The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy 9783110211177, 9783110203967

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Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 19

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Monograph Series 19 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Daniel Greenspan

The Passion of Infinity Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Monograph Series Volume 19 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenspan, Daniel. The passion of infinity : Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and the rebirth of tragedy / Daniel Greenspan. p. cm. ⫺ (Kierkegaard studies. Monograph series, ISSN 1434-2952 ; 19) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-020396-7 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813⫺1855. 2. Aristotle. 3. Tragedy. I. Title. B4377.G7195 2008 1281.3⫺dc22 2008026010

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-11-020396-7 ISSN 1434-2952 © Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Typesetting: OLD-Satz digital, Neckarsteinach Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

For Piet, bright, beautiful and beyond conceiving

Acknowledgments Without the support of the Howard and Edna Hong Library at St. Olaf College, which made a substantial amount of advanced research possible, and the generous spirit of Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund, I would have been nowhere near as prepared to begin this project. For support both material and spiritual during the actual writing I need to thank the Kierkegaard Research Center, along with the Fulbright foundation, who together made my Copenhagen residency possible. There were many faculty members there from whom this project benefited, but certainly its most warm and welcoming director, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, whose editorial advice was essential, and whose encouraging presence across the hall often brought a lift. Joakim Garff, a kind of Socratic-comic guide while at the Center, must also accept my warm appreciation for his reading and sympathetic support, as must Jonas Roos, for a passing remark that provided far more than he realized. Although most of the work was completed abroad, both before and during this process there were two readers in the U.S. whose contributions were essential. Walter Brogan has been a source of valuable insight, particularly on the Greece sections. I especially need to thank Jack Caputo for his concernful mentoring of this project. His keen eye and sense for where to pull back from the edge were vital. Finally, Irene Ring and James Sikkema were both an indispensable part of the preparation of the manuscript, the latter sent at a critical moment apparently by the gods, volunteering without any obligation or hope of recompense. And of course, I need to thank Dana, for standing so close by me every step of the way.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Part I Ancient Greece 1. Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus .

10

2. Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

3. Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy .

70

4. Psuchê Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology . . . . . .

95

5. Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107

Part II Golden Age Denmark A. Kierkegaard’s Retrieval of Greek Tragedy 6. Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama Reflected in the Modern”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

140

7. Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity . . . . . . . . .

158

8. Fear and Trembling: Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism of Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

195

9. The Concept of Anxiety: Fate and the Tragic Logos of Second Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

209

x

Table of Contents

B. Beyond Eudaimonism: Tragic Virtue and the Practice of Eternity 10. Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method

237

11. Ethics Contra Ethics: Climacus on Eternal Happiness and Tragic Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265

12. Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship . . . . . . . . . . . .

293

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

317

Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

327

Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

330

Introduction In his essay on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a work in which tragic emotion carries titular weight, Jacques Derrida gestured briefly at a new conception of emotions and the body which would do the lived reality of emotion better justice, one at which Kierkegaard, I believe, was hard at work: Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble with cold, and such analogous physical manifestations translate experiences and sentiments that appear, at least, not to have anything in common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as tears. Even if one knows why one weeps, in what situation, and what it signifies (I weep because I have lost one of my nearest and dearest, the child cries because he has been beaten or because she is not loved […]), but that still doesn’t explain why the lachrymal glands come to secrete these drops of water which are brought to the eyes rather than elsewhere, the mouth or the ears.1

To better interpret the phenomena of emotion, “We would need to make new inroads into thinking concerning the body” – “What is it a metaphor or figure for? What does the body mean to say by trembling or crying[.]”2 Through his careful phenomenology of emotional life, particularly these tragic emotions of grief and terror, Kierkegaard, we’ll find, attempts to restore both the archaic mystery of emotion and its cognitive significance (literally, that emotion signifies, intends a meaning) that Greek philosophy recognized intuitively. 3 It was this coinci1 2 3

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55. Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55. Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, pp. 46 f. “[I]t is only because he understands emotions as cognitive phenomena that he can be accurately described as an advocate of ‘passionate thought,’ or ‘passionate reason.’” Furtak cites the following authors as presenting a similar view, though without acknowledging its implicit Hellenism: Walter Lowrie Kierkegaard, p. 99; Jean Wahl Kierkegaard, p. 229; David J. Gouwens Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 52; C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, generally. Cf. Abrahim Kahn Salighed as Happiness? pp. 98-109. Khan also gives an impressive argument for the non-modernness of Kierkegaard’s passionate thought, though, again, without mentioning the Greeks.

2

Introduction

dence between reason and the body (that the body had reasons, and could be trained in its desires and action to express argued ideas about what was best, and that, on the other hand, reason might also be forced to express the ‘irrational’ reasons of the body) that constituted for the Greeks the interest and domain of what we now call moral psychology. Derrida’s essay poses this question of the emotive body within the broader context of investigations into the modern, European relevance of ‘daimonic’ madness (in the mystery religion primarily of Christians, but also ancient Greeks) as a repressed condition of possibility for rational culture and the ùthos of responsibility. His essay invites a return to Kierkegaard as the first philosophical thinker to interrogate the disenchanted rationality of enlightenment culture in terms of this challenge that the violence of divine madness once raised in the schoolhouse of philosophy. The irruption of the mystery and unstable emotion surrounding daimķn returns in Kierkegaard as an essential component of his critique of both philosophies of immanence and depressed cultures of reflection in need of a tragic blow and healing. Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Aristotle’s aesthetics and moral psychology, under the heading of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, this book charts the conception of this irrationality as a practical problem for tragic poetry to explore and philosophy to conquer. Each of these thinkers represents an essential historical turn in thinking the problem of the irrational, both in terms of guilt (hamartia) and sickness and the purification (katharsis) and potential happiness (eudaimonia) that knowledge can bring. In reclaiming the structures and concepts of ancient Greek tragedy, Kierkegaard, we’ll find, undoes the undoing of tragedy Aristotle had accomplished in eliminating the possibility of daimonic experience from the table of tragic equations. Before Aristotle, the collapse of human reason was bound generally, and even with Plato, in part, to a transcendent religous domain, powerfully independent of man’s logos – the “sign of a beyond.”4 Aristotle’s 4

Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 74. Foucault distinguishes the powerfully independent irrationality of madness per se from “unreason,” the genus in which modernity envelops it, an opponent defined by the reason which, in it, fails, in which reason enjoys “a triumph arranged in advance” (p. 64). While Foucault locates the transition from the irrational to unreason in the classical age of modernity, the movement can be traced to Aristotle’s anthropologizing of the irrational as a form of animality. See, for instance, pp. 77-78 on the inherited meaning of Aristotle’s “rational animal.” “From the moment philosophy became anthropology, and man sought to recognize himself in a natural plenitude, the animal lost its power of negativity, in order to become, between the determinism of nature and the reason of man, the positive form of an evolution.”

Introduction

3

scientific psychology for the first time reduces man’s irrationality to the ‘unreason’ of an exclusively natural cause, that the reason implicit in a purposive and intelligent nature defines. 5 The psychologizing of dangerous emotion as pathù in the soul and the effect of unreasoning desires introduces an entirely new conception of the irrational as a blind, animal failure. While the overwhelming of our intelligence once signified the transcendence and divinity of other logoi, more powerful and complete, it lapses now into a simple stuttering or gap, a vacancy within our self-same reason, without meaning or use, which the philosopher’s care of the soul defends against. Without a radical intervention in Greek culture’s traditional concept of the soul (a creature largely of its poets, Homer chief among them), the philosopher’s moral science (epistùmù) or craft (technù) would have been unthinkable.6 And so in addition to the work, in Part I, on Sophocles and Aristotle, I also offer a pair of chapters briefly sketching the genealogy of the soul as a historical idea, from its conventional, literary conception to that worldconquering notion of a personal element in us akin to the divine – identified principally with thought – which philosophy would shape as the object of its moral care and psychological study. Reading Kierkegaard alongside the Greeks confirms a hypothesis whose invention was no luxury of mine, but rather Kierkegaard’s own, echoed by his first biographer, Georg Brandes, who described him as “essentially educated” not only “by Socrates” but also “the Greeks” more generally.7 In 1848, Kierkegaard drafted an invitation to an imaginary lecture series in which he would unlock the hermeneutical principle of his authorship as a modern writer. The relation to ancient Greece would be the key:

5

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Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 307. A key strategy of the philosopher’s art of life and its goal of rational independence, common to both Plato and Aristotle, was to make “our lives safe […] from these internal sources of uncontrolled danger.” In Nicomachean Ethics i.2, for instance, Aristotle uses both languages, that of art and science, to characterize his ethical-political thought and identifies the practical sphere of “the Good” as a domain of “science,” though not, of course, in the strict sense he gives it later in vi.3. Cf. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 94. In “the consensus of philologists, there is, at least through Plato’s time, no systematic or general distinction between epistùmù and technù. Even in some of Aristotle’s most important writings on this topic [of a technù governing practical choice], the two terms are used interchangeable.” As cited in Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 317.

4

Introduction

The undersigned intends to offer a short course of lectures on the organizing principle of the entirety of my work as an author in relation to the modern age, illuminated with reference to classical antiquity.8

The lectures were never given and until recently this Greek horizon of Kierkegaard’s thought, Socrates notwithstanding, had been left relatively unpursued. About twenty years ago, Alisdair Macintyre included a few pages on Kierkegaard in After Virtue, which he later admits, pleasantly enough, represented an amputated and somewhat mistaken view of Kierkegaard.9 This encounter with Kierkegaard, however abortive and mutated, was the first stroke on a new page, suggesting that Kierkegaard’s relevance as a moral thinker, historically, ought to be understood in terms of his relation to Ancient Greek virtue ethics, particularly Aristotle. For Macintyre, the “radical choice” theory which he ascribes to Kierkegaard marked the first recognition by our modern, rational culture that moral choice could no longer be rationally justified. Kierkegaard, for Macintyre, has been caught celebrating at Aristotle’s funeral, raising the flag of individual will amidst the useless fragments of reason’s moral claims. In the space of a few years, a number of essays were published, as well as a book, Kierkegaard After Macintyre, in which Macintyre’s criticisms were not-so-coolly rebuffed by Kierkegaard scholars, whom, loyal to the spirit of their man, took this attack somewhat personally. More importantly, though, than the accuracy of Macintyre’s reading of Kierkegaard (an insignificance Macintyre himself admits), was the surge of interest in Kierkegaard as a moralist along Aristotelian lines. Not only was Kierkegaard NOT Aristotle’s nemesis, historically, we began to hear, but there were important ways in which Kierkegaard’s philosophy of action labored in a workshop outfitted with Aristotelian tools.10 One critic “shall read Kierkegaard more as a successor of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas than as a predecessor of Sartre and 8 9

10

Pap. VIII 2 B 186, 292-293 (no SKS). Cf. JP 5:6094. See Alasdaire Macintyre “Once More on Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd. Anthony Rudd “Reason in Ethics, Macintyre and Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 136. Kierkegaard “was concerned with the long term development of character traits – virtues and vices. […] Why, then, is Macintyre’s account of Kierkegaard in After Virtue, (he has hardly mention him in his subsequent work) so negative?” Cf. Norman Lillegard “Thinking with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virture, the Aesthetic, and Narrative” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, pp. 211 f. Lillegard uses Macintyres’s framing of the question of ethics as “what sort of person am I to become” to place Kierkegaard in the classical tradition as moral psychologist.

Introduction

5

Foucault.”11 Most recently, in Wisdom in Love, Rick Furtak enlists Kierkegaardian moral psychology in a debate about Hellenistic ethics, offering a very reasonable justification of loving engagement with others, against the detached wisdom of the Stoics. Through Kierkegaard’s work Furtak offers a “guide for the emotionally perplexed,” “a conception of what it would mean to trust oneself to be rational in being passionate.”12 Still, rosy passages such as this ought to come as something of a shock to even those with only a glancing knowledge of Kierkegaard’s titles. They tempt us to draw Kierkegaard dangerously close to the therapeutic individualism of a certain brand of self-help, whose ideals of well-adjusted comfort he would have ridiculed expertly.13 Kierkegaard, of course, does hold the passion of love dear. In Works of Love, he has left us a lengthy and passionate meditation on its elemental, religious force. But is it so easy to forget that other passion at work in the Gospel of Luke’s frightful dictum (14:26), which his pseudonym de Silentio recalls in his poetizing of Abraham: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”14 As he raised the knife over his son, his wife’s child and the promise of generations, could Abraham trust that he was “being rational in being passionate?” Of course he could not. Explanation and justification were scarce on the awful peak of Moriah. Though, when the pseudonymous ‘A’ posed the question epigraphically – “Is reason then alone baptized, are the passions pagans?” – he did situate Either/Or as well as the authorship it inaugurates within the classically Greek frame of something like virtue ethics. Yet, as we’ll discover, the passions which interest Kierkegaard are not the tempered passions of the Greek philosopher, but instead the ecstatically conflicted emotions specific to the poet’s tragic plots, and typical, we’ll find, of Greek lyric generally. While it is not without cause that scholars of late have drawn Kierkegaard into the measured 11

12 13

14

Robert C. Roberts “Existence, emotion, and virtue: Classical themes in Kierkegaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 177. Cf. Robert C. Roberts “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of Virtue Ethics” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal. Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, p. xii. Phillip Rieff The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff’s book is a classic treatment of this historical trend. As translated from Kierkegaard’s Danish in the Hong edition of Fear and Trembling, p. 72.

6

Introduction

company of Greek philosophers, the tensions that ought to result are always either downplayed to a fault or missed entirely.15 John Davenport, for instance, discovers a Kierkegaardian virtue ethics, but “in place of the classical notion of eudaimonia as the human telos” attaches the goal of “narrative shape and enduring meaning” in “a human life.”16 He focuses, typical of the frontiersmen of Kierkegaardian virtue ethics, on the moderating, civic-minded example of the Judge, decontextualized and without reference to the religious. “That,” he writes, “is a further story, which we would have to trace to get Kierkegaard’s complete conception of existential virtue fully in view.”17 Yet, I would argue, without a discussion of the religious, we spoil the insight that Kierkegaard may have something like a virtue ethics to explore with a fraudulently amiable picture of how emotional life ought to be understood and developed. The tendency to define human beings by social standards, for Kierkegaard, leading naturally to the regimes of affluence and station, was responsible for the loss of the human itself. Man can only truly be man individually, in the awful, destabilizing encounter with god, an experience of the eternity whose incomparable measure brings personal mortality brutally and instantly to light. Investigating Kierkegaard’s debt to the ancient Greek ethics of virtue, to Aristotle in particular, in whom the technique of this ethics matures into a full-fledged psychology, requires the exploration of darker territory and more unstable passions, a return to the domain of tragic lyric in which the West first deliberated 15

16

17

See Robert C. Roberts “Existence, Emotion and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 203. Roberts, another frontiersman of Kierkegaardian moral psychology, rightly distinguishes Kierkegaard’s thinking from Aristotle’s in its heightened suspicion of reflection, and the endorsement “against Aristotle” of dissociating “oneself from aspects of one’s character.” Yet, surprisingly, he never qualifies Kierkegaard’s work with regard to temperance, an Aristotelianism Kierkegaard utterly inverts. By default, Kierkegaard’s moral psychology appears to be a minor tune-up of Aristotle’s, subordinating passion to thought and establishing reason’s authority and harmony in the soul. Other commentators, such as Norman Lillegard, promote an identically sanguine view of Kierkegaard the Aristotelian, based on the isolated character of Judge William, exemplar, for Kierkegaard, of a very prudent, civic-minded rationality. Cf. Norman Lillegard “Thinking with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virtue, the Aesthetic, and Narrative” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, pp. 221-226. John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macintyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 265. John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macintyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 308.

Introduction

7

on the problem of the irrational. It is Kierkegaard’s philosophical legitimation of not just some emotion (i. e., Greek wonder) but all of the soul’s modulations, no matter how distorted or painful, as crucial to our studies and exercises in humanity that makes him so worthy of attention. Through a poet’s sensibility and skill he ennobles even the most destructive and uncontained of the passions with a digniity and purpose. It is not until Kierkegaard’s philosophical drama, which I take up in Part II, composed of the pseudonymous lyrics of his various dramatis personae, that this ancient, tragic problem of the irrational assumes its latest shape.18 In each of his pseudonymous students of the soul we can observe psychological study return, once again, to the moral art of character-building, rather than the disinterested observations of natural science which at the time of his authorship were just beginning to find their pace. The authorship’s appropriation of tragic concepts and structures, not without tension, bears the influence of the philosopher’s concern for moral education and his definition of humanity in intellectual terms. Like Aristotle, Kierkegaard develops a theory of human action and a practice in virtue based on the authority of ideas and the absolute telos of ‘happiness’ – though one with explicit rather than implicit religious significations19 – grounding his ethics in reason’s passionately tragic experience of a god. This leads him to a radically different understanding and valuation of the passions, though oriented still by a version of the Greek ideal of passionate intelligence. The philosopher’s reason-centered craft of human life, armed now with a tragic-religious insight into reason’s failure to satisfy or even understand its desires, cedes its authority to the wonder and terror of religious experience as authoritative intelligence of a different order. Kierkegaard’s tragic moral psychology frees the psychologically reduced notion of the irrational from its dependent position (as a kind of

18

19

See CUP1, 625 f. / SKS 7, 569 ff. I take Kierkegaard seriously when he instructs us to regard his pseudonyms as dramatic characters, who nevertheless are the product of their own creation, whom he has merely ”prompted,” each with an independent psychology corresponding to their own ”life-view,” the philosophical perspective they embody. This is the difference between the Greek eudaimonia and the Danish salighed. For an analysis of Salighed, see Khan Salighed as Happiness? Kierkegaard on the Concept of Happiness. The concept, across the authorship, implies man’s impotence and the reliance on either his love of god, or god’s grace. It implies the shaping of individual personality, through “the exercise of one’s passional capacity” (pp. 72 f.). Like eudaimonia, it demands the activity of the self (p. 91).

8

Introduction

“manifestation of non-being” 20) beneath reason in the soul, enlarging the field of possible experience beyond the limits which rational man defines. This study of the pseudonyms would undoubtedly profit from an account of tragedy’s significance for the explicitly religious and predominantly signed writings, as well as Kierkegaard’s own biography. The biographical parallels with tragedy range from the obvious, such as god’s alleged curse upon the Kierkegaard family, killing five of Søren’s six siblings by his thirty-first year (1834, nine years before the authorship begins), to the more subtle hints, such as the journal’s sketch of “a novella titled ‘the Mysterious family.’” Here Kierkegaard considers reproducing “the tragedy of my childhood: the terrifying, secret explanation of the religious” which with the suddenness of a word would provide “a terrifying explanation of everything.” 21 Were we to look to the later writings and their almost insane fervor for religious offense, we would discover rich figures like St. Peter, exemplary figure of a tragic pollution and exile: “In love of Christ or in hatred of the world he left everything, his station in life, his livelihood, family, friends, human language, love of mother and father, love of fatherland,” 22 a thought from Christian Discourses once again completed by the journals. “The despised person, rejected by the human race, a poor, single, solitary wretch, an outcast – this, according to Christianity, this is what god chooses and what is closest to Him.” 23 But the subjects of dramatic literature and philosophical psychology, especially of the pagan ilk, are not properly Christian subjects, and space will not allow a responsible treatment of these themes as they do enter into the content of the signed works. In the context of the final chapter, though, placing Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous use of tragedy structurally in relation to the authorship as a whole, I do mark several points where this work could begin.

20

21

22

23

Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 115. For a general discussion of this development in the modern age see Chapters 3 and 4. Pap. IV A 144 / SKS JJ:147. Cf. JP 5:5690. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 352. On Garff’s analysis, the entries fleshing out this novella are later included in Stages on Life’s Way. SV1 10, 186. Translated by Bruce Kirmmse, in Garff’s Søren Kierkegaard, as with all references to the Papirer references in this introduction. Pap. VIII 1 A 598 / SKS NB4:113. Cf. JP 4:4131.

Part I

Ancient Greece Tragedy, Happiness and the Problem of the Irrational:

Aristotle’s Moral Psychology and the Challenge of Sophocles’ Oedipus

Dionysus has still his votaries or victims, though we call them by other names; and Pentheus was confronted by a problem which other civil authorities have had to face in real life. – E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational

The gods have become diseases. – C. G. Jung, Commentary on the Golden Flower

Chapter 1 Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus Introduction Oedipus was the quintessential tragic hero for Aristotle, and probably also for Sophocles. And so Sophocles returns to Oedipus, “most splendid symbol of humanity,” 1 a quarter century after the Tyrannus, having reached such an extremity of age it would excuse a poet of even his powers from more work. Kierkegaard, we will see, like Hegel, preferred Antigone to Oedipus. But this still places his most elaborate thinking on tragedy within the Oedipus narrative. As Kierkegaard himself will explain, the tragic nature of ancient dramas was not to be found in a conceptual dilemma which Antigone better represents, such as Hegel’s dialectic between divine and human law or logos. The ‘tragedy’ of Greek tragedies is rather internal to them, located somewhere in the actual dramatic time through which a family catastrophe unfolds.2 It is for this reason impossible to separate his (or our) meditations on Antigone from the tale of her father. A single guilt binds them as one. 3 And so the story of Kierkegaard’s Antigone begins with the father, Oedipus. “[I]t is not an individual who goes under, but a little world; it is the objective grief, unloosed, that now strides ahead,

1 2

3

H. D.F Kitto Greek Tragedy, p. 393 f. The sorrow, writes Kierkegaard, is “in the tragedy” itself. EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 147. “What provides the tragic interest in the Greek sense is that Oedipus’s sad fate resonates in the brother’s unfortunate death, in the sister’s conflict with a specific human injunction; it is, as it were, the afterpains, Oedipus’s tragic fate, spreading out into each branch of the family. This totality makes the spectator’s sorrow so very profound.” EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155. Cf. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 158. Kierkegaard anticipates Bremer’s understanding of hamartia as an entity extending itself through the action of the plays. Oedipus’ life “may thus be seen as a single long drawn out hamartia. Not a moral quality.”

Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus

11

like a force of nature, in its own terrible consistency, and Antigone’s sad fate is like the echo of her father’s, an intensified sorrow.”4 In Fitts’ and Fitzgerald’s translation of the Tyrannus, they add an ornament which is not in Sophocles’ text. They call Oedipus the “heroic mind.” Although technically imaginary, it is an illuminating fraud. If the mind has a story, 5 as does the evolution of the Oedipus myth, from Homer through Sophocles, down to the modern versions of Corneille, Dryden, and Voltaire, then the tragic myth of Oedipus as “heroic mind” represents a second episode. In this story, the birth of ‘reason’ at the start of the 6th century develops unforeseen complications in the sphere of praxis,6 or, reasoned action. Oedipus comes to embody these complications as the paradigmatic figure of tragic knowledge, a transplant of the intelligence and accessibility of the Ionian postulate – logos – to the dissecting table of Athenian drama. Man rather than nature now becomes this object of rational investigation. This transplantation is completely natural to the Milesian germ of reason:7 The advent of the polis, the birth of philosophy – the two sequences of phenomena are so closely linked that the origin of rational thought must be seen as bound up with the social and mental structures peculiar to the Greek city. […] Reason itself was in essence political. […] When philosophy arose at Miletus, it was rooted in the political

4 5

6

7

EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155. That thinking has a history is of course what Hegel will claim. Kierkegaard, still very much under the impression of Hegel’s historicizing of philosophy in his early phase of authorship, at which point Either/Or was composed, echoes this thought throughout the essay on the tragic in ancient and modern drama. For the Hegel influence on Either/Or, see Jon Stewart The Relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 182-237. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 102. “In the history of humankind, beginnings ordinarily elude us. But if the advent of philosophy in Greece marked the decline of mythological thought and the beginning of rational understanding, we can fix the date and place of birth of Greek reason – establish its civil status. It was the beginning of the sixth century, in Ionian Miletus, that such men as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes ushered in a new way of thinking about nature.” J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 131. “In fact, it was at the political level that reason was first expressed, established, and shaped itself in Greece. […] For the Greeks, the individual could not be separated from the citizen; phronùsis, reflection, was the privilege of free men, who exercised their reason and their civic rights at one and the same time.” Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, pp. 139, 142. At the start of the 6th century B. C., the time of Solon and the world’s first strides in Athens towards rational politics and democracy, “[T]he culture of the Athenian nobility was Ionian through and through.” Solon used “Ionian scientific ideas as a pattern” for his political poetry and legislation.

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thought whose fundamental preoccupations it expressed and from which it borrowed a great part of its vocabulary.8

In hatching reason, the polis gave birth to the Siamese twins of philosophy and tragic poetry. Their inevitable division would necessarily kill one of the conjoined. And so the Greeks tear down the stage of serious tragedy a century after its construction. Oedipus is a model (paradeigmi, 1193) and it is his heroic mind which defines him. The heroic mind Sophocles bestows upon Oedipus of old would have been a pattern of thinking typical of all men of a new rational culture, which by the 5th c. had already begun to contest the traditional pieties and vision of Greek life, especially in the fields of medicine, the legal-political sphere, and more fundamentally in the science of nature. Thucydides has left us a record of this impulse, in the midst of the plague Athens suffered perhaps not long before Sophocles wrote this play (430-429 B. C.).9 And so Sophocles makes the themes of law, sickness and, implicit in sickness, nature, an essential part of his production.10 Oedipus was no incidental figure for Sophocles. There are no less than nine Oedipus tragedies of which we have no more than the title.11 Both Aeschylus and Euripides had written an Oedipus, like Sophocles, as part of larger cycles. These of course have been lost, save Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Oedipus appears in both the Iliad and the Odyssey and both Hesiod and Pindar touch on his story.12 His is a very old story for the Greeks. In adopting Oedipus as its first child, Athenian tragedy adapted his character, deeply embedded in the collective mythos, to the shape of its own specific vision. It placed itself within a tradition of poetic reflection from out of which Oedipus emerges into full tragic bloom, 8 9 10

11 12

J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 131. C. F. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 171. Cf. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, ch. III.3 and G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 88, 97. Knox devotes all of Chapter III.3 to the deep significance of medicine in the Tyrannus. Lloyd echoes that “[o]f course the play is not about medicine, about medical diagnosis and treatment. But human misfortune is depicted, repeatedly, in terms of diseases.” “[T]heir efforts so often come to nothing (as was the fate […] of Greek doctors of every description in their attempts to understand and to cure). To seem pious, or wise, or even good, offered no immunity to calamity, indeed no immunity was to be had, any more than there was for disease. Its sudden onset, often unexplained, maybe irremediable, captures, in so many respects, the very essence of the human predicament, serving as not merely analogous to, but itself a key example of human vulnerability” and the impotence of reason. Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, p. xxxiii. Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, pp. xii-xv.

