Motivated by the Gods: Compartmentalized Agency and Responsibility

Abstract

Over half a century ago, Martin Nilsson wrote of the ‘Homeric man’ who distances himself from certain actions which he appears to have performed, laying the blame instead on a deity of one kind or another:

Men turn to the gods…to lay upon them the blame for that which has happened contrary to desire or intention. Even in the divine apparatus this idea finds expression in the common phrase: ‘Now this would have happened…had not a god…’ The Homeric man is absolutely under the dominion of the emotion of the moment. When passion has subsided and the unhappy consequences begin to appear he says: ‘I did not desire this; hence I did not do it.’ His own behaviour has become something foreign to him, it seems to be something which has penetrated into him from without. He lays the blame on some daimon or god or Ate or on Zeus, Moira and the Erinyes, as Agamemnon does in regard to his treatment of Achilles. A kind of division of personality takes place within him, though not in the pathological sense of two different states of personality. Rarely do two contrary currents appear in the mental consciousness… The abrupt change from one state to the other cleaves the mind in two. The man becomes ‘besides himself’, and when he comes ‘to himself’ again his ordinary self refuses to recognise the effect of this derangement, and regards it as due to some force outside of him.