A big problem with E.R. Dodds’ classic The Greeks and the Irrational is, to the extent that anyone can tell, Dodds imposes concepts of rationality and irrationality drawn largely from Freud onto Greeks who had no idea that Freud was coming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – psychoanalysis can tell us stuff about the past, for sure – but it puts Dodds on a spur track from the main line of a modern “social anthropology” that aims, to the extent this is possible, to understand other societies in their own terms. A book that took into account what the Greeks thought the irrational was would be very different than the one that Dodds ended up writing.
In a forthcoming article that argues somewhat along these lines, Robert Parker sets Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Azande side-by-side with Dodds as an example of how anthropologists, even in the 1950’s, were already beginning to look for other rationalities in other cultures. The comparison is an apt one, especially from Parker’s standpoint as a historian of religion. A major project of Dodds’ work, though, is to bring together “religion” as a mass phenomenon with the critiques of that phenomenon which were leveled by sophists and philosophers who belonged to, and addressed, a small elite. Insofar as those critiques are “rational” in nature, Dodds can draw a distinction between rational and irrational in Greek culture without thereby imposing on it a purely etic standard of judgment.
Where we draw the distinction, though, still matters. That’s because the Greeks, unlike the Azande (but like many other premodern societies) have a word that includes “irrational” among its meanings and that gets deployed in debates over what irrationality is. The word is alogos, and one would be interested to know the history of its usage so that we can understand what counted, for the Greeks, as irrational.
One category of things that the Greeks took trouble to stigmatize as irrational is animals – such that ta aloga, the irrational ones, was a kind of a byword for nonhuman creatures. What did animals do that was irrational? Very little, as it turns out: ancient philosophers who insisted on this distinction were hard-pressed to separate the only “apparently” rational activities of dogs and dolphins and the rest from the “actually” rational activities of human beings which the former seemed to emulate, while skeptics ran roughshod over the distinction. What really justified the Greeks in calling animals “irrational” was a lack. Animals lack logos in the sense that they can’t speak and therefore can’t give an account of their actions. The Greeks inferred from this that such an account was also missing internally, such that animals had a kind of subjectivity (phantasia) without thought.
In effect, animals were thus excluded from a human community united by speech and a set of practices surrounding speech. This exclusion served as the prototype for a number of others: women, barbarians and slaves, to name just a few. The focus on speech which underlay these practices, however, was a central feature of a more-or-less democratic polis community and fared poorly outside of those conditions. I’ll have more to say on what this meant for postclassical animals in a later post.