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embodying the troubled heart of reason in the city’s breast, isolated like a sickness for treatment within the ambit of the theatre. Before moral philosophy or the tragic lyric with which philosophy briefly shared the city, man’s gnomic lot fell to the poets: Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, and Pindar. They projected a new cultural possibility through which the logos or account of the good human life could be discovered.13 For these poets, it was the divine order of Homeric $IKù given a new moralising interpretation that determined the path of human lives. In the context of tragedy, this archaic attempt to deliberately align human choice with a god’s Justice becomes terribly ironic. As the gods express themselves through human language, its capacity to plan or give an account is ironically reversed.14 Divine language intrudes upon mortal speaking. In the Tyrannus especially, language becomes a network of blockages rather than a snare for insight. Words indicate barriers, points of conflict between the past and what is to come,15 positioning Oedipus impossibly within the contrary logoi of men and gods. The Greeks, Sophocles included, believed “as if by instinct”16 that the universe was based on a logos, obeyed law, and “[e]very detail 13

14

15

16

J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 115. Bremer makes Pindar the lynch pin between Homer and the tragedians. Hesiod, Theognis, and Solon are supplemental sources for our understanding of the development of the moral equation through which tragic ¿Ê¿ÏÒÇ¿ can finally be interpreted. Pindar’s representation is ðÉÀÍÐ u ©ÍÏÍÐ u DÀÏÇÐu ÊÎÉ¿ÈÃÊ¿u ÒÅ: happiness, leads to complacency, leads to arrogance, leads to offence, leads to god-sent ruin. Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, p. 252. Jaeger points out that this has roots in the poetry of Solon. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 120. Human language is reversed when the gods express themselves through it. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 42. Cf. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 14648. Segal observes that “The present is both a recapitulation of the past and a reenactment of the past in symbolic form,” or, in Sophocles’ own language, “inferring the new by means of the old” (916). “Sophocles devotes most of the action to the problem of logical deduction in the present.” C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 143. Cf. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, pp. 107 f. Vernant argues that what Bowra calls this “instinct” toward logos is organic to the social-political order arising with the polis. This helps clarify the natural community of reason between Ionian and Athenian thought, across fields as diverse as the study of nature, politics, and lyric poetry. It was not simply that Ionian natural philosophy exported the invention of reason to Athens, but rather that “the form and content of natural philosophy depended heavily on the secular-rational institution of the polis” underlying them both.

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in the Tyrannus is contrived in order to enforce Sophocles’ faith in this underlying logos.”17 But while the universal order to which philosophical reason aspires naturally draws the mind into its harmonies, the tragic logos seduces the intellect into a kind of suicide. Tragic guilt expressed a live political dilemma specific to Greece at this time between human reason and the force of the irrational, represented dramatically by the logos of divinity. Knowledge within the sphere of tragic thinking included “at its center a core of ignorance, the shadowy conjunction at our origins whose mystery we can never fully penetrate.”18 It had something of the Socratic, a knowledge whose only advantage was an awareness of its own ignorance, whose only accomplishment was the imposition of paradox and which could aspire to expression only through excessively ambiguous language. Oedipus’ vision of truth coincides with a blinding, as the eternal order of the gods intervenes violently in the contingent human time of the play. Once the catastrophe has unfolded and Oedipus the wise king has been destroyed, overtaken by a kind of divine madness, the traces of this intervening violence remain as a kind of screen through which a divine logos presents itself. This after-image of the divine anticipates another literary impression which, as we’ll see in Part II, the modern tragedy of Kierkegaard’s authorship evokes.

17 18

Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1. Jaeger takes the explicaton of this unargued premise of Bowra’s as one of its essential missions. Philosophical logos can be traced back through the lyric poets to the epics of Homer and Hesiod; the order (dikù) at work in natural reality was originally a moral force, proper to the domain of poetry. Already Hesiod’s “mythical system is formed and governed by reason” (p. 65). “Like the rationalistic ideals which created the system of the Theogony, [Works and Days] presupposes city-state civilization and the advanced thinking of Ionia” (p. 68). The “justice” in Anaximander’s “nature” was a moral and not a physical law (p. 160). It was the life of the city-state and the the problem of the ways of god to man that was first read into the cosmos (p. 161), though, after the Ionian investigations of the 6th c. into physis, this nature would once again be read back into the inner life of the individual man. If there was a law of the cosmos, there must be a law for the souls living within it. Heraclitus takes this step (p. 180), connecting the “knowledge of Being with insight into human values and conduct, and made the former include the latter.” This is an original source for Greek thinking on phronesis, knowledge-related action. Cf. fragments 2, 112, 113, 114, 116. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 144. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge In the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 147 f.

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Sickness and Purgation Already in the prologue of the first of the Theban plays, we have an ambivalence between the human and divine realms which rings true until the last, when Oedipus is translated like an epic hero, or those of Pindar’s lyrics, into immortality in the groves of Colonnus. We begin with a crowd of people huddled before the altars in front of Oedipus’ palace. He emerges before these suppliants, their “boughs of supplication wreathed with chaplets” (327), as a figuration of the divine.19 One of these suppliants is himself a priest, who has come to Oedipus like the others to supplicate in time of plague. The confusion of Oedipus with a god is almost immediately disclaimed. “It is not because we rank you with the gods that I and these children are seated at your hearth, but because we judge you to be the first of men …” (329). But that the confusion must be clarified only confirms what the audience must have felt. Oedipus emerges at the opening of the play like a god before his altar. What gives Oedipus this divine status, though, is more important. He is proton andrķn (33), “first of men.” This first of men has his universal aspect in an exceptional power to reason practically. Human wisdom is Oedipus’ native element and he establishes its measure both in the “incidents of life and in dealing with higher powers” (329). Though, the priest continues, “it is by the extra strength given by a god that you are said and believed to have set right our life” (329). The heroic mind is a gift from the gods that has made Oedipus the prototypical man. Sophocles drives the point home once more in the same piece of dialogue. Oedipus, says the priest, we do not know if your knowledge comes from men or from the gods. The exchange between mortals and gods is a dialectic which Sophocles will continue to exploit, slowly turning Oedipus’ divine status and authoritative intelligence on its head. 20 High will be made low, as in the ancient ritual of ostracization, and low made high, as with the pharmakos of the Athenian festival of the Thargelia. The relevance of both is worth explaining. The ritual of the pharmakos originates in the Athenians impious murder of Androgaeus the Cretan, re-enacted on the first day of the Thargelia. The pharmakoi were selected in terms of ugliness. They represent all that is dead and defiled in the city, what needs to be 19

20

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 125. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 124.

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sloughed off or purified for the city to “be refertilized,” to bring itself back to life. Hence its connection with the fertility ritual of the eiresiķne.21 The pollution (agos) which the katharmos-pharmakos embodies gave him a sense of religious awe, 22 in addition to defilement – the pharmakos was treated royally before the expulsion. When a divine scourge afflicts a city, the normal solution is to sacrifice the king 23 and this so-called scapegoat is a member of the community who assumes the role of this king “turned inside out,” sacrificed in his place, carrying with him all the disorder he embodies. But the city set its limits from both below and above. Like the pharmakos, the ritual of ostracization, introduced by Cleisthenes and used between 487 and 416, expelled what was too high as opposed to too low. It seems to be a politicized version of the pharmakos, also protection against divine retribution, plague, and later tyranny. 24 Our picture of Oedipus resolves under the influence of both of these political and religious institutions with which tragedy co-existed in Athens.25 The action of the Tyrannus truly begins with an incident transpiring long before the prologue opens, to which the play as aetiology returns. Oedipus has freed the city from the tribute of that “cruel singer,” the Sphinx. Her song was doubly cruel. Not only did it surround the many deaths of her victims, but it also distracted Thebes from Laius’ murder. This distraction is the cause of the unholy sickness whose symptoms now emerge in full bloom, as will Oedipus, their cause, from behind the palace doors, once Jocaste has perished and the tragedy run 21

22 23

24

25

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 129 f.  ÁÍÐ also denoted matters of religious awe, as indicated by the verb ¿ÄÍÊ¿Ç. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 132. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 326. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 128. Vernant emphasizes Oedipus’ identity with the pharmakos, following the link Louis Gernet established between tragedy and the ritual of the pharmakos, as well as J. P. Guepin. Cf. p. 131: The paean of the opening scene was also part of the Thargelia, and would have reminded the Athenian audience of the kathartic ritual, connecting Oedipus with its agos. Cf. G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, p. 88. Lloyd confirms that Knox, Burkert, Sabatucci, Vegetti, Girard, Segal all agree on the association between Oedipus and the pharmakos: the source of pollution through expulsion is likewise the source of salvation. Cf. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet Oedipus in Athens in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 326. As tragedy was both a political and religious institution, it should be compared with other political and religious institutions.

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its course. In ridding Thebes of its affliction by the winged maiden, he “set right” or “straightened out” their “life” (hùmin orthosai bion), and so the priest also asks him now to “raise up the city so that it does not fall (anorthoson polin, 39). 26 Now as before Oedipus will be called upon to correct what has become crooked, but Sophocles translates this “crookedness” likewise into “sickness.” Addressing the Thebans as a father would his children, Oedipus sees all of them sick (noseite pantes, 60). Though “None of you,” he continues, with an irony only available to the audience, “is as sick as I.” The political disease from which Thebes suffers infects the king most of all. Presented first in dialogue flush with the language of Hippocratic authors, as a physician at the bedside of the ailing Thebes, Oedipus in the end stands “revealed not as the physician but as the sick man –” 27 the source of the city’s plague. As king of Thebes, Oedipus IS the city. The law of substitution is a special feature of both traditional Dionysiac sacrifice and those reserved for the altar of the tragic god’s stage. One sacrificial victim takes the penitential place of the group to which he belongs. That which affects the landscape and the populace naturally concentrates itself in its king. Oedipus himself explains the equation for us. “My soul [emù psuchù] mourns equally for the city and for myself and for you” (63-64). This “mourning [stenei]” was also a “groaning,” or “moaning,” the sound of the victim. 28 26 27

28

Sophocles uses another form of the verb ÍÏÆÍÑÆ¿Ç: to straighten. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, p. 147. Knox catalogues the many Hippocratisms in the play on pages 139-147. See also page 147n31 for additional instance of words with medical connotations. There is a homology between dominant forms of Dionysiac sacrifice in such rituals as the Agrionia and the Bouphonia, where the animal is symbolically killed as both god-victim and man-criminal, and the killing of tragic heroes in a drama. The homology also applies to the ritual of the pharmakos, as we’ve seen, as well as ostracization. In each case the victim is meant to be a redemptive substitution for another person or more typically for a group of people. There have so far been four ways of approaching the obscure relation between Attic Tragedy’s performance at the Spring festival of the Greater Dionysia and the myth and cult of the masked god for whom this festival was instituted. The first wave of scholars, such as Rohde, thought they had discovered in the myths of the tragic god the echo of historic events. And so when we find a people re-enacting the arrival by water of Dionysus to Greek shores, we then presume that at some point in the dusk of Greek pre-history Dionysus did arrive as a foreigner from the eastern shores of Thrace. Now of course we know this not to be the case. The linear B tablets at Pylos disproved Rohde’s thesis that Dionysus was a deity alien to the Greeks, and likewise called his thesis into question that his immigration infused the vital Greek bloodline with an alien strain, with a yearning to deny mortal life for a disembodied, immortal alternative.

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Diagnosis is the first part of any cure – knowledge of the causes (tas aitias) – and so Oedipus sends Creon to the Oracle at Delphi for just this reason, calling it a remedy (iasin, 68). The search for a remedy in the case of this particular ailment is also an inquiry into non-human realms. Oedipus presumes that the plague is not the fruit of chance, but rather of a divine order which the inspirations of the Pythian priestess will reveal. Upon returning from the oracle, Creon’s first words already imply the reversals towards which Thebes is prone, the tragic consti-

Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, in the early part of the 20th century, applied this historical method of interpretation in their groundbreaking studies of the underlying ritual structure of Attic tragedy. They were the first to follow Nietzsche in his attempt to envision the transition from full blown Dionysian rite to the allegorical lyrics represented on the tragic stage. While Nietzsche’s approach, the first on record, was one of inspired imagination, Harrison and Murray apply their philological science to the same problem in the same historical spirit as Rohde. J. P. Guepin replies to the unscientific inspiration of Nietzsche and the somewhat naive historicism of Harrison and Murray with a third method of interpretation. The myths and cult legends of Dionysus as they have been passed down to us ought not to be read literally as history, and neither should we abandon a scholarly pursuit of the actual course of events, as he believed Nietzsche had done for his own personal form of literary philosophical revel. Rather, these stories and practices, he believed, ought to be read in terms of their collective, symbolic, psychological meaning. In the matrix of cult, myth, and the literary production of the tragedies, Guepin discerns a systematic pattern of meaning bound up with killing, guilt, and penitential sacrifice. On this reading the nature of the myths surrounding the cult is not bound up in history, but rather in a tragic sense of paradox definitive of both actual sacrifice as well as the representations of it in the “gloomy” plays of the Greek stage. What constitutes this paradox will have to wait for the moment. The last word on the connection between tragic theatre and Dionysian cult is the shortest. There is nothing much to say. Pickard-Cambridge establishes this position in his Dithyramb: Tragedy and Comedy, a response to B. Frazer’s Golden Bough as well as Jane Harrison’s Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: Themis and also Gilbert Murray’s appendix to Harrison’s book. Though in a revised edition (1962) of Pickard-Cambridge’s 1927 publication, T. L. Webster revives the possibility that Guepin pursues. More recently, see B. Knox Word and Action, p. 6. Knox confirms both the likeliness of some connection and the perhaps impossible difficulty of specifying what exactly that connection entails. On the other hand, a tacit representative of Pickard-Cambridge’s view, J. P. Vernant maintains that there is no proof of any material connection between Dionysiac cult and the dramatic contests. We can say nothing about the link between ritual and theatre, especially concerning sacrifice. Vernant does leave room enough to establish at least one semantic link. It is in the capacity to subvert reality for illusion that Dionysus claims his authoritative in tragic theatre. The power to convey illusion, the play of representations, “as if” it were real, to the audience assembled in the theatre at the Greater Dionysia is the special province of this god.

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tution of this troubled city.29 Though here Creon speaks of a reversal from bad fortune to good: “I say that even trouble hard to bear, if they chance to turn out well, can bring good fortune” (87-88). We can read the inclusion of chance here as an ironic charge timed to detonate catastrophically with a few words from the shepherd who finally confirms Oedipus’ true identity. Similar, we’ll find, to Aristotle, nothing in the vision which Sophocles constructs, ultimately, leaves room for chance. Tuchù appears only as a foil for the revelation of its antipode, Dikù. 30 Justice is the unflinching order governing the cosmos, but it can only be seen directly from a god’s perspective, and related to man ambiguously, indirectly, through the signifying wings of the prophet’s bird, or the obscure speech of an oracle. And so as the prologue ends, just before the first choral Ode, the priest calls Apollo down from the skies to save them and put a stop to the sickness. Sophocles connects Justice and healing in the figure of Apollo, “the healer.”31 Thebes’ sickness is both moral-religious and physiological and the moral defilement, unexpiated, is now expressing itself in the brutely physical terms of plague. The misfortune of sickness can only be translated into a greater health once the city has been purified of its blood guilt. Like the black bile of pre-modern melancholy, the substance didn’t cause evils the way that brain chemistry now ‘causes’ the ‘effect’ of depression as a kind of representation. It was evil – had value. Laius’ murderer would have to be physically expelled from the city. It is at this point that we first read of katharsis, or purification. “Poiķ Katharmķ,” Oedipus asks Creon, “With what means of purifying” (95) can we drive out the pollution (miasma). The purifying of Oedipus and the city’s unidentified guilt, what a more enlightened Aristotle calls hamartia, begins with an inquiry into another protoAristotelian concept in which Ionian science and moral-religious language intersect: ‘the cause [hù aitia],’ that which is ‘owed.’32 Where shall the track of an ancient guilt, hard to make out, be found? ÎÍÓÒÍÂqÃÓÏÃÆÅÑÃÒ¿ÇÇÕËÍÐοɿǿÐÂÓÑÒÃÈÊ¿ÏÒÍË¿ÇÒÇ¿Ð(108−109). 29

30 31

32

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 334 f. Attic Tragedy expatriates political conflict (ÑÒ¿ÑÇÐ), like comedy derides it, and funeral speech denied it. Athens is represented as Plato would have wanted it, while Thebes is a model “anti-city,” a magnet for terror and strife. Cf. H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy. Kitto develops this insight extensively. Apollo’s epithet is initially Paian, the physician of the gods, healer, and also saviour or deliverer. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 161.

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The cause of the city’s grief will be determined when we know who is responsible for the murder. The cause will be to whom this sickness is owed.33 But before the nature of this guilt or debt can be exposed, before the murderer can be driven out or killed, as the Oracle advises, and the sickness purged, Oedipus must begin the investigation of his crime a second time by returning to the beginning (archù), again. The “riddling song” of the sphinx “forced us to let go what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet” (339), Creon tells Oedipus before the chorus’ first stasimon. And so Oedipus must “light up the obscurity [aut’ egķ phanķ]” (339). He will now once again defend the city, but also Apollo (339), in search of the guilt or aitios which is likewise the ‘cause’ of the religious pollution dawning on the city.34 This “first of men” acts on behalf of Phoibos (133), Apollo the bright, the radiant, the pure – illuminating the obscure under the god’s aegis of light, and purifying the city and all who dwell there of its pollution. Oedipus investigates the moral-religious archù of this crime against the city and the gods through an investigation (historia), recalling the investigation of the Ionians into the rational principle (archù) of an essentially intelligible nature, composing a “history,” developing the “comprehensive account” which the Ionians dubbed theory (theoria). Sophocles’ representation of Oedipus as investigator poses the implicit question of the possibility of extending this Ionian science to the human sphere, to questions of ethics and religion, to man, his cities, and eventually, his soul – a question revolutionized by Aristotle’s philosophical psychology and, 2300 years later, Kierkegaard’s dialectical-lyric.

Terrible Knowledge, Tragic Speech, Third Wisdom The chorus first invokes Zeus as both speaker and healer: “Sweetspeaking message of Zeus […] Delian healer invoked with cries” (151154). This Delian cure comes in the form of language, and, particularly, speech. Since this first lament of the chorus is an absence of the right kind of mental attention, the kind of language which would re33

34

Aitia can mean an accusation of a crime, and also the guilt implied in the accusation, but also cause, in the sense of “for the sake of.” Oedipus’ “guilt” is the “for the sake of which” the plague is now on Thebes. This “for the sake of which,” or “cause,” returns as a principle of both ethical choice in Aristotle, and also kinùsis in the natural world. Agos from the verb Azomai: to stand in awe of, also to dread.

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direct this attention and the healing of the city’s grief coincide. “Sickness lies on all our company, and thought [phrontidos] can find no weapon to repel it.” (170) The images in the parodos of dark turning to light, night turning to day, are, as we’ll see, unmistakable. They seem to correspond naturally to the chorus’ appeal for this illumination of practical thought. But at this point the thinking would have to be divine, rather than human. The entire ode is a beseeching of the most luminous of the Gods to aid and defend Thebes, shining Phoibos, “bright-faced” Athena, “golden daughter,” and “Zeus, you who wield the power of the lightning flashes” (344-345). Yet, paradoxically, the illuminating vision which Oedipus seeks in Apollo’s name comes as if from the bright blackness of Phoibos’ sun turned inside out – the vision of an eclipse. To look directly into this anomaly carries the risk of blindness. This obverted sun which shines in a kind of night ironically requires special protection against the enhanced power of its light. There is a wonderful strangeness to events such as these, when nature seems to veer off course, just as there is something awesome and terrible in Oedipus, and the way he must learn. The Chorus’ parodos develops a powerful vision of this strangeness through the image of the embattled city. There the Thebans sing for a kind of fire. Just as customarily it is blood which washes away the taint of blood, both the plague and the cure are imagined as flames. The death which spreads “swifter than destroying fire” and “the flames of ruin” (343) which illuminate the Night of Ares’ onslaught invite the fire of Zeus’ lightning, paralleled by Sophocles with the Day which always follows this Night. Day and Night are continuous with one another. Their fires collaborate in the same work. Invited as well are the “fiery torches of Artemis.” The final god to be invoked is also familiar with the flame. It is “ruddy-faced Bacchus, to whom they cry Euhoe, companion of the Maenads,” whom they wish “to draw near with brightly blazing torch of pinewood against the god who lacks honor among the gods” (203-215). This dishonourable god is of course Ares. Thebes is caught between the flames of life and light, divine intelligence, and those of ruination, between Day and Night. 35 35

J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. Guepin discusses the conflict in tragedy between the gods Dionysus and Ares as typical of the tragic paradox (pp. 43, 46). The destruction of the tragic hero, his criminality and guilt, is the other side of a divine innocence which he also embodies (pp. 108, 116). The problem of tragedy was previously the problem of sacrifice, the unity of joy in death and suffering, the unity

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For all of its luminosity the imagery of the parodos turns essentially on the ambiguity and paradox through which it evokes nature’s inversion, the inversion of light and dark, Day and Night. “The fruits of the glorious earth do not increase, and no births come to let women surmount the pains in which they cry out” (172-174). Nature is failing, but not of its own. Ares’ Divine fire has “scorched” (192) the womb of Thebes. It cannot grow, or nurture itself. Life has turned to death. The fires of plague brought on by pollution illuminate the Theban night. Yet it is the magnification of fire (so far an image of sickness) in the hands of the gods which brings healing. The sun of the Tyrannus is charged with a number of meanings, all of which refer back to the mingling of vision and blindness: illumination and darkness, wisdom and foolishness, sanity and mania. Oedipus returns to this familiar image of the sun as his initial confrontation with Teiresias concludes. “You are sustained by darkness only, so that you could never harm me or any other man that sees the light” (374375). But Oedipus suffers, finally, at the hands of Apollo, the most luminous of the gods, the god from whom the light of divine intelligence ushers forth at Delphi from the split rock. Oracular knowledge is akin to the knowledge of the prophet, which is unspeakably ambiguous, and in its unspeakability as well as its mechanism, unteachable. 36 It is the light of these benighted truths which will blind him. And I say, since you have reproached me with my blindness, that you have sight, but cannot see what trouble you are in, nor where you are living, nor with whom you share your home. Do you know from what stock you come? First you are unaware of being an enemy to your own above and beneath the earth, and, next, the two-pronged curse that comes from your mother and your father with deadly step shall one day drive you from this land; now that you have sight, then shall you look on darkness. (412-420)

Oedipus’ expiation is accomplished through sunlight, the pure god.37 It will drive him from the day and into darkness, a terror (deinon) neither to be seen nor heard (1312). Both Oedipus and the landscape

36

37

of victim and god, innocence and guilt, the value of violence, suffering and death (pp. xiii, 31, 62, 74-79, 84). Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus 395-396. Teiresias possesses two potentially distinct types of mantikù, according to Oedipus, who says the prophet has neither. On the one hand, divination, which was a skill that could be taught, and on the other hand a kind of inspired prophecy which cannot. The second kind of knowledge would be identified with the god, while the first would not. Cf. Cornford Principium Principium Sapientiae, pp. 73 f. Cornford distinguishes between the possession/divination of mantic wisdom, such as we read of in the Phaedo, or Republic 571d, and the augury by signs which is an “art of the reasoning faculty.” C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 184.

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take on the aspect of darkness and terror which Teiresias ascribes to the doomed king’s knowledge (316). The “fire of the sun,” along with the rest of nature, “the earth and the sacred rain” which Oedipus had inverted, can no longer receive him (1425-1428). The sun of Phoibos as it shines through oracle and prophet does not illuminate. Oedipus’ tragic vision will be forced to range through mountainous night, beneath a sun which burns all the brighter against this night’s black foil. It is an unnatural image – Oedipus is an unnatural creature. The sun that burns at night is the recoil of Oedipus’ speech upon him, which Teiresias has promised: “It is sad that you utter these reproaches, which all men shall soon utter against you” (oneidizķn, oneidiei, 372373). 38 The truth of Oedipus’ native birth will place him correctly in the royal line, straightening it out, while this straightening is likewise the recognition of perversion, of the ignorance in tragic speech within which tragic knowledge hides. He associates himself inadvertently with this foregone knowledge, with the Pythian oracle, its radiant God Apollo, and also Laius, the murdered king. In fact, Oedipus will act “as though he had been my father” (349). Oedipus’s pledge is ironic proof of the depth of his ignorance. He cannot act “as though” Laius is his father – Laius is his father. The speech made most clearly and with the most dramatic force by Oedipus, that of the curse, is also ironically a kind of speech without knowledge, even less than he realises. And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is. (246-248)

“It was not to leave the guilt unpurified [akarthaton]” (256), Oedipus says a few lines later to the chorus of Thebans. The only possible cause for the extent of Oedipus’ disaster is the curse upon the criminal which he voluntarily commends to the city and the gods. The killing, were it done without knowledge, or in self-defense, as it had been, would have required a mere ritual purification. 39 As for the parricide and incest which reveal themselves, even they would have been excused once the pollution were ritually cleansed. To a Greek audience this curse would have been completely 38

39

Sophocles’ language recoils in the doubling of the participle and the active indicative. This is a pattern that continues throughout the play. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 165, 172. The law of Dracon would have acquitted Oedipus of deliberate homicide. Oedipus’ crimes would have demanded purification, not punishment. SIG, 111.

