← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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A
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we welcome back the Dr. Patrick Dineen to discuss his new book, which is out today, July 21, the American what An Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls. It is a wonderful text. It's particularly a wonderful text to read after reading Homer's odyssey, because what Dr. Patrick Deneen does is he takes the perennial truths that we see in Homer's Odyssey and he sets them alongside some classic pieces of American history or American culture, like the wizard of Oz or Huckleberry Finn. And he shows us some surprising similarities between these pieces of Americana and Homer's Odysseus, to the degree that he claims that Odysseus is a proto American. What does he mean by that claim? That's something that we explore in the podcast today. He also does a deep dive into Aristotle, how a quick phrase at the beginning of Aristotle's politics tells us explicitly what Homer shows us poetically in in the Odyssey. And then how that principle, that deep philosophic political principle that we see both in Aristotle and Homer, applies then to America, to the American spirit. It's really an excellent conversation. It's a wonderful way again to end your study of the Odyssey by taking all the truths that you just learned and applying them today, gaining a better understanding of both Homer and our own American culture. And as an aside, before we jump into that, yes, I did see the movie. No, I don't recommend it. The family was sick all weekend, so I'm a little bit behind on things. But I did post a article on Our Patreon page 23 quick observations on the Odyssey. You can go check that out, see if you agree with me or not. Feel free to leave a comment. Argue back Always appreciate discussing Homer and what Christopher Nolan attempted to do in his film, but today we're going to talk about something that it's a little bit more on the true good and beautiful side. We're going to discuss Dr. Patrick Dineen's new book again out today, the American Odyssey. What an Ancient story Reveals about our divided souls. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I live in rural Oklahoma with my wife and five children, serve as a deacon at Holy Family Cathedral, and Chancellor General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. In my free time, I like to help people read the great books and that's the purpose here on Ascend. We can be like a small group to you if you're new. We've just finished an amazing 12 week study of the Odyssey. If you're Looking to decide, hey, where do I go from here? What do I study next? You can join us for reading Hesiod and the Greek plays. That'd be the natural next step after reading Homer. All those discussions are actually already posted and ready for you. If you've already read the Odyssey but you didn't read the Iliad first, then we actually have 24 episodes on the Iliad already posted. So go back, check those out if you want to continue with us. New episodes here on the podcast. We'll be reading some Platonic dialogue, some short stories, and then dive into Plato's Republic this fall. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters who have access to written guides, articles, community chats, etc. To help you read the great books. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for a reading schedule, more information. Okay, today, Today's a good day. So we are discussing Dr. Patrick Dineen's new book, the American Odyssey. What an ancient story reveals about our divided souls. I've been promoting it through our 12 week study. It is finally out today, July 21st. It's a wonderful opportunity to take all the wisdom of Homer that we just learned. We just kind of saturated ourselves in and allow it to guide our own day and age as Americans. It's a really excellent next step in your Homeric studies. And to guide us today, we are joined by Dr. Patrick Dineen himself, who serves as the professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He's author of several acclaimed books like, like why Liberalism Failed, I'll Hold it up like Vanna White. Here it is right here on my desk. And also Regime Change, two excellent books which I very much appreciate. His PhD thesis was actually on the Odyssey and that was also turned into a book, the Odyssey of Political Theory, the Politics of Departure and Return. He joined us for our introduction to the Odyssey as part of our original 2024 Year of Homer. So welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Patrick Deneen.
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B
Thank you so much, Deacon. It's nice to be back with you. Although regrettably not in Oklahoma this time. Greetings from Indianapolis.
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A
Yeah, it's always wonderful. The few recordings we did at the beginning where we got to actually record in person, are much more human than being via technology.
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B
Yeah, but we'll do. We'll make the best of it.
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A
Okay, so you're known very much for why liberalism failed. Post liberalism, critiques of liberalism, things of this nature. What kind of led you, though, to return to writing about the Odyssey Again,
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B
well, if I may be a rude guest, I would actually probably put the question differently, which is what led from writing about the Odyssey to eventually writing about liberalism, which may not have been an obvious career path. If even if I had charted out where I would be from the start of my career, which was much more. I was originally hired at Princeton and then at Georgetown, essentially to be there. Professor of classical political philosophy. I did a lot of teaching and writing and reading in the classics. So the move to why liberalism failed really was a. That. That was kind of the departure from what seemed to be the natural trajectory in which I would spend my career writing about Plato, Aristotle, classics and so forth. But I. I suppose there's. There is a kind of deep continuity, and it's there in the original dissertation and book, which is the. I described there, as well as in the most recent book, the kind of the tension and the paradox in the West, I think, that you already see articulated in the classics and of course, in the Christian tradition as well, that paradox between human beings as having restless, insatiable souls that always want more, that can never be satisfied, that are always going to be in some ways driven by, of course, in the modern world, driven by a kind of anxiety of that there's something more. That there's something more to be bought or gained or achieved. And then, of course, the alternative, you could say in the Western tradition, again, going all the way back to somebody like Aristotle. So Aristotle, of course, articulates an ideal of human happiness in which human flourishing is the attainment of a kind of. You could say, a kind of condition of contentment and satisfaction. Not easily or always and everywhere achievable, but that should be the aim and goal of the telos of human life. So you could say that we have then at the heart of the Western tradition this tension between these two kinds of ideals, these two forms of understanding of human life. And I think they. You could say their source material, where they are most fully and first articulated is in the Odyssey. You can see it there, and it's in its full articulation. So this theme that in the Odyssey that was so central in the dissertation in my first book, I think naturally, you could see the development in how my own thinking as I would teach and read not just the classics, but then, you know, more modern political philosophy. And there I would discover and argue, of course, that this tension, what I see as a kind of a productive generative tension between these two aspects of our. Of our sort of Western soul tip. They're tipped in the kind of modern tradition. And they're tipped, I think, in a decisive way toward the kind of discontent this human soul is, a discontented soul, an anxious soul, a seeking soul. And then this, of course, gets translated in the early modern period, especially in economic terms, in which figures like Smith and Locke, in the kind of Enlightenment tradition, that the generative and productive form of this anxiety and seeking will find a kind of safe valve in economic pursuits. And so I think it's. That's the trajectory from a dissertation on the Odyssey to why liberalism failed. So for me, this opportunity to kind of return, to talk about the Odyssey represents a kind of return to my own origin story and a kind of happy opportunity to talk about work that many people don't know that I even wrote or engaged in. You know, I became somewhat known for a later book and the timing, of course, of the film and all of the. I think, really happy. I'm very happy and pleased that there's an outpouring of interest in the Odyssey and I'm happy to be able to participate in that.
