Introduction

Have you ever wondered why the English language equates words for seeing and
visualization with knowing and comprehending?
Here are some examples: “Eye-opening experience”; ‘I can see your point”; “everything
is clear”; “I see what you mean”; I can see where you are coming from; “I see where you
are going”; “I can see through your argument”; “see solutions to problems”; “I just
wanted to see what it felt/tasted/smelled/sounded like” as if we could see feels, tastes,
smells, and sounds, "seeing is believing, and many others.

What if I told you that associating seeing with thinking and knowing is not universal
across language families and cultures, but rather bound to specific languages and
societies? In this video, we'll look at the evolution of the "eye," what it means, what it
implies, how it manifests culturally, and what its anthropological significance is.

Aristotle and Dawkins

Let's look at the opening of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, which is
unquestionably the founding work of western thought, the forefather, and the originator
of what is now known as western philosophy.

“All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses;
for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake and most of all the sense of
sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer
sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason for this is that of all the
senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions..”
- Aristotle, Metaphysics

Fast forward to the closing of the 20th century Richard Dawkins, an accomplished
scientist, public intellectual, and thought leader writes in his book "Unweaving the
Rainbow"

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a
sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must
close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in
the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?
This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get
up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without
ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from
bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?”

- (Dawkins, P.11) Unweaving the rainbow

Is there something broader going on concerning sight being the dominant sense organ
in western thought?

For us to answer this question, we need a very concentrated journey of how the concept
of “eye” and “seeing” functioned between the entire 23 centuries and beyond the
western culture we need to define the concept of vision, what changes, and
understandings did “seeing'' undergone throughout the cultural evolution, and what
language was used to denote seeing as knowing. Did “eye” become dominant sense at
a certain point in time? Were there other sense organs that were privileged before that?
Are there cultural variations between the epistemological value of sense organs? We
are going to embark on an anthropological journey from ancient cultures to modern
western Europe and how it contrasts different cultures including my own.

The concept of the “eye”

“The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can
most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second”
Da Vinci

Before delving into a pivotal turning point when the metaphor of vision became a
dominant sense of cognizing the world, I would like to draw your attention to a more
fundamental notion of the mind’s eye. The external world, the world of matter has no
inbuilt epistemological value to it. The tree that you are looking at has nothing to say
about its value, essence, or purpose, which brings me to the statement that information
per se is neutral and indifferent, however, the mental apparatus of the living organism is
a filter through which the information coming to the senses assembles into a
comprehensible picture, along with functions that will be ascribed to it. Namely, what
should you do with it, what it means to you, what it looks like, etc? So, for one a bird
song is devoid of any kind of inbuilt essential meaning. However, a female chick
experiences it as a calling for mating, whereas a zoologist is prompted to make a
scientific investigation. Thus, an organism comes with its in-built system of cognition
which makes meaning-generation possible.
Immanuel Kant had an extensive overview of how our mind shapes the raw matter of
the external environment by applying concepts of quantity, quality, relation, and modality
to it. Kant in his magnum opus critique of the pure reason stated that time and space
are a priori intuitions of pure reason, (pure reason being a faculty that is free from
empirical knowledge, thus being a house of apriori forms of knowledge). Therefore,
everything you experience is possible by processing them into our inbuilt intuition of
space and time, which constitutes the necessary precondition that makes experience
possible.
Now, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist came up with a concept - the middle
world. We live in a world that is governed by classical physics and Newtonian
mechanics, a world that is populated by objects that are neither infinitely small nor
infinitely big. Furthermore, the laws that govern the universe at a larger scale, Einstein’s
general relativity theory is very much unintuitive for us as we evolved in the middle
world. On the flip side, Quantum physics describes the behavior of an infinitely small
world and defies our sense of intuition even further. Note two things - When scientists
try to provide analogies to explain Relativity theory and Quantum mechanics, those
analogies are in essence middle worldly, meaning common sense. The bottom line is,
things that take place within the constraints of the middle world populate our universal
common sense with which we process the external world. Dawkins goes on to suggest
that the brain - like every other organ- evolved specific in-built adaptive concepts that
help us perceive and interact with the middle world. For example, we can not imagine
the actual size of the atom the same way we are unable to picture the vastness of the
universe as the world we evolved into is dominated by objects that are medium in size.
In the same way, our intuition tells us that a cannonball would hit the ground faster than
a feather, the reason being that we did not evolve in a vacuum, as in the middle world
air friction is always there. Also, we tend to think that only solid things have real
existence whereas the behavior of particles at the quantum level seems unrealistic as
we did not evolve in that particular environment.

Now, I wanted to set up a notion of sensory modality as something that organizes, that
which gives something a form and shape and thus ascribes value to it. A value that
greatly varies concerning the challenge put forward by the environment. From there, we
can get to the meaning of the metaphor and the concept of vision as it was abstracted
from the physiological sense organ that we possess.

