To which you said: Which is why we appreciate Homer, who certainly gives us an understanding of this particular man as he is “among others.”
The conception of man as a “particular man as he is ‘among others’” has certainly been given short-shrift in the modern imagination. That is, the tendency to accentuate the individual aspect of man comes at the expense of viewing man as the social being he clearly is.
The human individual and the human community cannot be isolated and held apart, as in an intellectual exercise or designed experiment. The relations are organic, dynamic; and thus unavoidably inseparable. In the process of segregating the two, we lose the idea of what is common to all men. Concentration on the “part” leaves us blind to the whole. And thus we are left with no way to make human existence intelligible, to ourselves or to each other.
May I here interject that historically, science has been predicated on the isolation and study of parts, the assumption being that this is the best way to understand the wholes that the several parts collectively constitute. And that more recently, along came quantum theory, which places this heretofore reliable assumption in doubt.
I’ve been thinking about this part (e.g., human individual) vs. whole (e.g., human community) tension a lot lately. And I find I have been having recourse to Bohr’s complementarity principle, inspired by actual observations of a certain fundamental duality in physical nature, expressing as particle/wave, position/velocity, quanta/field constructs – their “relation” specified in the terms of the uncertainty principle. On their face, such relations seem mutually exclusive.
Bohr’s point was, however, that neither “side of the divide” can give a complete description of the physical system of which they are “modes,” or parts. If you want to understand the whole, you need to understand both.
But I digress. Cornelis, I thought this was simply beautiful:
Homer, who delights in the confusion of the barbarian who thinks Odysseus is a nobody, who plays up the error of those that mistake him for a god or treat him like a beast, who in many ways is already way ahead of Socrates--that first intellectualist who conceived himself in a movement toward individuality as when divorced from land, friends, son, wife, and body--Homer, who gives Odysseus his most profound individuality as unmistakably Odysseus – [sorry cornelis; I have no Koine, and neither does my present character set] -- whose namelessness is exorcised by the token of industry, a cloak woven by his wife.
Book Eight and especially the irony of King Alcinoos trying to be civil makes sense as long as Odysseus is the true name of him who weeps and not the onomatopoeic gurgle of [...] no one in particular -- of the one whose existence is in doubt, even by Odysseus himself, whose name pains and prides him.
I imagine your specification of “onomatopoeic gurgle” to pertain to the faceless “mass man” of our current era. Never in a million years could a personality such as Odysseus be understood in such terms. He was distinct; he was enormously potent, ingenious, and strenuously active in his disposition towards and engagement with the world outside himself. But at the end of the day, his power resided, not merely in personal intelligence, ingenious/industrious applications of personal judgment and will, and courageous, glorious personal acts, but in the perduring, faithful, and wise “industry” of a loving other – his beloved wife, Penelope. And also to his connections with his native soil, community, and culture.
As the poet says: No man is an island.
The poet is wrong. But then, one had to have been an island to know the bitter truth.