Information about Heart (anthropology)

In the pre-Christian era the emotional and mental character of the human being is attributed to the heart. In the after-Christian era a gradual separation fulfills itself from this idea of unit: the brain of the human being becomes a central- and essential point of mental functions. In recently time in the course of the new perceptions in the field of the neurobiological research particularly in the emotion research people think about a co-acting of the corporeal functions (of the organism) and the mental functions (of the brain).

pre-Christian era

With the arising of written fixation by cuneiform script and hieroglyphs about 3000 before Christ, without delay the decisiving and forming values of the organized societies are transferred into a callable memory form. During the disclosure of this order of values of the things in the divine working by the written fixed text and its interpretation, obviously a form of internalness moves in the center of the dialogue with the divine nature. As a first testimony for this use of internalness prevails the Akkadian word „libbu“, which paraphrases the term of the inside and so to say the organ of the vitality. ^[1]

The inside of a human being „contains an oracle of the God in everyone“, publishes a contemporary of Thutmose III 1000 years after the first written documents. And as an organ of this internal dialogue the author names „the heart of a human being, which is its own God.“ „Jeba “, the Egyptian word for this heart term, is also meant as an inside opposite. ^[2] In this opposite, so to say an alter ego,^[3] are established not only the emotions, but just so the intellectual faculty. In the Old Testament „leb“, the Hebrew word for heart, is the center: supplied with spiritual and mental aspects, which uses its sens organs - eye and ear -, in order to be able to notice the order of value of the things. ^[4]

after-Christian era

This thread of intensification is still spinning out for a long epoch with the Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Eastern mystics: about the new millennium of the after-Christian era Al-Ghazali speaks of the inside, which he names soul, spirit and heart: „The inside is your true nature.“ ^[5]

Above all in the course of the enlightenment Descartes sets the rationalistic antipole by professing the experiences of emotions in the heart section as an „illusionistic projection“. ^[6] First Antonio R. Damasio, one of the general agent on the neurobiological field of the emotion research, starts a reconciliation, which directs now to the holistic: „The feeling of an emotion has much more to do with the body“, Damasio explains, „and obviously the rational thinking is not possible without the influence of the emotion.“ Damasio refers to a quotation of Blaise Pascal, who did note that the heart as organism would have reasons, from which the intelligence does not know anything: „The organism has some reasons, from which the intelligence must make use.“ ^[7]

Notes

Literature

• Jan Assman, Religion and Cultural Memory, 2006 ISBN 0804745234
• A.R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 2000 ISBN 0156010755