You can find Part One of this essay here, Part Two, here, and Part Three, here.
What motivates an Athenian woman like Lysistrata to take action based on her own ideas about War and Peace, even if motivated by a sense of Duty that exceeded the cultural expectations of her time? In the Syntopicon, Adler defines a Hero as one who does “not despair in the face of almost helpless odds” as well as possessing “the strength and stamina to achieve whatever they set their minds and wills to do” before finally adding that “they would not be heroes if they were not men of courage.” [195]. In other words, Lysistrata is a Man of Courage…except, of course, that she is not a man at all. Possessed of marvelous modern minds, we can easily remedy this malapropism by calling her a Woman of Courage or, perhaps a Person of Courage.
While this glissando may pave over some of Adler’s unattractive chauvinism, it does not clarify his meaning or even defuse those critics who might argue that Lysistrata is a incredible (as in not credible) character because no woman could have done what she is portrayed as doing in the time and place where she does it. In order to untangle this cluster of irreconcilables, we must do as Lysistrata herself suggests and “put it to the spindle, unwind it this way, now that way” as “that’s how we’ll unravel this war, if you’ll let us.” [853]
It would be disingenuous to characterize the unmistakable patina of phallocentrism in Adler’s opening description of Courage as a mere byproduct of his worldview and not endemic to the material he is drawing from in his delineation of the Great Ideas one from another. There is a particular telling passage a few paragraphs later where he asserts that “such courage is a virtue in the primary sense of the Latin word virtus—manliness, the spirit, or strength of spirit, required to be a man” [196].
To see the illogic inherent in a sentence like that, one must think it in three modes, Greek, Roman, and Modern. His first assertion, that Courage is a virtue sets specific parameters wherein Virtue is the Set and Courage is a sub-set. This is reasonable enough as we can easily think, as could the ancient Greeks, of other kinds of virtue as well; some masculine in nature, some feminine in nature, and some inhabiting no gender at all. The Greek word arete (translated into English as virtue) had more to do with the ultimate fulfillment of something’s function than some warm and fuzzy feelings about how people ought to treat one another.
Moving to his second premise we are told that Courage is, in itself congruous with the primary meaning of the Latin word virtus which, as we can see from his description, is neither feminine nor neuter but specifically masculine. This admission places every other kind of virtue (of which there are many) as subservient to the ultimate fulfillment of what it means to be a man. In Greek, this masculine Courage (or Courage of the body as he later defines it) is one type of virtue among many. In Latin, all virtue is made subordinate to that of being masculine. In English, the distinction is invisible but no less potent in its connotation.
Adler, to his credit, does not end his exploration of Courage with this exclusively masculine expression though he does lumps the remainder as “other sorts of Courage” [196].
The courage of the tragic hero, of Oedipus and Antigone, goes with strength of mind, not body. This, perhaps even more than being lionhearted, is a specifically human strength. Courage does not consist only in conquering fear and in withholding the body from flight no matter what the risk of pain. It consists at least as much in steeling the will, reinforcing its resolutions, and turning the mind relentlessly to seek or face the truth. [196]
Pausing for one last moment to remark upon the cluelessness of not recognizing that childbirth is pretty damn obvious example of “conquering fear” while “withholding the body from flight no matter what the risk of pain”, Adler does extend the personhood of mind to women, going so far as to describe his Courage of the mind it as a human strength rather than a manly one. He also provides more criteria by which to judge the courageousness of Lysistrata’s actions in her capacity to summon her will, enact a plan of action based on her convictions and confronting her culture’s long-held notions on gender in the service of Truth.
Turning to the text at hand, there is ample evidence of not only Lysistrata exhibiting both kinds of Courage but other women as well. There are a number of obstacles that threaten to derail the wives’ strike before it is even fully hatched. The most persistent one is the women’s own hunger for sex, already badly malnourished as they are by the never-ending war. While this is the hurdle to which Aristophanes returns to the most often (because it’s funny and this is a comedy), it is not the most dire in terms of consequences.
LYSISTRATA: Just imagine: we’re at home, beautifully made up, wearing our sheerest lawn negligees and nothing underneath…and the men are all like ramrods and can’t wait to leap into bed, and then we’ll absolutely refuse—that’ll make them make peace soon enough, you’ll see.
LAMPITO: Din ye mind how Menelaus threw away his sword when he saw but a glimpse of Helen’s breasties?
CALONICE: But, look, what if they divorce us?
LYSISTRATA: Well, that wouldn’t help them much, would it? Like Pherecrates says, it would be no more use than skinning the same dog twice.
CALONICE:…What if they take hold of us and drag us into the bedroom by force?
LYSISTRATA: Cling to the door.
CALONICE: And if they hit us and force us to let go?
LYSISTRATA: Why, in that case, you’ve got to be as damned unresponsive as possible. There’s no pleasure in it if they have to use force and give pain. They’ll give up trying soon enough. And no man is ever happy if he can’t please his woman. [827]
There is no disputing that Aristophanes’ dialogue here is very funny. There is also no disputing that anyone of those things could happen to a Greek woman if she refused to fulfill her wifely duties, whether domestic or carnal. The threat of social retribution is real. The threat of physical violence is real. Fitting in with the tone of the play, however, the men’s response to their wives’ abandonment of them is mostly one of confusion and helplessness.
Lysistrata’s usurpation of male authority does not end, however, with the mere refusal of women to act like wives. The more subversive facet of her strategy, to occupy the Acropolis, thus depriving the men of the money they need to continue waging war is not met with the same hapless amusement. A chorus of men arrive almost immediately with fire to burn them out of the Temple. Though the battle that erupts between dueling choruses of old men and old women is more comedic than threatening, the violent timbre of the men’s exasperation is unmistakable and met by an equal fury from their female counterparts.
LEADER [to his neighbor]: Are we going to let them go on blethering like this? Shouldn’t we be bringing our logs down on their back?
STRATYLLIS: [to her followers]: Put down your jars too. We don’t want any encumbrances in case it comes to a fight.
LEADER [raising his fist]: Someone ought to give them a Bupalus or two on the jaw—that might shut them up for a bit.
STRATYLLIS [presenting her cheek to him]: All right, there you are; hit me; I won’t shy away. Only if you do, no dog will ever grab your balls again!
LEADER: If you don’t shut up, you old crone, I’ll knock the stuffing out of you!
STRATYLLIS: If you so much as touch me with the tip of your finger—
LEADER: All right, suppose I do; what then?
STRATYLLIS: I’ll bite your chest and tear out your inside! [830]
The women of Lysistrata are clearly shown exhibiting both physical and mental courage despite Adler’s assertion that the former is the exclusive domain of the masculine. One might say (and some have said) that the women of this play behave not as women do but as men and, therein lies its comedy. While that interpretation is open to those seeking it, Aristophanes’ comedic technique of inversion (something Lysistrata shares with The Clouds) is effective because of the unexpected truths that it uncovers. Though the women of Greece may not have been any more able to act in accord to end war (or even desire such as thing) as the women of the world today, Aristophanes’ meditations on the relationship of women to war and, on a broader level, to the societies to which they belong are universally potent in their insights.
Showing posts with label Aristophanes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aristophanes. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Part 3 of 4)
You can find Part One of this essay here and Part Two, here.
Like War and Peace, the lessons regarding Duty contained within Lysistrata touch upon ideas so ubiquitous within the Greek culture that they are rarely discussed in the abstract and must, instead, be inferred from the characters’ commentary on seemingly divergent topics. What makes Lysistrata stand out from the rest of her conspirators is not the abstention from sex but her willingness to first identify that a conflict has arisen between differing modes of duty and then reconcile them, thus bringing harmony not only to her own life but to all of Greece. Aristophanes places great emphasis throughout the play on women’s primary role in Greek culture as wives and keepers of the home . In the opening scene, as Lysistrata complains to her first arrival, Calonice, about the other women’s tardiness to hear her plan, her friend plainly lays out the many obligations that may have kept them from the appointment.
CALONICE: Don’t worry, dear, they’ll come. It’s not so easy for a wife to get out of the house, you know. They’ll all be rushing to and fro for their husbands, waking up the servants, putting the baby to bed or washing and feeding it—
LYSISTRATA: Damn it, there are more important things than that.
Note that Lysistrata does not say that those things are unimportant, only that there are concerns that go beyond them in dire need of resolution. What does this tell us? First, there are than more one set of duties that a woman might have an obligation to fulfill and that some of them are more important than others. Only the most banal would argue that women are born with no obligations to duty whatsoever. The fact that a woman is a human being, subject to the same laws of life and death that govern us all means that her first and most basic obligation is, in fact, to continue living as long as possible, just as it is for anyone else.
Unlike men, women carry the potential for creating more human life; a necessity, that must acknowledged as pertinent to some percentage of women of reproductive age or the species would have terminated aeons ago. So, looking at it from a strictly biological perspective, a woman’s most basic potential obligation is to, first, survive, and, second, potentially give birth and nurture that offspring until the child is capable of fending for her own survival. Through the course of human evolution, it became advantageous for a woman trying to accomplish goals number one and two to pair-bond with a capable male partner, creating a third sense of duty; expressed mostly simply as the relationship between husband and wife—though every culture and civilization develops an unique set of mores regarding this relationship (sometimes called marriage) reflective of its peculiar values and always subject to periodic re-examination.
