II. Talk on the Common Course (1952)
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Against the short life of Achilles, in which all significance is concentrated into one single act of supreme courage, stands the long life of Ulysses whose wanderings lead him over the whole space of the world. He does not concentrate his life into one single climactic point, he ensures its full course. These are the two alternate possibilities of human bios, of the life which man can make out of his mere existence, as Homer conceived it, and his two epic poems are the greatest biographies ever written. Homer's metaphor is man himself and its truth consists of his having a bios, a life whose story can be told as a consistent and continuous whole.
Opening the Odyssey, there is Ulysses on the island of the nymph Calypso, who prevents his return to Ithaca because she hopes to marry him. In a few lines we are introduced to the essential facts of his life, the time and the space which he has and of which he is the center. From there, Homer leads us up to the Olympus, where the gods are deliberating Ulysses' fate. Immediately we find ourselves in a world inhabited by gods and men where everybody is concerned with Ulysses and where Ulysses is ever present. Tho only exceptions, as we are told presently, are Penelope's suitors, the most important fact about them being that they are not aware of Ulysses and that this oblivion eventually leads them to their doom. The omnipresence of Ulysses provides the unity of the story. The deliberations of the gods are opened by Zeus, whose first speech seems to have no connection with Ulysses. Zeus bewails the crime committed by Aegisthus, the murderer of Agamemnon, because it was committed "against fate" and therefore will bring sufferings to the mortals which are "beyond fate," more than moira had assigned to them. These opening words of Zeus, seemingly unconnected, are of great relevance to the whole story because they introduce an entirely new concept of the relationship between men and gods and moira. Gods as well as men, Homer tells us, have some freedom from moira; Zeus knows not only the moira of men but also what men do or can do against and beyond it. The conclusion is obvious: blind fate has decided nothing about Ulysses; divine as well as human forces are at play in his life and the gods have to save him first of all from the wrath of Poseidon, whom Ulysses had provoked of his own free will. Athena leads us back, down to earth. She acquaints us with Ulysses' wife and son, who are all the more aware of his presence since they live in fear of his death; she acquaints us with the suitors who do not think that he is present because they believe him dead. Telemachus' voyage to the kings, who were with his father at Troy and from whom he hopes to learn what happened to him, is chiefly a land journey and contrasts with Ulysses' own wanderings over the seas. For a while the two voyages of father and son parallel each other; a recurring line, describing the movement of horses, and a similar recurring line describing the movements of men rowing a boat transmits to the listener (and the reader) the essential notion of each man. The story of Telemachus' trip makes Ulysses present in the lands of his friends and brings Ulysses past back into the present. At the same time, it serves to drive the suitors, who, encouraged by Telemachus' absence, contrive to murder him, to their well- deserved doom. The whole story of Telemachus is designed in one straight time movement, which contrasts with the revolving time movement of Ulysses, whose circular wanderings thus become more impressive and measurable.
The fifth song brings us again to Ulysses on the island of Calypso. Here, we find him right in his own world, on one of the Mediterranean islands, the skies above him, the seas around him, the mainland of Greece in the East, and his homeland, Ithaca, in the distance: Ulysses' world, the transformed world image of the sailor and his poet.
It is the time element in the story that construes this world around Ulysses, and this time, expressed in Ulysses' wanderings over the seas, is the metaphor for the time Ulysses himself has and makes use of. He is in the midst of his island world, but he is not yet in the middle of his time and life, and therefore cannot yet go home to Ithaca. He must wander again, leave the center of the island world and go to one of the borderlands of his world, the country of the Phaeacians. Only then will he be able to go home and come to the peak of his life. Now, on the island, he is jammed between his past and his future, they overlap, so to speak. The last part of his past, its last big wave, will roll over him, and (this is the power of the metaphor) this will be the wave of the storm let loose by the god of the seas, in which he will lose his liferaft and almost his life. The storm will wash him ashore to the land of the Phaeacians, the shore of his future, where he will cone into the midst of his life and his time, taking his past into his present. This happens when he tells the story of his life to the Phaeacians, presents them and himself, as it were, with his past and thus assures his future by persuading them to bring him safely home. Recollectiong his time, the story of his past, he assembles his space around him: Troy and Ithaca, the lands of his friends and his enemies, the magic islands of the bad sorceress and the good beautiful nymph, the lands of the borders of the world and of strange, barbarian people, the island of the Cyclopes -- all of them bordering on the sea or surrounded by it, the sea with its rocky dangerous shores and straits between Scylla and Charybdis, the skies above it with the Olympian gods, and underneath, Hades, the world of the dead. This is Ulysses' world constructed by Homer in a multiple space by the instrument of one man's time; and this is Ulysses' time, whose revolving motion year in and year out Homer describes by the means of one man's space. In the Odyssey, a perfect unity or time, space and action is accomplished in which the identity, consistency and continuity of one life, the life of man, is metaphorically caught. The final victory over the suitors is the climactic, not the decisive action of this life. Ulysses' great deed, the deed that decided his whole life, was done when he told his name to Cyclops whom he had blinded and thus defied Poseidon. This is the nucleus of the story and this is the key to understanding who Ulysses was: he will risk everything in order to assert and keep his identity. It is the identity of a free personality as it is shown in his relationship to Penelope and the faith he keeps.
While the inner unity of the story is provided by Ulysses' omnipresence, its poetic unity is enforced by recurrent metaphors. The same metaphor makes the sun rise and set every day; other metaphors combine to describe movement on sea and land; everything that happens is represented, time and again, in its essential, unchanging identity.
