Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of ψυχή before Plato by David B. Claus (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 311 Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of if!vx~ before Plato. By DAVID B. CLAUS. Yale Classical Monographs, 2. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1981. Pp. xii + 200. $17.50. The meaning of if!vx~ changes and expands dramatically from Homer to Plato and the course of its semantical development has never been satisfactorily understood or definitively treated. David Claus's Toward the Soul makes an impressive contribution to our understanding of this difficult problem. Taking Burnet's 1916 classic " The Socratic Doctrine of Soul " as a model, though later repudiating its conclusion, Claus attempts what he calls an empirical study of the important occurrences of if!vx~ before middle Plato. No presumptions about archaic logic, no anthropological , sociological, or philological theories, including etymological ones, no narrowly epistemological considerations or speculations about religious life are to intrude. The categorization of indifferently seleeted instances of if!vx~ or other relevant " soul" words on contextual grounds is his chief methodie strategy, and much of the book consists of eontextual descriptions of word usage. Claus displays great sensitivity to idiosyncratic patterns of meaning in the documentary record, whose causes are often deemed beyond recovery. The result is a cautious study, frequently negative in impact, whose main positive eontention is that the notion of a life-force is central to the meaning of if!vx~ throughout its history to Plato. The book's first of three parts prepares for the discussion of if!vx~ by studying the pattern of meaning exhibited by other Homeric words used for phychic phenomena : wo>, cpp~v/cpplv£>, Ovµ,6>, K~p, ~rop, and µho>· The semantics of these so-called " soul " words provides the key for understanding the meaning of if!vx~ in post-Homeric popular usage according to Claus. He argues that v6o> and cpp~/cpplv£> share the root meaning of an immediate, concrete, contextually determined thought, and that the other words all refer most basically to the non-psychological physical force or energy responsible for a person's life. Other uses of these " soul " words, including the more distinct uses designating intellectual or emotional agents, are personifications or extensions of the contextual thought or life-foree senses. According to Claus these findings confute the usual view that these words in Homer refer to specific bodily organs, and that more abstract senses are developed from these concrete ones. On the basis of his contextual descriptions Claus sees no reason to read these words organically in Homer nor to accept either the etymological arguments often offered to link them to specific body parts or the notion that Homeric man's emotional and intellectual life is the domain of a range of discrete agents. That the archaic mind would move from concrete particular meanings to abstract ones cannot be proved, and idiomatic BOOK REVIEWS patterns of meaning may well be in place by Homer, even if one presumes primitive organic readings for these words. With regard to this issue Claus contrasts KpaSl'Y/, which in Homer indisputably means the physical heart, with 8vµ6>, K~p, ~Top, and µf.vo>. KpaSfi] never shares with the latter physical contexts involving strength, syncope, wasting and waning, and it is not " lost," " destroyed " or readily said to " waste away " as they are. The restricted context of the organ KpaU'Y/ would not differ so markedly from the broader common life-force contexts of these other words were they actually signifying specific organs. Part II, "tftvx0 and Its Evolution in Popular Usage," studies the development of tftvx0 against the background of the life-force words. In Homer tftvx0 means either the life lost at death or the shade which persists in Hades. But the instances of tftvx0 which Claus examines in lyric poetry, tragedy, old comedy, and in Herodotus and Thucydides, once idiomatic cases such as periphrastic constructions are discounted, show usage which matches the models of physical and derived psychological usage devised in Part I for the life-force words. Claus concludes that by the time of Homer tftvx0 belongs to the life-force pattern of meaning and " it therefore shares with the other words a natural ability to act as a psychological agent of...