Hubert Dreyfus lecture series on Homer's Odyssey

Notes on Odyssey lecture pt. 4
From 1:37:59 to 1:58:00

Ok, so Athena had just inspired Telemachus with the idea that he's a man now, and a potential hero rather than a victim, and she was wearing mentos like a skin-suit when she did it. I think it means Mentos said it, but he was in Athena mode when he did, he was struck with the inspiration to say what needed to be said to activate hero mode in Telemachus. So Mentos was possessed by the Athena spirit when he said that. But in Homer's world and time, it isn't that Athena changed anything internal in Telemachus, anything psychological, she changed his world. He now lives in the world of a man.

His mentors are surprised, but accept that Telemachus was just flipped into manhood by a god. They don't seem to know or care what god, they just understand it was by a god, and that's good enough for them. Here Dreyfus talks for a while about the fact that nobody back then really thought about or talked about the gods in an objective way. They didn't think of them as having bodies, or taking any particular form, in fact they seemed to have a very esoteric idea about them. A god would just suddenly be in someone you're talking to and inspire that person to say something that changes your world. It didn't seem at all surprising to them. In other words, they didn't have a materialist worldview, and gods was just the name they used for any sudden burst of inspiration that would strike, whether it came fROm somebody else, or from within yourself. When a new resolve takes someone over or something of that sort, it's a god working in or through them. They did personify them when they talked or wrote about them, because how else are you going to do it? After all, each god has particular traits that are very human traits but the most perfect versions of them. So the easiest way to conceive of them is as something like people who personify those particular traits, only they're very magical people, they can fly around or suddenly appear somewhere etc. By the way, in checking my spelling of Conceive I was just shown that the first meaning is to give birth. But it also means an idea taking shape or coming into being in your mind. Another human trait or activity. An idea is something like a baby we have in our mind. I suppose it starts off weak and needing some protection, and then it can grow strong and take on its own independent life, much like a child does when they grow up. It's difficult to talk about ideas and the things of the inner world without using metaphors from the external world and some of them are best thought of in personified form. This is why we call gods he or she, and imagine them as people, partly so they can be represented in paintings and carvings etc, but also partly just so we can talk about them meaningfully, otherwise we'd have no language for them.

What if they went to the top of Mount Olympus and there were no gods there, would they lose their religion? (Rhetorical question posed by Dreyfus). No, they think of the whole thing in another ontological way, gods exist of a different plane of exsitance or Being. They don't exist the same way we do. They don't even think it, they experience it somehow. The gods are the names for these events, which are very important, these life-changing moments of inspiration. They don't think of it as an inner thing or an outer thing, they think of it as whether a person is attuned or not. If you're out of attunement with the world as it is, then you need the help of a god to bring you into attunement.

In response to un-hearable student question: No, it isn't really an abstraction, it's something different and more real than that. There is an ontological level in which we move through different worlds, and each god rules one of the worlds. Aphrodite is the goddess of erotic love for instance, because when we're in that world it has a different set of characteristics than the worlds of planting or fishing or war (I often forget his specific wording and have to substitute my own). When things get erotic, Aphrodite is around, and when things get aggressive, Ares is around. What does it mean that they're around? I think it's just calling attention to the fact that the world can become erotic, and that that's something very powerful which nobody is able to control, and it isn't a question of the willpower of the people, or the beliefs of the people involved. Some people tend to lean in the direction of one god or another, For instance Helen (of Troy I think he means) tends to lean in the direction of Aphrodite, Aphrodite seems to always be around or show up when you're near her. And some people incline toward Ares much of the time, but Areas can suddenly show up even in the life of someone who is normally much more inclined toward Aphrodite or Hera or whatever god.

