Julian Jaynes famous quotes

What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Self #Civilization #Understanding

It is by metaphor that language grows.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Language #Metaphor #Grows

Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Problem #Sometimes #Forgotten

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Consciousness #Conscious

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Firsts #Nervous #Behavior

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Moving #Learning #Knowledge

Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Adventure #Play #Consciousness

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Men #Order #Hemisphere

The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Taken #Writing #Voice

Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Jealous #Mind #Breakdown

Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Force #Function #Idolatry

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Space #Mind #Psychological

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Mind #Firsts #Poet

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Mind #Speech #Breaking Down

We know to much to command ourselves very far.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Command

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Memories #Mediums

We invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others ... we assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioural world that do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Space #Mind #Quality

Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Reading #Cuneiform #May

The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Long #Catholic #Church

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Powerful #Mind #Divinity

The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Needs #Logic #Reason

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Consciousness

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Lying #Civilization #Mind

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Expression #Events #Becoming

The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Sea #Eruption #Legends

Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Self #Civilization #Understanding

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Evil #Puppets #Moral

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Art #Civilization #Doe

The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Mind #Way #Divine

Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Essence #Justice #Consciousness

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Giving #Use #Coins

Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Twins #Evolution #Problem

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Real #Vocabulary #Mind

We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Moving #Space #Together

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Echoes #Mind #World

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Serious #Language #Consciousness

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Loss #Voice #Self

We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Men #Needs #Research

The king dead is a living god.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Kings

This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Civilization #Mind #Population

One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
-- Julian Jaynes

#Thinking #Doe