Julian Jaynes Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Julian Jaynes
"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
It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, to grow, or make grow, while the English forms 'am' and 'is' have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, to breathe. It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it breathes.

Julian Jaynes
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.

Julian Jaynes
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
These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the material we are talking about.

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

Julian Jaynes
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
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
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