Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture FiveThe Greek Tragedians on Man’s FateScope: In the drama of the ancient Greek world—in the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles—thetension between fate and striving can never be relaxed. Medea is illustrative. Here is a woman whosemagic is used to rescue Jason, only to have their subsequent marriage set aside by him as he pursuesanother woman. In blind vengeance, she kills their two sons. Was Medea’s crime mitigated by Jason’streason against their love? Was she a murderer or the victim of uncontrollable impulses? Nomos orphysis—better still, perhaps, nomos as physis.Consider, on the other hand, Antigone, as presented by Sophocles. Against the express orders of KingCreon, she buries her brother, then appears before the king to defend herself. But her defense is not that ofMedea, not that she was overcome by grief or that passion got the better of her. No, Antigone’s defense isthat her allegiance to her brother is a veritable law of nature—something as causal as the laws of naturethemselves. Indeed, if there would be kings at all, there must be a capacity for unrepentant faithfulness.Is human nature within or beyond the natural realm? What is it in our nature that inclines us toward goodand evil? Is everything but the result of whim and chance and fate, or is there something in the person thatmight rise above both custom and brute nature itself? It is in the major dramatic works of Aeschylus,Sophocles, and Euripides that the problem of self-knowledge is underscored—a problem made ever moredifficult by the variety of factors, both seen and unseen, that operate on us in the course of a lifetime. Howcan we limit the destructive force of those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”? What form of life,what mode of conduct, might yield sanctuary?OutlineI. Pre-literate societies had limited resources for recording what was of value to them, but one method used wasdance, such as the dance of the cranes that Theseus performed to communicate the secret of the labyrinth to hispeople.A. Chorus and singing add vividness to dance, and narratives of consequence can be acted out before thewhole people to remind them of who they are and what their responsibilities are.B. As individual speakers arise who are able to carry on colloquies and embody characters, the chorusaddresses the audience, evaluating, commenting, and analyzing.C. Thus, out of gesture, dance, ritual, bardic story comes a world of stories and philosophical disquisitionscast in the form of dialogue: the world of the Greek dramatists that will issue eventually in the dialogues ofPlato.II. The psychological depth and philosophical complexity of Greek classical drama can be seen in the dilemmas ofEuripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Antigone. We first look at Medea.A. Was Medea guilty of murder? The killing of children by a parent is the most “unnatural” of acts, but heract might be seen as a natural revenge proportionate to the crime committed against her and, thus, fitting or“meet.”B. Revenge of this sort harks back to an earlier, pre-juridical world—the world of the law of revenge, whenthe chthonic gods of the earth held sway and the Olympian gods of light were still in the future, a world inwhich the pleadings of the heart trump the demands of rationality.1. This older religion was associated with birth and renewal, with crops and nurturing, and identified thefemale with all that was sustaining; the bond of mother and child was the fundamental social bond. Atthis most primitive level is where Medea’s creative and destructive energies reside.2. In the classical period, this pattern is reversed. The Olympian religion installed Zeus as chief amongthe gods, and the superiority of the male was uncontested. In Aeschylus’s drama of Clytemnestra andAgamemnon, Clytemnestra’s crime (killing her husband) is judged to be worse than Orestes’s crime(killing his mother) by the Olympian Athena, because Clytemnestra’s crime is that she killed a man.3. Medea harkens to an older perspective, so different from our own that she seems to us, and toEuripedes’s audience, as simply mad. Indeed, Medea seems to be more driven than driving. Something12©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership