Are you interested in the history of Western philosophy? If you are, you might Simon Critchley's accessible and thought-provoking new book Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (Pantheon Books, 2019) interesting. In it, he develops tragedy's philosophy in the context of Western philosophy. If you feel that Trump is a tragedy, you might find Critchley's account of tragedy's philosophy resonates with your feeling that Trump is a tragedy.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 28, 2019: In Simon Critchley's accessible and thought-provoking new book Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (Pantheon Books, 2019), he describes his undergraduate studies in the early 1980s (pages 36).

In my undergraduate studies in the 1960s, I became interested in Shakespeare's tragedies and, to a lesser extent, in tragedies by his contemporary playwrights. On my own in the summer of 1963, I slowly but surely read through James Joyce's novel Ulysses, even though I had not previously read the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. When I did eventually read them, I read them in English translation. To this day, I am, like St. Thomas Aquinas, the famous medieval Catholic Aristotelian philosopher and theologian whose thought I initially read as an undergraduate, Greekless.

During my undergraduate studies in the 1960s, I first heard of the classicist Eric A. Havelock's book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963). However, I do not remember when I first read it. But also see Havelock's book The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Harvard University Press, 1978).

I heard of Havelock's book in two undergraduate English courses that I took from the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, 1955) at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. His massively researched doctoral dissertation included the history of rhetoric and formal logic in Western culture. Ong characterized his thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. However, he often singles out Plato for critique. In this respect, Ong's work is part of what Alfred North Whitehead referred to as footnotes to Plato. My, oh my, how did Plato manage to evoke so many footnotes? Put differently, how did he manage to evoke what Ong refers to as the agonistic (contesting) spirit in so many footnote-writers?

In my estimate, what Ong refers to as agonistic (or contesting) behavior involves the part of the human psyche that Plato and Aristotle refer to as thumos (or thymos). See Ong's book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. In Critchley's new book, he excels in contesting with a wide variety of adversaries. By comparison with Critchley, Ong seems more irenic as he advances his own arguments. But he frequently structures his arguments in terms of dialectical contrasts in effect, contests of a sort (e.g., Greek/barbarian, aural/visual).

Now, I do not remember when I first read Ong's massively researched book about the history of rhetoric and logic, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958), but not during my undergraduate years (1962-1966). But the spirit of what Ong refers to as dialogue is embodied in the artfully constructed dialogues in the Homeric epics, in the ancient Greek tragedies and comedies, and in Plato's famous dialogues which evoked so many footnotes. For Ong, Plato and Aristotle were closer to the oral thought-world of Homer than was the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572), whose work in Ong's estimate, represents what he refers to in the subtitle of his 1958 book as the Art of Reason. Ong sees the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Western culture in the mid-1450s as contributing significantly to what he refers to as the decay of dialogue in Ramus and his followers and his subsequent heirs in the so-called Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment).

For a relevant discussion of orally rooted reason, see the Canadian Jesuit Lonergan scholar Frederick E. Crowe's 1965 essay "Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All" as reprinted, slightly revised in the anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Sheed & Ward, 1993, pages 89-107).

For further discussion of Ong's philosophical thought, see my online essay "Understanding Ong's Philosophical Thought" that is available at the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:

http://hdl.handle.net/11299/187434

Ong's big breakthrough insight about orally rooted expressions of reason parallels Martin Buber's big breakthrough insight about orally rooted dialogue in his famous 1923 book I and Thou, 2nd ed., translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958; the second edition contains a new postscript written by Buber, pages 121-137). After Buber's big breakthrough insight inspired him to write his 1923 masterpiece, he further developed his mature philosophy of dialogue in further publications. Ong never tired of referring to Buber's 1923 masterpiece I and Thou, just as Ong never tired of referring to Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato.

But we should note here that Buber in 1913 published a work in which he himself actually practiced writing dialogues, Daniel: [Five] Dialogues on Realization, translated by Maurice Friedman (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). In the book Martin Buber's Journey to Presence (Fordham University Press, 2007), the Irish Buber scholar Phil Huston devotes her lengthiest chapter to discussing it (pages 106-184).

Perhaps we should consider the basic structure of Plato's dialogues as orally rooted. In theory each of his dialogues is a script that could be enacted as a drama in a theater. So how much did Plato learn from the Greek playwrights who wrote the scripts of the orally rooted tragedies that Critchley discusses? Of course, the orally rooted Homeric epics (see Havelock) also feature a lot of dialogue.

