Abstract
Is Achilles a narcissist? Can he feel for his fellow man in a way that we humans know as our own? And more particularly, what does this half-god’s behavior—the way he is moved to tears by the plea of another man—tell us about the nature of human empathy more generally, our knowledge of how others feel, and the possibility of the human as such? Sometimes it is those who are not fully human—Gods, half-gods, animals—who demonstrate and reinforce (our presumed) human traits. Drawing primarily from the work of Stanley Cavell, yet in company with disparate scholars, including Simone Weil and her remarkable reflections on the Iliad, we are pushed to ask whether it is possible to genuinely weep over others, or whether tears are necessarily only shed over one’s own pain and losses. Why and how this scene of male weeping recommends this troubling thought lies at the heart of my investigation. Not wanting to leave things at loose ends, I conclude with notes on some criteria for human emotion and expression, and whether we may mediate ourselves out of our own narcissism.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle, Politics in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), Book I.2. It is my pleasure to have an occasion to thank those who have aided my research on this chapter, and for their generous insights, improved and enriched the present essay: Stanley Cavell, Kimberley C. Patton, the late Helmut Koester, the late Gordon D. Kaufman, Despina Kakoudaki, the late Newton Garver, J. M. Bernstein, Lawrence Rhu, William Rothman, Michael Shaw, David Glidden, and especially Garry L. Hagberg.
- 2.
Homer, the Iliad, trans., Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), Book 24, lines 563–66. Note, all quotations from the Iliad come from this edition and translation (unless otherwise noted) and will be henceforth cited by book and line number, except when quoting from Bernard Knox’s introduction, in which case the page(s) will be given.
- 3.
Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1993; originally published 1940), p. 15. See also Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force—A Critical Edition, trans. James P. Holoka (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
- 4.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979/1999), p. 207.
- 5.
Stanley Cavell, “An Interview with Stanley Cavell,” James Conant, in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, Bucknell Review 32, no. 1 (1989) and (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989), p. 50. See also Richard Eldridge, “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” in Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4; and David LaRocca, “The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 109–31 and “Defying Definition: Opening Remarks on the Transcendental” in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, ed. David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 6.
See Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 4–5, and LaRocca (2013), p. 112.
- 7.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 397.
- 8.
See also David LaRocca, “‘Eternal Allusions’: Maeterlinck’s Readings of Emerson’s Somatic Semiotics,” in A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture, ed. David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (Re-mapping the Transnational, Donald Pease, Series Editor; Dartmouth College Press, 2015), pp. 113–35.
- 9.
Among epithets for Achilles, we find him “breaking through men” (ῥηξ-ήνωρ).
- 10.
See Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Stephen Mulhall, The Dying Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, “Thinking Through International Influence,” in A Power to Translate the World (2015), pp. 1–28; and David LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), pp. 437–82.
- 11.
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 26.
- 12.
See David LaRocca, “Performative Inferentialism: A Semiotic Ethics,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 9, no. 1 (February 2013), and “The False Pretender: Deleuze, Sherman, and the Status of Simulacra,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 3 (Summer 2011).
- 13.
See Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- 14.
Here as elsewhere, it may be useful to distinguish between empathy and sympathy. Adam Smith, for example, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), describes sympathy as “fellow-feeling for the misery of others.” Other figures to consult for variations on these two terms include Rousseau (pitié), Hume, Herder, Dilthey, Schelling, Schleiermacher, the Schlegels, and Novalis. Indeed, as Robert Sinnerbrink writes: “Herder […] applied the notion of Einfühlung [empathy] to the interpretation of texts, arguing that one could experience the ideas of an artist or author through an ‘empathic’ projection that opens up a text’s inner symbolic meaning.” See Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 89–90. For Herder, empathic projection not only applies to humans, as in our case, but to inanimate things as well.
- 15.
Stanley Cavell, “Othello and the Stake of the Other,” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, updated edition, 2003).
- 16.
For example, Norman Malcolm’s work becomes a point of shared interest between the present essay and Cavell’s “Knowing and Acknowledging,” though I draw from Malcolm’s “Knowledge of Other Minds” (1964), while Cavell uses Malcolm’s “The Privacy of Experience,” in Epistemology: New Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, ed. Avrum Stroll (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 129–58; for the latter, see Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 238–66, esp. 242n1.
- 17.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, see esp. Part IV, pp. 420–55.
- 18.
Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 19.
- 19.
The Iliad, 24.587.
- 20.
The Iliad, 24.4–12.
- 21.
The Iliad, 18.25; 18.36–38.
- 22.
See Section 3 below.
- 23.
The Iliad, 24.592–93; 24.146. The idea of empathic projection will be discussed further below, but I wish to note here a concern about the use of this modern theory for an analysis of an ancient Greek text and culture, principally, that there is arguably no concept in the Greek language that fully parallels our idea of empathy. For the Greeks, empathy was something more akin to “emotion in general” (Michael Shaw, Department of Classics, University of Kansas; private correspondence). Given this proviso, though, it should become clear in the course of the present argument that the ideas proposed by John Stuart Mill, Norman Malcolm, A. J. Ayer, Stanley Cavell, and others, regarding empathic projection bear a strong conceptual relationship to the experiences of characters in the Iliad, despite the lack of an isomorphic term or concept in the Greek language.
