a book and a problem

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A Book and a ProblemGöttliche und menschliche Motivation im homerischen Epos by Albin LeskyReview by: Frederic WillArion, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter, 1962), pp. 89-95Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162810 .

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A BOOK AND A PROBLEM1

Frederic Will

la

THERE ARE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF LOGIC?THE LAW OF NON

contradiction, that of the excluded middle?which bind the

operations of every human mind. Similarly there are certain

laws/ or habitual patterns, of philosophical awareness which are strongly determinant. Within a particular culture, at least, there are notions of the structure of reaUty which function as

though they were incontrovertible. They are most persuasive to

action, are in fact effectual in the hour-by-hour course of our

experience. Yet those notions are less deeply rooted in the neces

sary nature of thought than are the fundamental axioms of logic. They are merely relative, while logical axioms are absolute, in

dependent, for their truth, on the time or place in which they are held.

Among such relatively' vaUd axioms is the notion that human free will is incompatible with a divine 'determination' of human acts. These two possibiUties have usually been considered mutu

ally exclusive. In the western tradition this exclusion has rarely been challenged, either in experience or on logical grounds. There are

exceptions?both ancient, as we shall see, and in movements

of modern thought Uke Calvinism, which longed to harmonize God's will with man's freedom. But these exceptions

are rare.

The mutual exclusiveness of human free wiU and divine deter mination has generaUy been accepted without question.

That this was not so in Homer's work, and presumably in the world from which that work grew, is one of tie main points of Albin Lesky's new book. He analyzes the complexity of the ques tion, by introducing a specific aspect: that of the relationship between gods and men in Homer. Often those gods directly, and

physically, intervene to make heroes act according to divine will.

They make heroes do things uncontinuous with their (the heroes') own 'natures/ On the other hand, there are cases when men

follow their own wills against, or even

quite independently of, divine plans. There are

many more puzzling examples, however,

of continuity between divine wiU and heroic will, of cases where the two forces are joined. In a typical example the god wills the hero to fight, and the hero simultaneously wills to do so. These examples demand attention. Divine will is real, and binding; human response to it is necessary, and bound. Yet human response ?the upsurge of thymos or the excitement of the phrenes?is humanly motivated, unmistakably a human act. The human is

1 Albin Lesky, G?ttliche und menschliche Motivation im homerischen Epos, Heidelberg, 1961, pp. 52.



90 A BOOK AND A PROBLEM

both impeUed and impeUer. The result shocks our sense of the

way things are. In Lesley's summary: Divine influence which eventuates in human action, gods who stand by their heroes as helpers: these are conceptions which we can very easily accept. But that one and the same

action, Uke Achules' return home, or his renewed entrance into battle, can be motivated in precisely the same way by

man and by god: aU of this involves a unity which simply eludes analysis by the means of our logic, (p. 30, my trans.)

Man is here both free and determined; God is both a determiner and an inspirer of freedom. Determination and freedom?or free

will?seem strangely

united.

16

This curious Homeric perspective, in which it is possible to consider motives and acts from two different viewpoints, is to be found in other parts of the experience embodied in the Iliad and

Odyssey. Singers, for example, decide to sing, although the gift of song

in them has been implanted by the gods. A hunter exercises his great skill, which is in a sense not his, at aU, but has been put in him by Athena. The same is said, in other places, of the skiU

of a bowman, or of a carpenter. Man exercises, freely and as his own, a skill which was put in him from outside.

Is he responsible for this free exercise? Here the perspective is

similarly puzzling. NormaUy we?from our cultural perspective would expect that when the gods force a man to act in a certain

way, or provide him a nature which dictates the way he acts, that man is not responsible for his actions. But, as we might expect, this is not necessarily the case in the Homeric world. There divine influence does not necessarily replace the energy of human actions, and consequently need not assume the burden

even of human action which is divinely 'caused/ Homer's char

acters, in fact, seem almost especially responsible for acts which

a god has imposed on them. Lesky amasses many proofs of this

point. The fact that Athena demands Odysseus' return puts par ticular responsibiUty on him to return. The gods demand that Achilles give back Hector's body, yet when he does so it is as an act from his own heart, is very much his own act.