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real.40 Patriarchs as well as the priests of Apollo were thought to have the power to curse with great effect. The revenging spirit of Laius as well as Oedipus’ devotion to the God in his invoking the curse would have been enough to insure its force. But as king Oedipus is given still a third established authority by which to command the fates.41 These words of his become a crucial part of the action of the play. As he himself explains, once the tragedy unfolds, “myself I spoke that word” (1381). But the power of ‘who’ speaks and ‘when’ draws its strength of language from the ordering power of a divine Dikù. It is the ritual power of language which demands Oedipus’ destruction, a wretchedness he unwittingly calls upon himself in Justice’s name. “But beside you other Cadmeans, all who approve these words, may Justice fight and may all the gods ever graciously remain” (275). The connection between the enforcing of this justice and both the power and obscurity of human language asserts itself consistently throughout the play. As Oedipus’ true nature gradually reveals itself, the curse he has uttered against the criminal repeatedly terrorizes him,42 from Teiresias’ initial demand that he “abide by the proclamation,” and “from this day on address neither these men nor me” (350-351), to Oedipus’ late recognition that he has “in my misery cut myself off, commanding with my own lips that all should drive from their houses the impious one, the one whom the gods had shown to be impure and of the race of Laius” (1379-1382). It is a “fixed point”43 of reference about which the story unfolds. Just before Teiresias enters the second scene, Oedipus, responding to a chorus confident in the power of his public declarations to draw a confession, explains that “He who is not afraid to do the deed is not frightened by a word” (296). But what if the word is a deed, part of the action, like a marriage vow or an insult? There is good reason to see Sophocles not only using language to forward the plot (which is what Aristotle meant, identifying language in the Poetics as part of the action) but also thematizing the ability certain kinds of language have to be deed-full.44 Oedipus was not afraid for his life 40 41

42 43 44

C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 172 f. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 173. Bowra provides a lengthy list of other textual authorities on the special ability to curse allotted certain figures. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 350 f., 744 f., 767, 813-820, 1290-1291, 1379-1382. John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 208. Aristotle Po., 1456a36-b4. On Aristotle’s claim, see John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Cf. Charles Segal in “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 162. Sophocles’ Tyrannus makes “language itself the

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at the crossroads where he met his father, but it will be the word that strikes fear into him. It is the word which finally destroys him, spoken with a delayed knowledge, which, in dawning, reveals the terribly selfdestructive nature of this act of speech. The distinction between word and deed was well established for the Greeks. 45 By using the destroyed figure of Oedipus to present early on the sort of heroic distinction between word and action we are accustomed to finding in Homer and Pindar, Sophocles ironically calls this distinction into question and prepares us for the terrible action the word will soon have on this hero, whose deeds and catastrophes are intellectual – about speech and knowledge – rather than warrior-athletic. In the universe of Oedipus we “speak disaster,” we “accomplish words.” But this is only possible given the intertwining of the mental and the physical which was also conventionally Greek: he “accomplished the word given aforetime [palaiphaton] at Pytho,”46 Pindar writes of the famous king’s twist of fate. This is no isolated quirk of the poet. Xenophanes, for example, describes language similarly as something which, if true, completes itself in action. When a man says something “completely true” it has “completed itself,” “and yet he has no exact knowledge, in contrast to the god.”47 These usages all draw from the single well of Homer, in which the word often does just this (epos telein).48 Sophocles returns to the same source: “You shall not get away with speaking disaster twice [pùmonas ereis]” (363), Oedipus warns Teiresias. Disaster is wreaked with the lips and not the hands. But these words cannot be just any mortal words. And so it will not

45

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47 48

field that fully enacts the play between the hidden and the obvious.” Cf. J. L. Austin How to do Things with Words, for a discussion of performativity. Cf. Jacques Derrida “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy. Derrida offers a critical discussion of Austin’s notion of performativity. Bruno Snell, Poetry and Society, pp. 78 f., 82. There was a customary opposition between word and deed, or word and fact, in Homer and Solon. Snell cites Solon E. I. fr. 10: “for ye look to a man’s tongue and shifty speech, and never to the deed he doeth.” Pindar’s opposition between the hero and the poet who praises him, for Snell, reflects the same opposition. Tragedy, a development in the internalising of man, he argues, naturally transforms the passivity and language and reflection into something active. This will culminate in the pure activity of the philosopher’s contemplation, such as Aristotle’s ÆÃÍÏÇ¿. See also Iliad, xvi. 718-723, xx. 232-234, 497-498, xxii. 333-334. Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2.42 ff., as cited in Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, pp. xiv-xv. Fr. 34. As translated by Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142. Homer Iliad i.108. See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142n18.

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be the speakable element of Teiresias’ knowledge that we ought to be interested in, not the teachable, but rather the unspeakable.49 The “truth” is implanted in Teiresias, whom we hear is a “godlike prophet” (298-299). Teiresias has a wisdom (phronùsis) in communion with “all things, those that can be explained and those unspeakable, things in heaven and things that move on earth” (353). Although, as Aristotle explains, the action of tragic speech expresses thoughts, there are some thoughts, like the prophet’s, which cannot be expressed directly, some knowledge which cannot be transmitted from one person to the next. Teiresias and Oedipus represent a distinction between two kinds of truth which language can express, divine and terrestrial, between two languages, prophetic and profane, and finally between two types of wisdom or knowledge. The prophet is said to “dispose [nķmķn] (300) all things, to distribute them (nemein), reminding us of the ordering function of law (nomos) in both nature and the state. 50 Behind this distinction in languages, truths, and wisdoms is the enforcing of this law, a quantity like Oedipus (though infinitely stable, rather than infinitely unstable) crossing the threshold between the human and divine, a principle of order for both nature and politics through which human wisdom and language are subverted by the gods from within. The first choral ode’s inversion of nature is mirrored by the inversion of wisdom and foolishness. “I did not know that your words would be foolish,” (433) Oedipus tells the prophet. Teiresias is foolish to Oedipus, but, we hear from the prophet, wise (emphrones) to Oedipus’ parents (435-436). Teiresias, whom Oedipus has called blind in thought (nous, 371), irrational, betrays the first glimpse of a vision which will change Oedipus’ wisdom into folly, and, likewise, the folly of the prophet’s riddling words into wisdom. The power of his intelligence has also been the cause of his ruin (442). True wisdom (phronùsis) belongs to Teiresias, the profundity of the religious, though Oedipus may have a talent for solving riddles (441). And so when Teiresias tells 49

50

The word for unspeakable things follows and is contrasted with didakta, things taught. The implication is probably that the unspeakable things are unspeakable in that it is impossible to explain how they work. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 86. Force (Bia) in Athenian politics was a servant of “nomos, which reigned in place of the king at the center of the city. Because of its relation to dikù, nomos still had a certain religious connotation.” It was through logos that dikù was established. The element of force was an irrationality necessary to ensure the rational politics of the state. Cf. Arendt Hannah The Human Condition, p. 63 f. Arendt provides a relevant discussion of the verb nemein and its relation to the institution of Greek law, in its spatial aspects especially.

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him flatly who he is and what he has done, it is as if the prophet has merely stopped to clear his throat. Not two but three kinds of wisdom touch in this play, as three roads had met where Oedipus clashed with his father. “A man may surpass one kind of sophia by means of another,” but both are distinct from the wisdom of Zeus and Apollo, who “know the affairs of mortals” (498-505). Prophetic wisdom stands (like Oedipus will in the Colonnus, once transfigured) on a middle ground between human wisdom and the wisdom of the gods.51 The second chorus pits Oedipus’ intellectual weight against this inspired knowledge of the prophet. The “decision” (krisis) will be resolved once the “saying” is “made unmistakeable” (501). This unmistakable saying, the kathartic truth of the prophet’s divine logos, will express itself in a form that has been straightened out, a clarification of the prophet’s “obscure” and “riddling words” (439). And so the chorus refers to this language as orthon epos, the word that is straight.52 But what force is it that might pound this crookedness in Oedipus straight, releasing nature, the city, language and thought itself from the sickness with which it has been contorted? It will be the intervention of this third wisdom in the first, though without the mediations of the prophet: the coming of a dreadful knowledge. “How dreadful it is to know when the knowledge does not befit the knower!” (316-318) – Teiresias’ first response to Oedipus. He speaks of terrible knowledge, a “being-wise” which does not pay a profit, to paraphrase Sophocles’ expression: ÔÃÓÔÃÓ ÔÏÍËÃÇËoÐÂÃÇËÍËÃËÆ¿ÊÅÒÃÉÅÉÓÅ ÔÏÍËÍÓËÒÇ. But taken more literally, we can hear in the language of this expression the sense of goals (telù) reached through a knowledge which does not free the one who knows. Rather, it binds him, in contrast to the loosening, slackening, or freeing motion of luein. Even Teiresias is bound by this knowledge. “I shall never reveal my sorrows, not to mention yours” (328-329). But whether he speaks or not, 51 52

See note 97, ch. 1. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Lame Tyrant” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 226 f. The theme of literal lameness and straightness, apart from a metaphorical correction of language, thought, or justice, as Sophocles clearly applies the idea, is essential to the play. Oedipus, as the chorus suggests in the first ode with the image of the wounded bull, due to the crooked lineage he originates, as Vernant has shown, is a “lame tyrant.” The tyrant is a god and a beast among men. He is isolated, rejects the rules at the basis of social life, placing himself apolis. In Oedipus we have the perversion of generations. He is originally other than he is, a bent figure. Mythologically, the tryant, such as Periander, is lame, like Oedipus, and possesses a “different, dancing gait.”

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“things will come of themselves, even if I veil it in silence” (341). If language is really so ineffective, as Oedipus, too, has claimed, and if there is such a gap between religious truth and human thinking, why did Sophocles, a fundamentally religious poet, compose his song? The human situation can be glimpsed from a point outside of it, its truth revealed, if and when this point places itself, however catastrophically, within man’s domain. It is an event no less essential to tragedy than it was to the Dionysian rite from out of which it grew. While Pindar’s mortals and gods intersected in the translation of the hero into immortal splendour, echoing Homer’s Elysium, in Sophocles’ lyric they meet in tragic conflict. Oedipus is this place where the time of the gods and that of humanity intersects. Tragic poetry is the misdirected language of its exposition. 53 Tragic Vision and Moral Education Sophocles illustrates through Oedipus man’s learning of an inhuman truth. 54 The development of tragic speech bestows a tragic knowledge upon the king, like that of Teiresias, a second wisdom through which a third communicates indirectly. Although the purpose of the play is not fundamentally moral, Oedipus does acquire what the philosopher might call the virtue of wisdom, though not as the result of sustained practice, such as the askùsis of philosophy, but rather in the spontaneous acquisition of vision, via the accidental pursuit of a veiled guilt. The Creon of the Antigone – twin tragedy of the intellect to the Tyrannus – learns in a similar way, as he explains to a chorus describing the typical circumstances of moral education, a situation which does not apply to his exception. He will not know what is happening to him until the education is over:55 Ah! Seeing justice seems to be like knowing it. Chorus: ÍÇÊqoÐÃÍÇÈ¿ÐÍÖÃÒÅËÂÇÈÅËÇÂÃÇË. But ah me … I will have a wretched learning. (1270) Creon: ÍÇÊÍÇÃÌ×Ê¿Æ×ËÂÃÇÉ¿ÇÍÐ. 53

54

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Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 163. “Poetic language ‘means’ by indirect suggestion and paradox as well as by (or in deliberate contradiction with) one-to-one correspondence.” See B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox is once again a great resource. On the contemporary significance of teaching and learning in the Tyrannus, he directs us to lines 31, 388, 357, 554, 545, 574, 576, 698, 839, 708, 1009, 1193, 1193-1195. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 113. The citation of this exchange belongs to Dawe.

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Creon’s learning is not the normal kind. It is not enough for him nor will it be for Oedipus to absorb this knowledge in the usual ways, practically, gradually acclimating his moral vision. Teiresias is of course right when he says that Oedipus “cannot learn from me” (333). 56 But then how can he learn? What kind of regimen does an education like his require? Since the resistance to tragic knowledge and the destructions it carries are naturally tremendous, recognition must be forced against every mechanism of defense that Oedipus and Jocaste can enlist. Divine knowledge appears here as a kind of truth which consciousness resists, unknowingly. 57 That the gods are in some sense Oedipus’ unconscious does not mean that they are merely a projection existing only in the mind. The resistance he mounts in his investigations does not oppose some fantastic primal scene, for instance, but rather something very much real and independent of him. The revelation of what the gods have in store, that speech which breaks “the veil of silence (341),” will be the recognition of this reality as a conscious fact. The true meaning of language, its knowledges, which shudder and break, do not begin in the mind of man. They have their beginning outside of him, only winding down to him finally. The recognition, we will see, begins with mania, and concludes in the reversal of a life and its essential life-view. It is a tragic rejoinder to the philosopher’s adequation of the knower with the divine object of knowledge. 58 In the case of Oedipus, to be56

57

58

He anticipates the problem of learning as Plato defines it in the Meno, and Aristotle at EN, ii.4, in terms of habituation. Cf. Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 218. This was an essential Greek problem even before Sophocles, in the poetry of Pindar, for instance, and can be traced back to Achilles and his teacher Phoenix in Iliad ix, though Pindar was the first to formulate it, as in Nemean Odes, iii, in The Odes of Pindar, “for it was thrust on him by the conflict of the aristocratic traditional education with the new rational spirit.” If virtue can be learned and taught universally, then aristocratic blood becomes politically devalued. Kierkegaard will return to individual learning and generation as an essential problem in the Fragments and their Postscript, where the possibility of learning, and especially of learning to be virtuous, takes center stage. Cf. Paideia, vol. 1, p. 28, on the force of the irrational and the limitations of education in Iliad, ix. Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 161. Segal says something similar: like the unconscious in Freud, the truth about Oedipus and Thebes is a radical alterity which seeps through the cracks in the reasonable structures of language, and lives. “Where Sophocles implies divine powers, Freud implies the processes of the unconscious.” See Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae. Cornford provides a general discussion of the history of the belief in the adequation of knower and known. This would

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come more like the gods through divine intelligence does not make a king. It expels one. Wisdom means self-destruction.59 Tragic experience transforms Oedipus’ vision through the eruption of tragic knowledge, in him, and with it the vision of the city he commands, as well as the Athenians who wrought the tragic stage. Tragic vision coincides with a social structure. Its lyric was part of a creative upsurge of “strictly political institutions, modes of behaviour, and thought” implicit in “the regime of the polis.”60 It is a consciousness divided between the old wisdom, which was unteachable, and the new didakta of a democratic reason and democratic virtue in which any citizen could train. In the Tyrannus, it is Teiresias who first announces the potential tragedy of knowledge – to know fully, beyond one’s measure, as a man, was to suffer. The divine truth with which Teiresias sorrowfully aligns himself from the opening scene has been set upon Oedipus. It is a contest between the king’s crafty truth and the uncrafted intelligence of the gods. And the speaking of truth, though Teiresias says otherwise, does matter. This tragedy is one of knowledge. The question of knowing, at the time, was no mere theoretical diversion, but rather an essential political matter. Oedipus embodies both the great teachers of the 5th century, Socrates included, and the student whose ignorance becomes the object lesson of the play, the instrument of its tragic purpose.61 Through this instrument the poet reveals the uncanny reality immanent in the things themselves of the city, its people and landscape, through which the divine logos shows itself. Teiresias had already tried to communicate this reality directly.

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apply to both the Ionian and Attic philosophers, ranging from the 6th to 4th centuries, where the mind and its object are formed of the same substance: Anaximenes’ air, for instance, Heraclitus’ fire, Anaximander’s apeiron, or, in the case of Anaxagoras, mind itself. And so the cosmos was by nature intelligible. Cf. Plato Republic 490b, 508de. Plato traces both the power to know and the truth which this power grasps to the single source of the Good. But the literal expression is Aristotle’s, who spells out this theory of knowledge in De Anima, iii.4. Cf. EN, 1139a8-11. As is typical, the late philosophical expression merely expresses a latency at work in the culture long before. For even more on Aristotle and the Greek background of this idea, see J. A. Stewart Notes to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, vol. 2, pp. 11-15, as well as H. H. Joachim The Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 169-172, both commenting on EN, vi.1. For early accounts of ‘homoiotic’ knowing by the senses, Joachim directs us to Empedocles, fr. B109; Democritus, frs. A77, A121 and A135. Bruno Snell Poetry and Society, p. 77. “All his searching and investigation destroys Oedipus himself. This is ultimate wisdom.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 31. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 136 f.

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Oedipus responded to the danger inherent in the more instructive kinds of speech with a warning: “You shall not get away with speaking disaster twice!” (363). But Teiresias spoke twice because he had not been understood (359, 361). The king cannot “see the plight” (367) in which he lies because he has not understood the prophet’s speech. He cannot see, or understand, because the knowledge Teiresias possesses cannot be taught. It must be undergone. Only in this way can there be the katharsis Oedipus seeks, can his soul and city be healed. We might get some sense of what this katharsis of intelligence involves with these, perhaps the most terrifying, of Teiresias words: This day creates you and destroys you. kÂqkÊÃÏ¿ÔÓÑÃÇÑÃÈ¿ÇÂÇ¿ÔÆÃÏÃÇ.62 (438, my trans.)

We hear an echo of the physical inversion of nature which struck the city’s fields and women: “The fruits of the glorious earth do not increase, and no births come to let women surmount the pains in which they cry out.” This inversion of generation concentrates itself in Oedipus’ fate, in generations crossed: brother-father, son-husband.63 The natural production which issued in death instead of life returns in Oedipus with absolute energy and again turns life on its head. The day of growth is the day of decay – the day of decay is the day of growth. This is the totally destructive depth which learning must achieve. We seem to hear the voice of Heraclitus sound here as the first scene draws to a close, and once again, when Teiresias identifies the “first of men,” now, as the last, “most cruelly rooted out.”64 Behind the veil of harmony is the unflinching truth of human strife weaving itself perpetually into divine patterns.65 Once the investigation into the identity of the criminal succeeds, Oedipus, blinded by his own hand, will no 62

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It is true that we hear of Oedipus’ birth, his creation, in the context here of the question of his literal parentage, “those that gave you birth” (ÍlÑqÃÔÓÑ¿Ë). But human procreation soon slips into something else when Oedipus asks Teiresias what mortals gave him birth. Teiresias’ response, that it will be the day, casts Oedipus out beyond the limits of the human, where he rightly belongs by dint of his tragic fate. “And he shall be revealed as being to his children whom he lives with both a brother and a father, and to his mother both a son and a husband, and to his father a sharer in his wife and a killer” (457-460). “For there is none among mortals that shall be more cruelly rooted out than you,” (427-428) the prophet tells him. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 201. There is a kinship between Sophocles and Heraclitus. Both impose the absoluteness of a logos upon man and both consign human knowledge to obscurity and contradiction. In addition to Jaeger’s Paideia, Bowra also points to the influence of Ionian ideas on Sophocles’ distinction between perceived appearance and reality, opinion (ÂÍÌ¿) and knowledge or truth.

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longer see what there is to be seen. He will have discovered nothing on his own. Tragic knowledge sharpens the contradictions in Oedipus to their finest point, between the intellect and this active something that “is never fully explicable in rational terms.”66 The play moves in the manner of a revelation. In this sense Jocaste will be right, when, dismissing the oracles, she councils Oedipus in the impenetrable uncertainty of fortune. Pronoia, the foreknowledge implicit in reasoned choice and moral responsibility, is impossible (978). Oedipus’ mutilation, however, enacts the renunciation of this reasonable human vision in which “the event” (977, 1080) of Luck rules, anticipating a god-like vision akin to the prophet’s: For he broke off the golden pins from her raiment, with which she was adorned, and lifting up his eyes struck them, uttering such words as these: that they should not see his dread sufferings or his dread actions, but in the future they should see in darkness those they never should have seen, and fail to recognise those he wished to know. (1271-1274)

What has come to light is Oedipus’ own terrible nature, which Teiresias has known since the start. The investigation into his birth reveals that Oedipus in marriage returned to the source of his being (1499), as through his criminal investigation he has returned to another beginning, the time of the murder, before his arrival.67 This was a terror which could not be learned through examination, or looked upon directly, but rather revealed against the mass of his intellectual will. Even Oedipus’ genius was unable to provide the conditions for receiving this kind of knowledge, nor could an intellect as desireful as his interest itself in pursuing it. It breaks in upon human thought from beyond the horizon, an unsought for numen which destroys as it enlightens.

Tragic Crime and the Onset of Mania What is it that forces this terrible knowledge upon Oedipus? Where does it draw its strength? In the first ode, the criminal is pictured by

66

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Sophocles’ view is “a product of religious and philosophical thought,” he writes, directing us to Heraclitus, frs. B78 & B79; Parmenides, fr. B1; Alcmaeon, fr. B1. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 149. Cf. 1496-1499. The parricide can be seen as a necessary complement to the incest, their father killing his own, (ÒÍËοÒÃϿοÒÅÏnÊ×ËÃÎÃíËÃ), to “have issue with the mother, from whom he himself had sprung.”

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the Theban choristers as a “bull, limping sadly with sore-wounded foot.” He “travels through the wild jungle and through caves and over rocks” because Zeus “armed with fire” pursues him (462-482). Oedipus’ name announces to us the “swollen foot” of this bull (oidein – pous: to swell – foot), as it betrays the intellectual rather than physical source of its injury (oida: I know).68 While Oedipus the bull flees this terrible knowledge which the prophet forecasts, “the dread spirits of death,” Erinyes of father and mother “that never miss their mark,” as well as the prophecies themselves, take on a physical reality. Emerging from the earth’s centre the prophecies “hover about him, ever alive” (481-482). The language of the prophecy is real, the stuff of heat, earth, and vapour. Like the life which this earth nurtures, a living which extends to human generation,69 oracular language is also alive (zķnta), akin to the vital flames of Zeus and his son Dionysus, but also Ares the destroyer. The life of earth nurtures that of language and, as allies of the divine order in which Oedipus and his city are thrown off balance, both have become distorted beyond human thought and control.70 Oedipus will be forced to adopt a difficult vision, like the philosopher in Plato’s cave. Learning to see man as he truly is draws the initiate of tragic knowledge into the hands of a daimķn deploying madness as an instrument of this renewed perception. Because human language is not built to house such a vision, the god communicates through language that is riddled, or bent, though the broader vantage of the play’s end reveals this derangement as the sudden eruption of intelligence. Oedipus unearths his true identity, an episode in the series of interpretations of the Delphic maxim (gnķthi seauton), making Oedipus an unlikely companion for Socrates and a precursor to his great Danish admirer. When Creon and Oedipus collide in the second scene, precisely this question of mental health and the integrity of knowledge dominates the exchange. It is a straight mind (orthos phrenos, 528) which judges straightly (orthķs phroneis, 550), says Creon, to which the chorus adds: 68

69

70

For a gloss on the linguistics of the name, see J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 322. Cf. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 127 f., 149, 183 f., 189, 264. An individual’s life is always referred to by Sophocles as ÀÇÍÐ, while the life which extends across generations is expressed in terms of ÄÍÅ. Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 212. Segal gives his analysis of this element (ÁÅ, ÕÆÍË) as divine, as opposed to the political ÕÍÏ¿, or land, over which the king rules.

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speaks “the word that is straight” (505). But in what ways can this straight-thinking become vulnerable to a crookedness? Distinguishing himself from Oedipus, Creon attempts to correct the debauched king with these words: When I do not know I like to say nothing. ÃÔqÍlÐÁ¿ÏÊÅÔÏÍË×ÑÇÁ¿ËÔÇÉ×. (569)

A more literal translation is helpful: “For with regards to that which I do not know, I love silence.” Oedipus is living proof of the consequences for not cultivating this appropriate love of silence. While “a mind that thinks sensibly cannot become evil” (600), judging poorly will contort a straight mind into a crooked one. The juxtaposition in the line by the poet makes it clear: ÍÓÈ¿ËÁÃËÍÇÒÍËÍÓÐÈ¿ÈÍÐ (−) È¿É×ÐÔÏÍË×Ë (600). There is one hinge upon which “thinking well – evil mind” turns. In the case of Oedipus one is in the process of spinning into the other, and as Creon advises, “time alone reveals the just man” (613). He has already beseeched the king to pause and “reflect upon the matter” in order that he “might give himself the logon” (583, my trans.). But Oedipus cannot think straight. He suffers from divine inspiration, a mania brought on by the gods that since Homer, through “mental blindness,” has brought great men to ruin.71 The chorus will soon sing of the shafts of passion which the gods send down upon those, like Oedipus, who disturb the order of Justice. The shape of his life has been redrawn to include the vague hands of a daimķn – possessing both mind and spirit – which only now make themselves known. Once Jocaste reveals a few more details of Laius’ murder at “the place where three roads meet,” Oedipus himself recognizes a kind of mania overtaking him, a “wandering” of the soul (psuchù) and a “stirring” of the mind (phrenķn) (727). This stirring (anakinùsis) is literally a motion upwards, a rising we might associate with waking up. Along with the ever-present images of the sun, Helios, “foremost of the gods” (660), this hint of Oedipus’ madness strikes us as the initial ascent of a kind of divine light, one which ignites an alter71

See J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 104, 112. Cf. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, pp. 116-9. Oedipus’ madness is a development in the Greek concept of atù. As Bremer explains, both atù and hamartia link some kind of error to mental derangement brought by a god. But this happens in different ways for different poets, depending on the degree of culpability assigned to the error, the moralizing of the atù. Homer and Sophocles are free of this moralizing, while Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Aeschylus develop the moral significance of atù as divine punishment. Aristotle’s error will be of the Homeric-Sophoclean ilk.

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native form of knowing in the ‘middle place’ between gods and men which Oedipus occupies. The development of these “torments [atais]” (1205) – a mania bespeaking the influence of a daimķn – climbs toward its highest pitch as the act of self-mutilation draws near. 72 Oedipus is an artistic-political experiment in the limits of law, the extreme situations by which the shape of law and the city it defines is established from the outlands of what is prohibited or excluded. The law that tragedy expressed was still in the making and these extremities of legal circumstance test the limits of what law can contain, of what legal speech can comprehend.73 Oedipus’ mania is a consequence of violating the divine nomos which first greeted us in the figure of the prophet. A divine pattern has revealed itself in the stormswept waters of Thebes, though the full extent of it is not yet clear. With the conventions of human law consumed by revolt, the disease and chaos of Thebes that Oedipus concentrates in his individuality open a choric space, a place without place,74 removed from both the land (chora) of the city and the humane earth (gù) that gods provide, through which the chorus of Thebans glimpse divine law: “The mortal nature of men did not beget them, neither shall they ever be lulled to sleep by forgetfulness. Great in these laws is the god, nor does he ever grow old” (868-872). This is a law grounded in the fear of Dikù. Its violation calls “shafts of passion [thumou] against defenseless souls [psuchas amunķn]” (893-895). By the third scene, Oedipus’ mania rises to the surface language of the drama. This passion he suffers, in which his logos fails, which only intensifies as the play continues, was typically daimonic in Sophocles’ time.75 An invisible power has been at work in his life, diverting him internally from his chosen course. “Would one not be right who judged that this came upon me by the action of a cruel deity [daimonos]” 72

73

74 75

J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 118, 163 f. Bremer spends time developing the centrality of atù, a god-sent mania, to Sophocles, and Oedipus in particular. His blindness is ÆÃÍÆÃË, indissociable from the act of the gods. The doom which he had to work out himself is simultaneously the accomplishment of the god Apollo (164). Cf. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, pp. 95-98. Dawe also goes through great philological lengths to show the genealogical connection between atù and hamartia in Sophocles and determines that the idea of ruin or damage which generally defines atù is based on a more fundamental cause of “mental blindness.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 339. Cf. Jacques Derrida “Khora” in On The Name. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 41.

