Read Homer to Understand Human Nature
(Navigating between Scylla and Charybdis in Homer’s Odyssey—the ancient version of being caught between a rock and a hard place)
In these postmodern 21st-century times, there are many ways of approaching and understanding human nature—many mirrors of ourselves and lenses through which to look at the human experience. Some of these approaches to human nature can be categorized as essentialist—claiming that there is something essential and universal about human nature, shared by all humans regardless of culture, worldview, or time period. In contrast, some views of human nature are non-essentialist—the view that there is nothing essential or universal to human nature, that human nature is radically subjective, cultural, historical, or context dependent.
Some views of human nature are easy to classify. The Christian worldview, for example, with its view that humankind is made in God’s image, is essentialist by definition. Various theories of human nature in philosophy can also be classified as essentialist—from ancient theories such as Plato’s threefold account of human nature (cf. Republic, Book III) and Aristotle’s view of humans as rational, political animals (cf. Nicomachean Ethics and Politics), to modern theories of human nature such as Descartes’s view of our essence as nonphysical thinking things (res cogitans—cf. Meditations on First Philosophy) or the utilitarian view that humans seek pleasure and avoid pain and suffering (cf. the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill)
At the other end of the spectrum are the clearly non-essentialist views of human nature—whether historicist, postmodern, subjectivist, existentialist, structuralist, post-structuralist, and so on. From the non-essentialist viewpoint, the attempt to find a core truth about human nature or a shared experience common to all humanity will remain fruitless, with untold possibilities for and varieties of human experience found in the past and still to be discovered and explored in the future.
So, returning to the question with which I began this post, how should we go about trying to understand human nature in these postmodern 21st-century times?
Should we look to evolutionary biology with its broadly darwinian explanations for human behaviors and natural instincts?
Should we look to psychology with its competing theories about the human mind in all its conscious and subconscious aspects?
Should we look to cultural anthropology with its rich understanding of the similarities and differences from human culture to human culture?
Should we look to philosophy with its countless theories of human nature—political or rational?—ancient, modern, or postmodern?
Should we look to the poets and artists with their highly metaphorical and expressionistic view of human nature, about which Friedrich Nietzsche was so optimistic?
Should we embrace our own local, social, religious, or cultural contexts and abandon the quest for commonality and universality in human nature altogether—reading all of humanity and all of world history through the lenses of our own beliefs, our own political convictions, our own gender identities, and/or our own historical situatedness?
What a dizzying array of approaches to human experience are possible for us postmodern thinkers—and this short list barely scratches the surface! Yet, despite this dizzying array, I suggest we do what Western thinkers had done for thousands of years until quite recently in the history of Western civilization. I suggest we read Homer to understand human nature. In my decades of experience now considering human nature from almost every conceivable angle, I have never found as rich, complex, and nuanced account of the totality of the human experience as I have found in The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer.
Interestingly, Western thinkers continued to look to Homer for its understanding of human nature even in tandem with the developments of Western philosophy and the Enlightenment—with their highly rationalistic and/or political account of human beings and human nature. No matter what phase of life you are in, no matter what journey you are on (wither literally or metaphorically), no matter what challenges or obstacles you are facing, no matter what emotional highs and lows you are experiencing, no matter what your specific culture or worldview may be, you can almost certainly find its analogue in The Iliad or The Odyssey. While each of the other alternative approaches to human nature listed above makes a similar claim about its own broad applicability and explanatory adequacy, in my experience none captures the totality of the human experience as well as the epic approach of Homer—and of other epic poets by extension (such as Vigil, Dante Alighieri, and others).
Reading Homer to understand human nature is inherently an essentialist approach, as it presumes that there is some common thread of the journey of a human lifetime in general that transcends culture, religion, historical time period, or worldview. And although there is much in Homer that is arguably outdated and anachronistic, Homer is a bottomless well of hermeneutical interpretation of the meaning and purpose of human life that has proven to be more flexible, malleable, and steadfastly persistent in its applicability to the human quest for meaning than its alternatives.