These three obligations (to husband, to child, to self; listed in order of importance) can be thought of three-fourths of the Greek status quo for a woman’s duties as assumed by both Aristophanes and his audience. For the purpose of placing them on a more pragmatic continuum, I found it useful to think of these obligations as Internal at one extremity and progressing from self, to child, and then to husband (the opposite of Greek attitudes) towards another extreme that might be thought of as External. While the institution of Marriage (as observed by the Greeks) still represents an Internal obligation (as it is tied at least historically into both the preservation of self and nurturing of offspring), the final duty assumed in Lysistrata, a woman’s relations to the gods and goddesses represents the only socially acceptable foray into territory that is inarguably Exterior. As one might suspect, this piety is restricted to some extent to those goddesses specifically tied to home and the hearth. Athena, goddess of wisdom, war, and patroness to the city of Athens, despite her gender, is considered, to some extent, off limits to the women. As the women storm the Acropolis (Athena’s temple), the chorus of men sound their indignation.
CHORUS:
Incredible! Impossible!
Our women, if you please!
We’ve kept and fed within our doors
A pestilent disease!
They’ve seized our own Acropolis
With bars they’ve shut the gate!
They hold the statue of the Maid,
Protectress of our state!
Come on and let us hurry there
And put these logs around,
Smoke out the whole conspiracy
From Pallas’ sacred ground! [828]
The female chorus, a short time later responds, saying:
CHORUS:
Some frail old men
Approach with limping gait,
And carry logs
Of an enormous weight.
Dire threats they make,
Our friends they hope to see
Roasted alive.
O Maid, this must not be!
No, may they save
All Greece from war insane
For that is why
They occupy thy fane. [829]
Later, as Lysistrata is able to make her case before the magistrate, another exchange is even more descriptive of this divine segregation inherent to the culture.
MAGISTRATE: Well, the first thing I want to know is—what in Zeus’ name do you mean by shutting and barring the gates of our own Acropolis against us?
LYSISTRATA: We want to keep the money safe and stop you from waging war.
MAGISTRATE: The war has nothing to do with the money—
LYSISTRATA: Hasn’t it? Why are Peisander and the other office-seekers always stirring things up? Isn’t it so they can take a few more dips in the public purse? Well, as far as we are concerned they can do what they like; only they’re not going to lay their hands on the money in there.
MAGISTRATE: Why, what are you going to do?
LYSISTRATA: Do? Why, we’ll be in charge of it.
MAGISTRATE: You in charge of our finances?
LYSISTRATA: Well, what’s so strange about that? We’ve been in charge of all your housekeeping finances for years.
MAGISTRATE: But that’s not the same thing.
LYSISTRATA: Why not?
MAGISTRATE: Because the money here is needed for the war!
LYSISTRATA: Ah, but the war itself isn’t necessary.
MAGISTRATE: Not necessary! How is the City going to be saved then?
LYSISTRATA: We’ll save it for you.
MAGISTRATE: You!!!
LYSISTRATA: Us.
MAGISTRATE: This is intolerable!
LYSISTRATA: It may be, but it’s what’s going to happen.
MAGISTRATE: But Demeter!—I mean, it’s against nature. [832]
Parsing that passage, we see the magistrate open his attack with a double invocation of the patriarchal prerogative; first condemning her actions in the name of Zeus and then referring to the Acropolis as “our own”, meaning belonging rightly to the men. Sidestepping this condemnation to her authority, Lysistrata refutes his argument against it. He is left at the end only to invoke a “proper” female goddess, Demeter and labeling the entire spectacle as “against nature.”
Once Lysistrata moves beyond the conventions of her culture, she finds that there is very little that does not concern her more directly than she ever supposed, opening up a whole new sphere of duties that women might share alongside the men of Greece.
LYSISTRATA: In the last war we were too modest to object to anything you men did—and in any case you wouldn’t let us say a word. But don’t think we approved! We knew everything that was going on. Many times we’d hear at home about some major blunder of yours, and then when you came home, we’d be burning inside but we’d have to put on a smile and ask what it was you’d decided to inscribe on the pillar beneath the Peace Treaty.—And what did my husband always say?—“Shut up and mind your own business!” And I did.
MAGISTRATE: He’d have given you one if you hadn’t!
LYSISTRATA: Exactly—so I kept quiet. But, sure enough, next thing we knew you’d make an even sillier decision. And if I so much as said, “Darling, why are you still carrying on with this silly policy?” he would glare at me and say, “Back to your weaving, woman, or you’ll have a headache for a month. ‘Go and attend to your work; let war be the care of the menfolk.’”
MAGISTRATE: Quite right too, by Zeus.
LYSISTRATA: Right? That we should not be allowed to make the least little suggestion to you, no matter how much you mismanage the City’s affairs? And, now, look, every time two people meet in the street, what do they say? “Isn’t there a man in the country?” and the answer comes, “Not one.” That’s why we women got together and decided we were going to save Greece. What was the point of waiting any longer, we asked ourselves. Well now, we’ll make a deal. You listen to us—and we’ll talk sense, not like you used to—listen to us and keep quiet, as we’ve had to do up to now, and we’ll clear up the mess you’ve made. [833]
Now our continuum continues on its journey away from the traditional Greek sphere of women's obligation and into territory deemed by culture, convention and dogma to be exclusively male. This is Aristophanes’ radical leap as he begins to question what a woman’s obligations to her City, to Greece, and, indeed, to all humanity might very well be.
Like War and Peace, the lessons regarding Duty contained within Lysistrata touch upon ideas so ubiquitous within the Greek culture that they are rarely discussed in the abstract and must, instead, be inferred from the characters’ commentary on seemingly divergent topics. What makes Lysistrata stand out from the rest of her conspirators is not the abstention from sex but her willingness to first identify that a conflict has arisen between differing modes of duty and then reconcile them, thus bringing harmony not only to her own life but to all of Greece. Aristophanes places great emphasis throughout the play on women’s primary role in Greek culture as wives and keepers of the home . In the opening scene, as Lysistrata complains to her first arrival, Calonice, about the other women’s tardiness to hear her plan, her friend plainly lays out the many obligations that may have kept them from the appointment.
CALONICE: Don’t worry, dear, they’ll come. It’s not so easy for a wife to get out of the house, you know. They’ll all be rushing to and fro for their husbands, waking up the servants, putting the baby to bed or washing and feeding it—
LYSISTRATA: Damn it, there are more important things than that.
Note that Lysistrata does not say that those things are unimportant, only that there are concerns that go beyond them in dire need of resolution. What does this tell us? First, there are than more one set of duties that a woman might have an obligation to fulfill and that some of them are more important than others. Only the most banal would argue that women are born with no obligations to duty whatsoever. The fact that a woman is a human being, subject to the same laws of life and death that govern us all means that her first and most basic obligation is, in fact, to continue living as long as possible, just as it is for anyone else.
Unlike men, women carry the potential for creating more human life; a necessity, that must acknowledged as pertinent to some percentage of women of reproductive age or the species would have terminated aeons ago. So, looking at it from a strictly biological perspective, a woman’s most basic potential obligation is to, first, survive, and, second, potentially give birth and nurture that offspring until the child is capable of fending for her own survival. Through the course of human evolution, it became advantageous for a woman trying to accomplish goals number one and two to pair-bond with a capable male partner, creating a third sense of duty; expressed mostly simply as the relationship between husband and wife—though every culture and civilization develops an unique set of mores regarding this relationship (sometimes called marriage) reflective of its peculiar values and always subject to periodic re-examination.
These three obligations (to husband, to child, to self; listed in order of importance) can be thought of three-fourths of the Greek status quo for a woman’s duties as assumed by both Aristophanes and his audience. For the purpose of placing them on a more pragmatic continuum, I found it useful to think of these obligations as Internal at one extremity and progressing from self, to child, and then to husband (the opposite of Greek attitudes) towards another extreme that might be thought of as External. While the institution of Marriage (as observed by the Greeks) still represents an Internal obligation (as it is tied at least historically into both the preservation of self and nurturing of offspring), the final duty assumed in Lysistrata, a woman’s relations to the gods and goddesses represents the only socially acceptable foray into territory that is inarguably Exterior. As one might suspect, this piety is restricted to some extent to those goddesses specifically tied to home and the hearth. Athena, goddess of wisdom, war, and patroness to the city of Athens, despite her gender, is considered, to some extent, off limits to the women. As the women storm the Acropolis (Athena’s temple), the chorus of men sound their indignation.
CHORUS:
Incredible! Impossible!
Our women, if you please!
We’ve kept and fed within our doors
A pestilent disease!
They’ve seized our own Acropolis
With bars they’ve shut the gate!
They hold the statue of the Maid,
Protectress of our state!
Come on and let us hurry there
And put these logs around,
Smoke out the whole conspiracy
From Pallas’ sacred ground! [828]
The female chorus, a short time later responds, saying:
CHORUS:
Some frail old men
Approach with limping gait,
And carry logs
Of an enormous weight.
Dire threats they make,
Our friends they hope to see
Roasted alive.
O Maid, this must not be!
No, may they save
All Greece from war insane
For that is why
They occupy thy fane. [829]
Later, as Lysistrata is able to make her case before the magistrate, another exchange is even more descriptive of this divine segregation inherent to the culture.
MAGISTRATE: Well, the first thing I want to know is—what in Zeus’ name do you mean by shutting and barring the gates of our own Acropolis against us?
LYSISTRATA: We want to keep the money safe and stop you from waging war.
