(N.B. This entry follows from the previous one, titled: “An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War”)
Pierre Clastres states that “primitive societies […] invest themselves totally in their religious and ritual life, which unfolds as a continuously repeated affirmation of the communal Self,” and hence that “[e]ach ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if society is good, livable, it is due to the respect of norms previously bequeathed by the ancestors,” which means that, through a number of “initiatory rites,” “the mythical discourse and the word of the ancestors guarantee the permanence of society and its eternal repetition”(⊜). There is a reason to suspect that war actually plays the very same role.
For it is obvious that whatever the particular myths and rites of a given society, they turn around characters which neither fall short of certain moral qualities nor exceed them, as virtue is frequently a question of finding a mean between two undesirable extremes: a temerarious warrior, for instance, proves as dangerous and counterproductive as a coward one.
Many other examples could be actually adduced to support an argument that is extensive to most extra-modern cultures, which are often structured in binary or balanced terms and rely on their dual affirmation (whose general formula is: this and that, instead of this or that alone) for that very reason. But we shall return to the essence of such dual affirmation in another occasion. For now it will suffice to keep sight of the fact that virtue is more often than not a “middle” term (Greek: μεσότης) between two extremes.
It would be reasonable to add that the transmission of virtue grants society’s “permanence” – to paraphrase Clastres – against its dissolution due to moral shortage or moral excess; or, what amounts to the same, that society must be educated in the perpetuation of virtue as its fundamental behavioural model. If morally excessive behaviour (e.g. abuse of power and injustice) is supplied as a behavioural model, its imitation will bring about the collapse of the group’s cohesion. If, on the other hand, morally scant behaviour (e.g. cowardice or inability to perform whatever appropriate tasks) is consecrated as society’s referential model, its imitation will put the society at risk of destroying itself in the short or the long run. In other words, “education” (παιδεία) and “virtue” (ἀρετή) go hand in hand.
Now, is the battlefield anything but the domain par excellence in which virtue is both given a chance and called to excel? For if virtue has to do with finding the middle term between two extremes, it can be argued that there is no better scenario for it than that in which one is inevitably led to be in either advantage or disadvantage before an Other, or in advantage now and in disadvantage afterwords, or the other way round; it is in the battlefield that one finds oneself in that situation as a matter of fact and as a matter of life and death.
In other words, warfare can be seen as the best imaginable, if also the toughest, school of moral education. But let’s look at it more closely. In the battlefield you either have the upper hand or you do not. If you do you must nonetheless restrain yourself: inflicting him, for instance, too many wounds when one could be enough to kill him, and whispering to him, right before he dies, that his wife and son will follow him shortly – as writer David Farr has Achilles tell Hector in an unnecessarily abject adaptation of the Iliad recently produced by the BBC – would count as “excess” (ὕβρις) rather than virtue. Conversely, if, like Paris in Homer’s Iliad vis-à-vis Menelaus, and unlike Hector before Achilles therein, you hide yourself in order to avoid a duel, or if, in the midst of a duel, you are losing and you use a shameful trick to reverse the situation so as to escape your otherwise previsible death – as Farr has Paris do, incited by Aphrodite – your coward behaviour would be deemed not less despicable. In neither case would your deeds be sang for the generations to come, in neither case would they be upheld as an educational example of virtuous deeds for the sake of society’s perpetuity.
This is also the reason why Thersites – whose Shakespearean instantiation Marx so much confessed to love – is silenced by Odysseus and mocked by all the Acheans: Agamemnon may be unbearably greedy and, consequently, a shameful leader – as, long before Thersites, who is introduced by Homer as the vilest and ugliest of the Acheans; yet that does not imply that the Achean warriors should refrain from fighting before the walls of Troy and return home, for the battle gives fame – as the Trojan ally Sarpedon will recall later – to the very extent that one behaves virtuously in the battlefield (and beyond the battlefield, as well). For, again, only virtue can effectively function as an educative model for society not to disintegrate. (If those who are not virtuous, like Paris and Agamemnon, are also remembered, it is only as part and parcel of the plot that makes the virtuous ones, e.g. Hector and Achilles, shine by way of contrast.)
