Plato and Aristotle on the denial of tragedy (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Philosopher and the Beast: Plato's Fear of Tragedy
PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 2014
It is well known that in Plato’s utopian ideal state there is no room for free artistic expression: artists are mistrusted and art works heavily censored. Less known is that, once they are properly selected and purified, art works are particularly valued by Plato. However, Plato completely disapproves of a certain category of art, which he defines as ‘mimetic’. ‘Mimetic art’ is a priori disqualified by him as morally bad, misleading and dangerous. It is therefore categorically forbidden in the ideal state. In practice, Plato identifies ‘mimetic art’ chiefly with Greek tragedy. We will go into a Jungian explanation of why this is the case. I hope to show that psychologically speaking Plato’s ideal state is an unstable construction. It is built on the repression of unconscious powers that may erupt any time. Tragedy is threatening to this construction because it undermines the unrealistic Platonic conception of man as an autonomous, rational being.
A Noble Pity: ἔλεος in Plato's Philosophy
Vol. 82: The Passions in the Platonic Tradition, Patristics and Late Antiquity, 2022
Pity (ἔλεος), broadly understood as an emotional response to another's misfortune, had a prominent role in Athenian culture. Pity's significance was particularly evident in dramatic and judicial contexts 2 , whose mechanisms afforded groups of citizens opportunities to witness the staged or reported predicaments of others. It is no surprise, then, that both Plato and Aristotle commented on this emotion, albeit in apparently contrasting ways-Plato's stated disregard for pity 3 (in Apology and Republic) standing at odds with Aristotle's appraisal of it as a legitimate and even desirable response (in Poetics and Rhetoric). Given the scope and extent of pity's role in Greek thought, however, one may revisit and reassess this commonplace opposition, and especially its guiding premise, namely that Plato did away with pity entirely. I argue in this essay against this assumption, proposing instead that Plato conceived a form of pity that would constitute an
The Platonic Rehabilitation of Tragedy
Classical Rationalism and the Politics of Europe (ed. Ann Ward), 2017
Plato is usually considered a critic of poetry and of tragedy in particular. In the Laws, however, we read of a city-in-speech whose “whole regime is constructed as the imitation of the most beautiful and best way of life, which we at least assert to be really the truest tragedy” (817b3-5). This chapter takes up the apparent rehabilitation of tragedy in the Laws and argues that it is in fact consistent with the critique of tragedy in the Republic. Although the Athenian stranger appears to praise the regime that he conceives in calling it a tragedy, I show that he quietly means to insult it. The regime is a tragedy, he implies, because it merely—and hence regrettably—imitates the way of life that is best and truly serious. Attending to key passages that Plato dramatically connects with 817a-d, I argue that the reasons adduced for this shortcoming are the very ones responsible for tragedy’s enduring appeal. Like Socrates in the Republic, the Athenian in the Laws counsels the censorship of tragic lamentations. But his arguments suggest that the allure of tragedy is ineradicable and the cause of the unfortunate necessities to which politics must resort even or precisely at its best.
The Review of Politics, 2008
In this article, the work of the cultural historian Jean-Pierre Vernant and the philosophical anthropologist René Girard provides grounds for reflecting on Plato's adaptation of tragedy in the Apology, and in particular on Plato's implicit comparison of Socrates with the character of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. The Apology uses certain thematic and formal elements of tragedyincluding systematic ambiguity, dramatic reversal and recognition, and the figure of a hero who is also a scapegoat -in order to expose the paradoxical combination of persuasion and compulsion at the heart of political life and of philosophical passion and aggression in the soul of the philosopher.
Tyrant and Philosopher: Two Fundamental Lives in Plato's Myth of Er
What is the significance of the recurring link between tyranny and philosophy in Plato? Often, Plato's treatment of tyranny is discussed either in the context of moral psychology -- as a problem of agency, moral choice and akrasia -- or political science, where it is the limit case of political decline. It is suggested, however, that a close inspection of the myth of Er and an elucidation of its neglected links, not just with the rest of the Republic but also with dialogues such as the Philebus and the Symposium, shows that Socrates' fascination with tyrannical characters points to a deeper theme -- nature, and specifically the problem of its benevolence to our purposes and its very ambiguous relation to human excellence and degradation. Philosopher and tyrant, for all the radical differences between them, both illuminate the internal instability of the human being in Plato's thought.
For the Interrelation of Plato’s Phaedo and Ancient Greek Tragedy
Journal Phasis - Greek and Roman Studies, 2016
The interrelation of Plato and the Greek tragedy is rather complex, heterogeneous, and even contradictory issue, but to my mind, some aspects of ancient tragedy can be observed in Phaedo . On the one hand, the philosopher is shown as an opponent of poetry generally and namely, of drama, but on the other hand, in Plato’s works there are some details that are characteristic of the genre unacceptable to him. The complex and dilemmatic side of the problem is the ambivalence of the material found in Plato’s dialogues.