Most of the stuff that’s being written on the Classics these days is, directly or indirectly, responding to the New York Times Magazine piece, which means that most of these pieces are arguing either in defense of the Classics or in favor of its self-immolation.
(I don’t know how often I’ll do these link posts — I’m guessing that it’ll depend on, well, how much people are talking about this. I suspect that there’ll be enough material for at least a weekly post, but I do wonder if we’ll all go back to normal Classics navel-gazing at some stage.)
Statue of Socrates in front of the Academy of Athens.
I spent part of the weekend rereading Plato’s Phaedo ahead of the next Interintellect salon and an upcoming conversation I’m having with Agnes Callard on the book.
It was both my first time rereading a Classic, and it’s also an excellent book in its own right. Wikipedia says it’s up there with Republic as the most famous Platonic dialogue, a claim I’m wholly unqualified to test. Mortimer Adler’s right, though — these are indeed the books that benefit from close rereading. I found myself following Socrates’ arguments more easily, and enjoying the ups and downs of the dialogue much more than the first time I read it (which wasn’t even that long ago — December 2020).
Briefly: Phaedo is a dialogue between Socrates and his friends. The setting is Socrates’ jail cell: he’s been found guilty of corrupting the youth and not following the correct gods, and has been sentenced to death. The last section of Phaedo details Socrates’ death and is surprisingly moving. (It also contains the single best set of last words I’ve come across, which have launched literal centuries of academic analysis, because of course it has.)
Phaedo is also known as On the Soul, since the book deals with a series of arguments as to why the soul is immortal. I’ll list them out for my own memory and edification, but please leave a comment below if you think I get something wrong: I make no contention that I have the correct opinions here, and nothing would make me happier than being corrected:
The Cyclical Argument, essentially saying that the soul is immortal because death and life are opposites. Something that’s now bigger must’ve been smaller before, and gone through a process of “getting bigger.” Since living and being dead are opposites, and everything that dies was alive, everything that dies must come back to life. The problem here, reminding me of the Fawlty Towers joke about the door being “slightly locked,” is that something can be bigger or smaller, but not more or less dead. (I also don’t follow why it’s necessarily true, and Socrates’ later arguments that the soul must go somewhere left me uncertain. I might come back and edit this!)
The Recollection Argument, which says that since you can prompt people, or lead them (in what we now call Socratic-style discussion) to insights, then we must have had some subconscious knowledge of those things beforehand. Since they didn’t come through our senses, they must come via our souls, which must have come pre-birth. Ergo, the soul existed before we were born.
The Two-World Argument, where Socrates posits that there are two worlds: the carnal, material world, and the true world of Forms. The soul, separate to the body as it is, is really of that second world, and so must be immortal.
The fourth “bonus” argument of immortality: the soul is definitionally alive, and (like the number three can never be even) so can never be dead. Things that can’t die are immortal.
There are two more things jumped out at me.
First: in the current milieu, where the likes of Jordan Peterson and Naval Ravikant are popular, I was taken by Socrates’ contention that attaining happiness and reducing anxiety are two of the highest-leverage things people can do. With apologies for the awkward paraphrase, he says:
What you should do is pronounce an enchantment over him every day until you have charmed his fears [of dying] away. […] You must ransack [the entire world] in your search for this enchanter, without sparing money or trouble; because you could not spend your money more opportunely on any other object.
The Last Days of Socrates, Penguin Classics ed. (p. 145)
The second part that was striking is Socrates’ style, which is that he seems to only become certain in the context of the discussion. He invites his interlocutors several times to interrupt and challenge him (and they do) and stresses the importance of this sort of debate. “No greater misfortune could happen to anyone,” he says on page 161, “than that of developing a dislike for argument.” There’s an intellectual humility here that I hadn’t previously associated with Socrates.
I’ll likely have more intelligent thoughts after hosting two salons on The Last Days of Socrates, which includes Phaedo and three other dialogues that deal with the accusations against Socrates and his (unsuccessful) defense. In the meantime, comments are open below, so jump in!
Ed. note — I found out that the registration system for the forum doesn’t actually allow you to register. Sorry about that. A fix is in the works!