Plato’s fourfold account of human nature seems positively outdated from our modern egalitarian and democratic perspective—even despite the global resurgence of fascism with its consolidation of power in the strength of the ruler or the elite instead of distributed among the people at large. And Descartes’s account of humans as disembodied, rational souls seems hopelessly tied to a religious worldview that fewer and fewer people are embracing in recent decades. And although psychology arguably had its heyday in the 20th century (typified perhaps by the presence of ship’s counselor Deanna Troi—her name itself being an interesting play on “Troy” from Homer’s Iliad—with a seat right next to the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Enterprise-D in the late-1980s/early-1990s television show Star Trek: The Next Generation) and in the self-help movement of the 1980s, people in recent decades have become more resistant to the need to analyze (or psychologize) every aspect of humanity through the lens of the relatively limited and prescriptive theories of modern psychology.
So while these various approaches to human nature come and go, have their day in the sun and their cup of coffee in the big-time before fading into obscurity and anachronism, looking to Homer persists, at least for those Westerners like myself who were fortunate enough to have teachers who exposed us to Homer and passed down this rich and ever-fruitful tradition and way of looking at humanity and the human experience across the generations. For me that teacher was Gloria Checchi (@GloriaChecchi), with whom I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding once again after nearly 25 years since I first read Homer’s Odyssey in her Advanced Placement (AP) English class at Vacaville High School. And although I myself gravitated professionally toward philosophy instead of literature, I’ve never lost my love for classics ini general and for classic literature in particular. And I pride myself in taking a more literary approach to philosophy than the vast majority of my fellow professional philosophers and philosophy instructors—so much so that I will actively and routinely recommend to my students that they read Homer instead of relying on those purely philosophical but limited (and limiting!) accounts of human nature we look at in my philosophy classes.
The American transcendentalist philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau lamented in his book Walden; Or Life in the Woods that Homer is no longer generally read in the English-speaking world:
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Reading)
At least we today are a bit better off culturally than those in Thoreau’s time. Thoreau complains that Homer had not yet been translated into English, whereas we have several translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey from which to choose, my favorite of which are the translations by Robert Fitzgerald, which you can find here:
But even though we are fortunate enough to have English translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, too often those works are relegated to the high school English classroom instead of becoming a lifelong discovery process for those who are at least fortunate enough to have been required to read Homer in high school or college. How many of those classically educated contemporary students return to Homer later in life, or at intervals along their life’s journey, in the attempt to find meaning and to regather one’s strength for the next leg of the journey?—even if that means tying oneself to the occasional mast to avoid the many Sirens of life with their omnipresent call within all of us.
I’m not sure what can be done to continue the tradition of reading Homer to understand human nature besides doing my part to pass down the tradition to anyone who will listen, preserving our cultural heritage for a future age more literate and poetic and less pragmatic than ours when its value can once again be appreciated by the common person—when Homer’s voice is once again heard by every child with an ear to hear instead of his being relegated to dusty bookshelves in aging classrooms, soon to be forgotten when other areas of life rise to the forefront. I would put money on the fact that, of everyone in my high school AP English class with Mrs. Checchi, I am the only one of my classmates still reading Homer today, 25 years later—a sad commentary on our cultural views on the importance, or, sadly and more likely, the lack thereof, of this classical understanding of the nature of human life, with its struggles and its glories, and of our quest for meaning within it.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that we only have two out of three of Homer’s known works. In addition to The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer also composed another work, the Margites, a comic mock-epic, which is still lost except for a few fragments, perhaps never to be recovered. It’s fascinating to think of the additional insights into human nature that may have been lost as a result of the Margites having been lost to time. It goes to show that even the greatest works of literature (or philosophy or history or science) are in perpetual danger of being lost, and thus we have a duty to preserve them for our children, for our students, and for our future descendants in perpetuity and for all time.
So after nearly 25 years in philosophy—as a student, an educational content developer, and a university and community college philosophy instructor—my advice for understanding human nature still stands. Forget psychology, forget religion, forget cultural anthropology, and forget evolutionary biology (although these disciplines and areas of inquiry are valuable in their own right for other reasons). If you want the fullest and most broadly applicable account of human nature and the journey of a human lifetime, look instead to The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer—and return to it in every epoch of your life, in time of your greatest achievements and in times of your greatest struggles. In their pages you will find untold worlds of meaning, and you will find yourself.
Need a Copy of The Iliad and The Odyssey? Of Course You Do!
The Robert Fitzgerald translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey are my favorites:
