Shining in Homer

A few years ago Bert and I were together in Oslo for much of the summer with our families. We spent a lot of time walking around a beautiful lake at the top of the hill where we lived. (Thanks to Liv Duesund, our gracious host.) When we weren’t doing that, Bert and I spent a lot of time talking about Homer.

The notes we wrote were eventually published in a Norwegian Journal of Sports Science under the title “Notes on Embodiment in Homer”. They are not widely available there, so I thought I might put up a short excerpt here. The idea for the excerpt was to try to find the phenomenology behind all the different ways in which the metaphor of shining works in Homer. We came up with three. Can anyone find more? Or further examples of the phenomena we’ve got?

June 10, 2006

Three kinds of shining in Homer

1. The light that characterizes the phenomenology of startling, unexpected shifts in the mood or situation. This is paradigmatically associated with the light of Zeus’s lightening bolt. Like lightening, you notice it when it happens – it calls attention to itself. And also, it’s necessarily momentary, since it marks a transition from one mood or situation to another. Example: Il. 17.180. “Zeus…tears away his triumph all in a lightening flash.” See also Aphrodite and the chin strap, Il. 3.435. Notice that Zeus’s lightening bolt is never associated with storms, since these are the domain of Poseidon, but rather comes strictly out of the blue.
2. The blazing power of shining heroes and gods when they’re at their best, for example fighting “brilliantly.” When somebody is manifesting their excellence at something, we say in English, they really ‘shine.’ One notices, or can notice, this kind of radiance, as when we say the bride was radiant on her wedding day. But the radiance can also just change your relation to the person, your way of treating them or responding to them, and indeed your way of understanding yourself and the whole situation, without your noticing the radiance itself. So one can either look at the radiant being as radiant (Marylin Monroe, Aphrodite as golden, shining Hektor) or see the situation in the light of their radiance. Manifesting excellence happens suddenly too, like the lightening bolt, but like a fire it endures, lingers, and is only gradually extinguished – phusis. Example: Il. 15.623. “Hector shining all about with fire leapt among the throng…” When one notices a shining hero or god it is like seeing flow from the outside; the shining person is acting in flow, and you experience his flow as a shining. If it draws you to get in sync with it, as it usually does, then one transitions to the third form of light.
3. The light that attunes people to each other and to their shared situation when they’re in flow together. This light must not be noticed or it will disrupt the flow. Examples: Il. 15.667ff, in which Athene shines light upon both sides of the army and in this light they see the situation – Hector, etc. – clearly. Here Homer says that Athene has shined the light, but none of the characters see it, they only see the things it illuminates. See also Od. 19.40ff, in which Telemachus interrupts the flow of the situation because he notices the light of the working gods and Odysseus warns that one must not pay attention to it. A particular version of this can also be found in the case of mood. For example, Aphrodite shines on Helen and Paris so that the erotic aspect of the situation shine, and one is drawn to respond to them. Il. 3.395.

These three categories of shining highlight Homer’s sensitivity to phenomena of embodiment that have been covered up since Plato, and have been replaced in our Enlightenment era by Descartes and Kant’s emphasis on will and agency. They characterize Homer’s glorification of our kind of being as existing along a spectrum of kinds and degrees of bodily receptivity – from the lack of receptivity given to one in sleep to the receptivity to particular affordances like tasty food, to the full in-sync receptivity of embedded-ness in the shared situation with others – all of which Kant would have denigrated as heteronomous determinations of the will. In Kant’s account of the enlightenment man becomes the source of all light and intelligibility and his freely chosen actions are the paradigmatic exercise of his autonomous will. By contrast, Homer characterizes man as responsive to a light given to him from outside by the shining of the gods and heroes.