Filial Piety and the Intrinsic Significance of Human Life
A remarkable literary moment unfolds at the end of the Odyssey when Odysseus and Telemachus stand shoulder to shoulder, prepared to fight the relations of the suitors they have killed. Odysseus prods his son’s fortitude by telling him (in the Fagles translation): “Telemachus, you’ll learn soon enough – as you move up to fight where champions strive to prove themselves the best – not to disgrace your father’s line a moment,” to which Telemachus pointedly replies: “Now you’ll see, if you care to watch, father, now I’m fired up. Disgrace, you say? I won’t disgrace your line!” Laertes, father and grandfather to the two men, stands observing the exchange, until he blurts out in pride: “What a day for me, dear gods! What joy – my son and my grandson vying over courage.”
The scene provides a culminating accent to a theme at the heart of the entire work, which is the moral significance of the filial relationship. When we first encounter Telemachus at the beginning of the story, he is a weak, immature young man, incompetent to carry out the duties of his exalted station as prince of Ithaca. When he throws down the scepter in frustration before the assembly, weeping at the unjust treatment meted out to him by the suitors, we can see very clearly that he lacks the virtue required of him at that juncture.
The story of the Odyssey is in large part the story of how Telemachus grows from such an underdeveloped individual into that man of courage and resolve he appears at the work’s conclusion. It is through emulation of his father, and his father’s virtues, that the young man begins to develop the traits that life demands of him. His first awareness of the moral standard set for him by Odysseus occurs when he travels to the courts of Nestor and Menelaus, and receives from them an account of the extraordinary character displayed by his father throughout the fighting in Troy. Upon returning to Ithaca, he is quickly reunited with his father; by plotting and fighting alongside him, Telemachus soon imbibes the same elements of arete that make Odysseus such a remarkable figure. And of course, Odysseus himself developed that virtue in part through emulation of his own heroic father. So what Laertes is celebrating in the story’s culminating scene is the profound meaningfulness of the filial relationship as it unfolds from generation to generation.
That keen sense for the moral contours of the father-son relationship is a distinctive note in the cultures of the ancient world. Virgil captures the Roman ideal in that scene when Aeneas, during his flight from the Greeks, bears his aged father Anchises on his back through the streets of Troy, while leading his son Ascanius by the hand. In the breathtaking depiction of this scene by Bernini, the vertical alignment of the figures descends from the representation of the household gods that Anchises holds aloft, so that the sanctity of the filial bond descends from generation to generation, while the piety through which that sacred bond is honored summons the child’s gaze upward towards his forbears.
It is worth reflecting for a moment upon the deeper philosophical implications of this appreciation for the significance of the filial bond. What is unquestionably bound up in this insight is an even more basic intuition of the intrinsic meaningfulness of human life as such. Parentage is one of the facts through which human existence is conditioned, but this relation is hardly only a biological one. A child from his earliest awareness looks up into the face of his father – of his physical progenitor - and perceives there a model of character, demeanor, and belief that is his to inherit. He looks up into the face of his mother – the origin of his life - and perceives there an encompassing, consuming affection which binds him in a relation of infinite gratitude for the duration of his existence. The organic, even causal, relations through which the child is attached to his parents accompany, or entail, or include, or are consonant with, or are transcended by, relations of a moral and religious purport. They are there from the start, such that to describe the relationship obtaining between the child and his parents merely in terms of physical concepts would be to misdescribe it radically. The meaning of this structure of human life is not imposed upon experience; it defines and delimits that experience right from the start.
Another passage in the Odyssey expresses this aspect of human existence quite memorably. The marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope, hewn from a flowering olive tree, is planted in the heart of the king’s palace, representing the origins of both the king’s family and of Ithaca’s political society. Here the growth of ordered community out of the bonds of the family is aptly symbolized. The duties undertaken by the child within his domestic sphere become his first lessons in the duties incumbent upon human beings living a shared life with other human beings. The virtues he is taught by grandparents, parents, and siblings, become the seeds of the traits that will be required of him in any future public capacity. All the rudiments of political life are born with the birth of the child, so that his conscious existence is enmeshed in political dimensions from its inception. The biological act of procreation brings forth a moral, meaningful world – a world of obligations and demands, that cannot by any conceptual violence be reduced to physical categories.
To talk about the intrinsic meaningfulness of human life might strike some readers as hazy or impressionistic language, but it is nothing of the sort. It is only to say that certain experiences present themselves to our awareness in a manner that invites a certain kind of volitional response - an exertion of the will that embodies a principle we can articulate and assent to. News delivered to us of a given event is meaningful to us if we feel obliged to act upon that news in any given way. An artifact is meaningful to us if it elicits gestures of reverence from us. A story from the past is meaningful to us if we feel compelled to emulate or reject the behavior of the persons involved in the legend. To say that the structure of human life is intrinsically meaningful is just to say that the familial, communal, and cultural conditions of our lives invite us to act in certain ways and to avoid acting in others.
This is to say nothing less than that human life comes to us as a scene of moral striving, that categories of good and evil comprise part of the accurate description of our existence, and are not inventions or figments transposed over some more basic factual description. To claim that an experience invites us to act in a certain way is equivalent to claiming that one kind of response to that experience is good and one kind evil. Life only means in a moral way; those who put forward philosophies centered around amoral conceptions of meaning are talking nonsense. Information is indifferent; mere data makes no overtures to our wills. That is why classical educators put such a great emphasis on teaching content that is more than information. What they aim at is a course of study that is meaningful, that has the power to solicit the child’s will in certain lasting, salutary ways.
