The Philosophy of Tragedy: Introductory Lecture 1 by Michael Davis

I want to start with the same two naive questions that I asked that I suggested that you ought to ask if you were interested in the course so start with the first one why is it worth spending a whole semester on Greek tragedy Greek tragedies odd it's not really like what we think of as drama and it's it differs in a bunch of ways at most it's performed by at most three actors in Aeschylus it's two and then it gradually shifts to three if you've read any you know that there are more than two roles and therefore you know that they play multiple roles playwrights sometimes use this so for example in Sophocles play the Philoctetes at the very end of the play this demigod Heracles is supposed to come on and it's part of what gets the name the day of sex maken of the god from the machine but God comes on Heracles comes on and solves the problems that have been raised in the play now the interesting thing about the philic tt's is that there are on three people in the play plus a couple of bit parts but mostly you've got odysseus Philoctetes and Achilles son Neoptolemus odysseus here as elsewhere in Greek tragedy is a very cagey sort of sly man and so he's trying to get Philoctetes to go to Troy with him so that back to Troy there in the 10th year of the war so that they can finally end this thing there's an Oracle that says not until philic tt's comes with his bow will they be able to prevail over the Trojans so he's trying to get Philoctetes to come I didn't mean to do any of this but it's a beautiful story it's sort of the limit case of Greek tragedy they lock TVs is a man who as a tragic hero is tragic because he has an unhealing wound that is incredibly stinky and and he he wails all the time because it hurts so much so they're on the way to Troy and they just can't stand it anymore and they drop him off on the Isle of Lemnos and leave him there for ten years in the war and then because he smelled so bad and then they come back and realize I mean they here they get this Oracle they need his bow so they come back and it's a disease's job to try to convince Philoctetes to come to troy with them voluntarily after they abandoned him on this island so it's a tricky business and you watch Odysseus use all sorts of indirect ways of trying to trick Philoctetes so it wouldn't be surprising if he somehow came in and faked being Heracles at the end of the play and given the fact that there are only three actors it's the same actor so there's a long scholarly debate about whether it's really Odysseus whether it's really Philip I'm sorry whether it's really Heracles at the end or it's meant to be you're meant to take it or disuse as Odysseus in disguise and the interesting thing is of course is that the way Greek drama is limited by three actors there's a way in which you can't know so Sophocles takes advantage of the fact that there are only three actors in the play these actors were elaborate masks one expression on the mask obviously they couldn't change it and they wore we think elevated shoes they did the performance before probably thirty thousand people regularly a full house because they didn't do them that often we think that it included women and slaves which by itself would be unusual in Greece for men and women publicly to be in the same place outside in such large numbers the acoustics in the theaters there's one in Epidaurus pretty much intact where it's as though if you drop a pin on the stage you can hear it in the last row they've worked out the acoustics so well Greek tragedy isn't realistic so in the first scene of Antigone you have Antigone sort of running around in the open and meeting is Meany she's just buried her against the the Edict of Creon she just buried her brother but of course in contemporary Athens where this play would have been performed women of Antigone's class weren't allowed out in public by themselves in that way maybe the strongest the strangest feature is the chorus for tragedy initially you had 12 and then later 15 for comedy it was 24 the chorus and you'll watch me over the course of the semester move between singular verb and plural verb because in a way the chorus is weird it really is both simultaneously the chorus is or are both an actor in the play with peculiar characteristics so for example in our first play the Agamemnon the chorus will be a chorus of 12 old men who were already too old 10 years ago when the Trojan War started to go to war so they're both a character with distinctive characteristics old men captive women and so on and at the same time a spectator a commentator on the action takes place in the play this chorus seeing ODEs in there called Stasi ma they sing them when the other when the actors have left the stage they sing in one dialect Doric and they speak in another dialect ionic as they sing they also dance in the orchestra which is a circular area in front of what's called the skein a our word for scene derives from it the whole play is in poetry it's metrical the complicated meters are not like ours our meter is based on stress shall I compare thee to a summers day I am bent amateur Greek meter is being based on syllable length so if you know anything about the Greek alphabet you know that you have this in caps and this this is called an Omega and this is called an Omicron but Omega just means Big O and Oh Mike Ron means little Oh Big O because it takes longer to say it it's stretched out more in time when consonants clustered together in Greek that extends the length of this of the syllable so there are meters based not on stress but based on length standard examples that in a way correspond to ours the I am that the trokey so the I am is short long the trophy is long short the dactyl is a word for fingers so you can guess what it is right long short short that's why they do it that way so those are not really different we also have the the anapest short short long that somehow corresponds about we have but they have you know I only name them all the doc MEAC the Hupa duck niak duck niak is short long long short long the Hupa dope duck niak is long short long short long so when you stretch things these things out you have extraordinarily complicated metrical systems now Greek words are different from in in antiquity from what our words are like what modern European languages especially are like they're accented totally so when I first learned Greek many many