It's a language convention. How do you talk about what we today would call moods or inclinations or tendencies or personality traits, when they didn't know anything about psychology yet, and had no idea of an inner world? Abstract concepts are very difficult to talk about when you don't have the terms for them yet, and they were very new to the idea of abstract conepts. As I often say, the conscious mind was in the process of developing back then, and that's the part that does the abstract thinking. Before you can just come up with terms like a persoanlity trait, you need to wrestle for a long time with the basic idea of it. Language developed as a way to talk about things, and the things that were important in the beginning were food, shelter, things to run away from, etc. Consciousness itself was developing little by little, and it could only develop as the language allowed it to.

The conscious mind is very language-based, it's the part of the mind that uses language and that developed it, and language shapes what we're able to think about. If we don't have a word or can't put words together in a familiar way to describe something, then it's very difficult to talk or think about it. This becomes clear when you remember being a child, who didn't yet have certain concepts for certain things. It would be difficult, you'd have to struggle, when adults were trying to teach you some of these terms, because you hadn't thought about them before, you didn't have the words for it. The hardest things to think or talk about are abstract ideas, like emotions or thoughts or the inner things that have no material reality. If you want to talk about a material object you can just point to it or crudely draw it in the ground or mime it. But it's much harder to do that for internal emotions or thoughts, especially thoughts of an abstract nature. It took a very long time to develop mathematics, because numbers are very abstract. You don't see numbers lying on the ground or growing in trees. You can see a pile of apples, and then at some point somebody got the idea that there are a certain number of them, but he didn't have a word for 'number.' If you wanted to get across the idea of twelve apples to somebody, you had to show them a pile of twelve apples. Gradually, if the person was pretty smart in the abstract realm and willing to work with you, you could, probably between the two of you, start to work out a way to get this weird idea across. Maybe they found they could make a hand gesture that represents Twelve, and they both understood what it meant. But nobody else did, and it was hard to get it across to them. And even when they had maybe taught their entire family about twelve, then one of the kids suddenly was inspired by a god (let's call him Pythagoras) with the number 6. Well shit, what strange magic is this?! Maybe Ugg, who originally noticed the number twelve, gets mad, he thinks Grunt is trying to steal his thunder, and he totally can't understand that twelve is just one of many possible numbers. A war might develop, between the Twelvians and the Sixians. And then there steps forward some forward thinker who begins the cult of "They're both true!" And then they hear about a family down the road who came up with something they call Three.

Back to it (sorry for the long digression, but I was inspired by some esoteric god or other).

You'll notice that, if Homer says Helen is frequently possessed by Aphrodite, he doesn't judge her for it, even if she's very happily married. It's simply a fact that, when she meets new people, she tends to have Aphrodite around somewhere, and so she sees everything in an erotic way. That's just the way some people are most of the time, and even those of us who aren't usually like that get stricken every now and then by it.

Question from inaudible student—No, it isn't right to say that they're inspired with a new way of thinking. It's more than that, and that's too internal. It's a new way of being or of relating to the world. When Telemachus became a man suddenly, he was so transformed that there was something godlike about him. Everyone noticed it immediately. Reading: "Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace that held their eyes on him." It's not just his thinking that's transformed, it's his posture, the look in his eyes, the way he talks, and how people pay attention to him when he talks. He's just a different—he's become a grownup. Nobody paid attention to him before. It has to be a big dramatic change in a person. A god doesn't inspire you to buy a hot fudge sundae when you're at the market, that's too trivial. If it isn't on the level of world-attuning, then I think the gods aren't there, then it's just people doing what they're supposed to do.

Then after Athena left and was no longer inspiring him, he lost the gift for oratory, he lost all their attention, he started sort of whining and complaining, and became sort of the ordinary schlub he was before. He regresses to a child when Athena and Mentes aren't around. It's not magic—you can't turn a boy into a man just like that. He just has a temper tantrum. He throws his rod, his scepter, to the ground, and he cries. The moral, I want to say is, that the gods are not magical, they can't make him have the skill of being a prince and an orator, just when they're actually there and active (I think is what he's trying to say, he got very confused and confusing here).

And I think we just hit the end of a lecture, It's very hard to tell. And I don't know which lecture.