From the Beginning to Plato

408 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
provide the citizens with an insight into the ridiculous. At first sight this allows
the possibility of a distancing, an intellectual detachment on the part of the
audience from dramatic productions, which Plato rarely acknowledges
elsewhere. 66 His standard interpretation of audience reaction is exclusively in
terms of emotional involvement; and in fact the Laws passage is no exception.
The question is about how comedy would give us its insights. We get an
answer to this question from the Philebus, in which Plato develops what may be
termed a theory of the dramatic emotions. Socrates is involved in establishing the
posssibility of pleasures which are mixed with pain, and finds one of his star
examples in tragedy: ‘Shall we not find [anger, fear, longing, sorrow, love, envy,
spite 67 and so on: i.e. the feelings in general] full of inexpressible pleasures?’ So
anger is undeniably pleasant, as is wailing and lamenting similarly when
audiences watch tragedies, and ‘enjoy weeping’ (Philebus 47e—49a). (It is
because we enjoy them, of course, that such experiences have the capacity to
draw us in.) With comedies too, Socrates goes on, our state of mind is the same:
a combination of pleasure and pain. The feeling that comedy arouses in us is
‘spite’ (phthonos), 68 which along with other feelings has been agreed to be a
‘pain of the soul’ (or, as we might put it, a ‘mental pain’: one which does not
have its source in the body). What we find comic or absurd is other people
suffering misfortune, and especially the misfortune of not knowing their own
limitations. They can think they are richer than they are, or better physical
specimens than they really are. But the commonest delusion they suffer is about
‘the things of the soul’, especially wisdom. Now those in this last condition, if
they are strong and powerful, are not objects of amusement at all, but dangerous
and frightening, whether we encounter them in real life or in the theatre; it is
only if they are weak and unable to defend themselves that they are amusing. So,
Socrates concludes, ‘our argument now indicates to us that in laments, in
tragedies and in comedies, 69 not only on the stage but in the whole tragedy and
comedy of life, pains are mixed in together with pleasures.’ 70
By this point, it has become obvious that what he is talking about is not actual
comedy and comic audiences, but what comedy should be, and what its audience
can and should get from it. By learning to laugh at the right things in the theatre,
we will laugh at them, and avoid them, in life itself (and for Plato’s Socrates,
nothing is more to be avoided than ignorance and the pretence of wisdom). We will
learn it through our feelings, by the same sort of process of habituation that the
children of Callipolis in the Republic learned how to react to death and loss. But
this will entail a new kind of comedy, which actually knows what is truly
ridiculous. So also in the Laws: the comic play-wrights will have to change their
act as much as the tragedians would have to change theirs. But there is no need
for them, as there is for their comic counterparts, because a substitute is
available: ‘we are ourselves poets, according to our ability,’ says the Athenian
who leads the conversation, ‘of the finest and best tragedy there is; so our whole
constitution is established as a mimēsis of the finest and best life, the very thing
we for our part say is genuinely a tragedy of the truest kind.’ 71