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A
Yeah. One thing I always appreciate about your writings is they're kind of like being introduced to an entire library. So you have a lot of citations, you bring in a lot of different thinkers. And so, no, I was actually very excited when I realized that you had this love for the Odyssey because bringing that great books discourse, bringing in kind of these perennial millennial works of the west into a modern dialogue, into how can they actually apply to our lives now, I think is incredibly apt and something that we need to be doing. Kind of building on your comments, one of the claims that you make at the beginning of your book, which I found was really interesting, is that Odysseus, of all the ancient heroes, Odysseus is maybe the most proto American. Can you comment a little bit on that?
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B
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine people will immediately say, what a ridiculous claim. And you know how, you know, I'm just a typical booster for all things American, American exceptionalism. I mean it in the following sense, that to the extent that Odysseus, as I just said, Odysseus, represents this great tension and paradox and sort of, again, productive tension within the Western tradition itself, it ought not to surprise us that the kind of the. We could say the furthest point of development of the Western tradition, which is America, which is America as simultaneously it's a product of an Enlightenment project as well as an inheritor of a pre modern tradition that we would be. We should be unsurprised to see these elements kind of in their most intense display and their most intense instantiation on these shores. And in particular because of course, you have, in addition to the, you could say the philosophical, theological currents that inform America, you have this continent that now is sort of ripe for settlement and development and exploration. So the exploratory, pioneering, wayfaring theme of the Odyssey is of course deeply and profoundly not just present here, but defines our kind of social imaginary. It's kind of what we are, it's what we do. And even to like, you know, this minute, people like Elon Musk talking about, you know, going out and making humans interplanetary, this is still very much a part of our self understanding. And I think we can. It's not inapt for us to say, well, there's. There are some deep origins to that particular side of our national character.
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A
Yeah. One thing I really appreciated that caught my attention was you're discussing this kind of split between us, this tension of somehow being settled, wanting to be settled, wanting to have a home, but constantly seeking more. And how this kind of tends to characterize the American spirit, but also something that we see very much as a microcosm inside of Odysseus himself, particularly having just come off of Read the Odyssey. One thing though, that I found really intriguing and noteworthy about towards the beginning of your book was the idea in this shift from Odysseus being considered a villain in Dante. So we've also read Dante on the podcast. We read the Inferno two lengths ago and it really caught people's attention, like, oh, wait, here's Odysseus the hero, and he's in hell. He's in hell for evil counsel. He's, you know, the picture, the poetic image there is he's burning in a tongue of fire along with Diomedes. Right. And so we get this story in which, you know, he's unsettled, he cannot be settled. And so he can't stay with Telemachus and Penelope, he can't stay on rocky Ithaca. He's got to go. He has to find all the knowledge. And so, you know, we see then this kind of Dr. Prudlo was on the podcast and helped us guide us through this passage, this cautionary tale in the medieval imagination where going past the bounds of human knowledge, there's a certain transgression. And so, you know, famously, Odysseus is traveling on the seas. He sees Mount Purgatory. He goes past the. They get there. He goes past the Straits of Gibraltar, past the Pillars of Hercules, which is kind of this image of the boundaries of human knowledge, and God strikes the ship and they all die. That's the death of Odysseus. And we see that in the Inferno of like, okay, well, then Dante presents himself almost as a new Odysseus that is obedient to. To the boundaries of God because he'll be able to not just make it to Mount Purgatory, but also to ascend. That's. That's fantastic. It's a beautiful image. It's something we've talked about on the podcast. What I did not know, though, and you talk about is that then in the European mind and then in this pioneering American mind, how Dante presents Odysseus as a villain becomes then an image of the heroic. Can you say a little bit more about that?
