The Existential Analysis of Telemachus's Sonship and Alcibiades' Shame in Light of Martin Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology

Abstract

The article presents a phenomenological-hermeneutic analysis of ancient textual sources – Athena's inquiry into Telemachus's parentage in Book 1 of Homer's Odyssey and Alcibiades' speech on shame in Plato's Symposium – in comparison with Martin Heidegger's existential analytic. It substantiates Hans-Georg Gadamer's methodological premise that a classical text tests and refines a philosophical conceptual scheme rather than merely serving as its illustration. It is demonstrated that the doubt regarding Telemachus's parentage possesses an existential-ontological dimension rather than a biological or status-related one: it concerns the potentiality-for-being-oneself and the appropriation of heritage as the discovery of one's own possibility of existence. Athena's question functions as a call that wrests Telemachus from a state of lostness in the impersonal "they" (das Man) and prompts resolute decision. In contrast, Alcibiades' speech testifies to a specific structuring of inauthentic existence, namely "inauthenticity with open eyes". The paper describes an existential mode in which the disclosure of one's own inauthenticity through the affect of shame (αἰσχύνη) has fully occurred, yet this awareness fails to lead to resoluteness or behavioral change. It is argued that this condition cannot be reduced to ignorance, self-deception, or weakness of will, revealing a more radical divergence between affective disclosure and existential resoluteness than that articulated in M. Heidegger's Being and Time. Based on the analysis of both episodes, the concept of the "heteroclitic call" (from heterokletos — "called by another") is formulated and substantiated as a call constituted exclusively through an address from a concrete Other (Athena, Socrates). Demonstrating the topological independence of the Other from the power of the "they" allows for overcoming the immanent closure of the Heideggerian call of conscience, thereby distinguishing the proposed concept from Sartrean objectification by the gaze and the ethical imperative of Levinas's Face. Finally, shame is demarcated from Heideggerian timidity (Scheu) as articulated in Contributions to Philosophy.