In light of certain other themes in Critchley's 2019 book, perhaps we should remember Plato's use of myths. See the bilingual compilation in the book The Myths of Plato, translated with introductory and other observations by J. A. Stewart (Macmillan, 1905).

Now, during my undergraduate years in the 1960s, I did read Ong's book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, 1962). In the title essay "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Within Society Today" (pages 260-285), Ong works with the Greek/barbarian that goes back to Greek antiquity, as Edith Hall explains in her book Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1989).

In Ong's 1962 book, he reprints his 1959 essay "Personalism and the Wilderness" (pages 233-241) and his 1954 essay "St. Ignatius' Prison-Cage and the Existentialist Situation" (pages 242-259). (I will discuss Ong's 1962 book further below.)

During my undergraduate studies in the 1960s, existentialism was still being discussed, including Christian existentialism. See, for example, the American Buber scholar Maurice Friedman's anthology of key selections in his book The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader (Random House, 1964).

In any event, in 1987, I was very interested in Warwick Wadlington's book Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Cornell University Press). Wadlington, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is obviously using the term "Faulknerian Tragedy" in the title in an honorific way to call attention to certain qualities about Faulkner's major novels.

In 2013, I was also interested in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster's book Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon Books). Critchley was identified as a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Webster was identified as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Oddly enough, their detailed discussion of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy included discussion of a fragment attributed to a little-known ancient Greek thinker and teacher of rhetoric named Gorgias (c.483-375 BCE; pages 15-19, 22, 23, 27, 45, 59, 191, 231).

See my OEN article "Critchley and Webster Study Hamlet's Complicated Grief" (dated July 23, 2013):

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Critchley-and-Webster-Stud-by-Thomas-Farrell-130723-695.html

In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I am willing to give Gorgias credit for the insight that Critchley and Jamison credited him with having about how to understand tragedy as a genre performed live in a theater in their 2013 book.

Because Socrates (c.470-399 BCE) is considered to be a pivotal reference point in the history of Western philosophy, Gorgias (c.483-375 BCE) and certain other ancient Greek thinkers are referred to collectively as pre-Socratics. Western philosophy decisively emerges in the dialogues of Plato (born c.428; died c.347 BCE). Plato expressed and manifested his grief and mourning about the death of his teacher Socrates by commemorating his memory in a character in his dialogues named Socrates. One of Plato's dialogues is named after Gorgias and features a character named Gorgias.

In 2017, I read Emily Katz Anhalt's book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths (Yale University Press).

Now, in Critchley's accessible and thought-provoking new book Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019), mentioned above, Gorgias emerges as the hero, because the fragment attributed to him provides Critchley with a key insight (pages 5, 21-24, 33, 45, 48, 62, 93-94, 95, 96, 98-114, 117, 119, 261, and 275).

The book includes sixty-one short chapters grouped into six parts:

"Part I: Introduction" includes chapters 1-7, pages 1-29;

"Part II: Tragedy" includes chapters 8-18, pages 31-87;

"Part III: Sophistry" includes chapters 19-29, pages 89-133;

"Part IV: Plato" includes chapters 30-38, pages 135-182;

"Part V: Aristotle" includes chapters 39-59, pages 183-267;

"Part VI: Conclusion" includes chapters 60-61, pages 269-280.

The book also includes "Acknowledgments: Why This Book Was Hard to Write and Thanks," pages 283-285; notes, pages 287-300; bibliography, pages 301-305 ; an index, pages 307-322; a note about the author, page 323; and a note about the type, page 324.

Just as Aristotle is part of what Whitehead referred to as footnotes to Plato, so too is Critchley's new book. Indeed, his new book appears to be written by one philosophy professor for "Us [Philosophy Professors]." And perhaps also for graduate students who aspire to become philosophy professors.

But let's consider what Critchley himself says. He says that "when revived" by responsive readers presumably (of the sort that Wadlington tries to develop in his 1987 book Reading Faulknerian Tragedy), "the ancients speak, [and] they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us. . . . This 'us' is not necessarily existent. It is us, but in some new way, some alien manner. It is us, but not as we have seen ourselves before, [but] turned inside out and upside down" (page 7; I added the bracketed words here).

Let me use C. G. Jung's terminology here. For people in Western culture today, the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Greek tragedies, represent our Western collective unconscious. Now, according to Jung, each adult needs to undertake the task of recognizing and integrating various elements of his or her personal unconscious in healthy and pro-social ways into his or her ego-consciousness. Similarly, each adult also needs to recognize and integrate various elements of our Western collective unconscious in healthy and pro-social ways into his or her ego-consciousness.

