This is an extremely short reading, very doable. It'll be crucial that we all do it. Plus, it'll offer you a chance to reflect on, and to review, other reading in preparation for the upcoming midterm.
Assigned Text and Access
I'm assigning the following book chapter:
Critchley, Simon. 2019. "Knowing and Not Knowing: How Oedipus Brings Down Fate." In Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, 12-16. New York: Pantheon Books.
Access the PDF via:
Brightspace course site > Content > Critchley: "Knowing and Not Knowing" (critchley_knowing_and_not_knowing.pdf)
Guiding Questions
In the assigned reading, the author, Simon Critchley, makes a number of very broad claims about ancient Greek tragedy. Ordinarily I'd be very skeptical: How can one prove claims as broad as these in the span of a mere five pages? Of course, Critchley points out that he intends to support those claims over the course of the book's 285 pages. But we don't have time to read all those pages. Still, I think we have enough here to begin to think critically about the author's claims. So, after reading this Study Guide (the "Background Information" section, below on the Study Guide, is crucial) and the book chapter uploaded to BrightSpace, be ready to discuss the following:
- What are the author's claims, his main "talking points"?
- How does he support them those claims?
- What in what you've read so far for this course validates those claims? Challenges them?
- Related to #s 1-3, can one play, in this case, Sophocles' Oedipus the King (which we haven't read yet), provide the template for, can it model, all other ancient extant fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides?
- What do you think about the author's claims? Explain. . . .
Background Information
Critchley is a philosopher and teaches at the New School. For background on the book from which the assigned chapter comes, see its promotional webpage. For background on Critchley, see his personal website.
Critchley's larger aim — an excellent one — is to challenge philosophers who, like Plato, say that tragedy isn't philosophical. In his Republic, Plato excludes from the ideal state not just tragedy but all representational art.*
* Representational art generally, because it imitates and therefore lies; tragedy in particular, because it promotes grief and lamentation, things deleterious to civic virtue. Note, however, that a number of philosophers, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche among them, value tragedy.
Critchley wants to rehabilitate tragedy as a way to think — let me quote from his Chapter 2, "Philosophy's Tragedy and the Dangerous Perhaps":
"Tragedy's philosophy" is opposed to "philosophy's tragedy." The thought here is that philosophy as a discursive invention, beginning with [Plato's] Republic, but extending along the millennia into the present, is premised upon the exclusion of tragedy and the exclusion of a range of experiences that we can call tragic, particularly the emotion of grief and the phenomenon of lamentation, which is at the center of so many tragedies, from Aeschylus’s The Persians onward. I want to suggest that this exclusion of tragedy is, itself, tragic, and this is arguably philosophy's tragedy. I want to defend tragedy against philosophy, or, perhaps better said, to propose that tragedy articulates a philosophical view that challenges the authority of philosophy by giving voice to what is contradictory about us, what is constricted about us, what is precarious about us, and what is limited about us. Philosophy, once again beginning in Plato, appears to be committed to the idea and ideal of a noncontradictory psychic life. Tragedy does not share this commitment. And nor do I. Tragedy is about what Anne Carson calls "that hot bacon smell of pure contradiction." [From The Beauty of the Husband (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 134. Note that Anne Carson just won the Nobel Prize for Literature]
And:
My general question could be stated in the following way: What if we took seriously the form of thinking that we find in tragedy, and the experience of partial agency, limited autonomy, deep traumatic affect, agonistic [= competitive] conflict, gender confusion, political complexity, and moral ambiguity that it presents? How might that change the way we think and the way we think about thinking? Might that be tragedy's philosophy as an alternative to philosophy’s tragedy? Might that be what Nietzsche meant when he described himself as the first "tragic philosopher" and called for "philosophers of the dangerous perhaps"?
What light does this idea of tragedy as "the dangerous perhaps" shed on Critchley's "Knowing and Not Knowing" chapter? On tragedy generally?