Interview with Professor Michael Davis on Sophocles' Electra | The New Thinkery Ep. 37

Welcome back to the new thing. I'm David Barnes with me as always as my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you doing Greg? Very well David.

Very well. How are you? I'm okay. It's raining.

So we have a special guest which is which is between my spirits but before that a less special a less special person Alex pre-hurry Alex. I'm right David. I was feeling good until you just make that remark. I'm just kidding.

So who do we who do we have with us today? I know we usually engage in five to ten minutes of vulgar banter but today we have somebody that's so impressive and we don't want to drag down and the data shows that people skip that part of the show anyway actual. So who's with us Alex one of your great teachers? Michael Davis professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College where I think you've talked since 1978 or 76.

No, no, I'm sorry 77 at Sarah Lawrence but I started in 74. That Dickinson College. But by this point he's an institution basically a building at Sarah Lawrence. He studied at Cornell and Pennsylvania State University Press and there he studied with some of the most.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. He studied at Penn State Press. Sorry, Pennsylvania State University. I had to talk in Penn State University Press so it slipped on the tongue.

There he learned from some of the more prominent students, most prominent students of Leo Strauss, Alan Bloom, Richard Kennington, Stan D'Rouza, and Seth Benardetti. He's established himself in his own right as one of the most engaging interpreters of great works in the history of political philosophy. He's written a number of books and articles on a really impressively wide range of thinkers and topics and I'm going to embarrass him now by listing them all. Hold on, Alex, before you do that can you say one thing about how Michael structures his books?

There are so few scholars that structure their books in the same way that he does. They're quite different. They're quite different. Some of them are full on studies of single works.

He has books on air cells, politics and politics. That's the politics of philosophy and politics of philosophy respectively. He also has works that range on a number of thinkers and not necessarily chronologically. One is ancient tragedy in the origin of modern science, which has essays on chapters on Sophocles, Plato, Descartes, the autobiography of philosophy has two parts.

One has essays on Plato, Aristotle, and Echin Heidegger. The other is a study of the other half is a study of the reveries and some interesting remarks on the second discourse. His book, Wonderlust, is a wide range of essays, most recently the music of reason. That's a study on the relationship between reason and irrational in research essay on the origin of languages, Nietzsche's birthday tragedy, and in the last chapter.

That's first in time is Plato's lesser hippies. I'll say the best for last or least my favorite for last on that side. So of the Greeks, and that contains chapters on Homer. Herodotist Euripides played on Aristotle, though interestingly not in that order.

I think what's common to all his works is they're really provocative. I think Michael, it's fair to say, has a playful joy in uncovering the small, strange, and interesting. His skill at this, or his knack at finding these things, is that most on display in his teaching, I had the distinct pleasure to sit in on his courses for a number of years while living and teaching in New York. And I guess the best way I think of it is that if people with poor sight need small things writ large, those with keen sight can see big things writ small.

And I think Michael is surely one of those with keen sight. How long did you work on that one, Alex? That one's been in my back pocket for the Republic. But I think we'll see that today.

We're going to talk about Sophocles and specifically his tragedy, the Electra. And I think we'll see how much he can find hidden meaning in very, very small places. So welcome, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. But first, Alex, what did we want to ask your professor? Well, I wanted to give my chest a say hi. I'm real pleased to be here.

So let's go back to the mythic origins of Michael Davis. What was it like studying with all these people? What are some of the, I mean, your work is probably most associated with that of Ben or Dettie. You sat out in squirces for decades, right, until it's death at the new school.

But I think going back to Cornell, you were there at a very politically interesting time with so many very interesting teachers through that event. Well, it was interesting that Bloom, I found him my second semester at Cornell. And he talked in a way nobody else thought nobody was like him because I had all these, in a way, adolescent questions and adolescent longings. I somehow had a mixture of extraordinary ambition with a kind of latent nihilism.

So half of me, the intellectual half of me thought, you know, how can there be any meaning and the other half wanted to be because I'm bourgeois and American and not from another place I wanted to be present in the United States rather than wanting to be a tyrant. But the impulse was the same, you know, the sort of way in which you show yourself to the world as an important significant person. So as we know now, looking backward, the connection between all of these ambitions has something to do with coming face to face with your own mortality and the fact that you want to make a mark. So Bloom knew all that.

He knew that that was the origin of a lot of political longing and he attracted a group of students around him who were in a way right for the picking. And he was elegant. I remember I was in a government 203, it was called, there are about 250 students in it. He walked into the room in the middle of the winter.

He had this wonderful silks scarf that he would rip off his neck in a kind of gesture. And it was an extraordinary performance. And after about two weeks, I was sold on the fact that philosophy was the highest kind of life. It sort of brought together the two means in a way that was, it was generally enchanting.

And it did that to a bunch of other people as well. A lot of my contemporaries names are known to you. Nathan Tarkov is there. A bunch of other people at the same time.

Michael and Catherine Zuckert, Michael and Catherine Zuckert were a little before me. So not to mention close friends, people who stayed close to me for my lifelong friends, like Richard Valkley. So Bloom created an atmosphere in which there was something extraordinarily attractive, almost erotically attractive about the philosophical life. But being young and kind of a rogue, I registered for all of his courses after that, but because he was selling philosophy as the highest kind of life, I also registered in the philosophy department, which at the time was saturated with Vicki Stynians.

And so I was sort of pulled in these two directions. Once again, Bloom on this part of political philosophy and the grand tradition and especially Plato and Aristotle. And then these people who have the same kind of attraction to Wittgenstein. At that moment, Bloom had a year off.

He got a year off because Cornell awarded him a teaching award. And what else would a college do to give a good teacher a year off of his career award? So he got Richard Kennington to come and take his place for a semester. And then I, Kennington taught a course in which he was teaching the discourse and method and the passions of the soul.

