Empathy Does Not Imply Guilt

A sidebar on some of the criticism of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

I haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey yet—thanks to my son, who’s a huge Nolan fan, I have tickets to see it with him in IMAX 70mm early next month. But I’ve been enjoying the online debates about the film, over whether it is an interesting and expansive reinterpretation of Homer’s epic or a travesty thereof. Despite not having seen the film yet, I wanted to weigh in on one of these debates—over the question of Odysseus’s guilt.

As I understand it, Nolan’s version of Odysseus feels a great deal of guilt over the destruction he wrought in the sack of Troy. Some critics are taking Nolan to task for this because, they say, Bronze Age Greece wasn’t a guilt culture but a shame culture, and seeking glory in war is an honorable pursuit. (Whether successful trickery like the Trojan Horse gambit would have added to that honor or detracted from it is a separate matter.) Odysseus might have felt sorrow over losing his men, he might have longed for home, he might have felt bad for any number of reasons, but he wouldn’t have felt guilt or shame over the destruction of Troy.

Defenders of Nolan’s vision respond by pointing to passages in Homer in which Odysseus weeps as the destruction of Troy is recounted, specifically comparing his reaction to that of a woman seeing her husband being killed—comparing him, in other words, to one of his own victims. That’s an incredibly powerful expression of empathy, fully justifying the idea that Odysseus felt guilty about what he had done.

But does it? Does empathy for someone you caused pain to imply guilt?

At the end of the final match of the World Cup, the famed Argentine striker sat on the ground and teared up. He had not distinguished himself in this final—indeed, he not only didn’t score, he didn’t even get a single shot off, neither on nor off target—and he would never play in another World Cup game again. After a tournament that featured one dramatic comeback after another, his finale was ignominious. He knew that this was the end for him, and so, despite his fame and wealth and the fact that he had already won the trophy in the last World Cup, he sat down and wept.

Now, a member of the Spanish team might have had any number of reactions to Messi’s tears. He might have mocked them. He might have rolled his eyes at them. He might have shaken his head at them. He might have turned away from them. He might have contextualized them in his mind in any number of ways that were judgmental rather than empathetic. But he might also have empathized, which is to say, he might have imagined himself into Messi’s position, imagined what it must have felt like to know that your life’s work was over and that it hadn’t ended the way you wished it had, and his heart might have gone out to Messi. He might even have teared up himself contemplating Messi’s tears.

If a Spanish player did that, I think everyone would see it as a sign of exceptionally good sportsmanship. It would take a truly great soul to reach out emotionally in that way, in a moment of triumph, toward a defeated opponent—particularly toward an opponent who was not himself showing greatness of soul, congratulating the victors and so forth, but was locked into his own feelings, and whose team had behaved and was still behaving appallingly, with a total absence of sportsmanship. We would not expect empathy in such a moment, and for that very reason we would admire it, and applaud this hypothetical Spaniard for his tears.

But would we imagine that they implied guilt? That he regretted defeating his opponent? Of course not. It wouldn’t even occur to us to think that his empathy for his opponent’s suffering implied any kind of regret or guilt on his own part. Losing is just part of the game of soccer, as aging is part of the game of life—and both soccer and life are nonetheless good, notwithstanding the inevitability of suffering. That awareness of inevitability is the reason for the lack of guilt, but it is also the basis for empathy and compassion.

It strikes me as entirely plausible that this could be true of Odysseus as well, that he could, authentically and with real empathy, weep for his victims without by implication feeling guilty at all for having caused their suffering. If that sounds weird to your ears, as though I’m implying that war is no different from a soccer game, well, it is and it isn’t. The stakes are certainly higher, but both are zero-sum contests with chances to win honor and glory. But even granting that war is not soccer, ask yourself whether you can imagine an American general crying for the victims of Dresden or Nagasaki while still forthrightly defending the necessity of the bombings that destroyed both, and evincing no guilt over their destruction. Ah, you might say, but the reason my hypothetical general might not feel guilt is that he felt those wars were just. But as Henry V’s soldiers point out to their disguised monarch in Shakespeare’s play, judging the justness of the cause for which they fight is above a soldier’s pay grade—and besides, where is the evidence that Odysseus thought the war against Troy unjust? Didn’t the Trojans dishonor Menelaus by stealing Helen?

I don’t say any of this to question Nolan’s choices as a filmmaker; I’ll wait to see it before doing that. I’m only trying to puncture a dichotomy that I’ve seen in some of the critical discussion of the film. The essence of a tragic mindset is the conviction that not all values can be reconciled and not all suffering can be avoided. That doesn’t mean that you react to suffering with callousness; quite the contrary. Greatness of soul only actually matters in a tragic world; there’s no room for it in a nihilistic world where all that matters is dominance or a perfectionist world where all that matters is judgment. The fact that in our day we are so frequently tempted by those inhuman extremes may have something to do with the ever-shrinking scale of our own souls.