My job now is to present how and when the metaphor of the “eye” became what it is
today. After the evolution of abstract thought, language, extensive tool use, social brain,
and higher cognitive abilities, Homo sapiens have undergone major changes in the
organization of their living. Before the so-called “agricultural revolution” homo sapiens
lived as hunter-gatherers isolated in different tribes. After the gradual shift from hunting
and gathering to sedentary life began in 10.000 BC the abstract symbolic layer of
cultural symbols and sign systems experienced a qualitative shift and quantitative
increase. This new homo sapiens of the neolithic period is our subject of interest. I want
to look at the major cultural contrast between the philosophically oriented cultures of the
new generation, such as Ancient Greece and western culture which were progressive in
nature, and the Archaic cultures and social formations. The extinct ones and those that
have survived, including the place of my origin.

To kick-start the thesis of my video without further ado - let’s see how Jean Gebser
differentiates the mental consciousness structure that characterizes ancient Greek,
Western and Judeo-Christian societies from previous consciousness structures such as
magic and mythic which dominated the world of upper paleolithic up to archaic pre
mental cultures. Gebser takes “eye” as a primary sense organ of the mental structure
whereas magic gets the ear and mythic the mouth. For a little sneak peek, If you want to
translate an English common phrase denoting the success of thinking, namely, “I see
your point” into my native language, Georgian, one of the most archaic languages out
there, you would get - “I hear your point”. “მესმის რასაც ამბობ”
Now, in Dravidian languages another example of archaic culture - “saying/telling” is
used in reports of thinking. Drawing an example from Koaya, the standard and most
common way to say “he had a thought” would be tanaki ittondu (“to himself he said”). In
Turkish, another non-Indo-European language - to say “I see your point” you would say,
“senin değinmek istediğin noktayı anlıyorum”, where “değinmek” denotes touch, rather
than vision. Tyler P 35

Although I could present the answer to this question very briefly it would not make
justice to this problem and I am not generally attracted to such formats. So, we need to
go down a cultural rabbit hole to see how “eye” and the metaphor of vision acquired
their value.

Ancient Egypt - The first inkling of the “eye”

Mostly, Egypt spanning the galloping 3000-year dynasty is thought of as one of the
earliest Mega-civilization, however, Egypt apart from being one of the first is also a
meta-culture. Its cultural forms and achievements functioned as a memetic repository
for subsequent social formations, which inevitably were influenced by the ever-lasting
eye of Egypt.
Here are the major themes about it that are relevant to the video.

1. Egypt is one of the first which draws a straight and orderly line on the curvaceous and
ever-liquid nature.
“The hardest object of Apollonian thing-making is western personality, the glamourous,
striving, separatist ego…first appeared in art of Old Kingdom Egypt” (Paglia,1990,30)

Thus, the apollonian eye as an arrow and projectile into the beyond with its phallic
aggression later creating guns, pointy ships with giant eyes to explore and colonize the
world, cinema with its blazing light beam of movie projectors, rockets flying in space can
be witnessed in Egypt in its embryonic form, allowing us to look at the hypertrophy of
the “eye” like in a time-lapse of a flowering plant. However, the growth of an eye unlike
plants is going to be inward rather than outward.

In what turned out to be a famous video about female sexual objectification I talked
about the evolution from the eyeless and faceless venus figurines to Egyptian Nefertiti
which is solely a face where everything leads to her eyes, denoting a shift from the
impersonal unconscious condition of the great mother archetype to the emergence of
personality and the “self”, which is in a direct ontological relationship with the concept of
vision and later the “mind’s eye”. The Egyptian eye is analogous to western personality,
as the soul was thought to reside there. Note how in Egypt eye is always shown full
face, even though characters are painted in profile.
“As Gombrich observes, the ‘Egyptian painter distinguished, for instance,
between a dark brown for men and a pale yellow for women's bodies. The real
flesh tone of the person portrayed mattered as little in this context as the real
color of river matters to the cartographer” (Mcgilchrist,2009,400)
Egyptian eye is the first demonstrable and aggressive standoff against the muck and
muddle of chthonian nature. With its black-tailed outline and makeup, the eye
represents a clear definition and order against the backdrop of entropic nature striving
towards perpetual chaos. However, as the sun is the force that keeps nature from
achieving entropic death, the same way golden disk and sky gods of the new cultures
guard the consciousness and its Apollonian order against the devouring great mother
archetype.
“The Venus of Willendorf, a cult image half modeled from a rough stone, is unbeautiful
because art has not yet found its relation to the eye. Her fat is a symbol of abundance in
an age of famine. She is the too-muchness of nature which man longs to direct his
salvation” (Paglia,1990,55). She is eyeless because the sleeping consciousness of
magic and mythic nature can be seen but not known, thus the vision and the emergence
of the eye are of conceptual importance. It's not about seeing, it's about having the
ability to see through nature and conceiving a model and an understanding of it, rather
than a reflection.

Now, to briefly address the controversy, I read the criticism that somehow the
facelessness of venus figurines had to do with low-level crafting skills, and
psychological processes had nothing to do with it. Here’s a quick fact. There are venus
figurines with faces in the pre-civilization period and here’s the Ancient Greek sculpture
of Persephone, a goddess of the underworld who is faceless, as it represents the
everpresent gaping unconscious with its danger of swallowing the whole personae in
the belly of the great mother. I highly doubt that Greeks did not have the relevant tools
for sculpting faces.

