Greek Models of Mind and Self by A. A. Long (review)

After a summary introduction, the book consists of five chapters that cover material from Homer through the Stoics. Intended for non-scholars (x), the book makes no effort to engage competing scholarly views or to indicate where such positions might be found.

For the general public, however, many lacunae limit the book’s value. Long sometimes refers to details of texts, or to ancient authors not actually quoted in the book, in ways that would bewilder most general readers. Nor is the discussion a full survey; important figures and issues in the history of the topic are left untouched. Of the many Presocratics who might be discussed in a book like this, one finds scattered mentions of only Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles, and these are noted mostly in passing for their influences on others. Although the first chapter begins with a couple of pages on Plotinus, the Neoplatonists receive no sustained attention. The Epicureans are named in the first pages of the final chapter, which is then mostly devoted to the Stoics, especially Epictetus. Aristotle is characterized briefly as a somewhat unfaithful Platonist. Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Gorgias are discussed in some detail; archaeological evidence, Greek dramatists, and historians are not.

But not just numbers of ancient authors are passed over; Long never once directly engages with the obviously pertinent (and notoriously thorny) problem of laying out what any of his specific philosophical authors had to say about personal identity. I do not see how one can adequately discuss “Greek models of self” without some notice that the very notion of a self (for example, as an individual essence) was problematic for a number of reasons within ancient Greek thought (see especially the difficult discussion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z.6).

Long’s general theses, too, were often overstated in ways that might put off the general reader. One might reasonably expect non-specialists, for example, to know well that in Homer, the dead were transported to Hades for the rest of time. But Long is adamant that, for Homer, there really is no life after death, since the person is (only) the psychosomatic living person. But Long makes too little of the “shades” in the Odyssey, who need only blood to regain (apparently completely) all of their life’s experiences in memories, and, indeed, all that is required for personal identity to be restored. Long quotes Odysseus’s mother’s shade (53) in support of his anti-afterlife view, but I find what she says to Odysseus rather too cogent about her own condition to qualify as being “mindless” (54) in the way Long requires. Besides, it seems that her main complaint is that she no longer has a body. That “the psyche flies away like a dream,” as she puts it (Odyssey 11.222) makes better sense if we take the psyche to be “like a dream” relative to the material substantiality of the body. After all, it is this “dream” that addresses Odysseus so articulately and (at the risk of begging the question against Long) with such self-awareness. I do not see how this can be reported as showing that “nothing of the real person survives death,” as Long characterizes the Homeric view later on (153).

In chapter 3, we learn that it was Plato’s contribution to add to the body-soul dichotomy a comparison of the goodness or badness of their conditions. Long’s discussion of this analogy is clear and informative, but I was not convinced by his main argument here. According to Long, “Plato’s Socratic elevation of the soul over the body was decisively shaped by his wish to oppose the cultural and political influence of rhetoric and its threats, as he judged them” (110). It seems that one would do better to reverse Long’s account of cause and effect here, to provide a more compelling explanation of Plato’s motives—more compelling...