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(828-829), he asks. Oedipus also invokes the interference of the gods in the figure of Zeus,76 defining himself soon after as hated by the gods (echthrodaimķn) should his fate work itself out in the disaster which looms.77 The chorus later confirms the background influence of the daimķn. “With your daimona as my example, yours, unhappy Oedipus, I say that nothing of mortal life is happy” (1193-1196, my trans.). Of course no god has intervened directly, at this point. All the action has arisen naturally from within the relation Oedipus bears to his world. But this is just how the irrationality of the daimķn worked for 5th c. Greeks, and that of Homeric atù before it. It is an exteriority which operates from within.78 Through its infection by this unstable difference the immanence of human reason and design is obverted, forced, ultimately, to recognize the authority of a divine Other. This alterity communicates itself only indirectly, through the reversed course of human affairs. Anxiety, an “exciting” of “his mind with every kind of grief,” is the first signal of the work of this unseen daimonic power upon Oedipus (914-917).79 As Jocaste supplicates before Apollo, bearing garlands and incense, she laments to the god that Oedipus is no longer a “rational man [ennous]” (915-916), but has been possessed by some irrational force. Presenting herself here before the god of light, so that Oedipus might be restored to “mind” through a “cleansing solution” (921), she goes on to describe his manic state more specifically. The king is “at the mercy of the speaker,” she says, “struck powerless” if anyone “speaks of terrors” (915-917). The cleansing which Jocaste speaks of is also a loosening or freeing from the grip of this fear. 80 Speech, like Oedipus’ curse in the first scene, possesses great occult power in this play. The magic of the word takes effect in physical reality. The word and the world – ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – coalesce in a way that is alien to modern distinctions between subject and object. Language is of the earth, the skies, and inside Oedipus is a terrible world about to spill. 76 77 78

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Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 738. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 816. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 38-42. Atù, unruly passions, pollution, and moira, and Erinye, are each typical forms of daimķn as linked to misfortune. It returns at lines 1190-1196. For references to the “active” intervention of a daimķn, where the passive, undetected influence translates into actual madness, despair, and self-destruction, see lines 1258, 1260-1261, 1300-1302, 1311, 1327-1328, 14781479. There is also the reference to atù at line 1205. The word ÉÓÑÇË refers us to both the ”lustral baths” through which the polluted are cleansed, and also the related freeing or loosening of ÉÓÃÇË.

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Though language also functions in a way to which the methods of psychoanalysis can testify today. It takes only a word to dredge the unholy monsters of the unconscious to the daylight of consciousness. Still, as we’ve seen, the unconscious here is not within Oedipus. It is a divine transcendence latent in the world of men, about to dawn upon him awfully. A key feature of the mania mounting in Oedipus will be its capacity for doubled or even tripled language, accommodating contradictory truths. The word in general in the Tyrannus has a “double power [dunamin diplùn]” (938), like the words of the messenger who visits Jocaste once her supplications are through, whose message will bring pleasure, but also sorrow (936-937). That language is always more or less obscurely doing two things at once is no accident, since there are two orders of thought and language intersecting, human and divine, in the ambiguous third wisdom which both Teiresias and Oedipus abide. 81 It is impossible to contain a tragic character like Oedipus within a single “network of meaning.”82 The characters themselves testify to it as the story unfolds behind them, and they gain the kind of narrative perspective afforded the reader. They become readers themselves, for whom the autonomous force of language is always playing tricks, even when it is language they themselves have spoken. The loosening of the signifying web within which Oedipus’ identity hangs is both a symptom and cause of this mania. In Jocaste, a precursor of this doubling or reversibility in language enjoins a scepticism concerning the oracles, and the limits of human knowledge more generally. The play is written at the height of the sophistic enlightenment, and Sophocles gives Jocaste the role of the skeptic for whom all truths can be argued both ways. 83 To be reasona81

82

83

W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 163-173; J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 117; Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 140. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 349. See Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 176 f. The Tyrannus was written at “the height of the sophistic enlightenment” in Greece. It is clearly about “conscious knowledge.” It “may certainly be read as a critique of man’s confidence in understanding and controlling his world through his ever-increasing power in the physical, biological, and medical sciences, and in the human sciences of language, politics, history, and so on.” Segal echoes hear a reading made earlier by Knox, in Oedipus at Thebes, a debt which he acknowledges, only to go on, more to my taste, to stress the significant resistances and blindness of Oedipus to “the radical otherness of the kind of ‘knowledge’ that

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ble, as she prays that Oedipus would be, though the terror of the word is fast upon him, requires submission to chance. Foreknowledge is impossible – that is the discovery of reason, the return to nous which it seems Oedipus may now make. “It is the event that rules, and there is no certain knowledge of anything” (977). Oedipus will soon declare himself enthusiastically to be this “child of Tuchùn (1080) – “Event” – the mother of a human time which streams freely, without significant purpose or measure. But this apparent return to reason is only the heightening of his madness. The elevation of reason is equivalent to a kind of madness. Jocaste’s faith in rhetoric and chance, which we see in her attempt to use language to persuade and bend chance to her will, along with her rejection of certain knowledge, dead ends in the unholy madness which peaks in her suicide, just before Oedipus, mutilating himself, mounts the crest of his own disturbed heights. This is the telos of the play, whose arrow, the chorus has told us and will tell us again, inevitably hits its mark (481, 1197-1201). The sickness of the city must concentrate itself in Oedipus, to be expelled with him. It is his service to them as sacrificial victim, an offering to the divine order of Dikù in which Oedipus plays a part that has come offensively loose.84 No priest is required to raise the knife, no maenad to tear at his flesh. Oedipus accomplishes this sacrifice under his own power, through the simple act of bringing the truth of his origin (sperma) to the light of knowledge (idein) (1077). He will bring his birth to light, make it appear (phanķ, 1059)85 through dialogue, as he promised earlier to “light up the obscurity” of Laius’ killer (phanķ, 339). But to uncover the mystery of his birth, the source of his life (sautou

84

85

he does not have.” This is “a knowledge to which the organs of consciousness – the ‘ears, eyes, and mind’ of line 371 – are indeed ‘blind’.” See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. There is good reason to interpret the tragic hero, at least partially, in terms of the “resistance model” of Dionysiac myth and sacrifice. He is both criminal and victim, guilty and innocent, human and divine. The offense is somehow necessary, if not to the gods, then to us. This is Guepin’s conclusion. To live means to kill, and to take life means to incur guilt. This guilt must be expiated. Charles Burkert reaches similar conclusions in Homo Necans about the nature of Dionysiac Religion, where the community incurs a murderous guilt in order to establish its own moral-religious limits, and then re-establish its innocence and the bounds of an ordered, human life once again through sacrificial violence. See ch. 4, especially p. 226. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox gives a complete discussion of the significance of Ô¿ÇË× and similarly derived words, at pp. 131-133, connects it with inquiry at pp. 120 f., mind at p. 125, knowing at p. 128, reason at p. 133, truth at p. 134, and teaching and learning at pp. 135-137, invoking the “atmosphere of the intellectual ferment” of the time.

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biou) in a line of generation (genos), he must sacrifice this individual being (1060).86 His self-sacrifice will ironically be the effect of this intelligent self-assertion, through which he accidentally tears the fabric of society within which the tune of nature, time, the gods, and human identity is harmonized. The ambivalence between the human and divine in Oedipus, a place where society ruptures, the excluded source of its health, the source of pollution, is also a source of salvation. But the fever must rise before it breaks. The excessively inspired language of the third stasimon points toward the mad presence of the divine in both Oedipus and the choristers themselves, who sing now of Oedipus’ divine parentage. Who, who among those who live long bore you, with Pan who roves the mountains as your father? Or was it some bedfellow of Loxias? For the mountain pastures are all dear to him. Or was it the lord Cyllene, or the Bacchic god dwelling on the mountain tops that received you as a lucky find from one of the black-eyed Nymphs, with whom he often plays. (1098-1109)

This has been a puzzle of its own to many interpreters. What to make of Oedipus’ hypothetical fostering or adoption by a number of gods? The choruses of Sophocles, we should recognize, do not stand outside the time of the play. Their perspective is neither that of the gods nor that of the author.87 Their beliefs change, they make exchanges and undergo the play as do the individual characters. In this ode, we witness the passing of Oedipus’ inspired mania like contagion to the choristers themselves.88 As Oedipus loses his right mind, swooning with the terrible knowledge of his birth, the chorus now swoons with him, as the intoxicating appearance of the gods in the figure of Oedipus’ fate similarly inspires the Thebans. The sickness which Thebes had contracted in adopting Oedipus as its king, while first literally bearing black fruit, expresses itself ultimately in the symptom of holy madness which they share with their debauched king, likening him to a god, while singing, inspired like the poets, of his fellow immortals.89 86

87 88 89

The play consistently opposes the distinctly separate lives of individuals (ÀÇÍÇ) from the generations and destructions within the processes of “Life” itself (Ä×Å), of “living.” An example of this is the cluster in which one’s “life,” at line 983, is distinguished from a “being alive” or “living” at lines 979, 985, 986. H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy, pp. 159-161. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 199. The four kinds of holy madness as Plato describes in the Phaedrus are that of prophecy, poetry, philosophy (as love), and initiation. While the madness of atê is clearly at work here, the situation is as always ambiguous. Both Oedipus and now his chorus could also be said to suffer from the madness of initiation, through which a mystical union is forged between man and gods. That Oedipus returns in

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His madness and theirs coincides with his removal from the human line of generations, choked by the knot his probing has tied in it. He is placed in the incestuous family of the deathless gods, in which time and generations are always crossed, going nowhere, where frivolity and luxury are the rule. But this chorus, after all, is mad.

Madness, Katharsis and Language The mounting enthusiasm and anxiety of Oedipus and his chorus, as well as the queen, anticipate the violent release of this energy in a concluding katharsis. What the effect of katharsis was is a question imposed on us by Aristotle. While he was interested in a katharsis in the audience, we are still at work inside the play. The language of katharsis is part of the drama. What it entails in Aristotle is a complicated and difficult question, one that will have to wait for chapter three. Here within the context of the drama we can claim a little more authority. The theme of purification sends us back to the king’s question at the beginning of the play. By what means will Thebes be purified? After begging for the rights of an old man to keep quiet, the elderly shepherd finally completes the story Oedipus has been assembling. Oedipus demands the shepherd “speak justice” (toun dikon, 1158), reveal the truth that can ease this crease in nature that has starved and infertilized the city of Thebes. This day will destroy him, Teiresias augured, and this katharsis comes at the hand of this unwilling shepherd, a few words from whom make a grand sacrifice of his king. The sacrificial blow which a few turns of phrase deal Oedipus is best described by this shepherd himself. While in the opening scene of the Tyrannus Oedipus stands like a god before his altar, he now lies prostrate upon it. Just before the blood spills, the shepherd warns his victim: Ah, I have arrived at the danger in speaking.90 ÍÇÊÍÇ ÎÏÍпÓÒ×ÁqÃÇÊÇÒ×ÂÃÇË×ÉÃÁÃÇË.

90

the Colonus as a prophet figure, like Teiresias, who is finally translated into immortality, supports the thesis that here too his unholy madness, like the pollution more generally of which it is a symptom, also has a holy aspect. Lloyd Jones, in the Loeb edition, translates: “Ah, I have come to the danger point in telling my story.” It is a matter of emphasis. While he puts it on the point of arrival, I put the emphasis on the speaking. It is in speaking that I have arrived at the danger, rather than being at a certain point in speaking.

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And I in listening. But nevertheless, one must listen. È¿Á×Áq¿ÈÍÓÃÇË¿ÉÉqmÊ×пÈÍÓÑÒÃÍË. (1169-1170, my trans.)

And so the shepherd and the king face one another, overcome together by their fear of what speaking will reveal. The revelation demands they cooperate in a speech which claims them both, unwilling instruments of its own momentum. Neither wants to continue, but they must. The shepherd because he is forced by his king, and the king because he also has been forced. Despite his resilience to the truth of his crime (he has set himself against it from the start), the irresistible desire to know in combination with the facts (to pragma) has overpowered his ability to evade it. “Ah, famous Oedipus, whom the same wide harbour served as child and as father on your bridal bed! How, how could the field your father sowed put up with you so long in silence?” (1207-1213). This is the pollution of which the house must be purified (katharmķ, 1228). The ambiguous doubling we have seen throughout the language of the play, between day and night, straight and crooked, true and false, life and death, sickness and healing, justice and chance, wisdom and foolishness, sanity and madness, etc., all seem to be rooted finally in a doubling of the flesh. Before taking her life, Jocaste “weeps over the bed where in double misery [dustùnos diplù] she had brought forth a husband by her husband [andros andra], and children by her child [tekn’ ek teknķn tekoi]” (1249-1251). But the “double power” of the poet’s word is co-present with the power of bodies to wreak a “double misery,” a power which is physical, expressed by other bodies, the husband who is also a son, the father who is also a brother, the wife who is also a mother. Oedipus is the “self-same seed [tauton sperma],” a seed that was sown twice in the same maternal soil, the father that grew up to kill his own (ton patera patùr humķn epephne, 1496), yet the wretchedness of Oedipus’ fortune is likewise a wretchedness of mind (tou nou), as it is for those, like the chorus, who must look on him (1348).91 This becomes unequivocal as the passive influence of the daimķn to which Oedipus and the chorus attest translates itself into a more direct and violent intervention in life and mind, which, in Oedipus, are so closely joined.92 The passage at 1258-1262 is “surely a locus for the way the 5th century Greeks thought about the irrational.” 93 91 92 93

Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1348. “How I wish I had never come to know you!” Cf. lines 1258-62, 1300-2, 1311, 1327-1328, 1478-1479. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 164. Bremer points out that both ÃËÅÉ¿ÒÍ and ÃÊÎÇÎÒÃÇ “are used in tragedy to indicate the sudden and destructive approach of, or mental invasion by, divinity.”

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And in his fury some god showed her to him; it was none of us men who stood nearby. And with a dreadful cry, as though someone were guiding him he rushed at the double doors, forced the bolts inwards from their sockets and fell into the room. ÉÓÑÑ×ËÒÇÂq¿ÓÒ׿ÇÊÍË×ËÂÃÇÈËÓÑÇÒÇÐÍÓÂÃÇÐÁ¿Ï ¿ËÂÏ×Ë ÍlοÏÏÅÊÃËÃÁÁÓÆÃËÂÃÇËÍËÂq¿ÓÑ¿ÐoÐníq kÁÅÒÍÓÒÇËÍÐÎÓÉ¿ÇÐÂÇÎÉ¿ÇÐÃËÅÉ¿Òq ÃÈÂÃÎÓÆÊÃË×Ë ÃÈÉÇËÃÈÍÇÉ¿ÈÉÅÆÏ¿È¿ÊÎÇÎÒÃÇÑÒÃÁÅ.

This wretchedness and mania, the ambivalences he embodies, cannot come to light outside of the ambiguous logos of the play’s tragic speech. In blinding himself, Oedipus avenges his daughters Antigone and Ismene, as a brother, against the father who begat the three of them. He has split in two, punishing the father, as son, with a physical metaphor for the blindness with which the father’s mind has seen and probed. Come to these hands that are your brother’s, which have done their duty on the eyes of the father who begat you, once so bright; he who unseeing, unknowing (ÍÓÆqlÑÒÍÏ×Ë)94 became (ÃÔ¿ËÆÅË) your father by her from whom he himself was got. (1480-5)

The ‘showing [ephanthùn]’ of Oedipus’ ‘becoming’ depends essentially on the grammar of kinship, as all the disseminations of meaning in the play have depended upon the potential play of the signifier, have had the structures of Greek grammar as a necessary condition.95 His madness is both the collapsed crossing of generations and of the symbolic ordering power which distributes them, the conventionalized space and time within which identity is established. The crushing vacuum that the gods leave in their wake absorbs them both. In the end, this katharsis accomplishes the straightening which Oedipus, his wife and the chorus have each in their own way sought. Once the truth is made clear, the dark figure of Oedipus has no more need of the light (1182). The inversions have been righted. It is no 94

95

In Oedipus declamation to his daughters, as one who neither sees nor “knows,” Sophocles significantly chooses the participle of historia, the proto-philosophical investigations of the 6th c. Ionians into an essentially rational ‘nature.’ Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 141. “Sophocles makes the ambiguity of language impinge inescapably on the ambiguity of personal identity. In the play language and kinship function as parallel modes of situating oneself in the world and so of knowing who one is. To know the truth of what we are, we need to understand the discourse through which we create ourselves.” Cf. Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 179. Segal, however, does not want to deny that reality exists outside of textuality, to make “the post-structural fallacy, reducing what can appear only through language to a solely linguistic existence.”

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longer the darkness which illuminates. It is no longer the sun which blinds. The paradoxes of nature along with his identity have been simplified.96 Once the truth is revealed, speech becomes plain. The only thing the sun can do for Oedipus is shine upon the world which he has defiled. But Hades too is prohibited. To die would be to return to the heart of his defilement, the shades of the mother and father he violated. Because Oedipus can neither look upon this world nor the one below, he chooses the middle place of blindness, no longer of this world but living still within it.97 Though even this habitation will be beyond the city, in the wild regions of Kithaeron (1452).98 The mountain where he was first left to die as an infant once again becomes his home, the same mountain where the maenads, inspired by their tragic god, perform their savage winter dance, suckling the young at their breasts, before tearing them apart and eating them raw.99 96

97

98 99

See Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 212. Segal analyses the relation of men as mortals to the divine element of earth, and with it sky, as opposed to the “land (ÕÍÏ¿)” over which man has dominion. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 356-358. As Vernant points out, in the Colonus, Oedipus occupies part of the ÊÃÑÍÁ¿Ç¿, or middle place, between the gods of the underworld and the gods above, chthonos and Olympos. The space in the play is divided between the sacred wood and the profane space through which access is given freely. Oedipus is always carried to and fro between them. The bùma, the exact frontier between the sacred and the profane, also acts as the boundary between silence and speech, between the wood where quiet must be observed, and the place where it is proper to speak. My interpretation of the blinding follows Bowra. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 179-183. The implication is that Oedipus was not mad, but “chose” to blind himself. Though this is the inference Bowra draws, I do not. Dwelling neither in this world or another strikes me as a fairly mad choice, governed by a paradoxical logic. Oedipus is left with no ‘place’ to go on living. Yet ultimately Bowra dissolves the difference between this self-possessed choice and the work of a ¿ÇÊ×Ë. Bremer, too, does the same. “Daemon and man are viewed as one awful entity bent upon destruction.” The subtle difference may be that the former insists on Oedipus’ self-presence in the act, though it was destined to pass, while the latter emphasizes Oedipus’ raving. The ample textual evidence Bremer gives for his view outweighs Bowra’s interpretation, based only on dramatic logic. For the influence of the ¿ÇÊ×Ë on Oedipus, especially his blinding, see lines 738, 816, 828 f., 1193-1196, 1258, 1260 f., 1300 ff., 1311, 1327 f., and 1478 f. See Euripides Bacchae 752, where Kithaeron is mentioned. J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 252-256. The suckling which precedes the maenads’ homophagy is said to be a symbolic mothering. Usually animals were used, such as fawns. The rending of the beasts and eating raw of their flesh signified a devouring of their own child. This “symbolizing” was sometimes accomplished more precisely by the devouring of actual children, stolen from the arms of other mothers. It is possible that more rarely some women did massacre their own children

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Happiness and Moral Wisdom Once the terrible knowledge of the third scene is secured, Sophocles interposes a few concluding words on happiness in the chorus’ final stasimon. He distinguishes between two kinds:100 the first, olbos, implies wealth and prosperity, the benefit of talents, such as a fine intellect or good birth, successfully put to use – what we might simply call good luck.101 There is another concept of happiness, though, that carries with it a number of religious nuances which the first lacks. In the fourth ode, now that Oedipus’ endowments and good luck have been unmasked as conspirators in his annihilation, the chorus sings of this other kind of happiness, of eudaimonia. The generations of mortals are always “close to nothingness” (1186), they chant. What man, what man wins more of happiness than enough to seem, and after seeming to decline. ²½ÐÁ¿Ï ҽпËÅÏÎÉÃÍËÒ¿ÐÃÓ¿ÇÊÍËÇ¿ÐÔÃÏÃÇÅÒÍÑÍÓÒÍË mÑÍËÂÍÈÃÇËÈ¿ÇÂÍÌ¿ËÒ¿ÎÍÈÉÇË¿Ç. (1189−1192)

In the same lyrical breath, the chorus explains the connection between this universal pronouncement and Oedipus’ fate in particular. The first of men has been revealed as the last. The Thebans use his fate (daimona) as an exemplar (paradeigmi) for all mortal men (1193): “Nothing of mortal life is happy” (1196, my trans.). Through his representation of eudaimonia, Sophocles reveals the last great paradox of the fall of Oedipus and the purification of Thebes. Oedipus’ arrow had found its mark, travelling correctly and with great strength when he destroyed “the prophesying maiden” and “stood like a wall keeping off death” (1197-1201). But this success (olbou) was not eudaimonos, “sactioned by the gods” (1198). Oedipus’ happiness was not a happiness, his eudaimonia, from a wider perspective, that of the gods, was dusdaimoni, a terrible fate (1302). Now relaxed, the

100

101

in this Dionysiac rite. The entire ritual is traced back by Guepin to the Egyptian threshing of wheat, a mythological metaphor for Seth’s murder of Osiris, and his rebirth and reassembling at the hands of his sister, Isis. Seth, the criminal, then becomes the sacrificial victim in expiation of his crime. Sophocles’ distinction, we’ll see in Chapter 4, mirrors Kierkegaard’s own between lykke and salighed. Cf. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1530, 1285. “So that one should wait to see the final day and should call none among mortals fortunate (ÍÉÀÇÄÃÇË), till he has crossed the bourne of life without suffering grief.” “Their earlier happiness (ÍÉÀÍÐ) was truly happiness.”

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web of time102 that had twisted into the knot of Oedipus reveals the paradoxical collision of happiness and unhappiness in the same man, a crookedness and a being-straight, a bending which destroys life, and a divine correctness of course which sustains it. In being destroyed Oedipus’ faulty human knowledge is converted into a more truly heroic mind. But this hero is also an outcast, without human abode, living as an animal or a god. Like the translation of heroes in Homer and Pindar, Apollo, straightening him out, translates Oedipus as knower into a kind of god. This divine correctness, foreordained, frames the contingent successes (olboi) of human life within the wider lens of a destiny they allot. Luck is a mere apparition, it only “seems [dokein]” (1189-1191), while the true fate in store is no more likely a eudaimonia as it is dusdaimoni, the worst of miseries. For a moment the awful irrationality which seeps into the human scene through Oedipus disturbs this veil of appearances long enough for us mortals to steal a look. But it cannot be squared with human categories, eliciting contradiction from the chorus. “To speak straight, you breathed life into me and lulled my eyes in death” (1220-1222),103 they sing paradoxically to their fallen king. Who Oedipus is and what he has accomplished for the city of Thebes cannot be communicated directly. He is too many things at once to be identified. To “tell the truth” or “speak straight” in a world where Oedipus is the paradigmatic man, we admit it, the chorus sings, sense cannot be made of any of this. We are left only with the horrible image of an Oedipus which the mind resists. Once the blinding has taken place and things have been “straightened out,” Oedipus is once again remarkably sane. The god-sent atù he has suffered, temporary by nature, exhausts itself.104 Now, alongside his daughters, Oedipus laments that he cannot give much advice (phrenas, 1511), not because reason fails him, but because they do not yet have understanding. We wonder what kind of advice Oedipus would have been able to provide his daughters, had they reached the age of reason by the time his horror had come to light. Everything in the play militates against the relevance of human reason, its wisdoms and prospects for moral education. The intelligent desire that 102

103 104

Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1213. “Time the all seeing has found you out against your will.” This is a minor adjustment of the Lloyd Jones translation. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1299-1302. “What madness (Ê¿ËÇ¿) has come upon you,” the chorus asks Oedipus, first seen after his blinding. “Who is the god (¿ÇÊ×Ë) that with a leap longer than the longest has sprung upon your miserable fate?”

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drives Oedipus so ambitiously towards his mark, the investigations it pursues and the choice in which it concludes, none of these operate under human authority.105 Sophocles perverts Heraclitus’ enlightened formulation, subjecting ùthos ambiguously to daimķn.106 Happiness is a matter for the gods to decide, whose self-same time invades the contingency of life onstage and determines every outcome, manifesting itself through the zones of opacity and incommunicability in the words men exchange.107 Returning in his idea of justice and guilt to a Homeric understanding, Sophocles contests the poetry intervening between he and the blind bard – the logic of man enforced by the gods is neither just in any moral sense nor is it discernable.108 Like Oedipus, we are seeds furrowed within a divine fabric, which, upon relaxing itself into its full display, extinguishes each protective fold for the sake of a brighter pattern.

105

106

107

108

See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 119. Oedipus embodies phronùsis, to which euboulia is related, as well as “that quality of deinotes to which Aristotle alludes at EN, 1144a25.” Cf. pp. 111-112. For a parallel in the Antigone, the only other tragedy, writes Dawe, composed in terms remotely as intellectual as the Tyrannus, see the chorus’ stress on the need for euboulia (1098), the messenger’s summation of events in terms of aboulia (1242), Creon’s description of his own dusbouliai (1269), Antigone’s description of her possible error as dusboulia (95), and especially the closing lines of the play, a “homily on phronein.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 37. Vernant emphasizes the ambiguity of Heraclitus’ formulation within the context of tragedy: ùthos anthropķ daimķn. The fragment can read, “it is character in man that one calls daimķn,” or, “that in man which one calls character, is daimķn.” This ambiguity for him is the essence of tragedy. Kitto, Bowra, and Bremer also subordinate character to daimķn, though Kitto and Bowra also cite Oedipus’ hubris as an essential component of his tragedy. Indirectly this points to the ambiguous identity between character and daimķn which Vernant claims. For Bremer, there is no ambiguity. Oedipus’ fate is through and through the work of a daimķn. Knox, on the other hand, insists unambiguously on the flaw of hubris. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 48. Cf. p. 43. The word hamartia actually occurs at lines 621 and 1149 in the Tyrannus. The sense is that of missing the mark. It also shows up in the same sense in both Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus.

