With the release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, it seems like everyone’s been talking about a 3,000-year-old epic again. But my guest thinks this ancient tale offers a framework for understanding our modern lives that you probably haven’t heard before.
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science and the author of American Odyssey. Today on the show, Patrick argues that Odysseus embodies a tension that has defined the human experience, and especially the American experience: we’re both home-seeking and exploring, rooted and restless. We long to settle down somewhere, yet we’re equally driven to push beyond the horizon in search of something new. Patrick shares how Alexis de Tocqueville made this observation about our country two centuries ago, how Odysseus navigates the temptation to become both more than human and less than human, and the surprising act Patrick thinks is the most heroic thing Odysseus does. We end our conversation with the idea that having a home can give us the confidence to explore, or as David Brooks put it, “All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.”
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Article: 3 Lessons From Homer’s Odyssey
- AoM Podcast #337: What Homer’s Odyssey Can Teach Us Today
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. With the release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation to The Odyssey, it seems like everyone’s been talking about a 3000 year old epic again, but my guest thinks this ancient tale offers a framework for understanding our modern lives that you probably haven’t heard before. Patrick Deneen is professor of political science and the author of American Odyssey. Today in the show, Patrick argues that Odysseus embodies attention that has defined the human experience, and especially the American experience. We’re both home seeking and exploring, rooted and restless. We long to settle down somewhere, yet we’re equally driven to push beyond the horizon in search of something new. Patrick shares how Alexis de Tocqueville made this observation about our country two centuries ago, how Odysseus navigates the temptation to become both more than human and less than human, and the surprising act Patrick thinks the most heroic thing Odysseus does. We end our conversation with the idea that having a home can give us the confidence to explore.
Or as David Brooks puts it, all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/theodyssey. All right, Patrick Deneen, welcome to the show.
Patrick Deneen:
Thanks so much, Brett. I appreciate it. I appreciate being here.
Brett McKay:
So you are a political philosopher and you’ve spent your career writing about political theory in America. Your latest book is called American Odyssey, and it takes a look at what the Greek epic, The Odyssey, can tell us about American political life. And this book came out at the right time. We recently celebrated our 250th birthday in America, and Christopher Nolan’s long awaited Odyssey adaptation came out as well. Before we get started, have you seen that Christopher Nolan Odyssey yet?
Patrick Deneen:
I have seen it.
Brett McKay:
What was your take on it?
Patrick Deneen:
I think, like a lot of people, I was just incredibly impressed by what he was able to achieve just in terms of cinemagraphic ingeniousness that he really focused on not just CGI, but building a real horse that they had to drag up to the city of Troy. It turns out some of the casting decisions were, I think, maybe less prominent than people had initially suspected, or at least they didn’t play as much of a role. They were very brief characters. However, I think the changes that he made to the story and particularly to the character of Odysseus are, in certain respects, much more problematic than what people originally anticipated. Odysseus is really not a terribly heroic character. He’s a figure who’s racked primarily by guilt and regret, and the entire journey is a kind of working through of his guilt over what supposedly the evils that he did by conquering or helping to conquer Troy.
And so this is a real departure, of course, from Homeric understanding of heroism. And at the same time, we lose all sense of him as a clever, wily, shrewd, inventive, thoughtful, interesting human being. So I think anyone who sees the movie knowing the book, you’ll see those differences. But I worry about people who will only have seen the movie never having read the book and come away thinking, oh, that’s what The Odyssey is, and that would be a real tragedy.
Brett McKay:
I haven’t seen it yet. We’re going to go see it here pretty soon.
Patrick Deneen:
Okay. Sorry. That’s a spoiler.
Brett McKay:
No, that’s fine. I mean, I’ve heard that, that basically Nolan put 21st century moral sensibilities onto Odysseus. I don’t imagine a bronze age Greek hero feeling much remorse. And in fact, even early Christian writers didn’t really think Odysseus would do that though. I guess Dante put Odysseus or Ulysses in one of the layers of hell.
Patrick Deneen:
Yes. The eighth circle of nine. But it’s actually not for anything he did in terms of committing bad crimes against the Trojans. It’s because he was seen as a source of bad counsel. He’s a liar. He deceives. And so this for Dante was really one of the worst sins, was to be a bad counselor, an evil counselor. But we can talk about Dante because that plays a part in my book as well.
Brett McKay:
Sure. But I mean, what I think is interesting, all this interest in The Odyssey because of the movie. I mean, it just goes to show how timeless this story is. And you make the case that it’s a very American story, and we’ll talk about that here in a bit. But what’s interesting, you’ve been doing this for decades. You’re writing about American political life. You’ve actually started your career writing about politics with The Odyssey as well. I mean, what’s been the draw at looking at American political life through this 3000 year old epic poem? Why do you keep coming back to it again and again?
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. Well, yeah, thanks. That’s a great question because it’s something I’ve been, of course, thinking a lot about in the last couple of months as I was writing this book. Really, I mean, it’s not merely coincidental, of course, that I wrote and now published this book just days after the Nolan film. I was very much anticipating that there would be a lot of discussion about The Odyssey coming out of the film. I haven’t been disappointed in that respect. And since I did, in fact, not just the early part of my career, but in graduate school, I did a deep dive study of The Odyssey with a great classicist at the University of Chicago. David Green, the late, really great Irish scholar of antiquity. David Green, great translator of a whole vast range of Greek texts. And it was one of those great University of Chicago courses where you spend the entire, I think it was actually two terms just with one book.
And so we did a very kind of painstaking, slow, very close read of The Odyssey. And I really got to know that text quite well during those years that I was in Chicago. And then when I departed from Chicago, I went to study political philosophy at Rutgers University. The Odyssey really stuck with me. And as I did the preparation for the exam in political philosophy, which is really kind of a compressed great books curriculum really is what political philosophy, particularly passing the comprehensive exams in political philosophy at that time at least, I was just seeing The Odyssey everywhere in all of the major works that we would think about as the great books. And this shouldn’t surprise us, of course, because the Western tradition is a kind of conversation with preceding authors. And those conversations get built author by author and each author in some ways responding to interacting with previous authors.
That’s what makes it a tradition. It’s not just this author, that author, that author. It’s a conversation and it’s a debate. And so it’s not surprising then that a foundational text like The Odyssey appeared everywhere. And so my dissertation was really on The Odyssey as a work of political philosophy, which might seem to sound somewhat odd, but I think it has a very philosophic dimension as we’ll talk about. And then the way that it was taken up and interpreted and reinterpreted in a long tradition. And I got to kind of modern times, but I didn’t take that story to America. And that’s kind of what I always wanted to do. But when you’re writing a dissertation, you always have to sort of say, I got to finish this thing and get out of graduate school. So I always wanted to come back and write a kind of subsequent set of chapters, I guess, in which I would talk about The Odyssey in America.
And so this confluence of the 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence and America’s birthday and the film coming out seemed to me to be the perfect occasion finally to go back and do what I’d kind of wanted to do roughly 30 years ago.
Brett McKay:
I mean, in the book you say, you make the claim that the Odyssey, this bronze age Greek story is the most American of text. Why do you think that? Broad brush and then we can get into details as we go.
Patrick Deneen:
Well, yeah, I might phrase it a little bit differently that if we look in some ways to where do we see some of what I regard as the most foundational kind of dynamic in the Odyssey. Many different readers might take a different set of lessons and dynamics from the text. But for me, a main focus has always been the kind of, you could say the divided character of Odysseus as a figure who maybe he doesn’t really want to go out and there are stories that he didn’t want to go to Troy, that he tried to avoid military service. Of course, when he leaves Troy after the end of the Trojan War, he wants to get home. But all along the way, there are these constant encounters with all of these fantastical characters and creatures and beasts and gods. And some of that is portrayed in the film, of course, some of which is quite horrible.
And the film portrays those really with great effect, these horrible figures like Cyclops and the Scylla and Charybdis. But some of these are really enchanting for Odysseus. And some of these are extremely tempting to him. He does try to throw himself over the side of the ship when he hears the Siren song. And the Siren Song is an offer of knowledge, the offer to know everything that occurs everywhere, below, above and on the earth. And this is something that tempts Odysseus to the point really, without realizing it, that he would meet his death, he would meet his demise if he had been successful in pulling himself off of the ropes that bind him to the mast. And throughout his journey home, there are these constant temptations to be more or potentially be less than human, to encounter the strange and unusual and fantastical. In other words, that yearning and longing that I think all of us know to set out and discover and encounter that which is yet unknown to us, something that’s entirely new to us.
And I think when we begin to think about the character traits that define Americans, we would say this has to be one of the primary ways we would describe Americans from the very start. Those who left their home countries and bravely and quite in some ways madly got onto ships that could barely float. And these people were extraordinarily brave and they were striking out for a new world. And for a vista that they didn’t know, they couldn’t yet anticipate what they would encounter. And once they get there, they begin to spread out and they move and they go further west. So this dimension of Odysseus I think is really profoundly visible to us and something we can all recognize in what it is to be an American. And at the same time, of course, when those wayfarers came over the ocean and come to this new world, they’re not merely seeking adventure and to boldly go where no man has gone before.
