Seth Benardete: The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Winter 2001-2002, Volume 29, Number 2. Republished with permission.
Philosophy asks questions of tradition, then spins traditions of its own. A ‘philosophic tradition’ must be some tradition that builds questions of itself, and of tradition generally, into itself. One such tradition interrogates the Odyssey, seeking philosophy in Homer’s poetry. Few modern philosophers have taken up this tradition, such philosophers having judged the learning needed to do so unnecessary to the philosophic quest as they conceive it. Seth Benardete has acquired that learning, and with it the strength to follow the tradition. He departs from modern philosophers, renewing an old voyage.
His book, as the phrase goes, resists summary. But it encourages insight, and listing some insights Benardete offers may invite consideration of his argument. He recalls the acknowledged wisdom of poets and philosophers and asks readers to wonder if and how philosophic wisdom differs from poetic. Does the rational dialectic of argument differ fundamentally from the “poetic dialectic” of speech and action, or plot (xiii)?
1. “Whereas the Iliad begins with the names of Achilles and his father,” the Odyssey begins with a man in whom anonymity is coupled with knowledge, a much-traveled man separated from “father and fatherland” (3). Odysseus defeats the Cyclopes by calling himself “No One,” and by using his mind, the least ‘rooted,’ the most anonymous human characteristic.
In doing so, and yet also in so doing as part of a voyage back to his fatherland, back to his ‘roots,’ Odysseus radically alters the conditions of his rule of the fatherland, the rule he had won by revolution or “natural right” (4). Before his voyage, he ruled by natural right but had not used his mind to understand natural right. “[W]hat was originally an accidental coincidence of power and wisdom will have to be replaced by the conscious effort to put them together; but the terrible consequences of that effort” (the slaying of the suitors) “would seems to deny the desirability of their coincidence. Homer seems to have reflected on the Platonic possibility of philosopher-kings…” (4). The Olympian gods are the ones who overthrew their fathers, the cosmic gods, and Odysseus imitated them. Associated always with the Olympians (while his men remain pious, worshipping the Sun), Odysseus understands the world as nature not cosmos, understands political rule as founded upon natural right not paternity, and rules accordingly.
Any monarchy must concern itself with succession. A natural right monarchy, one that sees mere paternity as inadequate, presents its ruler with a problem beyond the usual worry that the legitimate heir to the throne may prove a dunce. The people of Ithaca, are restless, understandably; the brothers and cousins of Penelope’s importunate suitors had been led to violent death by her husband the king. The Olympian gods of natural right instruct Odysseus on how to found a new regime in the “postheroic world” in which son Telemachus must live, an iron age ruled by Athena or mind (13). Telemachus consults Athena but imprudently “blurts out” her “private advice” in front of the suitors (14-15), a failure that puts his own natural right to rule into question. “The Odyssey is remarkable for the light touch with which Athena guides the course of events” (15); for the ancients there is no very tight connection between the rule of reason and the slaughterbench of ‘history’ (that is to say, there is no ‘history’ conceived as a dialectical course of events). This is so, even if Athena occasionally commends the use of the slaughterbench to rulers.
2. In the Odyssey the person who most closely resembles a historicist is Nestor, who believes human events to be explicable in terms of “a strict theodicy” or moral tale in which everything that happens happens because wise and just gods cause it 919). Those slaughtered are rightly slaughtered; only the good survive. Nestor is no poet; his speeches lack both simile and dialogue. Simile and dialogue bring duality in, and with it moral ambiguity. Poetic dialectic yields no grand synthetic end and raises questions more insistently than it sets down answers. Poetry brings with it “a perspective beyond good and evil,” at least in any narrow or ‘moralizing’ sense of the phrase (21). The Nestorian account leads in the end not to piety but to the disappearance of the gods, who are relativized to certain places and time.
Duality also inheres in the distinction between appearance and reality, a distinction that would bedevil the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who said they wanted to bring reality to the surface and make it publicly authoritative. But the harshness of reality would make its publicity a source of endless vengeance, or of despairing listlessness; political life, impossible without memory, is only possible if memory is limited by wise forgetfulness, as when Helen drug men, making them “forget their malignant thoughts and sorrows” (27). By selecting some memories and covering others, poetry in its doubleness acts like the drug mixed by the beautiful, Argus-eyed, transpolitical Helen. Founders must plan thoughtfully like gods and the best poets; they must also understand that the plans and even the planning, the work of the mind, also affect (at worst infect) the workings of the heart or spirit (thumos). “Helen seems to have all the traits of the poet, from the coolness with which Homer depicts the most terrible things to his mimetic capacity to make things appear in all their vividness and his insight into the hiddenness of things” (29). But Homer’s Odysseus excels even her; unlike her, he “seems never to have fallen under the spell of Aphrodite” and so exhibits a strong moral character. Why then does he choose mortality instead of godly immortality?