MAGISTRATE: The war has nothing to do with the money—
LYSISTRATA: Hasn’t it? Why are Peisander and the other office-seekers always stirring things up? Isn’t it so they can take a few more dips in the public purse? Well, as far as we are concerned they can do what they like; only they’re not going to lay their hands on the money in there.
MAGISTRATE: Why, what are you going to do?
LYSISTRATA: Do? Why, we’ll be in charge of it.
MAGISTRATE: You in charge of our finances?
LYSISTRATA: Well, what’s so strange about that? We’ve been in charge of all your housekeeping finances for years.
MAGISTRATE: But that’s not the same thing.
LYSISTRATA: Why not?
MAGISTRATE: Because the money here is needed for the war!
LYSISTRATA: Ah, but the war itself isn’t necessary.
MAGISTRATE: Not necessary! How is the City going to be saved then?
LYSISTRATA: We’ll save it for you.
MAGISTRATE: You!!!
LYSISTRATA: Us.
MAGISTRATE: This is intolerable!
LYSISTRATA: It may be, but it’s what’s going to happen.
MAGISTRATE: But Demeter!—I mean, it’s against nature. [832]
Parsing that passage, we see the magistrate open his attack with a double invocation of the patriarchal prerogative; first condemning her actions in the name of Zeus and then referring to the Acropolis as “our own”, meaning belonging rightly to the men. Sidestepping this condemnation to her authority, Lysistrata refutes his argument against it. He is left at the end only to invoke a “proper” female goddess, Demeter and labeling the entire spectacle as “against nature.”
Once Lysistrata moves beyond the conventions of her culture, she finds that there is very little that does not concern her more directly than she ever supposed, opening up a whole new sphere of duties that women might share alongside the men of Greece.
LYSISTRATA: In the last war we were too modest to object to anything you men did—and in any case you wouldn’t let us say a word. But don’t think we approved! We knew everything that was going on. Many times we’d hear at home about some major blunder of yours, and then when you came home, we’d be burning inside but we’d have to put on a smile and ask what it was you’d decided to inscribe on the pillar beneath the Peace Treaty.—And what did my husband always say?—“Shut up and mind your own business!” And I did.
MAGISTRATE: He’d have given you one if you hadn’t!
LYSISTRATA: Exactly—so I kept quiet. But, sure enough, next thing we knew you’d make an even sillier decision. And if I so much as said, “Darling, why are you still carrying on with this silly policy?” he would glare at me and say, “Back to your weaving, woman, or you’ll have a headache for a month. ‘Go and attend to your work; let war be the care of the menfolk.’”
MAGISTRATE: Quite right too, by Zeus.
LYSISTRATA: Right? That we should not be allowed to make the least little suggestion to you, no matter how much you mismanage the City’s affairs? And, now, look, every time two people meet in the street, what do they say? “Isn’t there a man in the country?” and the answer comes, “Not one.” That’s why we women got together and decided we were going to save Greece. What was the point of waiting any longer, we asked ourselves. Well now, we’ll make a deal. You listen to us—and we’ll talk sense, not like you used to—listen to us and keep quiet, as we’ve had to do up to now, and we’ll clear up the mess you’ve made. [833]
Now our continuum continues on its journey away from the traditional Greek sphere of women's obligation and into territory deemed by culture, convention and dogma to be exclusively male. This is Aristophanes’ radical leap as he begins to question what a woman’s obligations to her City, to Greece, and, indeed, to all humanity might very well be.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Part 2 of 4)
The first part of this essay can be found at
http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-books-aristophanes-lysistrata.html
The contemplation of War and Peace, whether in Ancient Greece or today, spills over messily into other avenues of consideration like Belief, Custom and Convention, and Man. While there have been countless intellectual developments in the world since the time of Aristophanes, we, as a species, have come little closer to answering the fundamental questions regarding war and its complement, peace. War, as a phenomenon, stretches back to the outer limits of history (which is to say history begins with the invention of writing) and so even as Aristophanes contemplates it in a time now twenty-five hundred years separated from us, war already had a track record as a constant among human activity stretching back twenty-five hundred years before that. It is easy to see then, as it is easy to see now, why War might be considered an integral component of the human framework and Peace, an object of great fragility that few might expect to hold for long.
In one sense, Lysistrata is very much a piece of its time, taking on the hard questions about War and Peace through the filter of Belief. War in the Greek tradition bore the sanction of the gods. It was an act of devotion. It was a rite, governed like any sacrifice, by rules and traditions. Yet, the Peloponnesian War was one unlike any the Athenians (or any other Greek for that matter) had known. While the frequent skirmishes between cities in the past had been limited in scope and duration by the finite resources of the warring factions, successful colonization and alliance with more distant kingdoms allowed this war that pitted all of Greece against itself to escalate beyond the settling of a particular grievance or boundary dispute. It was endless war for endless war’s sake. It was war that had taken on a life and a purpose of its own.
Lysistrata’s plan to end this conflict actually entails two steps; the first, to force the men to listen to her through the wives’ strike and, the second, to bring them to reconciliation through an indictment of the War and those determined to fight it. The latter deals more specifically with the idea of War though some groundwork for her argument gets laid (no pun intended) earlier in the piece. As she makes her pitch to another Athenian woman in the opening scene, Lysistrata’s assessment of the stakes of their mission are haunting in their accuracy.
LYSISTRATA- …the whole future of the city is up to us. Either the Peloponnesians are all going to be wiped out…--and Athens—well, I won’t say it but you know what might happen.
As history would have it, the Peloponnesian War resulted in Macedonia breaking free of both Greek and Persian influence and, in turn, producing an Alexander to conquer them both. The peace Lysistrata seeks would eventually come, albeit temporarily, but it would come under the boot of Alexander’s conquest. This provides us with a contrast between at least two types of peace: Peace by Reconciliation and Peace through Victory. History provides innumerable lessons on the benefits and shortcomings of Peace through Victory (Google: Pax Romana), but Peace by Reconciliation has proven to be more of an exercise of the imagination than of experience.
Reconciliation, in Lysistrata, however, is much more than just an agreement to stop fighting. In the play, Reconciliation is presented as “[a]n extremely beautiful and totally unclothed girl” who essentially distracts the negotiating partners into making compromises that seemed too onerous to consider mere moments earlier. As they ogle and fondle Reconciliation, Lysistrata delivers the core of her argument.
LYSISTRATA:
I am a woman, but I am not brainless:
I have my share of native wit, and more,
Both from my father and from other elders
Instruction I’ve received. Now listen, both:
Hard will my words be, but not undeserved.
You worship the same gods at the same shrines,
Use the same lustral water, just as if
You were a single family—which you are—
Delphi, Olympia, Thermopylae—
How many other Panhellenic shrines
Could I make mention of, if it were needed!
And yet, although the Mede is at our gates,
You ruin Greece with mad intestine wars,
This is my first reproach to both of you. [842]
In this role, Reconciliation is herself, a divine presence among mortals on the stage. The crass manner in which she is handled by the negotiating partners does not diminish her status. If anything, it is proof of her functionality as a Divine player in mortal affairs. The men, fascinated by her charms, are essentially helpless to assert their customary grievances and Lysistrata’s well-argued reasoning is able to win them over to the cause of peace among the Greeks. While modern readers might be put off by the subservient role Reconciliation plays here, Lysistrata herself is described in a nearby passage as a “mighty lady with a mission/Paragon of common sense/Running Fount of Erudition/Miracle of Eloquence!” [842]. She is subordinate only to the gods and, as such, is every bit the hero of this play that the conventions of Old Comedy will allow.
Aristophanes’ vision of peace by some means other than bloodshed is tantalizing in its simplicity which explains, to some extent, Lysistrata’s lasting impression on the Western canon. Paul’s vision of Peace through Christ was similarly conceived hundreds of years before it displaced Peace through Victory in the Roman ethos and hinges on a similar premise that War might cease if only Men loved Christ (as opposed to Sex) more than they loved killing each other. While belief in Victory or Christ has failed to end war in the Western tradition (or anywhere else for that matter), it doesn’t take much effort to see the fragile peace sustained by both as an improvement over their absences, illustrated respectively by the sack of Rome and the atrocities of the First and Second World Wars. The lesson would seem to be that, in a vacuum of a shared belief to redirect its energy, Humanity seems predisposed by some invisible synergy of its biological, intellectual, and social evolution to warring with itself over abstractions.
http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-books-aristophanes-lysistrata.html
The contemplation of War and Peace, whether in Ancient Greece or today, spills over messily into other avenues of consideration like Belief, Custom and Convention, and Man. While there have been countless intellectual developments in the world since the time of Aristophanes, we, as a species, have come little closer to answering the fundamental questions regarding war and its complement, peace. War, as a phenomenon, stretches back to the outer limits of history (which is to say history begins with the invention of writing) and so even as Aristophanes contemplates it in a time now twenty-five hundred years separated from us, war already had a track record as a constant among human activity stretching back twenty-five hundred years before that. It is easy to see then, as it is easy to see now, why War might be considered an integral component of the human framework and Peace, an object of great fragility that few might expect to hold for long.
In one sense, Lysistrata is very much a piece of its time, taking on the hard questions about War and Peace through the filter of Belief. War in the Greek tradition bore the sanction of the gods. It was an act of devotion. It was a rite, governed like any sacrifice, by rules and traditions. Yet, the Peloponnesian War was one unlike any the Athenians (or any other Greek for that matter) had known. While the frequent skirmishes between cities in the past had been limited in scope and duration by the finite resources of the warring factions, successful colonization and alliance with more distant kingdoms allowed this war that pitted all of Greece against itself to escalate beyond the settling of a particular grievance or boundary dispute. It was endless war for endless war’s sake. It was war that had taken on a life and a purpose of its own.