And then I was really, in a way, I really fell in love because these two, but one thing we were doing in the philosophy department wasn't nothing. It was interesting. It was really interesting. And what Bloom was doing was selling a way of life that he did, but he was as much selling as he was doing it.

And then Kennington seemed to me to be the embodiment of that, of the two things brought together. He was really doing what I wanted to do. And so I guess I was a junior by the time Kennington came. By the end of the year, I had decided that I would go study with him no matter where he was.

I remember I went to my advisor in the philosophy department, Norman Kretsman, and I said, I want to go to Penn State to study with Richard Kennington. And he said, who's Richard Kennington? And I said, well, he's just, he knows more about the cartoon as far as I can see anybody in the world. So he looked him up in the directory of American philosophers.

And he didn't even have a PhD at the time because he had not completed his dissertation. He only did that after I got to Penn State when he was 50 years old. And he said, well, he doesn't even have a degree. He's only an instructor.

You're going to study with him. And I waffered a bit because I needed his letter of recommendation. But yes, I applied to Penn State. I really didn't apply to anywhere else to consider going anywhere else.

And then I went to Penn State, studied for five years under Kennington and rose in there as well. Kennington was the kind of person you could ask a little question. And he would, I remember we were dinner one night with our students and their families. And he said something about her minutics.

And my wife said, what's her minutics? And Kennington said, well, you see, it starts with a Greek god, her needs. And then he went on for, you know, it must have been 45 minutes off the cuff with maybe the best account of what her minutics is. I've ever heard that's what Kennington was.

He could do that on so many things and so many levels. It was a joy. That's the story of his dissertation defense, right? They asked him one question and then he talked for an hour and then it was over.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Better daddy was actually on that committee because it was so late.

You know, that and then I, and then I was writing a dissertation on Plato's by Liebens. And Kennington said, well, I have better, better copies of then or these course notes. And he gave me two, two classes that then I did import on the Philebus. And it was amazing.

I mean, I, I had gone to Germany the year before I had actually taken a course from Hans Gautner on the Philebus. Gautner had written his dissertation, Shryft or whatever they call it on the Philebus. So, you know, I'd learned from, he was very impressive and all of that. And nothing better than he was just, I mean, it was so far beyond anything anybody had ever seen that it very much influenced my dissertation.

And then of course, when I got the job of Sarah Lawrence, I had the chance to sit in on his classes. I started the first class was on Sophocles, Collectedes at NYU and then always, of course, fall and spring graduate course, either at NYU or at the New School and Plato or Sophocles or escalates or whatever. And that's when I really got educated. I was already, you know, 30, 32, something like that.

And that's actually when my, my real education started. Yeah. And I was just listening to a lot of the small, strange and interesting in Sarah Lawrence, but it's obviously comes to some extent from better daddy, right? His ability, you see this in his essays and books.

You can see this in his course notes and lectures, how he can find these very tiny details. And just, I was just listening to his course on the Republican early on, he points out, and this is in his book, but he develops it at length in the first lecture on the Republican House. Socrates doesn't actually see Paul, Paul Mark is sending the boy and that this implies, he goes on at length about causality at time. Right.

But his ability to see in a small detail that's there, great implications as really eye-opening. Yeah, no, and that detail in particular is about, is a reflection on what it means that this dialogue is a narrative dialogue, a not a performed dialogue that things creep into the account that what is though, they're part of the experience, but can only be, you know, retrospective reflection on the experience. And that turns out, of course, to be important in book three of the Republic, when you're talking about the different kinds of poetry. So it's, yeah, he's quite extraordinary in that way.

And not just in books, I mean, he had a way of being able to walk down the street and notice something that other people would notice, but wouldn't see how deeply it got. I remember one day we were walking down the street on University Ave going up toward whatever the name of that park is, I've forgotten. And there was an argument over a parking space between two people, and one of them screamed at the other, something like, I'm not going to get this perfect, but you paranoid and then another deady turned to me and he said, you know, in another age, he might have called him bastard, but psychology has so penetrated the way we think about things that it's become a part of the everyday language that we look at things and that way. This is the sort of thing that he saw.

Or I mean, if you think about it, he noticed, for example, at the beginning of this is the libation pairs, that the first theme is, arrestees and phyllotides, and then a lecture comes on the scene. When she comes, they hide behind the tomb, the tomb of Agamemnon, so that she won't see them. And it becomes clear from the dialogue that the tomb is not far away the way it is inside the place of Agamemnon, but right there in front of the house. So Benedict, how interesting that is, you've got a tomb of Agamemnon, big enough to hide two grown men, sitting there right in front of the house.

Why is that? They killed it. And so is this an honor? Or is it what it's common?

It doesn't have to be that common. It doesn't have to be that big. Clearly, this tomb had to have been put there by justice and clay mistress. So if you're thinking it through, you're confronted with a big question.

Why did they do that? Why did they establish such a big monument? Is it a man who has a warning to the citizens? Is it a man who does some kind of honor?

You know, before a word is uttered in a way, you are confronted with a question that nobody else notices that. I mean, they just take it again. Of course, you need a tomb and therefore, and you need to hide two men and therefore. So it's that kind of care that made him so intriguing to study with because he would see so many things that other people, they just asleep.

Anyway, probably rambling on through too long. And that's really eye-opening. And you can tell what your talented teacher can do, you transition perfectly to the subject. I'm not a maniacal and only know what.

So we're going to talk about Sophocles. You're for people listening. You recently taught a course on the three depictions of a lecture by the three great Greek tragedy in zesclists, Euripides and Sophocles. And you're currently writing a book on these plays.

We should have you on for the two others. Yes, I'm writing a book and yes, I'm writing a book. I sense that I shouldn't press further on that. Well, it's got, you know, it's got, in a way, the way I think of it is that you've got these three plays.

They're the only extant Greek tragedies of which we have the same story from all three of the Trigidians. So it's kind of interesting to put them together and see how they treated the same story and they treated quite differently. For example, a lecture seems to be the cause of everything. She's really manipulating everybody.

