Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Homer: Seele u. Leib (soma, psyche)

Kurzinhalt: ... in the language of Homer there are no words for body and soul;

Textausschnitt: 171a The word soma, which in later Greek means "body," occurs indeed but it has the meaning of "dead body," "corpse." The living human shape can only be designated by chros, skin; and chros does not mean skin in the anatomical sense (the skin or pelt that can be skinned off an animal, derma), but skin in the sense of a surface that is the bearer of color and visibility. This Homeric visibility of surface (as distinguished from our notion of bodily existence) is an immaterial, intangible quality to which unexpected things may happen. The visible shape may become invisible at the right tactical moment and reappear elsewhere, as in the case of the vanishing Paris. And then again it may expand demonically as in the appearance of Achilles when he frightens the Trojans from the body of Patroclus, with a thick golden cloud around his head and shining flames rising from the cloud, shouting with the sound of a trumpet. Such diminutions and exaltations of visible shape, however, are understood as more than human; they only occur with the help of the gods, an intermediate phenomenon as it were between normal human appearance and the occasional donning of visible shape by the immortals. The conception of a "living body" as it is familiar to us does not exist in the epics; it would presuppose the notion of an animating principle that endows the body with form, the notion of a "soul"-and there is no word for "soul" in the epics. (Fs) (notabene)

171b Again, to be sure, the word psyche, which in later Greek means "soul," is present, as is the word soma, but it signifies an organ of man rather than the organizing form of a body. Not much information can be extracted about this psyche from the epics, except that it means a life-force that leaves man in death and then leads a miserable, independent existence as the shadow, the eidolon. And since there is no conception of the soul, such phenomena as "emotions," "stirring of emotions," "thinking," cannot be conceived as functions of the psyche but must be understood (by the terms thymos and noos) as additional organs of man. The problems of man and his soul are not absent from the Homeric work, as we shall see presently,- nevertheless, this peculiar articulation of man into a bundle of organs and forces compels the poet to treat such questions by means of a symbolism that barely recognizes man as a well-circumscribed, world-immanent center of action.1 (Fs)