Culture conceives beauty standards, not nature. The apollonian freeze-frame of

civilization comes in trying to apply shape to unorganized matter, thus the fashion and
maximal intervention in women’s freedom so that the Great mother archetype can be in
check. Standard of beauty is created by emerging apollonian consciousness which aims
at limiting women’s sexual allure. Thus, we get a sense of glamor and a cultural sense
of aesthetics as opposed to nature’s excesses.

“The apollonian eye is the brain’s great victory over the bloody open mouth of mother
nature” (Paglia,1990,50). The contemplative, conceptual, and artistic sense of the eye
was conceived in Egypt and later acquired a philosophical layer in Greece. Thus Egypt
is the first to oppose the light emitting eye of consciousness to the daemonic eye of the
staring Gorgon, which paralyzes and devours everything it encounters. Gorgon’s name
comes from the adjective “gorgos” which means terrible and fierce, thus the gorgopos
the “fierce-eyed”.

2. Egypt is one of the first to apply the judging apollonian gaze to nature. The one who
creates its own mountains, as opposed to real ones; the one who creates its sense of
beauty, which is trimmed and constrained as opposed to nature’s wallowing fertility
figurines. No wonder why Egypt is the first to glamourize small breasts which will be
seen in the western renaissance once again. Egypt comes up with the personality of a
single self with the sun disk, symbolizing the dominance and empowerment of the
shining bright light of consciousness over the darkness of nature. Now, remember how
someone intelligent is called bright, and how awkward it would be to call them loud
right? Remember, how for Plato the sun and the light represented the highest truth and
virtue as opposed to the darkness of the cave? How was Jesus incorporated as sol
Invictus in the Roman empire? How does he himself utter the words “I am the light”? We
will get to the contrast between Greek thought and consciousness that preceded it in a
moment. Thus, by the power of directive light, Egypt is one of the first to hack away at
nature’s excess, coming up with a definition by drawing lines as opposed to the curves
and circles of nature’s uroboric element.
“How did beauty begin? Earth-cult, suppressing the eye, locks man in the belly of
mothers. There is, I insisted, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is primal power, coarse
and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them
limit, symmetry, and proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”
(Paglia,1990,47)
Generally, nature is conceptualized like a typical wallpaper of the windows XP, however,
it is just a thin layer above the turbulent ugly, and devouring gaping mouth of the
chthonian world. “
“We say that nature is beautiful. But this aesthetic judgment, which not all peoples have
shared, is another defense formation, woefully inadequate for encompassing nature’s
totality. What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we
huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature’s daemonic ugliness will erupt.” (Paglia,1990,14)

However, culture, a symbolic superstructure filters and circumscribes the perpetual

Heraclitean flow of nature into a system of meanings. That’s why the layer of existence
dominated by consciousness is called the noosphere. Note how the word “noos” which
comes from the Greek roots means to see. It is only later that “noos” acquires a
meaning of consciousness/mind which will be explored in the section about Greek
culture. The prevalence of stone and lack of wood in Egypt marks the sense of
permanence, a phallic sky pointing apollonian line defying time and organic change
understood as an essential property of Heraclitean nature. That’s why its art is glyphic
meaning they carve out their world feeling on an unregenerate nature of the stone,
drawing a demarcation line between nature and culture. “Western personality is hard,
impermeable, intractable. Spengler says “the brilliant polish of the stone in Egyptian art”
makes the eye “glide” along the statue surface.” (Paglia,1990,49)

Writing arose in Egypt around the same period as in Sumer, or a little later, about 3100
BC. It appears that there all three forms – pictograms, ideograms, and phonograms –
were used alongside each other in different contexts throughout.

This interests me as when language acquires a dimension of writing a new layer of

reality is formed, whereby systems of symbolic meaning become self-replicative and
form a symbolic order. Now, from a neuroantrhopological perspective, we can speculate
that this process has to do with the neural reorganization of the angular gyrus,
especially of the left hemisphere. We know from studies that lesions in the left
angular gyrus eliminate abstract skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic.
“ANGULAR GYRUS A brain area situated in the lower part of the parietal lobe
near its junction with the occipital and temporal lobes. It is involved in high-level
abstraction and abilities such as reading, writing, arithmetic, left-right
discrimination, word representation, the representation of fingers, and possibly
also comprehension of metaphor and proverbs. The angular gyrus is possibly
unique to humans. It is also probably rich in mirror neurons that allow you to see
the world from another‘s point of view” (Ramachandran,2011,231) This is of utmost
importance as the prefrontal cortex later be hypertrophied with the advance of abstract
philosophy and euclidean geometry forms re-entrant connections with angular gyrus.
Generally coming of the new mental skills has to do with the inner reorganization of
white matter connectivity that accounts for intracortical connections. I think that it is
warranted speculation that the advance in metaphor, writing, and apollonian
consciousness has to do with the reorganization of the existing parts of the brain so that
it can adapt to new challenges and environments.

The popular eye of Horus functioned as a protective apotropaic force deflecting

misfortune and averting the evil eye. It is not an accident that the Eye of the Horus was
understood as an eye of the mind, the eye of the insight and truth (note how deep
knowledge is denoted by word in - sight), and the eye of the God inside the human
mind.