years ago they were beginning an experiment it where I went to graduate school they knew that Greek was totally accented they knew that it had three accents acute draw of circumflex one ascending one descending and one ascending and then descending it had been the habit forever at least since the time of Erasmus to just forget about all that and translated as though you were translating us to read it as though you're reading a language where a stress was important in that tone so these people very imaginative Lee invented what they thought Greek might have sounded like and I remember still they made us memorize dialogues in Greek and the first line of Plato's Euthyphro on their system I don't think it sounded like this but on their system would have gone something like this DRT or Socrates so in total noon parry tends to one so it's not that's not the way it was but once you hear that you understand that however it was it was in some way different from our way of stressing words or it was different than their meter and their accent different radically from ours it must have been been very difficult to distinguish since all of these in the chorus especially since the courses were sung it must have been extremely difficult to distinguish the tones of the tunes from the tones of the language itself how do you take a language that that is what it is by virtue of its intonation and turn it into and that means rising descending rising and descending how do you do that and then mix it together with a tune that varies in terms of in terms of certain notes now I mention all of this not because I think it's important for you to remember it but to give you a sense of just how strange by our standards Greek tragedy really is well okay at least it lasted for a long time right I mean it's a it's so it's 2500 years old but it lasted forever so it must have been important well actually no that lasted for a hundred years roughly from 500 to 400 BC roughly the length of one man's life Sophocles lived over that period incidentally and interestingly that's also the hundred years in which Greek in which Athenian democracy existed well it's not for a long time at least it was widespread right no in fact Greek tragedy was largely restricted to Athens and to the area around Athens which in which Athens finds itself which is called Attica and so we talked about attic tragedy in fact there we have 32 Greek tragedies complete I for 12 I think Aeschylus and Sophocles and 17 by is that 32 anyway I've got it quite right Euripides is the rest of them so we have 32 and all of them were performed for the first time and it's interesting we think they were actually only performed once in these tragic festivals in one theater the theatre of dionysus on the slope of the Acropolis so not for a long time not particularly widespread what have we got then we're gonna spend a whole semester on a strange literary form practice 2,500 years ago for a short time in a single theater in a city with a population less than Yonkers so why why is why is this worth doing I mean it's a sort of historical curiosity but I don't know about you but I'm not interested in that I mean it's there's got to be more to it than that if it were an historical curiosity well then you'd watch a special on TV on it and say oh isn't that interesting and then let it fly out of your mind immediately but you wouldn't spend a whole semester on it so why let's turn to the second naive question maybe we'll have better luck why do we do it in a philosophy course why is this course called the philosophy of tragedy I have a note here that I'm supposed to read a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks and naturally I left it at home on my desk so I can't read it but it's the past passage a passage that says every philosopher every great philosopher has one great thought and it's always an error but it's a magnificent error as opposed to you know a sort of trivial truth so philosophy involves a great error when Nietzsche uses that phrase he knows and this is in a book called philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks Nietzsche was was educated and taught in the university as a philologist as a someone who was an expert in the languages and literature of antiquity he knows that when he says one great error he's using a phrase if he translated into Greek he would have the word hamartia which is supposed to be the fundamental characteristic of all tragedy the hamartia of the tragic hero according to Aristotle so what does that mean why is it the case that philosophy is always grounded in a great error there's a tension between this in a way is a is a much too quick account of something that occurs in Nietzsche's book the birth of tragedy there's a tension between the assumption that the world ultimately makes sense that would be the motive for a serious question right the motive for philosophy it's always seems strange to me there's a lecture so you don't talk back not in the first day anyway in a seminar it's always seems strange to me students come in and or in the interviewing before the interviewing for a seminar and students say you know I really like philosophy because there are no answers and most of the time I just let it pass and sometimes I can't bear it and I say what why would you why would you get involved with it if there were if there are no answer why do you ask the question if you know from the beginning there are there are no answers it looks as though a serious question can only be asked seriously if you honestly want the answer if you've decided in advance that there are is no answer then you just kind of playing around it's not it's not serious it's just you know it's the equivalent I don't know reading a you know mystery novel or taking a long hot bath or something but that philosophy is not supposed to be that it's supposed to be the most important thing in the world once you understand what's good so so the Assumption underlying philosophy seems to be that however difficult these fundamental questions admit of the possibility of answers now that means that ultimately the assumption is that we live in a world that in principle make sense even if it doesn't make sense initially or to each of us individually there's a tension than between the assumption that ultimately the world makes sins and the tragic sense of life according to which for Nietzsche at least at the heart of the things there is a kind of chaos so