Lysistrata’s plan to end this conflict actually entails two steps; the first, to force the men to listen to her through the wives’ strike and, the second, to bring them to reconciliation through an indictment of the War and those determined to fight it. The latter deals more specifically with the idea of War though some groundwork for her argument gets laid (no pun intended) earlier in the piece. As she makes her pitch to another Athenian woman in the opening scene, Lysistrata’s assessment of the stakes of their mission are haunting in their accuracy.
LYSISTRATA- …the whole future of the city is up to us. Either the Peloponnesians are all going to be wiped out…--and Athens—well, I won’t say it but you know what might happen.
As history would have it, the Peloponnesian War resulted in Macedonia breaking free of both Greek and Persian influence and, in turn, producing an Alexander to conquer them both. The peace Lysistrata seeks would eventually come, albeit temporarily, but it would come under the boot of Alexander’s conquest. This provides us with a contrast between at least two types of peace: Peace by Reconciliation and Peace through Victory. History provides innumerable lessons on the benefits and shortcomings of Peace through Victory (Google: Pax Romana), but Peace by Reconciliation has proven to be more of an exercise of the imagination than of experience.
Reconciliation, in Lysistrata, however, is much more than just an agreement to stop fighting. In the play, Reconciliation is presented as “[a]n extremely beautiful and totally unclothed girl” who essentially distracts the negotiating partners into making compromises that seemed too onerous to consider mere moments earlier. As they ogle and fondle Reconciliation, Lysistrata delivers the core of her argument.
LYSISTRATA:
I am a woman, but I am not brainless:
I have my share of native wit, and more,
Both from my father and from other elders
Instruction I’ve received. Now listen, both:
Hard will my words be, but not undeserved.
You worship the same gods at the same shrines,
Use the same lustral water, just as if
You were a single family—which you are—
Delphi, Olympia, Thermopylae—
How many other Panhellenic shrines
Could I make mention of, if it were needed!
And yet, although the Mede is at our gates,
You ruin Greece with mad intestine wars,
This is my first reproach to both of you. [842]
In this role, Reconciliation is herself, a divine presence among mortals on the stage. The crass manner in which she is handled by the negotiating partners does not diminish her status. If anything, it is proof of her functionality as a Divine player in mortal affairs. The men, fascinated by her charms, are essentially helpless to assert their customary grievances and Lysistrata’s well-argued reasoning is able to win them over to the cause of peace among the Greeks. While modern readers might be put off by the subservient role Reconciliation plays here, Lysistrata herself is described in a nearby passage as a “mighty lady with a mission/Paragon of common sense/Running Fount of Erudition/Miracle of Eloquence!” [842]. She is subordinate only to the gods and, as such, is every bit the hero of this play that the conventions of Old Comedy will allow.
Aristophanes’ vision of peace by some means other than bloodshed is tantalizing in its simplicity which explains, to some extent, Lysistrata’s lasting impression on the Western canon. Paul’s vision of Peace through Christ was similarly conceived hundreds of years before it displaced Peace through Victory in the Roman ethos and hinges on a similar premise that War might cease if only Men loved Christ (as opposed to Sex) more than they loved killing each other. While belief in Victory or Christ has failed to end war in the Western tradition (or anywhere else for that matter), it doesn’t take much effort to see the fragile peace sustained by both as an improvement over their absences, illustrated respectively by the sack of Rome and the atrocities of the First and Second World Wars. The lesson would seem to be that, in a vacuum of a shared belief to redirect its energy, Humanity seems predisposed by some invisible synergy of its biological, intellectual, and social evolution to warring with itself over abstractions.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Part 1 of 4)
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Great Conversation: Knowledge and Belief
In The Clouds, Aristophanes examines the dynamic tension between inquiry, which draws its authority from skepticism and religion, which draws its own from certainty. The two ideas can be thought of, in this sense, as two extreme points on a continuum that connects Knowledge to Belief. Geometry tells us that any line with two points on it can be bisected. What idea then lies at the mid-point between Knowledge and Belief? Are the differences between them irreconcilable?
Great Books’ Editor, Mortimer Adler, opens his Syntopicon entry on Religion with a short passage directly germane to the contrast between Knowledge and Belief.
“Argument is unprofitable—worse than that, unintelligible—when opponents do not share some common ground. Between the skeptic who denies reason’s competence and the philosopher or scientist who appeals to it, no common ground exists. Between the man who obeys the rule not to contradict himself and the man who finds nothing repugnant in answering Yes and No to the same question, there can be no argument. There is an issue between them, but the position each takes reduces the other to silence.” [466, Adler].
Despite Adler’s candid assessment of the difficulties in reconciling Belief with Knowledge (couched in his terms as Religion and Science), there are a number of truths that I, at least, hold to be self-evident that suggest that the decision to simply allow them to agree to disagree is not only unwise but, perhaps, dangerous. The first is that, for ill or well, whether by merit of truth or biology, the Belief in ideas that are either scientifically unknown or unknowable have been with us since prehistory and show no signs of becoming outmoded. The second is that Knowledge (or Science in whatever form it might take) draws unshakeable authority from its relentlessly skeptical inquiries and its discoveries may be thought of as true as anything can be until disproven. Both ideas obviously play an important part in understanding what it means to be human and so, the task falls to us to act as the arbiter in what seems to be an otherwise intractable negotiation.
We posed the question that opens this post to our growing community of readers on Facebook, evoking the active verb part of the Great Conversation by opening the broad ideas up to scrutiny in a general rather than a specialized way.
Dr. Sarah Webb, a writer and practicing Buddhist, postulates that the mid-point between Knowledge and Belief was “ambiguity and staying with uncertainty.” Drawing upon her own faith as a practicing Zen Buddhist, Dr. Webb directs our attention to the “religious traditions that are apophatic (which believe that ultimate reality is beyond the verbal, the rational, the constructed, and thus not entirely knowable.)” The key in reconciling these diametric viewpoints is based in one’s willingness “not to know because complete knowledge is impossible” while “looking into one's own experience and examining it in a questioning, open way without the expectation of a final and definitive answer.”
Though the Great Books deal most specifically with Western religious traditions, we were reminded that each of the extant faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) once contained traditions (Kabbalism, Gnosticism, Sufism) that prized an experiential relationship with the source of their faith over the texts supposedly containing his Holy Writ. Turning more specifically to Christianity, we find Augustine, first, finding ambiguity to be a valuable commodity when interpreting what he supposes to be the Holy Words of God.
“When so many meanings, all of them acceptable as true, can be extracted from the words that Moses wrote, do you not see how foolish it is to make a bold assertion that one in particular is the one that he [Moses] had in mind?...There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scriptures in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in each case.”
Aquinas restates Augustine’s position succinctly, noting that one must “hold the truth of Scripture without wavering” while adhering to “a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it, if it be proved with certainty to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing.”
Here, at this early point in the development of both Christianity and Science, the methods by which both might be further and better understood show more similarities than irreconcilable differences. In all fairness, there was a parity that existed between Religion and Philosophy (of which Science was still considered a part) in terms of describing what could be known by the latter and speculating on that which cannot with the former that has become drastically unbalanced in the modern age.
William James, writing in the late 19th century as the gap between the two yawned ever wider suggests that Philosophy might yet play some intermediary role between the warring factions. The observations validated by the scientific method are, James suggests, “anything but ultimate…the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics, must sometime be overhauled. The effort to overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics.” While James would definitely argue that Philosophy is distinct from his conception of Metaphysics, he does imply that each of the involved parties (Religion, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Science) exist on a continuum that flows smoothly from one mode to the next and are each, in some way, dependent on the health and stability of the others for its own growth and well-being.
For James, the divergence of Science from the realm of Philosophy can be traced to the emergence of Positivism (a term coined by pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte) as the dominant scientific worldview from the mid-19th century onwards. Positivism, according to Adler, is the “identification of science with knowledge of fact, and further, the restriction of such knowledge to conclusions obtained and verified empirically. Whatever does not accord with this conception of science is either, like mathematics or logic, a purely formal discipline, or, like philosophy and religion, it is conjecture, opinion, or belief—personal, subjective, even wishful” [Adler, 542]. For James, educated liberally in all of these subjects, abandoning all other modes of knowing for one, whatever benefits it may promise, is unthinkable.
Sigmund Freud, however, did not share these reservations and sketches out the hard-line positivist position clearly enough; noting that, “There is no other source of knowledge of the Universe, but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration.” It is ironic that a psychoanalyst and a sociologist (both from fields considered to be soft sciences) share an almost erotic attachment to empiricism (which had existed as an important if not isolated element of scientific inquiry since its genesis on the fringes of philosophic thought). They were, of course, not alone in this great migration towards the certainty of uncertainty as, by the mid-20th century, universities from all over the world joined in the fray to convert every possible discipline into a Positivistic one.
One would think that social trends pushing the agenda of Positivism to civilization writ large for over one hundred fifty years running might result in a dramatic change in the way that people saw the world in which they lived. We might expect belief in supernatural powers, at the very least, to show weakness in the face such overwhelming data to the contrary. A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 showed, surprisingly, that 90% of Americans surveyed expressed a belief in God. Another Harris poll, conducted in 2009 on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, found that nearly half (45%) of persons surveyed believed that humans were created “directly by God” while only 29% believed that they had evolved from another species. To be sure, polling data is only as useful as the questions that generate it but the contour here is unmistakable.
While die-hard positivists might look at this data and conclude that all it proves is that 71% of people polled about Darwin are willfully ignorant, it is more telling that the polls asks them not what they know, but what they believe. What these numbers tell me is that science is a poor substitute for belief and the sooner that we come to reconciling our innate need for both, perhaps visualized under the idea of Ambiguity, the sooner we will be able to identify which value is appropriate for judging the merits of a particular argument.
Great Books’ Editor, Mortimer Adler, opens his Syntopicon entry on Religion with a short passage directly germane to the contrast between Knowledge and Belief.
“Argument is unprofitable—worse than that, unintelligible—when opponents do not share some common ground. Between the skeptic who denies reason’s competence and the philosopher or scientist who appeals to it, no common ground exists. Between the man who obeys the rule not to contradict himself and the man who finds nothing repugnant in answering Yes and No to the same question, there can be no argument. There is an issue between them, but the position each takes reduces the other to silence.” [466, Adler].
Despite Adler’s candid assessment of the difficulties in reconciling Belief with Knowledge (couched in his terms as Religion and Science), there are a number of truths that I, at least, hold to be self-evident that suggest that the decision to simply allow them to agree to disagree is not only unwise but, perhaps, dangerous. The first is that, for ill or well, whether by merit of truth or biology, the Belief in ideas that are either scientifically unknown or unknowable have been with us since prehistory and show no signs of becoming outmoded. The second is that Knowledge (or Science in whatever form it might take) draws unshakeable authority from its relentlessly skeptical inquiries and its discoveries may be thought of as true as anything can be until disproven. Both ideas obviously play an important part in understanding what it means to be human and so, the task falls to us to act as the arbiter in what seems to be an otherwise intractable negotiation.
We posed the question that opens this post to our growing community of readers on Facebook, evoking the active verb part of the Great Conversation by opening the broad ideas up to scrutiny in a general rather than a specialized way.
Dr. Sarah Webb, a writer and practicing Buddhist, postulates that the mid-point between Knowledge and Belief was “ambiguity and staying with uncertainty.” Drawing upon her own faith as a practicing Zen Buddhist, Dr. Webb directs our attention to the “religious traditions that are apophatic (which believe that ultimate reality is beyond the verbal, the rational, the constructed, and thus not entirely knowable.)” The key in reconciling these diametric viewpoints is based in one’s willingness “not to know because complete knowledge is impossible” while “looking into one's own experience and examining it in a questioning, open way without the expectation of a final and definitive answer.”
Though the Great Books deal most specifically with Western religious traditions, we were reminded that each of the extant faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) once contained traditions (Kabbalism, Gnosticism, Sufism) that prized an experiential relationship with the source of their faith over the texts supposedly containing his Holy Writ. Turning more specifically to Christianity, we find Augustine, first, finding ambiguity to be a valuable commodity when interpreting what he supposes to be the Holy Words of God.
“When so many meanings, all of them acceptable as true, can be extracted from the words that Moses wrote, do you not see how foolish it is to make a bold assertion that one in particular is the one that he [Moses] had in mind?...There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scriptures in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in each case.”
Aquinas restates Augustine’s position succinctly, noting that one must “hold the truth of Scripture without wavering” while adhering to “a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it, if it be proved with certainty to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing.”
Here, at this early point in the development of both Christianity and Science, the methods by which both might be further and better understood show more similarities than irreconcilable differences. In all fairness, there was a parity that existed between Religion and Philosophy (of which Science was still considered a part) in terms of describing what could be known by the latter and speculating on that which cannot with the former that has become drastically unbalanced in the modern age.
William James, writing in the late 19th century as the gap between the two yawned ever wider suggests that Philosophy might yet play some intermediary role between the warring factions. The observations validated by the scientific method are, James suggests, “anything but ultimate…the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics, must sometime be overhauled. The effort to overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics.” While James would definitely argue that Philosophy is distinct from his conception of Metaphysics, he does imply that each of the involved parties (Religion, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Science) exist on a continuum that flows smoothly from one mode to the next and are each, in some way, dependent on the health and stability of the others for its own growth and well-being.
For James, the divergence of Science from the realm of Philosophy can be traced to the emergence of Positivism (a term coined by pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte) as the dominant scientific worldview from the mid-19th century onwards. Positivism, according to Adler, is the “identification of science with knowledge of fact, and further, the restriction of such knowledge to conclusions obtained and verified empirically. Whatever does not accord with this conception of science is either, like mathematics or logic, a purely formal discipline, or, like philosophy and religion, it is conjecture, opinion, or belief—personal, subjective, even wishful” [Adler, 542]. For James, educated liberally in all of these subjects, abandoning all other modes of knowing for one, whatever benefits it may promise, is unthinkable.
Sigmund Freud, however, did not share these reservations and sketches out the hard-line positivist position clearly enough; noting that, “There is no other source of knowledge of the Universe, but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration.” It is ironic that a psychoanalyst and a sociologist (both from fields considered to be soft sciences) share an almost erotic attachment to empiricism (which had existed as an important if not isolated element of scientific inquiry since its genesis on the fringes of philosophic thought). They were, of course, not alone in this great migration towards the certainty of uncertainty as, by the mid-20th century, universities from all over the world joined in the fray to convert every possible discipline into a Positivistic one.
One would think that social trends pushing the agenda of Positivism to civilization writ large for over one hundred fifty years running might result in a dramatic change in the way that people saw the world in which they lived. We might expect belief in supernatural powers, at the very least, to show weakness in the face such overwhelming data to the contrary. A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 showed, surprisingly, that 90% of Americans surveyed expressed a belief in God. Another Harris poll, conducted in 2009 on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, found that nearly half (45%) of persons surveyed believed that humans were created “directly by God” while only 29% believed that they had evolved from another species. To be sure, polling data is only as useful as the questions that generate it but the contour here is unmistakable.
While die-hard positivists might look at this data and conclude that all it proves is that 71% of people polled about Darwin are willfully ignorant, it is more telling that the polls asks them not what they know, but what they believe. What these numbers tell me is that science is a poor substitute for belief and the sooner that we come to reconciling our innate need for both, perhaps visualized under the idea of Ambiguity, the sooner we will be able to identify which value is appropriate for judging the merits of a particular argument.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Part 3)
Parts One and Two can be found here and here respectively.
Of the three Great Ideas considered within this discussion of The Clouds, Custom and Convention is the most important because the first two, Knowledge and Justice, may be read as subsets within a broader discussion about the importance of tradition. While we have already looked at the tensions between Faith and Fact and Justice and Law, Aristophanes includes some interesting tidbits about the nature of these shifts in other areas. One that sticks out repeatedly is the contrast that Aristophanes presents between the Rural and the Urban.
It begins early in the play as Strepsiades recalls, with deep regret, the circumstances that led to his marriage, describing himself as having “a life without worries in the country” and “happy with my bees and my sheep and my olives.” He reiterates this idea just a few passages later while bemoaning his wife’s bad influence on his son.
STREPSIADES: When she was holding him and fondling him she used to say something like, “When you’re a big boy and ride in procession to the Acropolis in your chariot, wearing a lovely yellow coat, like your Uncle Megacles…” I did what I could; when it was my turn, I said, “No my son, when you’re a big boy and drive the goats, home from the hills, like your daddy did before you, wearing your good old leather smock…”—but it never did any good. He never took any notice of anything his father said.
The argument presented by the Right during the big debate provides an extended articulation of what values Aristophanes allies with tradition. He begins with education, extolling the virtues of order and solemnity among students. Older styles of music are emphasized over “modern” innovations as is sexual modesty and physical fitness. It should be noted that Aristophanes presents the Right’s argument in a less than flattering light. While extolling the virtues of chastity and modesty in the youth, Right makes licentious comments about the young men that suggest he himself is not above enjoying the more relaxed modern atmosphere. By its end, Right’s argument never presents any meaningful observations about why the traditions of the past were better, only that Athens of the past produced better men than those currently occupying her walls.
If anything, it is this ambiguity that makes The Clouds such a difficult piece of satire to mine for any sense of what Aristophanes himself might have thought about any given issue. While traditional values are extolled, mythologized and, finally, entombed in the course of the play, it is the audience (or in our case, the reader) that must decide for the most part what those might be. It is a cunning device that enables the Clouds to be relevant some 2500 years after its original performance as each new generation has met its obligation to produce a segment of people convinced that the solution to today’s problems is the re-application of yesterday’s values—a description that, for some, might include the writers of this blog!
Given this ambiguity, what are we to make of The Clouds? The humor of The Clouds that endures comes from the lengths that Strepsiades is willing to traverse in order to deny his own culpability in indulging his son’s vices in the first place. His error, Aristophanes seems to suggest, is in going up into his head (or up into the Clouds) to concoct an over-elaborate solution to a simple problem. Despite the eventual damage it may have done to his public reputation, Socrates is a secondary target and is satirized in the broadest strokes as a stand-in for teachers and philosophers as a whole. Aristophanes’ treatment of Strepsiades is much more pointed and the full consequences of his error made plain within the course of the play’s action. The playwright’s inability or unwillingness to prescribe a remedial action for this cultural shift towards laxity suggests that Aristophanes, like Strepsiades, may have felt equally paralyzed by the complexity of the changes that occurred in his lifetime. The fact that these tensions between the values of the past and the future continue to surface in social and political dialogue to this very day indicate that Aristophanes may have correctly identified it as an irreconcilable difference and, wisely, refused to pick a side.
Of the three Great Ideas considered within this discussion of The Clouds, Custom and Convention is the most important because the first two, Knowledge and Justice, may be read as subsets within a broader discussion about the importance of tradition. While we have already looked at the tensions between Faith and Fact and Justice and Law, Aristophanes includes some interesting tidbits about the nature of these shifts in other areas. One that sticks out repeatedly is the contrast that Aristophanes presents between the Rural and the Urban.
It begins early in the play as Strepsiades recalls, with deep regret, the circumstances that led to his marriage, describing himself as having “a life without worries in the country” and “happy with my bees and my sheep and my olives.” He reiterates this idea just a few passages later while bemoaning his wife’s bad influence on his son.
STREPSIADES: When she was holding him and fondling him she used to say something like, “When you’re a big boy and ride in procession to the Acropolis in your chariot, wearing a lovely yellow coat, like your Uncle Megacles…” I did what I could; when it was my turn, I said, “No my son, when you’re a big boy and drive the goats, home from the hills, like your daddy did before you, wearing your good old leather smock…”—but it never did any good. He never took any notice of anything his father said.
The argument presented by the Right during the big debate provides an extended articulation of what values Aristophanes allies with tradition. He begins with education, extolling the virtues of order and solemnity among students. Older styles of music are emphasized over “modern” innovations as is sexual modesty and physical fitness. It should be noted that Aristophanes presents the Right’s argument in a less than flattering light. While extolling the virtues of chastity and modesty in the youth, Right makes licentious comments about the young men that suggest he himself is not above enjoying the more relaxed modern atmosphere. By its end, Right’s argument never presents any meaningful observations about why the traditions of the past were better, only that Athens of the past produced better men than those currently occupying her walls.
If anything, it is this ambiguity that makes The Clouds such a difficult piece of satire to mine for any sense of what Aristophanes himself might have thought about any given issue. While traditional values are extolled, mythologized and, finally, entombed in the course of the play, it is the audience (or in our case, the reader) that must decide for the most part what those might be. It is a cunning device that enables the Clouds to be relevant some 2500 years after its original performance as each new generation has met its obligation to produce a segment of people convinced that the solution to today’s problems is the re-application of yesterday’s values—a description that, for some, might include the writers of this blog!
Given this ambiguity, what are we to make of The Clouds? The humor of The Clouds that endures comes from the lengths that Strepsiades is willing to traverse in order to deny his own culpability in indulging his son’s vices in the first place. His error, Aristophanes seems to suggest, is in going up into his head (or up into the Clouds) to concoct an over-elaborate solution to a simple problem. Despite the eventual damage it may have done to his public reputation, Socrates is a secondary target and is satirized in the broadest strokes as a stand-in for teachers and philosophers as a whole. Aristophanes’ treatment of Strepsiades is much more pointed and the full consequences of his error made plain within the course of the play’s action. The playwright’s inability or unwillingness to prescribe a remedial action for this cultural shift towards laxity suggests that Aristophanes, like Strepsiades, may have felt equally paralyzed by the complexity of the changes that occurred in his lifetime. The fact that these tensions between the values of the past and the future continue to surface in social and political dialogue to this very day indicate that Aristophanes may have correctly identified it as an irreconcilable difference and, wisely, refused to pick a side.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Part 2)
Part One can be read here
While Aristophanes exaggerates the tension between faith and fact on the surface of the Clouds, what he intends to convey about Justice is done so with more subtlety. Though Strepsiades is afforded more likeable qualities than the other characters in the Clouds, the story’s genesis lies in his desire to avoid Justice; that is, to avoid paying debts that he otherwise legally incurred. In order to avoid Justice (a Great Idea still conceived of by the Athenians as one governed by the divine if implemented by human hands), Strepsiades must turn to Socrates who, in turn, reduces it from a matter of divine sanction to one of human sophistry. This transition can be seen most plainly when the great debate between the argument known as Right and the argument known as Wrong unfolds with predictable consequences. Speaking to Socrates about his son, Strepsiades opens this debate with a final statement of his ambition.
STREPSIADES: Well, anyway, see that he learns your two Arguments, whatever you call them—oh yes, Right and Wrong—the one that takes a bad case and defeats Right with it. If he can’t manage both, then at least Wrong—that will do—but that he must have.
SOCRATES: Well, I’ll go and send the Arguments here in person, and they’ll teach him themselves.
STREPSIADES: [calling after SOCRATES as he goes out}: Don’t forget, he’s got to be able to argue against any kind of justified claim at all.
[Enter RIGHT, dressed in the good old Attic style. He is followed by the smirking figure of WRONG, dressed similarly to PHEIDIPPIDES except that his tunic is embroidered with tongues.]
That brief description tagged on to the end of their exchange is valuable because it frames the real parameters for this debate along the same lines as Aristophanes' dialogue. The struggle between Right and Wrong is presented as a generational one, which spills over into the third Great Idea, Custom and Convention and parsing Aristophanes’ views on one from the other in this passage proves difficult. Still, after basing his entire defense of the Right on adhering to proven traditions, Right offers, as the summation of his argument, a final warning in verse to Pheiddipides and the audience
RIGHT:
If contrariwise you spurn my society and turn
To these modern ways, you’ll get a pale complexion
And with two exceptions, all your limbs will be too small
The exceptions are the tongue and the e-lection;
You will sing the trendy song, “Wrong is right
And right is wrong,
There’s no difference, there’s no Justice, there’s no God,”
And you’ll catch the current craze for Antimachus’ ways—
Or in plainer language, you’ll become a sod.
Here, Right asserts a causative link between the existence of Justice and reverence of the Divine. Borrowing, for just a moment, from Plato’s depiction of Socrates in Apology, Wisdom, which is the sole province of the Divine except in humanity’s ability to recognize that it has none, can be seen as in harmony with Aristophanes’ view of Justice. As these lofty ideals, once integrally intertwined with the idea of Divine influence on mortals, are relegated to the province of human achievement, both seem to suggest, they become a weapon in the hands of the self-assured and, invariably, incapable.
Later, after his son has been thoroughly trained in the argument for the Wrong, Strepsiades learns the awful consequences of subverting Justice when his son beats him and then uses the argument to defend his actions.
STREPSIADES: But look at the laws! Can you name a city where the law allows you to do this to your father?
PHEIDIPPIDES: But what is a law anyway? It must have been made at some time, and made by a man just like you or me; and he must have persuaded his people by argument to accept it. Why shouldn’t I now make a new law allowing sons to beat their fathers in return?
Even in this comedic setting, we can hear the supposed words of Pontius Pilate ringing hollow at the feet of a Jewish teacher who also believed, unlike the Romans of his time, that Justice was the sole province of the Divine; its very existence, the proof of Divine influence over the affairs of humanity. Athenian law was transformed from a matter of tradition to a matter of human avocation (a skill that might be learned) by the increasing demands on its social structure brought on by rapid population growth and the concentration of human learning. While most modern readers would cite a preference for being judged by human laws rather than Divinely inspired ones, there are few among us attesting to the ease with which Justice might be sought and found, in those times or these, whether inside a court or out.
While Aristophanes exaggerates the tension between faith and fact on the surface of the Clouds, what he intends to convey about Justice is done so with more subtlety. Though Strepsiades is afforded more likeable qualities than the other characters in the Clouds, the story’s genesis lies in his desire to avoid Justice; that is, to avoid paying debts that he otherwise legally incurred. In order to avoid Justice (a Great Idea still conceived of by the Athenians as one governed by the divine if implemented by human hands), Strepsiades must turn to Socrates who, in turn, reduces it from a matter of divine sanction to one of human sophistry. This transition can be seen most plainly when the great debate between the argument known as Right and the argument known as Wrong unfolds with predictable consequences. Speaking to Socrates about his son, Strepsiades opens this debate with a final statement of his ambition.
STREPSIADES: Well, anyway, see that he learns your two Arguments, whatever you call them—oh yes, Right and Wrong—the one that takes a bad case and defeats Right with it. If he can’t manage both, then at least Wrong—that will do—but that he must have.
SOCRATES: Well, I’ll go and send the Arguments here in person, and they’ll teach him themselves.
STREPSIADES: [calling after SOCRATES as he goes out}: Don’t forget, he’s got to be able to argue against any kind of justified claim at all.
[Enter RIGHT, dressed in the good old Attic style. He is followed by the smirking figure of WRONG, dressed similarly to PHEIDIPPIDES except that his tunic is embroidered with tongues.]
That brief description tagged on to the end of their exchange is valuable because it frames the real parameters for this debate along the same lines as Aristophanes' dialogue. The struggle between Right and Wrong is presented as a generational one, which spills over into the third Great Idea, Custom and Convention and parsing Aristophanes’ views on one from the other in this passage proves difficult. Still, after basing his entire defense of the Right on adhering to proven traditions, Right offers, as the summation of his argument, a final warning in verse to Pheiddipides and the audience
RIGHT:
If contrariwise you spurn my society and turn
To these modern ways, you’ll get a pale complexion
And with two exceptions, all your limbs will be too small
The exceptions are the tongue and the e-lection;
You will sing the trendy song, “Wrong is right
And right is wrong,
There’s no difference, there’s no Justice, there’s no God,”
And you’ll catch the current craze for Antimachus’ ways—
Or in plainer language, you’ll become a sod.
Here, Right asserts a causative link between the existence of Justice and reverence of the Divine. Borrowing, for just a moment, from Plato’s depiction of Socrates in Apology, Wisdom, which is the sole province of the Divine except in humanity’s ability to recognize that it has none, can be seen as in harmony with Aristophanes’ view of Justice. As these lofty ideals, once integrally intertwined with the idea of Divine influence on mortals, are relegated to the province of human achievement, both seem to suggest, they become a weapon in the hands of the self-assured and, invariably, incapable.
Later, after his son has been thoroughly trained in the argument for the Wrong, Strepsiades learns the awful consequences of subverting Justice when his son beats him and then uses the argument to defend his actions.
STREPSIADES: But look at the laws! Can you name a city where the law allows you to do this to your father?
PHEIDIPPIDES: But what is a law anyway? It must have been made at some time, and made by a man just like you or me; and he must have persuaded his people by argument to accept it. Why shouldn’t I now make a new law allowing sons to beat their fathers in return?
Even in this comedic setting, we can hear the supposed words of Pontius Pilate ringing hollow at the feet of a Jewish teacher who also believed, unlike the Romans of his time, that Justice was the sole province of the Divine; its very existence, the proof of Divine influence over the affairs of humanity. Athenian law was transformed from a matter of tradition to a matter of human avocation (a skill that might be learned) by the increasing demands on its social structure brought on by rapid population growth and the concentration of human learning. While most modern readers would cite a preference for being judged by human laws rather than Divinely inspired ones, there are few among us attesting to the ease with which Justice might be sought and found, in those times or these, whether inside a court or out.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Pt 1)
The Clouds by Aristophanes
Time: Written towards the end of the Fifth Century BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Knowledge, Justice, Custom and Convention
[The complete text of The Clouds may be accessed online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html though the translation is slightly different than the Alan Sommerstein translation used in the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World from which I'm quoting]
The Clouds is a play, written by Aristophanes in the Greek tradition of Old Comedy, that appears on its surface to be a straight-forward satire directed at the Socratic school of inquiry in particular and at philosophy in general. As one of only eleven plays written by Aristophanes that have survived into modern times, the reader is tempted to place special significance on Aristophanes’ relentless lampooning of a figure revered by Plato among others for his thoughtfulness and humility; not unlike eavesdropping in on an East Coast/West Coast MC battle from which we are removed in time and culture by almost 2500 years. In this sense, The Clouds provides a vital and complementary voice to Plato’s own on Socrates that sketches a much detailed picture of how the average Athenian might have viewed the obstreperous philosopher—as a polarizing figure and a man about whom it was difficult to be ambivalent.
That opposing balance, however, is not The Clouds most valuable contribution to our understanding of Aristophanes’ Athens or insight into the human condition. Under cover from his relentless lampooning of Socrates, Aristophanes constructs a haunting picture of a culture on a fulcrum between its more pastoral past and its increasingly complex urban future. While he hangs this paradox on a comedic frame, thus muting its medicinal flavor, his unity of action is pointed specifically at suggesting a bleak moral for which he neither provides nor, one assumes, knows a remedy. Though Aristophanes touches on a wide number of the Great Ideas in this and other plays, his themes in the Clouds address most directly the notions of Knowledge, Justice, and Custom and Convention.
The Clouds is the story of Strepsiades, an Athenian citizen whose son, Pheidippides, has run up a lot of debt due to his fixation with horse racing. Strepsiades decides that the only way he can avoid being sued is to enroll his son in the Thinkery, a school nearby overseen by Socrates where, “if you pay them well, they can teach you how to win your case—whether you’re in the right or not”. When Pheidippides shows little interest in this new-fangled learning, Strepsiades enrolls in the school, hoping to find out for himself what this argument known as “Wrong” is all about.
When Strepsiades meets Socrates, this fictionalized rendition of history’s most silent teacher lives up to his reputation of exposing how little men know but quite differently than Plato’s no-less fictionalized version. Aristophanes introduces him suspended above the stage “like a god in tragedy, in a contrivance like the gondola of a balloon.” It becomes clear quickly that the two men barely speak the same language.
SOCRATES: Why call’st me, O thou creature of a day?
STREPSIADES: Well, for a start, I’d be very interested to know what you’re doing up there.
SOCRATES: I am walking upon air and attacking the mystery of the sun.
STREPSIADES: Well, if you must attack the Mysteries of the gods why can’t you do it on the ground?
SOCRATES: Why, for accurate investigation of meteorological phenomena it is essential to get one’s thoughts into a state of, er, suspension by mixing small quantities of them with air—for air, you know, is of very similar physical constitution to thought—at least, to mine. So I could never make any discoveries by looking up from the ground—there is a powerful attractive force between the earth and the moisture contained in thought. Something similar may be observed to happen in the case of watercress.
While the comedic value of having Socrates address his newest student in a manner normally reserved for the gods in the theatre is obvious, there is a precision to Aristophanes’ language here that suggests he may not be merely kidding around. Though Socrates explains that he is attacking the “mystery” of the sun, Strepsiades immediately conflates that with attacking the “Mysteries of the gods.” In passage after passage, Aristophanes suggests that Socrates is, in effect, blaspheming against the gods by engaging in inquiry about phenomena once relegated to their authority.
After introducing Strepsiades to the Clouds (the Chorus but costumed “with dresses shaped and colored like clouds”), he brashly announces that they are, in fact, “the only divine beings—all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.”
STREPSIADES: What on earth—! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?
SOCRATES: Zeus? Who’s Zeus?
STREPSIADES: Zeus who lives on Olympus, of course.
SOCRATES: Now really, you should know better. [Confidentially] There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What? Well, who sends the rain, then? Answer me that.
SOCRATES: Why, our friends here do that, and I’ll prove it. Have you ever seen it rain when the sky was blue? Surely Zeus, if it was him, would be able to send rain even when the Clouds were out of town.
STREPSIADES: That certainly backs your argument. I wonder why I was so naïve as to think that rain was just Zeus pissing into a sieve. Well, that’s one thing; but who is it that thunders and sends shivers up my spine?
SOCRATES: The Clouds do that too—when they get in a whirl.
STREPSIADES: I can see I’m never going to trip you. But what do you mean, a whirl?
SOCRATES: Well, being suspended in the air, you see, when they get swollen with rain they are necessarily set in motion, and of course they collide with one another, and because of their weight they get broken and let out this great noise.
STREPSIADES: “Necessarily set in motion,” you say. Ah, but who sets them in motion? Now that’s got to be Zeus!
SOCRATES: Not a bit of it; as I say, it’s a whirl in the sky.
STREPSIADES: A whirl!—ah, I get you. That I must say I hadn’t been told before. I get it. Zeus is dead and now a whirl is the new king. But you still haven’t told me what causes the thunder.
SOCRATES: Didn’t you hear? I said that it occurs when Clouds swollen with rain collide with one another, and is caused by their density.
The spookiest thing about this passage is how accurate even this Bizarro-Socrates’ explanation of rain as a natural phenomena rather than a supernatural one is. I find myself torn between two readings; one which assumes that the audience would have found these explanations laughable despite the fact that they were, in time, proven to be essentially correct and the second, which assumes that the audience would have recognized the paradigmatic shift that these explanations represented and yet found themselves, like Strepsiades, clinging to a supernatural explanation despite evidence mounting to the contrary. This tug-of-war over causality (ie do things just happen or do they happen for a reason?) is one that science, religion, and philosophy have continued to wage for over two millennia since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. That alone may be enough to justify the assumption that the second interpretation is the more accurate.
[To be Continued]
Time: Written towards the end of the Fifth Century BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Knowledge, Justice, Custom and Convention
[The complete text of The Clouds may be accessed online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html though the translation is slightly different than the Alan Sommerstein translation used in the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World from which I'm quoting]
The Clouds is a play, written by Aristophanes in the Greek tradition of Old Comedy, that appears on its surface to be a straight-forward satire directed at the Socratic school of inquiry in particular and at philosophy in general. As one of only eleven plays written by Aristophanes that have survived into modern times, the reader is tempted to place special significance on Aristophanes’ relentless lampooning of a figure revered by Plato among others for his thoughtfulness and humility; not unlike eavesdropping in on an East Coast/West Coast MC battle from which we are removed in time and culture by almost 2500 years. In this sense, The Clouds provides a vital and complementary voice to Plato’s own on Socrates that sketches a much detailed picture of how the average Athenian might have viewed the obstreperous philosopher—as a polarizing figure and a man about whom it was difficult to be ambivalent.
That opposing balance, however, is not The Clouds most valuable contribution to our understanding of Aristophanes’ Athens or insight into the human condition. Under cover from his relentless lampooning of Socrates, Aristophanes constructs a haunting picture of a culture on a fulcrum between its more pastoral past and its increasingly complex urban future. While he hangs this paradox on a comedic frame, thus muting its medicinal flavor, his unity of action is pointed specifically at suggesting a bleak moral for which he neither provides nor, one assumes, knows a remedy. Though Aristophanes touches on a wide number of the Great Ideas in this and other plays, his themes in the Clouds address most directly the notions of Knowledge, Justice, and Custom and Convention.
The Clouds is the story of Strepsiades, an Athenian citizen whose son, Pheidippides, has run up a lot of debt due to his fixation with horse racing. Strepsiades decides that the only way he can avoid being sued is to enroll his son in the Thinkery, a school nearby overseen by Socrates where, “if you pay them well, they can teach you how to win your case—whether you’re in the right or not”. When Pheidippides shows little interest in this new-fangled learning, Strepsiades enrolls in the school, hoping to find out for himself what this argument known as “Wrong” is all about.
When Strepsiades meets Socrates, this fictionalized rendition of history’s most silent teacher lives up to his reputation of exposing how little men know but quite differently than Plato’s no-less fictionalized version. Aristophanes introduces him suspended above the stage “like a god in tragedy, in a contrivance like the gondola of a balloon.” It becomes clear quickly that the two men barely speak the same language.
SOCRATES: Why call’st me, O thou creature of a day?
STREPSIADES: Well, for a start, I’d be very interested to know what you’re doing up there.
SOCRATES: I am walking upon air and attacking the mystery of the sun.
STREPSIADES: Well, if you must attack the Mysteries of the gods why can’t you do it on the ground?
SOCRATES: Why, for accurate investigation of meteorological phenomena it is essential to get one’s thoughts into a state of, er, suspension by mixing small quantities of them with air—for air, you know, is of very similar physical constitution to thought—at least, to mine. So I could never make any discoveries by looking up from the ground—there is a powerful attractive force between the earth and the moisture contained in thought. Something similar may be observed to happen in the case of watercress.
While the comedic value of having Socrates address his newest student in a manner normally reserved for the gods in the theatre is obvious, there is a precision to Aristophanes’ language here that suggests he may not be merely kidding around. Though Socrates explains that he is attacking the “mystery” of the sun, Strepsiades immediately conflates that with attacking the “Mysteries of the gods.” In passage after passage, Aristophanes suggests that Socrates is, in effect, blaspheming against the gods by engaging in inquiry about phenomena once relegated to their authority.
After introducing Strepsiades to the Clouds (the Chorus but costumed “with dresses shaped and colored like clouds”), he brashly announces that they are, in fact, “the only divine beings—all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.”
STREPSIADES: What on earth—! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?
SOCRATES: Zeus? Who’s Zeus?
STREPSIADES: Zeus who lives on Olympus, of course.
SOCRATES: Now really, you should know better. [Confidentially] There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What? Well, who sends the rain, then? Answer me that.
SOCRATES: Why, our friends here do that, and I’ll prove it. Have you ever seen it rain when the sky was blue? Surely Zeus, if it was him, would be able to send rain even when the Clouds were out of town.
STREPSIADES: That certainly backs your argument. I wonder why I was so naïve as to think that rain was just Zeus pissing into a sieve. Well, that’s one thing; but who is it that thunders and sends shivers up my spine?
SOCRATES: The Clouds do that too—when they get in a whirl.
STREPSIADES: I can see I’m never going to trip you. But what do you mean, a whirl?
SOCRATES: Well, being suspended in the air, you see, when they get swollen with rain they are necessarily set in motion, and of course they collide with one another, and because of their weight they get broken and let out this great noise.
STREPSIADES: “Necessarily set in motion,” you say. Ah, but who sets them in motion? Now that’s got to be Zeus!
SOCRATES: Not a bit of it; as I say, it’s a whirl in the sky.
STREPSIADES: A whirl!—ah, I get you. That I must say I hadn’t been told before. I get it. Zeus is dead and now a whirl is the new king. But you still haven’t told me what causes the thunder.
SOCRATES: Didn’t you hear? I said that it occurs when Clouds swollen with rain collide with one another, and is caused by their density.
The spookiest thing about this passage is how accurate even this Bizarro-Socrates’ explanation of rain as a natural phenomena rather than a supernatural one is. I find myself torn between two readings; one which assumes that the audience would have found these explanations laughable despite the fact that they were, in time, proven to be essentially correct and the second, which assumes that the audience would have recognized the paradigmatic shift that these explanations represented and yet found themselves, like Strepsiades, clinging to a supernatural explanation despite evidence mounting to the contrary. This tug-of-war over causality (ie do things just happen or do they happen for a reason?) is one that science, religion, and philosophy have continued to wage for over two millennia since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. That alone may be enough to justify the assumption that the second interpretation is the more accurate.
[To be Continued]
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Author Sketch: Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata)
Aristophanes
455 – 380 BCE
World Events during Aristophanes’ Lifetime:
- Siddhartha Gautama dies – 480 BCE
- the wall of Jerusalem was built by Nehemiah and Ezra
- Xerxes II becomes the King of Persia and is quickly succeeded by Darius II
- Indian Civilization in Mexico declines
- The Fourche Maline culture reaches its apex in North America
- The 30th dynasty becomes the final native house to rule Egypt
Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes outside of the information that may be gleaned from his eleven comedic plays still extant. An Athenian by birthright, Aristophanes enjoyed a very long life and he, like Socrates, lived during a time of dramatic political change and upheaval. It is important to keep in mind that Greek theatre was a competitive sport and, at this, Aristophanes can be seen as a great success. His first play (The Banqueters) won second prize when he was only 18 years old. Embedded within the chorus’ dialogue (usually understood to be the voice of the author) we can hear that Aristophanes himself was understandably concerned with the success of his plays. The course of Aristophanes’ lifetime ran parallel to The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchies and two democratic “restorations”. One might ask how it was that Aristophanes could have possibly lived such a long life utilizing his satiric wit in the Old Comedic tradition that involved public ridicule for many local Athenian peoples of prestige.
His life was not void of political danger, however, and most notably he was put on trial by Cleon for allegedly committing slander against the Polis who were the only people who were “off limits” in Greek Comedy. Aristophanes was cleared of all charges but made Cleon a comedic target for many years to come. Cleon’s political life, ironically, was as long as Aristophanes’ 40 year long career as a poet and playwright and neither of them seemed to suffer from their extended “war of words”. One argument that scholars have put forth is that Aristophanes’ long life can be attributed to his willingness to be censored by whatever ruling political party happened to be in power at the time. This theory may explain why only eleven of his supposed 40-60 plays are still extant today. It may also explain the typically hard line conservative voice that seems to emanate from his written works. We will never know whether these views were actually his own or merely a reflection of his audience.
The fact that Aristophanes is a transitional figure between the traditions of Old and New Comedy should not be forgotten by the reader. Old Comedy is more localized and distinctly Athenian whereas New Comedy has a broader perspective and is suggestive of an emergent and distinctly Greek worldview. I have found that these transitional authors are among the more interesting to read, mostly due to the fact that the writing is in the voice of the declining and ascendant traditions at the same time. Unfortunately, because we do not have access to the whole of Aristophanes’ works, we cannot know the degree of fluidity with which this transition was made. We do know that his last play (which is lost) was written in the tradition of New Comedy but we do not know if it was a success or even if it was any good. His sons continued their father’s legacy as playwrights in the tradition of New Comedy and achieved marked competitive success.
455 – 380 BCE
World Events during Aristophanes’ Lifetime:
- Siddhartha Gautama dies – 480 BCE
- the wall of Jerusalem was built by Nehemiah and Ezra
- Xerxes II becomes the King of Persia and is quickly succeeded by Darius II
- Indian Civilization in Mexico declines
- The Fourche Maline culture reaches its apex in North America
- The 30th dynasty becomes the final native house to rule Egypt
Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes outside of the information that may be gleaned from his eleven comedic plays still extant. An Athenian by birthright, Aristophanes enjoyed a very long life and he, like Socrates, lived during a time of dramatic political change and upheaval. It is important to keep in mind that Greek theatre was a competitive sport and, at this, Aristophanes can be seen as a great success. His first play (The Banqueters) won second prize when he was only 18 years old. Embedded within the chorus’ dialogue (usually understood to be the voice of the author) we can hear that Aristophanes himself was understandably concerned with the success of his plays. The course of Aristophanes’ lifetime ran parallel to The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchies and two democratic “restorations”. One might ask how it was that Aristophanes could have possibly lived such a long life utilizing his satiric wit in the Old Comedic tradition that involved public ridicule for many local Athenian peoples of prestige.
His life was not void of political danger, however, and most notably he was put on trial by Cleon for allegedly committing slander against the Polis who were the only people who were “off limits” in Greek Comedy. Aristophanes was cleared of all charges but made Cleon a comedic target for many years to come. Cleon’s political life, ironically, was as long as Aristophanes’ 40 year long career as a poet and playwright and neither of them seemed to suffer from their extended “war of words”. One argument that scholars have put forth is that Aristophanes’ long life can be attributed to his willingness to be censored by whatever ruling political party happened to be in power at the time. This theory may explain why only eleven of his supposed 40-60 plays are still extant today. It may also explain the typically hard line conservative voice that seems to emanate from his written works. We will never know whether these views were actually his own or merely a reflection of his audience.
The fact that Aristophanes is a transitional figure between the traditions of Old and New Comedy should not be forgotten by the reader. Old Comedy is more localized and distinctly Athenian whereas New Comedy has a broader perspective and is suggestive of an emergent and distinctly Greek worldview. I have found that these transitional authors are among the more interesting to read, mostly due to the fact that the writing is in the voice of the declining and ascendant traditions at the same time. Unfortunately, because we do not have access to the whole of Aristophanes’ works, we cannot know the degree of fluidity with which this transition was made. We do know that his last play (which is lost) was written in the tradition of New Comedy but we do not know if it was a success or even if it was any good. His sons continued their father’s legacy as playwrights in the tradition of New Comedy and achieved marked competitive success.
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