3. Political organization of ancient Egypt, where the pharaoh is an unblinking wise eye
representing the head of the state is an organizing power of the people as a body. Thus
he unifies the scattered many into a hierarchical system of order. This process makes
evident the primordial opposition between the apollonian order and the chaos of
Dionysus.
“The unification of upper and lower Egypt, a geographical triumph, was man’s first
experience of concentration, condensation, conceptualization” (Paglia,1990,59). That’s
why a pharaoh is ontologically elevated symbolizing the sun disk of emerging
consciousness and apollonian beacon. Thus by its sociopolitical pyramid, Egypt creates
a set and rigid stratification of social classes resulting in an aristocracy and a sense of
personality. Thus they are the first self-designated beautiful people, as glamor and
aesthetics now are imposed by the personality with its penetrating sunlight.

No wonder why Oswald Spengler thought of Egypt as to be a manifestation of the “way”

as its prime symbol. The way that curbs and trims everything that is unorderly and
dionysian. “The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and
inexorably-prescribed life path to come at the end before the judges of the dead.”
(Spengler,1928,205)
Thus an Egyptian is a traveler who follows an unchanging direction as opposed to the
labyrinth of the unconscious. If we look at the old kingdom of Egypt namely the mighty
pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty we see a new understanding of space and interior a
sort of nature within nature that no longer pays homage to the mother archetype. This is
not the interior and spatial organization of the mosque and the cathedral, but a
“rhythmically ordered sequence of spaces”, The way leads to the chamber of the dead
through the passages, halls, arcaded courts, and pillared rooms that grow narrower and
narrower as the consciousness acquires a new dimension of concreteness. corpus
callosum, a band of fibers connecting two hemispheres shrinks in size as humans
advance and become more stratified in their social organization. Thus emerging
specialization of human mental faculties is evidenced by rising political hierarchy,
division of labor, specified gender roles, and intensity of apollonian eye. Spengler points
out that sun temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not just buildings but represent a path
enclosed by mighty masonry.

“For the Egyptian, the depth-experience which governed his world-form was so
emphatically directional that he comprehended space more or less as a continuous
process of actualization…way signifies both Destiny and third dimension”
(Spengler,1928,206)

Although Egypt is the first that shines light onto nature it is still a hybrid between a
magic/mythical consciousness structure and the mental consciousness structure of the
eye. Gods are still hybrids of animals and humans denoting that gradual growth of the
human “ego” from the depths of the organic world. That’s why two animals venerated in
Egypt were cat and crocodile. Both of them are a hybrid of apollonian consciousness
and chthonian unconscious. “Hefting itself between water and earth, the spiky crocodile
is the west’s armored ego, sinister hostile and ever watchful.” (Paglia,1990,59)
Cat on the other hand represents an apollonian eye intensity with its sense of persona,
dignity, and pride and on another hand the harshness of nature and magic
consciousness structure as she periodically surprises her owners with a neat pile of
mole guts or mashed mouse limbs on the porch a sort of Darwinian mementos. That’s
why cats are of double nature, having unnerving cool stares and autocratic self-interest,
but suddenly turning into the symbols of witchcraft and sorcery.

Although Egypt with its pantheon of gods, the concept of the afterworld, and the
bureaucratic system of organization demonstrably drew a straight line of consciousness
on the entangled nature, we are still far from what we understand to be a subject, a
cogito a new “self”.
So let’s get to the Major shift from the magic/mythical consciousness to the
crystallization of mental consciousness structure that took its inspiration from the still
freeze-frame of the Egyptian apollonian gaze so that it could have turned into abstract
ideas of Platonic philosophy.

The mental of the “eye” vs magic/mythic of the ear

So, now I am going to present a systematic breakdown of how Dorian Greek culture
with its cerebral innovations of abstract philosophy and geometry shows an obvious
shift into the acute and pointy mental consciousness structure of the “eye”. Now, in
order for us to understand the gist of how the “eye” as a primary modus operandi of the
new consciousness undergoes intensification we need to show how the pre-mental
consciousness structure of mythical/magic operated.

Note, that Jean Gebser takes the mental structure which emerged in Greece and near
east of Judeo Christian religions to be spatial and abstractly temporal with its
three-dimensionality, whereas mythical and magic are spaceless and timeless, its only
in mythic that natural temporality and cyclicity are recognized. The eye an organ
emphasis on the mental structure is the eye (the rational, hair-splitting, and judging),
which contrasts the magic ear, the cavernous labyrinthine unconscious, and the mythic
mouth which utters and sings the myths. Gebser takes mouth and myth to have
common etymological roots. Now, Before the mental structure emerged whereby an
“ego”, autonomous self, an active subject who emancipated from the interviewees of
nature, humans were continuous with nature. The Mycenean civilization yet to be
conquered by the Dorian Greeks is dominated by mythic consciousness. The stucco
relief from Knossos (Crete) The prince with the crown of feathers shows the gradual
emancipation of the soul from nature, as the upper torso is exposed against the sky,
whereas the lower to the mother ground. Note that the prince is directed to the left side
which is controlled by the right hemisphere which neuropsychiatrist Ian Mcgilchsrit
understands to be the house of the unconscious. The left hemisphere subject who
contemplates abstract ideas is still not there. “ Although it is a glimpse of getting
emancipated from mother nature as in the First generations of civilizations we find the
discovery of the soul and the inner world along with the temporality of time, our
sequential understanding of it is still not crystallized.

