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endymions_bowerWhen Oedipus suffers, as Lloyd-Jones argues, for the crimes committed by Laius, or when Agamemnon suffers for the crimes committed by Atreus, it may seem unjust, or at best, a merely superstitious belief in spiritual “pollution”. But one must remember that we are talking about kings. Someone wealthy and powerful has greater scope for the exercise of justice and injustice to begin with; but it is especially important that they use their power wisely and, indeed, in an excess of benevolence, when that power is inherited, and built on a foundation of the injustices of their predecessors. Mythic narratives like these, in addition to their esoteric significance, show an advanced political sensibility.
And so it is not that Oedipus has himself committed a crime deserving of requital on the order which he experiences: “Guilt that is described in this Aeschylean fashion, the guilt … of the man who has no fear of Dikê … does not sound like the involuntary guilt of one who has acted in ignorance; it is not contracted by one who kills, in a brawl, wayfarers who have provoked him, nor by such threats as Oedipus has uttered against Tiresias and Creon. It is true, however, that the man on whom a curse lies will be especially prone to fits of passion that will cause him to commit actions that will have disastrous consequences,” (111). Here it is useful to toggle back and forth, so to speak, between the diachronic, narrative succession and the synchronic, hierarchical organization of the symbols in the myth. A sequence of events which has one kind of explanation on the “higher” plane of the dynastic ancestor has a different kind of explanation, a more “mechanical” one, on the “lower” plane of the “wounded-foot” (i.e., earth-bound mortal soul), Oidipous.
“This law shall be valid for present, future and past; to none among mortals shall vast wealth come without Atê,” (Antigone 611-614); “Justice shines beneath smoky rafters, and honours the righteous life, but the gold-bespangled halls where men’s hands are dirty she abandons with averted eyes, having no respect for the power of wealth made counterfeit with praise,” (Agamemnon 773-780). Atê is the recklessness sometimes referred to as a “judicial blindness” sent by the Gods. It is also, of course, typical of the immaturity fostered in the overprivileged. From a more theological perspective, however, atê afflicts all transmigrating souls, however, and embodies the general inability of souls in such a condition to “join the end to the beginning,” the telos, the intended aim or simply the result, to the archê, the principle or cause or, narratively, the “true” beginning or originating action of the events which unfold. This gap, which creates what the individual knows as “destiny”, is also individuating, i.e., it is constitutive of what such a soul is, the sort of “one” it is. With a broader “perspective” a soul ceases to be, in a certain sense, human; and attaining this transhuman perspective is what I think is often signified by the transformations which occur in myths and which are often, indeed, portrayed as a gift of the Gods, a beneficent resolution to the problem at hand (see my earlier remarks on Hera).
Within the tripartite psychology of the Republic, the tragic hero is typically excessively thymotic, that is, excessively driven by the thumos, the sense of pride which turns on the individual’s ability to assess their own worth. This is where the modern confusion over the ancient Greek concept of hubris comes into play. The distinctively tragic destiny of the individual has its engine in the thumos; it is for this reason that Plato seeks to subordinate it to the reasoning part of the soul. In this sense, an ancient reader would have found it much easier to understand how the Myth of Er, with its elaborate description of the fate of the transmigrating souls, related to the rest of the dialogue. It is thumos which locks individuals into the destiny which, though just in itself, is not the sole variety of justice available to individuals. The tragic individual is caught between prophecy, which is difficult to appropriate correctly (we have examples of perhaps more successful appropriations of prophecy than those we know from myth—Socrates finds a beneficial understanding of the oracle’s pronouncement that there is no one wiser than he, which on its face invites abuse; Diogenes interprets the oracular injunction to “adulterate the currency” as calling for him to question the prevailing values, rather than engaging in questionable practices in the family banking concern) and the kind of attitude embodied by Iocaste, who asks “Why should a man be afraid, a man for whom the event is all-powerful, and no true foreknowledge of anything exists? It is best to live without guidance, as one may,” (Oedipus Rex 977f).
The oracle is not about “foreknowledge”, but it can only seem so to the individual enmeshed in a tragic and unreflective destiny. It offers a challenge to the individual, and a demand for transformation. If this is not taken up by the individual in a creative sense it may well be taken up by the Gods, who often do their work by way of the atê, the blindness, of mortals: “Patroclus … neglects the command of Achilles to return to camp once he had driven the Trojans from the ships, ‘because the purpose of Zeus is always stronger than that of men’,” (23). “What made it hard, [Sophocles] thought, for men to understand the justice of the Gods was the immense extent of time which may separate cause from punishment, and the complex interweaving within human history of different causal chains of injustice followed by chastisement,” (128). But it is illusion to attempt to trace these chains as though recovering the past, because it is really about the meaning of the past in the present, the sedimented social (familial, etc.) elements of character over which the individual has little power without a powerful effort of introspection. Nor are “tragic” acts necessarily evil; rather, as Lloyd-Jones describes Antigone’s act of burying Polyneices, such an act is “something ‘formidable’, an instance of human courage and resource which may accomplish great good or great evil,” (115). What is in common in the good and the evil outcome of such “formidable” acts is the transformation wrought upon the agent. It is this, in fact, for which Plato I think seeks to offer a moderate alternative.
And so it is not that Oedipus has himself committed a crime deserving of requital on the order which he experiences: “Guilt that is described in this Aeschylean fashion, the guilt … of the man who has no fear of Dikê … does not sound like the involuntary guilt of one who has acted in ignorance; it is not contracted by one who kills, in a brawl, wayfarers who have provoked him, nor by such threats as Oedipus has uttered against Tiresias and Creon. It is true, however, that the man on whom a curse lies will be especially prone to fits of passion that will cause him to commit actions that will have disastrous consequences,” (111). Here it is useful to toggle back and forth, so to speak, between the diachronic, narrative succession and the synchronic, hierarchical organization of the symbols in the myth. A sequence of events which has one kind of explanation on the “higher” plane of the dynastic ancestor has a different kind of explanation, a more “mechanical” one, on the “lower” plane of the “wounded-foot” (i.e., earth-bound mortal soul), Oidipous.
“This law shall be valid for present, future and past; to none among mortals shall vast wealth come without Atê,” (Antigone 611-614); “Justice shines beneath smoky rafters, and honours the righteous life, but the gold-bespangled halls where men’s hands are dirty she abandons with averted eyes, having no respect for the power of wealth made counterfeit with praise,” (Agamemnon 773-780). Atê is the recklessness sometimes referred to as a “judicial blindness” sent by the Gods. It is also, of course, typical of the immaturity fostered in the overprivileged. From a more theological perspective, however, atê afflicts all transmigrating souls, however, and embodies the general inability of souls in such a condition to “join the end to the beginning,” the telos, the intended aim or simply the result, to the archê, the principle or cause or, narratively, the “true” beginning or originating action of the events which unfold. This gap, which creates what the individual knows as “destiny”, is also individuating, i.e., it is constitutive of what such a soul is, the sort of “one” it is. With a broader “perspective” a soul ceases to be, in a certain sense, human; and attaining this transhuman perspective is what I think is often signified by the transformations which occur in myths and which are often, indeed, portrayed as a gift of the Gods, a beneficent resolution to the problem at hand (see my earlier remarks on Hera).
Within the tripartite psychology of the Republic, the tragic hero is typically excessively thymotic, that is, excessively driven by the thumos, the sense of pride which turns on the individual’s ability to assess their own worth. This is where the modern confusion over the ancient Greek concept of hubris comes into play. The distinctively tragic destiny of the individual has its engine in the thumos; it is for this reason that Plato seeks to subordinate it to the reasoning part of the soul. In this sense, an ancient reader would have found it much easier to understand how the Myth of Er, with its elaborate description of the fate of the transmigrating souls, related to the rest of the dialogue. It is thumos which locks individuals into the destiny which, though just in itself, is not the sole variety of justice available to individuals. The tragic individual is caught between prophecy, which is difficult to appropriate correctly (we have examples of perhaps more successful appropriations of prophecy than those we know from myth—Socrates finds a beneficial understanding of the oracle’s pronouncement that there is no one wiser than he, which on its face invites abuse; Diogenes interprets the oracular injunction to “adulterate the currency” as calling for him to question the prevailing values, rather than engaging in questionable practices in the family banking concern) and the kind of attitude embodied by Iocaste, who asks “Why should a man be afraid, a man for whom the event is all-powerful, and no true foreknowledge of anything exists? It is best to live without guidance, as one may,” (Oedipus Rex 977f).
The oracle is not about “foreknowledge”, but it can only seem so to the individual enmeshed in a tragic and unreflective destiny. It offers a challenge to the individual, and a demand for transformation. If this is not taken up by the individual in a creative sense it may well be taken up by the Gods, who often do their work by way of the atê, the blindness, of mortals: “Patroclus … neglects the command of Achilles to return to camp once he had driven the Trojans from the ships, ‘because the purpose of Zeus is always stronger than that of men’,” (23). “What made it hard, [Sophocles] thought, for men to understand the justice of the Gods was the immense extent of time which may separate cause from punishment, and the complex interweaving within human history of different causal chains of injustice followed by chastisement,” (128). But it is illusion to attempt to trace these chains as though recovering the past, because it is really about the meaning of the past in the present, the sedimented social (familial, etc.) elements of character over which the individual has little power without a powerful effort of introspection. Nor are “tragic” acts necessarily evil; rather, as Lloyd-Jones describes Antigone’s act of burying Polyneices, such an act is “something ‘formidable’, an instance of human courage and resource which may accomplish great good or great evil,” (115). What is in common in the good and the evil outcome of such “formidable” acts is the transformation wrought upon the agent. It is this, in fact, for which Plato I think seeks to offer a moderate alternative.
