• CHAPTER VII •

Oedipean Complexities and Political Science: Tragedy and the Search for Knowledge

If oxen and horses and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies (of their gods) in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.¹

—Xenophanes

The dead haunt the living. The past: it “re-bites” [il remord]. History is “cannibalistic,” and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, which is ... an action directed against the past; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten. . . . [A]n autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a “residue condemned to be forgotten.” But what was excluded . . . re-infiltrates the place of its origin. It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of being “at home” into an illusion, it lurks—this “wild,” this “ob-scene,” this “filth,” this “resistance,” of “superstition”—within the walls of the residence, and behind the back of the owner (the ego), or over its objections, it inscribes there the law of the other.²

—Michel de Certeau

IN THE Apology Socrates admonishes his fellow citizens for caring more for power and wealth than for truth, wisdom, and the goodness of their souls. If he corrupts the youth, it is by this insistence that excellence or virtue is a necessary condition for knowing what is valuable in private and public life and living by it. He himself is an example of his argument since he neglects those public and private goals valued by most men so he can pursue conversations with all he meets (but especially his compatriots) about why they should honor some things more than others.

The whole enterprise sounds quaint at best illiberal at worst. Most political philosophers talk about “thin” theories of the good and see those committed to “thick” theories as misguided communitarians. Those who do talk about public morality are most often associated with the religious right, and they, either paradoxically or inadvertently given their political alliance with free-marketers, often value wealth and power above all things.

Socrates sounds less quaint and dangerous insofar as what he values most is the examined life. Properly limited by time, place, and circumstance, examining one’s life seems a useful thing to do. It is why some people go to college or, more likely, something that may happen when they do.

In the culture wars each side accuses the other of failing to examine the implicit commitments that animate their arguments. Canonists see multiculturalists as indulging in a form of political correctness that curtails free debate while jettisoning reason in the name of ideology. Multiculturalists see canonist disclaimers about their own cultural power as self-serving evasions. Although canonists extol the virtues of rational exchange of views, they do not seem willing to defend their own intellectual or political positions but indulge in polemics, often, as I suggested in chapter one, of the kind Socrates’ accusers used against him.

There is a surprising lack of critical examination of the idea of “reason” and reasonableness in the culture wars, though the more academic debate between modernists and postmodernists (say Foucault or Lyotard and Habermas or Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib) is very much about that. That is unfortunate because, as the preceding chapter argued, reason is, to use Hobbes’s phrase, often “scout to the desires.” Indeed it is Hobbes’s notion of instrumental rationality and his assimilation of reason to calculation that has shaped how reason and rationality are so often understood in public life. Socrates (as well as Athenian political thought generally, not to mention Aristotle) may have tried to separate economic from political thinking and activities, but much social science assimilates them such that strategies in the pursuit of wealth are seen as analogous to strategies in the pursuit of power. In rational choice theory (as well as among many empirical political scientists, for whom such theory purchases analytic elegance at the price of empirical fruitfulness), the voter is simply a consumer in drag.

Rational choice theory as well as the more generalized commitment to a science of politics, seen by its practitioners as the most sophisticated and “advanced” form of political theory, is remote from the assumptions and sensibility of the texts treated in this book. It is indifferent to anything like Socratic political philosophy and is largely skeptical about democracy, seeing it as involved in paradoxes and inconsistencies that make it impracticable except in a highly attenuated form. Moreover, it embraces the kind of high-flown speech Aristophanes ridicules and it lacks the tragic sense of the world found in Antigone. Here is Vernant in a passage I quoted in chapter two:

In the tragic perspective, acting, being an agent, has a double character. On the one side, it consists in taking council with oneself, weighing the for and against and doing the best one can to foresee the order of means and ends. On the other hand, it is to make a bet on the unknown and the incomprehensible and to take a risk on a terrain that remains impenetrable to you. It involves entering the play of supernatural forces . . . where one does not know whether they are preparing success or disaster.³

In this world things cannot be enclosed in theories, grasped by understanding, or assimilated to what has been. The abyss of the unprecedented and inexplicable Hannah Arendt saw in Nazism cannot be covered over by facts, goals, numbers, incidents, and results.⁴ To think they can is to live and think like Oedipus; it is to be “rebitten” in de Certeau’s image.

In this chapter I want to use Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as an occasion to reflect on some of the epistemological and methodological claims made by political scientists in general and rational actor theorists in particular about their object of study and about themselves as studiers.⁵ I shall suggest that the play’s themes of incest and patricide can illuminate the relationship between the premium that method places on being analytic, rigorous, scientific, objective, and parsimonious⁶ and the object domain of the goal-directed utility maximizing (or “satisficing”) individual of rational actor theory⁷ that the method constitutes for study. I also will suggest that the admirable traits found in Oedipus are also those posited by many political scientists (most vigorously by rational actor theorists) about political actors and themselves and that, as a result, the king’s myopia parallels their own. He proclaims himself an independent agent free of fate and history, self-made and self-generated, and so able to see the world rationally. But in fact his knowledge comes with ignorance and so the meaning of his acts remains bifurcated in a way he only comes to understand in the scene where, significantly enough, he blinds himself. Penultimately, I will offer a reading of the play and an interpretation of its original conditions of performance to indicate a balance between proximity and distance worthy of emulation by political scientists if they are to avoid a method that mimics the culture they are studying and engaging in recondite abstractions that ignore the cultural specificity of their claims to universality. Most rational choice theorists read a particular historical and ideological configuration into “nature,” a construct that then becomes the premise for a historical narrative that justifies it as either the telos of human development or the unacknowledged assumption of all previous (and subsequent) human behavior. As a certain stage of liberal capitalism becomes elaborated into a social ontology, rational choice theory becomes the thought within which all thought must take place. As with Hobbes it functions both as a postulate and a projection, a description and prescription. When its advocates acknowledge its circularity, limited empirical successes, opt for “thin” rather than “thick” rational accounts, accept multiple equilibria and segmented rationality, conclude that rational choice explanations are more likely to hold where the options agents confront are relatively fixed and the decisions are not urgent, and accept the need for other theoretical perspectives, their admirable modesty compromises the claims made for its power and promise.

Finally, I will argue that the role of a spectator in the theater is as fruitful a model for political theory and political science as one based on economics or the physical sciences and that a tragic sensibility provides a needed antidote to the hubris of rational choice theory.⁸

I

Alone among mortals, Oedipus was able to solve the Sphinx’s riddle and so save the city of Thebes. The riddle, “What creature walks on four feet, two feet, and three feet all in a single day?” The answer, “man,”⁹ required a kind of abstract knowledge available to Oedipus because he was ignorant of the concrete circumstances of his birth.¹⁰ The intellectual achievement that enabled him to see the changing nature of man and to discern what was continuous and similar amid change and diversity disabled him from solving the riddle of Laius’s death and saving Thebes from a second plague. He did not “see” that and how the particular circumstances of his own life made him an exception to what he took to be a universal statement.

Having had a child despite an oracle that warned him that he would be killed by his son, Laius bound his infant’s feet and exposed him to die. Thus Oedipus, unlike the generic crawling baby, walking adult, and cane-using old man, never walked “normally,” never moved through any of the stages of life but was himself an unnatural unity who married his mother and sired his sisters.¹¹ Walking on three feet as an adult he used that third foot, his staff, to kill his father. Thus did he unknowingly fulfill the oracle he thought to escape and take revenge on the man who had sought his death.

Ignorant of what was closest and nearest, Oedipus did not know that he was the answer to the second riddle, Who killed Laius? and so the “cause” of the plague.¹² Not only is he ignorant of the conditions of his birth and origins, of who his father, mother, and people are, he does not even know his own name, which is a series of puns on oida meaning “know” and pous meaning “foot.” For Oedipus, and perhaps for all mortals, seeing is also blindness, success hides terrible failure, strength is a source of defeat, and delusion most pervasive when we think ourselves most wise and in command. Oedipus’s triumph in solving the first riddle was short-lived because his solution unraveled into yet another one. “Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance,” Camus wrote, “the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”¹³ Even worse, what escapes what one constructs is often a violence barely hidden by the surface calm of normal life, common sense, and established identity.¹⁴ As the play suggests, the civilizing hero cannot banish the savagery in himself.

What makes the dilemmas of the play so relevant and disturbing for political scientists is that the characteristics that define Oedipus and make his triumph a tragedy are those traits political scientists find admirable in political leaders and in themselves. Oedipus is an astute politician and a beneficent and responsible leader. He is solicitous of the views of others and for the people, confident in his abilities, and decisive in action, yet concerned for the view of the gods. His pride in his achievement, prominent in the opening lines and tableau where he is being supplicated by his afflicted people as if he were a god, is balanced by his piety. Moreover, he is an acute problem solver, an enlightened man who promises to reveal what is hidden, bring all to light, dissipate confusion and uncertainty, and dispel superstition and ignorance. Thus critics describe him as “a questioner, researcher and discoverer,” a “calculator” who brings a quantitative sensibility to the empirical world, and one who demonstrates, investigates, examines, questions, infers, knows, finds, reveals, makes clear, learns, and teaches.¹⁵

But the logic of noncontradiction does not apply to this man, who is one and many and in whom opposites coexist.¹⁶ For all his insight he is utterly blind to the reality of his life (or lives) and identity (or identities) and so of the meaning(s) of his actions. He thinks he is escaping his past, fate, and history and boasts of being a self-made, self-generated, freely acting individual even as he fulfills it. Having been told by a drunken companion that he was a bastard and then been dishonored by Apollo when he sought to confirm what he had heard—the priestess told him he would kill his father and marry his mother—Oedipus flees Corinth and his “parents” who have in fact adopted him, to Thebes, which “adopts” him though it is his original home. Later hearing that his Corinthian “parents” have died, he boasts of being a self-made man and a child of fortune and the gods, all this just prior to his discovering exactly who his parents are and what he has done to them.

By marrying his mother Oedipus became an unnatural unity, too much one and singular, too close to home, too implicated in his past: by killing his father he became too much alone and too isolated, too divorced from his past. The crimes of incest and patricide can stand for both the “unnaturally” intimate connection between the way political scientists in general and rational actor theorists in particular constitute their field of study, the method they use to study it, and the political culture they are studying, as well as their tendency to reject precisely those shaping features of the past that provide a justification for their rejection of the past.

“A social theory that adopts the same means-end individualistic rationality that the modern economy imposes,” Michael Shapiro writes, “helps that structure operate rather than effect a theoretical distance from it.”¹⁷ Using the entrenched language of power and authority to study democratic politics reifies that authority and power while muting the very possibility of radical critique. As this implies, there is no morally neutral language because as accounts of social phenomena are accepted by social actors they become part of the social world itself, unpredictably altering the very institutions and practices that are being described.¹⁸ One could even say that we become the language we use insofar as “the languages we speak and the cultural practices they at once reflect and make possible, mark or form our minds by habituating them to certain forms of attention, certain ways of seeing and conceiving of oneself in the world.”¹⁹ Every language encourages speakers to think and act in some ways rather than others, creates and sustains different kinds of characters with different understandings of human agency and action.²⁰

Such theoretical incest may explain the often tautological nature of rational actor (or choice) theory²¹ and, appropriately given my choice of Sophocles, lend a certain irony to Riker’s preference for “the simplicity” of the rationality assumption that people or things “behave in regular ways.” The rationality model allows one “to arrive at the regularity necessary for generalization” whereas “simple observation” or induction is too “inefficient” an alternative. What matters is “the easy generation of hypotheses” and a “single efficient parsimonious explanation of behavior” that allows “much of the complexity to disappear.”²² But this seems nothing less than a prescription for ignorance premised on the contradictory assumptions that the choice of method is arbitrary in the sense of being indifferent to the subject matter but that it can, nonetheless, reveal nature and human nature. More than that, the preoccupation with regularity and clarity easily leads to regarding what is irregular and opaque as a threat. There is too much diffidence for desperation here, yet there is, nonetheless, a Hobbesian attachment to method because it can maintain political as well as epistemic order.

Given Oedipus’s generation, his unnatural singularity, his imposition of order and simplicity, and the fact that he puts out his eyes when he finally recognizes how wrongly he has read the meaning of his life, Riker’s statement of preferences becomes deeply problematic.

Such theoretical patricide focuses on the way traits attributed to individuals by rational actor theorists (which are also the traits they claim for their theory) presuppose a rejection of the past, the salience of traditional wisdom, and a minimizing if not a disregard for the shaping hand of culture. To be rational, actors and theorists must (or do) disregard what has fathered them even as the unacknowledged background of history and sentiment give texture and concreteness to the lives of the former and the claims of the latter.²³

For instance, the aim of objectivity is to rid oneself of partiality by escaping those ties to place and people that compromise the neutrality of one’s findings. Marx thought that such claims are almost always ideological, Nietzsche and Foucault that they are self-serving, self-defeating, and bad faith, Tocqueville that the rejection of past and tradition was distinctively American. To be antitraditional, he argued, was our tradition, a fact that perhaps explains the extraordinary deracination present in the casual but confident insistence that “no goals that are pursued with tolerable consistency can be called irrational.”²⁴

Given the challenge the play presents to rational actor and rational choice theories (even when they are modified by numerous “side assumptions,” which make them more modest but less what they would like to be), as well as to the scientific aspirations of political scientists as a whole, it may be time, if not to renounce the Sisyphean quest for method and theories that ape natural science, then to “deprivilege” their status. It is true that Oedipus solved the Sphinx’s riddle, and to the extent the knowledge political scientists seek is analogous to that, it is clearly worthwhile. But what is one to do about the ignorance of that knowledge?

