Classical ways of handling classes

Regular readers of this blog know that El Cabrero is a total Greco-Roman classics geek. Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Virgil, Plutarch, name it. Bring it.

When I first started reading about Greek  and Roman history, I was struck by how much of it was shaped by class conflict and how they found different ways of working it out, at least for a while. I remember thinking "wow, the history of all hitherto existing society REALLY is the history of class struggles, at least a good part of the time" to paraphrase a certain out of vogue political economist whose name escapes me at the moment.

Anyhow, from the NY Times, here's an interesting look at classical approaches to class conflicts by way of Athenian democracy, the Roman republic and the politics of Aristotle.

One thing has been clear to me for a long time: the doom of the Roman republic came when they lost the ability or will to work out class compromises. Good thing that would never happen here, huh?

Birthday boy

It has come to my attention that today is the birthday (or the day the birthday is celebrated anyway) of the great philosopher Aristotle back in 384 BC. He is pictured in Raphael's School of Athens beside his older teacher Plato. Characteristically, Plato point upward to the realm of the Forms while Aristotle points downward to the earth.

Dante called him "master of those who know" and I will say he did pretty good.

Speaking of Dante, thanks to the Spousal Unit, I am now a paid up member--I would say card-carrying member but they don't issue cards--of the Dante Society of America. I'm presuming that membership comes with a license to raise hell. Mine hasn't come in the mail yet but I guess I don't have to wait.

JUST ONE LINK about WV's innovative legislation aimed at combating child hunger and obesity.

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So much for the unities

The Greek philosopher Aristotle had enormous influence on Western thought since his works were rediscovered (thanks in part to Muslim scholars) around the 12th century. His thought provided the framework for St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica as well as for Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Parts of his Ethics and Politics hold up well to this day.

His theories on art as expounded in the Poetics continued to be influential long after his metaphysical influence had waned and were going strong during Shakespeare’s time (search this blog in the upper left hand corner for more on that).

Many dramatists of that time and beyond adhered to Aristotle’s theory of “the unities” in tragic art, meaning that a work should take place at one time and in one place with one overriding theme. The best example of this is probably Sophocles’ Oedipus.

That would be yet another convention Shakespeare threw out the window. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of a single tragedy of his that fits that model. As Samuel Johnson put it:

Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to inquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and critics, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable, but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented, that they were not known by him, or not observed: Nor, if such another poet could arise, should I very vehemently reproach him, that his first act passed at Venice, and his next in Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare…

It is true that most of the action in Hamlet happens around the castle in Elsinore, although there is also the famous graveyard scene. But that’s as close to the unities as it gets. The action is stretched out over a period of weeks or months, at least long enough for Hamlet to see the ghost, put on an antic disposition, set up a play within a play, whack Polonius, get sent to England, get captured and ransomed by pirates, and return to Elsinore.

The plot is hardly unified either. Shakespeare took the template for a simple revenge play and broke that mold as well. There are several subplots (involving Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, etc).

The main plot of the play isn’t in fact revenge; instead it is the title character himself who hijacked the whole thing. More on that tomorrow.

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WHEN IT COMES TO BANKS, boring may be good.

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Pity and fear

Aristotle, medieval European style. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Aside from links and comments about current events, Goat Rope lately has been looking at Aristotle's view of art, literature, tragedy and poetry as expressed in his Poetics.

The ancient Athenians took tragedy seriously. Such performances were usually given during the spring festival of the god Dionysus and, like so much else in Greek life, they were a contest. All citizens were supposed to attend the performances (and got paid to do so) and vote on the winner. The contest consisted of a series of three more or less related tragedies and a lighter and cruder satyr play (named for the goatlike companions of the god). Three tragedians competed for top honors.

Attending was both a patriotic and religious duty. They took tragedy so seriously that when they voted special taxes on rich citizens, these were sometimes given a choice of paying for a new trireme (fighting ship) or a new tragic performance. Can you imagine a society today that viewed art as being as important as warfare?

Aristotle believed that a good tragedy should have a powerful cleansing effect or katharsis on those who watched it. He said

Tragedy is a representation of action that is worthy of serious attention, complete in itself and of some magnitude - bringing about by means of pity and fear the purging of such emotions.

Debate rages today about what he meant by katharsis. Some see it as something like a religious initiation, while others believe he derived the term from Greek medical practices and viewed it as having a cleansing effect on the psyche just as other treatments might have on the body. Ditto pity and fear. One possible interpretation is that we feel pity for the suffering of the protagonist and fear in recognizing that the same kind of thing might happen to us in a similar situation.