Whereas in Escalis, she drops out, you know, at the latest at maybe like five, fifty or so. So halfway through the play she's gone. And it's not called a lecture. It's called the libation barriers.

So it'd be, I thought it'd be interesting to put them together. And then the other thing I thought is this and this, I don't know how much of this makes it into the book, but it certainly was for me part of the reason for writing it. The libation barriers in a way everything I know comes from better daddy. Not that I haven't seen different things, but the structure, how what I, and he's written on it, you know, and on the libation barriers.

Sophocles electro actually took a course from him. He never wrote on it, but you could say the sort of frame in which I'm thinking about it is very much influenced by better daddy. And about the European's electro we never talked at all. We never, I don't think we've over, I knew him for, you know, thirty years.

We never, I don't think we ever said a word about it. And yet of course, having written on it, I know that I couldn't have done this without him. I was interested, you know, I learned mostly about the libation barriers from his writing. I learned mostly about electro, Sophocles electro through conversation with him and having him so horrible, you could say.

And I just cleared that I learned an enormous amount about European's electro from study with him, but I never, we never talked about it. So I was curious to see how the interpretations of those three things would compare with one another. One is mostly better daddy. One is very much better daddy and one in the way is not better daddy at all.

And he was a big influence on me. So just personally, I thought, oh, this would be an interesting thing to do. I want to see how that works out. As I say, I don't know that any of that actually maybe in the presence will be something about that.

It's interesting how teachers can become a kind of voice inside of you, right? That they become a guiding light, even though they're not there, you somehow have imbibed their character. Now, one of the, I think one of the sort of first questions is the political philosophy podcast and you're a philosophy professor for what those things matter. Why Greek tragedy and why softly is in particular?

Well, you've put it in this way that the E-Pistok King is a play about incest and parasite. The Makai is a play in which a man who seems totally public spirited suffers a terrible fate. It's not preaching morality. So the E-Pistok is a very, very good man, a very good king, and he suffers at the end.

So the question is, you start there and then you say, oh, how interesting. These things were not privately produced in somebody's attic, anti-political statements. They were, they were, they were, they were, my annual contents, celebrations, festivals. They were awards for the best tragedy.

So they were public institutions in a way designed to force you to experience the limitation of political life. So you could say in E-Pistok King, you have a man totally devoted to politics, who is, who suffers because of it. In the Makai, you have a man totally devoted to the political and he suffers. In Antigene, you have a woman totally devoted to the family and Sophocles has created her.

Why is the woman who defends the family the, the offspring of an incestuous family? So it turns out that it's good for political life to have something like, it's too strong to put it this way, but I'll do it anyway, an anti-political institution within it to remind it of its own limitations and solubilities because the polis, when it gets too self-confident, comes to be too brutal and too rigid in its own understanding of what's good, what's beautiful, what's just. So it's in a way, you could say the same sort of issue comes up in Plato's Republic if you reflect on Sumos' spiritedness, the middle part of the soul. As the fundamental political passion, you could say the Republic is all about, on the one hand, how Sumos is the absolutely necessary feature of political life and on the other hand about how dangerous it is.

So it, for a political institution, a polis needs institutions within it that are somehow at odds with it. It shows up in other ways in Aristotle's politics, it shows up in Book 7 when he gives you a kind of geographical model, that's our topological model of this. When he places the best polis on the hill, but it's not on the top, it's always looking up at something beyond itself and when it stops doing that, it gets into a series of struggles. So you could say the best citizen is the citizen that's incompletely devoted to the city in which he's a citizen and tragedy is a political institution designed to somehow encourage that incomplete devotion to political life.

So right off the top, you could say it's got a kind of interesting character. You know, you could say it's a little bit, this is the comparison. I mean, you could say it's a little bit like Mardi Gras, right? You need a time in the year where you realize what life would be like if you didn't live in political life.

And it releases you from the ordinary constraints in order to remind you of the ordinary constraints. I don't want to push that analogy too far because they go in different directions. But that's why I think why politics, that's why tragedy in some way is, you know, that's really crucial politically. You could say it's a difference in one way between Athens and Sparta.

As Sparta doesn't have, the Athens does. It's easy to admire Sparta. The Socrates pretends to admire Sparta all the time, but he lives in Athens because he can only admire Sparta in the way he wants to admire Sparta if he lives in Athens. He needs to, he needs somehow the impurity of Athens in order to think through the quote, unquote, purity of political life.

Now, as to Sophocles, I mean, I love Sophocles. I think that in escalists, it's all there, but it's harder to get at. In Euripides, it's all there, but it's too easy to get at. So all tragedy is in a way about tragedy.

That shows up too quickly in Euripides. I think that's what Aristotle means in the politics by calling it the most tragic of the Trigetians. And it's what nature means by criticizing and claiming the tragedy commits suicide with you. What does Aristophanes mean in the frogs?

He leaves him out, doesn't he? Yeah. I mean, that's so interesting that, you know, the contest is about what to do without supply of these. And escalists has one piece of advice and Euripides has another piece of advice.

And Sophocles is left out because it looks as though Aristophanes wants to show you the extremes, right? And you could say the extreme of Euripides is that in a way he's very aware of the power of tragedy, but it becomes so explicit. I mean, that comes out in the Nietzsche's criticism on the use of the data set, X-Mark, and I'm not going to under one end at the end and for the prologue. So why does he use the prologue so frequently?

Well, because he's fully aware that the story isn't the important thing. The important thing is how you react to it. So he's going to tell you the whole story so as to minimize that your sense of anticipation about what's going to happen. Nietzsche I think he's right.

The point is the way to that you're on the way to a certain end, not the end itself. But the problem is that once you make that point explicitly, you lose the movement because you need the anticipation of the audience in order to have to produce the effect that tragedy produces. So you can't have the effect without articulating, without the goal. And it's so funny because you could say, and that's what the crazy thing about Nietzsche's birth of tragedy is that he's so critical of Euripides.