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B
Yeah. And this is actually this, this is one. One piece of, I guess you could say, where there's been a big debate lately over whether secondary scholarship is relevant to the great books and should you, you know, should professors be experts in what they teach and so forth. And I, I can see myself sort of sympathizing with both sides of this argument. But there, there is something invaluable, of course, about knowing the secondary literature. In the case of the Odyssey. I spent years when I was writing my dissertation reading just about everything I could on the Odyssey about the Odyssey in different languages. And one little data point that stuck with me that I didn't write about in the original book is precisely this, is that during a transition from the late medieval period in which Dante is writing to the Renaissance, the image of Odysseus shifts. And particularly, let's say the image of the afterlife or the after Odyssey life of Odysseus shifts. That Dante's presentation, which, I mean, we may discuss this, but imaginary tellings of what happens after the conclusion of the Odyssey begin almost immediately. Right. It's just right. The conclusion of the Odyssey invites further reflection. What happens after Odysseus sort of cleans house, reestablishes peace in Ithaca, now assumes his position as king, husband, father? You know, is it happily ever after? Fade out? You know, credits roll, and that's the end of the story? Well, I think anyone who has any interest in Odysseus as a character in, you know, what is he going to do in Ithaca? How can someone who's seen and experienced what he has, will he be content at home or will he want to go out again? Well, from the very beginning, from very early on, people begin telling new versions or new sort of new sequels to the Odyssey in which Odysseus goes off or people come to Ithaca. There's lots of different versions of this. And this was in many ways the subject of my dissertation was the kind of after story of the Odyssey. But Dante as part of this is of course, writing this in the Christian frame, and you've described it very well in the Inferno. He's a figure for whom the desire to know more, I think maybe especially as portrayed in the Sirens episode, they offer of knowledge that the Sirens sing to him. He's someone who seems to be just, you know, has the potential of being disrespectful for the appropriate boundaries. Right. The original sin of human beings is craving to know what they ought not to know or to attain a knowledge that that's forbidden to them. This is a kind of human characteristic. So he's a kind of archetypal figure, like Adam and Eve, you know, like those who build the Tower of Babel. He seeks forbidden knowledge and as a result, he's consigned to the penultimate circle of hell. I mean, it's not just that he's in hell. Socrates and Aristotle are, you know, are in limbo. He's, you know, almost to the deepest level of hell, for it says for bad counsel. But there is a real emphasis on this, on the dimension of being someone who wants to know what is forbidden to human beings. But by the time of the Renaissance, and specifically by the time in which Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and a series of explorers are also then literally now traveling past the pillars of Hercules, past the Strait of Gibraltar and going to the west in exploration, this entire kind of curiosity and adventurousness and exploratory spirit is redescribed and it's understood now as a great testimony to the human spirit, as an extraordinary expression of human inquisitiveness and praiseworthy effort to push beyond the boundaries of the familiar and the known. And here's I talk about this in the book. What stuck with me from my time writing the researching and writing this dissertation is that you could say in the popular intellectual press of the day, the journey of Columbus and Americo Vespucci is described as a new kind of Odyssean figure that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci are described as new Odysseus. And in a sense, then you could say metaphorically at least, Columbus discovers America. I'm sorry, Odysseus as Columbus or America was Bucci discovers America. So Odysseus is here, you know, the first European in some ways to settle here. To discover the continent. And I think that's a. You know, metaphorically, but also in some ways in a very substantive way. It reflects the journey of the Western tradition to our shores. That's already being described in those terms at the time that the new world is being discovered.
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A
Yeah, I find that wonderful and incredibly intriguing. Yeah. One of the things about the great books is obviously reading the primary texts, spending times with these great authors. But there is so much value then in seeing how prior ages have also interpreted these texts. Because we're downstream from them.
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B
That's right.
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A
Our civilization, our culture. So a lot of these little things that you're able to show us about the Odyssey in your book. And the American Odyssey is. Are actually really valuable. And that was one that I had never heard of. I had never seen those connections before. I found it incredibly enlightening. So one thing that got my attention in chapter one of your book is you make a reference to Aristotle. And it's a very expansive kind of principle that you lay down that you then see kind of animating inside the Odyssey. So I'd actually like to read this passage from Aristotle and then kind of set you up about how do you see this actually as something dispositive to the Odyssey and ultimately to the American journey. So this is from Aristotle's Politics. In book one, chapter two, he says, from these things. It is evident then that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature. And that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city through nature rather than chance, is either a mean sort or superior to man. He is without clan, without law, without hearth, like the person reproved by Homer. But then skipping down just a little bit. One who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self sufficient is no part of a city. And so is either a beast or a God. And you give a thesis in your book about the importance of noticing and observing this theme of citylessness, of being without polis. Can you help us start to understand that?