The time has now come for me to return to Ong's 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies, mentioned above. In it, he reprints his 1954 essay "The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn" (pages 15-25) and his 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self" (pages 49-67).

For relevant further discussion of Ong's thought, see Thomas D. Zlatic's essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville's Novel] The Confidence-Man" in the anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2012, pages 241-280).

Later, Critchley says, "Tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, and how we might become cognizant of that suffering, and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action. (I want to emphasize the word 'partially' agency in tragedy is ever partial)" (pages 9-10; his italics).

On the one hand, Critchley, without adverting to Ong's 1954 and 1958 essays as reprinted in his 1962 book, is, in effect, approaching the texts of the Greek tragedies in a way that is consonant with the approach to literary texts that Ong recommends.

On the other hand, Critchley's new 2019 book could not be titled Reading Greek Tragedy as Wadlington's 1987 book is titled Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. But why not? Because Wadlington does not claim to be articulating Faulknerian tragedy's philosophy.

Now, when Critchley started his undergraduate studies in the early 1980s (page 36), the once-fashionable movement of existentialism that Ong refers to in certain essays reprinted in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies, mentioned about, had waned.

However, in Ong's preface to his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977, pages 9-13), he says, "At a few points I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast such as Jacques Derrida, Michal Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Tzvetan Todorov, not to mention Claude Levi-Strauss and certain cisatlantic critics such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, who are more or less in dialogue with these Europeans. Many readers will doubtless note that the works of these scholars and the present volume share certain themes and perhaps a kind of excitement. In particular, as I am well aware, my treatment of discourse and thought as rooted ineradicably in orality contrasts with Derrida's chirographic and typographic focus in his De la grammatologie [1967] and other works.

"But this book has its own history, traceable through my earlier works and the references embedded in them; it has also, I hope, its own intelligibility. From the time of my studies of Peter Ramus and Ramism, my work has grown into its own kind of phenomenological history of culture and consciousness, so I have often been assured by others, elaborated in terms of noetic operations as these interrelate with primary oral verbalization and later with chirographic and typographic and electronic technologies that reorganize verbalization and thought" (pages 10-11).

But Critchley's project in his new book is to articulate to the best of his abilities Greek tragedy's philosophy and to contextualize that philosophy in the history of Western philosophy starting with Plato and Aristotle. In short, Critchley is not trying simply to get college-educated people who read books to read the Greek tragedies. Rather, he is trying to get college-educated people who read books and who are interested in the history of Western philosophy to understand his articulation of tragedy's philosophy.

In any event, I would draw your attention to chapter 8: "Tragedy as Invention, or the Invention of Tragedy: Twelve Theses" (pages 33-35). Critchley's twelve theses provide an excellent preview/overview of certain key arguments that he develops in the course of his book. However, the sheer multiplicity and diversity of his twelve theses can serve as one reason why I am not going to critique all of them here.

However, I want to offer a nit-picking argument about his wording in his somewhat lengthy summation of thesis 12. The wording involves his characterization of "the dissolution of all the markers of certitude" (page 35). Now, Aristotle is generally credited with inventing the formal study of logic. In syllogistic logic, the conclusion follows from the premises, provided that all of the terms in the premises are operationally defined and used as univocal terms. Then the conclusion expresses a certitude. (In contrast with univocal terms used in Western philosophical discourse, poetry tends to prefer the use of polysemous terms.)

However, apart from syllogistic logic, all terms operational defined and used in philosophical reasoning, such as the reasoning in Plato's various dialogues, do not express certitude, but only probable reasoning claims to the contrary in the dialogues themselves notwithstanding. I know, I know, I am representing Aristotle's footnotes to Plato and Critchley wants to write his own footnotes to Plato.

As a thought experiment, we might imagine changing Critchley's word "certitude" in his summation of thesis 12 to the word "probability" to wit, "the mood [of Greek tragedy] is skeptical, it is about the dissolution of all markers of probability." I know, I know, Critchley wants to tout being skeptical, instead of trying to formulate philosophical probabilities. But isn't it possible that Plato and then Aristotle first grasped the skeptical dimension of Greek tragedies and then tried to the best of their abilities to construct philosophical probabilities as an alternative way to think about the world? In other words, why was Western philosophical reasoning invented?

After all, Critchley himself claims to be developing tragedy's philosophy. But if there were not good reasons for inventing Western philosophy in the first place, can there now possibly be good reasons for developing tragedy's philosophy?

