Odysseus, Calypso, and the Philosophy of Immortality
Suppose an attractive goddess offered you eternal youth and immortality. Would you accept? Most of us wouldn’t have waited for the end of my last sentence. Homer, however, tells the story of a man who turned her down.
Calypso is one of the most elusive characters in Greek mythology. Like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘eucalyptus’, her name derives from the Greek kalyptō, ‘to conceal’ or ‘to hide’. She lives on the remote island of Ogygia, hidden from both gods and men. She is beautiful and deeply in love with Odysseus. More than that, she offers him the greatest prize of all: eternal life with eternal youth.
Yet every day Odysseus sits alone upon the shore, gazing out to sea and weeping. He longs not for paradise, but for Ithaca.
The Odyssey is full of monsters and marvels. The Cyclops tests Odysseus’ ingenuity. Circe his self-control. The Sirens his judgement. Yet Homer saves his greatest temptation until the monsters are gone. Calypso cannot be defeated. She can only be refused. Her island may be the most philosophical place in all literature. It asks neither how we survive nor how we succeed, but what makes a human worth living—or even, what makes a human life human.
At first sight, Odysseus’ decision seems irrational. Calypso is more beautiful than Penelope, her island more idyllic than rocky Ithaca. She offers not merely pleasure, or happiness, but eternity. Why exchange eternity for a finite, imperfect, and uncertain human life?
Nor is Calypso a villain. Homer invites us to sympathise with her. When Hermes arrives bearing Zeus’ command that she release Odysseus, she bitterly complains that the male gods freely take mortal lovers while condemning goddesses for doing the same. Before letting him go, she desperately pleads with Odysseus. Penelope can never rival her beauty or save him from ageing and death.
The obvious answer is that Odysseus misses his wife and son. But Homer suggests something deeper. To embrace Calypso would be to abandon not merely his home, but himself. When we fall in love, we fall in love with someone who would change us, but not change us beyond all recognition. Calypso does not ask Odysseus to become a better Odysseus. She asks him to become someone, or something, else.
For thousands of years writers and philosophers and sorcerers have returned to the same question.
Some five centuries before Homer, another hero came to the opposite conclusion. After the death of his friend Enkidu, whom he mourned ‘like a woman mourning’, Gilgamesh set out in search of eternal life. At the end of his long journey and descent into the underworld, he discovered the plant of immortality—only for a serpent to steal it while he bathed. He returned home empty-handed, having learnt that the proper task of human beings is not to escape death, but to make the most of life.
Greek mythology itself offers an even darker warning. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with the Trojan prince Tithonus and, fearing his loss, begged Zeus to grant him immortality. As the centuries pass, the once alluring youth shrivels into a babbling old man, too frail to live yet unable to die. In some versions of the myth, he shrinks into a cicada, condemned forever to thirst and chirp.
Jonathan Swift issues a similar warning in Gulliver’s Travels. The Struldbrugs, though born immortal, continue to age indefinitely. As they lose their memories and outlive everyone they have ever loved, they sink into loneliness, despondency, and envy of mortals.
In his essay The Makropulos Case (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams sought to explain why immortality might ultimately become undesirable. The ambitions and desires that give our lives meaning, he argued, cannot sustain one and the same person forever. Once they are exhausted, we could escape the resulting tedium only by becoming different people, with different ambitions and desires. But then who exactly would be living forever?
Immortality threatens not only meaning but identity. Tolkien reached a similar conclusion, this time by asking the opposite question. In The Silmarillion, his mythology of Middle-earth, death is ‘the Gift of Men’. It is not men who envy the immortal elves. It is the elves who envy men, because only mortal lives possess the shape, urgency, and completion that immortality denies. Far from a punishment, mortality becomes one of humanity’s greatest blessings.
Today, our oldest ambition has become a technological one. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spend vast fortunes on longevity research. Some hope to slow ageing indefinitely. Others dream of uploading consciousness into machines. Cryonics companies promise to preserve bodies until such a time as science might revive them. The quest of Gilgamesh is now drawing venture capital.
Before asking whether any of this will succeed, we should ask, with Homer, whether it should.
Odysseus’ refusal is one of the most astonishing decisions in all literature. Offered eternal youth and immortality, he prefers an ageing wife, a rocky, run-down island, and a fragile, mortal life. Rightly or wrongly, it is not life that Odysseus wants, but his life—not an immortal life, but a meaningful one. Instead of trying to live forever, it is today that we should seek to live.
That, anyway, is what Homer seems to be saying.
What about me? Would I accept Calypso’s offer?
I think I’d compromise and ask for three hundred years. That way, I’d have the best of everything.
There are two things that man can do that God cannot: make wine, and end his own life.
Deus non sibi potest mortem consciscere si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitae poenis. —Pliny
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