This shift takes place in the sixth and fifth century BC which is mirrored by the image of
Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus, symbolizing the coming dominance of
reason and ratio, where the male sky-God with the advancement of mentally patriarchal
structure overtakes the power of child-bearing. Note how Athena wears the gorgon’s
head on her breast and shield, a gift of Perseus.
Note, that the following analysis will account for those cultural aspects with an
arborescent model whereby all those twigs share one common root. Hence, we should
see the clear difference between the roots through which its effects will be
self-explanatory.

Lack of mental language in Illiad

The evolution of the mind’s eye which presupposes the existence of the subject a
conscious intentional being who has a unifying sense of self can be witnessed in the
transitional period of Greek culture namely, from the great Mycenaean civilization to
Dorian Greece. An American psychologist, Julian Jaynes attempts to see Iliad as a
litmus paper to see how subjectless characters evolved into a persona with a unifying
sense as opposed to the modular e.i. bicameral, thus the name of his magnum opus the
“Breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

Now, although his neuroscience definitely cannot be described as cutting-edge (which I

will address in other videos) the value of his book comes from his analysis of so-called
“mental language” and how it underwent major changes. For our interest, I want to draw
your attention to how the words for mental processes and conscious states are lacking
in the language of the Iliad and how those words acquired the aforementioned meaning
throughout the cultural evolution.

“The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances
life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the
ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean
something like an emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops
moving, the thumos leaves his limbs….The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight.
Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells
him to and a god rouses him". But it is not really an organ and not always localized; a
raging ocean has thumos.” (Jaynes,1976,69)

Remember that Gebser understood mythic and magic as being characterized by bodily
senses a world-feeling as opposed to a world-view, where there is no distinction
between a self as a soul, self as a rational mind, and a body as a vessel of the two.
Rather, it is a unity with nature in magic structure and partial emancipation in the mythic.

When Ionic philosophy will be born we will witness an aggressive shift from ear to the
eye with which presocratic philosophers with a new mind’s eye will come up with mental
models of the universe governed by new rules of consciousness such as dialectical
relations, causality, and temporality a sort of arrow of the time. Thus Heraclitian notion
that you can’t get in the river twice. Now time is understood as something that is linear
and conceptual, rather than circular and ever-present. However, the apollonian
freeze-frame of Egypt will resurface in platonic philosophy which will harden the
Heraclitean stream into a stone of ideas. Thus the shift from Medusa who turns people
into stone to a philosophy that freezes being into discrete ideas that can be fathomed by
the power of the mind’s eye.

Now back to mental language:

“Phren is always localized anatomically as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is
usually used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize that his brother is
not near him; this means what we mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only
centuries later that it comes to mean mind or 'heart' in its figurative sense.”
(Jaynes,1976,70)

And now we get to the most important word for our topic which is “noos” which comes to
mean a conscious mind and acquires the highest metaphysical value in neoplatonism
as “noos” is the ultimate mind from which the universe is conceived.

Well, not surprisingly “It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the
Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus "holds
Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over him.”

However, the “noos” has yet to acquire its new meaning and is never used to describe a
doubt or being in a conflict, as conflict is often said to go on in the thumos, or in
“phrenes”.

Now for Jaynes, the major difference relevant to this theme between the bicameral
society and an integrated one is “a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind”, which
ironically coincides with Gebser’s understanding of consciousness structures, although I
doubt that one read another. Schopenhauer is in the bandwagon too “Sight has the
highest rank because its sphere is the widest and its susceptibility the finest …. Hearing
has second place ....” Although western culture will be examined in the following videos.

The reason for Jaynes here has to do with his understanding of the divided brain, which
characterized ancient people, whereby the left hemisphere harbored God who made
commands to the right hemisphere. He believed that all the commands in ancient
literature where Gods spoke to warriors or chosen people were actually heard and is not
a trope or poetic metaphor. He makes a somewhat disconcerting claim that they were in
a schizophrenic state, resorting to the fact that hallucinations the voice of Gods come
into play in the process of decision-making when characters are in a divided state where
they have to choose the route of action. This causes a hyper-stressful situation which
causes them to hallucinate, as stress even nowadays dramatically increases the chance
of having hallucinations. After the integration of the two hemispheres took place
according to Julyan the consciousness and unifying sense as we know it began to
emerge. Now, to intensify this line of reasoning, note how we people of the 21st century
intuitively regard “hearing voices” as more alarming than seeing things. Like, imagine
someone telling you that they have seen something, which is not quite uncommon,
however, I am sure that your friend telling you about how he would hear voices would
unnerve you even further. This is a type of apriori bias and prejudice that we can’t take
for granted.

