Wednesday
As I revise my forthcoming book on Does Literature Make Us Better People?, I have been working my way through Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Nussbaum is my favorite contemporary philosopher, in large part because of the respect she accords literature, and I have a chapter devoted to her in my book. She is one who takes direct issue with Plato’s contention (in The Republic) that poetry and philosophy must inevitably quarrel.
Nussbaum sides with Aristotle against Plato because of the way Aristotle relies on Greek tragedy to understand how to live in the world. As she put it,
Aristotle has a high regard for tragedy. Both in the Poetics itself and in the Politics discussion of the education of young citizens, he gives it a place of honor, attributing to it both motivational and cognitive value….[H]is rejection of the Platonic external “god’s eye” standpoint leads him to turn, for moral improvement, not to representations of divine non-limited beings, but to stories of good human activity.
Aristotle, Nussbaum believes, thinks that “a detailed account of a complex particular case will have more of ethical truth in it than a general formula.” Therefore “the concrete and complex stories that are the material of tragic drama” are vital in helping us understand human beings.
By viewing Aristotle’s Poetics as a direct answer to Plato’s attack on poetry (even though Aristotle never mentions Plato in it), Nussbaum provides me new insight into Aristotle’s project. For instance, I now understand why it’s important the Aristotle regards plot as more important in tragedy than character.
For Plato, character is primary. The most important thing is for a person to be good, and being good involves attaining “rational self-sufficiency.” To a good person, external circumstance shouldn’t matter. He or she will rise above external pressures, just as Socrates rose above his execution, calmly drinking the hemlock while philosophizing with his students. Most Greek tragedy, on the other hand, focuses on how people buckle, even when they are good. This is what Plato objects to:
Plato informs us in no uncertain terms that the poets “speak wrongly about human beings in matters of the greatest importance” when they show the lives of good and just people being seriously affected by adverse circumstances.”
In Plato’s ideal society, Nussbaum points out, “[p]oets are to be forbidden to tell this sort of story and commanded to tell the opposite.” Or as Socrates puts it, “We must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.”
Nussbaum continues,
The great tragic plots explore the gap between our goodness and our good living, between what we are (our character, intentions, aspirations, values) and how humanly well we manage to live. They show us reversals happening to good characters but not divine or invulnerable people, exploring the many ways in which being of a certain good human character falls short of sufficiency.
If, like Plato, you are only interested in a person’s goodness, then “you will not want to give [tragedy] a place of honor in a scheme of public instruction.” However, “Aristotle’s belief that the gap is both real and important illuminates his anti-Platonic claim that tragic action is important and a source of genuine learning.”
Nussbaum concludes her book with a deep dive into Euripides’s tragedy Hecuba, where her Plato-Aristotle contrast is dramatically played out.
In the play, the former wife of Priam is now Agamemnon’s slave. Prior to Troy’s overthrow, Hecuba entrusts her young son Polydorus to King Plymestor of Thrace, but after Troy loses the war, Plymestor pockets Polydorus’s treasure and throws the child into the sea. Hecuba learns of this through a dream where Polydorus speaks to her. Also, his body washes up on the shore. To add to Hecuba’s woes, her daughter Polyxena is to be sacrificed to provide Achilles with a bride in the underworld.
Polyxena seems to live up to Plato’s ideal, refusing to fall on her knees before the Greeks but heroically accepting her death. As she puts it,
Odysseus, I see thee hiding thy right hand beneath thy robe and turning away thy face, that I may not touch thy beard. Take heart; thou art safe from the suppliant’s god in my case, for I will follow thee, alike because I must and because it is my wish to die; for were I loth, a coward should I show myself, a woman faint of heart…The name [of slave] makes me long for death, so strange it sounds; and then maybe my lot might give me to some savage master, one that would buy me for money,–me the sister of Hector and many another chief,–who would make me knead him bread within his halls, or sweep his house or set me working at the loom, leading a life of misery; while some slave, bought I know not whence, will taint my maiden charms, once deemed worthy of royalty. No, never! Here I close my eyes upon the light, free as yet, and dedicate myself to Hades. Lead me hence, Odysseus, and do thy worst, for I see naught within my reach to make me hope or expect with any confidence that I am ever again to be happy…
And then to her mother:
Mother mine! seek not to hinder me by word or deed, but join in my wish for death ere I meet with shameful treatment undeserved. For whoso is not used to taste of sorrow’s cup, though he bears it, yet it galls him when he puts his neck within the yoke; far happier would he be dead than alive, for life of honor reft is toil and trouble.
