Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros

Introduction: On the Underlying Sense of Aristophanic Comedy

While the Aristophanes literature stands as a worthy testament to the comic poet’s greatness in many respects and to his significance in the classical world, there is no book to my knowledge that presents a systematic philosophical treatment of his comedies. It is my firm belief that Aristophanes stands with history’s finest inspired artists, and that his poems are truth-disclosing works that speak to us thoughtfully as well as dramatically across the centuries. His comedies deserve an elucidation that reveals their philosophical depth. In this volume, I propose to provide such an exposition of four of them. The seed for this book was first planted by a talk given by John Sallis on philosophy and comedy at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s. It was then fertilized by my study of his seminal Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues, in which he shows how comedy is an essential element of the philosophical enterprise. While I did not think that the nurturing process would take quite so long, its completion comes at a fortuitous time. Not long ago, Dennis Schmidt wrote: “In the end, the full treatment of the relation of tragedy and philosophy . . . needs to address the place of comedy in that relation.”1 While this book stands on its own, I hope it contributes toward the meeting of that need, as it directly treats the relation of comedy and philosophy. Introduction On the Underlying Sense of Aristophanic Comedy The methodology of this book is driven by a single focus, namely philosophical insight revealed through the Aristophanic text. All other matters, such as historical matters, matters that might pertain to performance and production, prosodic matters, and cultural matters will be considered insofar as they contribute to a close and rigorous interpretation of the written work. First and foremost, this book is a direct and sequential textual exegesis written for philosophers, classicists, literary scholars, and readers who both enjoy and take a deep interest in comedy of the finest caliber. At Republic 378d7–e1, in his controversial discourse that seems to censor the poets, Socrates obliquely acknowledges that poetry can have an “underlying sense” (huponoia). This view is borne out later. The first poetic passage expunged from the education of the guardians is quoted at 386c 5–7, at the beginning of book 3. It presents Achilles’ apparent lament over his death, a lament that would endanger the inculcation of courage in the guardians: “I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another, / to a man without lot whose means of life are not great, / than to rule over all the dead who have perished” (Odyssey 11, 489–91). But this same “expunged” passage is the first one the man who has been liberated from the cave will hear at 516d5–7, toward the beginning of book 7. In that context, the passage connotes something altogether different: its huponoia. The free human being would rather endure a wretched fate on the earth, seeing its truthshining light, than to rule among those who are bound to shadows, i.e., to the opinions of the city. In this book I will attempt to bring the huponoia of several of Aristophanes’ poetic plays before the reader in a way that will make both the insight and the joyfulness in them more accessible. plato turned his attention primarily to Homer and the tragic poets. Since then, philosophy has found tragedy a much richer subject than comedy , although there have been occasional works addressing comedy philosophically . (I have contributed some scattered reflections of my own.) many of them have focused, and in a way quite properly, upon the Dionysian origin and nature of comedy, and upon its place at the Dionysiad. To be sure, the old comedy to which the work of Aristophanes belongs2 evolved from the original celebrations of the Dionysian cult consisting of “dances, disguises, lyrical trances, and jocular turmoil”3 following a phallus -pole procession. As the revelers grew more and more inebriated, the lewd jokes and gestures grew more aggressive, culminating in an evening orgy. The more refined activities of the cult eventually found their musical outlet in the dithyramb, the material for tragedy, while the more earthy ones found theirs in the kōmos, the basis for comedy. Kōmos means song of revelry, and also refers to the revelers themselves. Gradually Dorian mime, a practice ridiculing someone present, was added to the kōmos. If we were  | pHIloSopHy AND comeDy...