philosophy for Nietzsche is not so much love of wisdom as a willful imposition of order that's unaware of its own willfulness in a famous phrase he says philosophy is simply the most spiritualize form of the will to power so at least at first and one has to emphasize that enormous lee at first for Nietzsche Greek tragedy seems deeply deeply antipholus avec now he's very smart and never simply wrong actually it you'll have to forgive my digression 'z but one of the easy mistakes we make is thinking that any opinion so it's one thing to think and a foolish thing I think to think that all opinions are equally valid and doesn't matter what you think as long as you're sincere all of that makes intellectual life really very frivolous if there's no place to go on the one hand on the other hand it's equally foolish to think that any opinion is ever simply false because even the most preposterous opinions come from somewhere they're grounded in something so it's foolish to think that you can simply dismiss them because you in order to dismiss them you have to try to think through why would someone say that what's that what would what are the grounds for believing in such a thing that's then this really is de ggressive but that's the secret of reading Plato 35 dialogues in which Plato presents conversations between Socrates and some pretty strange people with some pretty strange opinions but in fact what you learn is none of these opinions is simply wrong every one of these opinions is somehow grounded in something that's true and the goal in a platonic dialogue is to try to figure out what it is that grounds these opinions where do they come from so let's start from the obvious tragedy isn't about laughter it's about sadness it's about tears you might enjoy it that by itself is a little peculiar think of act 5 of Hamlet last act end of the act end of the play everybody's dead except for Horatio and what happens it's over the curtain Yunos closes applause bravo wonderful what's going on there you've just watched all these people die and you somehow move to applause it's magnificent and it's not just because you know you enjoy the spectacle it's because something's gone on that moves you deeply and yet it's something it's something in a way awful that's gone on so you enjoy you may enjoy tragedy but there's no way that you chuckle through it you don't say oh wow this is amusing still not every fatness regardless of what you hear on the evening news not every sad thing is tragic somehow to be tragic the sadness has to be inescapable for example not simply due to a lack of judgment not just because somebody did a stupid thing that's not tragic so tragedy seems to stand or fall depending on whether there are problems questions that can't be solved that can't be answered there's a wonderful story it's almost certainly apocryphal told by an ancient historian pagan historian named Zeus amaz according to zoasty Maas the emperor of Rome Constantine murders his son Crispus because Constantine suspects that he's been sleeping with his stepmother Fausto so so far is the story of Euripides play Hippolytus now he's he kills his son Constantine's mother Helen Christmases grandmother is rather upset by the fact that her son her grandson has been killed so to make it up to her Constantine has Fausto his wife burned up in her bath then he wore he's worried over what he's done and asks his priests for Rights that will purify him and they say that's quite impossible you know you can't some things you can't be purified for but there's an Egyptian from Spain in Constantine's court who tells him about a religion that offers absolution from any crime it's Christianity accordingly Konstantin converts and with him the whole Roman Empire and the history of the world is changed now you see why I called it apocryphal this isn't true but it's revealing because in its in in the way it proceeds it calls into question the very possibility of a Christian tragedy this if nothing is beyond expiation how can there be tragedy where no problem is beyond solution so you know Edith should go to counseling after he kills his father and sleeps with his mother Agamemnon and Clytemnestra should go to a marriage counselor to work out their differences so the assumptions somehow that all differences can be worked out in this way assumes that you know there's no reason for there's nothing nothing is beyond expiation so tragedy is impossible on the other hand where problems are incapable of resolution this suggests that there's something irrational at the core of things and so Nietzsche is somehow right there's a tension between the worlds of tragedy and the worlds of philosophy we're in deep here because it's very unclear what a course called the philosophy of tragedy would then do with itself so let's start over the paradigmatic tragedy even in the fifth century was Sophocles Oedipus toronto's they eat it was the king Aristotle and the poetics mentions at nine times twice as often as the next as the runner-up if it's an eye among the torian's all others he mentions only once there of this play by Seneca by corn a by Dryden by Voltaire by g'd not to mention Aeschylus and Euripides although they don't exist any longer we know that they wrote them and of course there's freud so the Oedipus tirana seems to exemplify the expression that the first chorus and Agamemnon use pas faim Athos the tragic dikmen dictum learning through suffering now Edith Edith problem is roughly thinking that he can take matters into his own hands so he hears a drunk in what he thinks ETA's thinks as his home city of Corinth the drunk questions his parentage a tip is goes to Delfy where the Oracle tells him he's going to kill his father and marry his mother and so he runs away from Corinth because he's a good son he believes enough to leave but not enough to believe and we know what happens so Oedipus is attempt to take control leads to his losing control he suffers and learns pas faim a'those that is he blinds himself and goes into exile suitably chastened and then he moves on to the next play the universe at Colonus so ii depe slor' n--'s that human beings can't be autonomous they can't be utterly responsible for themselves they can't be self caused they can't be their own parents or generators now contrary to Nietzsche this seems to suggest a kind of rationalism albeit learned through hard experience you know it's not as though he's he's ease it he's so rational that