They’re also seeking to make a home and to settle down. So you have pioneers and settlers and they’re often the same person. And to become people with roots and traditions and to deeply commit themselves to place and people. And this too is of course a profoundly Odyssean element that of course Odysseus wants to achieve his homecoming return to Ithaca. And he goes through these great tests and these great challenges ultimately in order to return to Penelope, to Telemachus, to Ithaca. And I think that kind of paradox and tension of longing for more, longing for something different, longing for the frontier, for the undiscovered territory, and longing for home is, it’s of course a profoundly human tension and paradox, but I think it is especially keenly defining of what it is to be an American.
Brett McKay:
And what’s interesting is a 19th century colleague of yours, French political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, he noticed that same tension when he came and toured America back in the early 19th century. Americans have both this restless desire to move and to get better, but then also this desire to establish roots in a community. For those who aren’t familiar with Tocqueville’s democracy in America, what were some of his observations about the American personality?
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. So now we’re talking about a 700 page book about America. But I think as Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University has described it, both the best book about democracy and the best book ever written about America. I think that’s entirely accurate. Tocqueville was amazed and stunned and really was in a kind of state of wonderment at what he called the restlessness of Americans. In French, its own kiet. It kind of means inability to be still. Just the inability, the lack of capacity of being at rest, of being satisfied, of being not just quiet, but at rest. And this he contrasted, of course, with his native France and arguably with the kind of aristocratic world that he was coming from in which one’s status and one’s position in society was a matter of birthright. And Tocqueville knew this well. His name means literally of Tocqueville.
He is of the estate and of the family of this aristocratic line. And so he knew from the very youngest age possible that he was an heir of this aristocratic status. And therefore there was nothing he could do or not do that would change his position. Just as someone who’s born to a peasant couldn’t change their status or condition no matter how hard they might work or how little they might work. One was what one was born to be. Now coming to America, of course, and again, this is something we know very well, our birthright is not a guarantor or in any way an indicator of who we are and what position in life we will hold, what jobs we will have, how far we will go, how high we will rise, how low we will fall. And so coming to America, he encounters this new civilization, which is for him sort of the people look European that he’s encountering, but they are completely opposite to the European world he comes from.
They are driven. They are constantly kind of in a state of active engagement. They’re always striving. They always see that if they don’t get ahead, somebody will pass them. You’re in a race by simply birthright of being an American and not to run that race in some ways is not an option. And so there’s an openness to America that was striking to him. And again, he calls this restlessness. But he also, in really one, I think one of the most important passages of democracy in America very early on, and a passage I love because he’s writing about my native home, New England. So I grew up in Connecticut. He’s writing about what he sees as the form of democracy that he really comes to admire and praise. And that form of democracy is, you could say, it’s very based in a place, in a small place, the New England Township.
It’s centered on the town square. When they talk about town hall meetings, it’s not a CNN episode. It’s a actual meeting of people that come together. He talks about trust and mutual knowledge and a kind of shared belief that we share a common destiny and therefore we’re invested in the future with each other. And this is kind of, in some ways you could say he describes a form of democracy that is at least, again, in tension with this description of democracy as a kind of restless pursuit of something else, something better, something out of reach. And again, I think he captures a real quality about our experience as Americans in which both of these aspects of our democratic life at various points, maybe sometimes one more, one less, but both of these are very recognizable to us.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I think a lot of Americans, when they think about what it means to be American, they might think of images of people on the open road. They might think of books like Jack Kerouac’s On the road. Or bold explorers. But then also you start thinking about Norman Rockwell illustrations of small communities where everyone. Or you think about Mayberry, what’s the name of that show? Oh, Andy Griffith Show.
Patrick Deneen:
That’s America.
Brett McKay:
There are these two competing drives, but they’re both American.
Patrick Deneen:
Yes. I think that’s right. And I would underscore that while there are certainly individuals who might embody one of these more than others, I think if we kind of look within, many of us, maybe most of us could say we value both of these qualities as kind of paradigmatic aspects of being an American. And I want to underscore, this book is called American Odyssey. I think you can see these qualities in any human being, in any human society. But I do think I’ve traveled a lot, just got back from a long two month trip to Japan and across Europe. And I just think that these qualities are especially in this kind of tense and interestingly dynamic way. They’re especially features of an American life in ways that I see not quite as intense in other cultures and civilizations.
Brett McKay:
In Tocqueville, in addition to noticing this restlessness and this energy and this ambition and this drive, and that people were constantly building houses and moving out before they finish them and starting gardens and renting it out before things even start growing. He also noticed that along with this drive and this ambition, Americans were really unhappy at the same time.
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. So this condition of being restless or unquiet, that word also expresses, I think, again, what we might associate with restlessness, a kind of discontent. And that discontent, of course, can be generative. When you’re discontent, it means you recognize that there’s something more that could be done, that maybe you need to work harder at this aspect of your life, or you need to pursue that part of your job with a little bit more vigor. And so this discontent is a source of a lot of the dynamism and energy of America. And this is something that Tocqueville recognizes. But discontentment also has that feature of, we could say almost the psychological condition of being ill at ease, of being anxious, of being worried about what one might be doing. And when this is a constant future of life, and not just an occasional future of life, but a constant future of life, this becomes a really profound burden.
