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Seven Years in the Library: A Dissertation SummaryIntellectualy Poets In Theory and On StageBy Professor John Given, Ph.D. 2002In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre censures academic demarcation of history and philosophy, as a result of which “ideas are endowed with a falsely independent life of their own on the one hand and political and social action is presented as peculiarly mindless on the other.” Classicists are ideally situated for transcending MacIntyre’s departmentalization, but, while “influence” is often charted among genres, philosophical texts are primarily in a philosophical vacuum, and even literary theory too often sidesteps the genuine problems of ancient philosophy. My dissertation, “Intellectual Poets In Theory and On Stage,” attempts to trace a fuller (and more complex) intellectual-literary-cultural history by juxtaposing the work of three men in the final third of the fifth century: the tragedian Euripides, the comedian Aristophanes and the philosopher/sophist Protagoras. At the beginning of my research, I made the important decision not to explore the influence of Protagoras’s philosophy on contemporary literature (or vice versa). Rather, I considered how these three contemporaries, from three distinct generic perspectives and yet sharing similar historical circumstances in the Athenian democracy, treated questions that were central to philosophy, literature and culture generally. I chose particularly to study “intellectual poets” — that is, people or characters who make a special claim to authority based on wisdom, and who use such wisdom poetically to create new personae, whether real or fictional, whether for themselves or others. These intellectual poets included Euripides’ Medea, Aristophanes’ caricature of Euripides, and even Protagoras himself. Each of them, I found, created and performed identities (again, whether real or fictional) that treated wisdom as an essential component of identity, but as a component itself incapable of fulfilling an entire ethical persona. Each person displayed his or her wisdom, often in order to theorize the performance of identity or the relationship among identity, ethics and rhetoric. But each person also supplemented this wisdom by adducing further ethical priorities that would delineate his or her identity. Often, perhaps surprisingly, these people would subordinate their intellectuality to more highly prioritized ethical codes. For example, Protagoras ironically displayed his wisdom by theorizing the need for performing identity in accordance with the democratic requirements of Athenian politics, which felt great anxiety regarding claims to intellectual authority. Euripides’ Medea similarly subordinated wisdom in order to fit into her community of women, but her wisdom proved inadequate for devising a suitable alternative ethical priority. |
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