Individual and Community in Greek Thought VI

Comedy and Tragedy

We conclude this discussion with a brief reflection on the ways in which the notions of individual and community are presented in the forms of Greek drama. As with the other issues I have dealt with, I can merely hint at one of the many possibilities that could be taken up. It is clear that these forms are profoundly interesting from the point of view of our subject dealing as they do with the refractions of self and other, merit and responsibility, the group and the hero. These forms may also be thought to afford us our deepest insights into the construction of individual identity, and the intimacy with which the self is realized is undoubtedly unique to them. Vernant's unwillingness to grant the notion of the `ego' or the person (MI 321) a substantial place in Greek thought seems to skirt around the experience of tragedy. Medea's troubled realization

               I know indeed what evil I intend to do

               But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury (1078-9)

is obviously different from the mode of the confessional or the diary, but is no less an attempt to document a state of psychic intensity. My argument however is not about the individual themes of drama as about their forms. The two great modes of fifth-century Greek drama - quite irrespective of theories of origins - seem to reveal a kind of complementarity in respect of their formal dispositions. Some of these contrastive relationships are touched upon by Aristotle in the Poetics (chs. 2-5, passim). One of the distinctions made is in respect of the agents of the respective forms, with tragedy seen as imitating those better and comedy those worse than ordinary people (ch. 2, 1448a). It is likely that better and worse at this point are not moral terms and are used mainly in a technical sense (Aristotle glosses `worse' as a species of the ugly, 1449a). It may be that Aristotle has the possibilities of idealization and satire in view; but a more fanciful interpretation could be that tragic and comic agents are distinguished on the basis of the forms of intelligence that they exhibit. Tragic intelligence, on the face of it, is noble and heroic, but also lacking in pragmatism. When we consider the ends that the tragic hero pursues, we see that self-preservation is not one of them, for he/she fails (or refuses) to try to protect himself or herself by trying to evade death and disaster. Comedy on the other hand interiorises a kind of intelligence that corresponds to Detienne and Vernant's classification of μητις [metis], cunning or pragmatic intelligence, a stochastic ability that agents exhibit in averting danger and forestalling their enemies. In this sense a shade of ethical valuation is present: there is no doubt that Aristotle regards self-abnegation (itself a form of triumphant self-regard, see supra) as ethically superior, and would presumably class comic intelligence as the inferior kind of self-love stigmatized in the Nicomachean Ethics. Detienne and Vernant point out that pragmatic intelligence, the logic of self-preservation, is conspicuous by its absence in the early philosophical traditions, Greek as much as Christian.

Should one then see tragedy as tending towards a `greater' good - individual and communal alike - and comedy restricted by the limits of self-interest? Or, to put it in a different way, does the action of tragedy more readily invested with marks of altruism than that of comedy? The great paradigms of tragic action - especially as found in Sophocles - could be thought of as supporting such a conclusion: Oedipus acts on behalf of the community, taking its sufferings upon himself:

               For in your case his own particular pain

               Comes to each singly; but my heart at once

               Groans for the city, and myself, and you

The wounded outcast Philoctetes is made to lay aside his anger and pride and take up his magic bow in aid of the Argives. On the other hand, the clever agent of Aristophanic comedy is often seen as assiduously pursuing self-interest, as the sharp capitalist Dikaiopolis in the Akharnians, or the farmer Gorgias in the Peace. It seems to me the case however that the experience of reading the plays themselves suggests otherwise. Comedy reverses the logic of self-interest that it introduces at the beginning - the Aristophanic hero is usually at the beginning to be very much in a minority - to suggest that what we had so long read as `cunning' intelligence is actually the basis of a new view of the world. One might say, therefore, that in comedy altruism is only misrecognized as egoism; the hero's actions form the basis of a transformation of the social order.

Tragedy, on the contrary, holds on to a concern for the self that is unique in the Greek experience. Whatever may be the reasons assigned for the hero's actions - family honour, state interest, communal safety, the enmity of fate - the real cause for acting must be discovered within the self of the protagonist. The action of tragedy decisively separates the heroic individual from the community he or she initially forms a part of: the protagonist is viewed in a state of radical singularity, a naked selfhood. This is the reason, perhaps, that it is the tragic theatre that is able to comprehend aspects of human experience that are ineluctably private: madness, irrationality, the life of the emotions, confusions of identity and gender. Thrown upon the resources of his own selfhood, the tragic hero can act only for himself or herself, notwithstanding how others appropriate the same actions or benefit from them.