And I’ve taught at some really excellent universities. I’m at Notre Dame now. I was at Georgetown. I’ve been at Princeton. And I would say that what Tocqueville describes as the restlessness of the American is you can see it in the lives of the students at these kinds of institutions where you might think if you’re not in these institutions, you might think, oh, these kids have it made. They got into these great schools. Their careers are made. And if anything, they’re some of the most discontent, anxious young people you would ever encounter because they feel this drive and this worry and concern. If they’re not getting ahead, someone else in their institution or someone else at a competing institution might be getting ahead. So now Tocqueville says, now imagine this restlessness, which humans have known forever. Augustine writes about the restless heart that we all have to know and to love God.
But imagine a whole civilization that’s built upon, that rests upon this restlessness. And he says, this is a source of deep unhappiness, that these Americans are constantly in a state of worry and fretfulness and anxiety in a way that ultimately may not be terribly healthy for them.
Brett McKay:
Alright, let’s bring this back to Odysseus. So you make the case that Odysseus can be a symbol of these two poles in American life of wanting to be more, do more, go different places. It’s Odysseus the wander, the Odysseus that wants to gain more knowledge. Then also the American that wants to stay home, have a sense of rudeness. This is Odysseus wanting to get home. As you mentioned earlier, on his journey back to Ithaca, Odysseus encounters all these beasts and gods and all these fantastical creatures. And you talk about how the juxtaposition between Odysseus and characters like Polyphemus, the Cyclops or Calypso the Nymph, it says something about the way our restlessness can manifest in this desire to go beyond being human and how both gods and beasts show us something about the desire to be sort of oblivious and escape the bounds of being human. Tell us about that.
Patrick Deneen:
So actually, you’re touching on what is… there are four kind of central chapters in the book and they all pick up themes, sort of what I see as central themes in the Odyssey. And so the first of these themes, as you just indicated, really focuses on the journey of Odysseus isn’t just a journey across space and across the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a journey through alternative possibilities of what it is to be in some ways a human that can potentially transcend our humanity, which is to say that we are this very unique creature. And Aristotle is among the first great philosophers to observe this. And he’s resting his account on portrayals of Odysseus and polyphemos, the Cyclops, and others. What Aristotle notices is that the Odyssey in many ways is about the navigation between the temptation to be more than a human, specifically to become a God.
And for the Greek, that would especially mean to become immortal, but also to have certain kinds of powers and abilities, a certain kind of sight, a certain ability to see things with a clarity that human beings can’t see. And something that goes along with both that capacity to see things for what they are rather than be in a state of uncertainty. And also a condition of immortality where you don’t have to worry about death, that the gods are also kind of oblivious. They act in ways in which, for example, the gods can commit adultery, which they do regularly without any consequence. But when humans commit adultery as Helen does, it causes a world altering war. It causes the source of the Trojan war. So adultery is a serious matter for human beings. Whereas for the gods, it’s a funny story that they tell about the time that Hephestus caught his wife Aphrodite sleeping with Aries.
It’s a story within the Odyssey that’s told one evening over dinner. So that’s a temptation for human beings. And human beings from time to time have been offered, at least according to the Greeks, have been offered the possibility of becoming a God. And so too is Odysseus by the nymph, the deity calypso. He’s offered immortality. And evidently for seven years when he’s on her island, he declines the offer of immortality. But the text makes sure that we know how extraordinary this decision is on his part, because every other human that has been offered immortality that is mentioned in the book in which Calypso is featured with Odysseus’s book five of the Odyssey. Every time a mortal has been offered a similar possibility of immortality, they’ve taken it and they’ve actually suffered the consequences for it. So it turns out it’s a kind of gift with two edges.
But Odysseus is unique in his kind of ability to stay human and to recognize and acknowledge and even embrace his own mortality as a condition of his humanity. And the Odyssey also, of course, describes the possibility and temptation of being less than a human, of becoming kind of a beast, of becoming a creature that is no longer in some ways conscious of what it is to be a human, reflective, intellective. Those qualities of Odysseus that are especially pronounced, the kind of wily clever figure. And we see, especially Odysseus as men often succumbing to the temptation of being less than human. And I think especially the scene with the temptation of the lotus, which is a kind of drug that makes them oblivious, makes them essentially no longer conscious of who they are. They forget home. They forget their companions. They’re just in a kind of blissful, unconscious, kind of quasi 1960s hippie existence.
