Wittgenstein symposium, assuming that he would meet with kindred spirits there. (Wittgenstein, for example, ironically asked whether a dog was too honest because it wasn't pretending.) However, it didn't get a great positive response. The only great philosopher who took Jaynes seriously is probably Daniel Dennett . The media scientist Norbert Bolz describes Julian Jaynes as an "unjustifiably forgotten" thinker.

Some expressions could represent further hurdles if, for example, Graecists had come to the opinion that Jaynes had declared the heroes of the ancient epics to be mentally disturbed individuals.

His theses may also have suffered from some speculative considerations about the once supposedly different collaboration between the brain hemispheres , with which Jaynes sought to underpin his thesis of the bicamererality of the preconscious or pre-reflective structure of consciousness. With these approaches to a neurophysiology of archaic humans, Jaynes wanted to justify that and how people could process experiences that had not yet developed any knowledge or awareness that even spontaneously occurring memories, ideas and dreams are ideas that are indeed form automatically and according to special laws of association and thus arise autonomously, but which are nonetheless self-produced. However, Jaynes has also hardly used the relevant psychological literature on unconscious psychological processes. It was not received to any significant extent in brain research , nor in psychiatry , psychology , or philosophy .

In the bibliography of Raoul Schrott's Die Invention der Poesie (1997) Jaynes' main work is mentioned in a prominent place.

Publications

  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, Boston / New York 1976, ISBN 0-395-20729-0 ; with extensive afterword as A Mariner Book, ibid. since 1990; 2000, ISBN 978-0618057078 .

literature

  • Marcel Kuijsten (Ed.): Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness. Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited. Julian Jaynes Society, Henderson 2007, ISBN 978-0979074400 .
  • Marcel Kuijsten (Ed.): The Julian Jaynes Collection. Julian Jaynes Society, Henderson 2012.
  • Voices from the right Julian Jaynes: The origin of consciousness . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1988 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Julian Jaynes's Software Archeology. In: Daniel Dennett: Brainchildren: essays on designing minds. 1998, ISBN 0-262-04166-9 .
  2. ↑ Norbert Bolz: The real life. SWR2 Essay, November 18, 2013, accessed on May 28, 2017 (German).
personal data
SURNAME Jaynes, Julian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Newton (Massachusetts)
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 1997
Place of death Charlottetown