Is there such a thing as a self-respecting philosopher? Aristophanes, in The Clouds, made the philosopher into an object of derision: impractical, impoverished, devoid of common sense and emotional intelligence, and so obsessed with metaphysical esoterica as to be incapable even of self-care.
Against such formulations, how does the philosophical nerd stand up for himself? His prognosis seems to improve when we recall that his natural enemy is not the jock but the poet — not himself known for practicality. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates famously describes the “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy,” started of course by the poets, when they made fun of philosophers.
For those who can’t decide which side to take, there is the third way practiced by Nietzsche: to enter the battle on the side of the poets but as a philosopher. This is the spirit of Simon Critchley’s Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us. The book is not merely an account of ancient Greek tragic drama (and its relevance for us) but also an attempt to turn Plato’s famous critique of the poets back on itself: Philosophy must be corrected by “tragic consciousness.”
No one who has set foot in a philosophy classroom will be surprised by Critchley’s recital of what he calls “philosophy’s tragedy”: It overestimates the power of rational reflection to obtain knowledge of the world and ourselves. It establishes metaphysical and moral absolutes. And it overestimates our agency — our ability to act freely on the basis of reasoning about what is right and good. These anti-philosophical tropes have been in fashion since the beginning of philosophy and have reached their apotheosis in the fusion of critical theory and post-structuralism that now dominates the humanities and social sciences. In fact, they are increasingly influential in public discourse: Critchley himself is the moderator of the Stone, the New York Times’s philosophy forum.
Will an analysis of tragedy add something further to such well-worn complaints? Critchley is particularly insistent on the idea that philosophy is devoted to a “noncontradictory … psychic and political existence” that has no place for the feeling of grief. This describes the position of Plato, whose Republic attacks tragic poetry for encouraging audiences to identify with the spiritual conflict and sorrow of the poems’ protagonists. Such identifications, Plato warns, allow us to take pleasure in painful psychical states, which means that pain then overwhelms our rational capacities and no longer serves as the proper corrective to bad behavior. Instead, we are encouraged to indulge in our sorrow, mimic the psychological disorder of protagonists, and write off our own conflicts as part of a hopelessly irrational human condition.
One might attempt to defend tragedy by challenging Plato’s rather simplistic rendition of identification, in which the audience simply incorporates represented mental states whole cloth. We get the seeds of a more robust account in Aristotle’s Poetics. Particularly important here is the concept of catharsis, which suggests that tragedy can actually purge us of the emotional states it elicits instead of leaving us with their permanent detrimental effects.
Critchley does not like this sort of account, nor does he like various attempts to deepen it: Catharsis, in his view, is not purgation, nor is it purification, emotional recalibration, psychotherapy, or any sort of moral education that leads to greater “psychical integration” or “authenticity.” He has no argument against such understandings except to say that they come dangerously close to having something favorable to say about the possibility of human autonomy and self-knowledge. His preferred view, tragic consciousness (or “tragedy’s philosophy”), is concerned with the ways in which we are irredeemably compromised by fate, understood as any force (social, psychological, or divine) that exceeds our capacity for deliberation. Our agency and self-knowledge are never more than partial.
In Critchley’s view, a protagonist’s tragic flaw symbolizes human fallibility and finitude. The tragic hero is essentially conflicted, “at odds with himself, doubled over and divided.” So is the audience, and so is “the city of which the tragic hero is both the expression and symptom.” Tragedy forces us to recognize both our limited agency and the world’s incomprehensibility and moral ambiguity. “Tragedy’s philosophy” turns out to be “a bracing, skeptical realism” that stares down a world “entirely without the capacity for redemption.”
There’s much more to this account, including Critchley’s praise of Plato’s other well-known antagonists, sophistry and rhetoric. The last section of the book is devoted to Aristotle’s Poetics and rejects its focus on coherence and organic unity in favor of Euripides’s “tragedies of disintegration, disunity, and incoherence.”
Unfortunately, Critchley’s distaste for coherence is clear in the way his book is structured and written. It consists of 61 brief chapters of disjointed rambling that at times verge on mania, as if Holden Caulfield lost his mind after attending a graduate postmodernism seminar. It combines ham-fisted attempts at being accessible and relevant with all the pretentious tics of contemporary continental philosophy. Pop culture references abound, and an alarming number of sentences end with “or whatever” — as in “truth, justice, or whatever.” But if you need any reassurances about the author’s sophistication, you’ll be treated to many a “horizon,” “doxa,” “otherness,” and “lacuna.”
This is all to say that the book is full of the counterproductive effects that follow from a philosophical bad conscience — from Critchley’s attempt to disavow a simplistic conception of philosophy in order to ally himself with a simplistic conception of the poetic. In doing so, the book sacrifices both philosophical depth and literary sensibility.
What substance the book has it borrows from a handful of well-known secondary sources. It reports these sources faithfully but makes no attempt to analyze, synthesize, or otherwise critically engage with them. Meanwhile, it represents philosophy in general as a form of dogma — a straw man devoid of the nuance to which “tragic consciousness” is supposed to attune us. Contra Critchley, philosophy has always sought to grapple with its own fallibility. Socrates, after all, claimed to know nothing, and his willingness to die for it was tragic.
If you can’t be friends with philosophy, you ought to at least make friends with psychology. Whereas Critchley identifies “affect regulation” (or our ability to manage our emotions) with reason’s repression of emotion, depth psychologists think of it as the capacity to have emotions without being overwhelmed by them: One contains them. This in turn requires a capacity to represent feelings, to put them in thoughts and words, instead of disavowing them only to enact them tragically. And this capacity is thought to be a product of growing up, a process in which loss and mourning are essential. We give up the ministrations of our early caretakers only to internalize the ability to take care of ourselves.
The insight of the depth psychologists is that integration and disintegration, much less reason and emotion, do not form the binary opposition that Critchley thinks they do. The experience of loss may involve an integration of what is lost and forms the basis of the identification at work in an audience’s experience of the tragic. This sort of account is essential to deepening our understanding not just of catharsis but also of the aesthetic. If we can understand the relationship between external losses and internal gains, we are in a much better position to explain the pleasures of tragic consciousness and defend them against anti-poetic mania.
Wes Alwan is the co-host of two podcasts: The Partially Examined Life, about philosophy, and the soon-to-be-launched (sub)Text, about literature and film. Follow him on Twitter @wesalwan.