One could begin by recognizing the “literary” dimensions of political science texts, the fact that how one writes, the texture of the prose—the use of equations or models, metaphors, the rhetorical structure of an argument—is itself a claim about how one can know and represent the world. Form or style expresses a sense of life and value, of what matters and doesn’t, of what learning and communication and knowledge are, just as how one teaches may be as “substantive” as what one teaches. Life is never simply presented by a text, whether that text be Plato’s Republic, Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy, Elster’s Ulysses and the Sirens, or Oedipus Tyrannus. It is always represented as something; there is always a choice involved, however constrained it may be by canons of academic professionalism.²⁵ More pointedly, it may be that a work of “literature” like the Oedipus Tyrannus is more alert to the moral complexities of action and actors, more alive to the variety of allusiveness and flawed beauty of the world than the hyperanalytic prose that characterizes rational actor theory and the fetishism of method that characterizes political science as a whole.²⁶ 2It is at least worth asking what a style “so remarkably flat and lacking in wonder” does to the world it studies and the students it teaches. It is at least worth asking what is lost when the tale of Ulysses becomes an analysis of calculation and measurement by an individual mentality trying to reduce risk and achieve end states that are completely detached from social and institutional forms of valuing, or when mythic time is transformed into the logical grammar and temporality of t₁, t₂, t₃.²⁷ Measuring and counting time is one of Oedipus’s talents. He too organized time into logical patterns. But the patterns collapse in the terrible uncertainty of his life. “Go inside and reckon these things up,” Tiresias taunts Oedipus after being provoked by the king to tell him who he really is. But anger prevents Oedipus from hearing. “And if you catch me as one who’s false,” the prophet adds, “then say that my intelligence in prophecy is nil” (461-62). Analysis, reason, logic, the penchant for precise speech and the passion for method is as much biography as conscious choice. Whether we know it or not, we write our lives into a world that has already inscribed itself in our souls.

But my criticism is ungenerous and overstated: ungenerous because Elster’s use of a literary text to dramatize the substance and limits (or costs and benefits) of rational actor and choice theory has stimulated my obverse strategy; overstated because political science, like Oedipus, does provide important knowledge. Still, I want to insist that a work like Oedipus Tyrannus can help us see where political science in general and rational actor theory in particular are blind, bring clarity and depth where they are obtuse, and be winged and moving where they are dull and heavy.

As I suggested, one way the play can help is by indicating the need for methods to maintain a balance of proximity and distance toward the subject matter rational actor theorists are constituting and studying.

As I have argued, Greek drama was a political institution analogous to the Assembly, Council, and courts.²⁸ During the festival of Dionysus, playwrights competed for prizes before an audience of the entire citizenry. What that audience saw before itself on stage were plays that dramatized the decisions (about democratization or empire) it had taken in other forums and the cultural accommodations (concerning sexuality, public and private life, and the relations between generations) by which it had defined itself as a community and a people. The mythical settings for these decisions and accommodations provided both distance from the urgency of immediate decision necessary in the Assembly, Council, and lawcourts, and proximity to it since the sufferings of the characters on stage resembled the audience’s own. In this way the theater became a place and experience in which democratic citizens could reflect on the significance of their everyday lives and particular decisions in an arc of understanding more comprehensive and theoretical than was otherwise possible. In it they could see the problematic aspects of cultural hierarchies and distinctions which otherwise defined their collective and individual lives. In these terms, the qualities Oedipus displays on stage are the talents and temperament Athenians most prized in their democratic leaders, such as Pericles, and that they idealized in themselves.²⁹ “To attend a tragic drama,” Martha Nussbaum writes in language that echoes Knox’s description of Oedipus, “was to engage in a communal process of inquiry, reflection and feeling with respect to important civic and personal ends.”³⁰ From what we can tell, that engagement provoked responses of extraordinary emotional power and intense critical reflection, which, together, provided the ground for the political judgments the audience would make when it brought the experience in the theater to the Assembly, Courts, and Council as it had brought the experience of being an active citizen to the theater. This is a representation of democratic deliberation that is almost unintelligible within the individualistic premises of rational actor theory.

What is clear from this and from Knox’s argument about Oedipus and Athens is that the talents of the king and audience were both political and intellectual. It was this combination that the Athenians came to identify as unique to their own democratic culture. No play dramatizes the greatness and limits of this combination more provocatively than the Oedipus Tyrannus. It does so in the context of the fifth-century enlightenment during which, as we saw in chapter two, the sophists challenged the “natural” status they saw as conventional notions of education, law, religion, justice, and the polis while suggesting that man, not god, is the measure of all things.

Given this, the idea of being a spectator in the theater is as rich and generative a model for political theory and science as one based on economics and the physical sciences. At a minimum it compensates for the limits of what Sheldon Wolin has called “methodism” and provides a way to democratize political wisdom against the presumptions of professional expertise, political economism, and technical jargon.³¹

While the actors on stage are, by definition, bound to play the parts assigned them, a spectator can see what they can’t: how those parts form a whole. Whereas the actor is, and enacts, his part, the spectator puts the parts together; he or she (it is probable that women attended the theater) was literally less part-ial and partisan. But the truth attained by the spectator was inaccessible and invisible to the actors on stage only as a matter of position, not of nature. By extension and analogy ordinary citizens were limited in their capacity to judge not because they were incapable of Arendt’s “representative thinking” (discussed in chapter two) but by circumstance.³² Figuratively there is nothing stopping the characters on stage from being spectators at a different play. And, of course, when members of the audience left the play, they exchanged the near omniscience of spectators for the role of actors in public life.³³ Having seen what Oedipus did not see, knowing all along the shaping hand of circumstance where he had thought himself a selfmade independent agent, they know that they might, individually or collectively, be like him, not because they will commit his horrendous crimes, but because they also may too confidently assume they have a method to master the empirical world and define human nature, which only a god could do. Impartiality, an ability to see more than one part and from one standpoint, is one thing; objectivity in the sense that one is outside or above all parts is another. The spectator in the theater (unlike the philosopher in the Republic or Parmenides) does not withdraw to some higher region, but remains a member of the audience, at once disengaged from the particular characters on stage, yet deeply affected by the sufferings they bear and the ignorance that plagues their lives.

But could they (can we) learn from the play so they (and we) would not live through the experience depicted in it? If the tragedians were the political educators of Athens (the Greek word for producing plays is the same as the word for educating) did Sophocles think, or does the play suggest, that the audience could be spared the experience of Oedipus because it had seen Oedipus Tyrannus? Could the same be said of rational actor theory and methodism? To put it in a thoroughly unliterary way, if Oedipus had seen Oedipus Tyrannus, would he have acted differently? Could he have “escaped” his fate and achieved the freedom of which he wrongly boasts?

What makes answering these questions so difficult is that the play provides no single vantage point on itself, no resting place where one can confidently say here I stand, I can see no other. Instead, it dramatizes the questions in ways that leave us with a deeper sense of the problems rather than with solutions to them. I offer three examples.

The first concerns the play’s dramatization of the theatrical experience of itself. In its preoccupation with sight, insight, and blindness, the Oedipus Tyrannus makes the audience self-conscious about the experience it is having. Yet the play itself presents important events (such as Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’s selfblinding) as outside the field of vision, accessible only in verbal fragments, which the audience must make coherent just as Oedipus must with the pieces of his life. In calling attention to its withholding of visual experience in favor of verbal description, the play evidences a consciousness of the theatrical spectacle as a narrative mediating between what is inside and outside, internal and external vision, physical acts and the emotional world they reveal.³⁴ But in the agōn between Oedipus and the blind Tiresias, the mediation breaks out into a conflict between the analytical empirical knowledge possessed by the king and the prophetic knowledge of the seer.

Second, the play suggests that the careful seeing and hearing it demands of the audience is too much and not enough. There are things no man should see, boundaries no man should cross, truths about ourselves that are unbearable to hear, times when anger, fear, or confidence prevent listening. And there are times when understanding the world requires the use of all the senses, not just the intellectual ones. Near the end of the play, in a scene of excruciating poignancy, Oedipus, now blind and equal to nothing, calls for his daughters so he can touch them in a gesture of love, loss, and contrition.

