Denneny on Homer

the song of the poet who saves the phenomena

In 1966, aged 23, Michael Denneny wrote an essay on Achilles and the overcoming of ressentiment. It foreshadows—I’ll be arguing—important features of his thesis on the aesthetic foundations of ethics and politics, and subsequent turn (itself emerging logically out of the ‘conclusions’ of his unfinished dissertation) away from academia and into publishing and editing a ‘gay world’ at Christopher Street and Stonewall Inn Editions of St. Martin’s Press (putting into print everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Larry Kramer to Edmund White to Randy Shilts to Jaime Manrique etc etc).

It’s an odd document, written as an answer to a question on his ‘Fundamentals Exam,’ which is the equivalent in the University of Chicago’s peculiar Social Thought program of field exams or comps in a normal graduate track. A list of Great Books throughout Western History is compiled; the student ostensibly responsible for reading them confronted in course with a set of questions about a select number and given some amount of time to write responses demonstrating, if not his having read the texts, his knowing how, according to local standards, such things are to be discussed.

One of the questions put to Denneny was:

I have no idea where this ‘remark’ came from; it seems made up! But the question is an opportunity to show mastery of The Iliad and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as (more importantly) of the obligatory rigmarole about the nature of tragedy, the nature of morality, the nature of nature and so on.

Denneny in one sense complies with the demand—he writes a philosophical essay that is, ‘fundamentally,’ an argument about human nature, aiming at a temporarily acceptable resolution to the endless Hyde Park problem of reading together the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. But he hardly says anything in the essay about Shakespeare’s play, spending 90% of his attention on The Iliad, as if he had already in mind before being posed any particular question an argument about Homer he was determined to make.

He announces out the outset, moreover, that the question is stupid (I have no idea if such moves by the exam committees were seen as annoying willfulness or the right kind of provocative) and will be ignored, except insofar as the misconceptions on which it depends must be cleared away in order for there to be a proper discussion of the texts.

Morality, or virtues and vices, means for Denneny, at least here, a set of moral rules to which individuals are supposed to conform. He says that morality is not relevant to the heroes of The Iliad, and particularly Achilles, who are not much ‘good’ in the sense of following rules, and whose ‘goodness’ is not of much interest to Homer. The heroes, Achilles foremost, are instead ‘good for/at…’—they are capable, powerful, virtuosic, a word that notably connects to aesthetics. They are performers; the poem/battlefield is their stage.

Heroes are those who are able to act to a heightened degree. And the worth of their action is measured within the world of the poem, Denneny suggests, according to some standard that, not being external or set, must be contingent, negotiated, evolving, determined by something other than a universal a-historical reason or unchanging nature.

Denneny goes on to distinguish ‘the hero’ from 1) the conventions of his society 2) the limitations imposed by the ‘world’ [here world meaning not as it does in Arendt and Denneny’s later habitual Arendtian vocabulary the specifically human horizon in which people and things appear to people who act and express judgments about appearances, actions and other judgments; rather world in this essay refers to something like nature as opposed to culture]:

Here the hero is further defined as being not only particularly ‘good for…’ or virtuosic but also as in some way excessive, going beyond or outside or against the rules of his culture and/or limits of nature. Incalculable, he seems unique. He as it were goes/is ‘beyond good and evil’ insofar as he cannot be understood according to norms, models, etc., imposed on him from without (such as the moral norms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, to the extent these are synonyms of virtues and vices in the sense Denneny has declared inapplicable to The Iliad). By implication the hero must be understood from within, i.e., according to his enactment of his own potentialities; the performance of his virtuosity.

But how can we do that? What does virtuosity mean if it is not in reference to a set of rules or to the immediate approval of onlookers? How is it possible to say that, for example, she ate, but she was slept on?