he knows from the beginning what to do and what not to do but over the course of the play he learns about mistake he's made and if wisdom is possible and very desirable then philosophy understood is the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom it's surely necessary Sophocles though won't let it go at this we talked a little bit about this in the group interview that the Oedipus who has just discovered that he's made this terrible error thinking that he could control his fate so fully learns it at the moment learns it deeply presumably at the moment when he he discovers that his mother wife has committed committed suicide when he sees her hanging there and takes from her her cloak the roaches that hold it together and sticks them in his eyes and blinds himself now I mentioned this before to you it's a rather wonderful piece of sophoclean poetry that every translation in order to make sense of it for you will say that he stabs himself in the eyes but actually the word that is used mean something like sockets stabs himself in the Arth raw our word arthritis comes from it it's a joint it's a ball joint and it's the same word that was used previously to describe what happened to eat of us when he was a little baby and he was stabbed through we take it to be his ankles or his legs or his knees were never quite sure but it's a ball joint it's through his arse raw plural ball joints so it turns out that after he stabbed himself in the eyes he walks out of the house and tells Creon I've been terrible you really need to take the rule and exile me to Mount Catherine outside of Thebes of course the baby Oedipus was stabbed through the ball joints the Arthur ah and put out on Mount Catherine so Sophocles is hinting to us that this man who has just discovered what he did wrong trying to be the sole cause of his own fate assuming that he could be that is once again doing the same thing by prescribing his own punishment this is what I did I should be punished this is how I should be punished he's taking control of the world again and thinking that he's in utter control of his of his own fade so it turns out then that he never learns even after all his suffering so tragedy then if this is where the play is handed and this is the paradigmatic tragedy it looks as though tragedy the tragedy ultimately implies a sad reality and Nietzsche was right there's a chaos at the core of reality yet we learn if we're paying attention that Oedipus doesn't learn we even learn why he doesn't learn and so it looks as though at a still deeper level red in the way we'll try to read the tragedies this semester tragedies do seem to make sense of the world tragedy itself somehow detaches us enough from the world to teach us exactly how it's impossible to be detached from the world so you remember I pointed out to you that in the play Oedipus the King every time he talks about where the killing of his father occurred he says it is at a parting of three ways and every time anybody else talks about it they talk about it as a fork in the road the interesting thing about the difference is that everybody else without even thinking about it understands that you only get to the point where the road forks by having come along another road you can't be what you are without having a past you can't forgive me for using the same example but it's so wonderful that I can't resist if you think about the standard teenage lament I wish you weren't my parents when you're in a fight with your parents you realize by realizing how crazy that is you realize what I saw what Sophocles has in mind if your only defense is against your parents when you're at odds with him is to say I wish I you weren't my parents that's like saying I wish I weren't born because you wouldn't be there unless you had these parents you are what you are by virtue of the path you've walked down except if you're a tip us you somehow treat it as though you're not as though you could hover above and choose any of the three ways that you're not constituted by already having come down one of them and the beautiful thing about it this is of course the source of Edith Edith is's problem the assumption that he is self caused the assumption that that he's autonomous it's the assumption he begins to play with it's the it's what he shows at the end despite what he's seen in the horror that he's seen he still hasn't learned and so it's interesting that Sophocles poses these two for us as alternatives and yet when you think about it for a minute you realize Sophocles has made us hover above and see things that in a certain way we shouldn't be able to see if the second way is the only way so we learn that Oedipus doesn't learn and why he doesn't learn if we learn that it looks as though at some still deeper level tragedies make sense of the world tragedy itself detaches us enough from the world to teach us exactly how it's impossible to be detached from the world it's in that way deeply philosophic now how exactly detachment of this sort is possible it's still a mystery and for this reason tragedy turns out to be deeply self-reflexive it's not only about what it's about it's about itself it's about it how it's possible to do what it's doing and so as self-reflexive in this way it is also deeply philosophic what's interesting is that for me interesting and I'll force it to be interesting for you by the end of the semester if the way this is a model for the Socratic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle philosophy understood is somehow figuring out the limits of certain ways of looking at things of common opinions of Orthodoxy right opinion of ideology which while not giving us an absolute knowledge of the way things are nevertheless reveals to us certain things about the way things are pave Martha's pas faim Athos is a tragic version of knowledge of ignorance and the interesting thing some of you've read Plato the temptation when you hear Socrates say all I know is that I do not know is to think oh how humble and he's really just saying well you can't know anything Kenya but in fact he doesn't say that he says he has knowledge of the fact that he doesn't know that's a lot of knowledge knowing that and why you don't know something teaches you something actually rather powerful and important about your world it's a little bit like what I talked about earlier it's a little little bit like realizing that everybody has an opinion about the way things are we're