Third, though the play warns us about our penchant for coherence, order, and logic, it itself has what Bernard Knox calls “a ferociously logical plot.” But then how does the knowledge Sophocles or the play possesses fit the dramatization of knowledge in the play? Does it resolve the tensions it portrays between the ways of knowing represented by Oedipus and Tiresias? Or does it leave us (as I think it does), with a framework within which various interpretative communities recast the resolutions it provokes in their own context of performance?

All this is very “literary,” probably abstract, and no doubt frustrating if one is concerned with the real world of political decision, and policy. Yet I am not so sure contemporary political science approaches such as rational actor theory are any less abstract or, for that matter, any more forthcoming with solutions. And the frustration of having problems deepened rather than solved may be precisely the right antidote to policy analysts who have more solutions than a chemistry lab, rational actor theorists with their preference for parsimony, and political scientists preoccupied with methods and methodism.

All I shall do in the following pages is look at five moments in the play as a way of dramatizing my claims about the significance of Oedipus Tyrannus for political scientists in general and rational actor theorists in particular.

II

The Oedipus we see in the opening scene is a man of generosity and intelligence. Compassionate toward his suffering people who appear as suppliants before him, open and collegial in the exercise of his kingly power, he is quick to analyze a situation and take appropriate action. He is proud of his achievements, comfortable commanding others, and confident of his ability to control events. He is, after all, the man whose intellectual prowess saved Thebes from the deathdealing Sphinx, and enabled him, a stranger, to become king.³⁵ Where others saw only discontinuity, difference, and plurality in the riddle about what walks on four feet, two feet, and three feet in a single day, he perceived unity in difference, identity in discontinuity, singularity in plurality, and coherence rather than fragmentation. They saw the parts but not the whole, but his abstract, analytical, generalizing intelligence enabled him to pierce the veil of illusion and uncover the solid ground of truth. Or so it seemed.

Since the legitimacy of his rule and the health of the city he rules depends on his superior intelligence³⁶ the plague and new riddle (Who is the murderer of Laius?) is a threat he must meet to exhibit anew the qualities of mind necessary to sustain his authority. The plague is a particularly complex challenge since it is at once a reminder of the unpredictability of events, the limits of reason, the connection of mind to body, and of politics to nature. In Thucydides the plague at Athens (which is contemporaneous with the play) follows and is juxtaposed to the Funeral Oration of Pericles. Where the latter is a paean less to the fallen dead than to Athenian power—the city is represented as a collective Achilles able to make the sea and land the highway of its daring—the plague destroys mind and body, city and family. Appearing out of nowhere, it kills with a randomness that mocks any assumption that nature is an inert object to be mastered by human intelligence and design. Instead, the plague reminds us that human beings are part of an organically connected network of animate beings whose delicately balanced mutually responsible relations are violated at the risk of disaster.³⁷

Not only do the opening lines mention the plague, the very first phrase of the play—“Oh children, sons and daughters of Cadmus’s line”—is cause for unease since it addresses the assembled citizenry as if they were children. The phrase represents a collapsing of generations which, while it enabled Oedipus to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, also recapitulates his committing of incest. Apparently Oedipus’s admirable qualities of mind are plagued by the unnatural acts, which have so far defined his life without his knowledge. At the heart of his rationalism, animating his confident assertion of self and order is his biography, paradoxically played out in the deracinated intelligence that allowed him to solve one riddle but that disallows him to solve the new one concerning Laius’s death.

Thus the first four lines of the play with their reference to plague and incest introduce a theme that will be elaborated in the symbolism of Oedipus’s selfblinding: political meaning and order as well as the construction of character and self are neither a rational nor an irrational process. They derive neither from the purposive decisions of self-conscious individual actors seeking an efficient means for recognized goals nor in an incomprehensible way by actors who are victims of external forces and other agents. Oedipus moves within a preconstituted reality that constitutes the terms of his identity. He acts within a script that provides meaning and structure for decisions, which are nonetheless his own. When the chorus asks what spirit drove him to put out his eyes, Oedipus answers: “It was Apollo, friends, Apollo that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion. But the hand that struck me was none but my own” (1329-33).

To aid him in solving the new riddle Oedipus summons the blind seer, Apollo’s prophet, Tiresias. He greets the old man with great deference as a savior who knows what only the gods know. For reasons obvious to the audience Tiresias does not want to be there and at first refuses to talk. For Oedipus such recalcitrance at first seems like ungratefulness toward Thebes, but then, when the old man speaks the truth, which Oedipus in his anger and certainty cannot hear, the king accuses the prophet of being part of the conspiracy that murdered Laius and would now murder him. Provoked by Oedipus’s false accusations, Tiresias proclaims Oedipus the city’s pollution and the murderer of Laius. “You have eyes but see not where you are, in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do you know who your parents are?” (413-15). As his fury mounts, he heaps abuse on the man he believes is abusing him and boasts of his brilliance in solving the Sphinx’s riddle, reminding Tiresias of his failure to do so.

Tiresias’s second mention of Oedipus’s parents stops Oedipus in his tracks. To the king’s “What parents. Stop! Who are they of all the world?” the prophet answers with his own dark riddle: “This day will show your birth and will destroy you” (437-38).

From this moment on the play takes a turn away from a concern with the city’s pollution to the king’s origins. All of Oedipus’s energies and intellect are turned toward the riddle of his own life. It is a riddle that will disclose the grounds for his reason and will, in fact, reveal the murderer of Laius. From now on every step forward in the discovery of who Oedipus is will be a step backward as present facts and distant memory forge inexorably toward a narrative of horrific violation.

The contest between Oedipus and Tiresias is a contest over ways of knowing and ways of presenting knowledge in language. Oedipus is impatient with Tiresias’ riddling answers to his cross examination. He wants clear, unambiguous answers to direct questions, not allusive evasions that “darken” rather than enlighten. He wants language to embody meaning appropriate to a notion of truth and enlightenment as something one is conscious of having achieved, uncovered, and disclosed. Oedipean meaning comes from what he can see, from things subject to his will and captured by his categories. Yet despite his insistence on clear speech, his emotions—anger, suspicion, pride, and fear—prevent him from hearing even when Tiresias does speak clearly. Apparently hearing and speaking are as much a matter of subtext as text, of the dynamics between speakers as what it is that is said, as discussions in class often reveal. Even the simplest exchanges are less and more than they appear to be. Because truth is embedded in the disturbances of language and passion, it retains an opacity and is subject to contests shaped as much by the will to power as by the will to truth. If so, the “vague” phrases, oracular pronouncements, and poetic transcriptions that capture this dynamic may more fully represent “the” world and our exchanges about it than the more precise language Oedipus and political science demands.