Ic

Many other points, and a great deal of apposite documenta tion, find their way into Lesky's short book. It opens on a brief skirmish with Bruno SneU, and an effort to reconstitute the Ho

meric man whom SneU had disarticulated piece by piece in the first chapter of The Discovery of the Mind. It finds that Homeric



Frederic Will 91

man did have an Innenleben, an organic spiritual fife, and even a

bodily wholeness of which he was aware, although he did not have a 'philosophical' language to discuss it. The issue of thought and awareness without language is spiritedly joined, but left hang ing. For Lesky Homeric man is simply far less 'stylized/ far more

'whole and real/ than he is for SneU. Homeric man was one who could receive divine commands, yet simultaneously be the

strength to will those commands himself. The core of Lesley's work, however, is the exposition of Homer's

double perspective, or, putting it differently, tie mapping of the

spiritual geography of Homer's world. Such mapping, espeeiaUy when it charts tie broadest and most central areas of the Homeric

mind, requires objectivity, and with it courage. 'Objectivity/ in such cases, is pecuUarly difficult. Homer's per

spective is so simply and naively there that we have the greatest difficulty appreciating its distinctive character. We assume that

Homer is organizing his universe about the same psychic prin ciples which are fundamental to us. We do not easily see the difference. Then when we do see, we too easily rationalize Homer's

system, that is, try to bring it into harmony with our own assump tions. In the present case, for example, we imagine that what

appears to be free wiU in man is in fact not reaUy that, at least not so intended by Homer. We distort the evidence. Such a

disposition for seeing the thing our way, such ingrained rational ization, is a great danger. But Lesky has resisted. Being objective required going against the grain, and so required 'courage/ from him.

Id

Only he did not go far enough. After establishing the point, he concludes by going on in time, and suggesting certain resonances, in later Greek Uterature, of the complex Homeric notion of divine and human motivation. There are various sharp observations on

Herodotus and Aeschylus, and the Homeric perspective is seen to have had a surprisingly long after-life. Possib?ities for a new cul tural history of ancient Greece are sketched. Still I would rather have seen Lesky go farther into Homer, and explore the issues there more

thoroughly. In a sense, the most interesting problems only begin where

Lesky has left them, or only there begin to demand further ex

planation. What kind of unconscious assumption does Homer need to have made, in order to present his paradoxical ideas of responsi biUty, and of impeUed free wiU? What does the very fact of this

assumption suggest about the character of Homer's epics as a

whole? Even the sketch of an answer to such questions may indicate the importance of the paths which Lesky has seen, and

made us see, but not followed. Homer has a distinctive, 'artistic' view of the relation of the




divine to the human. Those two 'realms' exist for him as spheres of energy, not as expressions of real Ufe, translated into artistic terms. Sometimes the spheres' respective energies do not coincide;

man ignores the divine impulse?refuses to attach the wires. Some times divinity impels man?completes its circuit through him, but

by force, by jolting him into action against his wiU. Sometimes,

however, the divine impulse flows effortlessly, continuingly, and

strengtheningly into the human portion of the intention's circuit. On such occasions divine impulsion can be the proper stimulus to human decision, can both 'cause' and simply ie' it; here it is hard to determine where the divine ends and the human begins, for the two sources of energy coalesce. On such occasions, divinity can impel man's action in such a way that the action is vigorous and original; and so that man, in the performance of it, can prop erly beheld responsible for it.

Such purely 'aesthetic' vision of a field of electrical powers must be taken as the prerequisite intuition, in Homer, for the

pecuUar divine-human dialogue which he dramatizes among his characters. Even to touch this assumption of the Homeric uni

verse, without so much as beginning a topographical survey of it, is to

suggest?as Lesky does not?certain general characteristics

of Homeric epic. Further exploration, carried out along these

Unes, would lead one to unusually penetrating observations about Homer.

It would suggest, above aU, the radical sense in which Homer's

epics remain art, not Ufe. The field of energies, to which I refer

here, is the product of 'imagination/ in the vigorous, Coleridgean sense of the word. Or rather it is the product of an imagination

which has radicaUy shaped certain cultural assumptions embodied in the epic-oral tradition. It is a description of extremely various

possibifities of transmission of force between two psychic spheres. Those psychic spheres are not real/ need not conform to real'

expectations. 'Real Ufe' exigencies and stringencies are abandoned, or used only for counterpoint clarification, in the construction of

these possibifities. 'Real Ufe' is equally indirectly employed in the

ascription of felt 'reaUty' to the two different spheres. In Homer the gods

are as real as, or rather are real in the same way as, the

mortals. We tend to read the Iliad as though it must present the divine-human relationship

in terms famiUar to us from 'real* life, where the divine is, if it is anything, a different order of reaUty from the human. Lesky, of course, does not make this mistake.

But he does nothing to show us that the roots of Homer's world view are

reaUy a radical artifice.

lia

Homer violates normal expectations, and does so in the name

of art. Art is the key to the character of his universe. Deeply artistic presentation, of this kind, is the hardest linguistic event



Frederic Will 93

to handle in criticism. It wiU be instantly clear to any reader of

Lesky-as of SneU, Bowra, Dodds, or M. I. Finlay-that the

thoroughgoing strategies of art are basically not 'serious' enough? and I intend no irony?for those men's critical consideration. Even Uterature?idea blunted by sensuousness?is not serious enough for them; their minds want Ufe, or the 'meanings' which examined Ufe appears to exude. SneU wants to talk about the world and

'philosophy' of Homeric man; Dodds wants to discuss that man's beUefs and expectations, from the standpoint of anthropology. Lesky wants to consider the philosophical assumptions lying deep in the world of thought which Homer's epics are. Lesky is trying to stay with Uterature. He does not get to ultimate assumptions, though, partly because he is in search of deeply grounded philo sophical principles,

not of those-principles-as-they-are-trans

formed-in-art. He, too, would rather be reading philosophy. At an opposite critical extreme are the classical scholars who

occupy themselves with the verbal details of Homer?or of any other classical text. These may be people of wide philosophical grasp, but they approach their texts from detail. They are, with out doubt, in some sense closer to art than are the cultural his

torians. Although classical scholarship has rarely been touched by modern movements in criticism, and has remained a backwater

of Uterary banaUties, it has nonetheless enUsted a regiment of careful and able students in the task of analyzing ancient poetry.

At the very least it must be agreed that these people are not?as are the cultural historians who discuss literature?frustrated seek ers for embodied philosophy. But at the same time, they are not close enough to art. They systematize, and try violently to crash the gates of the intangible. But it holds firm.

Is there a middle ground between the two positions sketched here? Is someone finding his way, in words, toward the Uterary center which Lesky avoids? Close textual workers, Uke Milman Parry, earUer, Eugene 0*NeiU Jr.

more recently, or

James Mc

Donough with his IBM studies, have attempted to draw conclu sions about the unity (or disunity) of Homer. Perhaps they have found truth?though we shall never know?but the fact is that they

have pushed from the detail toward the center of Homer's work. Have they managed to occupy a new ground? I think not. It is one

thing to emit

hypotheses, even if correct, about the nature of a work of literature?about whether, for instance, it was written

by one man or by two; and it is quite another thing to provide an

adequate, consistent, and ramified critical encounter with a work of Uterature. 'Adequacy/ though hard to define, is especiaUy im portant in this case. We need above all a tone and endurance, in criticism, which have something of the criticized text's power and quaUties. We cannot settle for sallies into 'truth/

Can the middle ground be reached from the opposite direction? It is much harder, I am afraid, to move in from Kulturgeschichte




to the Uterary center. Cultural history is a precious aUy for under

standing antiquity; but it is at its weakest in the effort to under stand art. Even the most astute strategist of such work, Hermann

Fr?nkel, labors in vain here. We are left, at the end of Dichtung und Philosophie des fr?hen Griechentums, with a renewed appe tite to read Hesiod and the lyric poets. This is something. We have a new synthetic awareness of the inteUectual mood in which early