Let’s see what Gebser has to say about this:

“Everything that "belongs" to us (gehoren), with its connotations of the auditory

(horen = to hear) is an expression of our power or might; it belongs to the magic
structure and is "attuned to its unity,"…Everything we see is an expression of our
understanding; and this "seeing" and "conceptualizing" are commensurate with
the mental structure.” (Gebser,2020,73)

It's interesting to note how authors from different backgrounds arrive at more or less the
same conclusion about the difference between the new consciousness where a subject
with a unifying sense of self and power of abstraction comes to the stage and a
pre-classical person who is not a subject yet, as we understand it today.

Necessary distance - mind’s eye

Jaynes notes that “Vision is our distance receptor “par excellence” Mcgilchrist

now I want to look at how Mcgilchrists ideas fortify this line of reasoning

I want to concentrate on the word “distance”, as it is a great keyword for understanding

the consciousness of the mind's eye. The new Noos what we know as consciousness is
a type of Cartesian theater, a space within which the drama of reality is played out, a
three-dimensional spatial fabric that allows us to simulate possible realities, contemplate
about future, travel in the past as we are going over old archives, and have a sense that
there is an inner me who is witnessing and watching this processes that are taking
place in the mystical place called consciousness. This is what’s known as user interface
illusion, whereby your mind constructs an accessible desktop so that you can have an
illusion of navigating into a spatial container that simulates reality as such. The reason
for such metaphors that we use in everyday life to describe our mental states has to do
with ignorance of how it actually works as if it was crystal clear that metaphors would be
redundant. Mostly, metaphors are used when we want to describe something that is
very complex and involves different strata of reality. Thus although you could describe
that particular thing with a conventional word, you still refuse to do so, as intuitively you
understand how a single word will constrain and limit the thing that you want to
communicate.

Now let's explain how a new consciousness with the ability to distance itself from the
existing accounts for cultural achievements of mental structure
“These processes require an ability to stand back from and detach
ourselves from the crows, from nature, and from ourselves that we may
objectify, This is in my view also the basis for the forging of the bridge with
others, and with nature, which classically and according to much of
neurophysiological literature is mediated by the right hemisphere. So in
order for you to connect you need to detach in the first place following the
Hegelian theme that union cannot exist without separation and distinction,
however the latter is of no use if it does not lead to the greatest synthesis.”
(Mcgilchrist,2009,369)

Now let’s get to the concept of distance and how it helps us to further assemble the
puzzle. Ian Mcgilchrist comes up with the concept of “necessary distance” which he
believes to be a result of advancement in the bihemispheric prefrontal cortex and to our
point he situated this occurrence in Greek culture.

East vs west

First, a quick detour to the east shows the demonstrable contrast between the
ontological status of the eye of the west and the east. What’s notable is the closed eye
of Buddha and the third eye of Hinduism. Because the east views the material world as
a veil of illusion (Samsara) the element of an epistemologically aggressive subject
which penetrates nature with the triangle of mental consciousness structure is
nonexistent and superfluous. The analogy that I came up with to describe the
fundamental ontological difference between the eastern and western subjects is of the
hunter and a fisher. You see east listens to nature so that it can pour into the space of
the mind using it as a vessel so that the subject can be purified from the contamination
of the material world. Thus the importance of eastern meditation stands in direct
opposition to the active subject of the west. A hunter is someone who blocks out every
domain of consciousness that interferes with its directive goals and wrath with which the
Illiad opens. The word “menin” a wrath of Achilles has the following meaning:
“The Greek word menis, meaning "wrath" and "courage," comes from the same stem as
the word menos, which means "resolve," "anger," "courage," and "power"; it is related
also to the Latin word mens, which has an unusually complex set of meanings: "intent,
anger, thinking, thought, understanding, deliberation, disposition, mentality,
imagination." (Gebser,2020,75)

Against the backdrop of the western subject with its hunting epistemology and
hegemony of nature symbolized by splitting the sea by Moses, walking on water by
Jesus, and stripping women from their reproductive capabilities, we have a fishing
modality of the eastern subject which lets the Dao reveal itself, thus a concept of the
passive subject. Note, how when people explain the essence of meditation, we are told
that the highest achievement is when you realize that thought processes going on in
your head do not belong to you and you have no authorship over them. This directly
translates into how the east attempts to comprehend reality with closed eyes as it is
inward-related rather than outward-related. Thus the concept of mysticism: “speechless
contemplation with closed eyes, that is, eyes turned inward.” (Gebser,2020,65)

According to Gebser

“The identical deed that prompts Christ to accept suffering via his conscious ego, leads,
in Buddhism, to the negation of suffering and to the dissolution of the ego, which,
transformed, returns to the original state of immaterial Nirvana. In Buddhism the
suspension of sorrow and the Ego is held in esteem; and this suspension of sorrow and
suffering is realized by turning away from the world. For Christianity, the goal is to
accept the ego, and the acceptance of sorrow and suffering is to be achieved by loving
the world. Thus the perilous and difficult path along which the West must proceed is
here prefigured, a course which it is following through untold•hardship and misery.”
(Gebser,2020,90)

Two passages from the new testament that I selected should settle the question.
Here’s Jesus speaking to Agrippa:
“to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of
Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among
those who are sanctified by faith in me.” Acts 26:18
Here’s how Jesus uses the metaphor of the eye in the sermon on the mount
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be
full of light.” Matthew 6:22

Greek myths - blindness

What’s fascinating about the Greek myths and tragedies is the prevalence of blindness
as punishment and how the role of seeing is intensified.