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B
Yeah. So these are. I mean, there's such critical passages in Aristotle's politics right at the beginning. And what he's doing is basically, it should be very familiar to us as Americans. What does Madison say in the Federalist Papers? What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? And, of course, the Federalist Papers itself and our Constitution contains implicitly and at times explicitly a theory of human nature. What is the theory of human nature? Well, we tend to be self interested. We tend to prefer our own. We tend to be prideful. We tend to, we tend to put forward our own best interest ahead of that of others. Can we rely then on the Platonic leader imagined in the Republic? And Madison says, no, we can't. We have to assume, kind of assume the worst, or at least assume a constant less than best as the likely kind of figure who's going to be attracted to political office. And as a result, we set up, of course, famously, our Constitution with checks and balances, division of powers, all of the various features that reflect that assumption of human nature. So you, whenever you know, every course I teach, basically I tell my students what we're basically going to be studying this semester is human nature and, and the politics that flows from that. And here at the beginning of Aristotle's politics, what he's doing is say, okay, here I'm going to lay out my theory of human nature as best I understand it from observation, from efforts to discern what lies in, sometimes below the surface, or not always as visible. And something that's contested, of course, a of a view of human beings that's constantly being debated and you know, there's conflict over that question. And, and he lays out then of course in the passages you just read that human beings, first of all we should notice they are, we could say, if we want to establish what they are, let's say what they aren't first. And what they aren't is either sort of animals, beasts, you know, and he says human beings are creatures that use words. We're Logos, creatures of Logos, creatures of reason. The beasts are not. But we're also not gods. And of course we're not talking about God God here, we're not talking about the Christian God, but we're not creatures of who don't we die? We have limits of our powers, we have limits of our perception. We can't fly. There's just lots of things that human beings aren't. And then Aristotle says, well, what, what is distinct about humans in comparison to those two things that were not the beasts and the gods? And that's what he laid out in that passage you just read, we are not self sufficient. So notice he's saying the beasts in some ways are kind of self sufficient. They're self sufficient because they can rely more or less on instinct. You don't have to teach, you know, a lion how to be a lion, doesn't have to go to lion school and you know, learn, you know, take years and years and write essays or have AI write essays. And so, so it's instinct Suffices and self, therefore self sufficiency is a definitive feature of the beasts. Beasts, interestingly have powers of perception that make the world, make the world comprehensible to the extent that they need it to be comprehensible. They have a kind of direct knowledge of things like my dog can, you know, smells things that I can't see. The creatures, the beasts have a form of perception that what they need, they can, can largely rely upon. And I think this is represented of course in the Odyssey above all by Argos the dog. Now we have Odysseus in disguise. Nobody knows who he is. Even his family can't recognize him, his servants can't recognize him. His nurse recognizes him only because she sees the scar that hasn't been transformed on his thigh when she's washing his feet. So he's kind of as so many figures in the Odyssey and in the ancient world, he is a figure that people, you can't be certain about what you're dealing with. Are we dealing with a God in disguise? Are we dealing with a human in disguise? What are the people's motives? We don't know. And instantly, 20 years after leaving this little puppy, now a 20 year old dog on a dung heap, who's been kind of driven out of the home, treated terribly. I mean, there's a heartbreaking, beautiful scene in the Odyssey. Apparently Christopher Nolan, like he loves this scene. So I imagine this is in the film, but you have to imagine this dog is described as covered with fleas and just in a terrible condition and smells his master who's in disguise, who's been gone for 20 years and immediately recognizes him. And immediately like any dog greeting a long lost master, the tail wags, the joy. And then, you know, very sadly of course, then, then passes, yeah, but passes in joy. The joy of knowing this master came home. That, I mean that that's the sort of the condition of being self sufficient and having this kind of perception of the, of the reality of things. And it turns out this is also a feature of the gods, a kind of self sufficiency that they, they don't really need anyone else. They, they have a kind of loose kind of government. But Zeus is king kind of in name only. Like if Poseidon wants to persecute Odysseus against the will of Zeus, he can kind of do it. When, when Poseidon goes away for a trip to Ethiopia, then Poseidon can do something about it, but otherwise he can't really control his, his younger brother. So the gods are self sufficient and they have this kind of perception, right? We know famously, of course, from, or I should say should be famously from the scene in which Hermes provides to Odysseus the antidote to the potion of Circe that would turn him into a swine. That Hermes says, here, take this plant. It's difficult for humans to dig up. Its properties are only known to the gods because we can see the nature of the thing. And that's the one time that the word phusis or nature is used in any of the Homeric texts. So these qualities of what it is to be a gods and humans, I'm sorry, gods and beasts are very distinct from the human condition. And I think what Aristotle is really laying out at the beginning of the Odyssey is to say human beings are by nature political animals because of very distinctive features of human beings. We can't just know the nature of things. We have to deliberate. We're going to disagree about whether what's the property of this, whether moley is this or that, or whether a person is this or that, or whether this policy does this or that, or whether your motives are this or that. I mean, that's our politics. Politics is the place where we hopefully peacefully settle what will be inevitably and unavoidably disagreements that we have because we can't know things with certainty. And it's also, of course, the place. And here Aristotle should especially, I think we need to underscore this especially. Politics is a place for creatures that are not self sufficient. It's the place where we in a sense, through again deliberation, but also the organization of a human artifice. So the polis is artificial. It can take many different forms. Like a meal, it provides something we need by nature. We need to eat food. But what form that meal will take, what its content will be, how we eat it, when we eat it, what are the customs by which we eat and in which we eat that food that will vary from place to place, time to time, culture to culture, civilization to civilization. So the polis, like a meal, is both natural and artificial. And it's the artificiality of it. The kind of the artifice, the human techne of the polis is, you could say, that which supports and provides for the fact we are not self sufficient. Right? We by nature we need the city, but we need to create it to by artifice, develop the polis that makes it possible for human beings to transcend our lack of self sufficiency, such that we can actually not just subsist, but even, of course, as Aristotle would write, achieve Flourishing, achieve our eudaimonia, our kind of this happiness. So the fact that Aristotle relies quite, I think, quite significantly and in a very profound way on a Homeric set of understandings and really specifically and explicitly that what human beings are not is some a creature like the Cyclops, is to me, indicative that when Aristotle is thinking about his politics, right, a theory of politics that will come to influence the west all the way until, like, basically the beginning of modernity, right through Christendom, especially with Thomas Aquinas, that his source material is the Odyssey and of course, and Homer more broadly. So anyone who wants to think about the, you know, the kind of the broad, deep influence of a text like the Odyssey can do a lot worse than to begin with Aristotle's own sort of starting point, that if we want to understand human nature, let's go to these great source texts.