Greek poetry developed and which it emitted. But we have been

deluded, too; having been made to feel, mistakenly, that we have been on the inside of Uterature. The fact is that we have been

brought to notice, as in Lesley's treatment, certain ideas which

emerge, legitimately enough, out of a whole structure which con tains very much more than ideas. Which contains, for one thing,

words, which at least in their sensuous aspect are not 'intelUgible/ As Wallace Stevens said:

The poem must resist the inteUigence Almost successfuUy

...

lib

What, then, of the criticism of ancient (or any other) uterary art? Does it make sense to accuse Lesky of stopping short of such an achievement? Or is the task itself impossible by nature, in such a way that it is meaningless to accuse a scholar of failing in it?

Before evaluating the achievement of Lesky in this larger con

text, it is worth taking one more excursion?this one

perhaps sur

prising?into the possibiUties of critical encounter with ancient Uterature.

The pages of this journal have been frequently devoted both to translations and to the 'question' of translation. This old, but

neglected, medium of cultural continuity has been receiving re newed attention as a form of criticism. Does there perhaps nere exist a form of work relevant to our problem? Does translation, if it is after aU to be considered criticism, perhaps occupy something closer to middle ground,

or provide the kind of 'adequacy'

want

ing to both cultural history and textual analysis?as Uterary critical efforts?

Certainly translation has credentials to present, in the case at hand. The 'creative' translator?for I think only of him here?fol lows his text word and fine. He may change, he may Ue subdy,

he may misunderstand, he may translate structurally?concerning

himself with large units of structure, and translating them; but at all times, and this is what matters, he encounters his original closely and simultaneously both on the level of word and on the level of idea. In some sense he is simultaneously dealing with, and

accounting for, the words which the textual analyst studies and the ideas which the cultural historian studies. Is he occupying the

ground between them? Is his the adequacy their studies lack? Short of speaking, understanding, and feeUng the actual Greek



Frederic WiU 95

Unes of Homer's epics, there is no way to get closer' to those works than through creative but responsible translations. To that extent translation is an extraordinarily intimate transaction. There is the further point, too, that translation incarnates a form of criticism:

every word chosen, every structural unit hewed, represents in some sense the translator's notion of the meaning of tie original.

Translation, though, is not expUcit. Like its original, and Uke all Uterature, it impUes meaning rather than stating it direcdy. Or, in other words, it adopts a position so close to its original that it, translation, may hardly be considered an activity comparable to either technical or culture-historical analysis of ancient Uterature. It does not, Uke them, wrestle with the problem of articulating rationally the meanings embodied in only 'serni-rational' art. But to the extent that it is Uke other forms of criticism?and that extent is Umited?it comes closest, among critical activities, to being 'adequate/

III

The preceding remarks may seem to have moved far out from

Lesley's particular problem. That would be so, I think, if Lesley's chief problem were not a representative one, were one, for in stance, which resulted from inadequate preparation or careless analysis. But that is not the case. In his brief book he has pro ceeded with exemplary care and imagination. He has, as I have said, seen what is there, in Homer, with great integrity. It is just that, when we reach the end of his book, we feel that something has been holding him back, or that the entire character of his work is Umited.

Lesky's general failure to address himself to Homer's art can

partly be charged to his account. The example of translation sug gests, with quaUfications, that a greater critical closeness to texts is possible than that found in the two main kinds of Uterary criticism?the philosophical and the philological. Perhaps their lesser degree of 'adequacy' could be surpassed even by that of some other forms of scholarship?say informed, but impression istic, essays or dialogues, which strove to adequate the wholeness of an original text without offering themselves as new works of art. It is of the greatest importance, for classical scholarship, that it remain open to, and push in the direction of, such possibilities. In Ueu of more concrete performances, however, and in Ught of the special category occupied by translation, we cannot simply hold Lesky to blame for his rather representative difficulty in

discussing radical artifice. We must rather hold liim generaUy to blame, thanking him for what he has done, but asking for more because he has done much. Asking for something new.



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