In chapter 21 (pages 98-100), Critchley says, "On the topic of his [Gorgias'] teaching and method, Gorgias did not teach any set of doctrines, but a method, a hodos, which was, in his view, value-free. He gave the highest status to the power of rhetoric" (page 100). But isn't the highest status a value? It doesn't sound value-free.

In any event, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) develops a generalized empirical method (hodos) in his philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed., edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1992; 1st ed., 1957).

John Angus Campbell, who is not a Roman Catholic, published the article "Insight and Understanding: The 'Common Sense' Rhetoric of Bernard Lonergan" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, volume 71 (1985): pages 476-488. Later, he revised and expanded it in the ambitious 1993 anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (pages 3-22), mentioned above. In other words, Campbell considers Lonergan's generalized empirical method for philosophical (and theological) discourse to be a "common sense" rhetoric.

In chapter 26 (pages 119-122), Critchley says, "Tragedy is a symptom of the fifth-century linguistic turn [from what?] that placed enormous value on rationality, argumentation, and persuasion. Reason is essential to the experience of tragedy" (page 119; I've added the question in brackets).

In chapter 4 (pages 17-20), Critchley says, "The most common topics in ancient tragedies are connected with the events preceding or succeeding the Trojan War and the affairs of the House of Atreus and the Palace of Thebes" (pages 17-18).

Because ancient Greek culture represents one example of an honor-shame culture, perhaps we can see Greek epic poetry as exemplifying heroic honor. By contrast, the poetry in Greek tragedies exemplifies shame.

In chapter 3 (pages 12-16), Critchley says, "Greek tragedy provides lessons in shame" (page 16).

When we put these pieces together, "the fifth-century linguistic turn" (page 119) seems to be a turn from poetry centered on heroic honor to poetry centered on tragic shame.

Now, the personal experience of shame is connected with early childhood traumatic experiences, according to John Bradshaw in his book Healing the Shame That Binds You, 2nd ed. (Health Communications, 2005; 1st ed., 1988). Simply stated, if you have ever experienced road rage, such as the road rage we learn about in Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, then you are probably suffering from shame that binds you deep within your psyche.

Now, apart from Critchley's explicitly argued twelve theses, the theme of grief emerges in his book (pages 9, 10, 17-20, 168, 186, and 275-277). But he does not happen to advert explicitly to the death of Socrates and Plato's mourning his death by commemorating his life-spirit in the character known as Socrates in his dialogues. Plato's mourning the death of Socrates probably involved experiencing anger and rage.

In Susan Anderson's book The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, 2nd ed. (Berkley Books/ Penguin Group, 2014; 1st ed., 2000), she describes and explains five stages that people usually go through when they feel abandoned by the loss of an important relationship or the death of a loved one. One stage is rage. Plato most likely experienced rage as part of his mourning the death of Socrates. But Anderson also describes a subsequent stage in the mourning process as lifting.

In the Iliad, King Agamemnon seriously dishonors King Achilles by taking Briseis away from him. Achilles is understandably enraged. He is ready to dispatch Agamemnon on the spot. But the goddess Athena intervenes and stops Achilles forcibly. She urges him, instead, to give Agamemnon a well-deserved tongue-lashing, which Achilles does.

With this famous example in mind, I can imagine Plato writing the Apology in the full force of rage over the death of Socrates. But I suspect that the full force of Plato's rage had lifted (in Anderson's terminology) by the time he wrote the Republic.

Even though mourning is a prominent theme in Critchley's new book, he does not draw on Anderson's book or any comparable books about the mourning process.

Next, in Critchley's discussion of Aristotle's famously puzzling comments about how tragedy evokes pity and fear in people participating in a live performance, Critchley turns to Jonathan Lear for help in understanding Aristotle's puzzling words (pages 190-192; also see Critchley's paraphrase of Lear's point on page 279). Critchley says, "Lear's view is that tragedy provides a safe environment in which emotions are raised and then relieved" (page 191). In a word, Lear is describing what is known as containment.

In the glossary in Dr. Justin A. Frank's book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Avery/ Penguin Random House, 2018, pages 239-257), Dr. Frank defines containment in detail (pages 239-241).

In conclusion, Critchley himself has highlighted twelve theses that he develops in his thought-provoking new book. Instead of trying to explain his twelve theses and then critique each of them in turn, I have only highlighted certain points in in his new book about tragedy's philosophy.

For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so publications, including those twenty-three articles, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview