Belief in free will is not inferior to rationalist or materialist explanations of reality; the same for reading mythology.

Odysseus is delayed some years by the gods, let us say by fate, in his return Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. What sense does he have then, to even attempt to return to his kingdom and wife, Penelope?

Those who believe in a causal universe argue that everything has a cause and there cannot be an action, effect, without a cause; that is, we are compelled to critical theory. All choice comes from the circumstances prior to the choice, perhaps against the limitations of one’s thrown circumstances, from education and upbringing, our past, preferences. Therefore, every action can be reduced fundamentally to chemical impulses, and what comes to matter to us is determined long before we have the cognitive ability to make choices. Odysseus’ eventual arrival home does not involve free will or uncertainty.

In refutation, let us simply reduce the scope and define free will as the agency to act in a way that strengthens or weakens the agent's priors. By this logic, Odysseus’ suffering is not just a neural pattern; rather, what yearning means to him is meaningful to him at an emergent level: the level of his person. Odysseus fells timber and creates the astrolabe to depart Calypso’s island because he wants to, whether or not his decision was predetermined by the gods or evolutionary biology. Then, the first leap of faith is to notice that his action does not make it any less of his own decision, of which he is the agent, and for which he takes responsibility. In this sense, his action is authentically his and meaningful because it is in accordance with his deeply held values.

Andrey Markov wrote: “Free will is not necessary to do probability,” and he is right. It is unnecessary to the argument of free will to suppose that the future is undetermined or all circumstances cannot be thrown. As readers, Odysseus relives his journey in a deterministic universe and we know the answer to his life choices before he does, so it must be that his reality is unrealistic to ours. Notice in his universe, the existence of the Moirai who have woven free will into the tapestry of his fate. They may send him storms to shipwreck him, but Odysseus has never given up on his values, ultimately remaining not with the Lotus eaters, Circe, the Sirens, or Calypso. Even in deterministic universes like Ogygia, free will is still the action of making decisions and acting on them. It is a different question if the future may or may not be foredestined; nonetheless, that does not implicate free will as action that must occur spontaneously or externally in an undetermined universe. No matter what situation or universe an agent belongs to, ownership of values remain the basis of agency.

I have joined the armies of interpreters holding proprietary knowledge on the Odyssey's true meaning as social, psychoanalytic and religious parable. In the barracks it is easy to say that epic is about accomplishing difficult tasks in a clever way, and the verb “to odyssey” means a long and arduous journey. Of course that is only possible because Odysseus unites the estrangement between the mind and the body that characterizes Western intellectual tradition through his displays of agency.

Because post scientific enlightenment, Odysseus is remembered for his precognition, which eclipses the fact that it is created from his values and his circumstances. All human action is permeated by the same evanescence of awareness, agency, from the Apollonian activities of the mind - order, logic, discovery, and truth - as well as the as the Dionysian aspects of existence in which our mind is rooted in - meaning, symbol, perception, memory, and time - which are most significantly embodied in Odysseus when he chooses to plan for returning to Ithaca, again and again, against even the most resolute of divine intervention. He did not navigate life by means of detachment of the body, nor was he concerned with teaching that, against the extrapolations of modern interpretation, which seem to muddle its own shortcomings with the optimization of intelligence with some normative message.

Perhaps because the unknown is existentially difficult to bear, we believe that whatever we can pin down and control must be of the highest value. Joseph Campbell in [The] Power of Myth: “Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told,” meaning myth is credible as mind and body, meaning the Odyssey’s longevity comes from simply its existence, its demonstration of visceral interconnectedness and not that of dualism.

© 2025 Erin Xu.