The Homeric Achilles as the embodiment of the existential anguish of death

The ambiguity of the human, i.e. his tragic fate, his passage from life to death embodied in the Homeric Achilles. The wrath of Achilles is the beginning of The Iliad, the timeless epic, which although is a literary genre, it is clearly governed by philosophical meanings, which continue to inspire and sharpen thought.

 Achilles, is that Homeric hero who embodies bravery, courage, but also the duality of human entity, because  he is governed by the certain knowledge of his existence, and at the same time he is also governed by the certain knowledge of his death.^[1] This ontological contradiction is inscribed in human existence and  becomes active at  the exact moment when the human being opens himself up to the world, ready to experience it in its entirety by revealing his Being through life. Achilles experiences throughout the Homeric epic the existential anxiety of dying, expressing  it through his physicality and the stake of the contradiction of mortality/ infinity, being a demigod himself, a fact which constitutes the deepest cause of his anger towards Agamemnon, anger towards everything that tends to undercut him, to dominate his existence, to negate the right of self- determination, therefore anger towards death.

 The Homeric hero Achilles is confronted with the contradiction of mortality/ infinity realizing that his only certainty in his body,^[2] the invulnerable body is the ultimate evil- death, because of his vulnerable heel. At that exact moment he feels the absurdity that governs him as a being, i.e. he realizes existence and at the same time non-existence, as it happens with human, thus arising, the deepest existential anguish in the face of mortality, and on the other side, his tendency to transcend this power of death, undoing his existential limitations through its hindsight. 

 The life that pervades the demigod hero as the essence of his Being,^[3] is constantly moving as an intermediate reality, passing from good to evil, from life to death , just as man follows its course in search of meaning of existence and the value of life by opening up to the world as a whole, questioning whether the world in which he lives Here and Now is his own.

 Achilles, as he becomes aware of his existence and indeed in a warlike Hic et Nunc experiencing the danger, is governed by the dizziness of agony caused by the possibility  of transcending  his mortality through his notoriety, through his militancy, transcending the certainty of mortality by the death of his adversaries, that is, transcending death through death. 

 Achilles’ demigod body experiences an open contradiction, i.e. his mortal part, the heel, is a mortal part of a lived, immortal body, continuing to be a functional part of the physical whole, Achilles is his lived body, therefore also his vulnerable heel which makes him mortal as a whole. This is also the absurdity of every human being, to experience existence and non- existence in his lived body. 

 It seems from this point, that Homer, and of course the later thinkers of antiquity, saw that human existence presupposes a body, not as a simple material or machine, but as complex intersubjective entity that is lived in the world, is spatial and temporal expressing both the natural, as well as the human, both Being and Becoming.^[4]

 Achilles tries to balance between Being and non- Being, Being and Nothingness, between life  and death, seeking his  last name in the present of the Trojan battles war. The synchronization of human being within the world ( in- der- welt- sein, referring to Heidegger)^[5], and the way of assuming his relationship with his lived body are placed at the centre of philosophical and scientific thinking since the first centuries of human existence. 

 The anxiety before death and the human duality are evident in the Homeric epics both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, more specifically, in the Odyssey in rhapsody 11,^[6]  Odysseus descends to the Underworld following the advice of the seer Teiresias. There he meets the souls of his dead comrades and even he converses with the soul of Achilles. So it seems that in the Homeric epics the soul is a reflection of the body in its material dimension. The distinction of space-time reality in two dimensions reflects the duality of human being: the sin and at the same time the purification. Human being is a “vulnerable” being subject to passions and sins, and on the other hand has the ability to overcome them and to be purified.

 Fear and anxiety before death is the reason why man created the Underworld, so that he has feeling that even after death there is some form of life. In rhapsody 16^[7] of the Iliad, after the death of Patroclus , his figure appears in the dream of the fallen Achilles, to tell him about how he wanted to be buried. When the time comes for him to leave, Achilles stretched out his arms to embrace him, but he didn’t catch him. At that moment, Achilles realizes in a soliloquy that there are souls and shadows in the palaces of Hades, but there is no life at all. 

 Death as a biological condition is inevitable, but at the same time unsuspected, referring to Epicurus’ Tetrapharmacus “death is unsuspected”, man knows that he will die, but he does not know when. The anxiety before death creates the need to study it, to make it concrete, so that he is able to face it. Death comes unsuspectingly, abstractly, it is governed by invisibility, it is not something visible, so that man can’t avoid it, death  has  no visible face, only the harsh face of nature. 