Chapter 2 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles Introduction Aristotle, we’ll discover, pursues the same problem as Sophocles, the conflicted nature of reason and its relation to the irrational, though in a purely conceptual register, and transposed fully into the language of theoretical psychology. At no point before Aristotle do we find a theory of psychic conflict in exclusively conceptual language, apart from images or dialogue, in the absent third person voice of science.1 This leap in methodology is what makes him such an essential case, historically. His attention to lived experience, especially the concreteness of emotion and desires, as well as the many dues he pays to common sense, make his work as practically relevant as it is interesting from the standpoint of historical psychology. The story of how this became possible is in part a revolution in how the Greeks thought about the soul or psuchù. What had been anything but personal and immortal, two centuries before Aristotle’s time, was transformed into an immortal and fully personal thing with which the individual identified completely.2 The idea and therefore experience of one’s ‘soul’ was remarkably new, and 1

2

See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 241 f. “To ask: ‘what then is the nature of the ‘motion’ of God, and of souls absorbed into his being?’ would be, for a man like Plato, to exceed the bounds of logos. Here mysticism steps in. […] Nevertheless this is just the sort of question that the irrepressible Aristotle did ask. […] [F]or Plato, however far dialectic might go, the veil between it and mythos must always remain, since it existed in the nature of things. For Aristotle, to take refuge in mythos at all was nothing but a confession of weakness.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 73. On Orphism and the soul: “We may think of this Greek conception of the soul as beginning to develop in the sixth century. Its roots may well reach deep into the pre-historic strata of human existence; but during the sixth century the belief that the soul was divine

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ultimately a hybrid of Greek thinking and the ingress of foreign religious ideas from the east, across the trade routes of the Black Sea. Before Socrates (and the sophists and medical writers from which Plato drew in illustrating him, who also distinguished importantly between soul and body), we hadn’t had souls the way we do now. 3 And without that Orphic watchword: “I, too, am of godly race,” the Socratic care of the soul, with the infinite value it placed on the individual personality, would have been inconceivable, as would the science of the soul and human action Aristotle proposes a century later.4 For Aristotle, desire combined with thought is the cause of human action, and all human action ought to be guided by an idea of the good life, or what it is to flourish (eudaimonia). In order to obtain this blessed form of happiness, then, we need a science of the soul to lay out the structures of reason and desire, so that they can be ordered in the way that best disposes us towards this flourishing. This is an echo of the problem of logos as Sophocles imagined it in the figure of Oedipus, but the terms of the problem have taken on new meanings, been transcribed into the substance and language of psychology as opposed to religious poetry. Just as Aristotle’s thinking, we’ll find, in its early phases retains a trace of this divine transcendence in the irrational element of the human soul, Euripides gives us two shining examples of this psychologizing of the irrational within the tragedy of the preceding century, both in the characters of Medea and the Phaedra of

3

4

and had a metaphysical destination took on the intellectual form that enabled it to conquer the world, and this will always remain a decisive historical event.” Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, p. 160. Burnet, in the landmark essay of 1916, argues that Socrates’ genius lay in this re-invention of psuchù as the site of a moral self care, or therapeia. “Socrates, so far as we could see, was the first to say that the normal consciousness was the true self, and that it deserved all the care bestowed on the body’s mysterious tenant by the religious.” And so the philosopher’s care of the self, in Socrates, was originally modelled on the Orphic-Pythagorean concern for katharsis of a divine, immortal self. Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 6, 108, 181-183, and, more generally, Part iii, ch. 4, pp. 141-155 & ch. 5. Claus gives a more nuanced and painstakingly etymological argument for a general shift in popular 5th c. usages of the word among sophists such as Antiphon (v.) and Gorgias (Encomium of Helen); the pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus (fr. B191, et al.); and the pairing of psuchù-sķma in the medical texts, Airs, Waters, Places and Regimen I, which theorize a technù of the soul. Cf. pp. 182 f. Plato developed this psycho-physical pairing (The psuchù was “the psychosomatic physis of a man, amenable to therapy and doctrines like those furnished by scientific medicine for the body.”) into the opposition with which we are now familiar. See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 89. Orpheus, fr. B19.

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the Hippolytus: “I know what crimes I am about to commit, but my anger is stronger than my reason, anger which causes the greatest afflictions among men” (1078), 5 says Medea, or, in Phaedra’s companion monologue, “We know and recognize what is right, but we do not act on it, for we are in the grip of passion” (380). This overlap between the problem of the irrational as both the poets and the philosophers conceived it begs the question of their common, intellectual inheritance, especially concerning the soul in which philosophy located the problem.6 While Sophocles’ concern for human action and choice opened the space for Aristotle’s theory of the human, like all poets, he perceived reality in terms of “living shapes, not as concepts.”7 This chapter’s task will be to trace the lineage and trajectory of this transformation of ‘soul’ which allowed something like a full-fledged moral psychology, such as Aristotle’s, to emerge from the popular inheritance from which tragedy eclectically draws. Practical science, the science of man and human action, full-fledged in Aristotle for the first time in history, concentrates itself on the nature and care of the soul. By closely following this shift in the soul’s conception, from that of religious poetry to the philosophically scientific register of investigation and conceptualization, we can stage the background for the shift, more specifically, in the troubled relation between reason and the irrational. Following Aristotle’s own advice, as students of ethics we “must learn the facts about the soul” (EN, 1102a18-20). So before turning to the state of tragedy in Aristotle and its implications for his ethics and psychology, I want to distinguish his view of the soul from that of Sophocles, by churning the literary-cultural soil in which philosophy went digging for the roots of its ‘psuchù’ as custom and the poets had traditionally conceived it. We’ll find that the altogether mortal soul of Homer and the lyric poets, before taking on its personal, immortal character somewhere between Socrates and Plato, and then, in a compromised form in Aristotle, was forced into conversation with a belief in the divinity and immortality of certain individuals foreign to Greece at this time: the image of the Thracian theologos. 5 6

7

See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 126, 128. His translation. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 353, for more on tragedy – Euripidean in particular – as character psychology, containing a theory of psychic conflict: “Euripides was the first psychologist. It was he who discovered the soul, in a new sense – who revealed the troubled world of man’s emotions and passions. He never tires of showing how they are expressed and how they conflict with the intellectual forces of the soul.” Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 112.

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Homer: Opening the Path for Psychology As odd as it may seem to apply the term psychology to Homer, the story of Greek psychology begins with the father of poetry, whose proud achievement it was to distinguish the soul (psuchù) from the corpse it survives.8 Aristotle identifies Homer as the seed bed of tragic lyric, and Sophocles’ conception of the soul, we’ll see, also draws from this Urpoet. In fact, the Iliad and Odyssey provide us with the first model for a general psychology which the West has to offer.9 Socrates taught that the soul was “‘the intellectual and moral personality,’ and in consequence a thing of unique and priceless value,” wrote Guthrie. All Europe “has a reason to be grateful for his teaching.”10 This soul as Socrates redefined it was a literary conjuring, as far as Greece was concerned, and by no means a popular inheritance. Nor was it popularly received. Homer, we’ll find, understands by soul almost the exact opposite of the individual character that Socrates describes and Plato confirms as immortal and god-like. In the very first lines of the Iliad, Homer identifies the individual man with the body which the breath or shade of soul leaves behind, the husk on which the birds and dogs feed.11 Homer became a hero for a chthonic thinker like Nietzsche, not so much because of what is there, but because of what isn’t. In Homer’s two epics the reader discovers the significant absence of any interest whatsoever in a life other than this one. Homeric man hated nothing more than death, where the divine order, beauty, and strength of life, in dying, really did become carrion for birds and dogs. There was no apologizing for the ugly certainty of man’s future. “‘Do not try and explain away death to me,’ says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades;” Death is beyond interest, “for when death comes it is certain that life – this sweet life of ours in the sunlight – is done with, whatever else there may be to follow.”12 The idea that earthly existence was somehow false, a training ground or a shadow of some other realm, is foreign to Homer. Death is merely the shuttling away of the thin psuchù-image of the embodied man to the house of Hades. 8 9

10 11

12

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 136. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 1. Beyond the esthetic, and the intellectualhistorical, “there is a third side to the Homeric phenomenon which we might call the ‘philosophical.’” Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. xi. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Cf. Iliad i. 3-5; xxiii. 105. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 4.

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But what then are the qualities of this soul? Rohde, the first to till this field, qualifies the soul initially by what it lacked. We can work our way back towards Homer’s concept by stripping away the alien layers of our own thinking, until we get to the hollow center that is Homer’s psuchù. “It [the psuchù] is described as being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind.”13 All of the capacities we typically ascribe to ‘soul,’ such as spirit (thumos), mind (noos), and desire (boulù), for Homer appear to be functions of “the empire of the body.”14 There is no one term which contains them.15 These powers we customarily ascribe to the unitary soul are referred to through physiological metaphors of the heart, the diaphragm, or other bodily organs associated with affection and drive.16 Will, feeling and intelligence are expressions of the midriff (phrùn).17 ðtor, a seat of feeling, seems to have designated the throat, and kardia, functioning similarly, the heart.18 The closest Homeric analogue for something as abstract as our ‘soul’ appears to be thumos, an agent variously of passion, will and knowledge – though tied, like phrùn, to the midriff.19 But Homer’s use of thumos implies that treating ‘psychic’ phenomena more generally as manifestations of the literal body was already somewhat a thing of the past. Thumos, though still closely tied to the midriff, was an immaterial function. The terms of psychology had begun to slip from the body into a symbolic register, the germ of an

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 5. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 8. “Homer has no one word to characterize the mind or the soul. Psuchù, the word for soul in later Greek, has no original connexion with the thinking and feeling soul.” Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7, and chapter 1 generally. The soul functions are divided by Claus into ÆÓÊÍÐ ÊÃËÍÐ ÅÒÍÏ ÈÅÏ ÈÏ¿ÂÇÅ ÔÏÅËÔÏÃËÃÐ ËÍÍÐ, all of which can “denote human psychological agents.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Coeur, p. 43. See David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 16-26. Claus makes clear that all of the elements of the soul could exhibit agency, for Homer. But on my reading of him, and others already referenced, especially Rohde, thumos distinguishes itself in combining a relative abstraction from the body with a passionate, existential situatedness, compared to these other forces. In this sense it anticipates the ‘soul’ developed and studied centuries later by Greek moral psychologists. Although, as one of a number of forces and agencies that overlap in a person, it does this only barely. On the immaterial nature of thumos and its similarity to phrên, both in function and location, Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29 f.

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inner life somehow separate from the world of bodies and force. 20 Powers such as noos, boulù, menos (courage), and mùtis (cunning) are thought of as “independent, free-working, and incorporeal.” 21 They are of, but not precisely in, the body. Homer conceals this primitive intellectualizing of man and world in the dust and blood of battle, retaining its root in the body, while, at the same time, providing an abstract psychology that reflects the meaningful order he brings to man’s world, mirroring the orderly realm of Olympus. 22 He is the first stage of psychology and of European thinking. 23 Even those scholars who question to what extent the Homeric soulwords essentially designated disparate parts of the body admit that insisting on the distinction between the mental and the physical is to impose an anachronism on not only the poet, but the age. There are, of course, tensions that exist within the Greek words for soul.24 And we can elaborate on these tensions, using the language and concepts we have spent ages developing. But to fully succeed at this task would be to destroy the essential value of archaic psychology for us now. It offers an alternative model from the ground up of what it means to think and feel, the relation between an individual’s thought and feeling and the common world. To the archaic Greek speaker our modern distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ subject and object, were simply not possible. 25 We’ve already found this ambiguity, original to 20

21 22

23

24 25

David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 25 f. Claus, for example, contests this traditional understanding of soul-functions in Homer, taking Snell as an example. Rohde, he argues, misses the influence of the development of secular disciplines, alongside Orphic-Pythagorean ones, on the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the soul. Even in Homer, he believes, these soul-functions are somewhat free of the body, and together express a “life-force” which carries through the pre-philosophical literature, and enables, along with the Orphics, the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the immortally rational, personal soul. His study is extremely systematic, covering every single instance of psuchù’s usage from Homer to Plato, and cannot possibly be glossed here. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30. We might see the mighty Cyclops whom Zeus enlisted in his struggle to establish this order as a precursor to the spirit element of the soul, in Plato and Aristotle, which serves reason, a kind of divinity, in its rule over the appetites (the violence of the chthonic Titans subdued by Zeus in the realm of Tartarus). For a discussion of the institution of order in the Greek cosmos by Zeus, against the Titans, see Norman Brown’s introduction to his edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, p. 20. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 22: The lawfulness of Olympus will be infused into the human mind, which, in Homer, is constructed as a part of the order they govern. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.

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Homer, reflected in the world of Sophocles’ Oedipus, which the literature intervening between Homer and tragedy will confirm, as will Aristotle’s psychology as late as the 4th century. The nature of Homeric psuchù, essentially embodied and alive, resists the kind of analysis I am skirting here as I try to align his innovations with those static analyses of philosophy to come. Not only was there no one soul to contain the personal life we now identify with the entity, but perception, thought, feeling, these things we now think of as somehow ‘inside’ the person were for Homeric man implicit in the world each man shared with the rest. Seeing, for example, in the verb derkesthai, denoted a “visual attitude” towards the world, an image of the eye itself, as gleaming, or menacing, etc., and not the function of the eye or the mind as such.26 It is an objective look someone has which is seen in the eyes of another, or, other times, when the verb is used with an object, a kind of visual beam which falls upon it, or cuts through to it: what we might call a gaze or a stare. There is no firstperson seeing in the modern sense of a purely psychological function. Like the other verbs for seeing, it expresses outward qualities of an action, dependent on gesture and feeling, not an immaterial, passive function of the mind or soul, or the seeing or knowing related to it. 27 Mind (Noos) was still too closely connected to the eye and this eye to the world (as one body among others) to be itself a source of anything.28 Seeing (idein) and knowing (eidenai) were determined by their object. The same would be true for the passionate intellect of thumos with which noos is often mingling. The difference for both of them from other physical organs is so slight that they become merely other elements of the person, an aggregate of bodily and quasi-psychological parts which respond to the touch of the world upon them, the many forces which penetrate him, each of which are connected with specific actions, parts of the body, and types of experience (fiery menos in ambitious limbs, for example, or defensive alkù in battle, sthenos in the force of muscle, the kratos of the ruler, etc.). 29 Homeric man is a 26 27 28 29

Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 2 f. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 4. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 18. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 20. Cf. pp. 5-8. Like the disunity of the self or soul, the body, too, which opposes it as an organic whole, has not yet been thought of in Homer. “[T]he Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of the word; body, sķma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as melù or guia, i. e., as limbs. Again and again Homer speaks of fleet legs, of knees in speedy motion, of sinewy arms; it is in these limbs immediately evident as they are to his eyes that he locates the secret of life.”

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loose connection of living parts infused with bodily forces, drawn or compelled by the shine or menace of the face of things, behind which lay the surge and power of the gods, or by the gods themselves. He is not yet the source of his own actions.30 There is an added irony in looking for Homer’s psuchù since the soul in Homer only becomes active in death. It has no function in the living man “except to leave him.”31 So long as the body breathes, the psuchù lies within, imperceptibly dormant. Likewise, sķma, for Homer, is only the corpse.32 The life of the body is divided between the many forces and objects compelling the limbs, muscle, heart, eyes, and other living organs, which are neither our body nor our soul. As the body (sķma) is a corpse in which the formerly active limbs come to rest as a generic whole, the soul is a “feeble double of the self.”33 Not only is this soul not immortal, it “can hardly be said to live even, any more than the image that is reflected in the mirror[.]”34 Both psuchù and sķma, the separate entities of soul and body, as we conceive them, Homer considered dead. In addition to the departed shade, Homer sometimes uses the word psuchù when “unmistakably we should say life.”35 This vague breath unites the independent powers of the body in a generic “living.”36 It is through the more original sense of breath that the shade and this lifeforce were bound together. 37 The verb apopsuchķ, in Homer, meant to breathe out. When we die, we breathe out the soul, a principal of animal 30

31 32 33 34

35 36

37

Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 31. In other words, he has no spontaneity of the mind, will, or any purely spontaneous impulse of emotion. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 5. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 6. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 9. Cf. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 142. Rohde alludes here to Apollodorus, who described the soul as an eidolon or image with “no more substance than the reflection of the body in a mirror.” Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 31 (59n). Homer Iliad xxii. 161. Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Cf. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Homer often uses the word psuchù in the sense of life. Rohde recognizes this usage, but projecting the famous passage from Pindar back into Homer, discovers an indwelling soul in the person, freed in dreams and in sleep. Jaeger, following Walter Otto’s landmark critique, reduces this sense of psuchù to merely generic life. See Walter Otto Die Manen oder Von den Urformen des Totenglaubens. Claus takes this to the extreme, reducing all the soulwords in Homer to a mortal “life-force” which is nevertheless not identically a part of the body. Ernst Bickel Homerischer Seelenglaube, p. 259. As Jaeger explains, this connection, now natural to any discussion of Homeric psuchù, was first made by Ernst Bickel. Jaeger brings Rohde, Otto, and Bickel together in his discussion of the priority of

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life shared by both man and all the lower species. 38 The flight of the soul to Hades and the loss of this force of animal life easily coalesce in the physical metaphor of the breath, and exhalation.39 Homer’s world is a kosmos, “a perfect organization such as men try to establish in their earthly states.”40 But in certain isolated passages of Homer, such as the funeral games, and the nourishment of the dead with wine and flesh, as well as the cremation of the body along with a man’s possessions, weapons, etc., the belief in a life for the soul after death still peeks back at the reader, despite the poet’s veils, from a more primitive past.41 These, Rohde believed, were the relics of an ancient soul-worship, a more primitive, chthonic-daimonic cult.42 In Homer these rituals occur only on “special and isolated occasions” and appear to be only “half-understood.”43 Time has removed from us exactly what led to the abandoning of this animistic cult of ancestor worship, the

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40 41 42

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“breath” over “life” and “shade” in the ordinary usage of soul-words in archaic Greece. Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 77. Homer uses thumos, however, almost exclusively for this principle of life in the lower animals, preserving the language of psychù for man. The exceptions to this only reinforce the rule. It is retained by the Orphic poets of the sixth century who represent the soul entering the child on the wings of the wind. Here, the Homeric conception takes its turn towards the Socratic, and eventually the scientific psychology of Aristotle. This is an important point, presupposing the connection between Homer and the Ionians, especially Anaximenes, who had identified both intelligence and life with the air, and, as we’ll see in part five of this chapter, made the Orphic adoption of the traditionally Greek philosophical impulse possible, preparing Greek soil conceptually for the cultivation of a profoundly new and strange sense of psuchù whose coinage we attribute typically to Socrates: our ‘true self,’ a personal divinity and immortality attributable to the rational element in us which is in some sense independent of the body. Whether the soul is immortal for Socrates is an imposing question, and not one I pretend to answer here. But it was divine, rational, and apparently set against the normal desires of the body. Though Rohde’s study excludes Socrates for just this reason: a “doctrine” of immortality was not part of his teaching. Burnet’s, infers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctine of the Soul, pp. 158 f. More recently, Claus’s exhaustive philological study concludes that the Socratic “invention” of the soul as the cognitive and moral identity of the individual does not until the Gorgias become “the fully realized psychological version of the Pythagorean soul.” David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 183. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, pp. 12-19. By soul, Rohde apparently means any non-material double which survives the death of the body, but not necessarily anything denoted by the word ‘psuchù’ itself. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 23.

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belief in an animation of the souls of the dead after the body’s expiration.44 But when the primitive past seeps through the cracks in this new foundation, it does so as daimķn. Yet, for Homer, the arbitrary power of individual daimones is limited both by the notion of an ordered fate (moira) and by “the will of the highest of the gods.”45 There is a notorious suppression in Homer of these aberrant powers, part of no larger order, which disturb the authority of Zeus’ Dikù. The epic, then, provides the germ of the Greek dialectic between reason and a more primordial irrationality, which, in asserting itself, reason is forced to suppress: The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by the province of belief or superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its figures. The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did the spirit-phantoms fade away into the shadows.46

The epic poet was of the same stock which “in a later age ‘invented’ (if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy.”47 With the chthonic opacity of the daimones removed, a near perfect order was composed in which the soul-functions and their burgeoning metaphysics could become clearly ordered, and orderable. Aristotle’s De Anima, from this angle, is an amendment to Homer. In both Homer and Aristotle the soul distinguishes itself from inanimate matter, first as life, breath, and shade, as well as the spiritualized yet mortal body of thought and feeling, and, later, as “the form of the living body.” This “mental attitude was a distant threat to the whole system of that plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had laboriously constructed.”48 Tragedy, the art of terror before the unknown, would be the return of reason’s primeval opponent in Greece for the last time.49 Luther 44 45

46 47 48 49

Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 28. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. See also E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 23 (65n), 42, 58 (79n). Dodds echoes Rohde, while rejecting the notion that the Homeric Erinyes represent what was once an ancestor spirit. It is, though, an element of the ancient notion of daimķn. When daimonic madness ensues, it is an effect of some violation of cosmic order, a dispensation of moira. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 33-38. Now and then, as during the early stages of Attic tragedy, the dark forces regain their power, and the terror of the mysterious asserts itself once more. The wonder in one’s eyes, before the Olympians, does

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will reintroduce this enemy of reason to modernity, again, just as reason itself is getting a foothold. Kierkegaard, in his spirit, charged with both the light of Greek reason, the ecstatic daimķn and suffering of the mysteries, and the imagination of the poet, will stage the tragic contest on the invisible, inner stage of the infinite dwelling within him. The construction of this inner stage, however, requires that the self acquire a depth which, we’ve just seen, it never had in Homer. 50

Homer and the Lyric Poets: A “Psychology” of Conflict In what sense were Homer and the lyricists to follow doing psychology, addressing the same problem of the irrational that the philosophical prose of ethics and politics would later take up as moral science? As a rule, when a person is emotionally distressed, Homer neither names nor analyzes the nature of the emotion. The Iliad’s Agamemnon is a perfect example, overcome by distress, his army on the brink of ruin, and unsure of which direction to turn:51 Agamemnon lay beyond sweet sleep, and cast about in tumult of the mind. As when the lord of fair-haired Hera flashes, bringing on giant storms of rain or hail, or wintry blizzard, sifting on grey fields –, or the wide jaws of dread and bitter war –, so thick and fast the groans of Agamemnon came from his heart’s core, and his very entrails shook with groaning. (X, 5-10)

This is one of two examples of the strife of anxiety in the Iliad. The other involves the Achaeans as a group: So Trojans kept watch that night. To seaward Panic that attends blood-chilling Rout now ruled the Akhaians. All their finest men were shaken by this fear, in bitter throes, as when a shifting gale

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not affect the whole man as does terror before the daimonic. The eye distances the gods of Olympus, making them objects of admiration, peers, almost, more remote, but also familiar. This wonder and admiration for the Olympian order, which the disordering terror of the daimonic necessarily interrupts, issued in philosophy. Cf. Heraclitus, fr. B45, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic philosophers, p. 27: “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul (psuchùs), though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its Law (logon).” The first discussion of the psuchù per se as something with inner depth shows up in Heraclitus. As we’ll see, the lyric poetry of Ionia and Aeolia will be an important precursor to this invention of an infinitely deep, inner territory in man. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 38 f. This is one of two examples of anxiety (l’angoisse) in the Iliad given by Romilly. The other involves the Achaeans as a group, at ix. 4-8.

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blows up over the cold fish-breeding sea, north wind and west wind wailing out of Thrace in squall on squall, and dark waves crest, and shoreward masses of weed are cast up by the surf: so were Akhaian hearts torn in their breasts. (IX, 1-10)

Emotion is presented forcefully, but this force is matched by the simplicity, evidence, and externality of its cause. Homer divides a man from himself neither in thought nor feeling. 52 When characters reflect, Homer, in place of showing them in the train of thought, presents them in conversation with themselves, as if they were two. 53 Characters dialogue with their thumos, or their kardia. Where we should find a struggle against oneself, just as hesitation is broken by outside influence, either of the gods or companions, these errant forces come similarly from the outside, as Athena calms Achilles in Song I, restraining him from attack on his general, staying his sword through a psychic intervention. 54 A true division in the self is so rare in early Greek literature generally that a single episode in Homer remained, as late as the fourth century, the classic example of psychological torment. Rapping himself on the chest to stay the murders for which his heart literally cries out, Odysseus cries in reply, “patience, my heart!”55 The scene returns three times in Plato (twice in the Republic [390d, 441bc] and once in the Phaedrus [94d]) as a vision of the soul’s struggle with itself. More so than the lover’s torments of the lyrics, it is this moment in Homer which remained paradigmatic of psychic strife. But even this example depicts the heart as a contestant which comes upon man from without, not from within. The lyric poet, like Homer, “inscribes the life of men in their actions and reactions.” But the lyricists do introduce a few changes. They slow things down, concerning themselves less with history and more with perception and feeling, the aesthetic absolute of attunement to a moment, to an episode such as the close of Sappho’s wedding hymn: … like the gods … this thronged crowd drove speedily … to Ilium. The sweet piping flute mixed with the lyre and the rattling of castagnets; brightly the 52 53 54

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Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 19, 31. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 31. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 34 f. Romilly refers us here to Iliad i. 193200. “The Gods direct the game. And this fact rids the poet of the need to search for psychological explanations.” Romilly, Patience Mon Couer, 37. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 41.

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maidens sang a sacred song, the divine sound reached the aether … along all roads … mixing bowls and platters … myrrh and cassia and frankincense rose in the air. The women raised a cry, those who were older, and all the men raised a delightful song, triumphant, calling upon the far-shooting lord of the Lyre, and they sang of Hector and Andromache, like to the gods (GL, fr. 44). 56

Despite their unmatched sensitivity to impressions, the immensity of their feeling, Greek lyric rarely expresses the life of the soul. It was pithy, and less analytical than Homer. 57 With the exception of three minor developments, the tendency to avoid psychologizing character and action “shows clearly that no major difference has intervened since the epic.”58 There is not much mention of psuchù in the popular lyrics (elegiac and iambic poetry), and when there is, it is Homeric. 59 Homeric psuchù remains the touchstone, despite the growing depth of mind and feeling in the lyric and the eternities of sensibility and sensation they explored. There were three developments in the lyric beyond Homer which prepare the ground for the tragic problematizing of the relation between the autonomy of human thought and feeling and the force of the world and its gods driving man from without. First, some of these poets talk about themselves in terms of “I,” exposing their feelings. “Wretched I lie, dead with desire, pierced through my bones with the bitter pains the Gods have given me” (EI, fr. 84), sings Archilocus in one epode.60 Second, while Homer had occasionally presented hesitation, and even more rarely a conflict with externalized desires or feelings, lyricism in-

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57 58 59

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As cited and translated by Bruno Snell. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 62 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 46. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 411. Jaeger also confirms Rohde. “It is only natural that the poets imitating Homer should have retained his terms with their old significations.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 79. Claus gives an exhaustive list and analysis of its post-Homeric usage, and comes to the same conclusion. With relatively rare exception, the use is essentially Homeric. David Claus Toward The Soul, ch. 2. Cf. p. 193, his index to citations of psuchù, for references to fragments. Cf. Archilocus EI, frs. 2 & 68: “In the Spear is my kneaded bread, in the spear my Ismarian win, when I drink, I recline on the Spear”; “I long to fight with thee even as when I am thirsty I long to drink.”