But really, when you look at the structure of the whole book, it's Euripides and it's modeled on the black guy. It's as always stolen at all from the black guy because the problem is the same for Nietzsche. He's trying to explain the power of tragedy and advocate a kind of pessimism of strength rather than an optimism that, but in fact, in order to do that, he's got to give an explanation of tragedy. So it looks as though it's in that way, it's a very untragic book.

He's got the same problem with his Euripides that articulating what what tragedy does is though it undermines what tragedy does. There's a tension between knowing and doing, you could say. And I think Sophocles of the three of them is the one who masters that combination most fully, sort of a mean between the two extremes. On the one hand, on the other hand, I want to take that back immediately and say, once I start reading any of them, I forget all of that and they all seem so great to me that it seems like an accident that I'm reading along them rather than the other.

I don't treat them any differently. I look at them from a distance and say, yeah, that's true, but they're all so smart that in the end, I don't categorize them in that way, it's useful, but it doesn't in any way reflect the way I read them. So any theories on why the tradition didn't survive? Why the tradition of...

Of Greek tragedy? Well, it's interesting, of course, that Nietzsche wants to claim. I mean, the whole premise of the book is that the tragic age of Greece is the greatest human accomplishment and that it ceases. It's what he seems to be saying and then in a long argument about what the significance of that is, you've noticed that he's constantly citing Faust and Hamlet as well as a thing.

He knows that in a way, the birth of tragedy claims to be as a book, a kind of historical account, but it turns out that more than you look at it, it's a fictional historical account. It's an account of how this grand thing fulfilled its purpose so perfectly that it led to its own destruction. So it's a tragedy about the birth of tragedy and it is also a lie, right? So, but that doesn't change your question.

I mean, your question's still there. The tradition of Greek tragedy specifically doesn't get carried over even though there are certainly instances in the tradition where it looks like something like that is occurring again, but not as a public festival. I'm not sure I understand it. I don't know.

Do you have thoughts? No, no, no. So one thing that you mentioned about Sophocles is that I think maybe it's a good transition to the electorate in particular is that on the one hand, there's the tragic effect it has on the audience watching it at a festival as a political institution and shows you what happens when you carry certain political tendencies too far, right? That's within taking care of something like that.

But then there's the weird things that happen, you know, I've gotten from reading your embedded ideas work on Sophocles. What better than it does with Antigone, for example, pointing out how she wants to live forever in the ground or something with her brother and all these things. When you start pushing it Sophocles narrative and you already know what's going to happen and it's how it's affecting, you start really just trying to figure out what's happening and it's actually happening. Here's where I think it ceases to feel tragically, it really gets philosophically interesting and you're sort of on the poets level looking at the construction, looking at the small details in that way.

And one of the points you made when we were talking beforehand about the electorate, the so odd is that it's named after a lecture, but if you take a lecture out of the play, it wouldn't really change things at all. She's almost a spectator in a way, but she's not as much of an agent, which is strange in a book named after a play named after. So why do you think that is, how does that take us to this other level of what? Should we get a broad before Alex, I apologize, but should we ask Michael for a broad overview of the play first just for listeners?

Yeah, so how does it unfold and how can you take her out? Yeah, that's better than a purchase. Well, you get, as with the other plays, Orestes and his friend, Pilities. Pilities has one line in Escalist's play.

I'm exaggerating a little, but the one line is killer. What should I do, Pilities? She's my mother, killer. That's essentially what Pilities says.

He has no lines at all in either of the other two plays. O sillities is Orestes' cousin and he's the person. His father is the king of the place where Orestes goes into Exxon. Orestes has been away for an indeterminate number of years.

He was sent away when his father was killed, the by-electra. He comes back and then in the first scene, this is true really of both this and the libation bears. He avoids running into-electra initially and the electro is coming to the tomb of Agonomnon and she's, you know, she's electric, but she's genuinely unhappy and the people with her only sort of, you know, richly unhappy. And then, uh, Electra, you know, mourns her father.

Pilities, an old tutor, a particle ghost, and Orestes make their plans about what they're going to do. The old tutor goes off to the house to find out what's going on, get internal intelligence. And then, uh, Pilities and, uh, and what's his name? Orestes, Orestes go off to, um, to, uh, the orders somehow wrong here, but in any case, go off to, uh, do their duty and honor Agonomnon.

Okay, so then, Electra, um, runs into her sister, Chrysophamus, who seems to be esophically an event invention. Chrysophamus is on the way to Agonomnon's tomb. She's doing that because in the evening previous, uh, that, uh, her mother asked her to bring. And, uh, you get the sense that they're really illaged with one another.

That Chrysophamus has made her peace with all of their sheep lives in the house, Electra's having one hell of a time being persecuted by, uh, Agist, who's now the head of the house on the end and quite a mess. So she's in kind of perpetual mourning and anger against those who have, uh, those who killed him. Um, and then, uh, it turns out that the plan of Orestes and, uh, the other two is to announce that Orestes is dead and Orestes has brought a funeral, earned with them. That'll get them inside the house.

The plan is to, it's never claimed that the plan is to kill Pyromestra. The plan is to kill Agistus and regain his afterlorny. Um, so Electra, um, doesn't hook up with them until, oh, it's line 1100 or so when they find they meet, that's very different from the other two places where they meet early. Um, Orestes and Pilities, uh, eventually get into the house, uh, and kill Pyromestra.

With Electra's help. Um, and after they've killed Pyromestra, uh, they send a messenger to Agistus to come back. Message is that Orestes has died. But just this, um, comes back, asks to see the body.

They bring out a body, the body and not the funeral earned. Um, and he unclothes, uncovers it and discovers, and not Orestes, he knows what's happened. And then it's clear that he's going to die and that these people are in a plot to kill him. And so the last scene is Orestes walking him hostage announcing that he'll kill him at any moment.

