“Hear me, Poseidon, blue-maned Earth-holder,
If you are the father you claim to be.
Grant that Odysseus, son of Laertes,
May never reach his home on Ithaca.
But if he is fated to see his family again,
And return to his home and own native land,
May he come late, having lost all companions,
In another’s ship, and find trouble at home.”
In the Homeric universe, Fate and Free Will do not have the same meaning they have in our world. In our world, Fate and Free Will are antinomies, meaning they are logically incompatible and can never be reconciled. However, the Odyssey gives us the opportunity to see these two terms in a different context. We often take Fate as something already set in stone, conversely, in this Homeric universe, Fate is in a process of becoming and has not yet fully become. This is best represented by Penelope weaving her fate with a suitor by day, but then unweaving it herself by night, rendering her fate an endless process of spinning. The narrative has a fate of it’s own, it needs to bring the hero back home. But the hero has the potential of either creating this Fate or destroying it with the choices he makes (this is free will in the narrative). We have seen potential examples of destruction, such as the gods offering Odysseus to stay with them, but then Odysseus choosing to deny these offers preserves the narrative’s constructed fate of bringing him back home. In this moment between Odysseus and Polyphemus, we have an example of this process of becoming. Odysseus chooses to ignore his men and test Polyphemus’ hospitality. This ends by a prayer that sets up Odysseus’ fate of suffering in sea. We see here how Odysseus’s Fate is being generated by his own Free Will.
In order to collapse a distinction we must find a nexus between the two terms, in other words, an unstable third term that sublates them into a whole. Faith and Free Will can be sublated into their synthesis: Generation. Free Will cannot exist without Fate and Fate cannot exist without Free Will- the two coexist in this process of Generation. However, the reason why Generation is an unstable term is because there is no evidence yet that Fate and Free Will work in some sort of a balance. Fate, at first, seems to contain Free Will within itself: Odysseus’s acts of free will are being countered by prophecies, implying that Odysseus was suppose to act that way. We see this first at Polyphemus’ cave and then again at Circe’s house. So it can be debated if Free Will in this narrative exists at all.
A fascinating, rich post. Great work.
Penelope’s weaving and unweaving does, indeed, mirror the weaving (and unweaving!) of the narrative–of Odysseus progress. But for him, going backwards (and he goes backwards a lot–ending up twice on Circe’s island, twice with Aeolus, blown backward over and over again by contrary winds and foolishness and disaster) represents not a willed fate-making, but contingency, chance, the arbitrary (or seemingly arbitrary) forces that prevent forward motion. In other words their stories run parallel–but where Penelope purposely delays an endpoint, Odysseus seeks one; delay, for him, is at odds with will.