And Odysseus has to shake them up, pull them away, drag them protesting because they want to stay and kind of stay hooked on the lotus. And these kind of juxtaposing episodes like these, we see that Odysseus is navigating between not just this monster and that monster, but between the temptations that all humans experience at different times of our lives to be either less than human or more than human. In other words, as Aristotle understood it, the odyssey is the first great text to teach us what it is to be human and to navigate the kind of Sylla and Charybdis, if I may, between the temptation to become gods and the temptation to become beasts.
Brett McKay:
How do you see that temptation play out in, let’s say, American life in the 21st century between those two?
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think anyone listening might already have said, “Yeah, I recognize that.” I mean, we certainly, everywhere we turn today, we can see that temptation to be less than human. And I assume your podcast is in many ways an effort to correct that, especially young men who might enjoy certain pharmaceuticals a bit too much. The pervasiveness of marijuana today is just one of them. That kind of zoned out quasi lotus-like existence based on how much I smell it in the air just walking around the average American city. And any time of day, it seems like there’s a lot of people who are kind of hooked on lotus. And then there are other forms of this, of course, which we could say would be especially young men’s addiction to video games, pornography, or all of our addiction to these little screens that we scroll on constantly for the little dopamine hit that it gives us.
So we are in a way struggling today, of course, with that temptation in ways that maybe aren’t as dramatic as the lotus, the island of the lotus eaters, but the very lack of drama in some ways is maybe even more problematic because it’s so pervasive that many of us don’t even recognize the extent to which we are succumbing to these kind of bestial temptations. And of course there are on the other hand, those temptations to be in a sense, more than human. And I think here we might seem to enter a little bit more into the realm of science fiction, efforts to prolong life, potentially indefinitely often under the rubric of transhumanism. So efforts, especially to begin to manipulate our DNA and manipulate genetic splicing, all kinds of possible ways that we may be able to overcome what we see as this horrible, or at least maybe some people see as this horrible fact of our mortality is becoming more and more no longer the stuff of science fiction, but increasingly the stuff of science today.
And I think in the future, human beings are going to face the really dramatic question. If we survive the AI apocalypse, we may be faced with the kind of transhumanist apocalypse, which is to say the decision of whether or not to engage in the kind of scientific advances that may make us effectively immortal. And so The Odyssey is a text long before some of these particular temptations, but already laid out what those temptations look like.
Brett McKay:
And Odysseus, he was holding the line as best he could. He really felt this pull to be human and he was doing all he could to remain human.
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. But he’s not perfect. And I of course don’t want to suggest that he’s perfect. Homer certainly gives us ample evidence that he is like all of us, an imperfect human being. So for example, the film doesn’t portray this, but he strays from his wife. Now this, of course, in the more patriarchal times in which his writing is not quite the sensational news that it would have been then. He sleeps either voluntarily or involuntarily with several goddesses on his journey home, Circe and Calypso. We at least understand that to some extent it’s under duress, but he may not have entirely minded it. But importantly, especially with Circi in the film, again, she’s portrayed as rather this kind of harpy kind of bitter figure who really, really hates the men, maybe just hates men, and they want to get out of there as quickly as they can.
In the text, Circi, it turns out after she turns the men into pigs and then she’s forced by Odysseus to turn them back, she becomes a great hostess and she entertains them for an entire year. And Odysseus is so charmed by her. And maybe he is put under a kind of spell or maybe just the spell of a beautiful woman. He forgets home and has to be reminded by his men, “Don’t you want to go home? Isn’t it time for us to leave? It’s been a whole year we’ve been on this island and it’s a beautiful island and she’s quite the wonderful hostess, wonderful food and it’s a very comfortable place.” And so here again, I think we see a moment in which Odysseus is tempted to forget home, to live with a goddess, potentially to be like a God. And all of us, even a figure as extraordinary and heroic as Odysseus and who does retain over a very long time, his commitment to return home, he can be drawn by these temptations of that which were taken beyond and away from home.
This is why I think this tension that I think The Odyssey portrays is so vivid and alive for those of us today in modern America.
Brett McKay:
So part of his journey home, he has to go to the underworld. He has to learn something there, which is kind of weird because he’s kind of being godlike. He’s summoning the dead to have a conversation with them. And he does a sacrifice, spills some blood, and then the spirits start drinking the blood and he gets to talk to his mom, talks to other people, but then he talks to Achilles, the great warrior in the Iliad who died. What did he and Achilles talk about and what did Odysseus take away from that conversation?
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. Again, this is unfortunately the film entirely cuts the character of Achilles, which is to me, one of the more inexplicable choices that Nolan made. I think there are a couple of scenes and episodes in The Odyssey that are, it seems to me just profoundly critical and key. And this conversation between Achilles and Odysseus is one of them. I mean, here you have the two paradigmatic, great, heroic figures of the two, at least the extinct epics that we have. There may have been more, but these are, you could say two poles of heroism. Achilles represents vigor and strength and kind of masculine, just brute capacity to defeat through physical force to defeat any human that opposes him. And he even goes so far as to even contend against the gods. And there’s a scene in the Iliad where he wants to take on the spirit of a river.