Insistence on precision, rigor, and analysis presumes the world is of such a sort that it yields its deepest secrets to those who speak and think that way. It presumes too that, with the right language as part of the right method, mortals can pierce the veil of illusion. But this may itself be part of the myth of rationality that is so much part of the Oedipus story. The one character who speaks reasonably and lucidly throughout is Creon and he “has no drives except those which he can consciously control, and no relationships except those which bring an advantage, no qualities except those which can be calculated and entered on a balance sheet.” But if he, rather than Oedipus, is taken to be the ideal rational actor and theorist then we are truly lost. For Creon is neither capable of receiving nor needing further self-knowledge through suffering. He shrinks from every risk and danger, regards self-protection as foremost, is satisfied with profit, and is reasonable in an utterly mediocre way. If he is the alternative, we are better off with Oedipus.³⁸

But what attitude does the play take toward the two kinds of knowledge it dramatizes: the empirical, analytic, “academic” knowledge of an Oedipus and the inspired prophetic reading of signs of Tiresias? Obviously the play respects both enough to provide a stage for their agon. Less obviously it speaks in both voices, manifests both kinds of knowledge, and refuses to make any final judgment as to their ultimate value, except perhaps to suggest that no final answer is possible for men and women living human lives. Thus the play shares the deciphering knowledge of prophets who speak in the poetry of parables. In this it respects the gods in whose honor drama was performed and acknowledges the depth of a world that will not yield to the identities and categories humans impose on it. But the play also shares the logical, analytic, investigative spirit that defined Athenian democracy as well as the enlightenment project of arriving at clear truths and firm answers. For all the suffering his trials bring, Oedipus perseveres in his search for truth and does solve the riddle of Laius’s death and his own birth. And though the oracles prove true, and the gods stand vindicated against presumptuous men who suppose they may escape the forces that shape their destiny and character, the man we see at the play’s end returns to something like the sense of command and power he showed at the beginning. Human knowledge, despite its propensity to take the part it sees for the whole it cannot, retains its majesty.

To reassure her “husband” that Tiresias is indeed lying, Jocasta tells him of an earlier time when prophecy proved false; when Laius was told he would die at the hands of his son. But the reassurance she thinks to render by detailing the circumstances of Laius’s death and the “killing” of the boy has the opposite effect on Oedipus. As the truth rises slowly out of its dark confines, so does madness. But there is still one thread of hope, and upon it the king clings for his very life. Laius was killed by robbers but Oedipus was alone when he murdered the man on the road. But before the sent-for shepherd can arrive to corroborate the plurality of the murderers, another messenger arrives from Corinth bringing news he expects to cause much pleasure and a little pain. Polybius, Oedipus’s “father” has died of old age and Oedipus has been chosen king of Corinth. (Oedipus supposes Polybius to be his natural father which was why he fled Corinth to avoid killing him when Apollo responded to his questions about his parentage with a prophecy of incest and patricide.) Jocasta, who hears the news first, exults in the pain, for it confirms her belief that oracles are of no account. Hearing the news himself Oedipus joins her in trumpeting their triumph over prophets and, by implication, Apollo, the god of prophecy.

It is Jocasta who first draws the “existential” conclusion from the “fact” that if oracles are false and the gods do not exist, all is chance and opportunity. Men can do as they like without worry about the future, for it is all random, unstructured by history, institutions, or meaning beyond whatever we choose to provide for the occasion. Best then to live for the moment and at ease, discarding dire thoughts and fearful prophecies which disturb sleep to no purpose. But it is also Jocasta who first recognizes that their belief in the falsity of oracles may itself be false. For as the Corinthian messenger assures Oedipus that he need not fear killing his father because Polybius was not his real parent and goes on to detail how he saved Laius’s son by receiving the doomed child from the Theban shepherd who could not bear to carry out his master’s orders and let the boy die, she pleads with the man who she now knows is her son as well as her husband to desist from his investigation. But Oedipus is constitutionally unable to stop his relentless pursuit of his origins or give up the search for truth even to save his sanity. And so his mother/wife ends with what, given his character, she knows to be a futile future prayer, “god keep you from the knowledge of who you are.” Oedipus does not listen. Given the kind of man he is, he cannot listen. Instead he presses forward in the hunt and the queen, in desperation and despair, goes inside the palace to commit suicide.

So intent is Oedipus on solving the mystery of his birth, and “bringing all to light,” so adamant is he not to let go “the chance of finding out the whole thing clearly” that he completely misreads what Jocasta says and why she says it. He thinks her ashamed of his lowly birth and in a final fantasy of escape before the trap door closes, he imagines himself Fortune’s (Tuchē’s) child, self-made and self-generated, unencumbered by past or culture, a free individual agent who lives by his wits and mind.

This fantasy was not the king’s alone, for the sophistic enlightenment whose beginnings coincide with the play’s performance, emphasized the power of reason to confront and resolve the problems of existence without recourse to supernatural or mysterious forces. In this shift,³⁹ abstract and conceptual modes of thought largely replaced mythical and symbolic forms, as the world was now seen as operating through impersonal processes that followed “scientific” laws. Where the earth had been an all-giving mother, it was now a measurable surface that could be mapped. Where the sun had been a god driving a blazing chariot across the heavens, it was now a huge molten rock. And while the gods were not wholly dismissed, they were increasingly understood as psychological forces within man or as allegorical expressions of nature. Finally, the laws of cities came not from the gods but from the deliberations of human assemblies and councils, while the cities themselves were human institutions, not the seat of divine powers rooted in a sacred landscape.

But Oedipus is not the child of chance but of Laius and Jocasta. He is not a self-made, self-generated individual who produces meaning and decides his own fate, but a man whose identity and character has been subject to meaning and forces spatially and temporally beyond him. We might say that humans are partly in life what Oedipus fully is as a character in a play: scripted figures whose freely chosen action manifests an, at best, half-glimpsed character. Even a glimpse will elude anyone who stubbornly adheres to the myth that he is an actor whose behavior springs from individual self-interest and conscious choice, that he possesses extensive and clear knowledge of the environment and a well-ordered organized stable system of preferences and computational skills that allow him to calculate the best choice (given individual preferences) among the alternatives available.⁴⁰

Since human beings are never the disembodied creatures that Oedipus wrongly supposes himself to be, they can recognize their human condition of mortality (that they are bom, live, and die) but they cannot know their own nature. To possess such knowledge would be like jumping over one’s own shadow. Even the distinctive condition of being human is ambiguous, changing, and historical. Because thought cannot fix the essential meaning of our condition, it cannot define human nature. Only a god who left the theater entirely could do so. For Sophocles the nature of man is as much a theological problem as the nature of the gods.⁴¹

When Oedipus sees the truth, he puts out his eyes. The self-blinding is an act of compensation and recognition. It acknowledges that the pride he took in his far-seeing intelligence was unfounded since all his life he was blind to the realities that plagued his identity and action. It also reconciles him to Tiresias, whom he had ridiculed for his ignorance and obscure speech, but whom he now joins as a blind prophet in a shared vision of the truth. And it honors Apollo, the god he had scorned, and the existence of an oracular structure of significance which remains opaque for even the most discerning eyes of the most enlightened human.

But the self-blinding is also an act by someone we recognize as Oedipus, someone we have known through the description of his acts by others as well as by what we have seen before us. In its forcefulness and excess, it is typical of the man and expressive of a character who killed another in anger, impetuously left his “native” Corinth when he wrongly presumed to know the meaning of Apollo’s oracle, was quick to find hostile conspiracies among men who wished him no harm, who physically tortured the shepherd into talking, and who called down such fierce imprecations upon the killer of Laius (who happens to be himself) at the beginning of the play. Here is a fit son of Laius who would not yield (either to the oracle who said that if he had children his son would kill him), or on the road to a man (who turns out to be his son) and of a mother who commits suicide.