Virtue endures: only virtue does, as a social model; and this means that social education cannot consist but in its transmission. Therefore neither Achilles nor Hector are exactly celebrated in terms of their individuality; we actually know very little about them, save when it is relevant to the development of the drama (to use an inaccurate modern expression). Surely there is Achilles’s relation with his companion and lover Patroclus, with his mother Thetis, and with Briseida, the captive girl whom Agamemnon steals from him; and there is Hector’s relation with his wife Andromache, with their son Astyanax, and with his own parents, Hecuba and Priam, etc. Furthermore it is through Achilles and through Hector qua individuals that Achilles’s and Hector’s respective virtues take shape; put otherwise, it is through the particular, which is ephemeral by definition, that the universal and transmissible acquires form: it is through the inevitable death of the singular – nothing survives today of Hector or Achilles themselves! – that the endurable – their memorable virtue – lasts.
Is Hector’s and Achilles’s individuality irrelevant then? No, not at all. If, (1) on the one hand, the battlefield was the (ephemeral) space where they achieved virtue – πόλεμος (polemos, “conflict”), says Heraclitus, makes some appear like gods and some like men, some like free men and some like slaves (frag. B 53), which means too that it is through πόλεμος that any “world” or “order” (κόσμος) is produced, if by “world” one understands any given distribution of things: this one above, this one below, etc;(⦹) and if, (2) on the other hand, the poem is the (eternal or ongoing) space where their achieved virtue is (repeatedly) sang for it to be remembered; then (3) there is a domain (as ephemeral as the battlefield, yet as sensitive as that of the poem) where the individual that necessarily passes away (while the universal transcends it) ought to be remembered (if for a while, unlike the ongoing remembrance of the universal through the poem) by being mourned: the household.
And if there is such specific domain – one must immediately add – there must be too, of necessity, specific agents that take care of it – like Achilles and Hector are the agents through which virtue is achieved thus becoming susceptible of being transmitted and the poet is, in turn, the agent that takes care of the remembrance of their achieved virtue. Such agents, responsible for remembering the heroes’s individuality – an individuality that does not make them heroes, but without which their virtue, and thus their heroism, would not be possible – are both the elder and women.
Why women? Because if the heroes deal permanently with death and become who they are only through their own death, for only once you die your deeds become fully meaningful,(#) and are thus susceptible of being remembered, celebrated, and sung, those who care for what these were under their inevitably tragic mask (or persona) must be – on behalf of a logic of structural inversion and complementarity – those who constantly deal with life and who become who they are by bearing new lives: women. Clastres’s ethnography in the South-American Chaco(¥) and Gardner and Heider’s ethnography among the Dani of Papua New Guinea’s highlands (∞) point to this, as well.
Battlefield and household thus oppose and co-imply one another:
A ⎪ B
A ↔︎ B
In other words, they form a structural relation, as a structure is no more, and no less, than a relation of reciprocity between two elements dependent on one other but that stand in inverse proportion to one another.(⦻)
The transformation of such relation into a vertical or hierarchic relation of the type:
A
—
B
where one domain subordinates the other one to itself, must be viewed as a corruption of the original horizontal structure (A ⎪ B, A ↔︎ B), in the same way that the suppression of the difference between the two terms on behalf of a plain horizontality (A = B) risks erasing the different functions assigned to each of them.
This is no place to ask how else may any society articulate those functions and their corresponding domains. We have simply attempted to clarify they way in which they happen to appear in the Homeric world.
(⊜) Clastres, Archeology of Violence (trans. Jeanine Herman, with an Introduction by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e): 2010), p. 139.
(⦹) Cf. the reference to Heraclitus in this sense in Aida Míguez Barciela, Talar madera: Naturaleza y límite en el pensamiento griego antiguo (Madrid: Oficina de Arte y Ediciones, 2017), pp. 14-15. Cf. too Maniglier’s neo-structuralist definition of a world (any world) as “a possible way of making identity and difference” (Patrice Maniglier, “Anthropological Meditations: Discourse on Comparative Method” [in Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish; London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017, pp. 109-131], p. 127).
(#) In the sense that your life is only then, i.e. when no deeds can be performed anymore, meaningfully closed, as Pasolini famously said.
(¥) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, pp. 279-324.
(∞) Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider, Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (Introduction by Margaret Mead; New York: Random House, 1968), p. 94
(⦻) See further Aida Míguez Barciela, “Los pechos de Hecuba” (Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 19 [2019]: 81-93), esp. pp. 91-92.
Mycenaean seal (detail), courtesy of Gilles Courtieu