A Discussion of Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy Applied to Oedipus the King (Nov 2008)

In Poetics, Aristotle seems to investigate tragedy with methods similar to those he uses to investigate the natural world. In the work, he proposes a definition of tragedy and explains why it affects us the way it does. Although its modern relevance as a whole is debatable, the work does make some brief statements influential to later aestheticians and is an indispensable tool for understanding ancient Greek tragedy. It is worth our attention for a better appreciation of this remarkable literary niche, of which Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is a standard reading. Aristotle had this play specifically in mind referring to it ten times. In modern times, it has been widely written about by many other great thinkers making it a prerequisite to a rich tradition of aesthetical and psychological literature. The most context can be gained through an active reading of Poetics, where we apply Aristotle’s definition of tragedy to Oedipus the King. Their conformity is not always perfect, but Aristotle’s definition generally fits.

To understand this definition, we must first understand his broader view of art. Aristotle said a poet “is an imitator just like a painter or other maker of images,” a conclusion developed by Plato in The Republic and Ion. Mimesis is an ancient Greek word both philosophers use to describe this notion of imitation. Aristotle doesn’t give us a good definition of mimesis in Poetics, so it is assumed he means the term in the Platonic sense. Just like an image a painter paints is not the actual thing depicted, but merely an imitation of what he sees, so too are poems imitations except in language. The performance of a play is not an actual event taking place, but merely an imitation of one that might take place.

According to Aristotle in chapter 6 of Poetics, tragedy is, “a mimesis of a high, complete action… in speech pleasurably enhanced, the different kinds occurring in separate sections, in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.” Each term of this definition has a specific meaning that will be explained throughout the essay. Along with this definition are the six elements of a tragedy. They are plot, mimesis of character, verbal expression, mimesis of intellect, spectacle, and song-writing. Some of these elements are not necessary for the play’s full effect, but are there merely to enhance the play. Aristotle claims a tragedy can be effective lacking specifically mimesis of character and the spectacle, although there are other elements that a tragedy could conceivably lack. In chapter 14, Aristotle mentions Oedipus the King as specifically having the kind of plot that would make one shudder just by hearing of the events that take place. Any element that can’t be experienced from a private reading of the play may not be strictly necessary, although these elements would have been expected in an ancient public performance.

The elements of lesser importance are the song-writing, spectacle, verbal expression, and mimesis of intellect. Song-writing includes the music to which choral parts are set. Song-writing may not be a strictly necessary element, since tragedies are enjoyed by readers and modern audiences lacking the songs. The spectacle includes anything having to do with the live performance of the play, including the actors and set. Verbal expression includes the writing of the verse parts in a meter appropriate to tragedy. This ability is mastered much earlier than the ability to arrange the actions of the plot. It is less important because it does not have a direct effect on plot. How Oedipus the King may include these elements is self-explanatory. Mimesis of intellect refers to the characters’ speeches in which they use rhetoric that makes their principles clear or makes a logical argument. However, it does not include the moral beliefs of a character. An example would be Oedipus’ speech declaring he must find Laius’ killer in order to save the city or Creon defending himself against Oedipus’ allegations of treachery.

Mimesis of character is the second most important element of the tragedy. Mimesis of character is the mimesis of virtue, vice, and other personal qualities of a character. It is second most important because a tragedy is, by definition, a mimesis of an action in which the characters are merely engaged. The only way we can know the moral principles of a character are through their actions, which is determined by the plot. All characters should be suitable according to his role in society, life-like, and consistent. It should be necessary or probable that these would be the kinds of people that would take the actions they do in the plot. A main character should be morally better than most people. There are no villains in tragedy. However, a character cannot be too much better than people in the real world. He must be at least somewhat similar to us in order to rouse feelings of fear for his misfortune. Oedipus is certainly better than those found in the real world. He overcame overwhelming adversity by fate to become the foreign savior of Thebes and her beloved despot. Of his similarity to us, Freud said of Oedipus,

“His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”

Freud thought Oedipus was so similar to us that he named a psychoanalytical childhood stage of development after him which if not properly resolved, would result in neurosis.

Of primary importance to Aristotle is the plot. Aristotle begins outlining a proper tragic plot in chapter 7. A plot must be a “complete action” meaning it must have a proper beginning and a proper ending both of which must be connected by a middle wherein events follow each other probably or necessarily. Although Oedipus the King leaves much to be said about the protagonist’s history, the particular action of the plot remains complete. Since the myth of Oedipus was popular in the Greek oral tradition, and even briefly mentioned in the Iliad, it would be reasonable to assume the average ancient Greek tragedy patron would already be somewhat familiar with Oedipus. The play must be short enough to be understood as a whole in one sitting, but long enough to include all the necessary plot elements so they follow necessarily or probably, and the longer a play is that fits these requirements, the better.

According to Aristotle, a tragedy is a story in which a man, such as one described above, comes to misfortune by some fault (harmatia). This fault cannot come from a vicious character flaw, but rather must be an action which is somehow a mistake. Oedipus made many mistakes from his ignorance, starting with the failure to realize the man he would kill at the crossroads was his father, Laius. Oedipus’ search for Laius’ killer was also a fault, since it led to his misfortune. Often, the mistake is perpetuated by the same strength responsible for a character’s high status. Oedipus used his keen intellect to become ruler of Thebes by solving the riddle of the sphinx, but this same cunning led him to the truth of his identity and his subsequent demise. Since there was no way Oedipus could have known these were faults at the time, and he was the kind of person who would do these things with this lack of information, the actions of the play would necessarily or probably happen as a result. Therefore, Oedipus, and all tragic heroes, is simply the victim of bad luck or fate. When the fate of a character is undeserved, it inspires our pity.

A complex plot, as described in chapter 10, will include a peripety (peripeteia) and a recognition which arise probably or necessarily from the arrangement of the plot. In chapter 6, Aristotle offers this definition: “A peripeteia occurs when the course of events takes a turn to the opposite.” The peripety of Oedipus the King came from the recognition of the true identities of Jocasta and Oedipus as mother and son, first by the herdsman, then by Jocasta and Oedipus themselves. This is truly a reversal because Oedipus’ seeking of the herdsman had the exact opposite effect of what he really desired, that is a happy outcome for himself and the city. Instead, the effect was a loss to both. Oedipus realized that he had not avoided his fate after all, making the horror of his situation clear. Following the recognition and the peripety comes the dénouement. The dénouement is the falling effect after the climax, when the outcome of the story is a forgone conclusion and all conflicts are resolved. The dénouement of Oedipus the King occurs when we learned Oedipus’ fate was to wander the earth banished from Thebes as a pariah, without even his sight to distract him from reflecting upon his misfortune.

Unlike the inquiries of history, which make particular statements of events, tragic poetry makes general statements about the sort of thing that would happen, and thus attempts to illuminate the nature of and reason for human suffering. Ancient Greeks used their poetry as a kind of moral philosophy, looking to the theater not just for entertainment, but to find messages, morals, and a view of life. Their sense of aesthetic pleasure and sense of morals were nearly inseparable. To them, that which is aesthetically pleasing must also be morally good. A moralist might say the general statement Oedipus the King makes about life is that we cannot avoid our fate to suffer. We must be humble before the gods and accept our insignificance. Perhaps Oedipus’ biggest fault was his initial rejection of the prophecy of the Oracle, as acceptance would have saved him the humiliating public spectacle of his downfall. When Oedipus found this truth we too, as the audience, find this truth vicariously. To the extent that we do, this brings about what Aristotle called a catharsis of our emotions.

Aristotle uses the word ‘catharsis,’ which in its literal, medical sense means the purging of bodily fluids, in its religious context as an idiom for purification. In the case of tragedy, the purification is of our emotions of fear and pity. Aristotle gives us little in the way of defining catharsis concerning poetry, although his elucidation with respect to music may be revealing. “When they have made use of the melodies which fill the soul with orgiastic feeling, they are brought back by these sacred melodies to a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis]. Those who are subject to the emotions of pity and fear and the feelings generally will necessarily be affected in the same way.” This purification may be said to “purge” us of the excess of these passions and bring them back to their virtuous means as he described them in Nicomachean Ethics. The idea of catharsis can be seen as a metaphor within the play as well. When Oedipus committed the impure act of incest and patricide within Thebes, the city required a catharsis, or purification, through his punishment, which presumably ended the plague.

Oedipus the King may or may not conform perfectly to every one of Aristotle’s elements of a tragedy, but I think they correspond enough at least to make a study of the one beneficial to the study of the other. The subject has been written about by many scholars and there are many conflicting points of view. I believe the two works generally accord. Understanding them both is necessary for any serious investigation of ancient Greek tragedy.

Bibliography
Barnes, Jonathan. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Bowra, C.M. Sophoclean Tragedy. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944)
Brunius, Teddy. “Catharsis.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas. accessed 11/03/08
Cooper, David E. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997)
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. (Franz Deuticke, 1899)
Knox, Bernard. Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and his Time. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)
Woodward, Thomas. Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1966.) 23
Lucas, F.L. Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics. (London: Hogarth Press, 1927)
Morrisey, Christopher S. “Oedipus the Cliché: Aristotle on Tragic Form and Content.” Anthropoetics--The Journal of Generative Anthropology. 9.1 (2003)

The Economic Effects of the 1973 Oil Crisis

From 1974 to 1975, the US economy was in a recession. The 1975 Economic Report of the President, speaking of 1974, begins with “The story of the past year was one of inflation and recession.” America’s production of goods and services was steadily declining for almost a year, causing a rise in unemployment that would leave millions of Americans without jobs. A major priority of the Nixon and Ford administrations was curtailing high unemployment rates along with high inflation rates; a combination known as “stagflation.” The poor economic conditions were exacerbated by a stock market crash in 1973, and steep hikes in the cost of food and other essentials that would leave Americans relatively the poorest they had been since the great depression. The causes of the recession in the United States were many among a competitive new world market recovered from the devastation of World War II and monetary and fiscal policy that led to increased inflation. One of the biggest contributing factors to the recession of 1974 to 1975 was the oil crisis of 1973. The crisis would shake the fundamentals of the economy and directly pinch the pocketbooks of average consumers not only at the pump, but almost everywhere they spent money.

Stable oil prices of the 1950’s and 1960’s led industries to demand more oil for variety of applications making it an inextricable part of the global economy. An already well-developed oil extraction industry abroad made oil imports more cost-effective than developing production within the US. Oil was the main source of energy in America accounting for three fourths of the national energy budget and nearly half of that oil was imported. The oil, petrochemical and automobile industries, all particularly vulnerable to swings in oil prices, accounted for one fifth of the economy in 1975.

Cheap oil was the basis for the bustling automobile industry which was a boon to manufacturing since the 1920’s. Cars permanently transformed the structure of typical American living places from rural farmlands or crowded cities to the sprawling suburbs in between. Cheap gasoline, half as expensive as in Europe, led to the construction of interstates and highways and to government subsides for the freight truck industry which replaced the relatively fuel-efficient rail freight industry as the primary mode of freight. The dispersed suburban population became increasingly dependent on cars and trucks for transportation making impossible more fuel-efficient modes of travel such as mass transit or walking.

The US economy’s growing dependence on oil did not go unnoticed. In the years before the crisis, oil had been cheap and politically easy to come by, but that was to change. The oil crisis started when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), which was the Arab members of OPEC, Egypt and Syria, declared an embargo banning oil exports to the US and cut oil production by five percent in response to America’s indirect military support of Israel against Iraq, Egypt, and Syria during the Yom Kippur War. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudia Arabia’s minister of Oil and Mineral Resources and chief architect of the crisis, demanded that Israel pull back to its pre-1967 borders before ending the embargo and resuming production. This presented President Nixon with a perplexing set of foreign policy challenges that directly affected average Americans. Even though Nixon assured America that the oil crisis was a “temporary problem”, economists predicted the end of cheap and easy oil thereafter. Although the embargo did not dramatically change middle-east foreign policy, OAPEC had proven a point. Oil producing countries could use what was dubbed the “oil weapon” to put political pressure on western nations by significantly disrupting the global economy. The price of crude oil quadrupled from 1972 to 1974 rising from three to twelve dollars per barrel as a result of the embargo and production cuts.

A diminishing supply of oil on the world market, along with a price freeze on oil set by Nixon in 1971, resulted in shortages having an immediate impact on American families and consumers. The oil crisis struck at the beginning of the winter when demand for heating oil was high. With heating oil harder to find, some schools and offices temporarily closed. Some gas stations had long lines of idling cars waiting to refuel. Some ran out of gas or only allowed commercial vehicles to refuel. Some states limited drivers with odd numbered license plates to fill up on odd numbered days of the month and even numbered license plates to fill up on even days of the month. Many rationing devices were proposed and implemented but the shortages nonetheless continued to hamper the mobility of suburban consumers impeding their normal business activity further contributing, in a literal way, to the economic slow-down.

In his column in Newsweek magazine, famous economist Milton Friedman argued that the reason why gasoline was in short supply on the market was less the increase in price and decrease in supply of oil and more government mismanagement by artificially attempting to lower prices with price controls. To keep oil prices from surging to levels businesses could not afford, Nixon signed into law the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act which instituted price, production, and allocation controls on the petroleum market. The low prices on gasoline gave consumers no incentive to economize their gas usage, so together they consumed more than the available supply. Friedman argued that any rationing device imposed by the government would naturally lead to shortages and in the long run be more costly than letting the free market work out prices on its own.

The increase in the price of oil had far-reaching effects throughout the economy affecting all industries related to gasoline. In 1974, over 20 percent of the production capacity of automobile companies was idle and 100,000 employees were laid off. The increasing prices of gasoline-related goods led consumers to cut back on things such as tires, campers, motel services, travel, and goods made with petroleum chemicals like plastics and polyester. Offices closed down and manufacturers were reluctant to spend money on machines that used large amounts of gasoline, expecting oil prices to rise further. Consumers cut their usage of oil-related products by $15 billion including $9 billion on cars. From higher prices on petroleum products, consumers were spending $15 to $20 billion extra dollars that went to overseas oil firms and couldn’t be spent on anything domestically produced.

Farmers were especially hit hard by the spike in oil prices and passed their increasing expenses onto consumers. Heavy farm equipment and new processing techniques made farming into an energy-intensive industry. Through advances in chemistry, oil transformed the way farmers grew crops with new petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. After the crisis, the price of petrochemicals soared. Between 1970 and 1975, the price of propane increased by 101 percent, the price of nitrogen fertilizer increased by 253 percent, and the price of pesticides increased by an average of 67 percent. Increased expenses of farms caused food prices to rise by twenty five percent.

The government took action to decrease consumer demand for oil. In 1974, the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act was passed that set a maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour on highways and interstates, although was largely ignored. The government scrambled to find alternatives to oil. Recalling the Manhattan Project, Nixon announced Project Independence in November 1973 with the goal of being independent from foreign oil by 1980. The project called for coal power plants, the completion of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, and mass transit. However, none of these programs were effective. The reason why attempts to curb demand for oil were doomed to fail, and why the oil crisis hit the economy so hard, was that oil had become integrated into the fundamental structure of the economy by technological advances that made petroleum-based products more profitable than their alternatives.

The energy independence rhetoric of the early ‘70s was short lived and all long-term solutions went unrealized. Oil shocks that hurt the economy would become a repeating theme in US history after 1973. The 1973 oil crisis is as relevant now as ever. A keen reader by now may have found many similarities between the 1973 oil crisis and the 2008 oil crisis and perhaps between the following recessions as well. Former President Bush has said about our dependency on oil “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world,” which unfortunately is still true. Energy, now more than ever, is considered a national security issue tangled up in tumultuous foreign affairs. The only two solutions seem to be increasing domestic production and finding alternatives. Whether the mantra is “drill, baby, drill” or “green energy,” there are no immediate solutions. We must use history as a tool and thereby learn from the many failures of policy makers and businesses in order to make a lasting long-term solution to the oil problem a reality.

Bibliography
Friedman, Milton. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1975

Rosen, Sumner M. Economic Power Failure: The Current American Crisis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975

Heller, Walter W. The Economy: Old Myths and New Realities. New York: Norton, 1976

Commoner, Barry. The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis. New York: Knopf

Gas Fever: Happiness Is a Full Tank. Time. 18 Febuary 1974. Accessed from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942763,00.html

Bush: U.S. must cut dependence on Mideast oil. MSNBC.com. 1 February 2006. Accessed from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11110276/

Second Arab Oil Embargo, 1973-1974. US Department of State. Accessed from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/dr/96057.htm

Some of My Favorite Wikis

If you know me, you know that I love wikipedia. In this post I will share some interesting wikis I have read lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Buffalo_Buffalo_Buffalo_Buffalo_Buffalo
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
This is a cool little linguistics puzzle. It's a grammatically correct sentence using entirely the word buffalo. Yes, this sentence actually means something. It uses different meanings of the word "buffalo": the city, the animal, and the verb that means "to bully." Happy parsing!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem
"Monty Hall Problem"
This is a "probability puzzle" that demonstrates a seemingly paradoxical principle of statistics. It goes like this:
"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law
"Godwins Law"
As an argument carries on, the chances of somebody being compared to Hitler approaches one. If you compare your debate opponent to Hitler, you automatically lose the argument. Also see Reductio ad Hitlerum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
"Ship of Theseus"
This is a philosophical question that I think is one of the most important, interesting, and relevant in the field. After many years at sea, the Ship of Theseus had every part replaced. Is it the same ship?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language
"Distinguishing Blue from Green in Language"
This site outlines how different languages distinguish different colors compared to English. Did you know that not all languages distinguish blue and green? In some languages the word is the same for both colors.

So there you have 5 of my favorite Wikipedia articles. If you have any interesting Wikipedia articles in your favorites, please post a comment and I will read them.

Post #2 - Why I Like to Hike Part 1

I’ve been thinking about why I like backpacking so much, and a lot of people ask me about why I like to do it. Let me try to explain.

If you don’t know, I like to go on long distance backpacking trips on the Appalachian Trail. The AT is approximately 2,175 miles long running from Springer Mountain in the north Georgia mountains to Katahdin in Maine. I’ve hiked about a quarter of it from Springer to a little way beyond Damascus, Virginia, at the very beginning of the Virginia section, and about halfway through the Virginia section to Harpers Ferry, which is very close to Washington D.C. The longest I’ve been out is 8 weeks.

My favorite section begins at the approach trail in Amicolola Falls State Park and ends at Blood Mountain about 40 miles north. The approach trail connects to the AT about 8 miles north at Springer Mountain, the official beginning of the trail. This is the section I’ll be doing again soon.
I’m planning a trip pretty soon. I’ll leave with a thirty-pound pack which includes a tent, a stove, some food, a sleeping bag, and little else. I’ll have everything I’ll need to survive for a few days right there with me. With the weather how it is and a perfectly comfortable house to live in, you may ask why I’m doing this.

The first and most important reason why I hike is the incredible patience it gives me. Walking for ten hours or so through a monotonous landscape gives me a zen-like focus. After awhile, every tree and mountain starts to look the same and each step feels like the last. However many miles I travel during the day seems unimportant when my surroundings are so stable. The travel begins to seem like an illusion. The paradox of moving forward but never seeming to get anywhere can be the biggest challenge of backpacking, but brings about the greatest rewards. It allows my mind to relax and soak up the nuances of a single experience. It’s quite a unique experience to be forced to focus on something so stable and not one you could ever have in civilization. There’s nothing in particular to grab my attention to take me out of the moment except for the occasional gust of wind or scampering animal, but none of these things are nearly as distracting as a ringing phone, an email, or a television commercial.

On the trail, I’m always just uncomfortable enough to have no choice but to be focused on what’s going on around me. This constant slight discomfort is a key part of the trail heightened consciousness experience. My aching legs and knees and exposure to the climate is a constant reminder of all the sensations of my body that I’m normally not particularly mindful of. Hiking is a great way to get out of my head and get away from all the garbled symbols and concepts that I spend the majority of the time thinking about at home. It’s a more natural and real way to live that’s good to experience once in awhile to clear out all of the garbage that accumulates in my head. It puts things in perspective.

All my defense mechanisms against boredom are disarmed when I know I have a few hours to a campsite and there’s no other option than to keep going. There’s no laptop to open or television to turn on. There’s not even a nice place to sit and have my mind wander freely for a few minutes. Hiking forces me to be conscious even when I would normally choose not to be which can result in superpowers of concentration after only a few days. I once met a guy who watched a spider build a web for a whole day. You never really know how you’re affected by your favorite distractions until you’re forced to deal without them. There’s a place beyond the frustration of boredom that’s difficult to get to. Getting into the hiking groove, where my mind is quiet and peaceful, has been one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Hiking is best when it’s walking meditation.

In short, through the consciousness forced upon me by trail conditions, I feel like I’m more authentically myself. When the modern complications of civilization are aside, there’s more time and attention for me.

That’s all for now. I’ll write more about why I like to hike in part 2 coming soon!

Post #1 - some techno I made in high school vol. 1

Lets start this blog off right with some techno music I made in high school.
Sometimes I wish I could get back in the creative mindset of my youth. I wish I could unlearn all this useless "music theory" and all these useless "scales" and just play around with music like I used to. Sometimes learning the rules impedes the creative process. Looking back at these songs brought back some good memories. They actually sound pretty good to me especially considering what little I had to work with. Here are the first five songs in the collection. The names of each track have unfortunately been lost and I don't remember what they were called. There are about seven more tracks that I will post later.
Also, I just joined a little jam project with my drummer friend Dusty that's meeting Sunday. Supposedly he's bringing over a violinist and a keyboardist to play. I'll be on guitar, Dusty on the drums, and some guy on the bass. I'll post a recording of the sesh on Monday or so.

Rapidshare link here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/182996495/TonysTechno.zip.html