A Philosophical Study of Tyranny in Plato, Sophocles, and Aristophanes

Abstract

Plato’s interlocutors discuss at length about psychology, politics, poetry, cosmology, education, nature, and the gods, in short, about the things that inscribe the transcendent and the grounding poles of human life. It stands to reason that what we wish to glean from Plato’s thinking will show itself more readily if we remain attentive to the self-undermining and the subversive elements of the dialogues. I call the interpretation, which follows the shape- and, hence, meaning-shifting structure of Plato’s writing, “paradigmatic procedure.” By this I do not mean that we ought to find, explain, and then interpretively apply to the whole of Plato’s thought any particular passages from the Republic, the Timaeus, or the Statesman, which mention paradigms. However, I, following Benardete, propose that “Plato must have learned from poets” who produced epos, tragedy, comedy, and myth. This means that Plato borrows these poetic elements and form when he writes the philosophical dialogues. Paradigmatic method of interpretation is conscious of the dramatic form. It situates and analyzes the arguments made both through speeches and through actions as these arise out of the play of literary images. The latter, in their turn, are made up of the tripartite convergence between the dialogical characters, their speeches, and their deeds. Depending on the colorations that the three impart to one another, the images of Plato are comic, tragic, or, which is most often the case, they are tragicomic. The dramatic tone of a given image, once it is detected, reflects back onto the dialogical discussion or account and presents the argument in this newly discovered light. It often happens that the difference between the initial and the paradigmatic reading is so drastic that the straightforward meaning of the studied passage is undone as Plato’s writing begins to show its self-undermining nature. This does not mean that Plato’s philosophizing, also, is undone. On the contrary, when we begin to think together with and through Plato’s subversive writing, instead of retrofitting our lives to some systems that may arise out of it and instead of forcing it to substantiate our views, then we begin to get a sense for the liberating force of Plato’s philosophy. In chapter one, I explain the relationship between paradigms and the tragicomic character of Plato’s writing. Consequently, I offer a reading of select passages from the Timaeus and from the Republic. My discoveries showcase how paradigms inform and how the paradigmatic reading uncovers the tragic dimension of the Timaeus. I show how comedy shines through the, seemingly, most serious passages in the Republic. Plato’s dialogues do not strictly divide into the tragic, comic, epic, mythic, sophistic, or pre-Socratic ones, but rather, most are woven out of all of these orientations. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that within parts or passages, such as those from the Republic, for example, a given form and theme is most pronounced. I turn to the examination of tragedy in the second chapter. There, I first argue that Sophocles’ Oedipus is a tyrant and then I expose the relationship between the psychopathology of tyranny, tragedy, and poetry in books VIII and IX of the Republic. The third chapter carries on the exploration of pathology and offers an examination of tyranny and the soul in the Timaeus. Paradigmatic analysis plays up the theatricality of the Timaeus and identifies several axes around which the dialogical accounts revolve. The three main horizons are made up of nous, necessity, and dream or choric logic. These are fleshed out by the distention given to the dialogical arguments through the enmeshment of φύσις, μῦθος, and πόλις. The fourth kind of emphasis, senselessness, ushers the dialogue’s grotesquely humorous ending and prepares the readers for the considerations of comedy in the fourth chapter of the present work. The comedy of divisions, mythic tall tales, the halving and the fitting cuts, with which Plato’s Statesman is woven through and through, reveal statesmanship’s sinister underbelly. If it were not for the comedic tone, the fourth chapter argues, the monstrousness of tyranny, which is interred in all of the paradigms entertained as models of rule in the Statesman, would have remained unseen. Attunement to the comical passages and references, in the Statesman, is made expedient by an analysis of tyranny in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The fifth and final chapter sees to the convergence of the speciously opposite forms and themes. Tragedy is brought together with comedy, poetry with philosophy, and theater with ordinary life under the auspices of the twice-born god, Dionysus. The Dionysian, duplicitously evasive, nature is shown to be contemporaneous with the double-edged nature of shame. The contemplation of shame in Sophocles’ Oedipus and Aristophanes’ Clouds, aids the investigation of the humanity preserving and the corrupting role of shame in Plato’s Gorgias. The findings of the final chapter serve to locate the pressure points of pathology and tyranny as these recede into the tragicomic dramas of our lives.