Irrational as phenomenology, not error

The book’s meta-thesis, never stated as a single sentence but carried by the accumulation of argument: the Greek “irrational” — divine intervention, shame, shamanic ecstasy, puritan eschatology, god-sent dream, Platonic mania — is not a collection of errors a later rationalism will correct. It is a phenomenology of the psyche the tradition has never superseded. The rational-irrational antithesis is itself the product of a historically specific moment, the fourth-century Enlightenment, whose confidence did not last and whose collapse produced precisely the theurgy, astrology, and aggressive magic that the polemicists had sought to displace.

Williams extends this methodological point in Shame and Necessity (1993): “the directions in which people look for the structures underlying the use of these terms are too strongly governed by their own inherited philosophical and psychological assumptions” (Williams 1993). What looks inconsistent in Homeric psychology is often only inconsistent under a post-Cartesian grammar that the Homeric poet did not share.

The thread is the classical-philological license for the Jungian refusal of developmental psychology-of-primitives. Where Snell’s Discovery of the Mind read Homer as the record of an as-yet-undiscovered interior, Dodds — and after him Williams, Bremmer, and Claus — read Homer as a different and equally coherent phenomenology. The depth-psychological inheritance follows: what Jung named the autonomous complex, what Hillman called personification, what the tradition as a whole means by daimon, is not modern superstition dressed in Greek clothes. It is the recovery of a phenomenology the Greeks had already given the tradition.

Sources

• e-r-dodds: the meta-thesis of the Sather Lectures
• bernard-williams: Homeric wholeness against developmental condescension
• bruno-snell: the contrary reading Dodds refuses
• james-hillman: the post-Jungian extension of Dodds’s methodological point