He’s so filled with fury over the death of his friend Patricles. And so he represents one pole of heroism that’s very recognizable. And of course, Odysseus, he is also quite accomplished in terms of his ability to fight. He’s a great warrior, but his great strength is always described as his intelligence and his ability to craft ideas and to use stratagems as kind of his strongest suit. And you could say here, you have like the two opposite poles of what it is to constitute a form of heroism represented in the figures of Odysseus and Achilles. And now imagine you get to meet the two of them talking to each other in the underworld to which Odysseus has descended. And now he’s going to encounter the spirit, the post-death spirit of Achilles and have a conversation with him. And that conversation is really, it’s just an extraordinary moment in which Odysseus begins by, in a sense, praising Achilles for all the things that were really important to Achilles when he was alive.
Remember, Achilles stayed in a tent for months out of protest that he was not being honored and he was not being given sufficient honor in this case by Agamemnon and his perception of the other Greeks withholding honor, that if he was going to die for the sake of this cause, he above all wanted to be remembered and honored as someone who was a great warrior. In his case, if you’re going to die young, if you’re going to lead a short life, it’s predicted he can choose a short life if he fights, but that short life will be one filled with glory and one in which he will be honored. That’s one choice he has. Or he could live a long life without honor, without glory, stay out of the battle and avoid the kind of dangers and perils of warfare. And in choosing ultimately to reenter the war after the death of his friend at the hands of Hector, in a sense, he seems to choose the short and glorious life.
He seems to choose, of the two options, I will be someone who will be willing to die for the sake of this, to be remembered always as this great figure, this great warrior. Well, now here he is in the underworld and Odysseus comes down with some news. He says, look, you’ve been down here for a few years, presumably, and stories have now been circulating of your glory. You are honored above all of the dead. You hold this extraordinary place, this place of great significance and glory in the minds of both the living and the dead and all glory to you Achilles. And Achilles now, rather than saying, this is exactly what I wanted. Rather than you might expect him to say, yes, this is what I had desired. If I was going to have a short life, I wanted to have a glorious life. He says, now having lived or let’s say not lived in the underworld for some years, he says, I wish I had chosen otherwise.
These are the words he says more or less, almost verbatim. I would prefer the life of a slave in the world above than to be the most glorious king of the underworld. He would prefer a life of complete indignity and complete obscurity to be a slave to another behind a plow in a field rather than enjoying the glory that he now has attained. Now this is a particularly significant moment because not only of course is Odysseus now hearing from the spirit of Achilles how awful life in the underworld or existence in the underworld is according to Achilles, but Odysseus has yet to be offered the possibility of immortality. This only happens later. So as then Odysseus continues his journey in his mind, with this retort by Achilles, we know or we learn as we read through this text that Odysseus is going to have the possibility of not having to go into the underworld, that the demigoddess calypso will offer him immortality.
The fact that he turns down immortality already is stunning, just the mere fact that he does. But now knowing that the fact he turns down immortality, having heard the words of Achilles, should fill us with a kind of awe. And I think the poet wants us to discover this kind of after the fact. The story of the underworld occurs in the book before his journey and time with Calypso. But in terms of the story, we only learn about it afterwards, after we hear about his time with Calypso. So I think the contrast between these two heroic figures couldn’t be more strongly drawn that it turns out what Achilles thought he was choosing, he himself comes to regret and in some ways diminishes him as a hero in retrospect. Whereas Odysseus, knowing fully what awaits him in the underworld, nevertheless chooses to remain immortal in order to return to the side of Penelope into the home of Ithaca.
And I think in some ways it elevates his heroism. In some ways you could say not only are Odysseus and Achilles kind of contrasting forms of heroes, but the Odyssey and the Iliad are kind of competing epics in a way, even if they’re both written by this figure Homer. In a way, the Odyssey is a kind of commentary on the Iliad in which the heroism of Odysseus isn’t just his intelligence. It’s his ability to accept the mortal condition with full knowledge of what awaits him.
Brett McKay:
What do you think 21st century Americans can take away from that?
Patrick Deneen:
Well, again, I think we are constantly being faced with the kinds of temptations that draw us away from our limited condition as human beings. And again, I mean, the most radical form of this, of course, would be life extension, forms of transhumanism, the kind of technological interventions in our lives. That one of the things that seems to me that the story of the Odyssey indicates is that we in a sense are most human when we can come to reconcile ourselves with and even embrace our condition as limited and mortal creatures. And I think this is going to be, already is a topic of debate and conversation. And at least the great Western tradition that we are heirs of seems very much to teach us that we are most human when we remain committed. Of course, in the case of Odysseus, remain committed to those whom we love and the limits that we place upon ourselves in order to be with those with whom we love.