I don't necessarily think that's the only function of tragedy or way to view it. Nietzsche believed that the beauty of such art made it possible for those who viewed it to say yes to life in spite of all its horrors. The best tragedies also warn against hubris and excess--if only we paid attention.

Pity, fear and katharsis may not be the last word on tragedy. Still, I'll never forget the way it felt when I first really read the works of tragedians such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. It might not have been exactly that, but it was close.

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Tragic flaws and all that

This man had tragic flaws which led to his undoing.

It's kind of easy to tell one of Shakespeare's comedies from one of his tragedies. In the former most everyone gets married, while in the latter, most everyone is dead on the stage.

It's a little harder to define what makes a Greek tragedy what it is. It's easier to say what it's not. Good guy beats bad guy, gets girl would not be a tragic formula. Nor would bad guy wins after all. Nor would good guy gets blasted by the cosmos for no apparent reason.

Aristotle, who is not the last word on the subject but was one of the first, had several ideas about what made one. Good aristocrat the he was, he believed that the main characters should be people of high status and usually well known from myth and tradition. He blamed Euripides for bringing common people to the state. Second, he believed one should involve some change of fortune, usually for the worse. He especially liked it if there was a major reversal and if late in the game there came some major recognition.

Conflicts in a tragedy should not pit conventional enemies or indifferent people against each other; he thought it was more powerful if rather the conflicts occurred within the same family or between people who had some kind of connection, even if they protagonists didn't realize it until it was too late.

The tragic hero in his book should be neither a perfect person nor a complete jerk. Rather,

There remains, then the character between these two extremes--that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous--a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.

To sum up his version of a good tragedy,

A well-constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue...The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty, in a character such as we have described, or better rather than worse.

The tragic hero, in other words, should be like most of us, except on a grander scale. The subject of tragedy should not be a retelling of something that definitely happened but rather should show what could happen given certain circumstances; hence its power. Often it's not about good versus evil but rather competing and conflicting goods and ills in which people are caught up in a long chain of events.

As I've said before here, a Greek tragedy is a different kind of story than an action movie. But however mythological the themes may be, the tragic is often closer to real life.

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Art or propaganda?

Plato (left) and Aristotle in a detail from Raphael's The School of Athens. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Goat Rope has been spending time lately with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially with his theories about literature, poetry and tragedy.

The contrast between Aristotle and his teacher Plato is often pretty striking and that is particularly the case with regard to what we would call literature and what they would call poetry.

Aristotle felt at home in the world of matter and the senses while Plato did not. Humans had their place in the natural order of things and art had its origin in human nature.

In his Republic, Plato argued, with the voice of Socrates, that poetry had a great power to do good or ill. He believed that works of art should be carefully controlled, sanitized and censored in the interests of public morality and social order. Needless to say, tyrannical regimes, closed societies and authoritarian movements throughout history have agreed.

(I think Socrates wasn't such a good influence on him after all.)

Aristotle's Poetics, on the other hand, isn't all that interested in art as propaganda. He views it as something important for its own sake and instead focuses on what made a particular kind of literary work great.

I think Aristotle won that one. With maybe a few exceptions, works of propaganda make lousy literature. They're not usually even all that effective as propaganda.

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What is concealed and what is revealed

Albert Greiner as Oedipus in an 1896 version. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

A few years back, El Cabrero went on a jag of reading bizarre works of literary theory. One little volume that was kind of fun was Mythologies by Roland Barthes. In it, the author attempted to explain the inner semiotic meaning of things like fast cars, professional wrestling and even strip tease.

He argued that what gave the latter its power (at the time anyhow) was what was concealed rather than what was revealed. I guess I'll take his word for it.

It does often seem to be the case that things left to the imagination have greater power than things explicitly shown. In Greek tragedy, for example, all kinds of nasty things happen. Oedipus gouges out his own eyes, Agamemnon is butchered in a bath tub, Pentheus is torn to pieces by a group of frenzied women led by his mother.

But one difference between ancient tragedy and modern gory movies is that this kind of action takes place offstage. But this doesn't diminish the effect; if anything, it increases it.

Aristotle believed that tragedy should produce a powerful and cleansing emotional reaction in the viewer (it works for the reader too) by producing both pity and fear. But it wasn't necessary to show everything to do this:

Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place. This is the impression we should receive from hearing the story of the Oedipus. But to produce this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method, and dependent on extraneous aids.

Some things are perhaps best left to the imagination. It occurs to El Cabrero that the makers of slasher movies have neglected their Aristotle.

THE STATES AND THE STIMULUS. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research warns that spending cuts at the state and local level could blunt the stimulus impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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The world in a grain of sand

El Cabrero sometimes teaches a night class in sociology somewhere comfortably off the campus of Marshall University. The most recent semester, now in finals week, I taught Deviance and Social Control.