So you don't see it just to die. It doesn't actually die in the play. I don't know whether that gives you a sense of the whole or not, but it's just sort of, um, okay. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it's necessary to.

Yeah. And that last bit, uh, just rereading it yesterday, uh, the ending is so strange, right? He's bickering about where he's going to get killed and just this. And, um, but to go back to the question, it's true.

You could take Electra out of the play. And in fact, uh, there's an opportunity to almost screw up the whole plot because when they meet Orestes and Electra meet, they're talking and it turns out, well, he could have been outside the door. Luckily this, uh, tutor of pedagogy right there and he stops them and it sees it, which is, I guess connected to this other aspect. You're talking about that.

Um, there's a number of accidents in the play that keep the plot going. It's not really driven by one person's will or like, you know, edit his terrain is where it's really like a who done it and edit this is discovering himself and that thought process guides the point. So yeah, why, why does he name it after a character who can be removed? And why all these accidents keeping this, I guess this feature of the play and check or operative?

So take the first one first. But, um, you've got a play that's about 1500 lines long. Um, they don't meet until two thirds of the way, uh, through the play. Um, in fact, she does help Orestes, uh, but she needs an task because the pedagogy is already in the house and he could have told Orestes is everything he needed to know.

So it turns out that if the point of the play is the action of the play, the killing of Cladnestra and the justness to avenge the murder of that command. None. You don't need her. So why is she there?

Well, um, the first from the very first site you get of her, she's in mourning. It's been a long time, you know, she's still characterized by a kind of a constant mourning. And that's what's gotten her in so much trouble with, uh, with Cladnestra and it just that she just won't let it go after all these years. And then when she has her first conversation with her sister, essentially what Chrisothin says is just let it go.

You can't, you can't argue with those in power. They have authority. You just, you know, forget it yet for your own good. So she's a little bit, you know, she's the, is me, figure from, and ticket, she's the one who brings a kind of common sense and says, what are you doing, Electra?

And that is repeated throughout. So what have you got? You've got a play named for Electra. And in a way, all Electra does is suffer.

She, she's the expression of suffering of pathos. It doesn't have any effect on the action. Okay. Who's Erusty's?

Well, what's very interesting is he comes out of the house after he's killed his mother and we've heard a little bit of the interchanges, you know, not ordinary and brief tragedy to hear people talking off stage, but you get it in this play. And Eresty's comes back out and I forget who asks him how did it go and he says, oh, beautifully clothes. Right. So no indication whatsoever remorse.

At the end of the libation bears, he's chased out of town by the theories in his head. He's guilty, but no indication of remorse whatsoever. So Eresty's is something like a pure agent of what in his play is characterized by him, at least in a direct and Electra has justice. So what if you've got, you've got, let me go back one more thing about Eresty's first scene.

What's the first scene? Well, the Piedigoldos opens it up by saying, Oh, look, here's the temple of so and so and here's this and here's that. And it becomes perfectly clear that he's a kind of tour guide. He's telling Eresty's what all these things are.

Well, what does that tell you? Eresty is not really a citizen of Marjkinah. I mean, he doesn't know anything. He's in name.

He's a good man, but he doesn't have any roots here. Why is that important? Well, you could say he comes back as an utterly detached character who so far as he has a motive for doing what he's doing, so I think he gives him or has a particulate the shallowest possible of motives. He wants to get his property back.

That's what's moving. He didn't know that. He didn't know. He doesn't have any attachment to it.

So you have a kind of agent who is disinterested, that's Eresty's. And you have a character who is characterized entirely by passion. The lecture has no effect on the action. Eresty's is responsible for the action.

But in order for if this play like all the others is a question is a question of what it means for justice to occur. You see on the one hand, you need a character. The justice is blind. You need a character detached, a completely disinterested actor.

But on the other hand, nobody acts without a motive. So the question of justice is simple in a way. How do you get those two together? The lecture is presented as the one who has a reason to want them dead.

And Eresty is presented as the one who can do it without bias because he's not been in this situation where his justice will turn into vengeance. So literally the problem of the play is the problem of justice. And that problem turns out to be identical to the problem of how do you get Eresty's and the lecture together in order to be responsible for this action. And what's interesting about the play is it's not at all clear by the end of the play that this is a sense.

Eresty's becomes passionate in a way because he sees how much his sister has suffered. And the lecture just before Eresty's comes on has resolved to do the action herself but the introduction of what when her brother, she discovers that her brother is there and she can withdraw from that. And in fact, she goes into the house in order to help him, but she exits before it's done. She says it's because she has to be a lookout to see if a justice is coming back.

In fact, it's pretty clear she doesn't want to be there when it happens. So the puzzle of the play is in some way, this is not in a way one of the most beautiful things in the whole lecture. You ask a simple question. Okay, Eresty's been away from it.

How long? You know, so he's a grown man. He's got to be at least 18 years old. So wait a minute.

He's Agamemnon's son, right? Agamemnon went off to Troy. He was away for 10 years. Then he came back and as soon as he came back, he was killed, right?

Which means that Eresty's at a minimum has to be nine years old because Agamemnon wasn't around, right? Okay, but wait a minute. There are several places in the play where Eresty's saving Eresty's is described in terms that make it inconceivable that he's anything other than an infant. She hands him off to the Patigold goes who takes it into exile.

So it can't be Agamemnon's son if he's an infant. He can't be utterly ignorant over as a scenery in the city if he was 10 years old when he left. So he's either Agamemnon's son, in which case he has an interest, or he could be this disinterested observer, in which case he's not Agamemnon's son. But that's just the way it's saying he wouldn't have a motive.

As a disinterested observer, he wouldn't have a motive for avenging Agamemnon. And as Agamemnon's son, he would have a motive, but he wouldn't be disinterested. Observer, that's immediate. That's apparent within the first 150 lines of the play.

