People are hating this article, but it points to something very important.
Not only the Greeks, of course, but everybody in the past had a completely different type of consciousness than we do. The title of the article is formulated in this shocking way on purpose because, yes, ancient Greeks did have some form of an inner life, but it was so different from ours that it doesn’t even make sense to call it by the same name.
The reason why I keep saying this is that it makes absolutely no sense to judge historic figures and events by our standards today. I wasn’t interested in watching the movie The Odyssey, not because of the woke casting, but because I see no point in transposing the Reddit mentality of today onto the events that happened millennia earlier.
And this is not only true for historic distance but also for the linguistic. Language provides the building blocks for our inner architecture. One tiny example is the word order in a sentence. Some languages have an extremely rigid word order, while others have a loose one. Curiously, you can find the most well-ordered societies among those who speak languages with the most rigid sentence structure.
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