Thus, to be committed to home, to place, to family, to our communities. It may be limiting in terms of what we might do and what we might be able to achieve and the various adventures we might have as individuals. And yet we are most human when we embrace the very things that in some ways you could say somewhat bind and even limit us in what it is we think we can achieve.
Brett McKay:
And it can be heroic. We’re still talking about Odysseus 3,000 years later.
Patrick Deneen:
Absolutely. I think this is the deepest way in which Odysseus demonstrates his heroism. We might think, okay, it’s that scene. It’s at the end of the movie. It’s at the end of the book. He confronts the suitors. There’s this great battle. He’s able to defeat hundreds or several hundred suitors almost single-handedly. And yet that’s not the most heroic thing he does. The most heroic thing he does is to leave Calypso’s island, arguably.
Brett McKay:
So Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca after it took a while. A lot of detours along the way. What happens to him? After he kills the suitors and reunites with Penelope, what happens to him? Does he settle down and relish being back home? What’s the sequel to The Odyssey?
Patrick Deneen:
Well, of course it ends with the reconciliation of Odysseus and Penelope. So it really is a marvelous ending to what has been a very long story of violence, death and suffering. But then that’s where the book ends. And immediately, people who read the book and people who write about the book begin to reflect and ponder what happens next. What happens particularly to a character like Odysseus who has seen so much of the world and has experienced so many things. And already very early on, you could say shortly after the text becomes widely circulated, people begin imagining, well, he couldn’t stay there. He would’ve wanted to go forth and have new adventures. I mean, Tiresias predicts he will have to leave home to assuage the anger of Poseidon, but perhaps he comes back after that or perhaps he continues his journey. And one thing that I certainly studied in my dissertation and which one could continue to read a lot of kind of imaginary sequels to the Odyssey is that many, many authors imagine that Odysseus departs again in order to explore new, including of course, Dante who pictures and describes the post-Odyssey journey of Odysseus past the rocks of Gibraltar, past what are called the pillars of Hercules and antiquity, and even reaches the foot of the mountain of purgatory, attempts to ascend it and is struck down at that point by God.
So there’s a long after history of Odysseus’s restlessness, again, coming to the fore. And I think keeps alive this interesting question of, is Odysseus at home when he reaches home or is his restless spirit finally insatiable? And does he kind of continue to go forth again and be the explorer?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Tennyson wrote a poem about this. He uses Ulysses. He talks about here, he says, “Not fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged father, nor Penelope’s claim to the joys of love could drive out of my mind the lust to experience the far flung world and the failings and felicities of mankind.” So he still had that drive. And I just love how the poem ends. He says, “Come, my friends. Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off and setting well in order to smite the sounding furrows for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all Western stars until I die. To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” So Tennyson imagines, he still has that wonderlust. He’s going to get home, but he’s not going to be happy and he’s going to go find something else to do.
Patrick Deneen:
Right. It’s really interesting. So of course, Tennyson is here playing on these very longstanding stories and themes of Odysseus as the intrepid and insatiable explorer. And it’s worth underscoring, I want to just come back and reconnect this to America, specifically the celebration of our 250th birthday with the Declaration of Independence. Because when Dante portrays Odysseus or Ulysses as this figure who pushes the boundaries and goes to the very ends of the earth to the point of the sort of Christian heaven and attempts to ascend it against the rules and laws of God, that this image of Odysseus as potentially the figure who pushes boundaries or pushes past boundaries that are allowable to human beings, in the Dantean world, this is seen as a kind of sinful exercise that he’s an exemplar of a kind of hubris. And this is why he’s in this very low circle of hell.
At least one of the reasons is that he is someone who seeks a kind of forbidden knowledge, going all the way back to the fall of human beings in the Garden of Eden. Forbidden knowledge of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil. But in the Renaissance, this version of Odysseus now has changed. And now it starts to anticipate the Tennyson understanding, which is that this figure who seeks all the possibilities of the unknown and pushes the boundaries of the permissible, this is now an admirable figure. And so at the very time that this change is happening in how the kind of Christian world of the time thinks about Odysseus, this change from that more medieval understanding of a figure of transaggression to a figure to be celebrated in the Renaissance gets morphed with the journeys of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the figures, the European figures who make the claim to having found the new world.
And they are described in kind of the modern press of the time and the kind of poets and the stories that are being told. They’re described metaphorically as the new Odysseus. And in the book, I really make a point of saying that by this telling, in a sense, Odysseus discovers America, at least in the European mind. And I think that lays down a certain kind of, you could say, imaginary self-understanding that from the very beginning, this country was in a sense settled by Odysseus-like figures. It was discovered by those people pushing the boundaries. And why is I think it’s fair to say as we think about the 250th celebration of America, that Odysseus was here all along.
