Rethink.

1. Con­sid­er­a­tion of come­di­ans: they use laugh­ter to make every­thing ridicu­lous. The good things, while made ridicu­lous, still are essen­tially good and can­not be dis­missed. They are nec­es­sary no mat­ter how much we laugh. The bad things, made ridicu­lous, fall away quickly. All come­di­ans — includ­ing those who believe all is spin, such as Jon Stewart/Stephen Col­bert — think they are defend­ing the truest, per­haps the old­est goods in prac­tic­ing their art well.

2. A more sophis­ti­cated con­sid­er­a­tion of com­edy comes about in “The Birth of Tragedy” when Niet­zsche asso­ciates Socrates with the comic. Strauss on Nietzsche’s “Socrates:”

“He [Socrates] is the pro­to­type of the ratio­nal­ist and there­fore of the opti­mist, for opti­mism is not merely the belief that the world is the best pos­si­ble world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imag­in­able worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best pos­si­ble world can be ren­dered harm­less by knowl­edge: think­ing can not only fully under­stand being, but can even cor­rect it.…

Ratio­nal­ism is opti­mism, since it is the belief that reason’s power is unlim­ited and essen­tially benef­i­cent.… Ratio­nal­ism is opti­mism, since the belief in causes depends on the belief in ends, or since ratio­nal­ism pre­sup­poses the belief in the ini­tial or final supremacy of the good. The full and ulti­mate con­se­quences of the change effected or rep­re­sented by Socrates appear only in the con­tem­po­rary West: in the belief in uni­ver­sal enlight­en­ment and there­with in the earthly hap­pi­ness of all within a uni­ver­sal state, in util­i­tar­i­an­ism, lib­er­al­ism, democ­racy, paci­fism and socialism.”

- Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristo­phanes, p. 7

We must keep in mind that Strauss is only stick­ing to Nietzsche’s sur­face here for a pur­pose. Strauss is putting us in the Aristo­phanean posi­tion of defend­ing the ances­tral and see­ing Socrates from that view­point. Socrates is not Rousseau, and the lat­ter half of the quote is pure Rousseau. More­over, we have noted from Nat­ural Right and His­tory the truer teach­ing — rea­son can­not cor­rect “being.” The whole of being is itself beyond being; reason’s abil­ity to merely appre­hend “what is” in all cases is dubious.

How­ever, I bring up this more sophis­ti­cated view of the “comic” to make the point that com­edy, in appeal­ing to what is “com­mon sense,” begins with the ances­tral but is beholden to rea­son as progress with­out know­ing it. “Com­mon sense” can be con­cerned with imme­di­ate effec­tive­ness, after all. This is an enor­mous prob­lem because peo­ple who love wis­dom or are very ratio­nal — peo­ple who can see 10 steps ahead of every­one else — are not nec­es­sar­ily embraced by the comic. The comic only embraces ratio­nal­ity as opti­mism: it con­fuses the two and misses that rea­son­able peo­ple can some­times see prob­lems the rest dis­miss as para­noid ravings.

3. The plot of Aristo­phanes’ “Clouds” is sim­ple enough: a father, Strep­si­ades, is of mod­er­ate means and is going broke. His son, Phei­dip­pi­des, is using all the fam­ily money to become a supe­rior horse­man. These lav­ish tastes stem from the merger of old and new Athens — Strep­si­ades didn’t have much money but mar­ried rich, and his wife instilled lav­ish tastes in the son.

So what Strep­si­ades wants to do is get Phei­dip­pi­des to go to Socrates and learn sophistry, i.e. the “unjust speech.” With that he can win any law­suit against cred­i­tors and can go back to his son wast­ing tons of cash and him­self, well, sit­ting around fart­ing (I kid you not. Aristo­phanes uses this sort of joke every other line). He goes to Socrates’ thinkery him­self and runs into new deities Socrates intro­duces — “the Clouds.” The “Clouds” promise Strep­si­ades quite a bit if he lis­tens to Socrates, and even give Socrates a hint or two about how to deal with his new pupil. He almost becomes decent enough to defend him­self, but doesn’t have the nat­ural abil­ity. Socrates expels him but the Clouds get him to enroll Phei­dip­pi­des and Phei­dip­pi­des learns the unjust speech. The father holds a feast for the son but they argue about the pious things; need­less to say, son is a lot less pious hav­ing worked with Socrates, and beats his father up after the ver­bal exchange becomes heated. Father encoun­ters the Clouds again and learns from the Clouds that his ini­tial want of injus­tice brought this on. He turns to piety of a reg­u­lar sort, and in this turn­ing, decides to burn Socrates’ “thinkery.” This he does, and the god Her­mes appears to drive him to expel Socrates and his dis­ci­ples even from the theater.

4. The struc­ture of the play is very com­plex — Aristo­phanes is fea­tured him­self as a char­ac­ter, the Clouds are selec­tive in what they tell and don’t tell the audi­ence and other actors. It is pos­si­ble to get a read­ing of the play that is very sym­pa­thetic to Socrates.

5. I am not in the mood for such a read­ing. While eros unites all com­i­cally in the Sym­po­sium, where Aristo­phanes and Socrates seven years after this play was per­formed don’t seem to hate each other, the end­ing of this play is absolutely bru­tal. The god Her­mes con­dones arson and encour­ages vio­lence against Socrates and his fol­low­ers, and Strep­si­ades, an unthink­ing brute who was more than will­ing to treat cred­i­tors like dirt when he thought his son could win any law­suit, is given not a “last laugh” but a rather seri­ous role in the polity. His piety is good enough to get Athens horse­men it will need for war, and makes him use­ful to the city’s higher pur­pose of throw­ing the dis­tract­ing and unnec­es­sary out.

Aristo­phanes comes before us as a char­ac­ter in the midst of the play to declare his wis­dom; he too is a devo­tee of the Clouds, who can mimic every­thing. Only: Socrates believes the Clouds to be a stand-in for human rea­son — imi­ta­tion is the province of the imag­i­na­tion and refers back to the uniquely human. Aristo­phanes sees the Clouds as gen­uinely divine and claims to be a dis­ci­ple of Diony­sus, the god of wine, himself.

It’s hard to see how Socrates isn’t cor­rect in this debate: how on earth are the Clouds gods? Strauss notes that the Clouds want to be gods that don’t wan­der, but find a home. They want to reside in Athens. Socrates is their only devo­tee, but a flawed one. His will­ing­ness to con­sider them divine stems from a rejec­tion of divin­ity in any tra­di­tional sense. What Socrates doesn’t see is that rea­son is a tool for divine, not just human, pur­poses. The Clouds may reduce to rea­son, but it isn’t human rea­son exclu­sively — the Clouds are every­where, and are lit­er­ally above man.

The Olympian Gods and the city that bears the name of the god­dess of wis­dom have a stake in the Clouds. Rea­son can never divorce entirely from “com­mon sense” for Aristo­phanes. If you look unhealthy, you must be unhealthy — Socrates’ gaunt­ness doesn’t reflect mod­er­a­tion as much as hubris: he thinks him­self beyond the human.

But we’ve seen above that “com­mon sense” can be fatally flawed: it doesn’t even real­ize its own ground­ing. And fathers, want­ing the best for their sons, can end up throw­ing away years of tra­di­tion that might help the city as a whole. Strep­si­ades is an arson­ist at the end of the drama; his pious rev­e­la­tion is just as destruc­tive to the city as the sophist that Socrates is pur­ported to be. Except that it wasn’t Socrates who came into the thinkery ask­ing if he would teach injustice.

Point is, Aristo­phanes is between a rock and a hard place in defend­ing his comic art. He wants to defend all the good things the city wants at once — wealth, mar­tial virtue, reason/superior speech, piety. Guess what? No mat­ter how much aware­ness your play may show as to the ten­sions between those things, even the exag­ger­ated, poorly rep­re­sented Socrates is in a bet­ter posi­tion to address the issue of the good. He’s at least hon­est about the things that aren’t com­pat­i­ble with each other.

So the ques­tion we’re left with is: Does human rea­son, which allows actual appre­hen­sion of the good, require a “beat­ing up” of one’s own father? How rad­i­cal is the ques­tion­ing of “com­mon sense?” The Pla­tonic and Xenophon­tic Socrates, the one that would never teach an unjust speech or hold “clouds” to be respon­si­ble for all phe­nom­ena, keeps the cri­tique very rad­i­cal. That much Aristo­phanes got right; what he missed is why it is essen­tial to not give up on lines of ques­tion­ing. Peo­ple are going to ask ques­tions about author­ity no mat­ter what, and it is when they don’t have any ques­tions one has to won­der: either they’re frit­ter­ing their money away on lux­u­ries like horses, not car­ing for the debt. Or maybe they’re per­pet­u­ally at war, with their neigh­bors and other cities. Finally, if they have no ques­tions, maybe they’re in the most dan­ger­ous state of all, think­ing they know every­thing when they can’t even artic­u­late what they believe.

• Pre­lim­i­nary Thoughts on Body, Soul and Moral­ity: Xenophon, Mem­o­ra­bilia I 2.19–20
• A Very Pre­lim­i­nary Thought on Nature and Convention
• Towards a Niet­zschean Under­stand­ing of Pol­i­tics: Notes on “The Case of Wag­ner” (Part 1)
• Towards a Niet­zschean Under­stand­ing of Pol­i­tics: Notes on “The Case of Wag­ner” (Part 2)
• Towards a Niet­zschean Under­stand­ing of Pol­i­tics: Notes on “The Case of Wag­ner” (Part 3)

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