Homer, Plato, Weil

For centuries, Western intellectuals have centered public culture around the triumvirate of Homer, Socrates, and Plato. In Homer they placed the origins of Greek tragedy and extended its ethos to popular cultural sentiment in the arts. In Socrates they centered rationality and public discourse. In Plato they centered metaphysics and the origins of Western cultural bounds of expression.

Thus reflections on Homer have historially revolved around the so-called “ Homeric question”: Was Homer one person or two? Or, perhaps, a school? Was the author of the Iliad the same author of the Odyssey? Such were the innocuous inquiries of the academics and literati.

But in the twentieth century, French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), praised by thinkers as diverse as Albert Camus and T.S. Eliot, overthrew the vacuities of the academics in a searing essay titled “The Iliad, Poem of Force.” The essay maintained that the West constructed its institutions on the ethos of a grand seminal premise, on the foundational values expressed in the Iliad, a foundation based on force, coercion, and violence.

Weil did so without pedantic argument but simply by presenting the text itself and letting the passages and descriptions speak for themselves. Her commentary is simple and illustrative. In the Iliad, the poem of war, the paean to violence, elite men slaughter one another, and elders, women, and children suffer in agony and resignation.

Notes Weil:

“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

“To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.“

Weil goes on to quote the text of the Iliad and to comment briefly on the given passage. Here is the first such passage, with comment:

Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground Lay,
dearer to the vultures than to their wives.

“The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:”

All around, his black hair
Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
Defile it on his native soil.

“The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero’s head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.”

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades,
Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigor.

Plato dismisses this sentiment angrily, objecting to Homer’s sense of resignation. A magnificent military sacrifice is belittled by Homer as meaningless death. For Plato, death means glorious afterlife and, therefore, a purpose and value to war. For Plato, useless slaughter was not in vain but was patriotic service, redeeming itself of horror. This is Plato’s bequeathment to Western culture. Weil merely points out that the lessons in the core literary document of Greek antiquity have been dismissed from the beginning of formal philosophizing. Greek tragedy is evident in the Gospels but noticeably absent in Rome.

The Western defense of the glory of war and death begins with Plato. In Book 3 of his Republic, Plato avers (through Socrates): “Can he [the citizen-warrior] be fearless of death. Will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery? We must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales … and beg them … to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.”

The warrior class must see Hades as redemption and glory not as bleak darkness. Indeed, not just the warrior class but the entirety of society must be instructed accordingly. The first step is to be rid of Homer, to be rid of the poem exposing the absurdityof violence. The first step toward accomplishing social and political control is to justify, extend, and praise war as virtue. And so Plato gives us the Republic and, later, the Laws, the origins of authoritarian thought in the West.