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A
Yeah, very well said. One reason I really appreciate that is on the podcast on a study of Homer, et cetera, as we've worked through the last 12 weeks on the Odyssey, you know, we did make a big deal about the Cyclops narrative and about him telling him that, oh, you know, my name is nobody. And we saw then that that created a certain strata in the text where then that nobody kind of followed Odysseus all the way home, right? So, for instance, you know, when he's on Cersei's. Excuse me, when he's on Calypso's island, like, if he stays there with her in a certain way, he's going to become a nobody. He's going to lose his identity, who he is. When he goes back to Ithaca, he literally becomes a nobody. He becomes a beggar. And it's only in then reclaiming his home that he tends to reclaim his identity. And there's a lot there to be made of the homecoming. What I like what you've done here by tethering Aristotle to it is I thought it was really intriguing then that you show that there's another strata to that of. It's not just like the concept of home, but the concept of the political, of the polis, that then where there he actually somewhat suffers the same citylessness, the same without polis that the Cyclops has. And you kind of point then that as he's going from, you know, basically island to island, having these little episodes, he keeps bumping into people who live in isolation, right? So you mentioned Circe, you mentioned Aeolus, you mentioned Calypso, and I thought that was just a really fascinating layer to the text that it's also not just simply about the home, but it's also about the political. And it's in the political that Odysseus can find himself.
- [31:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's actually extraordinary when you begin to think about it. There are so few cities that Odysseus encounters. Maybe the. Maybe the one that one can immediately think of is the Pha Kians, who of course are ruled by. By King Alkinous and Queen Arete, Queen Virtue and the lovely daughter who Nausicaa, apparently not in the film, with whom he could spend the rest of his life. There's a possibility, it seems, his parents. Her parents would be enthusiastic and she seems quite interested. He could marry this lovely younger woman, become king of a very peaceful, very beautiful, highly civilized island. Much more beautiful than Ithaca, much wealthier than Ithaca. And the fact is, as you say, he still would not be the somebody that he needs to be by returning to Ithaca. He would be, in some ways it's almost. You could say this is the first articulation of a utopia in Western literature is the island of the Fayakians. This is. In other words, it's so civilized and it's so perfect that it's a kind of. In an odd way, in a kind of parallel, if opposite way. It's as inhuman as the island of the Cyclops. It represents kind of that pole of beasts and gods. And theirs is much more of a. You could say a kind of paradisical city that is not really ultimately appropriate for or fitting for human beings simply because it doesn't reflect our true nature. There's something not quite human about it. They seem kind of quasi divine. And it's also quite interesting. Some scholars have suggested that we know. That we know two things from the text that connect these two islands of the Cyclops, or may connect the two islands of the Cyclops and the Phaequians. We know that there's an empty island, or at least an island that is empty, devoid of human beings, next to the Cyclops island. This is where the ship, Odysseus ship originally docks. He describes it as a rich, effusive, wonderful, filled with goats sometimes it's called Goat Island. He kind of comments on it like a colonizer would be a great. There's a great potential port, little harbor. It would be great for development, make a nice island for human beings. He's a little shocked there's not human beings on the island. And then we know that the Phaequians moved at some point away from that. They had lived somewhere Else at some point. And it's suggested at least that the Cyclops, that they lived near the Cyclops. So I think, again, wonderfully, Homer puts these two islands into juxtaposition with each other as two, you could say, the extremes of which then a place like Ithaca is the means. But there's one other feature we should underscore, which is that not only is Cyclops island apolis, not only is Cyclops himself apolis. Right. Not only is. Would Aristotle read the Cyclops as the kind of preliminary or primary example of what being apolis is to be self sufficient, to be not quite human, to be either. I mean, in case of Polyphemus, to be literally simultaneously a beast and a God. Right? The son of Poseidon, so not a human. But we also know that ithaca, for maybe 20 years has been Apolis, because at the very beginning of the Odyssey, Telemachus is directed by Athena in disguise to call an assembly, an assembly. So this would be the political forum where politics would happen. And it's noted by the poet that there has been no assembly since Odysseus has left, that Ithaca has ceased to be a polis since the time of Odysseus's departure. And so the king has left, there has been no assembly, politics has ceased. And now what we see is a kind of a vicious place where sort of Cyclopean ethos begins to reign. The suitors are the kind of quasi Cyclops figures who devour not human beings, but devour the stores of Odysseus and who are, you know, do not engage in kind of the great customs of guest friendship, who overstay their welcome, who. Who appear every day, who basically fracture the social order in very similar ways, to which a figure like the Cyclops not just fractures that order, but doesn't even exemplify that order. So Ithaca is also a kind of apolis place. By the time the action, and we join the action of the Odyssey. And one of the. It seems to me one of the distinctive features of the. Of the text is to say the return of Odysseus will also mark the return of being a polis. In a preliminary way, the first assembly indicates that this is, you know, the return is imminent.