While Jocasta’s suicide takes place in the palace and so remains a private act, Oedipus insists that he be made what the play as a whole is: a public spectacle. When he appears, the elders of the chorus asks him what madness (mania) it was that came upon him, what diabolical spirit it was that leaped so savagely upon his life that he should come to this. But they shudder at the sight of him and at the prospect of an answer to their questions not only because of their love for Oedipus but for themselves. If a man of such consummate intelligence and courage, if the savior of their city, can be so wrong, what about the rest of us?

Oedipus answers that he and Apollo are the joint authors of his life. Apollo may have set the course, but then as now in the act of self-blinding, he, Oedipus, was the one whose action realized that fate. He may have acted in ignorance, but everything he did was his, in the sense that it belonged to him and expressed his character. This discovery about himself “is scarcely less crucial than the discovery of his identity.”⁴² In fact the action of the play is not about the deeds he was fated to perform but about his discovery that he has already fulfilled them and this discovery is due entirely to his own actions.⁴³

The play dramatizes the darkness inside enlightenment, a darkness whose exposure leaves men blind to the world they (thought) they knew so well and in which they felt comfortable and in control. The most far-seeing of men and women, those deemed most rational and most empirically grounded, live with an ignorance proportional to the certainties of their theories and the stable identities they impose on others and themselves.

As the paths of Oedipus’s life come together, his double identity becomes one and the tension between the surface and deeper meaning of his deeds is resolved. Yet the ambiguities of his life are not erased but rather recast in the play’s final “vision” of its chief protagonist.

On the one hand the man who thought himself to be (and was thought to be by others) the equal of the gods and the supreme calculator, is now equal to nothing. The proud king once confident in speech and of his clear-sighted vision expostulates in a series of monosyllabic cries and scarcely coherent exclamations.⁴⁴ The rational man who prided himself on being an independent agent is now, like Tiresias, a blind beggar dependent on everyone for everything. “To the extent to which a man’s fate is dependent on other men,” Simone Weil has written, “his life escapes not only out of his hands, but also out of the control of his intelligence; judgment and resolution no longer have anything to which to apply themselves. Instead of contributing and acting, one has to stoop to pleading or threatening; and the soul is plunged into a bottomless abyss of desire and fear, for there are no bounds to the satisfaction and sufferings that a man can receive at the hands of other men.”⁴⁵ At the heart of the play, the classicist Karl Reinhardt believes, is “illusion and truth as the opposing forces between which man is bound, in which he is entangled, and in whose shackles as he strives towards the highest he can hope for, he is worn down and destroyed.”⁴⁶ 4477

But that is only on one hand; there is another. It is suggested by Oedipus’s exchange with Creon, now king of Thebes, with which the play concludes. He begs the man he had “used most vilely” to drive him into exile so he may never hear another human voice. But a moment and few lines later, referring to the burial of his dead mother/wife he commands (episkēpto)⁴⁷ and begs (prostrepsomai) Creon to do the deed and he continues issuing orders until Creon has to remind this man, who should need no such reminder, that he must not “seek to be master in everything, for the things you mastered did not follow you throughout your life” (1522-23). This sense of command is consistent with the way Oedipus not only takes responsibility for fate, but seizes it, proclaiming that the deeds done are his alone. The old Oedipus is not dead. Chastened, blind, and dependent he may be; but that is not all he is. His search for the truth and the knowledge he has, however dearly bought, gives him the strength and courage to persevere amid his misery.

And that is perhaps the most important thing: Oedipus did solve the riddle of his birth and Laius’s death; he remained committed, single-mindedly so, to the hunt for the truth even when he had premonitions of the disaster that awaited its capture. If no man has suffered as he has, which is the boast he makes now, then no man has learned so well the lessons of mortal life. Knowledge not borne of suffering, which does not touch the soul as well as the mind, which does not remain in the company of passion, is abstract, uneventful, sterile, intellectualized—perhaps not knowledge at all. A recent critic of rational actor theory’s dependence on the economic approach to the analysis of political behavior argues that a “great deal of human conduct occurs under circumstances that are insufficiently similar to those postulated by the rational actor approach for that method to be of great use for the purpose of explanation. The highly touted virtues of elegance and simplicity are very attractive in the abstract. They are less so when their application to real world explanation is achieved at the price of implausibility,”⁴⁸ or I would add, of surface plausibility.

III

There is no conclusion to the Oedipus Tyrannus, if by conclusion one means a final scene that sets all things right and in place and in which some irrevocable synthesis of opposing views is achieved. While it is true that, in some respects Oedipus becomes Tiresias, the opposed views of knowing they represent and literally embody remain, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” where each is a rejoinder in a continuing dialogue about enlightenment.⁴⁹

Given the play’s stance toward the riddles it dramatizes and the way it itself becomes riddling, this is hardly surprising. Indeed it would be strange if there were one integrating conclusion that answered all the questions raised by the play. If we are, as the play suggests, caught in a web of local meanings which necessarily leave us riddles to ourselves if not others, then reducing the play to a single term would endorse what it seems to warn against.⁵⁰ In these terms the aim of producing lawlike statements about measurable phenomena, adhering to the virtues of coherent parsimonious deductive theories or, more generally, anxiously purging contradiction, seems naive and self-defeating.

Certainly any obvious conclusion would cause the play to lose its capacity to disturb the alliance of reason, science, method, and progress that continues to flourish as the dominant conceit in political science. Political science may be able to provide essential perhaps even saving knowledge on occasion. But it can do so only if it honors what it cannot do, recognizes that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing, and avoids both incest, the cozy accommodation with dominant discourses and structures of power, and patricide, a deracination that denies the shaping hand of the past, discards inherited habits, beliefs, and institutions, and regards memory as an irritant.⁵¹

Drama and poetry do not make arguments or offer logically consistent truths informed by a rigorous collection of data. Their power lies in surprise and disruption, in shocking excess and in provocations that push us often against our interests and inclination to deeper and wider understanding of who we are, what we know, and how these are related. They teach by ellipsis and revelation, dramatizing “unspeakable things unspoken,” making darkness visible without dissipating its terror. While Jocasta’s suicide takes place offstage, the narration of her violent deed by the messenger (1237-1378) calls attention to what is not seen by withholding it. In this the play creates a counterpoint between events seen in the clear light of day in the theater’s orchestra and the hidden events offstage, which acquire an added dimension of horror, mystery, and fascination because they are present but unseen. The offstage place is the interior of the palace, a space of the irrational and demonic.⁵² What are we to say of a theory that steps over the abyss with no recognition that it is there or anywhere? Will we regard humans as organisms who generate layers of meaning that lie beneath the surface of understanding or as self-transparent as Oedipus supposes? Aristotle said philosophy begins in wonder; Sophoclean tragedy (or rather this one) begins in wonder that the opacity of events and character do not create more wonder.⁵³

If life does indeed present such depth and complexity, then creativity is not the exclusive prerogative of the divinely inspired poet or individual hero but is an aspect of ordinary existence. If Freud is right in locating the unconscious inside the psyche, then “everyone is poetic, everyone dreams in metaphor and generates symbolic meaning in the process of living. Even in their prose people have unwittingly been speaking poetry all along.”⁵⁴ Perhaps that helps explain certain tensions in Leviathan and suggests a moment where the classicist Hobbes remembered Greek drama.