Here are some examples:

Orpheus who desired to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld was commanded
by Hades to never look back, while her wife would follow him through the land of the
living. Getting to the threshold, when they were leaving the underworld Orpheus saw the
sun and turned back to look at his beloved Eurydice. At that moment tragedy trucks as
she disappeared back to the underworld. Erymanthos was blinded after he saw
Aphrodite bathing.

Zeus defeats the titans by blinding them with the flash of light; graeae, three old sisters
with one eye have been robbed by Perseus thus leaving them blind; EPHIALTES A
Gigante slain by Apollon and Herakles in the war against the gods. Each pierced one of
the Gigante's eyes with their arrows;

The tragedy of the king of Oedipus is a failure of the “eye” par excellence. His literal
blindness is caused by the metaphorical lack of insight and knowledge. Note, how
Oedipus and prophet Tiresias accuse each other of blindness denoting the lack of
insight. However in this case Tiresias has the mind’s eye a prophetic vision a higher
sense of the eye, thus his prophecy turns out to be correct. Note, that Tiresias was
blinded by Athena as he saw her bathing. His prophetic powers were given by gods as
a form of compensation. The fact that Oedipus chose to blind as a form of
self-punishment but not other things is also not arbitrary.
There are numerous examples of characters being blinded as a punishment or in
exchange for greater power. However, the bottom line is clear - Sight acquires a
huge metaphorical significance in the mental consciousness structure of the
upcoming Greek culture.
Presocratics and platonism

It is not an accident that Russell’s first philosopher the Thales of Miletus was an
astronomer. A person whose epistemologically aggressive gaze was so intense that
according to the popular fable while contemplating and enjoying starts he fell in the well.
His servant caustically remarked: How can you comprehend the world if you can’t watch
your feet?
Now, that is a totally new concept of an absent-minded thinker where the act of seeing
acquires a new dimension of mind space.

What’s fascinating about presocratics is their willingness to come up with an extended

model of existence which is housed by the newly emerged mind-space of the eye. This
is the necessary distance brought by the strengthened connection between the frontal
cortex and parietal association cortices that houses the ability of spatial reasoning and
abstract categories. Presocratics were interested in the “Arche” and they wanted to see
through the beginnings of existence with their telescopic mind’s eye which would
eventually become materialized in the western culture. Thus the presocratic notion of
truth where is hidden from us and we need to engage in unconcealment. Thus, the
absolute importance of visual metaphor in seeking knowledge. Thus Heraclituse’s
anti-eastern epistemology whereby maintains that if we want to discover the nature of
reality we need to pay attention to the phenomenal world as opposed to turning inwards.
Elsewhere he writes that ‘eyes are surer witnesses than ears’, in other words,

west accepts the phenomenal external world as opposed to the east that what we
experience is more certain than what people say about what they experience. as ones
assertions should correspond to facts of reality

For the last part of the video, we need to address platonism, the concept of
contemplation i.e “theorein” and the theory of forms along with the analogy of the cave.

Note how Plato takes the sun to be an analogy of the highest truth as the sun is
something that makes everything visible. This fact tells about the fundamental equation
of seeing being equal with knowledge which is evident throughout the Indo-European
languages. Thus coming out from the cave, the darkness of magic consciousness
structure is equated with attaining higher truth.
The theory of forms is not just an add-on to an existing philosophical corpus but rather a
paradigm shift, a new way of conceiving the world. The word paradigm has to do with
seeing as it comes from the two Greek words paradeiknunai meaning to ‘show side by side’.
For Plato, the modus operandi of knowing is contemplation, which in the Greek
language is “theorein” from which the word theory comes. Note that “theorein” means to
look at. However, we have a twist of language whereby through an infinitive form of the
verb “theoreo” (I see) we get an abstract concept of contemplation i.e. “Theorein”.

Here it takes on the meaning we normally associate with seeing, the eye apprehending an object.
Interestingly it was not originally a verb, but is a back-formation from the word for a spectator, theoros. What
I take from this is that it is derived from what was thought of as a special situation, one of greater than usual
detachment from a ‘spectacle’. Words for ‘thinking’, in the sense of abstract cognition, and words for ‘seeing’
come to be closely related. The prominence, after the Homeric era, of theorein and noein, when compared
with the earlier terms for seeing, marks a degree of abstraction from what is under consideration. A related
distinction, touched on above, arises between aspects of the mind, between thymos and noos: very broadly
thymos is instinct, what keeps the body in motion, coupled with emotion, whereas noos is reflection, ideas
and images. Already, it would appear, the Greeks were making felt distinctions between thought and
experience as mediated by the left hemisphere and as mediated by the right. (Mcgilchrist,2009,379)