Brett McKay:
You in the book make this interesting argument. Americans, we are an explorer of people. We’re ambitious. We’re restless. But you argue for us to have that drive, that ambition, that sense of risk taking, you need a home. And it seems like there’s less of a sense of home for a lot of Americans. We’re feeling lonely. We’re atomized. How does having a home allow someone to take risks and go on adventures and be ambitious?
Patrick Deneen:
Yeah. The last chapter of the book is actually, I use the image of Sylla and Charybdis. So again, people, whether you know the book or you saw the film, you’ll know this is the two really great dangers that Odysseus has to navigate between. And he doesn’t have a choice in a sense, but to go between these two great perils. The one choice he has is where kind of to sail between these two great perils. And those, again, who know the book or have seen the film know, Odysseus is told, he’s advised both by Circe and by Tyreseus that he should navigate toward the less dangerous of these two perils. In this case, Sylla, which is a creature with six heads that will grab six men off of the ship and devour them. And so this is quite a horrible fate for those six men, but the alternative is to sail either closer to the Charybdis or even down the middle.
The presumption being that if you went down the middle, maybe you could escape both, but it turns out Charybdis is a whirlpool with such a strong current that if you try to avoid all of the dangers by going down the middle, you’ll be sucked into the greater of the two dangers, that it’s kind of more powerful and the greater danger will suck you in even if you try to go down the middle. So you can’t avoid one or the other. And at the conclusion of the book, I suggest that we are kind of in a situation of the Sylla and Charybdis and we always are. We have to always recognize in a sense where we are in terms of navigating our world at this given time. And if these two poles of our dyssean existence are always part of who we are, there can be times when we maybe exhibit more of one than the other.
And that this can be a kind of danger that we may need to have to avoid. We may have to tack a little bit closer to the other direction, which also isn’t without its own perils. So you can imagine, of course, a society that’s too home bound and too comfortable and too complacent and too much just bound up in the familiar. And such a society would lack dynamism and would lack adventurousness and would not be as dynamic as America rightly is I think we rightly recognize as a kind of positive quality of what it is to be an American. But we also can recognize that too much of that quality can lead to a kind of detachment, can lead to a lack of commitment, can result in the kind of fraying of our social lives for the sake of our own individual pursuits. And in our political and social and even just personal lives, this can really have just terrible negative effects on us as both individuals and of course as a society.
And I conclude the book by suggesting that if we evaluate where the sort of Sylla and Charybdis is today in terms of sort of home seeking and exploring, that we are perhaps more homeless than we should be as a society. And I mean that not necessarily literally, although I think for many younger people who are having a difficult time buying a home, affording a home, making families, committing to somebody getting married, having the courage to have children and having the confidence to have children and make a family, that we as a society have really moved toward a real peril that we have to correct for. And that might be some public policy. It might be podcasts like this one. It might be professors like me and hopefully teachers in universities that might be able to sort of move this ship and kind of correct our current course.
And I conclude by suggesting that it may be that there’s a kind of a formative and important connection between these two phenomenon that in the same way that Odysseus himself is formed by his love of home and carries with him this love of home. It makes possible in some senses the confidence to push the boundaries in the ways that he does and to allow oneself to be tempted by that which we as human beings can be tempted by with the confidence that one can resist those temptations knowing who you are and having the confidence that I know in this case, I’m Odysseus. I’m the husband of Penelope. I’m the father of Telemachus. I’m from the island of Ithaca. In some senses then that the capacity to be the adventurous seeker that we would hope that many Americans will still remain maybe as connected to our ability also to be home at home, to come from homes, and to know that there are homes to which we can return.
And the belief then that we can somehow retain and remain a dynamic, adventurous, bold society without at the same time attending to and even strengthening our capacity to be home bound and home oriented creatures, maybe that confidence isn’t actually supported by the evidence of our own historical experience and our tradition, that we have to hold those two poles of ourselves kind of in constant tension. And if we’re dangerously moving toward one, it really may not ultimately be good for our national character.
Brett McKay:
Well, Patrick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Patrick Deneen:
Well, the book is available online. My publisher is a wonderful new publisher called Creed and Culture. You can go to their website. They’ve got a short list to this point, but really wonderful books. And I think you can buy it at a discount on their site as well. So I appreciate the interest in having had this conversation with you.
Brett McKay:
Patrick Deneen, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Patrick Deneen:
Thank you.
Brett McKay:
My guest today is Patrick Deneen. He’s the author of the book, American Odyssey. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, patrickjdeneen.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