How is one to capture such depth or, if not capture it, at least honor its presence and generative capacities for good or for ill? The question leads back to Nietzsche’s Wir Philologen discussed in chapter two and to Martha Nussbaum’s concern for stylistic choices dictated by habit and convention, by “AngloAmerican fastidiousness and emotional reticence,” and by the “academization and professionalization of philosophy.”⁵⁵

IV

Even if Nussbaum is right about all texts (including those written by rational actor theorists) expressing a particular sense of life and possibility and representing choices that have as much to do with academic fashion and prestige as with truth, of what use is her polemic for political scientists concerned with the parameters of decision and policy? Indeed, as I asked in chapter two, of what “use” is a fifth-century b.c. drama for understanding political life in a modern nation-state? There are so many historical differences between then and now, between them and us; so great a transformation of scale and sensibility between ancient Athens and contemporary America; so many disjunctions between theater and university, stage and classroom, drama and political science that to suppose that some Greek play could retain its distinctive power to provoke and “enlighten” seems a gross exaggeration.

Yet the burden of this chapter as of this book as a whole is that it can and does; that if we wish to avoid drawing our political and methodological gods too much in our own likeness or wrapping ourselves in them as a form of mental prosthesis, we could do worse than make Oedipus Tyrannus companion reading for political science texts, methodological primers, and arguments about rational actors and theory.

Perhaps there are political and moral standards that exist somewhere in the mind of God or in the totality of the universe. Perhaps we need to believe there are if we are not to lose something of value (however it is we came to value it). But as Oedipus Tyrannus suggests, none of us lives in the mind of God (or the gods) or the totality of the universe, but in “specific places demarcated in their configurations and in their possibilities for action ... by transient, partial, shifting, and contingent understandings of what is and what should be.”⁵⁶ This is not to deny that some understandings are less partial and transient or that we can give reasons for our political judgments, or that some visions of the future and constructions of the past are better, fuller, or truer. It is to reiterate the conclusion of the Antigone that the world is not made for us or we for the world. Our history tells no purposive story and reveals no teleology. There is no Archimedian point from which we can confirm or authenticate our activities, no “redemptive Hegelian history or universal Leibnizian cost-benefit analysis”⁵⁷ to show that it will all turn out well in the end. What does exist is evidence that our fondest achievements, including reason, critical intelligence, and the capacity for reflection, however admirable, are “plagued” by a darkness that no enlightenment can wholly dissipate

Socrates of course is seen as repudiating this tragic sensibility in the name of reason, critical intelligence, and self-awareness. There are grounds for this claim. Yet his insistence in the Apology that he has human as opposed to divine wisdom and the kind of teacher he is dramatized as being speaks in a less optimistic register, one that, like comedy and tragedy, encourages democratic citizens to maintain a certain humility in the face of their power and self-importance. At least in that dialogue the world does not yield its meaning(s) to reason, and the commitment to an examined life is necessary because our partialities are never dissipated but are continually being reconfigured even as we are constituted by them. It is for this among other reasons that Socrates’ project sometimes seems less a matter of disinterring the deep features of our reality than showing us, as Sophocles does, how hard it is for us to obtain a clear sense of what we already know. In these terms the trouble lies for “us” as for Oedipus (and Wittgenstein) in our inability to see what is before our eyes, in the fact that we sometimes fail to see the truth not because it is so hard but because it is so familiar.

Plato is a more complicated case, as I will argue in the next two chapters on the Gorgias and Protagoras. Both dialogues present us with reason’s hope being disappointed by dialogue floundering on rocks of power and interest. What is uncertain is whether the disappointment is due to a misunderstanding of reason or because “we” are too corrupt to live up to its demands and realize its promise. The answer has much to do with the relationship between Socrates and Plato and everything to do with the question of philosophy’s relationship to democracy.

¹ Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the PrēSocratics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), p. 22.

² Michel de Certau, Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 3-4.

³ Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), p. 37.

⁴ See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1964), and Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 59-63.

⁵ I do not distinguish rational actor theory from rational choice theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory. On the common assumptions of these theories and the disagreements within and between them, see Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

⁶ The enthusiasm for “parsimony” might be less if the authors celebrating it knew its original Latin and Middle English meanings. The issue of maximizing one’s material advantage is raised in the play by the Greek word kerdos, which means both a search for material advantage and crafty or shrewd. Oedipus accuses Tiresias of being out for his own material gain when the seer tells him the truth.

⁷ See the discussion by Kristen Renwick Monroe in her editor’s foreword and “The Theory of Rational Action: Its Origins and Usefulness for Political Science,” in her edited book The Economic Approach to Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. xiii-xxiii, 1-30, and Jon Elster’s discussion of the ideal rational choice explanation in his introduction to his edited Rational Choice (New York: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 16-17.

⁸ In Greek hubris suggests the unlimited violence that comes from passion and pride. It is licentiousness as well as insolence, legally a gross personal insult and assault. I will generally rely on David Grene’s translation of the play in Sophocles, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

⁹ “Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the sphinx. Oedipus said, ‘I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?’ ‘You gave the wrong answer,’ said the sphinx. ‘But that was what made everything possible,’ said Oedipus. ‘No,’ she said. ‘When I asked, what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered Man. You didn’t say anything about Woman.’ ‘When you say Man,’ said Oedipus, ‘you include women too. Everyone knows that.’ She said, ‘That’s what you think.’ ” Muriel Rukeyser, “Myth,” in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 1787-88.

¹⁰ The earliest form of the riddle was “there is on earth a being two footed, four footed and three footed that has one name [literally one voice]; and it alone changes its form. But when it goes propelled on most feet, then is the swiftness of its limbs weakest.” This version is given by Charles Segal in his Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 56. See also the version and discussion in Thomas Gould’s translation and commentary on Oedipus the King (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 18-20, and Hugh Lloyd Jones in The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

¹¹ Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus, p. 87.

¹² When Creon returns from asking the oracle (who has said that the plague afflicting Thebes is due to the city’s harboring the murderer of Laius), the problem-solver king instantly starts the search: “Where is it to be found this obscure trace of an age old crime?” (pou tod’ heurethēsetai / ichnos palaias dustekmarton aitis;). As Bernard Williams points out, though aitias refers to a crime it belongs to the language of diagnosis and rational inquiry. “Oedipus plans to conquer the problem by the same means he used in overcoming the sphinx, by gnome, rational intelligence.” Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 58.

¹³ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 14. See the discussion of the point in Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 110-25.

¹⁴ In a recent essay, William Connolly argues that Foucault both challenges conventional morality in the pursuit of a higher ethical sensibility and is aware of the danger inscribed in the effort to shift the terms and bases of moral doctrines. Foucault (along with Nietzsche, Arendt, and Todorov) sees that “systemic cruelty flows regularly from the thoughtlessness of aggressive conventionality, the transcendentalization of contingent identities, and the treatment of good/evil as a duality wired into the intrinsic order of things” (“Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 [August 1993]: 365-66). Each one of these themes is dramatized in the play. I am not suggesting that Sophocles comes down on the same side as Foucault, though I think such an argument could be made on the ground that, though Sophocles believed there is a natural order of things and boundaries that had to be observed to avoid pollution (miasma), humans are, as historical beings, unable to fathom that order fully or adhere to it if known. I am suggesting that for Sophocles good and evil lie in the heart of their putative opposite, as rationality and irrationality do. Such polarities are evasions as well as inscriptions, desperate attempts to categorize under the rubric of normal.