clever enough to figure out that most people haven't thought through their opinions and so they're likely not to be true but they never come from nothing and so figuring out where they come from even though they turn out to be false gives you a rather interesting perspective on the character of the world in which you live so one example some of you have either read or heard about this famous passage and Plato's Republic in the seventh book the cave image I'm not going to go through the whole thing but the key is somehow the notion that were locked in a world of appearance were doxa also means opinion and that the goal of philosophy is to turn that opinion into knowledge no this is not good should I write knowledge and read into knowledge opinion is based in seeming knowledge is based in being the goal seems to be to get past seeming and live in the realm of being the difficulty in Plato's full well aware of this is that if you ask yourself what the character of the real being of things is it's this it's not bad the way things seem and why they seem that way as part of the way things are so when Socrates claims to have knowledge of ignorance that knowledge of ignorance is in a way a knowledge of why seeming is just seeming but that's a very big part of an awareness of the way things are how things really are so is by the way just the principle of all fiction you know the first line of Tolstoy is Anna Karenina all happy families are alike every unhappy family is on its unhappy in its own way well try to invent for yourself a novel that has to do with the happy family what nurse would it be I mean there are no problems nothing that at every stage they're they're happy it turns out to understand what it means to write means to write about a problem of some kind you can't imagine what it would be to be interested in a plot that isn't grounded in something that looks problematic which either works its way out or doesn't work its way out but you can't I mean I once did it in this way excuse the simple-minded way in which it comes out but that's useful too so once upon a time there was a boy and a girl and the boy and the girl lived next door and they liked each other very much and they went to school and as they work through school they each became the co-valedictorians of their class and they were also the very attractive everybody agreed and the best in sports and in theatre and you know you can add the details yourself when they got to be juniors they got 800s on all their SATs and they both went to Harvard together or if you'd prefer they went to Sarah Lawrence together you can write it any way you want to and then they at a certain point entered their careers and we're phenomenally successful and that no problems at all and then they decided to have children let's call them the parents Dick and Jane and the children dick jr. and Jane jr. and they and they were and their children were just absolutely gorgeous and destined for greatness so that's what the perfectly happy novel I mean if you don't figure out that this doesn't make anybody happy but if you just use it in the spirit it's offered it's what the perfectly happy novel would look like you could say you don't understand anything if you understand the world in that way yeah if you make a choice you're confronted with alternatives you're confronted with I mean you can imagine a lot of ways in which a story would work that out as the reader you might be reading and insight no don't true that because that's bad and you're a fool if you choose so you could make the wrong choice or you could be in a situation where you feel as though you have to make a choice and because you live a finite life you can't do both things but you recognize that both are worth doing and that hurts you so you can work it out at a bunch of different ways but if the choice doesn't involve a difficulty a genuine difficulty a problem then it doesn't look as though it it means anything to us it looks as though it's not really even a choice because when choosing is obvious and you just choose the the best way and there are no bad consequences of it who cares about that it's not it's not interesting so it turns out that for things to be interesting they have to be hard ha famous we learn through suffering but they have to learn through suffering too it doesn't mean they can't come out in a good story on the right side I like stories like that sometimes but it does mean that the family that's destined to be happy from the beginning is two things on the way uninteresting and on the one hand uninteresting on the other hand impossible give him giving the way we're put together so let's go back to our first naive a question question about the importance of tragedy and the reason for spending a semester on it this has to do with its powerful it has to do with the second question it has to do with this powerful if complicated connection between philosophy and tragedy now tragedy is obviously not about philosophy so let's pull back for a second and ask a simpler question what's the obviously Greek tragedy really most tragedy until the pretty modern era what's it obviously about so think Shakespeare King Lear King Macbeth Prince Hamlet general a fellow and down the list it looks like it's about politics in the broadest sense and yet by 500 BC when the great age of Greek tragedy begins the word King Basilio's in attic Greek already is a name for a minor functionary in democratic Athens it doesn't mean King any longer still for some reason political rule the city the polis is all over Greek tragedy as an issue now so it's about politics on the one hand on the other hand of the 32 extant Greek tragedies 30 of them excluding Euripides recess and Aeschylus Prometheus Bound turn to some extent on family ties so politics and family sort of obviously just by looking at the the things that the plays are on the most obvious level about okay what might connect those now wherever they're human beings there have to be some provisions for giving birth and rearing the young just think about the way in anthropology key kinship in ethnographies is so central now the content of course varies enormous ly although obviously male and female have to be involved however minimally now sexual generation is one sort of human making it's opposed to another sort of generation the Greeks have a word from it before it techne our word technology comes from it for them it points to the various arts and crafts so when you make a baby you're engaged in a different kind of process than you're engaged in when you make a bookshelf when you make a bookshelf you go into it with a plan you think I need to do this I need to do this I need to do this in order to get the product when you have sex it's not usually on your mind in that but even if you want to make a baby you're not thinking about you know how long the shelves have to be so techne as a mode of making seems much more under our control it's interesting creation myths tend to emphasize one of these two one one or the other of these two forms so in Genesis in the beginning God makes the heaven and the earth the earth is without form and void and the rest of it but it looks as though it's a process of which is in a way akin to techne he see it's the agony you have two gods at the beginning Gaia and or knows heaven and earth and they generate the second generation of gods now it's all interesting but it does look as though if you think about what earth is as soon as you have earth you have heaven you have something surrounding it so it turns out that the togetherness of heaven and earth is already a done deal when you have one of them but nevertheless the model the mythic model for for the generation of of the world is sexual in Hesiod in the Theogony but even in Genesis you very quickly get a distinction between Cain and Abel one Farms the other hunts they're understood to be I mean if one is a shepherd the other is a farmer they're understood be very very different from one another and interestingly enough came as ancestors and not as ancestors his progeny go on to be the founders of cities now even Aristotle is famous for arguing for the natural Ennis naturalness of political life even in Aristotle cities are understood to be founded to be instituted to be set up they have a kind of techne feel to them there matters of convention of agreement of Nomos it looks as though the alternative to political society is the family understood as a natural social unit that one makes or generates but doesn't choose or will so family and this is true even for us stands for what is fundamental to our lives but over which we have no control it's somehow the inescapable so it's not surprising that political philosophy has been preoccupied with it it comes out in Republic book 5 and the first the very first book of the politics in book 6 of chapter 6 of Locke's Second Treatise on government a second part first and second part of Russo's discourse on the origins of inequality Marxist communist manifesto insists on the on the overcoming of the family and its central to Hegel's philosophy of right so family in some way always resists the political it resists rationalizing so you know some of you have siblings you love your siblings I suppose have you ever dared to have asked yourselves the question if she weren't my sister would I love her would I even like her doesn't mean that you don't like her it means that you know it's sort of it's unclear the standards don't aren't are not that you don't choose your siblings you love them because they are part of who you are in a way but it's not the case that you would necessarily choose them if you could choose such things so in that sense family family is not something over which we have control now Greek tragedy is obviously very much concerned with this issue we just need to think about Antigone and Antigone's decision to bury her the brother despite the edict against his being buried or put it really crudely political life has within it the tendency to become comprehensive its goal is in a way the complete human good but it can't ever obtain the autonomy that is built into it that it wants that it longs for because it always has to rely for its supply of citizens on sexual appropriation it doesn't you know you can you can make up the rules of government you can make up citizens you've got to get them from somewhere so this process of sexual generation is something that ultimately resists techne something that gives rise to loyalties of its own either erotic loyalties or kinship loyalties that resist being completely politicized so the city the polis the political order absolutely needs the family and yet ultimately it wants to annihilate the family in the Antigone at one point crayons son hymen will warn him that he's becoming tyrannical and Creon tells him that he should just obey Him and Timon wonders why and Creon says you were my son right so the irony is that Creon is in the middle of asserting the primacy of the city the political over and against the family and the reason he gives to his son for why he should do what Creon wants him to do if ACCA's crayons his father that's not an accident it turns out to be characteristic of political life to do something like this it's let's look at it by beginning with the political rather than with the familial political life is always organized around some understanding of justice it doesn't have to be correct understanding of justice but however crude there's always an understanding of justice it worked but any understanding of that kind is in principle Universal the law says it's wrong to kill it's wrong to do this it's wrong to presumably that should mean it's wrong for anybody anywhere to do these things under that understanding however it would be very hard to justify a particularly law as an Athenian law as opposed to a barbarian law or an English law as opposed to a French law and yet political society is always particular that would be true even if it were comprised of all existing human beings and therefore it looks as a political society I'm not discovering this for the first time as you'll see political society is always founded in what you might call a crime not an accident that the founder of Rome is Romulus and Kane is the ancestor of the founders of cities in Genesis what does it mean that political life is thought to begin with fratricide the two most famous frat resides Romulus on the one hand Kane on the other well to found a particular polis means somehow to kill your brother to treat people who are the same as though they're fundamentally different even though you do that so that you can treat some people as the same the flipside of this problem is what's called autochthony the myths about the origin of a particular society that suggests that were we naturally differ from others because we spring up from the ground as brothers and sisters we spring from the same mother and so we have words like mother land and fatherland the polis then tends to justify its non universality by maeín analogy to the family and therefore on the one hand it tries to suppress particular families and only grudgingly acknowledges them and on the other hand it can only justify itself as a sort of family and therefore has to suppress real families as a threat to its understanding of itself as a family if you're everybody's brother everybody's sibling in the city then you're not supposed to treat your real siblings any differently from the way you treat everybody in the city so the political order of the polis is always a problematic mixture of the universal and the particular that shows up within the polis because it understands itself as both natural and instituted first paragraph of Aristotle's politics it shows up in the tension between the polis and the family Antigone it shows up in the tension within the family itself as we'll see when we read it Antigone as opposed to his meanie now for reasons that aren't yet clear these tensions the polis the family the universal the particular technique reiation get articulated in Greek tragedy in terms of the distinction between male and female this is in a way the most obvious distinction within humanity man and woman he created them in His image he created them meant to be a puzzle in a way in Greek you have a word anthropos that means human being and you have a word on air that means man and guna that means woman and the question is always what what it means be anthropos and yet so in a way Greek tragedy depends on understanding how this distinction is being articulated it's a distinction we're very uncomfortable talking about so the answer to why we spend a whole semester on Greek tragedy is that it asks fundamental questions in a way that unsettles us in a way that forces us to take them seriously even though in a way we don't want to take them seriously a bit something I wanted to say but forgot to say when I was talking about so understanding what I mean by the by the fact that Romulus and Kane are the paradigmatic founders of cities think about what Romulus does Romulus takes a plow and is the man who killed his brother Remus and plows a furrow around the seven hills of Rome and he says that everybody in the inside of that circuit is a Roman and everybody on the outside is a foreigner when the Greeks make the distinction between Greek and barbarian the notion of barbarian is thought by some to have come from this ba-ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba and what is that it's sort of like yada yada yada yada yada it is a way of saying they're doing something with their mouths but it doesn't make any sense so it's an insistence that Greek is a language and these other things that don't sound like language aren't language which is a way of saying is a way of doing what what romulus does it's a way of saying inside the circuit you're a real human being outside the circuit you're somehow not um okay I want to turn very briefly very briefly to Aeschylus's or a styie which will start when we read the Agamemnon for next Wednesday which reminds me you should read the whole thing it's the longest of the place we'll read about 1800 lines but read the whole thing so you have a sense of what happens but then go back and read the first half of it we will spend two days on it's the shortest time we'll spend on any on any play during the semester so Aeschylus is or a styie it's a trilogy the tragic festivals were entered when playwrights wrote not one play but three plays so originally all of these plays were parts of trilogies this is the only extant trilogy that we have was started on Wednesday to back are we into it we need a pre plot summary so they're brothers Atreus and vsts feisty sleeps with Atreus wife in revenge Atreus feeds thyestes most of his own children of Thyestes children and justice is the only child who escapes a justice then in the next generation sleeps with Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra Agamemnon is the son of Atreus now in order to go to war in this is the Greek the Trojan War Agamemnon is told by an Oracle that he has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so he does that and he goes off to Troy and he's gone for ten years at the beginning of the Agamemnon he's returning to his home after 10 years returning from the war now there are three very strange things about the trilogy the ank the language of the Agamemnon is incredibly lush sometimes it's unintelligible but it's gorgeous the last play the amenities by the time we reach it the language flattens out and becomes almost prosaic that's the first strange thing second strange thing in the Agamemnon the gods seemed to be at most personifications of specific powers so if Isis seems interchangeable with fire at 281 281 the Furies seem more or less interchangeable with a kind of inner torment or guilt at line 463 so when we're told on line 60 that the chorus has this wonderful line they say whoever Zeus maybe if this name is pleasing to him Zeus whatever he wants to be called so they acknowledge that in a way they don't really know what they're talking about when they talk about the top god but then this most interesting thing happens at the very end of the libation bearers after he's killed his mother arrestees kills Clytemnestra he's talking to the chorus and he announces that he's being tormented by these inner beings that are and everybody says what are you talking about what are you talking about you know and your arrestees about to run away the Furies are tormenting him but he feels them but nobody sees them the play ends maybe forty lines after that then you get the third play the amenities and it opens up when the priestess of Apollo that the that the at the temple of apollo at delphi runs out of the temple and gives you a description of what she's seen inside and what she's seen inside is on the one hand identifiable as arrestees who's gone to ask apollo what to do and then she gives a description of these awful old Gorgon like hags that are surrounding him so something rather interesting has happened between play to and play three invisible guilt has become visible nobody sees it at the end of the second play there it's visible to all at the beginning of the third play that's the second weird thing third weird thing it would be fair to say that this is a trilogy about justice in Greek decay now it means primarily decay right or justice and from that it has other meanings it can mean trial it can mean penalty it can be in a lawsuit it can mean punishment and then it has one rather strange meaning in the accusative case for us it would be the case in which a direct object is used in the accusative case not DK but decane you add a n it's also an adverb that means something like like or in the manner of so it's in its way not quite the same but sort of like the way we use just in English you can it can mean just having to do with justice or can just mean just in the way I just used it right now here's the distribution of decay in the three plays of the or styie and in two other plays by Aeschylus so the Agamemnon is about 1700 lines DK as just occurs 13 times decane meaning like or in the manner of occurs 14 times in the libation bearers which about 1100 lines the decay has just occurs 14 times and DK d cane as like occurs 14 times in the humanities the last play which is about a thousand lines long the DK as just occurs 27 times that's understandable because the amenities is all about the trial and just the word decay frequently means something like trial in in the play decane as like occurs three times in another of Aeschylus plays the Senate against thebes decay as just occurs seven times and not at all as like and in the Prometheus Bound it doesn't occur in either sense so it's much more frequent in general in the not only it's not only much more frequent frequent in general in the Oresteia which isn't so strange since the plays are about justice but the adverbial sense of decane as like occurs more in the Agamemnon alone than in all the rest of Greek literature to mind so that's not a fluke that's not it'd be one thing if it was a little bit more but no more than and all of the rest extant Greek literature combined Aeschylus is highlighting the use of a word that is seldom used in the way in which he's using it now remember the three plays are a trilogy and so they're written it exactly the same time and so there's no development here it's not as though the fact that it's present so little in the in the humanities relative to the Agamemnon is something that can be you can say well Aeschylus just got tired of it and stopped using it so what does that mean you start with a notion perfectly perfectly defensible a little empty as yet but we'll try to fill it in that the trilogy if it's about anything has to be about justice not hard to accept that since the humanities ends up with the founding of the Athenian jury system that's what it's about but this also seems somehow to do with the connection between justice and likeness or justice and poetry or justice and images and this in turn has something to do with how we understand the gods whether we understand them as persons or in some way as as representations of natural things if I stays and fire so the interesting thing about the trilogy is that you start with an awareness of three oddities and you wonder whether you can think them together in such a way as to understand why they have to go together so roughly speaking you could put the problem in this way half of the problem is there a necessary connection between poetry and justice not just in the in that horse diet but is there a necessary connection between poetry and justice everywhere and always think about it in this way one way of backing into this I hate to do this you know the you know the basic story right that Prime Minister kills him when he comes home why does she kill him there's a real question why does she kill liking them none anybody yeah for good but she's also been sleeping with justice for almost 10 years right and if Agamemnon comes back presumably that'll have to stop fine so she might do it because of her then she might do it because she prefers it justice Agamemnon what's she been doing for the last 10 years well probably but on the one hand but in a more mundane way she's been running the city not a justice but quite a minister they start by talking about her the court starts by talking about her they call her a manly woman they mean that to be a compliment and they're also means they're afraid of her so Agamemnon comes back she won't be running things anymore he'll be running things any of you remember what he brings back with him sorry yeah and so his plan is to install her in the house along with Clara and she might not like that idea so just easy I've got four motives her killing of Agamemnon is wildly overdetermined any one of these would be enough it looks as though the the notion of Justice as we're customed to getting it in legal proceedings the desirable thing is to be able to get your hands on the motive not five-note is the motive and the question I suppose is this given what human beings are can you ever get a hold of the motive do you ever know exactly what's going on in somebody's head so it begins to look as though justice under the law requires that we think that we can get a hold of something and articulate what it is in a way that's far more satisfactory than we ever can doesn't mean by the way we shouldn't do it but it may mean that in order to have a legal proceeding proceeding you have to imagine that something is available to you that is in principle never simply available to you and that would mean that you need some there's something like poetry at work so that may or may not be where we end up here but you begin to see how what it means to read these plays what it means to read these places to notice these little weird things and then begin to wonder how if they could be connected how might they be connected how might this these things that look so out of place actually fit into a larger pattern that once you've understood you've understood something that's going on in a very at a very deep level and what might that have to do with the gods what I just articulated so that's the way you've got to sort of get in the habit of reading I think I've reached one of those points where I really should have something very big to say I'm think I'm pretty much done so I don't have anything big to say questions about anything before we break so read I would say all of it quickly and then read say the first 900 lines and read them more carefully

Channel: The Philosophy of Tragedy

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Length: 81min 55sec (4915 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019