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sisted on the fact that people often act in spite of themselves.61 Perhaps it is in this experience of paradoxical feeling that the tincture of the self first impresses itself on literature and thought: “Lo! I both love and love not, and am mad yet not mad” (LG, fr. 104), sings Anacreon. The lyrical self is a source of delayed or obstructed action, a place where the memory or hope of action thrives poetically, as a kind of frustrated longing. It is a place where tensions thrive between contrary desires, such as Sappho’s “bitter-sweet Eros” (GL, fr. 130), part of the unstable world in which the back and forth of Anacreon’s conflict flourishes. Sappho, for example, writes of herself that she is divided between the desire to speak and a shame that holds back her tongue (GL, fr. 137). Finally, even in the evocation of an overwhelming love, the place where lyric takes the most remarkable step forward, they have “reprised the Homeric principle which consists in describing the proper emotion by evoking physical symptoms.” Instead of sentiments, Sappho describes sensations, as the following fragment demonstrates perfectly:62 For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than the grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying (GL, fr. 31).63

The psychological in lyric is still the physical. It happens on the surface of things. The source of these physical assaults is still the action of the gods64 – a savage exteriority, as were the psychic interventions in Homer. Eros and Aphrodite are capitalized, unable to fit within the psychological miniature of the human breast or skull. The force of love which the lyric expresses, having, yes, introduced the “I” in order to evoke it even more tensely, is still centrifugal, directs the versifier out towards the lover or the god, not inside towards a ‘self.’ They are 61

62 63 64

Sappho GL, fr. 1, 24: “she will love even against her want (ÈÍ×ÈÃÆÃÉÍÇÑ¿)” adj. trans.; fr. 94, 5: “truly I leave you against my will (¿ÃÈÍÇÑ’)”; cf. Theognis EI, 388: “and, acting forcibly against his want, to carry much shame” (adjusted trans., ÒÍÉÊ¿ ÂqÍÓÈÃÆÃÉ×Ë¿ÇÑÕÿÎÍÉÉ¿ÔÃÏÃÇË). Cited by Romilly in addition to other fragments. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50. As cited in J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50 (my trans. from the french). Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 52 f. According to Snell, all of the violent emotions, for the lyricists, were the result of the action of the gods.

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always uncovering through their individual, lyrical person a greater source of value, such as Justice in Solon, whose “price” should the guilty escape “the pursuing destiny of Heaven,” is paid by their innocent children or else by their seed after them.”65 It is Solonian Justice which “paves the way for Attic tragedy,”66 generating “the very core of the religious doctrine” which it dramatized a century later.67 The lyrically ambivalent subject, divided in thought and feeling, anticipates the ambiguous innocence of tragic guilt which Aristotle, we’ll find, rethinks in the purely cognitive terms of hamartia.

Sophocles and the 5th century The tragic poet, Rohde writes, is “committed to the search for an adjustment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.” He must “assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called forth the dark and cruel legend of the past” to his own time.68 As we’ve seen, these ‘ages’ can be classed in terms of the proto-philosophical Homeric religion, well-ordered and perspicuous to the human mind, and an older, daimonic religion which threatened and disturbed the burgeoning rational order. No tragedian is as focused by this task of reconciling them as Sophocles, with Aeschylus still rooted so literally in archaic religion, and Euripides overtaken by the philosophical spirit which ultimately triumphed over the age. Though Rohde may have been too much a creature of his own time when he claimed that ancient drama was “an artistic product based on psychological interest,”69 he does have his reasons. In posing the modern question of rational autonomy, the tragic poets must problematize human agency, and, by implication, venture into the realm of psychology. Individual psychology springs first from the moral quandary tragedy presented. The Homeric soul remains an essential element in the popular conception of the soul in the classical age with which both academic philosophy and tragic poetry would have to contend. Along with Homeric ‘life’ the idea of the soul in the fifth century confused several other notions. The influence of a new form of religious belief contradicting 65

66 67 68 69

Solon EI, fr. 13, 28-32. Cf. fr. 4, 14-16. “Justice, who is so well aware in her silence of what is and what hath been, and soon or late cometh to avenge.” Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 64. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. 144 f. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 422. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 421.

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Homer’s already shows itself in the poetic and philosophic belief that the unconscious activity of dreams and visions manifests a divinity within man.70 The Homeric shade also mingled with the notion of the living corpse which Homer had done his best to erase. Pindar can speak of Hades conducting the mortal bodies of the dead to his underworld estate and early Greek vases and later Euripides speak to us of the psuchù dying.71 Add to this medley the idea of the soul as the living self which appears to have cropped up first in 6th c. Ionia on the graves of sailors, for example, and the writings of Anacreon, and Semonides,72 and you have a mess of conceptual indistinction. The concept of ‘soul’ in Sophocles, however, is much narrower in scope and more easily managed. There is no mention of the living corpse, and no immortal, divine substance repressed within the body. The influences bearing on Socratic thinking about the soul’s personality and divinity had not penetrated the popular, earth-bound quarter of tragedy.73 It is most similar to the initially Ionian and later Attic conception of the living self, a trope for what in Homer went by the name thumos.74 Sophocles’ psuchù can be the seat of many capacities, like courage, passion, pity, anxiety, and appetite, but before Socrates, and while he perambulated Athens, the soul was seldom, if ever, the seat of reason.75 When the soul did constitute a self, it was a bodily self whose imagination was strictly emotional. It did not experiment in or identify with a purely rational reality independent of the body. The 70

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E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 135 (3n). This belief shows up in a fragment of Pindar’s, as emphasized by Rohde. Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr. 131. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415. Rohde also directs us to Xenophon Cyropaedia, 8.7.21, Plato Republic, 571d, and Aristotle Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138 (18n). Dodds cites IG, I2.920; Euripides Helen, 52; Euripides Daughters of Troy, 1214; Pindar Olympian Odes, 9.33 in The Odes of Pindar. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. This notion repeats in Sophocles. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 64. It is used interchangeably with body (sķma) at line 643 to refer to the person of Oedipus. David Claus provides a close analysis of psuchù in the tragic poets. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 69-85. He concludes that barring some exceptional instances in Euripides, the soul has not yet, in the tragic lyric of the 5th c., taken on the qualities of personal character which become essential to its development in Socratic and post-Socratic thought. See discussion on pp. 97 f. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139. Dodds follows Burnet’s lecture, “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul.” This language would have been extremely unusual to the ear of the 5th century Athenian, as Aristophanes satire in the Birds and Clouds attests.

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soul in Sophocles is no reluctant prisoner of the body; it is the “life or spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there.”76 And so Sophocles can speak of the soul as dwelling in the blood.77 It may be possible, however, to extract even a little more detail, approaching something like technique, from Sophocles’ notion of psuchù. In almost proto-Platonic fashion Sophocles’ Antigone contrasts the emotive self (psuchù) with two other elements of character: intellectual judgement (gnomù) and moral judgement (phronema).78 Phronema seems to act as a middle term involving both, a kind of gate passing between them, as Plato’s thumos will act as a mediator between the purely reasoned activity of the logistikon and an unreasoning epithumia. Of course in Plato, and then Aristotle, all three elements are inscribed within a single psuchù. Here the psuchù is part of loose talk about the self which aligns it with two other elements in a suggestively philosophical way. This only further demonstrates the contrast, since the psuchù itself is one of the elements, as was thumos in Homer, which also had a sort of umbrella function psychologically. A single psuchù comprising the whole of a man is clearly absent. Sophocles, more than any other poet, maps the interstices between the germ of an inner life of freedom and rational responsibility, on the one hand, developed by philosophy, and an opposing religious necessity, a divine dikù contesting this autonomy of reason. He does this, however, without any official training in either theology or philosophy.79 The reasoned element for Sophocles would not have been the philosopher’s psuchù, but, like Homer, most often the thumos, and in some cases nous.80 The multifaceted entity of thumos along with the other abilities typical of human life could not by any account be interpreted as the single substance of individual character that the soul becomes in the human-scientific imaginations and moral psychological techniques of 4th century philosophy. The moral substance of a man which the educations of reason sculpt, imposing the shape of it’s harmonies from without through a reason within, was not part of Sophocles intellectual repertoire. Neither Homer nor the lyric poets showed any sign of its psuchù, and it was they who conceptually set the tragic stage. 76 77

78 79 80

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139 E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 159 (27n.). ÒÍÓÊÍË ÃÈÎÇËÍÓÐ ¿ÃÇ ÖÓÕÅпÈÏ¿ÒÍË¿ÇÊ¿ Sophocles Elektra, 785. ÖÓÕÅËÒÃÈ¿ÇíÏÍËÃÊ¿È¿ÇÁË×ÊÅË. Sophocles Antigone, 176. Rohde Psyche, p. 431. See Romilly’s discussion of Sophocles, generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer.

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Character Psychology and Strife in the Soul How then can we speak of a tragic psychology without a psuchù to identify the thinking person?81 As we observed in chapter one, the inner life of thought and feeling and the outer realm of nature and the gods intertwined in Oedipus’ world. The answer to this question lies outside of the notion of soul, then, in the strict sense. It is found instead in the literary evolution of the idea of personality, or character, with which Socrates aligned the psuchù. It was the personal nature of Socrates’ soul that revolutionized the concept, and not the immortality assigned it by his student, Plato.82 As we’ll see with Sophocles, we need not have a soul to explore character and disposition, though the technique of the self which philosophy introduces will require it. While Homeric man “is not yet thought of as the source of his act,”83 the tragic poet rethinks action in order to extend as far as his abilities and inclination allow the degree to which individual responsibility can be thought. A new interest arose in the 5th century in what drives man from within, and tragedy was the literary genre most committed to this reflection on the sense of human acts.84 It examined through figures like Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ajax, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Aeschylus’ Clythemenstra the potentially disastrous conflict between the old mysteries and violence on the periphery of the city (ritually explored by adolescent boys as ephebes of Artemis the huntress, or the bacchant women on the mountain of Kithaeron) and the new reason, demarcating this outland of violence from the sanctioned order of the polis. Tragedy’s manner of expression was the first attempt to animate the individual agent artistically. This manner – the mask – forced the inner regions of this persona into the open air. The art form empha81

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 45. Romilly asks this question of Homer, which given her work, would extend just as well to the lyric poets. It is in tragedy that something which we might legitimately begin to call psychology first shows up. But even here the nature of the soul is not at issue, as it will be for philosophy. This is why Jaeger’s Paideia objects to Rohde’s study, which excludes Socrates for this reason: a doctrine of immortality was not part of his teaching. See Guthrie’s introduction to Psyche for the reply to Jaeger’s objection (and also Burnet’s, in “the Socratic Doctrine of the Soul,” which is the same – though Guthrie doesn’t mention it). Cf. Charles Burnet “Socratic Doctine of the Soul,” pp. 158 f. Burnet infers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. In addition, see note 39, ch. 2. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 45 ff. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 53.

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sized the collective significance for the city gathered in the theatre. It instinctively turned away from the intimacy of personal sentiment explored earlier by the lyric toward the objective potency of action.85 Sophocles was especially well placed for the literary development of ‘character’ which could only proceed once religious explanations of human action were on the wane. This psychological interest and the literary developments that accompany it are grounded in an unprecedented interest in disposition as a source of human action. 86 This finally is the sense in which psychology begins first with the moral deliberations of tragic lyric, and ethics, the science of human action first opens the doors to interiority.87 It doesn’t matter that Oedipus never chooses, that his character doesn’t affect the action, that the serious psychological conflicts are always objective ones between opposing characters, character and situation, character and the gods, never a matter of characters at odds with themselves. The way that he undergoes the action is a powerful comment on both his character and the others with which he collides, such as Teiresias, and Creon. As we saw in the first chapter it is not as a source of action – and so, in a way, we are still with Homer – but rather as a reverberation of it that an innovative psychological nuance first takes the stage of Greek life in Sophocles. Suffering follows character. Though he doesn’t choose his path, or have an interesting inner life, Oedipus the king is irreplaceable, caught in the web of his past and future, and, as a literary figure, the complex of tradition. Because of who he is, he suffers in an exemplary way. This occupation with ethical categories such as character, disposition, action, and the moral debates between characters, the language of which tragedy borrowed from the legal and political discourse of rhetoricians and sophists occupying the city, introduced a level of psychological conflict unheard of in any previous genre, even more radical than that of the lyricists.88 But Sophocles never analyzes the ‘nature’ of this conflict. He does not inquire into its mechanism. Feeling (more often than not, suffering and despair) is presented concretely, actively, as living in a way that still recalls Homer.89 Sophocles doesn’t explore 85 86

87 88 89

J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 54. See Winnington-Ingram Sophocles: an Interpretation. Romilly, additionally, argues that the invention of the third actor was necessary in order to stage the debate between characters qua characters. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 74 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 76 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 81.

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‘who’ the character IS, his substance, or soul, but rather the moral compass they carry, how they act, what kind of person they want to be.90 Though the individual pain is real, resolution comes when one yields to another, to a god, not, as with the philosophers to some, as Aristotle, we’ll find, codifies for the first time into theory, when one conquers oneself. No one educates Oedipus and he never struggles with himself internally. This could be said of Sophocles’ characters in general. They are never uncertain, or wavering in their actions.91 They are unified and steadfast as characters. Aristotle was right: through their action, they represent types of thinking. There are occasionally conflicting emotions, but Sophocles consistently refuses to give his protagonists divisions in the soul or self.92 They don’t have the formal nature93 which a soul provides, which the philosophical mind will impute, and which 90 91

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 82. See Sophocles Ajax, 457: “And now what to do,” Ajax asks, return home, or go to Troy. But this is a false problem. The decision, like all decisions in Sophocles, has been made ahead of time. It is oratory. Both choices are unsatisfactory. He has already decided to die. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 83. See Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 673675 (re: fluctuations of anger), 1303-1305 (re: the mix of fear and curiosity). In The Trojan Women, Romilly observes, Hyllus acts despite himself. See the final scene, where he burns his father, Heracles, on the pyre, and resolves to marry Iole, the woman responsible for his mothers’ death and his father’s stricken condition – especially lines 1202-1208, 1230-1231. As Dodds observes, line 176 of Antigone suggests otherwise, a hint perhaps of the philosophical conception to come. Romilly also cites this line as evidence for a possible counter-claim, in order to point out that these are not divisions in the soul, but rather in the person, which includes the soul. Still, it pushes the boundary of her claim that no such division exists, without necessarily contradicting it. See C.E Hadjistephanou The Use of Physis and its Cognate in Greek Tragedy with a Special Reference to Character Drawing. Hadjistephanou, in a systematic study of Sophocles’ plays, concludes that physis is used consciously to “to describe character either on the basis of duties and rights, or by virtue of general characteristics, or by ascribing to them individual traits, his main concern being to portray characters of noble birth and nature, and characters who display hubristic behaviour and are led to destruction” (Abstract). Only class characteristics are relevant to our question, and all of these are closely associated with the idea of birth, especially in cases of nobility. “Nobility of nature always presupposes nobility of birth” (pp. 30 f.). The original meaning from out of which the physis of individuals, in terms of character traits, develops, likewise, is birth (p. 9). The usage breaks down into six clear-cut categories relevant to character drawing: “birth,” “suggesting social rank and status” which is tied to birth, “growth,” suggesting stages of it, as in the growth of wisdom, “the ‘growth’ of man” as a species of life, “the differentiation of the sexes,” “‘character’ or ‘nature’” which is either noble or of another specific trait. There are no instances of “nature” used to describe something like the soul or essence of

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any moral psychology in the full sense requires (as a moral substance to mold).94 Aristophanes’ satirizing of Socrates’ language is our best witness to how odd the language of the soul applied to the ‘true self’ of normal consciousness would have seemed not only on stage, but in the mouth of the ordinary Athenian.95 If we look at the plays themselves, we see that thumos, an element of the Platonic soul, in the Tyrannus strikes the soul like an arrow from without.96 Emotion, even speech and thought, like the words of prophecy emanating from the earth or the appeal of “the land (47-48)” which calls Oedipus its saviour, like tragic knowledge, issues from a divine exteriority latent in all things. Emotion such as thumos is there to justify or explain character and action, never as a point of independent interest. The thumotic, for example, for Oedipus’ chorus, are the unjust. It is with arrows of thumos that the Gods punish these people. Emotion has an essentially dramatic significance.

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man, as found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see Hadjistephanou’s appendix of extraneous usages of physis). See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 2, pp. 37, 88. Foucault breaks the art of the self down to ontology, deontology, ascetics, and teleology. It is ontology which gives us the ‘what’ that we are to shape. Also, in Oedipus Rex, for example, the soul (psuchù) shows up three times, at lines 64, 727, 894. In none of these places does it have a ‘psychological’ significance. It merely refers, as was common, to living people, with an emphasis on emotional life. There are two noted exceptions in the rest of the corpus, both in the Philoctetes, one of his latest plays. At line 55, a psuchù is said to be capable of being entrapped by words, suggesting it is the seat of knowledge. At line 1013, “the mean soul of Odysseus peering through crannies” suggests it is the seat of character. Burnet cites both as exceptions to the rule, in the 5th century, where in “no other place is it even suggested that the ‘soul’ has anything to do with knowledge or ignorance, goodness or badness, and to Socrates that was the most important things about it. Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 156 f. Aristophanes Birds, 1555; Clouds, 94. Aristophanes plays on the ambiguities between the traditional Homeric meaning of “ghost” and the Socratic identification of the soul with the individual personality. Cf. Burnet, “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 157, 160 f. To care for the soul would typically have meant to be physically careful, to “mind one’s ghost.” Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 894: ÆÓÊÍÓÀÃÉÅÒÃÓÌÃÒ¿ÇÖÓÕ¿Ð (shafts of passion hitting souls). Here, the Chorus uses “souls” to mean individual people, who will suffer passions, if the gods punish injustice; 63-4: ÃÊÅÖÓÕÅ. Oedipus uses soul here to refer to the self which mourns, “equally for the city and for myself and for you.” In both cases of use the “soul” is generically emotive; 727: ÖÓÕÅÐÎÉ¿ËÅÊ¿. Here Oedipus refers to the loss of balance, emotionally, distinct from the stirring of the mind also named. This coincides with the mourning and the passions in the first two examples.

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Sophocles does speak of man’s ‘nature’ in one sense. The ‘growth’ of man – his origins in a specific type of birth – which characterizes his physis as a member of one of life’s species, as animals and plants also distinguish themselves specifically with respect to life, implies that man has certain natural limits which he should not transgress.97 Man’s nature is distinct from the gods. The fortune of a character can stand or fall on whether or not this limit is respected, namely, on the pursuit of sophrosynù and the avoidance of hubris.98 Physis in this sense is still tied closely to natural growth. The word is never used to characterize a god, as part of a class or in any other way, since, for Sophocles, gods are perfect and cannot ‘grow’ as men do.99 Physis as growth exemplifies the vegetal in man, as much as it is a word which in its Ionian modifications points to what this nature, in particular, might be. As with the cult of Dionysus from which tragedy grew, Sophocles understood human life dialectically as part of a more primordial living in which all things that grow and whose lives are eventually spent are embedded.100 There is no content to man’s physis other than this imperfection which being physikos represents. We are still a long way conceptually from Aristotle’s devising the universal essence of man, a soul defined by the unborn governance of reason over the unreasoned animal elements with which it has been forced into collaboration. What then will Aristotle as the first scientist of man make of this Dionysian art that had insisted so awfully on man’s inevitable part in the violences of nature, on the destruction of the human categories ordering sexuality and violence, as well as Homer’s distancing of men from the gods, especially in matters of reason?101 If tragedy is to be allowed back into the city from which Plato barred it, the tragic view of reason will have to yield to the universal pretensions of philosophical 97

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See Sophocles Ajax, 758-761, and, regarding the use of reason, Antigone, 683-684 with 720-721. As cited by C. E. Hadjistephanou in The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 53. C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 54. C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 25n1. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii. Kerenyi explains what on page 239 he calls the “dialectic” immanent in the Dionysian outlook. For Homer, mortality was something to enjoy while strong, and fortune was with you, and then lament as life was taken away. In the Dionysian religion, death and life intertwine in the ‘indestructible living’ of organic nature, capable not only of physical reproduction, but of ecstasies and visions. It had essentially divine properties.

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knowledge.102 As a part of a universally rational nature, even Oedipus, the most tragically excommunicated of figures, like all men, is governed by its logos. What he is – ‘human’ – will have to be redescribed in a way that makes him, as much as any part of nature, and much like a patient is for a doctor, intelligible.103 Before turning to Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, where he pursues this science of the soul and human action, we first need to examine the Poetics’ complementary interpretation of tragedy.

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Aristotle’s sympathy for tragedy ought to be seen within the context of Plato’s rejection of the art form. See Republic, 606b, specifically on the threat of tragic emotion. Aristotle claims that rather than exacerbating the emotions of pity and fear, tragic provocation mollifies them. See G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 176-179. Lloyd provides a discussion of the relation of the doctor (iatros) to the natural scientist (physikos) in Aristotle, and the naturalizing of medicine in terms of the physis of the Ionian philosophers. For Aristotle, the investigation of first principles and causes of disease, as part of nature, is the job of the natural philosopher as well as the doctor. The best doctors must derive their principles from the study of nature. Cf. Aristotle OS, 436a17, and OB, 480b22-4, as cited by Lloyd.

Chapter 3 Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy Introduction Aristotle’s Poetics, an incomplete set of lecture notes, is the first literaryphilosophical analysis of tragedy, the origin of aesthetics and the tradition of literary criticism to come. It gives us an unprecedented picture of philosophy’s reception of the Dionysian art and the problem of the irrational it presented in the violent and disordered life it brought to the Greek stage. But Aristotle’s Poetics was written about 70 years after Sophocles’ and Euripides’ death, and more than a century after Aeschylus had exited life’s stage.1 Aristotle, then, is an audience member in an empty theatre, whose stage has been abandoned. As a commentator on a dramatic art that is no longer being performed, Aristotle’s place at criticism’s hermeneutical beginning is doubly ironic, since it was the rise of a philosophical (or, maybe more specifically, ‘sophistic’) sensibility in fifth century Athens that put serious tragic lyric to death. Aristophanes in the Frogs (406 B. C.) was the first to announce the death of tragedy: Right it is and befitting Not, by Socrates sitting, Idle talk to pursue, Stripping tragedy-art of All things noble and true. (1491-1495)2

Aristophanes is writing about Euripides, whose ear for him was too inclined towards the Socratic. It was through the influence of philosophy upon tragedy and Greek life that the art form was corrupted and forced into decline. 3 By examining what Aristotle makes of katharsis 1 2 3

John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 11. Trans. by Snell. Bruno Snell The Discovery of the Mind, p. 113. See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 113. “The art had in fact been stripped of its very existence, and it cannot be denied that philosophy was responsible for its destruction.”

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and hamartia in the Poetics we can better situate his ethics and the relevant psychology in relation to tragic lyric, and determine tragedy’s legacy within philosophy’s moral and political science of the human soul. Aristotle’s Poetics devise a place for a sane Oedipus whose tragic blow does not deprive him of self-knowledge – of who he is. In doing this he redefines two crucial components of the tragic scheme: hamartia and katharsis. Hamartia becomes unambiguously Oedipus’ own, part of a rational, anthropocentric world, something we can comprehend and potentially control, as katharsis lapses into a pleasurable relief of emotion, no longer capable of spontaneously transforming the individual from without as it had before in the ecstasies of religious rite and the mystery cults of gods like Dionysus, as well as on Sophocles’ stage. Aristotle, by, contra Plato, finding a place for tragedy within the city walls, philosophically adopts the problem of irrationality irrupting through Oedipus and the earth (gù, chthon) beneath Thebes, ironically preparing a moral psychological interpretation which eliminates the possibility of tragedy as Sophocles originally conceived it. Something as basic as Aristotle’s tastes in language, unable as he was to distinguish between the dissos logos of sophistry and that of tragedy, demonstrates a typically philosophical rejection of the essential ambiguities of tragedy, without which its ironies, reversals, and inherent care for conflict fall flat. The Poetics and Rhetoric completely neglect the deliberate use of ambiguity in poetry, symptomatic in the poet’s hands of a logos which contests itself implicitly, and of a figure like Oedipus composed of the difference or gap within it.4 Aristotle was undoubtedly a member of the same squad which Aristophanes has Socrates and Euripides founding together, neutering the gods upon which Sophocles’ tragic vision of man depends. 5 The story of tragedy which we have today begins in the expert hands of one of its killers. 4

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See W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 12-14 (on condemnation) & p. 22 (on neglect). Poetic ambiguity in every case for Aristotle is a “regrettable accident” of “the reader’s ignorance or the poet’s incompetence,” writes Stanford (p. 69). Poetry, like philosophy, deals with truth, and to be true is to be clear (saphes), or, put another way, to be Greek. This excluded lexical ambiguities essential to Sophocles and the Tyrannus especially, as Stanford shows in Ch. 11. The play contains more than twice as many amphibolies as any of his other plays (p. 173). John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, pp. 13-15, and chapters iii-iv generally. Jones argues persuasively that the tragic hero is a false imposition on Aristotle’s text.

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The Essence of Tragedy: Katharsis and Hamartia This makes the Poetics a kind of autopsy. Fittingly, it is the model of the organism, the living whole, which guides Aristotle’s analysis. Tragedy ceased to change, he writes, once it acquired its own nature (1449a14).6 It will have to be understood in terms of function and aim, as, for Aristotle, do all living things. The link between the art of the poet and the nature which the art inspects, the shape to which it fits its craft (which, like all art, it imitates), marks a break in Aristotle’s understanding of poetry with the irrational influence of divine inspiration in the tradition before him. This “old story” of which Plato speaks in the Laws (719c) surfaces most clearly in the Phaedrus’ divine blessings of madness, their violent alteration of established social norms connected with Dionysus’ vintage, one of which is the gift of poetry (244a-245a).7 But we can trace it back at least as far as Democritus in the 5th century (frs. 17 & 18) who cites Homer as an instance (fr. 21). Aristotle’s rational nature governing both poetry and the poet replaces the gods and their madness as the source of what becomes a poet’s mimetic skill.8

The Katharsis Passage Aristotle identifies the form of tragedy which the poet imitates in its “tragic effect [tùs tragķdias ergon]” (1450a30-31), the source of endless circling by scholars around a passage which is not likely, barring the discovery of the hypothetical missing book of the Poetics, to become any clearer: 6

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Cf. Aristotle Po., 1449a23: Nature discovers the metre suitable to dialogue, when dialogue comes into being; Po., 1451a9: The limit of the size of a drama corresponds with the nature of the material. Po., 1460a4: Nature itself teaches the poet to choose the proper metre for an epic structure. Cf. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 82-96, on physis and its role in the technù of poiesis. Plato Phaedrus, 265a: Divine madness is produced ÓÎÍ ÆÃÇ¿Ð ÃÌ¿ÉÉ¿ÁÅÐ Ò×Ë ÃÇ×ÆÍÒ×ËËÍÊÇÊ×Ë. Poetic madness is linked to Dionysus’ wine by Cratinus, and its retrieval by Horace “made it a commonplace of the literary tradition.” According to Cratinus, writing even before Democritus, the best poets have been inspired by wine. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 101. See Cratinus, fr. 199k. Horace Epistles 1.19.1. See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 83-87. Before Aristotle, Plato, in both the Phaedrus and Ion, writes of the madness of poetic inspiration, and the lack of a technù. Their lack of knowledge also shows up in Apology 22b-c, and Meno, 99c-d.

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A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions (tķn toioutķn pathematķn katharsin). (1449b24-8)

Aristotle goes on to explain which plot lines will be most effective in producing the tragic effect. It is within the context of this discussion that he hits upon the tragic guilt or error of hamartia. A good man should not pass from good fortune to bad. A bad man should not tread the reverse path. Neither will arouse pity (eleon) or fear (phobon) or inspire “the human feeling [philanthropon].” Extremely bad men falling into grave misfortune are also to be eschewed, because while this may arouse the human feeling it likewise fails to produce the tragic emotions of pity and fear. There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. (1453a4-12)

The katharsis of emotions producing the tragic effect, and the hamartia of the play, though logically distinct, are unified in this turn of fate which Aristotle calls reversal (peripateia). The degree of pity and fear to which Aristotle continually returns depends on the way in which the poet accomplishes this reversal. The “incidents of pity and fear” which the poet imitates “have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvelous [to thaumaston] in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance” (1452a4-6). In an ideal plot such as that of Sophocles’ Tyrannus, reversal and discovery (ANAGNķRISIS) on stage and katharsis in the audience will coincide. The discovery and the reversal “will arouse either pity or fear – actions of that nature being what tragedy is assumed to represent; and it will also serve to bring about the happy or unhappy ending” (1452a39-b3). If plot is the life and soul of the tragedy, then the reversal and discovery are the center of its force (1450a33-5). In the Tyrannus, Oedipus himself is the site of reversal and discovery, the place where plot twists in the ideal way. “The marvellous” or “the wondrous” is maximized in him and has a reciprocal effect on the tragic emotions (1452a4-6). Though this wonder is a “pleasure,” it alone does not qualify as tragic. “Not every kind of pleasure should be required of a tragedy, but only its own proper pleasure” (1453b10-12).

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Depending upon who is doing the chronicling there have been up to six interpretations of the katharsis associated with this pleasure.9 The earliest period (neo-classicism) interpreted the effect in moral terms. On this view tragic katharsis taught us how to be virtuous, to avoid misdeeds and the suffering they cause.10 A similar but different view is that katharsis actually generates “emotional fortitude.” Aristotle suggests as much in the Rhetoric (1383a4-5). By exposing ourselves to catastrophe, and surviving, we are less likely to fear it in the future. A sort of homeopathy for the soul, it is a “loosely stoical view” with adherents dating back to the Italian Renaissance.11 A third group, also, like those concerned with moral psychology, relates katharsis to the cultivation of the mean found in Aristotle’s ethics.12 But the last great 9

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See Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics. In the following notes, I follow the appendix, generally. It appears first in Italy, with Segni and Maggi, and later in the Frenchmen Corneille, Rapin, and Dacier. The same idea emerges in England in the work of Dryden and Johnson. For example, see the work of Robortello, Minturno, and Castelvetro. Stephen Halliwell “The Poetics and its Interpreters” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 418 f. This theory dates back to the Italians Vettori and Piccolomine, later, the Dutch Heinsius, and most famously, Lessing, who interprets the term in its religious sense of purification. Lessing’s view drew on Heinsius’ recognition of the connection between emotion and virtue. Though Lessing breaks with much of the moralizing of earlier interpretations, he still connects katharsis with the mean of the Nicomachean Ethics. For Lessing, this purifying katharsis metamorphoses passions into virtues. He placed Aristotle’s comments alongside those on pity and fear in Rhetoric ii.5 & ii.8, and connected these tragic emotions with moral persuasion. See Lessing Hamburgische Dramaturgie, ed. by Fricke, p. 332, as cited by Bernays “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan Barnes. The theory still has live variants, in Halliwell, for example, and Janko, perhaps its foremost representative. See Richard Janko “From Catharsis to the Aristotelian Mean” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, pp. 346 f., 352. Janko notes that other critics neglect the intellectual component of phronùsis in feeling the emotions properly. He combines the intellectual and the emotive in support of the view that tragedy conduces us to the mean of the Nicomachean Ethics, “giving us universal patterns of action,” enhancing both phronesis and moral virtue. But if Lear’s objection stands, that tragedy for Aristotle always preserves the distinction between mimùsis and reality, then Janko’s view is untenable. It would train us to feel the wrong things at the wrong time, he argues, since drama is not homologous to real life. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 320. Goethe is the forerunner of the “dramatic or structural” interpretation, the fourth, in which katharsis is perverted from the audience to the play. While the theory, of which Else and Kitto are both modern proponents, is, given the evidence in the Politics, as untenable as the first three, it does eliminate the moral teleologies

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coup in the katharsis argument was raised by Bernays, who, first to emphasize its link with Politics VIII, argued in his famous article of 1857 (“Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy”) that katharsis ought to be understood as a physiological metaphor, a medical purging, rather than one from religious ritual, or lustration.13 Not only did he transform the debate among scholars of Aristotle, but, as Freud’s uncle in-law, he seems to have influenced Freud and Breuer in the formative stages of psychoanalysis.14 While earlier interpreters (such as Minturno, Milton, and Dacier) may have applied a kind of medical analogy to their moral readings, Bernays liberated the therapeutic view from its moral parent, to which it had been something of an ornament. It is his view which still dominates the scholarly landscape in one form or another. Placing the Poetics side by side with the Politics makes it impossible to locate tragic katharsis in the play, as had Goethe, struggling against the moral reading. Katharsis concerns emotions in the soul. It also eliminates the purification metaphor which Lessing’s interpretation borrowed from religious cult, replacing it with the medical one of purgation. But finally how the word functions metaphorically (medically, morally, religiously, and in the general senses of cleansing or separation) both within and outside of the corpus leave us stranded on an island of generality from which there is no hope of escape. That the preponderant use of the word katharsis in Aristotle, for example, refers to menstrual discharge, remains a problem for Bernaysians.15

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they artificially imposed. This was the motive, after all, for Goethe’s forcing katharsis from the audience to the play. In “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy,” Bernays comments on the clear mistranslation of the passage he was forced into in order to accomplish this relocation, making of katharsis a “balancing” in the mimùsis (p. 155). See Goethe Gesaumtausgabe vol. 15, ed. by W. Rehm, pp. 897-900. A mention should also be given to the doctrine of intellectual katharsis, which reduces the process to inference and the intellectual clarification of the plot. L. Golden is the first and best known advocate of this underdog view. See L. Golden “Mimesis and Catharsis” in Classical Philology 64. Golden argues that katharsis is merely intellectual clarification, excluding the emotions. Pleasure becomes cognitive. See I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, p. 152 on 1449b27. Bywater makes this basic distinction in lines of interpretation between the physiological and the religious metaphors. He favors the first, as do I. Whether or not this purgation has a moral value or not will have to be settled. Bywater, and later, Lear, reject this notion. Both Janko and Halliwell represent the opposition. Bennet Simon Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, pp. 140-3. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 315.

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In the politics, it is true, medical purgings (iatreias) are used as a metaphor for katharsis (Pol. 1342a5-17).16 But read closely they ought to lead us to the view peculiar to Aristotle, which is ultimately nonpathological. For any experience that occurs violently in some souls is found in all, though with different degrees of intensity – for example pity and fear, and also religious excitement (enthousiasmos); for some persons are very liable to this form of emotion, and under the influence of sacred music we see these people, when they use tunes that violently arouse the soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medical treatment and taken a purge; the same experience then must come also to the compassionate and to the timid and the other emotional people generally in such degree as befalls each individual of these classes, and all must undergo a purgation and a pleasant feeling of relief; and similarly also the purgative melodies afford harmless delight to people (my italics).

Aristotle likens the healing which tragic poetry supplies to the musical cure of enthusiasmos in the familiar cults of the time, especially those of Phrygia, where the flute dominates.17 He repeatedly connects the flute and the Phrygian mode, as well as the Bacchic orgù and the dithyrambic rhythms of its music with this violent enthusiasm of emotion and the “pleasureable relief [kouphizesthai hùdonùs]” from katharsis.18 The violent emotions of pity and fear occur within the context of these kathartic songs, referring us back to the pleasurable katharsis of tragedy and connecting the cathartic ritual of Dionysiac cult (and other related cults, such as the Corybantic rites, and those of phrygian Kybele) with tragic theatre.19 Theatrical music in particular provides 16

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I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, 155-59. The context presents “a whole series of words which either have or may have a medical meaning.” The pleasure of healing is connected with EN, vii.13 1152b34; vii.15 1154b17. Bywater’s commentary provides a list of other classical writings, beginning with the physicians, in which the katharsis of “x” (a similar construction) is found. Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 19 (32n). Burkert testifies that Pol., 1342a8 implicitly refers to the Corybants. The Phrygian melodies of the bard, Olympus, are said to excite the soul to enthusiasm, and, by implication, to have an effect on character, which is of the soul. Pol., 1340a6-7. He later writes that the Phrygian mode makes one enthusiastic, as does the flute. Pol., 1340b5. They are not fit for the purpose of ethics, but for that of orgiastic katharsis. ÃÒÇÂqÍÓÈÃÑÒÇËm¿ÓÉÍÐÅÆÇÈÍË¿ÉÉ¿Ê¿ÉÉÍËÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈÍË oÑÒÃÎÏÍÐÒÍÇÍÓÒÍÓпÓÒ×È¿ÇÏÍÓÐÕÏÅÑÒÃÍËÃËÍlÐk ÆÃÍÏÇ¿È¿Æ¿ÏÑÇËÊ¿ÉÉÍË ÂÓË¿Ò¿ÇÅÊ¿ÆÅÑÇË. Pol., 1341a21-24. Pol., 1342b4-12 seals the connection between Bacchic dithyramb, the flute, and the phrygian mode. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 76. Early Dionysiac ritual, Dodds believed, was essentially cathartic, in the psychological sense. He refers us to Euripides Bacchae, 77, though the meaning of “purification” remains ambiguous: “Blessed are dancers and those who are purified, who dance on the hill in the holy dance

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the pleasurable relief of katharsis, democratically, without prejudice, for both the healthy and the sick, the virtuous few and the uneducated masses, to whom Aristotle goes on to extend the added pleasure of relaxation, a kind of entertainment in which the pain of work is relieved (Pol. 1342a17-29, 1339b38-39) – recalling perhaps Pindar’s Dionysus who “breaks the rope of heavy cares” (fr. 248). Since the pleasure of katharsis occurs for everyone purgation cannot be pathological in Bernays’ sense. Not only would pathologizing katharsis elide the distinction between healthy and sick, it would also of the god.” Cf. Parker Miasma, p. 288 (36n): Plato’s Euthydemus 277d attests to the cathartic rite of thronķsis practiced by the Corybantics; Pindar speaks of “the mother” as kathartria tùs manias, at Pythian Odes 3.139b in The Odes of Pindar, and Diodorus, at 3.58.2, of a Kybele more generally who “invented purifications for sick animals and children.” But there is little evidence for a healing Dionysus in the historical period, writes Parker. What evidence there is he gathers from The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 95, 87n, where Dodds refers us to Plato’s Laws 815cd. Plato rejects as not suitable for the life of the polis certain Baachic dances which were performed ÎÃÏÇ È¿Æ¿ÏÊÍÓÑÒÃÈ¿ÇÒÃÉÃÒ¿ÑÒÇË¿Ñ. Along with Linforth “Telestic madness in Plato, Phaedrus 244de” in University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13, Parker takes Phaedrus 244e as a reference to Baachic/Corybantic rites which release from madness through homeopathic katharmoi and teletai (though Dionysus is never mentioned). This, says Dodds, is the usual story since Rohde. See Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 287. Rohde found that Plato had the Melampus story in mind, who “healed the Dionysiac madness of the Argive women ‘with the help of ritual cries and a sort of possessed dancing.’” See Apollodorus The Library 2.2.2, as cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 77. Lastly, the cult of Dionysos iatros was said to have been recommended to the Athenians by Delphi. See Athenaeus, frs. 22e, 36b. Other authors cited by both Dodds and J. Croissant Aristote et les mysteres, p. 121, such as Aristides Quintilianus de Musica, 3.25 and Servius ad Georgics, 1.166, 2.389, who connects Dionysus to an emotional-psychological katharsis, already bear the influence of Aristotle’s famous theory of katharsis, and so mislead us as clues to its background. Robert Parker Miasma, pp. 288 (38n). Walter Otto, on the other hand, rejects the therapeutic thesis outright: “The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no debility in life, but a companion of life at its healthiest.” Walter Otto Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 143. The argument rests largely on the observation that the god, not just his initiate, is mad. Vernant, likewise, preserves Dionysus as a celebrant of life, not a doctor. For them, he is the bearer of an ecstasy which unifies god and man, temporarily destroying the bounds of the individual and granting him a god-like experience of the world. This may have more to do with the difference between the more primordial cult of the god and the mysteries emerging later, at the time of the politicization of Greek life. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Masked Dionysus” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 388, which appeals to Plato’s clear destinction at Phaedrus, 265 between healing ecstasies and those of Dionysus. Cf. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. In its 400+ pages, Kerenyi never discusses a therapeutic function for Dionysian madness.

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imply that the virtuous were pathological. This, for Aristotle, is impossible.20 Emotions, as well, for Aristotle imply an “orientation to the world,” require “belief” as well as “feeling.” 21 And so reading purgation in the medical sense of a physical expulsion again cannot be right. Since the simple release of emotions for Aristotle is not in itself pleasurable, katharsis in the proper sense must explain why a particular kind of emotional expression evoked musically is pleasurable.22 Just as musical entertainment and relaxation as well as the musical ordering of the soul are naturally pleasant (as music is generally), the pleasure of katharsis is another natural propensity music brings to the table of Aristotelian psychology. It ought to be understood as a certain kind of pleasure, connected at least by analogy with emotional violence and relief (perhaps like relaxing amusement is for the strife of work), one especially suited to tragedy’s dramatic mechanism (mùchanù) and the pity and fear it evokes. 23 Admittedly, the picture of katharsis as a psychic pleasure rooted in specifically tragic music is still somewhat obscure. But our real concern is the relation between katharsis and the moral-psychological question of character. Fortunately, the Politics’ discussion of katharsis concerns the moral significance of music. Through it we move one step closer to mapping the central mechanism of tragedy onto the motions of ethics. Music in general for Aristotle has four possible uses: education (paideian), amusement (paidian), pastime (diagogù) or katharsis (Pol. 1339b13-15, 1341b32-9).24 The moral question bears on the relation between katharsis and education. These four musical functions 20 21

22 23

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Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317. See Aristotle Rhetoric, ii.5 and ii.8, as this pertains to pity and fear. For a discussion of the cognitive role of emotions more generally in Aristotle, see Matha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 307-309. Regarding the non-medical interpretation, Lear adds that Aristotle shows no signs of familiarity with homeopathic cures, which is how tragic katharsis is said to proceed. Rather, his work always explains medical cures allopathically. Halliwell says the same. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 193. EN, 1104b17; EE, 1220a36. Cf. EN, 1154a27-31; 1154b12-15; EE, 1220b30; Pol. 1337b41; 1339b17. Cf. Croissant’s discussion. J. Croissant Aristote et les Mysteres, pp. 49-58. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 328. For a discussion of the natural character of katharsis in the Politics and Poetics, which comes to generally the same conclusion as I have, see G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 187-193. Amusement is later removed, in the second passage of these two passages, and katharsis added. Although amusements and pastimes could be more or less interchangeable.

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carried out by both melody and harmony relate, he says, either to ethics and character (ta ùthika), actions (ta praktika), or enthusiasms (ta enthousiastika) (Pol. 1341b32-39 [re: melodies], 1342a2-5 [re: harmonies]). He links katharsis primarily with enthusiasms, and these, through both Bacchic rite and “theatrical music,” at least indirectly with tragic theatre and dramatic action. In both cases the religio-moral and therapeutic purifications pervading Greece in the late archaic and early classical period are dimmed to the vanishing point (as Homer himself once suppressed Dionysus and the daimones). The spontaneous ecstasies of the mystery cults, the more sober initiations of Eleusis, as well as the devoted training in god-like ways of life (bioi) among the Orphics and Pythagoreans have been rinsed away. Tragic katharsis becomes a kind of aesthetic pleasure with certain emotional features, a “psychological interpretation” of the phenomenon of ritual with the aid of a loosely medical analogy.25 Distinguishing the educational value of Dorian melodies and harmonies (Pol. 1342a28-30) from the enthusiasmic katharsis inspired by the Phrygian mode (Pol. 1342a11), Aristotle groups them generally into “ethical ones for education” and those concerning action and enthusiasm “for listening to when others are performing (Pol. 1342a1-5).” He rejects the Republic’s bringing the Dorian and Phrygian together for education, because the Phrygian mode “has the same effect among harmonies as the flute among instruments – both are violently exciting and emotional” (ÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈ¿ È¿ÇοÆÃÒÇÈ¿, Pol. 1342a33-1342b4). Enthusiasmic melodies and harmonies are clearly set off from ethical melodies and harmonies, as the musical purpose of katharsis, which, along with amusement, brings a kind of pleasant relief, was set apart from moral education. 26 Not only is there no direct link between katharsis and ethics or politics, Aristotle tells us directly enough that these enthusiasmic purgations are dinstinctly unethical (Pol. 1341a21-24). Just as Aristotle’s tuchù is a condition for eudaimonia but categorically distinct from it, 27 the tragic katharsis triggered by the operations of tuchù is set apart from the sphere of ethics, whose moral-scientific object will be the soul in which

25 26

27

See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 194. Aristotle Po., 1342a21-25. Aristotle actually recommends that the musician use unethical music to please the vulgar, whose souls, “warped from the natural state,” are best pleased by “those harmonies and melodies that are highly strung and irregular in coloration …” See Aristotle Po., 1452b34. Tragic action concerns tuchù. For the distinction between tuchù, which concerns external goods, and virtue, see EN, 1124a12-31.

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eudaimonia thrives, defended with the proper training against the potential miseries of tragic catastrophe.

The Hamartia Passage Through the secular metaphor of medicine, Aristotle reinterprets the religious katharseis of the centuries before him in terms of emotional provocation, psychologizing a religious rite. 28 In connection, hamartia, another term heavy with religious signification in the 5th century, and moral-legal weight in the century to follow, the centerpiece of the mechanism of this tragic effect, will be similarly neutered. The reconception of tragic guilt by Aristotle accomplishes the expulsion and secularizing of the destructively religious element natural both to the God of tragedy and the Sophoclean art, rethinking hamartia in light of a secular-rational ethics and psychology. The interpretation of the hamartia passage has been fraught with as much controversy as the concept of katharsis, which should come as no surprise. The two ideas are intimately linked. The moralizing interpretation, again, was the first to prevail, and in the same commentators determining the fate of katharsis.29 The Italian Renaissance set a moral tone which would take centuries to correct. 30 These are the tides which carry to France, along with Vettori’s specious introduction of the “tragic flaw” in his 1560 commentary, where the two misinterpretations take complementary and near permanent root. In the century to follow, in France, the bastard notion of tragedy’s poetic justice is born from the combined influence of Seneca and the medieval mystery-plays. The French Academie thought hamartia as the righteous punishment of evil, sins, or moral fault, 31 consenting to a new and 28

29

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See David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 154. The medical writers anticipating philosophy’s technù of the soul identify its disturbances with an internal physis which is “fundamental and single,” excluding any “demonic and external” sources. In tracing the scholarship on hamartia I follow Bremer’s exhaustive account almost completely. Valla’s 1508 translation was the starting-point of interpretation. He renders hamartia “per flagitium et scelus” (through misdeed and impiety). The word soon takes the leap directly to “peccatum” (sin) in Pacci’s influential 1536 translation, though this sin is also coupled with imprudentia, “a lack of information of foresight.” The pillar of this influence was Mesnardierre. Corneille and Racine insist on the moral fault of the agent, some “fatal weakness” of character, as did Rapin, and, the decisively influential commentary of Dacier: “Les vices d’Oedipe sont l’orgueil, la violence & l’emportement, la temerité & l’imprudence.”

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unambiguous interpretation of hamartia as “fatal passion or vice.”32 The English schools under heavy French influence followed a similar trajectory, via the work of Rymer, who actually coined the term “poetic justice” in his 1678 essay The Tragedies of the Last Age. 33 Yet, that hamartia means wrongdoing is made impossible both by what Aristotle actually has to say about tragedy34 and by the relevant sections of the ethical works, which I will soon examine. 35 What did Aristotle actually write? The context, following the passage on katharsis, is still Poetics XIII, where plot and the type of tragic figure best represented are under discussion: There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but ÂÇqgÊ¿ÏÒÇ¿ËÒÇË¿ [through some hamartia], of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. (1453a6-1453a12)

The plot and the tragic figure at its center, destroyed through an act of hamartia, should be tailored to the production of pity and fear. Oedipus is not so much a person as he is a hamartia delivery system, a moving, empty center within the motions of the play, who through his vulnerability to hamartia and its disastrous consequences reveals the pitiable and the fearful to the audience. Since the tradition after Aristotle is suspect, it is helpful to search both before and within Aristotle’s work for a proper translation. In addition, semasiological study of the word group in general can place Aristotle’s hamartia in relation to that of tragedy. Aristotle must have 32 33

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J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 80. Dryden concurs with Rymer, and John Dennis carried the “banner of Rymerian criticism” into the next century (Though Addison raised objections to “this ridiculous doctrine” his tune did not carry). For a comprehensive discussion of modern scholarship on hamartia, see J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 91-98. The moralizing interpretation of hamartia was first challenged, somewhat ambiguously, by Vahlen’s Beiträge (1865). Following Vahlen’s reading of the term as “ignorance,” Bywater’s 1909 commentary develops and further establishes this view. But it was not until O. Hey’s semasiological study of 1927, “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, writes Dawe, that the moral interpretation of hamartia was “killed stone dead.” See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 90. It remains to discuss the 19th century tradition of interpretation, German philosophy and “Tragsiche Schulde.” But this will best figure as an introduction to the siginificance of tragedy in Kierkegaard, as a member of this group. In any case, it is more germane to philosophical topics than to the philological question of hamartia in Aristotle and Attic tragedy. I will postpone its significant details to the beginning of the next chapter.

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been aware of one special legal connotation of hamartia, an exculpable mistake, as opposed to the punishable offense of adikùsai. 36 This meaning derived from an old one common to all hamart- group words as well as three others (alitein, amplakein, sphallesthai) that show an affinity: “to miss, lose an object, lose position.”37 The meanings were originally morally neutral. There have been five semasiological studies of the word itself and they all agree (save one) that Poetics 1453a10 refers to an ‘error’, ‘mistake’, ‘blunder’, etc. 38 But by the 4th century these older meanings had been decisively obscured. The word had generally come to mean a punishable offense, a crime. The affiliated words also tended since Homer toward a moralization of what had originally been a physical, morally neutral description. This makes Aristotle’s use of it exceptional, and more overtly specialized. Through Bremer’s exhaustive study the development of the word from Homer to Aristotle’s time becomes sufficiently clear. What had meant ‘miss’ slowly took on the meaning of ‘err’ until finally it connotes ‘offense.’39 The fifth century retained both meanings of the word, an ambiguity between innocence and guilt that made it perfectly suited to tragedy. In fact the first use that we have of the substantive hamartia is in Aeschylus, where offense’ is most frequent, while in Sophocles it is the sense of ‘err’ which predominates. It is easy to see how the genre of tragedy popularizes and metaphorically transforms the word group. Similar trends in this period can be found in the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, in which the frequencies of use are balanced (to miss: 32 – to err: 38 – offense: 33). In the latter, the opposition of hamartanein and adikein, an exculpable mistake and a 36

37 38

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J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 20. Cf. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64. Dracon (7th c.) had been the one to introduce the distinction between akousios, hekousios, and dikaios (as it applied to killing) which Aristotle continued to develop three centuries later, though Dracon’s innovation concerned the measure of an act’s offense, not the psychology of the criminal. It was a matter of what, socially, was forgivable or not. For more on the nature of Draconian law, see Louis Gernet Recherches sur le Développement de la Pensée Juridique et Morale en Grece. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 26-9. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 24 f., Bremer cites the studies by van Braam, Hey, Phillips, Harsh, and Ostwald. Harsh interprets Aristotle through Plato and Tragedy. This, argues Bremer, obscures his conclusions significantly. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 31-56. Homer and the lyric poets together use it in the first sense 40 times, the second 6 times, and the last six times. By the fifth century, tragedy invokes this group a total of 127 times, 25 in the first, 41 in the second, and 59 in the third. See tables on p. 31 (Homer), p. 36 (Tragedy), p. 40 (History), p. 44 (Orators), p. 56 (4th c.: Plato, Aristotle, Orators).

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punishable injustice, becomes clear. But this was actually a “rhetorical commonplace” among early orators such as Antiphon, Gorgias, and Prodicus. Their use of the word group is more disproportionately metaphorical than any of those previous, that is, more morally charged.40 In the legal world of the 5th century hamartia took on a special meaning which embraced the contradictory meanings of both mistake and offense: injurious action, the magnitude of the act and the intention of the agent notwithstanding.41 Hamartia could refer both to an act that was hekon ek pronoias, intentional and voluntary, as well as an excusable misdeed begotten through ignorance (agnoia).42 Aristotle’s ethics were in part trying to clear up this muddle of jurisprudence through the introduction of a more sophisticated psychology of action which could define intention and choice, and therefore culpability, more clearly. Defining Oedipus as a figure of hamartia was propadeutic for the moral and legal categories operating within ethics and the state. A look at the Nicomachean Ethics will help us interpret the meaning of tragic hamartia in the more opaque context of the Poetics.

Tragic Action: Oedipus in the Nicomachean Ethics Reading the Poetics adds color to the moral agent of the Ethics. It situates and extends him within the broader frame of life and action.43 Likewise, there is an ethical strategy implied in the hamartia of the Poetics that immediately becomes clear when we look to the Ethics. Plato, conveniently, has left us a passage which bears striking similarity to Aristotle’s, which situates more definitively the philosopher’s occupation with this term. Plato reflects in the Republic on what kind of an actor may enter his State. Being a measured man (metrios anùr, 396c) the actor will be prepared to imitate good men, and, sometimes, their failure via some error (esphalmenon, 396d). The Platonic inheritance, then, is greater than some might suppose. Though Aristotle defends tragedy against the sedition which Republic III and X allege, he saves the art by reducing it philosophically to something befitting, at least potentially, the Platonic legacy at the heart of the theory. As 40

41 42

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See note above. The meanings ‘err’ and ‘offense’ outnumber the original sense of ‘to miss’ by more than 200 (63-157-117). O. Hey “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, p. 15. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64. This is a basic premise of John Jones’ On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.