I should also note, by way of an aside and an evasion of these difficulties, the style in which Denneny makes these declarations. It borrows from Arendt (but this was perhaps also in the air more generally at Chicago, and is maybe a perennial move of an intellectual on the make) a tone of mastery in short, ringingly declarative sentences:

Whether this is a true statement about Homer—and whether is this a ridiculous posture for a 23 year-old—I leave unadressed. What interests me is that Denneny again emphasizes, without citing Nietzsche, that the greatness of Homer (and thus of The Iliad), as well as Achilles, is having surpassed moral valuation. Homer neither justifies nor condemns what he recounts; Achilles is not to be judged by us—and is not judged by Homer—in terms of his goodness or badness. Both Achilles’ actions and Homer’s poem about them are meant to be attended to, indeed responded to, as (excellent) performances. We’re supposed to ask, not whether they’re morally good or bad, but whether we’d toot or boot.

Here he draws on the language of Arendt’s The Human Condition to make the point:

The Iliad, Denneny, continues, has nothing to say either about the ‘meaning of life.’ Such a theme could only occur to someone who imagined himself, as Homer and his heroes do not, somehow outside of life, contemplating it as an object at a remove. Homer participates in life; he cannot evaluate it (this echoes, in echoing Nietzsche, Arendt’s famous and misunderstood comments about how, being Jewish herself, she could not ‘love the Jewish people’ since that would require her to somehow stand mentally outside of ‘the Jews’, contemplate them, and evaluate them; her life is too Jewish a life for such a standing-outside):

The only values in Homer’s poem, Denneny argues, are beauty and glory—not moral goodness. Beauty and glory are revealed or enacted in splendid actions and lives, and appreciated by onlookers. They are, however, like those who perform and appreciate them, mortal. Beauty fades, glory is forgotten; the communities whose members were awed by shining actions and appearances disappear.

The poet seems to wager, however, that his poem can, by force of its excellence, perpetuate his/its beauty and glory (carrying along with it the beauty and glory of the heroes whose deeds it narrates), if not forever then longer than anything else. It is the most durable kind of human shining.

This applies even in the most harrowing passages:

or again:

In comparison to the splendor of beauty-and-glory, whether in its brief intensity in a single life, or wider and longer burning in the minds of admirers, or for the human approximation of eternity in the poem, life’s other pleasures are not valued:

Nor is there anything good beyond this life—no ‘other world’ from which values come. The Iliad’s only value is being awesome, which might reach such a pitch that it becomes, remembered by communities and reenacted in art, as immortal as humanity (which, of course, will also disappear). That immortality is to be desired not because it will grant us any personal enjoyment (we will be dead) but because it is the hardest kind of serve.

Serving—being excellent in one’s own particular virtuosic way—has no justification beyond its splendid intensity; it has no connection to morality or personal immortality or the collective good. Being excellent is what is good-in-itself.

As Denneny puts it, notably suspending for a moment the pretense that he’s talking about Homer rather than trying to make an argument about Life, the man for whom beauty is the first category of the world has his be-all and end-all here rather than ‘beyond.’

Things are getting serious! So a quick break for a footnote:

Ok, on with the argument. The gods, about whom you have been wondering, do not provide a foundation for morality and are indeed in the world of the poem, Denneny argues—although, significantly, they model for readers how we might look on life (as represented in the poem) as spectators of beauty-and-glory. When we hear the poem we are living, as long as it lasts or we listen, the life of the gods, which consists of a pleasurably fascinated appreciation of humanity’s great serves:

This spectatorship is not like the pseudo-spectatorship of the modern philosopher of history (we are unfortunately all philosophers of history now) who asks about the meaning of events—for example, about the outcome of the Trojan War, what principles the two sides embodied, and how the Greek victory advanced the trajectory of history towards the present and future. ‘History’ in that sense is alien to the poem—and by now Denneny has already revealed, to the right kind of life for the person who puts beauty first:

There is no ‘other world’ beyond humanity that grounds our values; neither is History in its self-development such a ground. There is only our appearing, beautifully or not, to each other, and the gods whose spectatorship shows us what our own could be.

