The *Republic* is a simply beautiful book with immense suggestiveness, but as *one* (crucial) perspective on it one can see it as "nothing but" the ideology of a rich landed aristocracy projected on to the state and the universe. (I think that "reductive" interpretations of the very greatest works are not wrong, they are just only *part* of what is to be said, but an important part in many cases. *Paradise Lost* is "nothing but" the dramatization of the need of the abstract isolated individual to enter into social relations. It is an awful lot more, but the nothing but makes all the complexities possible.)
Sophocles' works must somehow be linked to the "invention" of the peasant-citizen having abstract relationship to the state rather than having only a set of direct relationships determined by "place." But I haven't encountered a really satisfactory account of that linkage. (George Thompson's account is vitiated by his assumption of something very much like capitalism in ancient Athens -- an assumption both De Croix and Wood have refuted.)
Carrol
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Hi Carrol:
> >> To paraphrase Pfister, Freud doesn't, for instance, 'explain' psychological
> >> novels (and other modern cultural and social artifacts); the latter
> >> contributed to the making of Freud.
> >
> >It is also interesting that Freud's most famous theory took its name
> >from a literary work so clearly unfreudian (so clearly political
> >rather than "psychological) as *Oedipus*. That play -- perhaps
> >responding to the first appearance of "citizens" as opposed to
> >"subjects" in history -- does however (to the modern reader,
> >but this may be anachronistic) seem to play with that famous
> >question of 19th c. lit, "Who am I?"
>
> This is a terrain that you know far better than I do, so perhaps I
> shouldn't quibble, but I'd like to add that in ancient Greek tragedy and
> philosophy, the question "Who am I?" seemed to make sense to the extent
> that the "I" stood in an analogical relation of sorts to the polis (e.g.
> the fate of Oedipus and of the polis over which he reigns, Plato's idea of
> [self-]mastery with regard to the individual and the polis, etc). As you
> noted, Antigone is something of an exception to this analogical
> individuation; perhaps, Hegel was inadvertently on the right track when he
> said that women are an eternal irony of the community or something to that
> effect (if that comment can be wrested out of its context).
>
> In any case, the near impossibility of reading Sophocles, Plato, etc.
> without encountering the embryo of the modern individual in their works
> reminds us of a difficulty of stripping the 'history of the West' of
> teleological pitfalls. Again, Hegel gave us a hint (that can be read
> against the Hegelian grain): "The well-known is unknown, precisely because
> it is well-known." A hint that Marx follows in his analysis of labor.
>
> Yoshie