As Parmenides says that thinking is a being - Plato also understands “theorein” as a

mode of thinking by which you comprehend the essences and the existence of things,
thus transporting us into a new layer of abstract thought. Therefore, the apollonian
mind’s eye with its ability to comprehend the essence acquires an ability to create
genera i.e. abstract categories, namely platonic ideas or Aristotelian forms from the
particular objects. As Mcgilchrist points out this process has to do with the advance of
the left hemisphere which houses abstract decontextualized thought. To further the
neuroantrhopology the reorganization of the brain should be evident whereby the
connections between the frontal lobe, namely the inferior frontal gyrus and left anterior
temporal lobe has to do housing abstractions over concrete words. Also it's interesting
how people with left temporal lobe epilepsy tend to be obsessed with abstract thoughts
and become extremely pedantic, argumentative egocentric, and garrulous.
(Ramachandran,2011,168). The nous coming from the visual sensation takes the
highest value for Plato. In dialogues, it is described as the highest sense. In philebus
socrates says that "all philosophers agree—whereby they really exalt themselves—that
mind (nous) is king of heaven and earth. Perhaps they are right."
He also states that "mind (nous) always rules the universe".[18]
In his Cratylus, Plato gives the etymology of Athena’s name, the goddess of wisdom,
from Atheonóa (Ἀθεονόα) meaning "god's (theos) mind (nous)" Remember Athena
springing from the head of Zeus and carrying the gorgon’s head?

Thus we have a shift from Heraclitean flux of nature to an apollonian freeze frame of
Plato's ideas, however now unlike Egypt, we have a fully crystallized mental
consciousness structure which’s a prime symbol for Gebser is the triangle. Remember
the engraving on the door of Plato's academy "Let no one ignorant of geometry
enter"
It is noteworthy to mention that the occult knowledge that Socrates derives from the
divine sources i.e. knowledge of the magic consciousness structure is primarily heard
emphasizing the labyrinthine cavernous ear, where the knowledge of the science is
seen and thus is contemplated. Socrates does not see the daemon, but rather daemon
speaks to him.

It is not also accidental that in Plato's tripartite theory of the soul - the rational part e.i.
“logistikon” which meant vision is of the highest value, being the horsemen of the whole
body. Thus, adopting Jaynseas understanding of the breakdown of the bicameral mind
we enter into a condition when a human body is now understood as a unity of parts
governed by reason as opposed to the sense that is presented in the language of the
Iliad where the notion of the whole body is lacking. The reason named logistikon comes
from the word logos which is the most famous word in greek philosophy being the
highest truth in Heraclitean philosophy and then representing abstract thought and
formal logic. What’s fascinating is that logos which means the word is also connected to
the “eye” and seeing. “The word logos is connected with the word “thing” as they both
derive from IE “leg” meaning “to gather, collect”, then it is connected with calculating
reading and writing as in Greek legein “ to reckon, say.
L legere, from which Iectio "a reading";in compounds like G analekta "collection of sayings,"
analogia "proportionate," apalogos "story," dialogos "conversation," L intellegere "choose
among," colligere "collect"; and in English, a host of words primarily pertaining to thought and
literary expression, as in "logic," "intelligence," "lecture," "analogy," "epilogue," "prologue,"
"lexicon," "dialog," "syllogism," "select," "trilogy," "monolog," and many others. On the whole
logos indicates a peculiar class of "things"-assemblages assembled with the eyes by means of
the intermediary alphabet, the visible substitutes for the things themselves that are the words we
have for them and the word we have of them.” (Tyler,1984,31)

Summary
To summarize the video - although incomplete, we have explored the conception of the “eye” as
a metaphor for knowledge from ancient Egypt to classical Greece. Also, comparing the
Indo-European equation of knowledge being equal to seeing with other language families and
cultures of the east.
The key takeaway is that with the emergence of mental consciousness structure the “eye” as a
metaphor for knowledge and truth is hypertrophied and intensified. However, the absolute
apotheosis of the eye has yet to happen and if this video generates enough interest I will make
the following video about the western culture going deep into language differences and western
cultural elements, where the eye becomes the dominant organ in every sphere of existence.

Next video
Thus in the second part of the video, I will review how perspective was born in rainessance,
venerating the power of the eye. We will go through Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust showing
how contemplation and the “eye” took a position of the highest power. I will look at Foucault's
concept of the panopticon and thus reveal how the “eye” experienced an evolution to its
pathologically inflamed state.

Thanks
Thank you for watching, I appreciate your sincere interest. Special thanks to my cousin who
donated his own personal computer so that I can edit my videos. The ones that you already
watched were done without the use of computer and electricity. Special thanks to my
patreons for supporting the channel.

Fortifies the third paradigm: Mario Rahmani, Łukasz Skowron

References

Houghton Mifflin Co. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.

Gebser, Jean. 2020. The Ever-Present Origin. Ohio University Press.

McGilchrist Iain. The Master and His Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
World. Yale University Press 2009.
Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

Jaynes Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.Stephen A. Tyler, The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Eye Sees,
Journal of Anthropological Research. Vol. 40, no. 1, Fortieth Anniversary Issue 1944-1984 (Spring,
1984), pp. 23-40 (18 pages)Published By: The University of Chicago Press

Spengler, Oswald, 1880-1936. The Decline of the West. New York :A. A. Knopf, 1928.

Aristotle Aristotle and Richard Hope. 1966. Aristotle: Metaphysics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.

Dawkins Richard. 1998. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist's quest for what makes us human.
W W Norton & Co.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4061881/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811918303173