The Portable Plato (3 page)

It is not by chance that Plato in the Apology and the
Crito
casts Socrates as an Oedipus, a master of life as his name indicates, who reasonably and willingly accepts his condemnation to death. Socrates, the hero-protagonist of the dramatic demonstration of justice in The Republic, uses his own trial, as he has used his whole life, to inquire and to find the answer to the riddle of the Delphic Oracle which had said that he was the wisest man in Greece; has killed his father, the city, by charming the youth away from conventional citizenship to the higher aims of the state; and married his mother, the laws, which have nourished and protected him in his mission. There is a different content in the Platonic riddle of Socrates, and tragedy has worked for a different end on a higher level, but the character and plot are the same. The end of the reminiscence is purgation and insight for all.

Aristotle says that
Oedipus the King
is the perfect tragedy, and for Aristotle this means that it is the most thorough realization of the potentiality that lies in the tragic pattern. One reason that it is so good is that the story of Oedipus is one of the best stories in the world; it is still fermenting, not only in the Oedipus complex of Freudian psychology, but in the moral patterns that enable the literary artist to see life steadily and whole. As Freud suggests, it is the hidden story of every man, no matter what the degree of sublimity or sublimation its articulation and purgation achieve. Another reason that it is a good tragedy is that Sophocles was a good work man. He had inherited from Aeschylus the dramatic tools for probing mystery and paradox, the notions of necessity, or fate, the hybris or arrogance of men that incurs the jealousy of the gods, the strict rigor of plot that binds action and thought into a chain of rational choices by the hero, and the inevitability of catastrophe in the kind of human goodness that learns from experience. Sophocles had turned tragedy into a powerful engine of inquiry which must have heightened the sense of spiritual adventure in every Greek’s mind. Socrates is quoting Sophocles when he says in the Apology that the unexamined life is no life at all for a man. Plato learned most of what he knew about dialectic from Sophocles.

Plato learned a great deal from the other tragic poets. The relation of reason to necessity in Aeschylus’s sea of troubles becomes cosmology in the
Timaeus.
The diabolic anarchy of man living merely under natural law, as it is presented in the Orestes trilogy, gives tragic power to the account of the rise and fall of civil government in the eighth book of The
Republic.
But perhaps the most characteristic lesson that Plato learned from these poets was the distinction between natural things in the fleeing shadow of time and the world of unchanging ideas. The tragic hero is the type of all things in nature; he comes into being and he passes away. His career is an embodiment of unchanging qualities, the realization of eternal and therefore incessantly recurring ends and goods. His growth is a blind and perhaps mad transmigration into the world of ideas, and his passage is a fall and a forgetting of the things that prevented understanding. Out of the loss and the suffering, wisdom. It is said that Socrates collaborated with Euripides; if so, Euripides studied the suffering, and Socrates chiseled out the wisdom. The Euripidean plays, as they reflected the religious, moral, and political breakdown of Athens, passed on the tragically worked material of the time to Plato for his new dramaturgy, for which Socrates was needed as the foil.

There is a legend that before Plato met Socrates he was a comic poet, imitating and rivaling Aristophanes in the theater. There is strong historical presumption that this is not the fact, but like most legends about Plato there is light in it for the kind of curiosity that wants to know the ingredients of the dialogues. Plato was certainly a comic poet in the dialogues, and this is true not merely of the surface gaiety and the teasing results, but also of the deep vision into his human and ideal material. No matter how serious and apparently tragic the data are, there always is the penetration of love and irony. These two ubiquitous qualities in the dialogues are the great comic virtues. For the best view of this quality of comedy in Plato, see the speech that Plato has Aristophanes make on love in the Symposium. Aristophanes himself could have done no better, and yet Plato must have hated him for the fatal effects his Clouds had on the life of Socrates. There are signs even where this matter is directly discussed that Plato belongs with Aristophanes to the charmed circle of those who have achieved comic wisdom. The ironist is understood best when he is being misunderstood; he understands misunderstanding. In this comic way Plato and Aristophanes are rival poets.

