Homer's Odyssey and Us

This is an impromptu discussion I provided on Homer’s Odyssey. In it I address the meaning and significance of the following themes and thinkers which most people are never taught:

— The significance of Homer in the rise of the Modern Universities by way of historical and classical studies as presented by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche who both recognized the backwards and apologetic approach academics were employing in attempting to transform the greatness of the Greeks into the bourgeois values of Modernity. Thus, following their lead, I address the philosophical meaning of academic education, popular art, and Modern science.

— The way in which Homer’s Odyssey provides us with an alternative to the Modern Enlightenment with Odysseus’s entirely unembarrassed (i.e., manly) attempt to satisfy the demands of justice in his soul when he can no longer find trust or intelligibility in the divine while simultaneously attempting to find intelligibility in the lands and minds of other men. That is, Homer’s Odyssey provides us with an incredibly powerful justification for our own spirited and outright angry demand for justice amid all the injustices of today which are so often explained away with empty bourgeois passivity.

— Lastly, I briefly touch upon the Odysseus we find in Dante because many Christians are just as guilty as the bourgeois academics of today in misreading Dante merely to assert their own faith and virtues into Dante on the topic of Odysseus. I show how Dante is far more aware of the profoundly important significance of Homer’s Odysseus for thoughtfully serious Christians than the mere larpers who through very lazy readings of Dante mistakenly assert that Odysseus in Dante is a perfectly clear case of deserved damnation

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