Political Theory on Death and Dying

Erin A. Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale, Bruce Peabody, Erin A. Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale, Bruce Peabody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Theory on Death and Dying provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic review that compiles and curates the latest scholarship, research, and debates on the political and social implications of death and dying.

Adopting an easy-to-follow chronological and multi-disciplinary approach on45 canonical figures and thinkers, leading scholars from a diverse range of fields, including political science, philosophy, and English, discuss each thinker's ethical and philosophical accounts on mortality and death. Each chapter focuses on a single established figure in political philosophy, as well as religious and literary thinkers, covering classical to contemporary thought on death. Through this approach, the chapters are designed to stand alone, allowing the reader to study every entry in isolation and with greater depth, as well as trace how thinkers are influenced by their predecessors.

A key contribution to the field, Political Theory on Death and Dying provides an excellent overview for students and researchers who study philosophy of death, the history of political thought, and political philosophy.

1Memory and Mortality in Homer’s Odyssey

Rachel K. Alexander

DOI: 10.4324/9781003005384-2

Though scholars are divided when it comes to the identity of Homer, tradition considers him to be the Greek author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written around the late eighth and early seventh century bce.¹ Providing accounts of the Trojan War, in the Iliad, and its aftermath, in the Odyssey, these epic poems present human confrontation of mortality. Indeed, Homer frames the Iliad as a tale of Achilles’ destructive wrath that sent many souls of heroes to Hades, and his tale of Odysseus’ harrowing journey home after the war, in the Odyssey, features two visits down to Hades.² This chapter will turn to Homer’s Odyssey to better understand death and the human condition of being mortal, by focusing on Odysseus’ response to what he heard and saw in Hades. Odysseus’ rejection of immortality, even after facing death’s reality, for the sake of preserving his memory and homecoming, illuminates the relationship between mortality, memory, inquiry, and love of one’s own.

When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he hears Achilles’ famous preference for being a slave on earth rather than ruler of the dead in Hades.³ He also encounters the frightening depiction of dead souls as fluttering shadows.⁴ Perhaps more striking is Odysseus’ response to what he hears and sees in Hades. He does not follow Achilles’ advice to avoid death, whatever the cost, even though he has seen its grim reality. At the beginning of the Odyssey, in fact, the very first image of Odysseus we encounter, described by Athena to Zeus, is of his captivity by the divine nymph Calypso on her island Ogygia, where he strains to see (noeō) Ithaca, his fatherland, and “longs to die” (himeirō thaneein).⁵ Moreover, as we discover in Book Five, Odysseus longs to die in the face of an offer of deathlessness from Calypso, who wants him to live immortally with her as her husband and ruler of her household.⁶

Athena’s description of Odysseus as simultaneously straining to see Ithaca and longing to die suggests both that Odysseus longs to die if he must stay with Calypso and never return home and that he longs to return home, even if this requires that he eventually die. The strength of his love of his own appears to drive the choice that entails his mortality. Yet, so too does his desire to see, or more literally intuit or perceive by his mind (noeō), seem to drive his choice. One of his most memorable encounters, for example, is his encounter with the Sirens, and his straining to escape his bounds to hear the knowledge they offer.⁷ Even in the first few lines of the poem, Homer tells us that Odysseus has seen (eidon) many cities and come to know (gignōskō) the minds of many men through his travels.⁸ His wandering far from Ithaca has brought him knowledge of the world and its inhabitants. On Calypso’s island, however, his strain to perceive and know points homeward. That Calypso, as Athena reports, attempts to charm Odysseus, with soft and flattering words, into forgetting Ithaca, also suggests that more is at play, in Odysseus’ choice, than simply love of his own. His memory, and therefore the soundness of his very mind and identity, are at stake.

In this chapter, I argue that Odysseus’ longing to die and his choice to remain mortal are driven by his desire to remember, which is in turn bound up both with his love of his own and with his desire to know. The age-old question of political thought is thus at work in Homer’s depiction of the options Odysseus faces—does the human desire to know lead beyond the confines of one’s home, one’s political community and its customs or laws, and perhaps even to their rejection? In order to investigate the relationship between memory and mortality, we first explore the threats to memory, posed by his pursuit of knowledge, that Odysseus faces on his journey; secondly, we examine what Odysseus learns about mortality and memory on his visit to Hades; and, finally, we consider the ways in which Odysseus’ choice of memory and mortality over immortality facilitates not only his return to his own, but also his own pursuit of knowledge. Unlike Menelaus’ mind-numbingly intoxicated coexistence with his wife Helen, whose elopement with Paris of Troy sparked the Trojan War, Odysseus’ reunion with his wife Penelope involves memory and inquiry.

Odysseus’ Curious Forgetfulness

Invoking the Muse, Homer introduces the reader to Odysseus as a man of many ways (or a man of many turns, polutropos) who wandered (plazomai) very far after sacking Troy.⁹ This introduction prompts the reader to ask whence, whither, and, most especially, why Odysseus wanders. One obvious answer is first suggested by the passive voice of the verb plazomai, which can also be translated as “made to turn aside.” Odysseus has been turned aside from his destination—by Poseidon, we soon learn from Zeus—and he wanders in search of his fatherland.¹⁰ He is a wanderer (and man of many ways and turns) in part, at least, because his return home has been thwarted by the gods.

Yet, his wandering state is not simply a matter of fate. As Zeus indicates a few stanzas into Book One, Poseidon did not turn Odysseus aside from his destination until Odysseus blinded the Cyclops. “From that time forth,” Poseidon did not kill Odysseus but “made him a wanderer [plazō] from his fatherland.”¹¹ Odysseus is lost because he blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus, not simply due to necessity, but due to his curiosity. Odysseus seeks out the Cyclopes not in order to find food, shelter, or transportation home, but to “make trial” (peiraō) of them in order to know what kind of men (anēr) they are.¹² In seeking knowledge of “lawless” men, men without political life, Odysseus seems to seek knowledge of natural man.¹³ His craft and wit serve this pursuit of knowledge as much as, if not more than, they serve his labored journey home.

Odysseus’ inquiry not only involves wandering, but it also leads him to assume varying disguises, as his epithet polutropos (shifty, or wily) suggests. To the Trojans, for instance, as Helen divulges to his son Telemachus, Odysseus craftily appears as a beggar, as he later appears to his own people, upon his return to Ithaca.¹⁴ To the young maiden Nausicaa and her people the Phaeacians, on the other hand, he appears to be a god.¹⁵ Indeed, his very penchant for disguise seems godlike; just as Athena appears alternatively as Mentes, Mentor, and a young herdsman, and as the immortal Proteus, Old Man of the Sea, assumes the forms of “all creatures that come forth and move on the earth,” so, too, do Odysseus’ appearances seem limitless.¹⁶

But if this fluidity of form seems to bring him closer to the immortals and facilitate his pursuit of knowledge, his multiplicity also threatens his memory and identity. In his capacity to be anyone, Odysseus, as he identifies himself to Polyphemus, risks becoming No One (Oūtis).¹⁷ His multiplicity suggests that the very accumulation of knowledge that his shiftiness enables also threatens his knowledge of himself.¹⁸ Indeed, when the other nearby Cyclopes interpret Polyphemus’ plight as one of a mad man, tormented, though there is not any one (mē tis) tormenting him, their pun reveals a connection between Odysseus’ clever mind (mētis) and the loss of identity it threatens.

The danger that Odysseus’ wandering search for knowledge poses to his goals becomes more manifest in his constant battle to keep memory of Ithaca alive for himself and his comrades. At nearly every step of their journey, Odysseus and his comrades are enticed to forget their homes. In one of their early detours, for example, Odysseus’ companions encounter the Lotus-Eaters, who feed them the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus. The fruit makes them wish to stay with the Lotus-Eaters and forget about homecoming.¹⁹ Odysseus has to forcefully carry them away, only to run into a similar problem later in their travels; when they come upon the island of the goddess Circe, she welcomes Odysseus’ companions with cocktails that make them forget entirely the land of their fathers and, moreover, lose their humanity, assuming instead the forms of pigs.²⁰ Forgetting their country, they become city-less beasts, not unlike the Cyclopes, whose one-eyed sight seems to preclude memory and political life alike.

Circe soon warns Odysseus of the Sirens, whose singing mesmerizes any passerby so as to forget about returning home to his wife and children.²¹ Later, after losing his last remaining companions to their disobedience, Odysseus ends up stranded on the island of Calypso, who tries to entice him to forget his homeland.²² Not only do Odysseus’ quests often require him to shed his outward identity, but they tempt him and his comrades to forget even the memory of that identity. In so doing, Odysseus’ wandering pursuit of knowledge seems to, paradoxically, cost him and his comrades some of the knowledge they already possess, and thereby put their identities at risk, for what one knows and remembers is what one is.²³

Odysseus and his companions’ time on Circe’s island presents the apex of this threat to memory, for it is here that Odysseus is most explicitly identified as having forgotten about Ithaca, so much so that he needs his comrades to remind him before he makes moves to resume their journey homeward. What makes Odysseus’ forgetfulness more remarkable is that he is aware of Circe’s power to captivate men before he approaches her, and even takes measures to guard against her charm. After landing on Circe’s island, Odysseus sends some of his companions ahead to investigate, as he did in the country of the Lotus-Eaters. Circe lures all but Eurylochos, who suspects treachery, into her palace, gives them a dangerous potion that makes them forgetful of their own country, and turns them into pigs.²⁴ When Eurylochos returns to Odysseus to report the loss of his comrades, Odysseus embarks on a rescue mission, armed with protection from Hermes. Hermes has knowledge, available only to the gods, of the nature of the plan...