Law and Justice - Antigone and the Defense of Tradition - 6.1 Introduction to Tragedy

Classical Athens was the birthplace of democracy, and that democracy, the democratic spirit, the openness of democratic culture, would make Athens the birthplace of a cultural renaissance, a cultural explosion that was unprecedented in human history. Athens would see the rise of history, the birth of philosophy as we know it, the rise of great forms of literature like tragedy and comedy. In the last lesson we talked about the Sophists, a philosophical movement that came to be centered in Athens, teaching rhetoric and teaching morality, teaching the sons of the elite to become great politicians, political leaders, speakers, giving them the talents and skill sets that would allow them to excel in democratic life. The Sophists also were challengers of traditional morality, and this was what we emphasized in the previous lesson. We looked at men like Protagoras, who said man is the measure of all things, who said about the gods I can know nothing because of the brevity of life and the obscurity of the subject. It was a radical challenge to traditional beliefs grounded in religion. The Sophists also invented a distinction between nomos, or convention on the one hand, and phusis, or nature on the other, between culture, convention, and objective truth, reality, nature on the other. And it's a profound challenge to morality because it asks you what about your moral beliefs are grounded in nature, are objectively part of the order of things, and what are simply conventions? Think about driving on the right side of the road here in the United States. It's a good thing, it's a convention we have and it has positive consequences, but there's nothing objectively natural about it. It's simply a convention. It could as easily be one way or the other. It's a convention we've contrived in order to maintain our way of life, but there's nothing objectively grounded about it. What else about our rules of living? Our moral beliefs might be simply conventional, cultural, and not really grounded in nature or truth. It's a provocative challenge, and it would shake Athenian culture in the fifth century and give rise to a range of reactions. And over the next several lessons we'll be looking at several of the reactions that were provoked by the challenge of the Sophists. First we'll look at Sophocles, a tragedian. Then we'll look at two philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, both of whom would give rise to a philosophical system that was a response to the challenge of the Sophists.