If you pay attention to the details. Now, Sophocles is an extraordinary dramaturge. It's not the case that he has you know from the E-dubists that he can't put play together. And he also understands these discrepancies because in the E-dubists, the king, E-dubists himself sees the discrepancy.

He says, oh, this messenger said that there were murderers. And I only, the person I killed, I was the only one there. So, it's for the messenger because I want it, this looks like it can't be the case that I did this deed. Now, I've never gets resolved in the E-dubists.

It never gets resolved because he becomes so concerned with the incest issue that he forgets about the fact that there's, you know, in a court of law, this would be reasonable doubt, right? The one person who saw the thing happen says there were multiple assailants. And the person, and E-dubists knows that he was the only assailant. So, it looks as though, strange as it seems, on this fork in the road between Athens, between thieves and Delphi and Corinth, it must be the case that the two murders happened at more or less at the same time.

So, he should be interested in that, but isn't. But the fact that Sophocles brings it out shows that he's very much aware of this kind of discrepancy. So, then you turn to this play and you notice that there is this initial discrepancy about the age of arrestees. It's literally impossible for him, for this plot to be, to work out the way you expected.

You think it works out. And then you look at the things that happen in the play. So, Chrysophamous goes to leave an offering at the tomb, at the tomb where arrestees and the rest of them have also gone to leave an offering. If, why is it the case that they don't come at the same time?

She could have run into them, or she could have gotten there before they did. And she wouldn't have seen the offering. So, it's an accident. The fact that it just is away from home when they come is an accident.

The fact that Chrysophamous tells a Lectra that arrestees is back, that's what she assumes when she sees the offerings. After the Pythagoras has talked about the death of arrestees and reported it, the timeframes don't work out as being necessary. So, if Eletra had heard Chrysophamous' report about arrestees having come back before she heard the report of arrestees death, she would have a very, very different response. So, Sophocles is arranged to play in which the accidental is in some way, is in some way central to the meaning of the plot.

He couldn't have made all of these, not, he couldn't do the play right he is and have made all of these dramaturgical errors. So, Michael, can I ask a quick question? That's a long question. Okay, so I find this is a commonplace observation, but say with Shakespeare, it's one thing to take into play in person, but when one reads the text, these little puzzles bubble up to the surface.

So, can you talk a little bit about if the audience wouldn't have picked, do you suspect the audience would have picked up on what you're teasing out and if they would have been unable to pick up on it, what's the effectual impact of the play on what they're? I think it's, I mean, we should get back to the Electra, but I think it's easier in a way to make this point in the, the Eletabist king because it's so powerful that if you, the winner point that Sophocles points out and then that has Eletabist point out and that we pick up on is that he never really knows that he's guilty of the murder of his father. He assumes he is, but he doesn't have the proof and there is reasonable doubt he should wonder whether he did it since the reports are so different. He acknowledges that, but he overlooks him.

But in fact, that's just a version of what we do. We do that because if we don't assume he's the murderer of his father, the play doesn't work for us, it doesn't make any sense. So our will to make sense of things is the cause of our overlooking minor discrepancies. So this overlooking of minor discrepancies is in a way a version of the problem that you could say the hamartia, the error of Eletabist.

Can I do you a sentence? Yeah, what? I want to restate that. I think that was just so excellent.

I'm sorry. So you could say the assumption that we make is of a piece with the assumption that he made. So it's by being seduced into thinking that the plot makes sense and that there are no problems that Sophocles induces us to experience what it would be to make the kind of a sense of assumptions that the edifice makes in order to make sense of things. In other words, yeah, he did it and he's a tragic figure and all of that.

But we are, but it's not something that's only true. Tragic characters, it's an assumption that we make all the time because the world by itself doesn't fall into place. We need to make it fall into place. And that's not a tragic sin on the one hand or nearly you do that.

But if you push it all the way, it turns out that we do act and must act as though we know when we don't know. Now, if you look at it in terms of the edifice, you could say, oh, now we're back to what we were talking about when we were talking about the world of tragedy because that's the perennial nature of political life. Of course, you have to act as though you know that you have all sorts of crises and you have to do things and you never know. You have to pretend that you know.

And if you ever get to the point where you forget that you're pretending, you're in trouble because then you're assuming a kind of knowledge that so it turns out that it's not accidental that edifice is in a way identified with the city. He says that essentially in the play. He says, you know, I suffer for all of you. So he is the city and that's the potential danger of political life.

Now, in terms of the elector, you see all of these contingencies, the play is loaded with contingencies. All of these contingencies require that in order for the play to make a hole that makes sense to us, we have to overlook them. And you know, that in a way means to make more sense of them than they really support. Now, I'm sort of in the middle of the electorate, so I'm not quite sure that I know people like Sophocles never do the same thing twice exactly.

So it's not the edifice problem, exactly this problem of contingency. There's another problem that needs to be teased out and it's obviously connected to this and there are ways in which the nature of causality, you could say the big issue in the electorate is the relation between activity and passivity. Electra suffers the world. It comes to her as a pure sufferer of the world.

In a way causality isn't the issue. Things just come to her. After another, as an agent of course, you have to understand the world causally. It's not simply a passive undergoing, but it's an action where you must assume that what you're doing as certain effects.

I think that ultimately the strange way in which the plot is put together so as to emphasize that these things that look as though they're causally connected are in fact only contingent and it could have been quite different. It could have happened in alternate, get a different way. That is something to do with trying to think these two things together. But I'm still fuzzy about how exactly to do that.

One of the things, even emphasizing Electra as almost pure, if not pure, patient or passive, and then you have a pure agent in the resties. In a way, as you're reading it or you're watching on this stage, you know what's going to happen. You're waiting for it to happen. It's all anticipation.

You're just waiting for all the pieces to fall into place to see how it actually happens. Then you don't even get the ending where you're really anticipating, which is a gistasis murder. That's all there. Then as you're speaking, I was thinking, is Electra actually a pure patient?