Denneny notes that the total this-worldiness of the characters of The Iliad, their not having any point of reference outside of trying to appear awesome to each other, makes them often seem quite pathetic:

Here Denneny suggests by invoking Socrates (Plato) that individuals who know themselves to be wholly mortal, and accordingly live for mortal intensities, may be unable even to measure up to the non-moral standards they set for themselves. That is, they might be more courageous, more capable of splendid action, etc., if they could control themselves (in this case repressing their fear) by invoking a principle that takes its strength from its imagined connection to something beyond the present, or even humanity. Perhaps one would be more virtuosic if one imagined that virtuosity was not just a matter of being fierce, but rather a way of fulfilling The Laws of History, or Divine Command, or otherwise BEING GOOD.

Denneny is implying either—and these are both to be found in Plato—1) that it might be advantageous for people to believe in a beyond, even on the purely ‘aesthetic’ grounds that such a false belief would help them be more courageous, glorious, beautiful by giving them greater motivation to commit themselves to splendid actions 2) that one cannot live a really splendid life without the help of some principle that would give that life coherence and order—such that when one wants to be brave but is afraid, one can manage to control one’s fear and remain faithful to one’s better intentions.

Denneny calls such self-command, being able to set goals and targets for oneself, autonomy—although it is a peculiar kind of self-legislation indeed if it can only operate by drawing motive force from belief in a beyond, i.e., by an individual imagining his own self-legislation as fulfilling some Laws from elsewhere that he did not himself invent (History, Nature, God), as a delegate for the Beyond.

In his later work, Denneny will decisively reject the line of thinking sketched above. The concept of taste, of an aesthetic basis for ethics and politics, will serve him as a way of showing how self-orientation and autonomy can arise out of a special way of thinking about our pleasures in conversation with others, such that we can evade the demands posed by Socrates for a life lived in accordance with ‘principles’ tethering us to an inhuman beyond.

At this stage, however, the menace of Platonic philosophy—embodied today by Hyde Park’s Agnes Callard—still casts a shadow over Denneny’s thinking. You must justify your life! it screams. Polyamory is very interesting! I’m brave and quirky! The concept of taste, as Denneny develops it over the coming years, will help us silence this monster.

Now we are about half-way through the essay, at which point Denneny abruptly turns to make a comparison between the characters of Paris and Achilles.

Paris, in other words, is a blond beast dancing through life. He is a plenitude of intensity. He has no memory, or conscience, or ability to promise. He is outside the ethical order that connects one individual to his fellows in a society; other characters in the poem express confusion, distrust and inability to evaluate him.

The other heroes, Denneny notes, share Paris’ values—they think, like him, that life is about being awesome, serving cunt, however you put it. But Paris actually achieves, in every moment, that self-same intensity in a constant present; whereas the others live in memory and expectation, concerned with beauty-and-glory not only as immediately visible in the moment, but as transmitted and preserved in reputation, renown, fame, etc.

Denneny frames the latter as ‘above’ the former, as if it were self-evidently better to be a remembering animal than a beautiful unremembering one. Earlier, however, towards the conclusion of Part One of the essay, he had made an argument that could be read as making Paris’ way of being seem rather superior to that of the other heroes. There he said that the latter—like us—are incomplete beings insofar as we 1) are going to die [and know it—Paris seems unconcerned about his own death or the fall of Troy] 2) require advice/orientation/guidance from others 3) more radically, require from others that they recognize us, that they see us as, to whatever degree, serving [what we moderns often misunderstand as the desire to be recognized as common members of an equal humanity, or as victims of oppression, or again as unique individuals, is here rather the desire to be recognized as awesome, as being fierce, serving cunt, etc. I don’t care about my ‘essential human dignity’; I want you to see how good I am at ____]

Such incomplete beings, depending on each other, need to be open to persuasion, the exchange of advice and evaluations of each other’s actions and speech—those exchanges and evaluations are, in fact, the basis of our lives. But Paris is not an incomplete being. He is full of himself. Whether this makes him lower (an animal) or higher (a Chad) than the rest of us, I think isn’t so easy to establish as Denneny makes it out to be.

