Why does Nolan's Odysseus feel remorse? A philosopher's sharp objection

Giving an epic hero a modern conscience looks, when you adapt the poem, like a decent instinct. For the ethicist Kathryn Lawson it is the most dangerous mistake in Nolan's Odyssey.

Lawson teaches in the humanities at the University of King's College in Halifax and has written two books on Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt: Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations.

The objection she puts to the film in her piece for the IAI is less a work of film criticism than an argument in political philosophy.

What the film is arguing#

Christopher Nolan's adaptation, summer blockbuster though it is, is largely a meditation on the ethical claim of the stranger.

Its central theme fuses the law of hospitality with the Golden Rule: do not shut the door on the stranger, because you cannot know who he is; and treat others as you would wish to be treated. Nolan welds the two together and calls the result the Law of Zeus.

The classicist Emily Wilson — author of the much-discussed English translation of the Odyssey — took the film severely to task on the quality of its writing in the London Review of Books, under the title "An Uncomplicated Man". Slavoj Žižek, for his part, wrote that the vast blockbuster he had gone in expecting turned out to be a modest chamber drama.

Lawson's objection comes from somewhere else entirely.

Three thinkers who went back to Homer#

Lawson's witnesses are not chosen at random. Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil all turned back to Homer after the world wars, in order to make sense of what had happened.

Weil's essay of 1940, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, is the best-known instance of that reading. As we have noted before, her thesis was that the greatness of the Iliad lies in its neither glorifying force nor concealing it. It shows force impartially, as a mechanism that turns both the one who wields it and the one who suffers it into things.

For Arendt and Weil the Homeric epics are extraordinary because they narrate war through the eyes of victors and vanquished alike. The poet can recognise the humanity of the "enemies" inside the falling city. The poem can think about responsibility without tipping into the abyss that opens when one sees the crimes one has committed oneself.

The crucial point: Odysseus feels no guilt#

At the centre of Lawson's analysis sits a single observation.

Homer's Odysseus suffers no pangs of conscience over the violence he commits. The slaughter of the suitors, the hanging of the servant women, the blood shed along the way — none of it sets off any inward reckoning.

The modern reader tends to count this as moral primitiveness in the poem. Lawson argues the opposite: it is not a deficiency but a warning.

What the epic tells us is this: power rarely notices its own cruelty. The man who holds power cannot be expected to turn on himself and say that he has done wrong. What stops violence is not the conscience of the perpetrator but a limit imposed from outside — the gods, custom, the law of hospitality, or a countervailing force.

Weil's analysis of force says precisely this. Force corrupts the one who wields it, destroying his capacity to set limits on himself.

Nolan's mistake#

In fitting Odysseus with a modern conscience, on Lawson's account, Nolan cuts away the ethical depth of the story.

What is left is a consoling fantasy: the powerful will change of their own accord once they understand what they have done.

This is exactly what Lawson resists. Reality shows something else. Where power has restrained itself, it has done so not through insight but through resistance from outside.

A hero who feels guilt makes the audience feel good. He also makes the need for external limits look superfluous. If conscience is enough, what are institutions, laws and counterweights for?

Where Levinas comes in#

Lawson's third witness, Levinas, brings a different concept to the argument: the face.

In Levinas, ethics begins in the encounter with the face of the other. The face carries a demand that cannot be calculated or reduced to a category: thou shalt not kill.

This sharpens the reading of Odysseus. The ethical demand comes not from within the agent but from outside — from the existence of the other. An internalised conscience abolishes that exteriority, and confines ethics to the agent's own psychology.

Nolan's Odysseus settles accounts with himself. Homer's Odysseus must settle them with other people, with the gods and with the law.

The second is less comfortable, but on Lawson's view more truthful.

The case against#

There are objections to be made to Lawson's thesis, and they should be recorded too.

The first is formal. Is an adaptation obliged to preserve the ethical structure of its source? Cinema may ask a different question with its own means.

The second is theoretical. The claim that guilt is politically useless may be too categorical. The debates over reckoning in post-war Germany — including Karl Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt — suggest that collective guilt can produce institutional consequences.

The third is historical. That Homer's Odysseus carries no conscience may also owe something to the difference of the moral vocabulary available in his period. The category of guilt as we understand it was not present in ancient Greece; the distinction between shame culture and guilt culture is one of the old quarrels of classical philology.

Lawson's strength lies not in refuting these objections but in putting the question in the right place: does the ethical value of a narrative lie in reassuring the audience, or in unsettling it?

In London in September#

Emily Wilson will take part in a discussion entitled "Ego and Epic" at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London in September. The event, which describes itself as the largest festival of philosophy and music, will also feature Louis Theroux, Roger Penrose and Mariana Mazzucato.

That the Homeric argument should be running in more than one venue this year is no accident. The stranger, hospitality and the limits of violence are all on today's agenda.

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Note: this piece is not a review of the film but an account of the philosophical argument it has opened.