Tauriq Moosa - June 25th, 2009 in Feature 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

The story of Medea is something of a “classic” of philosophical investigation, if such things as classics could exist in such a sphere. The focus in Eurpides’ play centres around the daughter of King of Colchis, Medea, in a dilemma. “Dilemma” is somewhat of an understatement, since it rests in deciding whether to murder her children or not. The tragedy of this play lies in the central human need to be understood– in Medea’s case it is the need for her blinkered husband, Jason, to understand all she has been through to marry him. She has watched her family ties be defenestrated; she has endured the ousting from her country of birth. Yet, Jason has decided, being the brutish man he is with his horrible Y-chromosome, to leave Medea and their sons for something sleeker and sexier (and no doubt something without umbilical attachments). Medea of course is in outrage, having gone through much strife to simply be with Jason – yet in the blink of a Grecian eye, Jason has tumbled headlong into the comforts of someone else. Our sympathy is hardened into protracted vengeance and we yearn for Jason to feel some pain as recompense; thus we can at least identify with Medea’s need to make Jason feel the pain she has gone through.

We understand her.

But its her actual decision which is philosophically interesting. Her decision is to literally severe the umbilical ties which unite Jason to her. That is, she decides to murder her sons to allow their hot blood to raise the heat of outrage within their uncaring, ossified father.

Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics have gazed upon this dilemma till their eyes were sore with wonder. Professor Julia Annas, in her broad outline of the various responses to Medea’s dilemma, states that the Stoics would have disagreed with Medea herself who thought that anger was dominating her reason. There are no “two parts” to Medea – she was a unified whole. Plato perhaps – we don’t know his actual position on most things since he spoke through characters and not from an official standpoint, like Aurelius – would have said there is a conflict, relating to different parts in Medea. Namely her passion and her reason really are in conflict. Someone like Galen, a late Platonist, would have thought that reason and anger were battling in the “soul” of Medea and eventually anger won.

Medea of course eventually kills her children.

What has this story or this investigation got to do with anything? As I stated in the beginning, it rests mainly in the need to be understood. Medea has an urgent need for Jason to understand her – post hoc, of course, but it seems that if he had understood what she had been through and (more importantly) appreciated it, he would not have left her so suddenly. The need to be understood is perhaps the central problem of philosophy, or at least an echo of the whole human enterprise, often called the “human condition”.

I don’t rightly kno what if anything is the human condition but I imagine it is this: What we consider internally often finds no harmony with what occurs externally and our need to reconcile these two incoherent and disharmonious constitutions leads to all manner of problems, with ourselves, others and the world as a whole. This we might consider a possible definition of the “human condition” (though I will be the first to say it is not a resolute or final one).

For example: We consider ourselves to be central to our lives, since the events and people we affect and focus orbit our sphere of knowledge. Yet to the universe at large and the earth as a whole, we are merely infinitesimal, insignificant bundles of perception, moulded by the fingers of nature and given a spark of consciousness as a cruel joke. We die and rot and amount to dust, which the closing fist of the universe will drive home into meaninglessness. We create meaning and yet we are largely meaningless, to the large expanse of time that has come before and will arise after. Meaning is meaning made in the face of meaninglessness.

For further illustration: We struggle and fight for things we believe in. We find certain books, careers, people important. Yet to most people, these important people (to us) are to most others unimportant because they do not know them.

These are illustrations of the incoherent nature of considerations between what occurs within our minds and what exists independently of our thoughts of them (I here take it for granted that, like GE Moore, I have two hands). This is labelled “absurdity” by many philosophers, like Mark Rowlands, and is thus central to all interesting and “important” dilemmas.

Absurd is of course another reason for the problem of lying; lying is thought to be bad for the simple reason that it is an echo of insanity. You are presenting reality as it is only to you, but reality does not actually exist like that. You lie and tell your parents that there is no girl in your bedroom, but there is one. Or perhaps you lie to your friends and say you were with a girl, when you were not. Both, if believed seriously by the speaker, would constitute madness since the girl is either there or not – independently of whether you assert it or not. Thus it only takes your parents checking in to confirm your statement. This makes lying, according to some philosophers, a resemblance to insanity, which is not a good thing if one is trying to formulate a coherent picture of reality. The only difference is that one is aware that the world is not as one says when one is lying; insanity, one does not know – or, rather, one believes the uttered falsehood.

Medea and her choices are “absurd” only to the extent that her inner feelings needed to find a balance or expression externally. This might be a reason for the need for humans to create art; our consciousness – which might be defined as the awareness of the incoherence of our external and internal spheres – allows us to take a full-throated cry of internal silence to a melodious utterance in the outer sphere of reality. (Reality, Nabokov once said, is the only word that was permitted to always be written in between quotation marks).

This is why we struggle to understand one another. We are already struggling to understand our significance in our immediate spheres and their ripples into the wider sphere of the world. Our creation of meaning is forever the building of sand-castles upon a stormy beach; we are fighting against a strong tide of reality, bashing against the rocks which themselves we hope will bleed. Reality will have none of it.

If we take this thought further into the sphere of the social world there are worse problems. Consider: the sphere which you represent, as a lawyer, academic or liberal fighter (for example) is part of a larger group. When you speak, you speak as “we”, which is nothing but a pluralised first-person viewpoint. Thus when you (plural) are fighting against, for example, the oppression of women, you are taking your internalised, important and, according to you, sensible beliefs into another wider sphere. It does not chime, it finds no harmony. Thus we have conflict, we have a forced view of reality thrust upon another sphere. We have the liberal secularist spheres attempting to free those who live under the conservative, Islamic one. For both, the absurdity does not rest with reason or logic or mutual understanding. It rests primarily with each sphere running down the rocks of reality and being pulled in by the tide of the external world.

One way we can begin to change does rest however in the use of reason to justify our beliefs and our ideas. This is why we need to begin to shift our own positions on many things we take for granted, which I will speak about next time. These might be thought of as the target areas of applied ethics, though one is often ignored by many: namely, the creation of new people. But with these thoughts in hand, I hope the reader will be able to follow me as I target key issues next time: things like science, drugs, creating new people and abortion, and animal ethics.

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Tags: human nature, Medea, philosophy