The play Oedipus the King depicts the theme of fate and knowledge, king’s power and relations between people. Factual explanation can be given: he now knows himself to be a foundling; he has lived through many vicissitudes, and feels his achievements can cancel any shame of lowly origin. But this supreme of Greek tragedies operates at more than one level of meaning. Oedipus, born a royal babe in the city of Thebes, had yet been transferred crippled and helpless to the mountainside. There under the weather, in earth’s bosom, he had somehow survived, to be transferred back again to an adopted royalty in Corinth. Thence he comes back to Thebes and solves the famous riddle and conquers the Sphinx. He has now become technical, resourceful, and political, exercising a skill of mind which has identified the nature of man and paved the road to political power. Thesis “Unconscious knowledge” exists but in the play it cannot be used to justify actions and behavior of the king.
Unconscious events cannot be used to justify actions of Oedipus as he is a man of power driven by personal gain and desire to use his power. Elected king of Thebes, he is the source of her security and the symbol of her law; state and society repose in his keeping. He is to be returned to the mountain side, to the lonely natural earth whence he came. This is his destiny, and for this he prays in abnegation at the close of the play. There is something in the symbolism of his career, and in the words with which it is memorialized, which is evocative of drama not upon the tragic stage but in the theories and speculations of Greek science.
It is possible to refute these arguments and use examples of Jocasta’s telling Oedipus that he resembles her late husband; the fact that Oedipus walks with a limp and that his name means “swollen foot”; the fact that he marries a woman old enough to be his mother. These are unconscious actions which free a personal from moral responsibility of his actions. Oedipus had an ambivalent character and a doubtful destiny. He too had been a foundling, discovered on the earth’s surface mysteriously alive, whose early existence had been nasty, brutish and brief. Moreover, both in his origin and in his historical development, he seemed to exhibit like Oedipus the two contrary forces of chance and intelligence: his life as an animal organism was a physical thing, biologically determined, yet it could embrace the discovery of technologies, the building and ruling of cities, the moulding of custom and law. Oedipus remarks: ”I do have some hope left, at least enough to wait for the man we’ve summoned from the fields” (Sophocles).
The tragedy shows that for the norms by which his behavior is governed, while they lie within the cosmos, lie outside history and process. They are as eternal as the cosmos itself. If the cosmos had a history, well and good. But it was always a history which exhibited a complete intelligence already present in the beginning. By its standards, Oedipus the King, instrument of salvation for Thebes and source of political authority in the state, is a ‘great’ man, typical exponent of the eternal norms of justice, political authority and wisdom as applied in a given social context. He is a fixed quantity. If he falls, there is either, in his otherwise perfect virtue, a tragic flaw, an excess or a blindness, some incautious neglect of divine power, which merits exposure; or, if none, then he leaves the stage with his moral dignity still essentially unimpaired, a hero to the end, and a hero of the civilized condition. Suppose that his kingdom of Thebes, with its religion and laws, is a pattern of chance configuration that sprang from the putrefaction of worms, with twisted roots that reached down not to realms of death but to life and growth, formless, vital, without prejudice or prejudgment? He was the scientist who had solved one riddle of the Sphinx, the riddle of the nature of that human being who starts a helpless babe and returns to a frail senility.
In the tragedy, his very language is only a highly developed form of that means of communication open also to the brutes, and his codes of behavior, like his language, have been ‘invented’; they represent successive adaptations to new needs. His developing intelligence continually complicates its patterns of response, and at the same time discovers new needs which evoke the response. This does not imply any necessarily mechanical relationship between man and his environment. The tragedy shows that civilization as a historical process can be viewed as both moulding man and as moulded by man. The only science which can understand it and evaluate it is historical and anthropological; a science which does not shrink from the assumption that man never emerged full-grown upon the earth. The historical and evolutionary approach to morals and law is no less likely than the metaphysical to come up with the conclusion that ‘mercy, pity, peace and love’ have in fact proved to be historically necessary to man’s survival and development. Indeed, in the history of the west, the violence done to these virtues has been more often committed by men who professed to march under metaphysical banners. On the contrary, law and justice become recognizable as norms of conduct only as our civilized condition advances, and they are therefore only a facet, even if a very vital one, of our technological progress. The tragedy shows that there had been a tendency for life to become less savage and more humane, and for forms of government to become correspondingly less autocratic and to rest more on negotiation of opinion. Justice and law can never be placed above or beyond men to regulate them by divine or metaphysical fiat; on the contrary, they are responses to all-too-human needs; they are patently evolved by trial and error. Accordingly men had to receive those divine gifts with which we are all familiar, together with instruction and education in their use: fire and the technical skills, The advantage of citing this much shorter and simpler example is that it so conspicuously establishes the connection in Plato’s mind between a regressive concept of human history and morality.
In sum, actions and behavior of Oedipus cannot be considered as unconscious and justified by any excuse. It is this willingness to take account of man scientifically as a species, with only relative importance in the cosmos, that prepares the intellectual climate for what we shall call in this book the liberal temper in Greek politics. The term liberal can mislead; in application it should be carefully qualified. What has to be asserted at the beginning is that, in sum, here is a whole philosophy of man and a point of view towards his morals and politics profoundly different from the classic view so familiar from text-books and printed so deeply on the mind of the west by Plato and Aristotle. In the liberal-historical view, the city-state is a useful form of society, but it can never be viewed as unique, or indeed as ideal; there are too many others.
Works Cited
Sophocles, Oedipus the King.