Astral Codex Ten

Homeric Greeks

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Homeric Greeks

Article

Homeric Greeks is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 26, 2022 and July 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Jaynes claims that eg the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind”; “conservatives claim the Homeric Greeks were masculine”. It most often appears alongside /r/forcedbreeding, /r/forcedbreeding, A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 26, 2022
  • Last seen: July 29, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
And I’m having even more trouble separating both of these stories from a third story, the story of the “mirror stage”. Imagine a baby, moving around. At some point, it sees its own hand in its peripheral vision: a pink blob. At some other point it might see its feet. Sometimes it cries, and noise comes out of it. Other times it has thoughts or feelings or something. As it grows, it might realize some correlations between all these things: for example, it can use the location of the pink blob in front of it to calibrate its aim as it reaches for a block. But this is far from having a coherent self-concept. (cf. my review of Julian Jaynes on theory of mind; Jaynes claims that eg the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies) At some point, the child sees itself in a mirror. This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence. But it’s not really coherent, deep down. It assumes that if it got some thing - the object of desire - then it would finally be coherent and as good as the child in the mirror, and its mother would finally love it perfectly 100%. What does it need? Probably the thing the mother wants (traditionally the phallus).
Inline links: Julian Jaynes on theory of mind
Links For July
July 29, 2022 · Original source
17: The Origin Of Two-Spirit And The Gay Rights Movement. Long, detailed, fascinating piece on claiming that the “two-spirits” concept of Native American trans people was invented by white enthusiasts trying to give a noble-savage-based credibility to their own LGBT movements. After reading it, I am only partly convinced - obviously “Native Americans” are an incredibly diverse group, and the specific “two-spirit” framing was some random activists trying to lump everything together in a kind of made-up way. On the other hand, some tribes did have some things which looked vaguely like transgender, probably moreso than Europeans of the same era, and any attempt to describe this is naturally going to be an oversimplification. I think of this as just another battle over how to use history in politics: usually these kinds of articles are written by some leftist saying that conservatives claim the Homeric Greeks were masculine (or whatever) but actually it’s much more complicated than that because [list of inevitable ways ancient civilizations are more complicated than any possible summary]. I think there has to be a balance between claims like “the Native Americans were trans / the Homeric Greeks were masculine, just like us, therefore any arguments against transgender/masculinity are an ahistorical flash-in-the-pan” vs. “everything is so complicated and diverse that you may never draw analogies between historical concepts and modern concepts, or feel inspired by ancient civilizations in any way”. Still, this is a good article and I recommend it.
Inline links: The Origin Of Two-Spirit And The Gay Rights Movement