Can Martha C. Nussbaum Help Save Our Embattled Democracy?

 

CRITCHLEY AND WEBSTER'S CONTRIBUTION

 

 

In the book STAY ILLUSION! THE HAMLET DOCTRINE (2013), Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster also discuss tragic spectatorship in ancient Athens, but they do not discuss comic spectatorship. In a short chapter (pages 15-17), they discuss the famous passages in Plato's REPUBLIC in which the character named Socrates "had a huge problem with theater" (page 15). Because the real person named Socrates was sentenced to death in the restored democracy in Athens on trumped up charges, Plato understandably was wary of democracy. In the view of Critchley and Webster, Plato invented philosophy "to displace theater with a drama of its own" (page 15). But Critchley and Webster do not advert to the Homeric epics as dialogue-heavy models that Plato's dialogues resemble at least with respect to being dialogue-heavy. Of course Plato's dialogues are not action-packed as the Homeric epics are. But Critchley and Webster's basic point stands as valid. "Plato's stroke of theatrical genius was to replace the tragic sufferings of Oedipus, Ajax, or whoever with another loftier heroic ideal: the dying Socrates" (page 16).

 

But that's not all. "Plato sees as the great danger of tragedy, the danger of deception that leads to a theatrocratic political regime based on nothing more than the affective effects of imitation and illusion" (page 17).

 

No, Plato was not thinking of the theatrics of Tea Party Republicans in closing down the federal government.

 

But he was thinking of the theatrics involved in the trial of Socrates on trumped-up charges. In addition, Plato worried about how the tragedies performed in Athens contributed to culturally conditioning the kind of mindset involved in Socrates's trial of trumped up charges. In other words, to what extent did tragic spectatorship in Ancient Athens contribute to the death sentence against Socrates by his fellow Athenians?

 

However, Critchley and Webster correctly note that Plato in effect may have thrown out the bath water with the baby. They counter Plato by suggesting that the deception involved in the fiction or fraud or illusion of "the dubious legends of tragedy and the fake emotions they induce [may] leave the deceived spectator in the theater wiser and more honest than the undeceived philosopher who wants to do away with theatocracy" (page 17). Perhaps.

 

DIGRESSION: For a relevant discussion of the illusions involved in fiction, see Thomas D. Zlatic's "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville's novel] The Confidence-Man" in the anthology OF ONG AND MEDIA ECOLOGY: ESSAYS IN COMMUNICATION, COMPOSITION, AND LITERARY STUDIES, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2012, pages 241-280). END OF DIGRESSION.

 

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