Success, unequalled by any other work of art in Western history, has veiled rather than revealed the character of Homer's wrk as free, transcending art and its author as the originator of purely artistic thinking. Since it is the only work of art on which a religion was ever founded -- the Homeric religion of the Greeks (See the interpretation of Walter F. Otto, Die Gotter Griechenlands, Bonn 1929) -- metaphysical thought has interpreted the work and its author in symbolic terms. The power of Homer's metaphors had transformed the older Greek gods into a vision of beautiful super-beings with such plastic force that the great imagination of the Greek people almost instantly believed in them as their real gods. They became personifications of the higher powers of life and spirit with whom post-Homeric Greece, and especially post- Homeric poetry, could live as though they were real divinities. The formation and development of the Homeric religion is the only example we have of the transformation of a mythical into a metaphysical religion. This theological process, initiated as it was by a poet, takes place chiefly in the form of poetry and culminates in Athenian tragedy. Plato synthesizes tragic theology with the thinking of the early natural theologians and philosophers; the result is the establishment of Greek supra-mundane metaphysics, which has remained the basis of all Western metaphysics, and which asserted itself again and again in continuous revivals. Aristotle himself presents the first of these revivals, the revival of early Greek natural metaphysics and theology.
The reason why theology as well as metaphysics could ultimately base itself on Homer's work is that Homer himself was a religious thinker. But this religious side of Homer is not something that was added to Homer the poet and artist; it arises directly from his specific poetic creativity. His vision of divinity is the vision of a free artistic thinker. It is also the vision of one God. Because Homer wished to be a free artist, he could not use the closed world of mythology and he had to liberate Zeus from his involvement in mythical functions. Homer's concept of God forces open the closed Greek cosmos, ruled by moira. Only in one respect, and this is decisive) does Zeus wield power against and beyond moira, and this creative power is an artistic power. Zeus cannot save Hector from the predestined moira to fall at the hands of Achilles, but he can make the fate of the defeated glorious, he can illuminate Hector's last fight with the undying aura of beauty, which gives his life and death eternal significance. Zeus does precisely what Homer, the poet, can do himself. But Homer tells us -- in full possession and awareness of his creative power, knowing that he had not created himself but only chosen the proposition of his creativity and tried his best with it -- that his great art in its free creativity could be inspired only by a transcending (moira and cosmos transcending) God, who himself possesses absolute power to create significance. This statement of Homer, to be sure, does not prove the existence of God; yet there is no argument in all human reason that could contradict the experience of such a man.
Homer, the poet, re-groups the world of Olympus around his vision of one God. The other gods became personifications of powers that Zeus delegates to them. They are metaphors of these powers, not their symbols, They remain acting persons and are at the same time the actions (the pragmata) of Zeus, his virtues (aretai). Arete in the Homeric sense means highest capability; it has not yet any moral connotation. Aphrodite is one of these divine "virtues," and Homer loves Aphrodite.
Homer, the artist, communicates with his God by making his Ulysses communicate with Zeus. The gods (first Athena, but also Hermes and the invisible Aphrodite, who shows her power in the desire of every woman in the Odyssey to marry Ulysses) are always present around Ulysses. The actions in the Odyssey are frequently described in such a way that we do not know whether certain acts are performed by Athena herself or by Ulysses, whom she advises and Protects. For these gods are metaphorical personifications of human capabilities (aretai, true virtues) as well as of the virtues of God. Each action of Ulysses, therefore, shows the influence of Athena and the power of Zeus; and each action of Zeus is transmitted through Athena to Ulysses.
Which then is Homer's answer to the threefold ultimate question of the meaning of Being, the value of life and the being of man? An artist never raises these questions directly because he is not able to doubt -- as a pregnant woman, under normal circumstances, is not able to doubt the value of life. Yet, he is the only one who lives this question permanently and his whole work is one single answer. The artistic impulse arises from the initial shock that meaninglessness is possible at all; and this shock is answered by am immediate transcending action in which the question itself is contradicted: Being and life is given artistic significance; artistic creativity is the ever repeated evocation of the aura of Beauty (signifying truth) which again and again assures the artist and the beholder that meaning exists everywhere.
If we pose our ultimate question directly to the artist, who himself never explicitly raises it, he is liable to mistake significance for meaning. He will tell us: I do not care if Being has no meaning or if life is valueless as long as man can create beauty and through this maya make life worthwhile and give significance to Being. Homer does not need to answer our question directly, he needs only to point to his work. It is up to us, not to him, to grasp meaning in significance and see truth in the aura of beauty that contains it. This is possible only if beauty begets meaning in us while we look and listen. Art, more than any other experience, inspires us to philosophize and in this process we may discover ways that lead to meaning, that is to the discovery of those creative capabilities through which we can realize meaning.
We shall discuss next the originator of creative scientific thought, Heraclitus of Ephesus. This follows the chronological order which we have observed. However, this transition from art to science is of greater significance than merely chronological. The relationship between science and art has again been questioned in recent times, since, on the one hand, Nietzsche attached science from an artistic viewpoint, and, on the other, the positivists mobilised science against art. Since then this whole problem has become rather involved; painters -- not the greatest artists among them, as a rule -- have begun to claim that only art can reveal truth, that science is an inferior human capability and that philosophy is old-fashioned. Psychoanalysts -- whose scientific achievements are more than doubtful -- have claimed that Shakespeare and Dostoevsky were nothing but clumsy and outdated psychologists who are no longer needed. Yet, this matter has also another and brighter side. The constellatory movement of the various creative powers, which our originators started when they liberated them from their early mythological bondage, came to an end with the rise of Western metaphysics which protected and fertilized each of these powers. In our time this movement has started anew. Science, led by mathematics, nuclear physics and logic, has come into its own. And so has art, led by the great modern development of painting and poetry. Scientists and artists, especially mathematicians and painters, have begun to inquire into their mutual relationship from the viewpoint of their own well established positions. (Reference to the study of certain art-problems by the eminent mathematician Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton l952).