The “True” Homer

M ax Horkheimer, director of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, considered Giambattista Vico the first real philosopher of history of modern age.' He praised Vico for anticipating anthropological study of myth as a projection of social needs, rather than a simple deception. As an alternative to Cartesian system of philosophical inquiry, anchored in presumably autonomous individual, New Science appeared to Horkheimer to recognize conditioning of knowledge in human and natural disciplines by prevailing form of social relations (Vico and Mythology, 65). Vico's attitude to ideal of enlightenment prefigures much in approach of Frankfurt School. Vico and Horkheimer criticized some of same tendencies in Enlightenment philosophy: mathematical model of human understanding, absolute opposition of subject and object (knower and known), and conception of truth as unchanging and transhistoricaL2 Horkheimer's later work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Theodor W. Adorno, also seeks out origins of enlightened, rationalistic thought in mythological barbarism-specifically in Homer, whom Vico considered the first historian of entire gentile world who has come down to us.3 Horkheimer and Adorno's reading of Odyssey betrays one of The True Homer: Vico, Horkheimer, and Adomo 25

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