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we’ve already seen, his restrictions on music were even more severe than Plato’s. Hamartia will have to live up to extremely optimistic and ultimately rational criteria, which become most explicit in the Ethics. The Nicomachean Ethics provide Aristotle’s mature view of hamartia. Dramas (dramata), he writes, were called “dramas” according to many because they represented people in action (drķntas, Po., 1448a2729). The two spheres of interest, ethics and poetics, therefore, were naturally kin.44 In the beginning of the third book Aristotle gives an account of voluntary and involuntary actions (hekousiois and akousiois) that, with several allusions, clearly has tragedy in the background. The involuntary, he says, due either to compulsion or ignorance, “are condoned, and sometimes even pitied” (EN, 1109b31-33). He refers in this context to Alcmaeon of Euripides’ lost play – “compelled by certain threats to murder his mother.” Voluntary action begins with the agent, while the “origin” of compulsory action (to biaion) “is from outside” (EN, 1110b16-18). Action like Oedipus’ “done through ignorance is in every case not voluntary” (EN, 1110b18-19). Though effectively Oedipus causes the parricide and incest he suffers, the force of ignorance, actually, compels the action from without. This is Aristotle’s version of tragic ambiguity. It is not voluntary (ouk hekousion) in every case, and involuntary (akousion), as with Oedipus, “only when it causes the agent pain or regret.” Aristotle makes a further distinction between acting in ignorance or through ignorance (en or dia). In the first case ignorance is not the cause, but a feature of the action, as when the drunken or the enraged (or, the drunkenly enraged) attacks the innocent streetlamp, for example. It may be true that he acts without knowledge of right and wrong, but the reason that he tarries with the inanimate is not ignorance.45 It is because he is angry, and drunk. The agent’s emotions (pathù) are the cause. Acting in ignorance refers to what Aristotle will analyse as akrasia in book VII. Although not deliberate, since the man acts despite himself, he is cognizant of the particular facts; his action is “in some sense voluntary”46 and therefore punishable. Oedipus, 44

45

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Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 140. “[I]t implies that the fabric of tragedy, or indeed of all poetry, is the representation of human purpose striving for realisation, and therefore falls within the purview of ‘practical’ or ethical philosophy.” The distinction here is between knowledge of the universal or major premise and the minor premise or particular fact. See pp. 109-113. Wrong action through spirit or appetite shows up at EN, 1111a25, and is deemed voluntary, because unnatural in kind or force, and though beyond individual control, is no less natural to humankind than reason, as stated at EN, 1111b-b3.

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though, for whom apparently the murder and without question the incest are both chosen, must act through ignorance: an unconsciousness of the particulars “of the act and of the things affected by it.” In cases like these, Aristotle writes, the act is pitied and forgiven, because he who acts in ignorance of any of these circumstances is an involuntary agent” (EN 1111a-a1).47 Aristotle identifies the circumstances of ignorance surrounding these involuntary actions of the Oedipal type: 1) the agent, 2) the act, 3) the thing that is affected by or is the sphere of the act; and sometimes also 4) the instrument, for instance, a tool with which the act is done, 5) the effect, for instance, saving a man’s life, and 6) the manner, for instance, gently or violently (EN 1111a2-6). Both ignorance of the agent and of the thing affected or the sphere of the act would apply to Oedipus. Aristotle, confirming its relevance to the Poetics, cites the Euripidean figure of Merope as an example of the ignorance of effect, who mistook her son for an enemy.48 Although Oedipus’ “ignorance of the sphere of the act” would make his action involuntary for Aristotle, stopping there would fail to describe what we have already seen in chapter one to be the essence of Oedipus’ hamartia: more than anything else, he is mistaken about his own identity. Although Aristotle lists ignorance of the agent as one type of ignorance, he immediately disqualifies it. “Now no one, unless mad (mainomenos), could be ignorant of all these circumstances together; nor yet, obviously, of the agent – for a man must know who he is himself” (EN 1111a7-9). Aristotle separates the agent from the sphere of the act and makes him a special kind of object about which, barring madness, it is impossible to claim ignorance. But Oedipus’ ignorance of “the sphere of the act” was originally, for Sophocles, grounded in the ignorance of himself which Aristotle separates and consigns to fiction. This ignorance, a half-civilized form of religious madness, disappears from the philosopher’s moral-aesthetic equation. Aristotle cannot make the action of a tragedy human-centered, subject to the same logos governing his Ethics and Politics, and also let these religious overtones ring out. Homer, for instance, had no problem blaming Agamemnon for stealing Briseis from Achilles, which, nevertheless, he 47

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The two remaining types of action are deliberate wrong action, the punishable consequence of a vicious character, an “ignorance displayed in moral choice” (EN, 1110b33-4), and deliberately virtuous action. This is an example taken from the lost Cresphontes, which, we’ll find, also figures in the Eudemian Ethics.

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chalked up to the religious madness of atù.49 For both Homer and Sophocles that the gods ruled the game was no excuse. The offense of crime was no less real. Aristotle leaves the poet’s Oedipus stranded in the no man’s land of tragedy, where the center of rational man and his cities, that which moves and guides him, his identities, can still be displaced. He replaces him with yet another avatar, a more sanguine Oedipus, like Homer’s, who “ruled on in beloved Thebes,”50 and exiles Sophocles creation to the hinterlands of gods and beasts, a territory beyond the human, against which its boundaries and aspirations are defined (EN, 1145a22).

The Alteration of Hamartia in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle in Book V devises his plan for a sane Oedipus, the source of an involuntary action – though neither medically or religiously deranged, due not to the compulsions of ta bia, but rather agnoia. That religious madness is no longer a valid interpretation of tragic action is enough to confirm the divorce of Aristotle’s hamartia from the archaic madness of atù. But this alteration of just how it is that reasoned choice is tragically reversed by external forces introduces if not a problem within Aristotle’s theory, then at least a major challenge to the relevance of the theory as a whole for readers. “[E]ither hamartia in Aristotle’s discussion has a meaning unknown from any of its other very frequent occurrences in Greek literature (including Aristotle himself), and Aristotle has not seen fit to add a word of clarification to his casual introduction of this novel concept: or else his words have almost no relevance to Greek tragedy as it was actually practiced[.]”51 Intepreting Aristotle’s hamartia as an “error of judgment,” as scholars generally do these days, rescues him from this irrelevance, and also harmonizes the single line in which the word appears with the rest of his work. “[A]n error of judgment,” however, “is something which can be either entirely the responsibility of the man who makes it,” as in 49

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Iliad, ix. 119. “But since I was blinded by atù and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make my peace and abundant compensation.” Odyssey, xi. 312. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 72, p. 91. Dawe’s article argues that atù and hamartia, while distinct, are continuous in the tradition. Aristotle’s usage is perfectly sensible. Adkins, in “Arisotle and the Best Kind of Tragedy,” emphasises the distance between Aristotle and the world view in tragedies of the 5th century.

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Aristotle, or, with Sophocles a century before, it “can be something induced, normally by the gods putting a man in such a position that he has little choice but to make a decision that will later recoil on him with disastrous, and above all disproportionate consequences.”52 So which is Aristotle’s use of the word? What does it make of Sophocles’ tragic paradox: an externality interior to Oedipus, which as it unfolds according to divine necessity destroys him? The beginning of an answer lies in the development of the language of “psychic interference” in the literature before Aristotle. The origin of its development, of course, is Homeric, where we read of the atù sent by the gods. But Homer assigns responsibility to the temporarily insane, which he can do only because reasoned choice is not the criterion, as with Agamemnon, compelled “to make amends” though “Zeus had stolen my wits[.]”53 The agent is still too mixed up in the act for psychological criterion to excuse him. As in the first Greek laws laid down by Dracon, later, in the seventh century, intention was not the issue. What mattered was the objective content of the deed, the offense it caused, what we might call the moral damage.54 Aristotle’s ethical project, in part, is an attempt to distinguish once and for all the moral and legal agent from the objective act, to develop a theory of action sufficiently grounded in the rational principles of the new Athenian politics, which could do away with the violent tribalism of the past that Homer represents and Dracon basically retains. The common conceptual root of atù and hamartia, deeper than mental blindness, is this damage (blabù) that they explain. Both words account for damage men accomplish when in some sense not the source of their action. Homer never once uses the term hamartia. He explains the way in which good men come to harm (blabù) through atù. But by the time of Euripides and Aristotle the word atù drops out of use completely. 55 Meanwhile, in the 5th century tragedies as well as the intervening lyric poetry, both words are used in similar contexts and “seem to be equated.”56 Antigone herself in a “homily 52

53 54

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R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, p. 94. Iliad, xix. 155-157. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 3. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 61. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 106. See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, pp. 101-105, for a list of exemplary contexts. Dawe establishes the correspondence between both atù and blabù, of which these examples

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on phronein”57 implicitly connects deliberation and hamartia with the atù of the famous ode at 582 and its “Erinyus of the mind” (Erinus phrenķn): For those whose house is shaken by the gods, no part of ruin (atas) is wanting, as it marches against the whole of the family; like the swell of the deep sea, when darkness runs beneath the water, brought by the dire blast of winds from Thrace, it rolls up from the bottom the black sand and the wind-vexed shores resound before its impact. 58

Aristotle, in choosing hamartia, had distinguished the “vital strand” of at least the tragedy of the Labdacids, which, more than any other, in the Antigone and Tyrannus, was about logos at its destructive limits, although what Aristotle understood by the word was still only “a part of what the tragedians had understood by it.”59 When Aristotle discusses hamartia in the Ethics directly he couches the damages of Book III’s discussion of voluntary action in his own civilized language. Hamartia enters the text explicitly in Book V within a broader discussion of just (dikema) and unjust (adikema) actions, that is, actions which are either punishable or not. First, an act must be voluntary, as described earlier in Book III, to qualify as either just or unjust (EN 1135a15-17). Aristotle now regroups the blabai of the earlier book in terms of justice and injustice. Compulsion (ta bia) drops out of the equation, leaving a space that he fills with the introduction of hamartema, acts committed dia agnoia. Both hamartema and the misfortunes of atuchema are categorized as acts done through ignorance, while adikema are the effect of either incontinence (akrasia, acts done in ignorance) or vice (kakia), both voluntary. Atuchema are not attributed to the agent at all. Hamartema are their moral and legal equivalent. In cases of hamartema, as with atuchema, I am the archù of the act qua damage. But I am ignorant of its ‘purpose’ or ‘end’ – the possibility that the act would prove harmful. This makes my action akķn, involuntary. If the poet determines the hamartia correctly, fol-

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are types. Aristotle, at EN, 1135b, classifies hamartema along with atuchema and adikema as types of damage. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 111. See Sophocles Antigone, 925-928: ¿ÉÉqÃÇÊÃËÍÓËÒ¿ÂqÃÑÒÇË ÃËÆÃÍÇÐÈ¿É¿ οÆÍËÒÃпËÑÓÁÁËÍÇÊÃËkÊ¿ÏÒÅÈÍÒÃÐÃÇÂqÍÇÂqgÊ¿ÏÒ¿ËÍÓÑÇ ÊÅÎÉÃÇ×È¿ÈοÆÍÇÃËÅÈ¿ÇÂÏ×ÑÇËÃÈÂÇÈ×ÐÃÊÃ. Outside of these odes, the language of the play has consistently legal and moral-philophical resonance. Variations on bouleusis relate the play to phronùsis: Euboulia (chorus, 1098), aboulia (messenger, 1242), dusbouliai (Creon, 1269), dusboulia (Antigone, 95), tied to blabù at 1050. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 123.

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lowing the doctrine of the Ethics, the tragic figure will cause his own ruin, but through an involuntary blunder which cannot be blamed, one legally identical with bad luck. Yet, it was against the senselessness of bad luck that Sophocles’ lyric voiced its tragic appeal.

Katharsis and Wonder (or) What’s Become of Pollution By severing its ties with atù and forcing divine activity, if necessary, outside the performed time of the drama, Aristotle secularizes the origin of tragic collision, as his rule for the dramatic mùchanù explains: There should be nothing improbable among the actual incidents. If it be unavoidable, however, it should be outside the tragedy, like the improbability in the Oedipus of Sophocles. (1454b2-8)

This rule forcing the divine outside the frame of the plot extends from an earlier discussion of how dramatic action should proceed in general. It is the thought and character of the agents from which action flows (1449b36-1450a3) and the playwright should always present this character-based action as “necessary” or “probable.” Divine interference would defy this rational necessity or probability. It must be excluded, along with everything else, including dumb luck, which is alogos (1454b6-8, 1460a28). Hamartia can be discovered, explained, and re-interpreted according to the broader rational vision which the end of the play provides. Wonder and terror before the gods are translated into the pleasure of katharsis, triggered by the unlikely discovery of reason in a pitiful, terrifying situation which had seemed at first to defy it. Aristotle, like Sophocles, connects disaster with wonder, which for the Greeks came as a pair, and had implicitly religious connotations.60 But for Aristotle it is the logos in disaster that ignites wonder, while, for Sophocles, it is the disaster pregnant in logos. Katharsis is enhanced by wonder, we’ve seen, when the poet structures his plot in such a way that the right figure suffers the right dramatic grammar (1452b34-1453a12). In Aristotle’s hands, his hamartia becomes something we can in principle understand, which unfolds in the right 60

Religious wonder and terror can be recogznied in the etymology of agos, the disastrous corruption which has its root in azomai, a mood of religious wonder. While the religious wonder which we find in the agos of Thebes is connected with actual divinities, in Aristotle, wonder is grounded in logos, which, of course, is also divine.

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way. It excites the mind to understanding, another kind of pleasure, connected by Aristotle both within this work and others with wonder (to thaumaston) (Metaphysics 982b12, 983a12, Rhetoric 1371a33). While the Metaphysics famously connects wonder with reason as a spark for understanding, the Poetics ties wonder to the irrational as its chief factor (alogon, 1452a4-6, 1460a11-17). The pleasure of wonderment passes from this tension between reason and the irrational to relief.61 Through poetic katharsis the unintelligible nightmares which we refuse to allow as members of a civilly ordered society, or even to see and to know, are brought into a reasonable, living whole. “There should be nothing alogon among the actual incidents” (1454b6-7). All of our Oedipuses are tamed. We wonder at the logos of that which seemed so violently alogon. In Sophocles, wonder is the tragic accession of human reason to the terror and wonder of life amongst the gods. Aristotle reinterprets tragic wonder within the now rational horizon of katharsis and hamartia as the accession of the irrational to the shape of human reason.62 The poet, says Aristotle, resembles the philosopher (1451b5), and perhaps his poet a little too much. The Poetics contests the status of the gods in Greek myth – and by extension tragedy – as causes of action that “lie at and beyond the limits of human comprehension” and which we therefore cannot anticipate, penetrate, or control.63 Their shadow remains as a mere incidental and exculpable “ignorance in the sphere 61

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See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 70-74, where Halliwell makes this connection. Lear objects and attempts to distinguish the desire to understand, in the Metaphysics, provoked by wonder, from the Poetics, in which he finds wonder provoked by the desire to understand. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty. His distinctions, though, are slippery and ultimately unconvincing. His fundamental point in making them is to point out that tragic pleasure is not cognitive, and that this wonderment before the unanticipated and in this sense irrational (bringing both passages together) is distinct from the “proper pleasure” of tragedy. But Aristotle does say that the marvellous is required of tragedy. Po., 1460a11-12. Its pleasure and the katharsis of emotions could hardly be distinct, since Aristotle identifies them at Po., 1452a1-6. Popular Greek belief would have privileged the gods over nature and dumb luck as a source of eutuchia, to which Aristotle alludes at Phy., 196b5-7 and Rh., 1391b1-3; Aristotle rejects traditional divine pthonos at Met., 982b32-983a3; Met., 1000a9 and 1074a38 introduce and reject the popular, mythological view. EN, 1178b8 describes the perfect contemplative happiness of the gods, whose activity is now exclusively intellectual. Finally, at Pol., 1252b4-7, alluding to Xenophanes, fr. 14, Aristotle supposes we imagine gods as men, ruled by a king, because we are men ruled by kings, or once were. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 233.

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of the act” as authentically tragic hamartia, ironically, becomes a necessary mistake in the preservation of the intelligibility and integrity of the whole.64 The Poetics reduce the resistance or paradox of the gods, pollution in Oedipus and plague in the city, to mundane ignorance, disabused by the kathartic discovery and reversal which reason discovers in a mechanism of its own design.

Conclusion The theatregoer, through tragedy, was able to exchange safety and regularity for the absolute perspective of extreme possibility which the play evokes. That chaos exists and is possible for us is something they could explore safely within the quarantine of the theatre, the paradigmatic breakdown in Oedipus of primordial social bonds, a catastrophe which the drama, ideally, imbues with a meaning and a form.65 By redefining hamartia as an “error in calculation,” and identifying katharsis with a superficially aesthetic pleasure, connected in the Politics with a pause in the Athenian work-week, the terrible flower of tragedy is cut off with the bud. Not only is the destructive power of the gods evacuated from the stage, but, we find, catastrophe averted becomes preferable to catastrophe undergone.66 It is better that the pollution, the plague, be avoided in advance, and if that is impossible, at least traced back to an error of judgment that could have been. True phronùsis “would make mistakes like the ignorant mistake of Oedipus impossible.”67 The best way to avoid potential misfortunes, we will find out in the Ethics, will be moral education. This begins with the soul. While tragedy was never, for Sophocles or Aristotle, a morality tale, Aristotle does preserve the connection between character and fortune. Exceptionally rational, good men (epiekeis) should not suffer tragedy.68 64 65

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Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 226. This is an observation of Halliwell’s. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, pp. 334 f. Po., xiv. 1454a9. Aristotle prefers a tragedy that ends happily, where disaster is averted at the last minute. This is in tension with Po., xiii. 1453a23, where he says the opposite. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 387. Nussbaum offers this as a partial explanation for why Aristotle excludes men of surpassing virtue from tragic roles. The best candidates for hamartia cannot be unexceptionally reasonable, good men (not epieikùs, Po., 1452b34) – they must not be “pre-eminently virtuous and just

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Tragic guilt must be of a specific kind and its parameters are a matter of character and action. But underlying this aesthetic criterion is the conviction that tragedy has a moral hue and its audience an eye to see it. Plays, like individuals, have a character (ùthos) and a thinking (dianoia). Though an error like Oedipus’ cannot be blamed, within Aristotle’s framework it can be avoided, and this is ethically significant. Aristotle’s primary ethical interest will not be a theory of blame, but rather how to cultivate the best possible life. Even if Oedipus is blameless, the tragic case remains ethically instructive. One ought to train oneself intellectually in the interest of eudaimonia. In chapter five we’ll see just what kind of mutation Sophocles’ Oedipus will have to undergo to enter this ethical calculus and perhaps wonder if tragedy itself and Oedipus as its best ambassador remain still, despite Aristotle’s invitation, an outsider to philosophy’s secular-rational ethics and politics. Fragment 15 (Rose) of Aristotle’s alerts us to his awareness of an alternative form of education – competitive with philosophy – bound still to the archaic religious power of katharsis: initiates in the mysteries “educate” and purify themselves through the ritualization of suffering. Like the Oedipus of tragedy they do not learn (mathein) anything. They experience or suffer it (pathein). Undergoing this experience transforms their disposition (diathùsis) spontaneously.69 Kierkegaard, we’ll find in Part II, calls for a similarly kathartic education. But the Poetics dismisses the spontaneous regeneration through suffering and katharsis to a minor corner of the philosophical world-view, dividing it from any moral considerations of the soul, and minimizing its force to mere aesthetic play. Rather, it is the Orphic-Pythagorean askùsis of the shaman, whose influence on philosophy and its reconception

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(Po., 1453a7-8)” – despite the fact that the seriousness and nobility of the tragic figure (Po., 1448a2,27, 1448b10) which Aristotle insists on would seem to recommend just such a man, as Aristotle himself suggests (Po., 1454b13). Cf. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 13-15. To be epieikùs for Aristotle meant to be morally honest and righteous (EN, 1137a31), distinguished by arête, as are the appropriately tragic characters (ùthù chrùsta, Po., 1454a17). The more unworthy of misfortune is the tragic figure, the greater a man he is (epieikùs also had social overtones, Cf. EN, 1132a2, 1167b1, Pol., 1274a15), and the greater the pity he solicits (Rh., 1386b31, 1385b33, 1389b10). See Werner Jaeger Aristotle, pp. 160, 162. Diathùsis is a medical term which both Plato and Aristotle recoup as ‘education’ in their diagnoses on soul. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 88 (n51). Cf. Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10, and DC 284b3, where Aristotle describes an emotional proof of God’s existence, as opposed to a rational demonstration: Ê¿ËÒÃÇ¿ÎÃÏÇÒÍËÆÃÍË.

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of the soul we’ll explore in the next chapter, which prefigures the prolonged, individual practice in virtue that Aristotle makes a central feature of his ethics. Pythagorean katharseis, in fact, may be the least problematic precursor to the tragic katharsis of the Poetics.70 Divorcing tragedy from the ecstatic madness which Herodotus’ tradition ascribes to the Baachants (ekstasis, existasthai, mainesthai)71 and the profound sense of pollution and guilt of which the archaic Greeks were capable, Aristotle’s doctrine of tragic mimùsis also deprives tragedy of the special significance of its appointed god, Dionysus, as the god of illusions.72 This is an especially poignant departure since it was likely under the auspices of the god for whom reality dissolved into illusion, and illusion became real, that something like theatre became possible.73 This break, we’ll see in chapter five, complemented by Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, reduces the tragic guilt and katharsis associated with Dionysus and his theatre to rational psychology. The irrational from then on can assert its power only within the human soul, where reason, naturally superior, can exercise it into a shape to match its own. Before getting to this story we need to know under what influence this leap can take place. The possibility of thinking the problem of the irrational psychologically relies upon a break in the culture’s narrative about soul, or psuchù. The extent to which human reason could study and master the irrationality that in cult and theatre (and even 70

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See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 187. Aside from medical purges and religious purifications, a third possible precedent for Aristotle’s tragic katharsis has been found in the musical katharsis of the Pythagoreans. The earliest record of Pythagorean katharsis comes from one of Aristotle’s pupils, Aristoxenus, fr. 26 in Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. by Wehrli, who wrote about the sect’s cathartic use of music. While also religious, the effect of this spontaneous purification “must have differed appreciably from the ecstatic or frenzied type of Corybantic katharsis,” and would have applied to all initiates, not just the pathological. This is a feature, as we’ve seen, that returns in the Politics. Herodotus, 4.79.3. It is the language of the Scythians in their observations of the Baachants he records. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 94 f. (84n). Although Rohde read the soul’s departure from the body into ecstasis, this language is “commonly used by classical writers” for “any abrupt change of mood.” It could “mean anything from “taking you out of yourself” to a profound alteration of personality” (p. 77). Homeric Hymns, 7.34. See E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 94 (82n); J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The God of Tragic Fiction” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 187 f.; Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 248: the Dionysiac nature of the tragic actor’s “ecstasy” passed naturally to the spectators.

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Homer’s epics, occasionally) disturbed the harmonies of men – their cities and their souls – in place since Olympus had been raised and the daimones suppressed – required a radically new conception of the individual. And so reason conjures both the instrument of psychology and the object it studies, psuchù, as tools in the subordination of the irrational qua unreasoning desires in the soul to a governance reason claims by nature. In the following chapter, we’ll see how the soul develops into the kind of medium through which such control can be exercised, as a kind of science. It is a development in the Greek story surrounding the god Dionysus, an alternative line of Dionysian flight, one of his ecstasies.

Chapter 4 Psuchù Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology Introduction The companion psychology to Aristotle’s revision of tragedy draws inspiration from two disparate strains in Greek thinking, one native, the other a trace of foreign blood welling in other-worldly figures like Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, poisoning life and thought against the mortal body Homeric man had celebrated. It was this infamous “drop of alien blood”1 which Rohde mistakenly traced to the ingress of Dionysus’ cult from the Thracian east, across the trade route of the Black Sea. Though we now know that Dionysus was not the source of infection, 2 it is no less true that “the idea of an everlasting soul in man contradicts every single idea of Greek popular religion.”3 There did, however, despite this contradiction in the culture, develop a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul.

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Erwin Rohde “Die Religion der Griechen,” p. 27. See Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Appearing on the linear B tablets discovered at Pylos decades after Psychù was published, Dionysus exonerated himself. It was clear that he had been in Greece since Mycenae, a millennium before Rohde imagined his voyage to Greece from Thrace. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 254. Moreover, neither the cult of souls which Rohde detects behind the scenes of Homer, nor the Homeric psuchù led to the idea of an “everlasting, indestructible, immortal life.” The soul never pre-existed the living person, nor did it lie dormant within him, despite Rohde’s mistaken introduction of the doubled self of Pindar’s, active in dreams or sleep, back into Homer as an inactive animistic double within the living person. This has since been recognized generally as an erroneous anachronism. In Homer the soul was but a dead image of the mortal man. In any case, Rohde himself explains that the animistic cult was focused on the remembrance of the dead here on earth, through the memory of those surviving (p. 253). It was earth bound, tied to the family hearth. Its claims to happiness were mortal claims, for which it depended upon its survivors. To be immortal was to be a god, for the Greeks (p. 253). The dead ancestor was no god.

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This alien strain, we’ll find, contradicts and through this contradiction revolutionizes the primordially Greek story about the soul dominant in Sophocles’ lyric. And while a sort of descriptive psychology of the individual does begin with tragic lyric, and Sophocles in particular, it does not mature until Macedonia comes to power, in the time of Aristotle, when the city has lost some of its hold on the individual.4 More freedom, less hierarchical rule, as with the modern period, corresponded to an increased demand for self-rule, a broader and more anonymous, horizontal web of power and its articulation in and through a dissipated assemblage of individuals. 5 Before the decline of 4th century Athens psychological interest had aimed at groups: “crowds, assemblies, of Athenians or Lacedaemonians, of oligarchs or democrats, of soldiers, youths, the elderly, of barbarians.”6 In the philosophy of the fourth century a new need arises. The interest shifts importantly to the character and soul of the individuals making up these groups, as we find first in Plato, and, even more so, in Aristotle.

Philosophy and the Reconceptualizing of Psuchê By the time Plato provides the first psychological taxonomy the idea of a personal, immortal soul may have been in Greek circulation for at least a couple of hundred years, first recorded for us qua psuchù in Heraclitus.7 Though it did not rear its head in the poetry we have dis4

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “The psychology of the individual, initiated in tragedy, will not truly mature until the city will have lost some of its power – which is to say under Macedonian domination.” See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 3, pp. 81-84. Foucault applies this insight to the slightly later Hellenistic and Roman periods. Alasdaire Macintyre seems to imply that the same notion can be applied to modern-philosophical attempts to provide a rational justification for moral claims, and their dead-end in the irrational ideals of a bureaucratic culture. This culture accepts on what amounts to faith both the possibility and value of the efficient management and optimization of human resources. Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, p. 62, and chs. 6 and 7 generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “This trait appeared in all its force with the work of Thucydides; but one discovers it also in a number of analyses by Euripides, and in a large part of Platonic thought.” Fr. B 62, B88: mÂÃ