- [36:52]
A
Yeah, very well said. Yeah, I know. I really like this strain of thought throughout the Odyssey. Two things that I would love to weave it into. One is that, you know, you see, Telemachus has to go on his, you know, Telemachus on his journey. And there's a way there too, in which he is being exposed for the first time to functional. A functional body. And so, you know, he goes to Nestor and what's he see? He sees a religious sacrifice, he sees a religious festival. He sees these people coming together to worship, to do what they need to do. Then he goes to Menelaus and he sees a double wedding feast. So he's seeing these like, political events, he's seeing these things that are marking a polis of a rich culture, et cetera, and they're pedagogical to him as he then has to return to Ithaca. The other thing too that you mentioned that I think is really fascinating with looking at Ithaca as you know, Apolis, like apolitical, you know, without city, is that there's also a way then to read Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors as an analogy or tethering back to the Cyclops as consuming of Odysseus men in the cave. If you read it, one position would be if you read Odysseus violating guest friendship when he goes into the cave because he's trying to see what guests or what gifts he can get from the Cyclops, then he almost becomes like an arbiter or an avenger for sacred rights that he himself has violated. And you'll notice then, like in book 23 or book 22, Homer uses and merges a lot of food in gore imagery very analogous to the Cyclops narrative. But that would be really interesting because then both Ithaca and the Cyclops cave would both be these apolitical places that are in need then of some type of like, re. Establishment, some type of reorder. The Cyclops cave doesn't get it. It's incapable of receiving it. But Odysseus homecoming then would allow that to flourish and return back to a political state. I like that because a lot of times we focus on what Odysseus needs in his homecoming. But what does Ithaca need?
- [38:47]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, this underscores again, another very Aristotelian point. You know, Aristotle would, I think, in just deep, profound ways have, you know, just have imbibed this from these texts, which is that it, it. It's impossible to draw a clear boundary between the public and the private. That, that what, you know, we could say as a very modern, distinctively modern phenomenon is, Is not, It's not feasible or imaginable in this Odyssean and Aristotelian world. The, the health of the home, we could say the health of a marriage. Right. The fidelity of husband and wife. Okay. We acknowledge Odysseus's strays, but he ultimately aims for home. And even you know, how one greets or doesn't greet a guest and whether one accords them the proper form of reception in what's called in the Greek xenia, the greeting, the guest friendship, the rites of guest friendship, which of course, it might push things to say. Odysseus, I mean, Odysseus is always a bit greedy. And so, yes, he goes into the Cyclops cave hoping to get gifts, but one has to say, if one wants to look for a violation of Xania in that episode, you'd have to say Cyclops is probably the figure you would want to focus on. What does he do? Not only does he not offer any food to these men who have entered his cave, he devours them. He does the opposite of what one is to do. And now compare that to Eumaeus in the latter part of the Odyssey. What does Eumaeus does when this beggar, this tramp, this poor rag wearing figure, comes to what, the hut of a swineherd? This is a place of poverty and diminished goods in which he's basically having to provide to the suitors all of the, the provisions that he would have provided to Odysseus. Well, he greets this beggar, not knowing who he is, and gives him half of his very meager dinner to eat. And Odysseus says, oh, you shouldn't do this. He is the kind of paragon of guest friendship. And so the meagerest, meanest figure in the epic represents in some ways the highest form of what you would think of as Greek, proper Greek culture, and one of the most powerful highborn of the figures, which would be Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, is the most vicious of the figures. So the continuity then, between what's happening in the home, what's happening between a husband and a wife, between Menelaus and Helen, you know, both to start the war and then after the conclusion of the war. When is the Trojan War resolved? Is it with the sacking of Troy? And in the book, I suggest, well, no, that Trojan War only ends when Odysseus restores order in Ithaca, is rejoined with Penelope, now you could say, in a cosmic sense, reestablishes the proper form of a human household and the proper form of a human polis. And this is the conclusion of the Trojan War. Of course, it takes a kind of deus ex machina to prevent a kind of ongoing conflict with the parents of the suitors. But the Trojan War only ends when the Cosmic war that's been taking place on the plains of Troy reaches its conclusion in the beautiful scene in the bed that has been hewn by Odysseus out of an olive tree, in which you see this beautiful reconciliation of Odysseus and Penelope. And there's the end of the war.
- [42:39]
A
Yeah, very good. Okay, so maybe in the spirit of your text, what would be the snapshot, the takeaway of this lesson of being without city, citylessness, apolis, to then being an American in our 250th anniversary?
- [42:58]
B
Yeah. For a long time, since I wrote the dissertation. And I've been obsessed with the Odyssey since I think I was in middle school when I first read it, just loved it. I would probably say that I'm a college professor today because I had a wonderful middle school teacher who assigned the Odyssey. I loved it, and she just kept feeding me books to read. And so it's been on my mind for a long time. And so I suppose, like anyone who has been shaped by a particular text or number of texts, you tend to see its resonances and its echoes and its features everywhere. And so from very early on, I would just kind of. I would notice what I would. Or at least I would imagine or perceive Odyssean elements in so much of. Even sort of American popular culture, American storytelling, the American tradition. And I thought, you know, maybe someday I'd like to write a book in which I kind of talked about the sequel of the Odyssey in America. And. And the. In some ways, the hook was that the. The kind of. That idea of. Of Odysseus discovering America, the kind of the blending of Columbus and Odysseus as figures who explore and go forth in the world. And of course, the theme of exploration and of mobility, of. Of pushing the limits, of seeking beyond what one is familiar and even perhaps what. What one should. I think, as I've. We've already said, is a constitutive aspect of the American tradition and the American character we celebrate. These figures, the. Again, the explorer, the pioneer. I mean, these. These are part of. When you think of what an American is, these are the kind of paradigmatic figures that come to mind. And at the same time, the. The kind of the. The figure who goes places, who seeks new frontiers to go where no man has gone before, does so not always, but very often in order to establish a new home or in order to make a home, in order to settle, in order to be a homesteader. Right. We have that image as well. In the American tradition. The pioneers went out right you had the families and the. In the. In the wagons in order to.
