The Unity of the Internal and External in Homer

Abstract

This work was written for the Midlands Conference of Critical Thought which took place on the 24th and 25th April 2025 at the University of Derby. It concerns the moments in the epics of Homer where the internal appears to be expressed through the external, moments where emotions are visible through the body, where the manner of the thought of individuals is seen in their person alongside their physical appearance. The way that these moments occur suggests the possibility of an implicit unity between the internal and the external. This unity must be distinguished from the modern view where the internal causes the external through physical mechanisms. This difference can be conceptualised in terms of a divergence in the way that thought is understood, in other words in thought’s relation to being. If the modern view sees only a purely causal mechanism, it understands thought as physical being only, where there is no more than an objectivity of thought that remains outside the subjective; if Homer expresses internal thought and the body together, he understands thought in terms of its unity with external being, where the objective body and the subjectivity of the individual are the same