Her death, which occurs offstage, is also heroic. As a messenger reports,
And she, hearing her captors’ words took her robe and tore it open from the shoulder to the waist, displaying a breast and bosom fair as a statue’s; then sinking on her knee, one word she spake more piteous than all the rest, “Young prince, if ’tis my breast thou’dst strike, lo! here it is, strike home! or if at my neck thy sword thou’lt aim, behold! that neck is bared.”
So far, Plato’s ideas have predominated and even Hecuba seems reconciled, saying, “[Y]et hath the story of thy noble death taken from the keenness of my grief.”
The play isn’t over, however. When Hecuba learns that Thracian king Polymestor is visiting, she plots revenge. Pretending not to know that he has killed her son, she lures him and his two young sons to a tent under the pretense of telling him where more Trojan treasure can be found. There she kills the sons and stabs out Polymestor’s eyes. In other words, this good woman becomes a monster. As Nussbaum notes, “Mother-love, formerly the central prop of this woman’s thought and character, has been transformed in the change to revenge…Revenge takes over the entire world of value, making its end the one end.”
Nussbaum notes that many see the play lacking unity and falling into two separate parts. (The Wikipedia entry thinks this as well.) It is unified if one sees it in the light of the Plato-Aristotle dispute, however, with the first half going to Plato, the second to Aristotle, with Aristotle getting the last world. Platonic purity is possible only for the young:
Polydorus dies too young, before he has had a chance to become and to act well. Hecuba dies too old, in the grip of revenge. Only Polyxena, through good luck, finds a time between nurture and disillusionment and dies a noble character. In the tragedies of Euripides it frequently seems that the good die young. This, however, is not the result of special divine malevolence. It is because if they had not died young they would in all likelihood not have remained good. To live on is to make contact in some way at some time with the possibility of betrayal….[T]he encounter with betrayal brings a risk of defilement: the risk of ceasing to look at the world with the child’s free and generous looks; of ceasing, in the Euripidean way, to be good.
Plato, Nussbaum says, wants to cut off the risks of ceasing to be good with his rational self-sufficiency. Nussbaum counters, “Inside the Aristotelian or tragic conceptions, [such risks] cannot be closed off.” We can only truly love, only truly be fully human, if we acknowledge the world’s instability. What both Aristotle and Greek tragedy show us, Nussbaum writes, is that
there is in fact a loss in value whenever the risks involved in specifically human virtue are closed off. There is a beauty in the willingness to love someone in the face of love’s instability and worldliness that is absent from a completely trustworthy love. There is a certain valuable quality in social virtue that is lost when social virtue is removed from the domain of uncontrolled happenings….And in general each salient Aristotelian virtue seems inseparable from a risk of harm. There is no courage without the risk of death or of serious damage…no true commitment to justice that exempts its own privileges from scrutiny. This willingness to embrace something that is in the world and subject to its risks is, in fact, the virtue of the Euripidean child, whose love is directed at the world itself, including its dangers. The generous looks of such a child go straight to the world with love and openness; they do not focus upon the safe and the eternal, or demand these as conditions of their love. It is this quality of loving affirmation that both Euripides and Aristotle…, wish, in their different ways, to hold before us as an adult way of being excellent.
While we may long for “another simpler or purer world,” Nussbaum concludes, “the Aristotelian argument, which continues and refines the insights of tragedy, reminds us that we do not achieve purity or simplicity without a loss in richness and fullness of life.” Goodness is fragile but that means we must commit ourselves to it all the more.
I am far from having done justice to Nussbaum’s ideas but, as a literature professor and literature lover, there’s one thing above all that I carry away from her book: her penetrating insights arise, not just from intellectually engaging with a genius like Aristotle, but by plunging into the richness of great literature. For her, poetry and philosophy do not quarrel with but rather sustain each other.