The purpose or end of tragedy was the purgation of pity and terror, as Aristotle said in his
Poetics,
not just any pity and terror, but that special blend of the two great passions that accompany heroic action. The hero of Homeric times and of later Greek poetry was the inspired lover of great deeds and fame. His discernment of the necessity of great deeds and the virtues that gave him courage to face them were evidence of divinity in the man, and the moment of decision, when the hero plunged into a “sea of troubles,” was the high point of tragic narrative. The Greeks had a word for it —hybris. It names a quality of pride, arrogance, defiance, and madness, and the resulting great deeds were admired, feared, and pitied because they obviously incurred the jealousy of the gods. Audiences sat transfixed by the stubborn blindness and the fateful irony of the hero’s inevitable choice. The hero’s equally courageous and willing acceptance of reversal, of calamity, and of the judgment of gods and fate, that events seemed to pronounce, purged and enlightened both hero and audience. Such dramatic instruction was the invigorating education of the Greeks. After a century of such education they were ready for the advanced studies that comedy provided. In Aristophanes another Muse is managing the stage.

It is as if the tragic hero had split into two persons. In a tragedy he was both protagonist and antagonist; he gave himself wholly to his vision, and then at the height of his blind commitment had to accept destructive and transforming light. In comedy this agony is carried by two persons, the hero and the villain, often with the aid of seconds. The heavy darkness of tragedy gives way to lightness and light, and the machinery of the mystery works and plays before all eyes. This is not to say that the burden of pity, fear, and sin is dumped, but rather that laughter and tears are added to it. The magic by which this takes place is the sophistication which tragedy has made possible. In place of the blind pride of the demigod-hero, there is pretense, ironic pretense on the part of the hero, and mischievous or diabolic pretense on the part of the villain or villains. The two pretenses brought together in the action accomplish a purgation, sometimes with more thoroughness and light than in any tragedy.

Aristophanes discovered the full range of pretense and, in a variety of roles, filled his stage with impostors: the bragging soldier, the learned or pedantic doctor, the magician cook, the flattering parasite, the aged politician, the retired business man, the foolishly wise young man, the lascivious old woman, and the treacherous slave. Most of these claim to know or to do more than they are able, but one, and sometimes more, claims to know less and do less than he actually does. This is the comic mixture, buffoonery and irony lighting and burning each other up.

There is the theory that comedy arises from the same rites of fertility for man, beast, and crop from which tragedy arises. It is supposed that a god is born, dies, and is resurrected. There is a mother at the birth, a bride at the resurrection, and a struggle with an antagonist at the death, perhaps a medicine-man at both death and resurrection, and these explain the categories of impostorship. There is the theory that the ritual in this case is concerned with the exorcism of devils. Be this as it may, it does not in itself determine the depth and brilliance of the ordeal by laughter, which can reach down to slapstick or up to theology.

As tragedy seems to have to move on high ground with creatures like men occasionally being transfigured into deities, as the closing episodes of the trilogies sometimes show them, comedy seems to have complete freedom of situation, material, and style. It is, for instance, very easy to turn a tragedy into a comedy; delivery in a slightly mocking tone of voice can do it with even the best specimens. Inspired madness seems to have a quick affinity with bombast, as the schoolboy translator of Aeschylus well knows. There are consequently comic parodies of tragedies and melodramas. But there can be vulgar comedies dealing in pornography and petty violence, backyard quarrels between housewives, intrigue between gossipy old men, satires on historical and current heroes, battles of giants and political ideologies such as we have today without a much-needed author. This range of versatility, set beside the rather narrow dignity of tragedy, should not confuse us; their dramatic ends are the same, and their successes mutually dependent. Tragedy impregnates and delivers; comedy lets the brood of offspring live.

The level on which a comedy moves is determined essentially by the powers that can be planted in the hero. To his audience he must appear part fool; in himself he must have either the confidence of a very energetic ignorance, or great restraint in the exercise of his intelligence. Simple naivete and omnivorous curiosity make the best ironic buffoon. The hero undertakes some trivial or commonplace project, is beset by imposture and illusion. By irony, or inquiry, as the Greek word
eironeia
indicates, he moves or transforms the illusions progressively until they disappear. Either curiosity or wit will accomplish the puncture. Magic or just imagination may suffice, and laughter is the sign of success. The original project may never be accomplished, or others may successively or endlessly take its place, but the pure gold of comic wisdom and charity precipitates almost unnoticed. There is a tradition of folk comedy that is said to keep us sane. It has familiar figures in it, such as Punch and Judy, Pulcinella, Pierrot, Harlequin, and Domino, the clowns in the circus, the faces on playing cards, and the now stock figures of Hollywood movies. We attend the sideshows at country fairs, go to the circus and opera, play bridge, and do our daily comics or our weekly movies, not because we are patrons of the arts but because we need the shadowy repetition of the ancient ritual to renew our lives.