Moving on, however…. having presented Paris as the human type ‘lower’ than normal humanity, he now presents Achilles as the human type ‘above’ us. Achilles, you’ll remember, spends a lot of the poem sulking that he doesn’t get the esteem he feels entitled to—and then he realizes that we’re all going to die, which might make the whole enterprise of seeking esteem turn out to be pointless:

skipping ahead…

When Patroclus dies, Achilles’ brooding in tent becomes his fury on the battlefield—fury directed as much, for Denneny, against the fact of mortality and the concomitant meaningless of human life as against the Trojans. Achilles has, on Denneny’s reading, to some extent departed from the characteristic Greek unconcern with the meaning of life and encountered the problem of nihilism (the problem of life having no meaning), an encounter that is perhaps particularly possible for him because, being half-human and half-god, he can to a greater degree than others occupy that dangerous imaginary position from which one looks on life and evaluates it as good or bad, meaningful or meaningless.

Achilles’ rage finally exhausts itself. This does not eventuate in any insight—a principle or sense of purpose or access to some beyond—that reconciles the hero to life. But he appears to returned back into it, such that insights are unnecessary. He gives Hector’s body to Priam, and there begins (rather than any answer to the questions his sulking and rage had posed) a silence, out of which the poem itself arises:

(The Denison quote is just there because Denneny loves Denison)

And then Denneny remembers, oh shit I forgot to talk about Shakespeare! and has a few hurried pages about that.

As an answer to an examination question, this is a bad essay. It’s perhaps also a dubious reading of Homer, so indebted to Nietzsche, Arendt, and assumptions about human nature that it doubtless gets many aspects of the text ‘wrong.’ I’m not a exam-grader or a classicist, though. I’m interested in what Denneny is doing, and how he’s setting himself up for further thinking.

What strikes me is that, just as Arendt in The Human Condition and elsewhere has a great admiration for what may be a totally imaginary ‘Greek’ world in which life can have as its foundation the self-justifying effort to be awesome, Denneny is as it were theorizing in advance Paris is Burning—a society of competition, shining, serving, excellence that goes without the warrant of metaphysical principle or Socratic self-knowledge. He is clearly very attracted to the idea of such a society, but also troubled by a number of things. These include the figure of the happy idiot who is so hot and carefree that he doesn’t even need to serve in the sense of winning admiration through werq; this person just naturally is what everyone else wants to be giving—as well as the figure of Socrates who goes around asking people why and in the name of what principle they are so busy trying to serve (courage, piety, or whatever other sort of drag). Denneny is not ready to dismiss Socrates as a decadent or to put him to death.

Death, too, is a concern—particularly for the final problematic figure, the person who, having what we might in the sad language of existentialism call an authentic encounter with his own being towards death that relativizes all human aims and reveals them as nullities, is apparently ‘outside’ (or beyond) society.

Achilles is Denneny’s equivalent of the man who leaves Plato’s ‘Cave’. He has had a revelation that makes it impossible to take seriously the values of other men. It also seems impossible for him to live—to act and to organize a life—in accordance with that revelation, which his fury and subsequent calm enable him, it seems, more to forget than to better comprehend. It’s as though in order to live at all, one has to be a little bit Paris.

The notion of taste as Denneny develops it, will respond to these problems (perhaps imperfectly)—which are also, I must say, problems visible indeed in gay male life and the life of the mind, both being arenas in which one must appear (beautiful, brilliant), evaluate, and worry whether a life and a society based on appearance and evaluation can really be proper for human beings, whether it doesn’t need some justification (grounding itself in History, Politics, etc)… and whether it wouldn’t be more fun to just be a himbo!