Only recall a moment when you have looked into the face of a child. Only recall what you have seen. Would anybody describe that sight in merely physiological terms? Would anybody claim the totality of what they saw was a cranium, a mandible, and some ear lobes? The thing that is there is a moral thing – a desiring, believing, angering, designing, remembering thing. Our perception of all that confronts us in the child’s face invites us – no, demands of us – certain modes of action that secure the good of the conscious, affectionate being in front of us, and to avoid certain modes of action that endanger it, so that our encounter with the child is one fraught with moral dimensions right from the start. It is getting the experience exactly backwards to ask what proof we have of those dimensions, as though we can know anything with greater indisputability than we can know our most basic intuitions of reality. To the contrary, it is intuitions such as these that provide reason with its starting point from which any kind of knowledge can be derived. To say that our perceptions of the moral dimensions of our encounter with the child are something invented or imposed upon the experience is to do as great a violence to the powers of understanding as it is possible to do.
And here is the explanation as to why ideology has held such dominion over the modern mind. What makes an ideology an ideology is always some kind of denial of experience. The ideologue must always suppress some facet of his understanding – must always set some portion of the personality against some other portion – until the problematic vessel of human nature is rendered blighted or inert. What wonder if this is such a recurrent tendency of modern thought when the sine qua non of the phenomenon – the very thing that makes it modern – is a primitive denial of the meaningfulness disclosed through the entirety of our encounter with reality. We moderns have fallen into the habit of referring to the “search” for meaning, as though the basic fact of the world’s meaningfulness (I do not refer to any specific account of what it means, but only that it means) were something hidden far, far away from us, when in fact it is positively screaming at us every waking moment. A mind that has habituated itself to denying this most fundamental facet of experience is poised to deny any and all other facets of experience. Modernity begins with, and is in its essence, a violence of the self against the self, setting the preconditions for the violence of all against all.
For something like three centuries, it has been customary in the Western world to believe that what we really know is what we can observe, which is equivalent to what we can measure. This claim is itself equivalent to the claim that only what can be translated into the “language of mathematics” (to use Galileo’s phrase) is certain, and everything else is delusive or “subjective.” The truth is that there is nothing remotely certain about number, or its correspondence to reality. No one can even say exactly what a number is, whether it is an entity derived from empirical observation or an abstraction of a priori provenance. That numbers do correspond to reality is undeniable, as all of modern physics attests, but that correspondence is merely an adventitious, wholly contingent fact about reality. There is nothing remotely lawlike or explicable about it. The correspondence of number to reality is in fact one of the greatest mysteries of existence; it is as far beyond the powers of the human mind to grasp as anything could possibly be. The supposition that this unsurpassable enigma provides us with the ground for certainty represents the most momentous philosophical misstep in our history.
Our return to sanity at this stage of history does not lie in the promulgation of some new philosophy. It does not lie in argumentation at all. Nor does it lie at first in a renewal of faith, as such an event is commonly understood. It lies in an act of reflection, of studied self-awareness, of a patient receptivity to the contours of our experience. It waits on a reconciliation of the self with itself, a cessation of the blind violence the Western mind has been inflicting upon itself for centuries now. It only takes a truthful description of what it is like for the human person to encounter the world - and especially the world comprised of other human persons – for all of the false doctrines of modernity to lose their purchase and die away. It is a renewed perspective – and not a rival creed or postulate – that holds the promise of living like civilized people once more.
Everything then depends upon the cultivation of such a perspective, and towards that end there are no more efficacious practices than the creation and study of poetry and narrative. It is hardly coincidental that we encounter in Homer’s epic a depiction of the filial bond as it genuinely shapes the experience of the developing youth, and not as it is misrepresented in any number of dogmatic accounts. Narrative discloses the true contours of human experience because it is the overarching structure of human experience itself. Human life is intrinsically narrative – is intrinsically determined by meaningful relationships, and the threats besetting those relationships; by the pursuit of certain ends, and the conflict ensuing from impediments to those ends. Sidney was right when he asserted that the story teller could never lie, though perhaps not for the reasons he suggested; insofar as the storyteller really is a storyteller, insofar as he accurately captures the narrative shape of life in his narrative, he cannot but disclose the authentic tenor of human experience.
Likewise, the poet, insofar as he is able to capture the interested disposition with which the mind first encounters the realm of being, articulates the human perspective in its most fundamental and encompassing form. Read Traherne’s imaginative recreations of a child’s incipient understanding to see how the world really does reveal itself to us, in its primordial totality. Read Catullus on the agonies, or Spenser on the ecstasies, of love; read Petrarch or Tennyson on loss; Holderlin or Goldsmith on the allure of home; Keats or Foscolo on the enduring legacy of art; and then try to convince yourself that human life is a meaningless affair, or that categories of experience like virtue or beauty are mere figments of our imagination. Poetry offers us the closest articulation of experience; it aims to leave nothing out, and so never contents itself with the willfully truncated accounts of life on offer by modern philosophy. It provides right reason with the only valid starting point for reflecting upon human life – with an examination of the thing itself.
The revival of the humanities, which the classical movement has taken as its special commission, offers us the only auspicious path forward through the spiritual and intellectual impasse of our day and age. Only by forming the minds of young people on the authentic articulations of human experience to be found in the great poets and storytellers of the past can we cultivate in them the mental habits which give rise to a humane social order. Reading and conversing about these great texts with young people is one of the most sensible and fruitful responses we can make to the spiraling crises of our age. This is why I never tire of emphasizing that classical education constitutes so much more than a movement of educational reform. In truth, it is the one source of hope in our times for the restoration of civilized life.