Mostly I do it to get to use the library, wherein I can find all kinds of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore with which to regale the Gentle Reader.

I often find myself bringing works of literature and poetry to class because these can often get to the heart of the matter more quickly and clearly than reams of statistics. In the last few weeks of this class, I've brought in or referred to works by William Blake, Shakespeare, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, and others.

William Blake's poem London, for example, speaks volumes about his time (and ours) in four short stanzas.

Aristotle noted the power of poetry for this kind of thing 2,400 years ago. In the Poetics, he discusses the difference between poetry and history. In modern terms, what he called poetry would include novels, plays and other works of literature, whereas history would include most kinds of nonfiction. He puts it this way

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. [emphasis added]

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A beginning, a middle and an end

An early Islamic picture of Aristotle, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been drinking at the fountain of Hellas again lately. Specifically, I've been pondering Aristotle's theory of poetics, which is the Western world's oldest and most influential work of literary theory and criticism. The best known parts of it have to do with the nature of tragedy.

Its influence can still be felt today not only in the realm of theater but in movies, television shows, novels and short stories.

He believed that basically all forms of art are imitative and that a main difference between comedy and tragedy is that one favored and portrayed the lower aspects of human nature while the other portrayed the higher. (He was all about distinctions between lower and higher.)

(This might explain the difference between Beavis and Butthead and Amadeus.)

According to his definition,

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude.

This may have been what Herman Melville was driving at in Moby-Dick when he wrote that

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

Aristotle also laid out the elements that most people expect from any kind of story:

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.

Clearly, the dude understood nothing about sequels...

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MEDICAID. This AP story highlights a study that found serious flaws in WV's redesigned Medicaid program.

STATE REVENUES in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia look a little better than expected for April. The legislature has postponed dealing with budget issues until May due to uncertainty.

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Poetic instincts

The English word poetry comes a real workhorse of a Greek word. Poesis means something like "making" and is by no means restricted to works of literature. The word shows up in all kinds of prosaic (no pun intended) contexts in the Greek language and is kind of like the Spanish word hacer, which also means to make.

It's interesting how a word of such broad usage in Greek came to have such a limited meaning in English, but I'll think about that tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara said.

Anyhow, the philosopher Aristotle believed that the source of poetry in the English sense of the word has its origins in human nature itself:

Poetry in general seems to have spring from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.

Note: he uses imitation in the broadest possible sense, which would include narrative. Both Aristotle and Plato seemed to view all arts as imitative--even music, which is something I never quite got. He goes on...

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for "harmony" and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.

Not too shabby. From the viewpoint of 2,400 years later, he seemed to nail it. Narrative or story seems to be hardwired into human nature and the universal sense of rhythm, which manifests itself differently in various times and places, seems to grow out of our biological heritage. Nature is one big rhythm band after all.

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Master of those who know

The dude abides. A statue of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, courtesy of wikipedia.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, the Greek philosopher Aristotle is referred to as "master of those who know." In the 14th century, when Dante wrote his masterpiece, Aristotle's long lost teachings had been rediscovered fairly recently and seemed to many to be the last word on subjects of science, art, ethics, metaphysics and politics.

You could say that this says more about the state of human knowledge in the late medieval period than about Aristotle. It is kind of sad that knowledge, philosophy and science in Europe had fairly stagnated for centuries.

Part of the reason for that can probably be explained by what has been called "the terror of history," i.e. the massive disruptions caused by the fall of the western Roman empire, massive invasions and migrations, and all that. And it's hard to deny that the Christian religion in its first several centuries was singularly uninterested in the advance of earthly knowledge and that it held a commanding place in the lives of most people.

Having said all that, Aristotle was no slouch and much of his writing can be profitably read today, particularly his Ethics, Politics, and Poetics. (El Cabrero must admit that his acquaintance with his works on metaphysics and logic is second and third handed.)

My recently reinvigorated interest in Greek tragedy inspired me to take another look at his Poetics, which still has a vast influence over how people look at literature and the nature of poetry, drama and plot.

More on that to come.

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WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?

Seamus McGoogle never asks such questions.

One area where some fundamentalists and atheistic materialists agree is the idea that there is no inherent end or goal of human life. For the former, these come only from God, while for the latter any goal or end is arbitrary.

Leaving the God issue aside, I disagree with both. While people have racked their brains over this question, I think it's one of the easy ones. I keep harping on this theme, but I still think Aristotle nailed it when he argued in his Ethics that the goal (telos) of life is happiness because we want it for its own sake whereas we want other things in order to be happy.