She actually set all of this framework up. She saved the resties. She put them with the pedagogy. She made sure they were there.

Set messages to try to come back. She's been working on this. Then when the play actually happens, all the fruits of her labors are there. On the one hand, you see this as sort of waiting for everything to fall into place and to come through.

But in reality, you have this other planning or plotting where you've put all the pieces and you're just hoping that they all fall as you're imagining and hoping that they will. Right? Yeah. I mean, you could say, even more exclusively, the story of Electra in the play between line 100 and line 1100 is the story of how she comes to the conclusion that she must act because her resties is no longer available.

In her action, we don't know whether it would have been successful or not, is forestalled by the fact that she discovers that he's now there and so she doesn't have to do it. So on that level, there is a change in Electra because she disbears at the beginning because he hasn't there. I do think that I'd have to look back, but I'm pretty sure that in terms of the messages exchanged, we're only explicitly told about the messages she's received, not about the ones she sent. So it's unclear whether she's after the Dede sending him off with the particle ghost.

It's unclear whether she's to be understood as an agent. But more metal than all of this, I think, is the fact that when you think about what she's done over this indeterminate number of years, her passivity is a kind of agency because Prime Nester and Agistus respond to her. They're angry at her and not at Chrysophomists who get along by going along. So she has been a former side and made them suffer, certainly made, I mean, just as about the killers, I mean, not about to go to Chrysophomists in her first speech with Electra says, what they're about to send you away to a prison.

They're so annoyed by you and that's what she's doing. So it turns out that she has wrangled then quite a bit. And I think the interesting thing that one would have to think through there is that in this dichotomy of action and passion, you have to be more subtle because in fact, an action requires a kind of passion in order to be, I mean, when you put it in this way, the question is, and it looks on the surfaces though, Orestes thinks he can accomplish his purpose if he just kills them. Orestes wants to make him suffer.

Punishment is not just killing. Punishment is killing in a certain sort of way. It looks as though maybe that's why the play ends, the way it does. Maybe what Orestes has learned is, I mean, they sort of reverse positions at the end.

Electra says, just kill him. And Orestes says, no, I'll kill him when the time is right. And he has to walk out in front of him and adjust his experience at that moment. He knows he is going to die, but he does not know when he's going to die.

So he's made not simply to die, which would be a kind of cosmic justice, I suppose, it would even things out. But he's made to anticipate it and suffer as a result of his knowledge that he's going to die. Punishment is in a way doesn't punish him and actually require that, an internal reaction to action, not simply action. That's what it would mean to bring the two of them together on the level of punishment.

So there's a wonderful, you know this, Alex, if you talk about admonishing someone in Greek, you literally, the etymology of the verb is to put mind into them. That's what it means to admonish somebody. It looks to us though, really admonishing somebody means to get an internal response to what you're doing. It's not simply, you know, you can hit somebody.

That doesn't mean they're acknowledging that they did something wrong. All it needs to mean is that they want to hit you back and they know they can't right now, but if they get a chance, they will. So punishment really requires acknowledgement on the part of the one punished of the crime that's been committed. It requires something like guilt.

Yeah. That word always reminds me of the English saying, knocking sense into you, right? I'm not going to say something to you, but what you're saying now reminds me a lot about Plato's Gorgas. And we don't want to go too far field, I think.

But in the Gorgas, you have the same problem, right? Calculus is most concerned about being slapped in the face, right? It's not the injury, it's the insult. And it ends with this myth about punishment where the strikes you make on the body make strikes on the soul, right?

So now find their way from that. There's no sort of internal resistance to the punishment in that. It sort of immediately communicates the lesson. So it would satisfy both the electrotype who wants to see punishment and the arrestis type who just wants to balance things out.

But it turns out you can't really separate those two. And they're always sort of living an uneasy tension with one another and kind of political or justice system. You could say that the play, for instance, you to focus initially on how to get the electro and arrestis together in order for an act of justice to be done, to be enacted. So the avenger has to have a motive on the one hand and the, it's got to be simultaneously interested and disinterested.

Justice requires a kind of interested disinterest or a disinterested interest. You can't have justice if you have an extigurine on the one hand, justice won't be done unless you have some motive for doing it. So you've got to figure out how to do that. That's to look at it from the point of view of enacting justice.

But it turns out that what we've just been talking about is if you think about it from the point of view of receiving justice, the same problem emerges. Because on the one hand, you have to, you have to be hit. That's your, you undergo a hitting. But on the other hand, you have to acknowledge the meaning of that hitting.

So decay can mean punishment. But the interesting thing is that punishment too, in a way, has to be a combination of external act and internal reaction or action, you could say that action and passion. So he's thinking it through from both points of view, from the passive point of view, receiving the punishment and from the active point of view, administering the punishment. It's a both of them required this putting together, which is, you know, it's not a surprise that when you think about what that means, that it's something to do with what it means to be irrational animal, to be a human being, that you're not, you're not ever, you want to understand the point about calicones, you have to separate off the physical impact of the slap from the shame that comes from the fact that someone could do that to you.

Very result on the one hand man and state of nature, on the other hand man and state of society. But in fact, you can't separate those two. There's always, you could say, indeed something happens, but there's something that happens, it's already saturated with meaning in one another. And so it's not, we need to separate them to analyze them, but they're not separate.

And so it should not be a surprise that when you think about what happens in an electro, you find electro enacting things and you find arresting arrest, he's having motives for doing things because it's not actually possible to imagine a human being without both of those things. So arrest is given a motive. He says several times, talks about when you get his property back. But that's not anything like it's interesting.

It's the other motive. He's deprived the other motive is because we want to make him superficial so that we can, we can see what it would mean to be a pure actor. I don't know. I don't know.