- [45:13]
A
What would they do?
- [45:14]
B
They'd create a town, right? They would make a new place. They would settle and carve out a space of civilization in what had been wilderness or forests and make farms and establish churches and eventually dedicate some space as a cemetery where you would remember the dead. This is also a paradigmatic aspect of the American tradition. And it's captured everywhere in our tradition. It's captured in our stories, it's captured in our films, it's captured in our music. It's articulated constantly. It's so much a part of what we are, that. That, like, as I, you know, as I like to describe to my students, we. We have to. To see the water we swim in, we have to put in a little bit of food dye to see what is invisible to us. But it. But it surrounds and pervades our. Our surroundings. And it just seemed to me that the. The release of this film in July of 2026 was a providential coincidence. And not a mere coincidence because this was the same month in which we would be celebrating the 250th anniversary of our declaration. And so to finally try to put these two stories right next to each other, the story of the Odyssey and our American form of self understanding might help us both see these deep roots of our own tradition, but also the ways in which what might sometimes seem to be so distant and so ancient from our own time actually is sort of alive and well and present in our own time. And so the effort of the book was to really, again, to juxtapose a number of. Especially episodes in the Odyssey that may or may not. I don't know that all of them are in the film. I suspect they're not, but would certainly be familiar to people who've read the text. And then to pair them with a very familiar, iconic piece of Americana, a film, a text, sometimes texts and films, films that were made out of books, not. Not hive, you know, kind of, you know, art theater films that. That only three people have seen, but, you know, things like wizard of Oz and Field of Dreams, very familiar texts in order to make visible again, these. That what I see as very Odyssean themes as they persist in our own time and place.
- [47:39]
A
That's something I want to stress to everyone who's listening is that our whole conversation today has actually just been scratching the surface of the preface and chapter one of your book. And so kind of just looking at the text here, because you have some comparisons here. That I think are fascinating, actually, to this one, you compare wizard of Oz, which I think is a wonderful comparison. In chapter two, you talk about Calypso's offer of immortality to Odysseus, which, by the way, we covered that. That's book five on the podcast. Again, I showed my gratitude. I had reference and recourse to you on the insight about Tithonus. You compare that to Huckleberry Finn, Twain, which is a fascinating comparison. I really enjoyed reading that. Chapter three, you go into Elpenor, Eumaeus, you talk about Field of Dreams. I mean, one thing I really like about your text is that you do take all these very famous episodes from the Odyssey and then you kind of compare them to little pieces of Americana and give really fascinating comparisons that I think are unique and things that I certainly would not have come up with. So if people enjoyed this conversation, I just want to say that this is scratching the surface at the beginning of your book, but there are many more comparisons in the text themselves.
- [48:46]
B
Yeah, I'll mention one of these juxtapositions with something approaching pride. So I might have to go to confession after this, but at the time I was writing my dissertation, I thought about adding a chapter on some piece of Americana. So my dissertation was on the Odyssey as a work of political theory, and then the way it had been interpreted and kind of taken up by a series of subsequent political philosophers. So chapters on Plato, on Rousseau, on Horkheimer, and Adorno, on Giambattista Vico. So I was really interested in the way that the Odyssey has an odyssey in the history of political thought. So the afterlife of the Odyssey or the wanderings of Odysseus and the texts of the Western tradition going back to. We were talking about how these texts have been read and reinterpreted, and I gave some thought to, you know, should I try to include a kind of American work? And the American work that kept. I kept coming back and thinking it would be Huckleberry Finn. Like, is there any American text that is more Odyssean than Huckleberry Finn? Right. Here you have a character who is so similar to Odysseus. He's a trickster. He's someone who assumes, disguises. He lives on the kind of, you know, he pushes the boundaries. He's interested in the frontier. He is. Oh, maybe most strikingly, he is a somewhat more minor figure in a preceding text. It's a sequel in which he becomes the main figure in the second text and the primary figure, Tom Sawyer, becomes a minor figure in the Sequel so much like the relationship of Achilles and Odysseus. And strikingly, Tom Sawyer is told in the. In the third person and Huck Finn is told in the first person. And who tells his story for at least four of the books, or 5, 9, 10, 4 of the books is Odysseus tells his own story. So more of a first person telling my own story element to it. So there are so many interesting, striking parallels. But I just thought, well, this pushes the envelope a bit. He doesn't talk about the Odyssey, unlike these other chapters I delve in. But after I finished Dissertation, brought out the book, I was poking around the Mark Twain Library in California, Huntington Library, and I came across this unpublished book review that Twain wrote about the Odyssey at the time he was finishing Huck Finn. And it's a pretty funny book review you would expect with Mark Twain because it purports to be a review of a new book by a German author called Herr Homer gets a new translation of the Odyssey in German, which. Which Twain could read. And so he proceeds to give this faux review as if it's like, you know, this, he's reviewing this new text. He talks, he makes jokes about, you know, how interesting it is, this book with people who speak German traveling in upstate New York between Troy and Ithaca. So there's funny things. But the review itself is really interesting because it actually anticipates criticisms of what will become critical reviews of Huckleberry Finn. So he critiques the character of Odysseus, which parallels or anticipates critiques of Huck Finn. And there's a really interesting aspects to his critique. This, for me, had I found this when I was writing the dissertation, I might have included that as a chapter in the. In the eventual dissertation