The word he used for happiness was eudaimonia, which means something like thriving. It implies actualizing one's potential over the course of a lifetime. It's also the goal of political life.

Thriving isn't necessarily the same thing as pleasure or even pleasing emotions. Sometimes people are happiest when they are so absorbed in doing something that they have little or no self-consciousness. This is sometimes called the flow state.

It also means having one's basic needs met. It's hard to thrive when you're cold and homeless, hungry, sick without the prospect of care, or are unable to have an adequate standard of living. As social beings, we need positive interactions with others and good social networks. As (occasionally) rational beings, we need mental stimulation, etc.

There's obviously more to it than that, but the basics are important.

I'd suggest that a valuable lens to use in looking at economic issues and policy options is to begin with the end in mind and consider how these impede or promote thriving.

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THINKING ABOUT VIOLENCE

There are often occasions in life where following our natural inclinations isn't a very good idea. One example is the all-too-human tendency to ignore things we don't like. Violence is a case in point. I think people who want to make the world less violent and less unjust would do well to think and learn as much about it as possible, although preferably not first hand...

I've had many discussions with people over the years about what they consider violence to be and what kind of violence is the worst. The ideas people come up with vary widely, although it seems like many people who have experienced a lot of violence in their lives often consider mental cruelty to be the worst--perhaps because cruel intent is conveyed by physical violence and other kinds of abuse.

I tend to think of violence broadly as any act (or non-action) involving human agency that harms people or keeps them from developing their potential. This would include institutional or structural violence such as poverty as well as physical violence committed by individuals or groups.

(And by the way, way more people die needlessly from preventable things related to the structural violence of poverty and economic disparities that personal violence or even armed conflict. )

To me, the opposite of violence is not so much peace or nonviolence as that state of thriving or well-being that the ancient Greeks referred to as eudaimonia (literally something like "good spirits"), which is often but inadequately translated into English as happiness. As Aristotle argued in his Ethics, happiness or eudaimonia is the goal of human life in the sense that we want other things in order to be happy but desire happiness for its own sake. It's not the same thing as pleasure, although that's a part of a happy life. Rather, it involves not only being able to meet basic human needs but also self-actualization, which for social animals like ourselves inherently involves others.

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"CAUSE I SAID SO" AND A GUIDE TO SLASHING POVERTY

Caption: That's Venus' answer to everything.

This week El Cabrero is musing over how people explain the world (and other stuff too). If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier entries.

It's really easy to say x causes y. We do it all the time, even when it's a bit of a stretch.

Philosophers have racked their brains over this topic from the beginning. Aristotle thought everything had four causes: material (what it's made from), formal (the shape it takes or what something essentially is, sort of), efficient (what made it happen) and final (the purpose of it all, assuming there is one, which he did). Unless you are a hardcore Thomist, that's kind of out of style these days.

The 18th century Scottish philospher David Hume thought that we just attribute causality to things because of habit. As in, we see one thing happening after another and assume the first caused the latter.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant didn't like that much. He argued that our minds are hardwired to see things in terms of causality. The downside was that we can only know the world of appearances, not the things in themselves. I think I'm with him.

Here's the Goat Rope version: before we can say with a high degree of confidence that one thing causes another, we need three things:

*First, the cause and effect have to be associated with each other (otherwise, we wouldn't think about it).

*Second, Aristotle aside, the cause has to happen before the effect.

Pretty easy so far. Here's the kicker:

*Third, we have to rule out everything else. And that's easier said than done.

Suppose I attribute bad driving in a neighboring state (let's call it Ohio) to the eating of French (or Freedom) fries. I'll bet most people there have not only eaten French fries, but they ate them at some point before they drove. So far so good.

(Dear Ohio cousins, I'm just using this as an example, I swear! I know you guys have a similar theory about drivers in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.)

Hold the Nobel Prize...I'm stuck at number 3. There might be something else going on besides Freedom fries (like the negative effects of flat land) causing the problem. Back to the drawing board...

Finally, even if you think you have all three, there's always the possibility you missed something and may have to revise your conclusions later.

REDUCING POVERTY BY HALF. The Center for American Progress has released a new report called "From Poverty to Prosperity," which suggest a number of concrete steps aimed at slashing poverty, which has increased each year since 2000.

Many of the recommendations have solid evidence to support them. Steps include raising the minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and early childhood education, passing the Employee Free Choice Act, child care assistance for low income families, making higher education more affordable, and more.

A BELATED THANK YOU TO WV IRAQ VETERAN JESSICA LYNCH for speaking truth about power at congressional hearings earlier this week!

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