The links post, Patrick writes, is an underrated artifact. One of the reasons for starting this blog was that I was interested in following the current debate around the classics.
On top of the problems facing the humanities as a whole — vanishing class sizes caused by disinvestment, declining prominence and student debt — classics was also experiencing a crisis of identity. Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men
And so I want to start collecting assorted links around the current debate around the classics (and perhaps about the issues with liberal education in general).
Point/counterpoint the Chronicle of Higher Education: A New Path for Classics vs. No, Classics Shouldn’t ‘Burn’. (I find it interesting when post URLs show something different to the final product — the post is titled “A New Path for Classics” but the post URL suggests its original title was “If Classics Doesn’t Change, Burn it Down.”)
Nothing new under the sun: we were debating the primacy of the classics back in the 18th century. (Also includes a fair critique of the Great Books curriculum.) “Even before the founding of the U.S., this humanist conception of higher education had many detractors. Why, critics wondered, must educated Americans learn the classical languages? And why did the prescribed curricula of the early American colleges provide comparatively scant attention to the natural and social sciences?”
Agnes Callard and I are putting together a discussion on Plato and the Classics, potentially to be hosted on Clubhouse. Professor Callard is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Philosophy and the author of the 2018 book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. She’s previously written about Pascal’s wager, and (separately) whether or not to cancel Aristotle.
What should we talk about? (And yes, I’ve read the comments on Tyler’s post.)
Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, Nikolai Ge (1855)
I co-host a series of discussions on the Great Books on the Interintellect (with the incomparable David McDougall). We’re hosting two “sections” to accommodate demand, which is a nice thing to be able to say. The sections are staggered by a month, so you do Book A, and then a month later, redo Book A with a different group.
I imagine this is what actual teaching is like, on a semester-by-semester basis, but I’ve learned that it’s a lot of fun. We covered The Iliad a second time this morning, and the second run gave me clarity on a bunch of thoughts that I wanted to write up. (Hat-tip to Mortimer Adler and his point on how the best books are the ones that reward re-reading and synoptical reading.)
One of my big questions in reading The Iliad is wondering how it was received by contemporary audiences. I’m less interested in the questions around oral traditions and when, exactly, it was written down. I’m more curious about the modern-day parallels.
Specifically, I’m curious about the sorts of people sitting around listening to or reading the tales that make up The Iliad. Presumably, these characters are known to the audience beyond just Homer, right? Agamemnon’s various trials and tribulations show up in The Oresteia, we hear a lot about Achilles and the Trojan War in The Aeneid. (I only just started The Aeneid, so I’m not responsible for any silly things I say about it.)
Is it a little bit like how we love sequels so much today? Here’s David Cox in The Guardian, writing in 2019:
Disney’s latest release schedule also promises eight more Marvel comic-book adaptations by 2022. Meanwhile, this year will see the spawn of not just behemoths such as Avengers, X-Men, Frozen, Toy Story, Spider-Man, The Lego Movie and Star Wars, but also less obvious franchise-launchers such as Godzilla, Men in Black, Shaun the Sheep, Angry Birds, Kingsman, Zombieland, Shaft and even Rambo.
I’m not a film person, so there might be some nuance I might be missing, but it seems like there’s some comparison to be drawn to The Iliad, in the sense that there are several works that deal with the Trojan War. On the one hand, maybe there’s no difference between this ancient reuse of the same characters — on the other, I’m not convinced we’ll still be talking about Avengers: Age of Ultron in a few thousand years.
Another thing that struct me during this second Salon is how much Homer tries to deviate from the stated narrative that war is glorious. He isn’t giving us an unexamined glorification of battle, although it is striking to read just how many different ways a sword or a spear or an arrow can penetrate someone’s flesh.
In Book 9, Achilles rejects (in some of the most forceful language in the entire book) the premise that he has to forgive Agamemnon or come and fight and gain glory. “The fate is the same if a man hangs back, and if he battles greatly,” Achilles says, rejecting the glorious warrior narrative top to bottom. “In equal honor are both coward and warrior; and they die alike.”
Later, he goes on to question the entire war. Why even are the Greeks fighting the Trojans? Why did Agamemnon bring the Greeks here to die here on Trojan soil? Achilles is the only person to ask these questions, and the book doesn’t provide us with answers. The book, in fact, takes it for granted that the war is going on: the war has literally been raging for a decade by the time that the Iliad even starts.
The first time I finished The Iliad, I felt the immensity of the poem: the sweeping narratives, the human costs of fighting, the gore, the inequity. But I didn’t feel like the story had resolved itself. The questions Achilles asks don’t get answered because they can’t be answered. If Homer spends too much time trying to answer the question, the entire poem comes apart.
“Antigone in front of the dead Polynices” by Nikiforos Lytras, 1865.
Antigone is a short play, first performed circa 450 BCE, that deals with open-ended questions around the power of the state, divine law versus moral law, and civil disobedience. There are obviously a lot of fun parallels to modern-day politics to be drawn out of Antigone, but I found myself spending most of my time thinking about the characters.
To briefly recap the plot:
In a war repulsing the enemy from Thebes, two brothers have died, fighting on opposing sides of the war. The new king (Creon) orders that the traitor is not to be given burial rites as a punishment and a warning against disloyalty.
Antigone, who is Polynices’ sister, secretly buries the man.
Seeking to uphold the laws of the city, Creon sentences Antigone to death for disobeying the order not to bury the traitor. After her death, Creon’s son, who was engaged to Antigone, kills himself. Upon hearing that her son has killed himself, Creon’s wife also kills herself.
Creon, then, has lost everyone in his blind reverence of the laws of man.
(I was reminded of the quote from Douglas Adams — to paraphrase, but the people who want to be rulers are perhaps those least suited to it.)
The big question Antigone asks is, well, where is justice? Is Antigone, the character, in the right, for giving the man a proper burial? Is Creon right, in a sort of sense that the laws of the state must be given respect? Creon maintains a loyalty in the rules of man until his last scene, when he has lost his wife and son. A paragon of the law he may be, but pays for this loyalty as a father.
Antigone’s rough order of priority, in terms of her loyalty, seems to be “the gods,” “family,” and “the state,” in roughly that order. Creon’s priorities, like any good literary foil, are precisely inverted.
The play was staged at least twice during World War Two; LitCharts describes as being stage in such a way where “the audience was able to identify Antigone with the French Resistance fighters and Creon with the occupying forces.”
Such a staging suggests that people have long used Antigone to ask these sorts of questions of their own lives and milieus. A 2017 book (which I’ve not read) transposes these issues onto the British Muslim community.
I can’t help but read something like Antigone through the lens of Bowling Alone and the decline of both religious and secular gathering spots for people. Maybe this is because I’m living in San Francisco, but Antigone’s reverence and her certainty in that reverence reads as very alien to me.
Whatever religiosity itself is doing in America these days (and it seems to be doing some strange things, see the rise of the religiously unaffiliated and the decline in church attendance numbers), it’s interesting to think who (or what community) would play Antigone in America in 2021. (In fact, I posted it as a discussion topic.) I’m not convinced that it would necessarily be a religious community. In a secular world, whence do we get morality as separate from state law?
Ultimately, Antigone is a way of putting these two ideas (divine law versus state law) in tension with each other: a way of asking ourselves “What would I do, if I were in this scenario?”
A second thing that came up in one of my discussions on Antigone was this idea of certainty. I referenced Antigone’s religiosity above, and the religiously-inspired moral certainty that she feels is striking. Equally strong is Creon’s strong belief in state law. I’m purposely avoiding passing judgement on just how certain they both are, but hey, I live in San Francisco: “Epistemological humility” is a phrase people use unironically here. The extent to which both characters are entrenched in their beliefs is ultimately both of their downfalls. As characters, their roles are to inhabit opposite ends of this spectrum. Creon literally says, “Whoever shows by word and deed that he is on the side of the State,—he shall have my respect while he is living, and my reverence when he is dead.” That word, reverence, is telling.
One final thought: if the characters are larger than life in this way, why name the play Antigone and not Creon? I suspect there are reasons for this that have to do with the other two plays of the Oedipus Cycle (which I haven’t read). But it seems to me like you could make a convincing argument that Creon is the central character. I suspect, with zero evidence, that Sophocles wants us to think that he is not presenting this argument dispassionately, and we are supposed to side with Antigone.