But the catalyst in this human alchemy is the ironic hero who holds the secret for all the other characters in the play and for his audience. He has somehow received the sign, as Socrates did from the Delphic oracle, that he is wise, he has taken it as a riddle, and has looked for the answer. The answer is that he will be wise if he learns that he knows nothing. These are stage directions for the comic actor; he is to play the fool. So much will make a comedy provided he does not completely discount the truth or probability of his folly. If, as Socrates did, he lends his folly an ever-deepening truth, he will raise the comedy as far as his learning ignorance will go with him. This is the secret of the writing and the reading of the Platonic dialogues. They are comedies, and Socrates is the archetypal comic hero of all time.

The key to the comic character and the ironic role of Socrates in the dialogues is in the inscription borrowed by Socrates from the temple of Apollo at Delphi and appropriated by him as the ruling principle of his life: Know thyself. He coupled this with a hypothesis, also provided by the Delphic oracle, that he was the wisest man in Greece. He reported these two facts to his judges in the
Apology,
and interpreted them to mean what he had discovered for himself: he was wise because he knew that he did not know. “I know that I do not know” contains a pun as it is pronounced in Greek. As it is written with a choice of accents, spacing and emphasis, it can mean three things:

1. I know that I do not know.

2. I know what I do not know.

3. I know whatever I do not know.

It can even mean “I know because I do not know.” It suggests that the study of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.

The punning proverb is a powerful formula if it is taken, as Socrates took it, as a hypothesis to be verified by a life of inquiry. It is also a powerful piece of ironic thought to be put to use in comic drama. In the early dialogues it is tried on professional poets, priests, military men, and politicians, whose opinions blossom quickly into a pretense of knowledge. It is tried on professional wise men, the sophists who are the professors of the day, and whose scholarship, as always, pretends both knowledge and humble ignorance. It is tried on starry-eyed young men who, like sophomores, underestimate the difficulty and cost of the quest for wisdom. In the later dialogues it is tried on seasoned, if not wise, men who shed their protective pretense before competent questions. The test for competent questions is of course: Does the questioner know the ignorance that his question expresses?

There is a great variety in these trials by irony. With bombast Socrates was irritatingly humble and gentle; with the clever irresponsible sophist he outdid the sophistry; with the evil stupid man he was patient and diabolic; with the stupid good man he was gentle and mock-respectful; with the practical man he was playful with the commonplace; with the young man he was devastatingly critical and eloquently imaginative; with the honest man he was unremittingly explorative. There is pretense in all these roles that Socrates takes, but the pretenses, amounting often to outrageous deception and absurdity, are measured and matched to willful ignorance and bad temper in the opponent impostor. Socrates is always good-tempered, understands his opponent’s bad temper, and has his eye on the argument and where it leads.

The beginning reader of the dialogues is often irritated and repelled by the behavior of Socrates and his conduct of the argument, and often this is not cured by repeated reading. This is partly because one cannot help but identify one’s own opinions and sometimes one’s deepest convictions with the apparently sincere beliefs of one or another of the impostors. The dialogues, like psychoanalytic procedures, set up resistance in the reader. On the other hand the beginning reader sometimes falls in love with Socrates and leaves his critical guard down, believing everything that Socrates says, and fighting everything that his opponent says. Again there is a psychological transference that blinds the reader to the dramatic truth. To the seasoned reader of Plato there is a great variety of result to be noted and weighed. One of the formulated rules of scholarship is to note first what is said in a dialogue, and then quite separately to note what is done; these are called, respectively, the logos and the
ergon.
The method gets results in penetration, and therefore is a good rule for stalled beginners, but it has a fatal flaw in that it cuts the drama in two, and does not accommodate the two views. Paul Shorey’s rule, exemplified in his book What
Plato
Said, to collect sayings of various characters to make a unified Platonic doctrine, is worse, although it has been the scholar’s temptation always and has filled the tradition with straw Platonisms. Plato himself says he has no doctrine, and he makes Socrates say the same for himself over and over again—with irony. One should remember Bernard Shaw, spending most of his waking life that is not spent in writing, telling the world in his inveterate comic way that he has no doctrine. It was noticeable, on the occasion of the recent Shaw revival, that dramatic critics have begun to catch up and laugh with Shaw at the doctrine of the life force and the superman.