The gods made me do it, says Agamemnon in the Iliad.
Then we have some points to operate from: Odyssey, Oresteia, Republic. Looking back on them we can say that in a sense they all have the same subject: the 'problem' of legitimacy in rule. No one even hints at a conscious formulation of this question in the Odyssey. But one could (looking back on it) formulate the question embryonically, which is just what Aeschylus did: he rewrote those absurd last 50 lines or so of the Odyssey. Odysseus, Telemachus, the grandfather each kills his man among those who in action (not theory) have questioned the legitimacy of Odysseus' rule. (The man goes away taking all the elite youth of Ithaca with him; he comes back 20 years later, all those followers dead, and kills off the generation that has grown up in his absence.) At this point Athena (it takes 2 or 3 lines) intervenes and makes peace among the contending factions. Indeed. We certainly do not have any theorization going on here. Odysseus is renowned for his intellect, his curiosity, his great strategic shrewdness. But certainly no theorist he, nor anyone in his "world."
Aeschylus comes after the democratic revolution, in which the peasantry threw off _all_ formal relations (obligations) to the aristocracy. There is nothing like revolution to enforce a bit of more conscious thought about rule. The first two plays proceed pretty much as the Odyssey had, except that at least some of the secondary characters and/or the Chorus brood more over it. But that brooding itself was wholly absent from the Odyssey. No one gives any thought there to whether it was legitimate for Odysseus to conduct these mass slaughters; some try to stop him, some try to help, but no one questions the actions in which they find themselves.
The resolution in the third play, The Eumenides, is still pretty blunt, hardly beyond Agamemnon's The Gods made me do it. I take the male side, Athena says, so I cast my vote for Orestes. And the Furies began to wail and threaten -- but Athena starts to persuade (a word that echoes through the whole trilogy). A new world of persuasion) the Furies (though her father's thunderbolt is always implicit) the Furies (though her father's thunderbolt is always implicitly there) She persuades the Furies to accept a high position in the New Order of Things. This still is not explicit Theory. But persuasion does involve giving reasons (and by this time the Athenian audience was certainly well acquainted with such debate). And of course the struggle continues in Athens, the Eupatridae like the bourbons, forgetting nothing and learning nothing new. And in the background various men are theorizing about beginnings, about principles of fire, etc. And in this new world of endless debate in Athens the theorizing about fire & water etc gets extended to questions about where rule comes from (emerging from a good deal of bloodshed in the revolutionary struggles and from Athenian imperialist wars).
And we have the Republic.
Always action within a given context, always thought and eventually conscious theorizing arising in response to the transformations taking place in that total context in which the actors find themselves.
Theory is derivative from practice, and most theorists are engaged in trying to explain that practice. This occurs at many different 'levels,' & that leads to the necessity of theorizing theory, of differentiating the level of abstraction, the 'reach' of the 'theory' in any given context. And to this thread.
Carrol ---------
I wrote:
Let me repeat one point from my previous post.
Theory has no existence outside conscious and self-conscious human minds.
Some of the comments seem to reify it as something out there. But it is not a Platonic Form, existing from all eternity.
So when we talk about the relation of Theory to practice we have to focus on consciously held abstract principles consciously controlling the practice.
Carrol
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