- 24.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 420–21.
- 25.
The Iliad, 24.592–93.
- 26.
The Iliad, 24.594.
- 27.
Crying is a strictly human possibility according to some scholars—see, for example, Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)—but it is important to note (and reflect on) the striking fact that, in the Iliad, there are non-human criers, among them Zeus, who weeps when his son, Sarpedon, is killed (and then, not shedding watery tears but tears of blood); and Achilles’ horses, who weep after the deaths of Patroclus and Achilles.
- 28.
This assessment is complemented by Rachel Bespaloff, who writes: “The two adversaries can exchange looks without seeing each other as targets, as objects which there is merit in destroying” in “Priam and Achilles Break Bread,” Modern Critical Views: Homer, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p. 35.
- 29.
The Iliad, 24.559–62.
- 30.
The Iliad, 24.568.
- 31.
The Iliad, 24.570–76.
- 32.
The Iliad, 24.578–91.
- 33.
The Iliad, 24.288.
- 34.
Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 76.
- 35.
Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula,” p. 76.
- 36.
Surprisingly, though very much focused on Melville’s work, Deleuze does make reference to Achilles in the context of Kleist’s Penthesilea—“an Ahab-woman who, like her indiscernible double Achilles, had chosen her enemy, in defiance of the law of the Amazons forbidding the preference of one enemy over another.” Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula,” p. 79.
- 37.
Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula,” p. 84. See also, David LaRocca, “The European Authorization of American Literature and Philosophy: After Cavell, Reading ‘Bartleby’ with Deleuze, then Rancière” in Melville Among the Philosophers, ed. Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi (Durham: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 189–212.
- 38.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 473.
- 39.
The Iliad, 24.592–99.
- 40.
See The Iliad, 18.24.
- 41.
The Iliad, 24.104–05.
- 42.
The Iliad, 24.612–14. Given the significance and prevalence of film in Cavell’s work, and indeed of the cultural uses that film is put in philosophy and elsewhere—often, we must admit, in the place of reading the literature on which it is based—we might benefit from a query into the adaptation of the Iliad as found in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). In the film, Achilles (played with sullen intensity by Brad Pitt) says that “we men are wretched things,” just as we find it in Book 24. Yet what he goes on to tell Briseis, as in confidence, should surprise readers of Homer’s epic: “I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” Of course, these are not Homer’s words but those of David Benioff, now perhaps more famous for being the creator and show-runner of Game of Thrones. As Charles C. Chiasson reminds us in “Redefining Homeric Heroism in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy,” sentiments among the gods are “precisely the opposite” in the ancient text, for example where Apollo rebuffs Poseidon’s challenge to a fight (drawing now directly from the translation in Chiasson): “Earthshaker, you would say that I am out of my mind / If I were to join battle with you for the sake of mortals, / Wretches, who like leaves at one moment enjoy / The prime of their lives, eating the fruit of the earth, / But the next moment dwindle and die. No, let us cease fighting / Immediately, and let the mortals themselves fight to the end” (21.462–67; in Chiasson, 200–01).
- 43.
The Iliad, 19.357.
- 44.
For more on contemporary warfare, including the depiction of male emotional expression, see The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014).
- 45.
The Iliad, 24.599.
- 46.
See Martin Heidegger, “Existential Project of an Authentic Being-toward-Death” (§53) in Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 2010).
- 47.
Aeneas is the son of prince Anchises and the goddess Venus.
- 48.
Garry L. Hagberg, “Self-Defining Reading: Literature and the Constitution of Personhood,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 144. See also Garry L. Hagberg, Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 49.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 12.938–52.
- 50.
Hagberg, “Self-Defining Reading,” p. 144.
- 51.
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Nature of the Virtues,” in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 171–72. See also David LaRocca, “The Last Great Representative of the Virtues: MacIntyre After Austen,” in Jane Austen and Philosophy, ed. Mimi Marinucci (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
- 52.
Helen is the only female half-god in the Iliad—in her case, the child of a mortal, Tyndareus, and the god, Zeus.
- 53.
Charles Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1971), p. 67.
- 54.
Harold Bloom has noted that Achilles may be considered the only tragic hero in the Iliad precisely because he is the only half-god: “The epic is the tragedy of Achilles, ironically enough, because he retains the foremost place, yet cannot overcome the bitterness of his sense of his own mortality. To be half a god appears to be Homer’s implicit definition of what makes a hero tragic…. Achilles can neither act as if he were everything in himself, nor can he believe that, compared even to Zeus, he is nothing in himself.” Homer’s The Iliad (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 4. It is unclear, however, why Bloom claims that Achilles is the only half-god in the Iliad, since there are others, among them Helen, Sarpedon, Aeneas, and one of Achilles’ Myrmidon commanders.
- 55.
Bernard Knox, The Iliad, p. 58.
- 56.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 37.
- 57.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 3.
- 58.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 4.
- 59.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 15.
- 60.
Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 362.
- 61.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 5.
- 62.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 6.
- 63.
The Iliad, 24.656; 24.667–69.
- 64.
If patience is lost, Achilles will become, as Katherine Callen King understands it, an animal: “Achilles attempts to comfort Priam with this exposition of generic human woe, but when Priam refuses comfort and asks only for the immediate return of the body, Achilles slips momentarily back into the anger that before had led to the merging of his human nature with that of god and beast. Human sympathy recedes. His mind reverts to the gods…. His mood, on the other hand, is bestial: he threatens Priam that, if provoked, he might kill him, suppliant though he is, and transgress the commands of Zeus; then he leaps to the door ‘like a lion’” (Homer’s The Iliad, 1987, pp. 42–43).
- 65.
Graham Zanker also writes of generosity, though without reference to Simone Weil’s work: “Achilles’ unique experience and knowledge of death enable him, alone among warriors before Troy, to attain to the companionship in suffering that he shares with Priam and the sublime generosity that he shows toward him, a generosity that … outstrips even that of the gods themselves, whose immortality debars them from the totality of Achilles’ vision.” The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 125.
- 66.
The word “castrate” is a translation of Weil’s French, and may strike the ear as being out of place, awkward, or simply the wrong word. In context, the word is used to characterize constraint such as soldiers are trained to endure. Weil writes: “For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him…. On each one of these days [that the soldier realizes his fate] the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.” Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 22.
- 67.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 25.
- 68.
“The most beautiful friendship of all, the friendship between comrades-at-arms, is the final theme of The Epic.” Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 29.
- 69.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, pp. 9–10, 23, 28–29.
- 70.
I have added the brackets to name Weil’s referents, and to emphasize how closely her account supplements the analysis offered in Part I; italics added. Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 29.
- 71.
Aristotle, Rhetoric in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), II.8.15.
- 72.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.8.15.
- 73.
The Iliad, 592.150; 595.252–54.
- 74.
The Iliad, 593.189–91.
- 75.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed., Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 567 and 637.
- 76.
Norman Malcolm, Essays in Philosophical Psychology, ed. Donald Gustafson (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 365–76; see esp. Malcolm, 365.
- 77.
A. J. Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” Gustafson (1964), pp. 346–64.
- 78.
The example of the stubbed toe is meant to isolate the nature of stimulus response, that is, something that generates both feeling and behavior. Yet, the example might at first blush be taken as a different sort of response than an emotional response, such as weeping. But this precisely illustrates the reason the analogical approach is problematic: it extrapolates from something that we might agree on, for example, that stubbing one’s toe causes pain, or is painful, to something that seems impossible to agree on, namely, how that pain feels. Hence, the complexity of moving from a simple stimulus response initiated by a stubbed toe to the immensely more complex emotional response to experiences such as the death of one’s father or son.
- 79.
Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 353.
- 80.
Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 364.
- 81.
Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 365.
- 82.
Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 366; italics in original.
- 83.
Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 373.
- 84.
Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 238–66.
- 85.
Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” p. 257.
- 86.
Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” pp. 256–57.
- 87.
Stephen Mulhall, The Cavell Reader (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1996), p. 48.
- 88.
Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” p. 263.
- 89.
Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” p. 264.
- 90.
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 111.
- 91.
Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions),” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 63.
- 92.
The Iliad, 1.8.
- 93.
The Iliad, 1.22–23.
- 94.
The Iliad, 1.25–27.
- 95.
The Iliad, 1.33.
- 96.
The Iliad, 1.49; 1.16.
- 97.
The Iliad, 1.132–33; 1.135–36.
- 98.
The Iliad, 1.56.
- 99.
Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 353.
- 100.
Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 373.
- 101.
Lutz begins his book by claiming “weeping is a human universal” and “weeping is exclusively human” (Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, 1999, p. 17). In Homer, weeping is not an exclusively human experience: Zeus weeps, Thetis weeps, even Achilles’ horses weep. See note 27 above.
- 102.
Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds,” p. 353.
- 103.
On the subject of what Priam provokes in Achilles, Katherine Callen King writes: “The generic grief that mingles his tears with Priam’s issues in a new personal response, pity. This pity leads into an assertion of their common humanity in sorrow as distinguished from the carefree existence of the gods” ( Homer’s The Iliad, 1987, p. 42). James M. Redfield links Achilles’ revitalized perception of humanity with Priam’s presence: “Achilles’ rending sense of his own mortality … becomes a bond with others, even with his enemy. At the moment Achilles feels himself most a mortal man, he stands away from his men, as the gods do, and sees himself one with other mortals…. In their common mourning, Achilles and Priam together experience the limiting finitude of the heroic consciousness” (Homer’s The Iliad, 1987, pp. 84–85).
- 104.
Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, p. 25.
- 105.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979/1999), p. 207.
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LaRocca, D. (2018). Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the Human. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_8
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