and book. But I'm glad now that in this book I can kind of finally make that connection clear and to do so in order, as you say, to draw what I think is a really fascinating parallel between Odysseus being offered immortality by Calypso and declining it, because ultimately both to be somebody, not to be nobody, and to return home to his wife and to his family and to his polis. In order, of course, when he does this, of course, he consigns himself to fate in Hades. And in a remarkable parallel, Huck is faced with this great sort of tremendous decision in which he thinks that by turning Jim into his owner, Jim, of course, the escaped slave he's traveling down the Mississippi with, that he can go to heaven, that he will achieve a kind of immortality if he turns Jim into his owner, Ms. Watson, and he's been taught by her that if he. You know, if he does a bad thing, he'll go to hell. If he does good things, he'll go to heaven. So he thinks he's doing a. A bad thing by helping Jim escape. And so he has this kind of terrible moment of conscience. But then he begins thinking about his relationship to Jim and his friendship to Jim and the times that they've been together and the sacrifices Jim has made for Huck. And he concludes, I can't do it. I can't turn this man in as much as it might threaten the fate of my eternal soul. And in a very famous scene, he looks at the letter to Ms. Watson and he tears it up, and he says, okay, then, I'll go to hell. So he declines what he thinks is a kind of immortal mortality of life in heaven with what he fears will be consignment to life in hell because of a friendship, because of his devotion to this real person. And I just find that parallel to be so rich and suggestive. And with the knowledge that Twain himself was at least thinking about the Odyssey and had read this German version of it as he's writing Huckleberry Finn, I think that's enough of a hook to say, hey, this might be maybe the most Odyssean of our American texts.
- [54:43]
A
Yeah, that was a wonderful insight, and I appreciate you sharing with us that in the providential discovery that you made to give it that kind of anchoring in Twain's own thought.
- [54:53]
B
I mentioned that I have pride about this because this is the only real scholarly discovery I expect I'll ever make in my life. Like a lot of scholars, I read books and recycle ideas, but this was, like, I found, like, this really interesting thing that nobody had talked about up to this point. So Twain scholars now have noticed it, but I found this little thing. It's kind of cool. It's a little sleuthing.
- [55:16]
A
Yeah. So there's the discovery, right? There's the. More. There's the spirit of Odysseus and Americana. Well, this has been wonderful, and this is a good snapshot of why I think your book is so insightful, because it's not just simply insights into the Odyssey, but also then how do those insights into the Odyssey comment on the American condition? But you do that by then comparing them to some kind of piece of Americana. So it's a really kind of unique, wonderful little work. Any kind of final comments to those who are thinking about picking up the text.
- [55:45]
B
Yeah, I suppose there's a danger in writing a book like this, and the danger is that I can try to draw together things that we ought to keep separate. And there are times when I think probably, you know, I make claims that, you know, maybe like Huck Finn, maybe they stretch how we. How we can understand these texts. But, you know, we talk, you talk and we talk, and people in our world talk a lot about the Western tradition. And we almost use those words as a mantra now, Western tradition, without necessarily thinking, well, what is that? What does that actually mean? And I think, at least I hope this book is an effort to say, hey, look, this is a real. This is a way in which you can track these themes in this very ancient book as they've been conveyed both literally through time and space, both in the form of books, but also in the form of an imaginary, of the way in which Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci become Odyssean characters and get associated with the discovery of America. The Western tradition is alive and well, and it's right here. And it's not only, I mean, it's, of course, it's in the great books of our tradition, but America is a land that has produced, dare I say, relatively few great books. Like when, you know, the great books you study are generally European, they're generally ancient, or until early modernity, America wasn't the place where you necessarily expected or even today anticipate. We will have a lot of great books. We might, and that's in part because it's a democratic society. As Tocqueville notes, this is not a place that's going to love the Greeks and the Latins. We're probably going to eliminate those departments from universities eventually, but the themes of the great books will be incorporated into more popular forms of literature, of film, of art, of music. Where would we look to find the themes of the Western tradition? And if we, in our more academic mode, look only to the. The John Rawls's and the John Dewey's of the American tradition, we're going to miss where the Western tradition has kind of settled in our own nation. It's tended to settle in the kind of more popular forms of democratic literature and of democratic film and music. And I hope at least that this book is suggestive of the way in which we can find the Western tradition in places where we might not expect. And it's here and it's present and it's very robust and we ought to. To celebrate that fact.
- [58:24]
A
Yeah, very well said. And yeah, it gives us a lot to think about and a lot of more texts maybe to explore to find our own Western tradition and our own mirror of what it means to be an American. So, again, Dr. Patrick Dean, thank you so much again for being here today and talking about your new book, the American Odyssey, what An Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls, which I'm assuming is available today on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
- [58:45]
B
Thanks. It's been great to talk with you again. I look forward to next time I can get down there.
- [58:49]
A
Yeah, that'll be wonderful. All right, everyone, go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon and Instagram. And we will continue next week looking at Holy Eros. We're going to take an aside and look at the tradition of holy Eros in the Western tradition, looking at Plato, the Old Testament, New Testament, church fathers and beyond. And then we're going to jump into four Platonic dialogues, starting with Hipparchus. So we will see you guys next week. Thank you so much.