¹⁵ See especially Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), chap. 1, and Alister Cameron, The Identity of Oedipus the King (New York: New York University Press, 1968).

¹⁶ See Segal’s discussion of this point, Oedipus Tyrannus, p. 118.

¹⁷ “Politicizing Ulysses: Rationalistic, Critical and Genealogical Commentaries,” in Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 29.

¹⁸ J. Donald Moon, “Political Science and Political Choice: Opacity, Freedom, and Knowledge,” in Terence Ball, ed., Idioms of Inquiry: Critique and Renewal in Political Science (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 239.

¹⁹ Quoted in Terence Ball, “Educative vs Economic Theories of Democracy,” in Diane Sansbury, ed., Democracy, State, and Justice: Critical Perspectives and New Interpretations (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1988), p. 19.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ See Gabriel A. Almond, “Rational Choice, Theory and the Social Sciences,” Harry Eckstein’s “Rationality and Frustration in Political Behavior,” and Mark P. Petracca, “The Rational Actor Approach to Politics: Science, Self-Interest and Normative Democratic Theory,” all in Monroe, The Economic Approach to Politics.

²² W. H. Riker and P. C. Ordeshook, An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), chap. 1, especially pp. 11-13.

²³ See Petracca, “The Rational Actor Approach to Politics.”

²⁴ (Emphasis supplied.) I am quoting Ronald Rogowski, “Rationalist Theories of Politics: A Midterm Report,” World Politics 20 (October 1977-July 1978): 299. See also Downs’s seminal An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). For an argument as to why the substance of the goals must count as much as the preference for them, see Hanna Pitkin’s discussion of consent as a ground for legitimacy in “Obligation and Consent II,” American Political Science Review 60, no. 1 (March 1966): 39-52. For an argument that no human community can or could live with such stricture, see part 3 (on Aristotle) of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). Tocqueville’s argument is most explicit in volume 2, part 1, chapter 1 of Democracy in America.

²⁵ See Martha Nussbaum, “Form and Content: Philosophy and Literature,” in her Love's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 3-5. In the same way rational choice and actor theorists tend to present choices of agents as the product of mentalistic acts by free-floating individuals, they present their own choice of method. In both instances they often ignore cultural constraints, including the definition of the profession and the desire for academic prestige and power that shapes their enterprise.

²⁶ See Sheldon S. Wolin’s discussion of “methodism” in “Political Theory As a Vocation,” reprinted in Martin Fleisher, ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 23-75.

²⁷ In Reading the Postmodern Polity, Shapiro is sharply critical of Jon Elster’s transformation of mythic art into rationalistic time (in the latter’s Ulysses and the Sirens [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984]). Cf. Segal’s discussion of time as an active agent in his Oedipus Tyrannus. Rather than serving as something Oedipus can find out and know with certainty, time “becomes an active force that finally found him out. . . . Rather than being an aid to human understanding time seems to have a kind of independent power that blocks knowledge” (p. 87).

²⁸ The idea of tragedy as a political institution is explored in my introduction to Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and in chapter 2 of The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

²⁹ See Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), and “The Freedom of Oedipus,” in Essays Ancient and Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 45-62. While I think Knox’s argument provocative, there is a danger in turning theater into history. For why, see Froma Zeitlin’s “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, pp. 101-42. This idea of theater should not be wholly alien to us, given such works as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

³⁰ Love’s Knowledge, pp. 16-17.

³¹ See note 26.

³² Arendt introduces the contrast between actor and spectator as a way of understanding philosophy with a parable attributed to Pythagoras. At a festival “some come to compete, others to sell things but the best come as spectators (theatai), so in life the slavish men go searching for fame and gain while the philosophers search for truth.” (See Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking [London: Secker and Warburg, 1978], pp. 129-31.)

³³ Men did but women did not since women were excluded from the central political institutions of the culture.

³⁴ See the discussion in Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 150-52, and my The Tragedy of Political Theory, chap. 4 (“Identity and the Oedipus Tyrannos”).

³⁵ Of course, no one is less a stranger and more at home than Oedipus.

³⁶ Again no one could be a more legitimate king. Oedipus is a tyrannos not so much because he acts tyrannically as because he has come to power through extraordinary means. “Tyranny” was a contested notion until the fourth century when it came to have most of the connotations we attribute to it. (The idea that intelligence is the prime condition for ruling is central to Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king.)

³⁷ See Segal’s discussion, Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 6-9.

³⁸ The quotation and argument are from Reinhardt in his Sophocles, trans. Hazel Harvey and David Harvey (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), pp. 111-12. I think Reinhardt exaggerates but it is a provocative point nonetheless, especially for a discussion of rational actor theory.

³⁹ As I have suggested in previous notes, the danger of such evolutionary stories is that they slight the degree to which what seems overcome by events or thought remains the ground for everyday life. The old ways did not disappear and in fact became more aggressively asserted as chapter five suggests.

⁴⁰ See Kristen Monroe’s summary in The Economic Approach to Politics, p. 4, and Herbert Simon’s discussion of bounded rationality in his two-volume work with that title (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), especially chap. 1.

⁴¹ See Arendt’s discussion in the Life of the Mind, vol. 1, and The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

⁴² Cameron, The Identity of Oedipus the King, p. 115. I have discussed this theme at length in The Tragedy of Political Theory, chap. 4.

⁴³ See the discussion in Knox, “The Freedom of Oedipus.”

⁴⁴ aiai, aiai, dustanos egō

poi gas pheromai tlamōn; pai moi

phthonga diapōt’atai phoradēn;

iō diamon, hin’ etēlou

Where am I going? where on earth?

where does all this agony hurl me?

where’s my voice?—

winging, swept away on a dark tide

O dark power of the god, what a leap you made!

(1441-45)

This is the Fagles translation as modified by Segal.

⁴⁵ Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1958), p. 96.

⁴⁶ Reinhardt, Sophocles, p. 134.

⁴⁷ One meaning of episkēptō is to make, lean upon, throw light upon, or impose upon. Another is to lay a strict charge upon someone or command them to do something. A third is to prosecute or indict. Given the themes of the play, the word, like the act of self-blinding, brings the parts into a whole.

⁴⁸ David Johnston, “Human Agency and Rational Action,” in Monroe, The Economic Approach to Politics, p. 106.

⁴⁹ See his discussion in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 6-7, 32, 97.

⁵⁰ Indeed, Frederick Ahl would suggest that this is precisely what I have done. He argues that Oedipus’s assumption that he did indeed kill his father and our presumption that he is right is precipitous, given that those upon whose testimony he (and we) relies to prove his guilt often have “vague identities and questionable motives” and that the king’s conclusions are based on words that are “notoriously elusive and prone to ambiguity.” Sophocles' Oedipus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 28.

⁵¹ See John H. Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond (New York: New York Review of Books, 1970).

⁵² The argument and some of the language is taken from Charles Segal, “Spectator and Listener,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Greeks, trans. Charles Lambert and Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 206-7.

⁵³ Jonathan Lear, “The Shrink Is In,” New Republic 82 (December 25, 1995): 24. Though I find some of Lear’s points persuasive and his formulations helpful, I do not endorse his overall defense of Freud.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 25.

⁵⁵ Love's Knowledge, p. 20.

⁵⁶ Stanley Fish, “The Common Touch, or One Size Fits All,” in Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 251.

⁵⁷ The phrase is Bernard Williams’s. See Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 166.