3. Odysseus’ choice of mortality occurs during his stay with Calypso, a stay that the wise Athena (not Aphodite) arranges so that the natural softening of democratic resentments in Ithaca may take place, and King Odysseus’ potential successor, Telemachus, may mature—both in the course of nature, over time. In choosing mortality, Odysseus rejects the mindlessness of paradise, where “there seems to be no place for man” (35). It is a wise choice, especially given the suspicion that Calypso’s offer was empty, and Odysseus would have been killed, not deified, had he accept it (37).
This non-choice points to the frustration of life, the anger of thwarted desires that cause minds to ‘double’ by ‘talking to themselves,’ or to the gods. ‘Odysseus’ may be a pun on odussamenos, the anger of someone against someone else. At the founding stage of his new regime, the natural-right rule of the angry but not mindless man will be terror (34). If the gods withdraw, human reliance on mind and force intensifies, but so do human self-opacity and the need for caution and questioning.
4. After a long stay with Calypso, Odysseus has a short stay with the Phaeacians, who live in a sort of human paradise “without pain or suffering” (47). Having chosen the human, Odysseus will induce the Phaeacians to make the same choice. Odysseus is the humanist evangel. A human life, in its doubleness, longs for the reconciliation of legal right with natural right. This can be done, but only at the expense of eros (59), and therefore it cannot be done satisfactorily, once and for all.
5. Centrally, Homer goes along with human duality by having Odysseus tell his own story, at the prompting of King Alcinous (“Brain”) of the Phaeacians. In telling his story, Odysseus’ “morally neutral curiosity” is on display, along with his considerable moral virtues. The two come together in Odysseus’ willingness “to run risks for knowledge” (69). Participating in the siege of Troy, an act of dubious justice, Odysseus wants to know more about the conflicting ways of men, and so voyages. “There are forms of the verb ‘to wander’ (alaomai) that are indistinguishable from ‘true’ (alethes)” (72). From the orderly but cannibalistic, insular, and doltish Cyclopes he learns that “law and order can be apart” (72). Odysseus outwits them, using the universal-anonymous mind, which at the crucial moment overmasters Odysseus’ anger. From his disastrous encounters with incestuous Aeolus and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians he begins to see the natural limitations of the rule of the mind, namely, the bodily and the democratic.
These adventures and misadventures prepare him for the education he received from Hermes, “the peak of the Odyssey” (84). After committing his first act of justice that does not serve himself (embarking on the rescue of his men from Circe) Odysseus sees the revelation of Hermes, who not only tells him about, but shows him the nature of the moly, a plant which protects him against the witch’s spells. Knowledge of nature “lets Odysseus share in the knowledge of the gods without his having to share in their being” (85). “[T]he gods’ power arises from the knowledge” of the nature of things, especially of human beings. The human body is the true home of the human mind: This discovery reconciles the question of the rootless mind with the longing for home, for rootedness. The moly has both flower and root; it is two and it is one. “It now seems that Homer was the first, as far as we know, to have come to an understanding of this philosophic principle, to which he gave the name ‘nature.’ The experiences that had to precede its discovery are the measure of the difficulty of its discovery.” (87) Odysseus’ odyssey represents the philosophic quest. The philosopher is both human, an embodied mind, and divine, insofar as the knows himself (as an embodied mind). The philosophic life suggests “a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily. Without that knowledge he can be enchanted and made subject to perfect rule.” (87)
How then could a philosopher live (as he must, given human limitations) among fellow men who are not philosophic? Unphilosophic men “must have a version of the knowledge of what constitutes man” (88). That knowledge is the story of Hades, which teaches all men that soul and body are separable, and that mindlessness is to be feared. Hades is “a lawful equivalent of Odysseus’ knowledge of his nature” (88).
Odysseus’ knowledge requires moral virtue before and after he receives it. Human being, anthopos, is intelligible and invisible; manliness and womanliness are visible, bodily, necessary. Odysseus must resist the temptation of Circe; “there is in man some capacity to resist, a strength of soul or whatever we choose to call it, that can be lost or diminished regardless of knowledge” (89). This thumotic virtue encompasses not only self-control but sympathy for other men, the unphilosophic ones; political life remains necessary for the philosopher, and that life includes a measure of piety. The suitors ignore the wisdom that begins with the fear of Hades, and this is the real reason why they must be so forcefully punished, for the good of both philosopher and city. Ithacans need to be re-minded. The philosopher, for his part, needs to learn that he can know, but not know all, that he can resist but not finally defeat evil, and that he can persuade, but only to a point. Self, gods, and other men “stand in his way” (100). He must in this sense “submit to his fate” (100).
6. The limited freedom Odysseus enjoys may be seen in his lies. Upon returning home, he would rule, but ruling after the experience of philosophic noēsis differs from ruling before it. Odysseus will soon push off for another voyage, a second sailing. To leave his kingdom safely “in the hands of his son” (104), he must employ both force and fraud. Having employed them, getting out of town will be both the philosophic and the politic move to make. Force and fraud combine in the killing of the suitors, which is not merely a punishment but an exemplary punishment “designed to illustrate the principle, ‘Fear the gods and the future indignation of men'” (106). Liars, including poets, can philosophize and side with the gods.
7. Once the gods “have completed their withdrawal” (120), eyewitnesses of divinity will give way to prophets who hear the divine choice. Such hearsay, at least in Telemachus, “seems to be nothing but his own thoughts” (117). The noetic experience will become more internalized in the twilight world, the iron age.
The twilight of the gods and heroes also brings democracy. Telemachus will rule the future Ithaca, but will share power with Eumaeus and even a cowherd.
As for Odysseus, his political character comes to dominate his philosophic character. Homer takes care to show “how closely anger can pose as reason” (126), distinguishing the bow from the lyre, and both from the liar. The anger built into Odysseus’ name comes to the surface in the end. Philosophy does not always ‘take,’ even after one experiences it. Philosophy is for the rarest natures; perhaps one should not suppose oneself a philosopher.
8. Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud enchants the suitors, distracting them from their most prudent political course, which would have been to form an oligarchy and ignore the woman. Responsible for the deaths of so many Ithacan men, Odysseus will kill most of the remaining ones who are spirited. The soft-spirited survivors will feel guilty, because one of Odysseus’ allies tells them that the gods favor Odysseus and punish them for failing to oppose the suitors through Odysseus. Guilt enables the gods to withdraw, to become invisible; guilt ‘works’ only with the base. All others must be killed, if they have rejected the gods. It might be noted that in coming generations, new spirited ones will arise. Regimes change, therefore, Men will need Homeric wisdom until there are no men.
9. The Enlightenment wanted to substitute knowledge for belief. The final episodes of the Odyssey might seem to support that project. Odysseus stands revealed as himself at last, and he rules. The consignment of the souls of the heroic world to Hades also seems consonant with the Enlightenment, with whatever would be the ancient-world equivalent of embourgeoisement. The Enlightenment made much of recognition, and in this Hegel, the philosopher who wanted a political world animated by mutual recognition, is its culmination. The end of the Odyssey seems full of acts of recognition, and of the restoration of authority founded upon recognition.
Benardete looks more closely, however. He sees that Odysseus grants Penelope little or no recognition for her sagacity, and indeed “from the first book on she is pushed aside in favor of the son she fostered and protected” (150). Odysseus teases his old father, who cannot seriously be expected to recognize his son after twenty year of wear and tear on both of them. In so doing, “Odysseus aims at two things at once, which he believes to be somehow connected: he wants Laertes to know him as he is, but he does not want Laertes to know him if he does not genuinely miss him. Only if his grief is real should he recognize the real Odysseus. These are competing demands unless the standard is doglike devotion; but no human being can be like Argus, and Laertes fails the test of loyalty with knowledge. Loyalty and knowledge are as far apart from one another as the unquestioned is from the result of questioning, or as Odysseus the homeward-bound is from Odysseus the wanderer. The entire Odyssey seems to have strained from the start to assert their togetherness in Odysseus, who first chose memory and then professed to represent the anonymity of mind.” (152) Odysseus’ “destiny is to establish belief and not knowledge.” (152) He is poetic-dialectical proof of the impossibility of political enlightenment, of straightforward anti-traditionalism. The rationalist dialectics of Hegel and Marx are taller tales than Homer’s. With a dialectic both rational and poetic, Benardete shows here that one may reject the dialectic of Enlightenment without falling into anti-philosophic obscurantism.
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