Odysseus and the Possibility of Enlightenment

Abstract

Many postmodern thinkers, viewing the Enlightenment as either an impossible, misguided, or shallow undertaking, treat its failings as spelling the end of the very possibility of genuine enlightenment. They thus invite us to reject rationalism as untenable and to embrace a nonrational, subjectivist, or contingent form of thinking. However powerful their arguments are against modernity (also known as the Enlightenment), there remains unrefuted an older and, I argue, superior notion of enlightenment that is advanced in Homer's Odyssey. Indeed, insofar as modernity began with a rejection of this older view, any subsequent rejection of modernity would seem to compel us first to reconsider the older alternative. That view can only be recovered by provisionally breaking with the contemporary demand that we not take the soul and its needs seriously. For Homer did so, thereby illuminating the moral quandary that compels Odysseus to strive for enlightenment as well as the moral and psychological obstacles that ultimately bar him from attaining it. By examining Homer's account of Odysseus' failure to achieve enlightenment, it becomes possible to uncover and sketch Homer's reasons for denying that enlightenment as such is impossible.

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