Upon Further Reflection ...
Some of Reflexivity's Odds and Ends, and the Impact of the Medium
The concept of reflection and reflexivity has found many uses in modern culture and language. We are encouraged to self-reflection, a vital part of finding some sort of true self which we apparently all carry within us, and finance barons (George Soros, in this case) employ words like ‘reflexivity’ to describe the behaviour of trends and their consequences for the financial markets.
It's a somewhat curious flexibility. The mirror has captivated artists as well, perhaps because the human eye usually looks at objects that are illuminated and reflect light towards our eyes – when we look at a flame, it seems somehow illusive. Mirrors are the ultimate illuminated surface: they appear to throw back at us exactly what we see – just in reverse.
To be reflective is to have a form of back and forth with oneself, being able to take in impressions, turn them over and think about them before acting. An educator is to be reflected, and a pupil is encouraged to show reflection. The metaphors abound. Where Bruno Snell emphasised the unity of modern man against the plurality of Homeric man, George Lakoff found that the unity envisioned by Western philosophical and religious traditions contradicted the several loci (places) in the brain where cognitive functions were carried out, but that our metaphorical language afforded us a view of this plurality through several contradictory manners of speaking.
Less fascinating is perhaps at first sight the use of this concept to describe a linguistic phenomenon, the reflexive pronoun. ‘I am now reading this sentence to myself’, I could say. ‘Myself’ would here be what we call a reflexive pronoun. There is a reflection of sorts – the pronoun doesn’t independently refer to something, but gets its reference from another constituent of the sentence, in this case the subject ‘I’. And we feel maybe some sort of weird reflecting going on inside of us, somehow, in the self, the person that we somehow are supposed to be, on the deepest level. Hence the notion of the so-called Cartesian theatre where an inner person somehow watches the actions of the body.
The Greek language hasn’t always had reflexive pronouns. In the Iliad, there are none; the Odyssey sports a grand total of two. But then in Plato and in the Athenian orators, they’re everywhere. Sometimes a grand spectacle is made of this, such as in Edward T. Jeremiah’s 2012 book The Emergence of Reflexivity in Greek Language and Thought. It’s a fascinating read, but it puts forth an argument that is difficult to prove properly, namely that reflexivity is the driving factor behind the development of reason and the individual. In the conclusion, for instance, he writes the following (page 261):
This monograph has demonstrated the consequence of reflexive concepts to the various developing discourses of Greek culture. The Greek relationship with reflexivity will come to condition the evolution of the West, and especially modernity, for which the definition of the individual as a reflexive agent, a self, becomes a guiding cynosure.
How do you know that the ‘reflexive concepts’ aren’t themselves the consequences of some other development, such as writing? Walter J. Ong, for instance, contends in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy (which is, in fact, referenced by Jeremiah, but does not appear to have made much of an impact) that it really is writing which produces the kind of reflexively introspective effects that Jeremiah locates in the Greek history from about 700 to 350 BC. And Ong further finds that the this change is driven not primarily by what he refers to as chirographic literacy, that is to say the literacy of hand-writing, but rather typographic literacy, which is to say the kind of literacy that Gutenberg’s alphabetic print technology introduced into the world.
That would probably mean that literacy’s real kick does not actually come until the printing press has gotten past the period of incunabula – the period where early printed works emulated manuscripts. Only after about 1500, then, would literacy really get into high gear, and maybe Luther and his radical internalisation of faith is part of this.
Although this kind of idea does not really originate with Ong, he was one of the authors who have had the most to say about it. Later scholarly work – as is usually the case – has tended to moderate the findings of early writers on literacy and orality, such as Goody, Havelock, McLuhan and Ong. Their successors, in a sense, tend to say something like ‘hang on, that’s taking it a bit too far’.
Though reality is a bit more muddled, the study of oral texts was pioneered first and foremost by Milman Parry and his student, Albert B. Lord. Milman Parry noticed early that there was something curious and unique about the poetry of Homer. The epithets, he thought, looked sort of funny. The poems are full of phrases like ‘clever Odysseus’ and ‘blameless Menelaus’. As Parry worked by studying living Yugoslavian oral poets, he found out that Homeric poetry was essentially formulaic – it was basically oral poetry which at some point had been written down. The formulae made it possible for an oral poet to create verses out of thin air in front of an audience during performances that lasted for hours. The formula was a technology that helped the bard create poems on the fly, but it was a technology deeply inimical to the dominant notions of what poetic quality had become in the wake of Romanticism, namely a sort of spiritual genius whose originality was the pinnacle of poetry. Thus, Parry’s work found much resistance to begin with, but eventually trounced the opposition.
Writing, too, is a technology. Its origins lie in the remote past. We have had writing for millennia, first in Sumer, more than five thousand years ago. The Semitic scripts presumably (I don’t know and sometimes the ever-present possibility of looking something up on the internet has to be suppressed) derive, somehow, from cuneiform script, but encoded only consonants. Ths s wrtng sng nl csnnts (‘This is writing using only consonants’). This doesn’t really work for English, but as for Arabian and Hebrew, the success of their scripts shows that it can work perfectly well for other languages.
Now, how does the technology writing help us get more introspective? Probably, the impact of handwriting was limited. It usually had to be read aloud to get the syllables straight (they didn’t use spaces and they didn’t have punctuation, or, rather, they had little of it by modern standards).
Ifthingswerealwayswrittenlikesoitwouldbeagooddealhardertoreadthoughofcoursedoableweshouldbehappywehavedashesdotsandspaces. And even though this compressed writing is harder to read, we still have the advantage of typographic letters that are always perfectly similar. In epigraphy, letters were usually very similar, but in, say, a manuscript written by a monk in the medieval period, the text would be full of both abbreviations and ligatures. (A ligature is a connection of more than one letter, such as the ampersand, &, which is a ligature of e and t, signifying the Latin et, ‘and’.) But already hand-writing, or so the story goes, was enough to make us engage with language in a different way. And once typography really got going, we could really engage with ourselves and get even more reflexive, introspective and self-conscious.
If that’s how things really are, I don’t know. But it does seem clear, at least, that there are many striking differences between Homer and Plato, and also between Plato and modern writings. If the development of reflexive pronouns in Ancient Greek is more than incidental, –if it really is a product of writing or indeed if the linguistic developments motored the emergence of rationality, as Jeremiah would have it? It would be a pleasant surprise if we should prove able to answer those questions.
FURTHER READING:
Braida, Lodovica. 2009. Stampa e cultura in Europa tra XV e XVI secolo. Bari: Laterza.
Havelock, Eric A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA og London: The Belknap Press.
Jeremiah, Edward T. 2012. The Emergence of Reflexivity in Greek Language and Thought: From Homer to Plato and Beyond. Leiden: Brill.
Lakoff, George. 1992. ‘Multiple Selves: The Metaphorical Models of the Self Inherent in Our Conceptual System’. Published online: Multiple Selves: The Metaphorical Models of the Self Inherent In Our Conceptual System (escholarship.org).
Ong, Walter J. 1988 [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.
Snell, Bruno. 1953 [2nd German edition published 1948]. The Discovery of the Mind. Transl. T. G. Rosenmeyer. Available online here.
Fascinating. I wonder if it would be possible to test Jeremiah's thesis by comparing the adoption of reflexivity in texts originating in different Greek cities with some measure of reason/individualism (political developments, innovation...)