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III. Homer (1954) Three Lectures By Heinrich Blücher Lecture VII(Part I) S-II(3-26-54) We are proceeding in our course mainly because we want to examine the strange situation of man in this new era that has been called the second Promethean age, and rightly so, because not since the pre-historic discovery of fire has anything so changed and endangered the life of man as has the discovery of atomic power. It has increased our performing and operational power to such a degree that we can now explode the innermost forces that hold nature together and we have exploded them. This is an event that is always somehow hidden in the middle of all our daily considerations but which is nonetheless decisive for our philosophical considerations, because it takes us directly back to the importance of philosophical thinking when inquiring into the basic problems of man. That is why it is unavoidable that the newspaper should interfere with our course. What do we read? We read that the new experiments with the hydrogen bomb were "beyond expectations". A fine phrase - "beyond expectations". That means they didn't know that eighty miles away there were Japanese fishermen who would be seriously burnt, or that perhaps millions of fish in the ocean would die from the radio-activity. It seems that if these are the things that turn out to be "beyond expectations" we have lost all reason for rejoicing in them. It should rather be a reason for considering, once again, the operational power we have made so much of and which goes so lightly out of hand. Einstein said already five years ago that there are many serious scientists who will no longer do everything they are told; that they cannot be sure that these chain reactions are ultimately controllable and if they cannot be sure then they will not tell people that they are. In the meantime we seem to be looking forward with joy to the newer experimental gadgets which will turn out to be even more beyond expectation than the ones we have already invented. Throughout all of this there is one thing that is decisive. Namely, that this operational power which we have turned loose through the controlling power of our political institutions has grown to the point where even our organs of government can no longer hold it in check. But even more serious, the creative power that should be behind it all, the power of reason in the minds of responsible citizens, has not been able to make new investments in institutions of control that could hold it in check. This is a fine beginning for the new Promethean age, the Titanic age, for titans are mostly sorcerers who cannot call off the forces they bring into being, and the first man to discover that was not an atomic scientist or philosopher but rather a poet, a singer, the man who first gave us the Olympic gods who defeated the titans, and I am speaking now of Homer. How do Homer's gods defeat the titans? They bind them and this binding of the Titans (including Prometheus) is what has made human life possible for us in the West. This notion that there are forces in life which man must bind comes initially out of Greek myth, the only myth in all the world that carried with it from its very beginnings a hatred of monsters. This is the real content of all early Greek myth. That man, by conquering the monsters within the world can make a place on earth for human beings and for humanity; so Homer is still available to tell us what the real difference between creative power and operational power is and what it means to take the side of the Titans or to take the side of the Olympian gods. The miracle here is that a religion, the Homeric religion of ancient Greece, was founded upon a work of art. It was an artist who told us that. The Greeks would say
and they admired and adored these gods which had been made for them by their poets. This was a poetical religion that was, nevertheless, observed as a religion, the only one in the world that has a purely artistic origin, that was founded by an artist who really did not want to create a religion at all but only to transform the content of Greek myth into a vision of art, and who brought forth instead, a concept of the gods that became believable to this Greek mankind, for it is perhaps true that they never would have accepted non-artistic gods, because they themselves were such an artistic people. This miracle, that a religion could be built by an artist, that it could be observed and carried on through hundreds of years until it became one of the three pillars of western culture, almost defies explanation. The first pillar has its source in Abraham's vision of the God of man and Jesus of Nazareth's vision of the God of inwardness- the one leading to Judaism and the other to Christianity. Then there is Heraclitus and Socrates with their insight into the human power of reason - this makes for the other pillar. And finally, there is the aforementioned transformation of the mythical Greek gods into artistic visions of humanistic gods - gods that are so thoroughly humanized that they take on the risk of being made to look almost ridiculous. This artistic creativeness, this timeless characteristic of artistic man, is what the Greeks called poetry, because all artists are poets. The original meaning of the word "poesis" was "to make". That which is made by man and only by man is art. Hence the poetic power of man is one of the greatest and most revealing of all creative powers and one of the most crucial in terms of checking our operational powers. How great this power is has already been revealed to us by the mere historical fact of Homer's artistic achievement. That is the first miracle. If we want to approach him, if we want to talk about him, if we want to give a portrait of him, we almost do not know how to begin. When he says in the Odyssey:
he means the multi-versed man. The topic is man. "Name the man to me, o Muse" as if he were making his own appeal, and as if he wished for us also to say:
A portrait of Homer! Fortunately we have a portrait of Homer. It was painted by Rembrandt and it is a portrait of the greatest portraitist of all times. It is one of the hidden self portraits and it is a portrait of Homer, because it is a portrait of the artist, and the artist is the blind man. Blind to what? Blind to reality? Oh no! To the world? By no means! Rather, blind to the one thing that never enters art and unfortunately almost never enters the artist's life; namely the relation to necessity. The relation to having to make a living, the relation to the things of life that merely sustain life. For the artist the only immediate relation to life is through life itself, and so the legend that only the blind man can really see has a mythical truth to it. Rembrandt paints for us a portrait of Homer as a blind man, but look at this portrait. This is the all-seeing man. His eyes see, his ears see, his eyes hear, his ears hear, his touch sees, he senses with all of his senses. All of his senses are alive and that is exactly the way the artist must be. A work of art gives truth to the senses and the artist himself must be the sens-ible human being, the sensing human being who senses beyond all others. That is what makes him such a helpless prey to over-sensibility, that is what drives so many of them crazy and into