 Death becomes visible through the body of a dead person, and this is the moment, that an alive person, in front of the sight of a dead person, feels more than ever the anguish of death, experiencing the waiting, hoping that the moment of his own death will be late.

 The moment of the climax of the agony of death that Achilles experiences is not his own death, but the moment of the death of his beloved friend, Patroclus. The loss of his friend, the fact that death has acquired a face and indeed the face of his confidant friend, is the climax of the anguish experienced by Achilles, the Dizziness of Agony, as Kierkegaard^[8]would define it centuries later. According to Kierkegaard’s thought anxiety arises from the fighting spirit of man to resist his mortality and rush towards the infinite. In this particular case, this tendency peaks at the moment when death becomes visible through the body of a loved one.  Human nature is defined by this tendency towards freedom, this existential anxiety of breaking through his finite dimension,  facing  the invisibility. Achilles transcends the invisibility by maintaining the light of innocence of the one who forgives himself alone^[9], as seen in the last Rhapsody of the Iliad, when he delivers the body of the dead Hector to King Priam, freed from rage and sorrow, both for the death of his dear friend, Patroclus, and for the death of his father Peleus. 

 Anxiety before death, as Karl Jaspers^[10] pointed out is distinguished from death as the end of life and from the process annihilation through pain. According to Jaspers of one suffers pain even while alive, while death as a biological condition escapes experience. Death can also occur without pain, for example in sleep, also due to the progress of medicine the person can have a painless death. Unfortunately, however, no medical treatment is able to free the person from the agony before his dying, but only philosophy , in fact philosophy as a study of death, as Plato emphasizes in his dialogue “Phaedon” about the immortality of the soul , which as an animating source negates death. 

 Achilles does not agonize over death as annihilation accompanied by physical pain, but over death as the condition of ending life, hence his burning desire for posterity. Death chronologically fragments eternity by dissecting Being and Feeling as a transitional stage from intersubjective Being  to abstract. The anxiety before death brings man face to face with his tragic dimension, as Oedipus faces the sphinx^[11], when he learns and experiences the truth about the meaning of life, the meaning of human being. 

 Achilles wants his name to remain in history, because he wants to break free from his finite dimension through his hindsight penetrating eternity. The invisible, as a consequence of death becomes visible through his hindsight, through the knowledge of Achilles’ past as existence transcending the chronological fragmentation of the mortal.     

^[1] Δ. Λιαντίνης, Γκέμμα, εκδ. Δ. Λιαντίνη, Αθήνα 2006, λ’, p. 186. 

^[2] Albert Camus, Ο Μύθος του Σίσυφου, (Le Mythe de Sisyphe), μτφρ. Ιάνη Λο Σκοκκο, εκδ. Αλεξ. Χ. Ρούγκα, copyright: Ελικών, p. 13.

^[3] Étienne Gilson, Το Ον και η Ουσία, (L’ Etre et L’ Essence, 1948), μτφρ. Θάνος Σαμαρτζής, εκδ. Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2009, ΙΙΙ, p. 208.

^[4] Σωκράτης Δεληβογιατζής, Ζητήματα Διαλεκτικής, εκδ. Ερωδιός (4^η έκδοση), 2010, Θεσσαλονίκη, ΙΙ, p. 92-93.

^[5] Martin Heidegger, Είναι και Χρόνος ( Sein und Zeit, 1927), (Μεταφρ: Γιάννης Τζαβάρας), εκδ. Δωδώνη, Αθήνα, 1^η εκδ. 1978, 2^η, 2013. 

^[6] Ομήρου Οδύσσεια, μτφρ. Ζησίμου Σιδέρη, Εισαγωγή: Γιάννη Κορδάτου, εκδ. Ε&Μ Ζαχαρόπουλου Ε.Π.Ε, Αθήνα, εκδ. Β’, Λ’, 477-541, p. 343.

^[7] Ομήρου Ιλιάς,( Homer’s The Iliad) Ψ’, 100-105.

^[8] Παναγιώτης Δόικος, Kierkegaard και Molla Sadra, Το ζήτημα της ύπαρξης και η ανατολική σκέψη, εκδ. Ρώμη, Θεσσαλονίκη2013, κεφ. 7, p. 95.

^[9] Albert Camus, «Η πτώση» (Να μείνουμε αθώοι), Νουμάς, Μάιος- Ιούνιος 2018, αρ. τ. 160, p. 8.

^[10] Karl Jaspers, «Η αγωνία προ του θνήσκειν», Νουμάς, 2019, αρ. τ. 164, p. 1 .

^[11] Βλ. Δ. Λιαντίνης, Γκέμμα, ι’, p. 152-153 .

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