It's interesting. And maybe this is a good note to end up, but I was, as you're saying, the stuff about the deed and the corrective deed, right, the punishment and the meaning of all the courtroom dramas I watch on TV and whenever they deliver a sentence, which is indeed, you're going to suffer in this way, they're told what it means, why they've done it, right? The thing that they've done that makes him deserving of this and that's supposed to somehow communicate in addition what the actual deed is supposed to communicate. But then again, there's no guarantee that the person punished takes it this way.

No, of course not because because a speech, a speech is a deed. Right. I mean, that's another way to put it, that you've got the courtroom drama and then on the one hand, the other guy's going to be put in prison or whatever he's going to be punished, but the stocks, that's the physical version of the punishment you're going to be confined or you're going to be whipped or something. And then there's the proclamation of what the meaning is of this whipping.

But the proclamation is not pure meaning. It's an external something that has to be interpreted. It doesn't stand by itself as having meaning. So you think about the consequence of this for a dialogue like Plato's laws, where you think, well, oh, how interesting the whole structure of the book, you've got the laws, and then you've got to preamble to every law in order to explain what it means.

But of course, that doesn't really solve the problem because you would need to preamble to every preamble because it's never simply self-evident what the meaning that you want to be internalized is. That turns out, by the way, to be a problem in the libation bears, a recipe comes in at the end and says to them, he's trying to justify what he did. He says, look at that bloody cloak, these points to the proof that supposedly this is proof of the fact that quite an ester murdered Agonene Nonden for ill will and murdering Agonene. He points to the blood of the thing.

And of course, that doesn't work because cloth can get bloody in any number of ways. And so he has to say, it's just like what would have happened if someone were clotted by a bandit and so on. So in order to give it meaning, he has to put it in a, he has to create a poem. He's got to put it in a plot because meaning is never simply evident.

There's always a need for interpretation and therefore same trilogy. If you think about what Prime Nester does when Agonene Nonden comes back, she is supposedly putting him on trial to see whether he'll walk on this elaborate carpet. And yet we get two interpretations of what that means. It either means he thinks he's like a god or he means he's doing God's bidding.

So she recognizes, you could say, the problem of justice is this. You can't have justice. You can't punish people for the bare act. You have to understand the motive.

Actions always have motives. You have to get at the motive. And the problem is that you can never simply get at the motive with certainty. Clyde Nester might have killed Agonene Nonden because he killed it in Janaya.

She might have killed Agonene Nonden because she's been ruling in Argos and she rather likes that and she's pretty good at it and she doesn't want to turn into a housewife again. She might have killed Agonene Nonden because she loves the justice and she doesn't have trouble. But you keep going. She's over-determined in a way too many possible motives.

Not only is it not the case that we can know for certain what her motive is, it's not even the case that she didn't know for certain what her motive is. And so, but justice requires, political justice requires that you attach a motive. So what have we got again? We've got a situation where political life requires that we do something that we know in principle, we can't simply do it, but we have to do it.

So if we're going to be responsible politically, we have to do it knowing that we're doing it, necessarily doing it imperfectly and therefore we shouldn't be too cocky about it, about our sense of our own justice. I think that's a great stopping point. I think you've gone at the catharsis that these places are supposed to put us through, right? Not this over-determining sort of assumption of motives.

That was fascinating. And I encourage our listeners who want to read more about Michael's thoughts on tragedy to pick up the soul of the Greeks where he talks about Euripides, pick up ancient tragedy in the origin of modern science where he talks about stuff, at least new other articles and things published elsewhere. And I'm glad to that, Alex. It's a delight to have discovered some of Davis's lectures on YouTube.

That's right. That was now long. Yeah, that's a good point. I think Greg has some lightning round questions for you.

Do we have time? Sure. We'll be very quick. If you love for this, Michael, you get to go.

Sure. Yeah. All right. All right.

We'll start easy. What's your favorite work of philosophy? Oh, that's not easy. I know.

Let me give you this is not true, but it's sort of true. I love the discourse on method. I think it's a gem. Who's your favorite stinker?

Period. Play. What's your favorite work of literature? It's private presence.

Oh, very nice. Have you ever had any nicknames? Yes. And you'd like to share with the world?

Well, when I was in junior high school and then high school, one of my friends started calling me Mitch for Michael, my CH. And then that sort of transmogrified into Twitch, which turns into Twitch. Yes. So that's the answer to your question.

Okay. Thanks, Twitch. What's your favorite place you've ever visited? Oh, welcome back.

Very nice. What was your first car? A 1960 Volkswagen bug. Very cool.

What do you think you would have done if you had not become a professor? As an early United States, yeah. No, there are actually two answers to that question. What I would have done and what I should have done, what I would have done is probably become a partner.

Oh, wow. Are you good at working? Attiqued. Oh, my father's just down into that.

I'm terrible with my hands. So that's really cool. But what your president commented reminded me of a professor of mine and undergraduate whom I won't name during class that his ambition as a young person was to become prime minister of Canada and I couldn't stop laughing out loud. He was clearly hurt.

He was like, I was serious. That's wonderful, actually. It was great. And of course, no, I'm just interlapping.

I'm just, you know, I look like it's total jerky. Last one. Do you have any pets? Oh, no longer.

I mean, I have a whole history of dogs. I mean, Alex referred to one of them that I use in class all the time. We had a people named Dunlop, but not for a while. Okay.

What was that? And his name was Dunlop. You said because his face looked like a tire. Well, the body looked like a tire.

This is black muscular and because my, actually my daughter was now a tutor at St. John's in there, I'd say, but at the time was about nine years old, decided that he should be named Dunlop. Sounds fair. That's an amount of lightning round questions.

I just want to say that I learned a lot listening to your talk about the lecture. I hope that listeners will consider reading it. It's not very long, maybe 50, 60 pages. Yeah.

The tragedy is going to be read sort of quickly. Yeah. I think that there's a lot to learn here. And I look forward to David joking.

They said it, but it would be fantastic to have you back on to do the other plays about electros. Well, thank you. It was fun and I had a good time. Thank you.

Thank you.