despair. This having to live without a skin, this having to live with all senses constantly wide awake and continually open, especially open to being hurt. This is the second part of that miracle given to us by poetic man, and we see all of that in approaching Homer. There is still another miracle in Homer, the miracle of an event that has been documented many times before and which we ourselves have been aware of, but which nonetheless has never been so readily observable in such a singular work; namely, the moment in man's history and in the history of man's mind when myth turns into art, when art ceases to be the servant of myth and the relation is reversed making myth the servant of art. That reversal is exactly what Homer did. His free handling of Greek myth, his absolute inconsiderateness of its content, is really the behavior of a reckless nonbeliever like Abraham, a man who smilingly rejects all of the implications, significance, and indications of myth, transforming it freely into expressions of the experience of man. Who takes the old gods of the Greeks into his artistic hands and transforms them into human figures, running of course the risk of making them attackable by Plato who doesn't find enough morality in them. No, there isn't much morality in them, because they have been made so entirely human. We are confronted here with a man, with a man who dares in a totally artistic way, to do what Abraham did in a totally religious way; namely to say "there are no demonic powers in divinity. Divine powers are friendly to man." They may be ironic, as the Greek gods certainly are, but they are not inhuman. They are thoroughly human and they understand human beings. The Olympian gods of Homer are really idealized human beings; idealized that is, except for one thing. They are immortal and men are mortal. Otherwise they are not even idealized but rather glorified. They are the glorified existence of the free human person. That is what Homer does as an artist and as a thinker. Up until now we have considered many different kinds of creative thinking, philosophical, religious, but never really artistic. Now we begin the study of artistic thinking. Homer is called the father of poetry. No doubt there was poetry before Homer yet in a sense it is true that he is the father of poetry, because he is the father of free art. He makes for us a declaration of independence of human art and in so doing establishes the independent capability of artistic thinking. How? All genuine creative thinking whether in science, philosophy, poetry, art, or love, takes as its defining characteristic some fundamental tool. Scientific thinking takes for itself the tool of the symbol, philosophic thinking the tool of the concept, erotic thinking the tool of the human attitude or gesture, and political thinking the tool of the model. They all stand in their own right and although they have their own means they still flow from a common source, the source of reason. But we first have to consider all of them in their separateness in order to see what this power can do and cannot do and where its limits lie. For just as the other forms of creative thinking proceed through the use of some fundamental tool, so it is with poetry. Poetic thinking proceeds with the metaphor. It is, as Holderlin said,
because it can change our vision and hence can change the world. After Cezanne had painted it was as if all of those who looked upon his work had different eyes put into their heads. They finally were able to discover for the first time the great artistic merits of Piero della Francesca, El Greco and Vermeer, because he had discovered them and in this discovery transformed them and opened up our eyes to them. We could look out at a real landscape and see it with different eyes, more different than anyone who had ever come before us, and that is because a poet had come along and made our eyes more "sun-like". This is what Goethe meant when he said "if the eyes of man wouldn't be sun- like then how could they see the sun?". The eyes of man are sun-like, because art comes and makes them more sun-like. Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world. It is almost as mighty as philosophy and not nearly so harmful, because it does not ask anything of us. Art makes no request except one - to be loved - but no other request will a work of art ever make. If we love art and participate in the experience given there then our entire being will be changed, so mighty is this experience and yet so harmless. When Homer wrote his works he may not have known that what he was really doing was building a whole culture. The Greeks called him their educator and the Greeks became the educators of the West so he is also our educator. Malraux once said (although he was talking primarily of painters but it is true of all artists) that artists have one main fault. They always want to outdo one another. To paint a better picture than Cezanne, to paint a better picture than this or that painter - that is the inner drive of the artist, and since this is so it is all the more astonishing that no one ever tried to compete with Homer, because it would be hopeless. This capability of man to be a world builder through art opened up in Homer with such a freshness that no one could ever hope to excel the father of poetry and they all knew it. In our time art is in danger of being transformed back into myth, primarily by those who go to art in the hopes of finding metaphysical and mythical experiences. This idea that art can be turned into myth would really spoil art, and yet in a very special way art is myth.
That is why in order to understand Homer we must understand the delicate relationship between myth and art. Homer makes myth the servant of art. He handles myth in such a way that it is absorbed by art and in so doing, it becomes, so to speak, free myth. Myth that is enriched by the imagination and which is not impoverished any more. All of this becomes possible through art and it is no accident, because myth has in cormoon with art the fact that it also works by metaphor, the most unreliable tool the human mind can conceive of, a tool with which it is possible to do almost anything. Almost every event in the world can be related to other events by means of the metaphor. No checking is possible and it almost seems as if there is no control possible (as there is in science or philosophy) but there is a control. Form Form is a phenomenon that we must analyze if we are to distinguish myth from art and to understand how they are related and what they have in common, but in order to do that we must first discover why it is that form is so important to art and how it is that form comes to play the essential role. The inherent wonder of art, the greatness of art, is that it is the only power of man that is beyond good and evil. When Nietzsche came, and de-masked all of the moral and ethical theories up until his time as illusions that were really created out of ulterior motives for power and that had no eternal or binding value whatsoever, it was no accident but rather a necessity that led him to replace science and philosophy by art as the central creative activity of man. He did this, because he was the first to smell that art has this strange quality of being beyond good and evil, and that it makes no requests of man. |
