Demystifying Mentalities, by G.E.R. Lloyd. Book Review

Classical Association of Canada Review: [untitled] Author(s): Joseph M. Bryant Source: Phoenix, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 276-279 Published by: Classical Association of Canada Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1088699 . Accessed: 13/06/2011 03:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cac. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Classical Association of Canada is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Phoenix. http://www.jstor.org 276 PHOENIX (though this is strictly not a conjecture), 16.16 praecutit, the transposition of 16.19 f. to after 14, 17.27 Diam, and 25.11 iam. Unfortunately the format precluded a full apparatus criticus and Goold has contented himself with simply noting divergences from Barber's OCT; only the lack of complete textual information and the insistence upon an unobelized text prevent welcoming this warmly as the current standard edition. There are few slips, but at 3.22.38 Baehrens' fera has sneaked in unannounced, and on 317 a typographical error has restored a corruption of the archetype and turned the river Asopus back into the "Aesopus." Some will dismiss Goold's Propertius as "Bentleyolatry" or "Housmanolatry" and "Anglo-Saxon hypercriticism"; but how is it possible to be excessively critical in a text so ravaged by error that even today's conservative editions acknowledge some 600 or more corruptions? Others will ridicule him for emending away Propertius' alleged unique literary qualities; in fact his Propertius displays far more of what antiquity admired in him than Barber's or Fedeli's does (much less Phillimore's or Rothstein's), and to plead that ancient literary criticism was too primitive to realize that Propertius was actually writing like Ezra Pound is as arrogant as it is nonsensical. We are still far, especially in the tormented Book 2, from the poet's ipsissima uerba, but Goold's Propertius is simply the best text seen since the elegies emerged from the obscurity of the Middle Ages; technical reasons may prevent it serving as a standard edition, but it certainly deserves to be regarded as the current textus receptus and as the starting point for all future discussion of the text. MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND JAMESL. BUTRICA DEMYSTIFYINGMENTALITIES.By G. E. R. LLOYD.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990. Pp. viii, 174. OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST THREE DECADES, a steady and voluminous outpouring of articles and books by one scholar in particular has done much to deepen our understanding of a rather elusive subject. The "Greek Miracle," the birth of Reason, the transition from Mythos to Logos-whatever one's stylistic preference, it is G. E. R. Lloyd's work which, cumulatively, provides the most varied and nuanced approach to its many facets. Whether investigating the social origins of Greek rationality and its basic modalities of expression, or its internal limits and major ideological lacunae and predilections, Lloyd's research has been marked by a rare but requisite balance between the analytical and the empirical. The 'Tacts," we now readily concede, do not speak for themselves: they must be repeatedly interrogated, reconceptualized from fresh and varied perspectives. To that end Lloyd has adopted a strategy of active engagement with the so- BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTESRENDUS 277 cial sciences, drawing upon the categories of anthropology and sociologythough not uncritically-to educe new insights from materials either long overworked or from sources hitherto neglected. In Demystifying Mentalities Lloyd's effort is more explicitly confrontational: the premise that times and peoples are marked by distinctive and enduring affective-cognitive structures, i.e., mentalites, is to be tested against what is perhaps the most significant case of all, the dynamic confluence of myth, magic, and science that informed the mental universe of the ancient Hellenes. Following a brief introduction, Lloyd offers four self-contained essays on various aspects of the central problematic: the halting and uneven crystallization of "proto-scientific" modes of discourse within Greek society. The first three chapters are given over to the many-sided confrontation between traditional thought-patterns and the new forms of rationalism developed by the pre-Socratic physikoi, the Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, and the Hippocratics. Fundamental to this encounter-and to the Greek "way of science" more generally-is the pronounced concern exhibited by the new rationalists with second-order or foundation issues, i.e., questions of ontology, epistemology, and a methodological self-awareness regarding matters of proof and argumentation. For Lloyd this development is to be explained not by anything so grand and vague as a collective mental mutation, a shift in mentalite, but rather by the concrete social imperatives of polemical self-legitimation, as those involved in the articulation of new modes of reasoning sought to "remove the ground," as it were, of their traditionalist rivals in the purveyance of knowledge. This pattern of intellectual competition, Lloyd suggests, was itself derivative, a by-product of the unique social organization of the Greek Polis. For in addition to allowing the structural "space" for such rivalry-neither kings, scribes, nor priests held institutional monopolies in the domains of truth and wisdom-the Polis imparted to its citizenry considerable experience in the formulation of arguments and the weighing of evidence as part of the legal and political responsibilities of self-governance. These parallels and connections receive extended treatment in the fourth chapter, where Lloyd attempts to specify the social bases of Greek rationalism by way of comparison with ancient China, juxtaposing the key political and cultural developments in the two civilizations in a most revealing manner. Since several of these subjects are covered in greater detail in Lloyd's earlier works, most notably The Revolutions of Wisdom (1987), estimation of this particular offering will probably turn on the perceived adequacy of Lloyd's "demystification" of the mentalities perspective. Proponents will no doubt find it odd that Lloyd directs most of his fire at the rather dated formulations of Levy-Bruhl; but even so, the more basic charge that "mentalites" lack analytical precision is widely accepted in social science circles. Lloyd's call to abandon airy speculation about collective mental states in 278 PHOENIX favour of concrete examination of linguistic categories and styles of reasoning is surely sound, but this is more a strategy for research than a theoretical solution to our problems. After all, new modes of discourse are not, presumably, self-generating but embody and are expressions of underlying social psychologies (mentalites, if you will), which are thereby framed and stabilized within emerging linguistic-cognitive patterns. Indeed, much of the best work in the histoire des mentalites has focused on the enveloping, constraining function of languages and worldviews, which, once fashioned, establish "limits of the thinkable" and restrict the range of affective response. As a descriptive category, the notion of relatively enduring and distinctive mentalities (or social psychologies) is not without some validity, as anyone comparing the artistic and philosophical offerings of the ancient Chinese and Greeks, for example, will readily concede (Lloyd himself reaffirms the prominence of "harmony" and "tradition" in the one, "agonistic striving" and "innovation" in the other). Cultural forms, in short, are structured, and we are thus once again obligated to confront all the old polarized debates regarding the genesis and role of ideas of history and of their relationships to wider patterns of social organization. The chief limitation of the mentalities approach-and of the whole Durkheimian complex of which it is a part-lies in its reductionist tendencies: analogues and homologies are discerned or posited between social structures and systems of thought, with the latter "explained" as functional emanations of the former. Much of this work is undoubtedly informative and at times brilliantly suggestive, but typically lacking is any clear account of process or mediation and specified forms of human agency. Lloyd as critic is aware of these failings, but one senses that a residual Durkheimianism still informs his own approach on occasion, most notably in his effort to claim a direct causal connection between Greek democracy and the emergence of scientific rationalism. Lloyd refines previous discussions by carefully distinguishing between actual democratic practice and its ideology ("a propaganda of openness," with an emphasis on argument over authority), but one is still left with the problem of how this ideology triggered, stimulated, or informed the speculations of the physikoi or the Hippocratics. The democracy-science thesis would seem to be claiming too much, for skill in argumentation and the custom of public debate-to say nothing of agonal striving-figure prominently in Greek social life virtually from the beginning, in the Homeric epics. Lloyd's research has been particularly valuable in identifying the discursive and linguistic parallels between the legal-political spheres and philosophical discussion (e.g., in lexical mutualisms such as marturia, tekmeria, elenchos, and logon didonai), but this reflects Greek political experience more generally, i.e., the Polis, rather than democracy per se. One might accordingly suggest that critical ratio- BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTESRENDUS 279 nalism and the ideology of democracy constitute two separate and distinct cultural derivatives of the Polis-form of social organization, mutually reinforcing at certain points, but each developing according to its own internal dynamic. It is of course a basic axiom of sociology that some form of "existential congruence" obtains between ideas and institutions, but it is equally obvious that the lines of causality can run in either direction, with ideas serving as catalysts for change and as conserving ideologies. Is there, then, an alternative model or framework that avoids the pitfalls of reductionism without lapsing into idealist excesses? If one is seeking an integrated, comprehensive theory, the answer must be negative; the unending controversies regarding the Marxist concept of ideology and Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge attest to that. One might, however, find a promising lead in the work of Max Weber, whose effort to lay bare the social psychologies of the world religions pays due regard to the differences between the creation and subsequent spread of ideas, chiefly by concentrating on the dynamic between the charismatics and virtuosi who fashion and expound new religious images and the mass converts or "carriers"who readjust the new faith in accordance with their social experiences and needs. There is value too in the symbolic interactionist framework of George Herbert Mead, which takes us beyond the standard formulations-that ideas "reflect," "mirror,"or are "determined"by underlying social structures-by showing how "society" is intrinsic to the development of "mind" through the internalization of the conversation of gesture, i.e., language, a system of symbols socially created and sustained. In the sociologies of Weber and Mead, in other words, the emphasis is on process rather than static structural correlations, and that is surely the direction required in the study of highly mutable phenomena such as cultural forms and social psychologies. If many of the interpretations and explanations in the sociological study of culture-including Lloyd's own-appear somewhat intuitive and provisional, this is no doubt due to the enigmatic nature of the subject matter itself. For just as the transformation of neural stimuli into cognitive responses constitutes one of the great mysteries for physiologists and biologists, so it can be said that delineating the multiform relations between "social practice" and "consciousness" poses the greatest challenge for the social sciences. Given that situation, co-workers from other disciplines are especially welcome; and when, as is the case here, they combine a thorough mastery of the source materials with a high level of analytical sophistication, the results should prove not only enlightening but also provocative. Demystifying Mentalities qualifies as an important read in both respects. UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK JOSEPH M. BRYANT