Introduction to Philosophy, Lecture 3: The Ode to Man and a Definition of Humanity

I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.

-- Hanif Abdurraqib, from There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

The "Ode to Man" in "Antigone" is easy to skip over when you're taking a class and everything feels random. Why are these Greek names so tough? Who cares what happened in a mythological city called Thebes? How could democracy depend on anything said in a play? I remember senior year of high school. "Antigone" was taught in a classroom under dull florescent lights, but the room was next to a courtyard no one ever went to. Sunlight fell on that overgrown area and it seemed like one of those magical and mysterious places heroes in young adult books would stumble upon. Maybe they'd find a sword or a portal to another realm.

"Antigone" is truly a majestic work, but it is grim. It isn't an invitation to becoming a superhero. Rather, "Antigone" serves as reflection on some incredibly uncomfortable truths. Perhaps family isn't what we think it is; loyalty, the primary way we understand love, could be too destructive for our own good. You might suspect that these sorts of questions and concerns don't come from a carefree attitude or a disorganized way of looking at the world. Does "Antigone" have elements of an underlying philosophy? Does it engage a way of seeing things that is no less than comprehensive?

The "Ode to Man" hints the answer is yes, even though it is spoken by those with a specific role in the play. There is a definition of humankind that we, the audience, are asked to consider at length. Before we speak about that, I want to talk about two other ways classical philosophy attempts to define what it means to be human. Differing views about this are not part of a mere thought experiment. No, a debate about what it means to be human informs how we make laws and customs. Maybe even more than that. With a sense of what we are capable of, we arrive at a conclusion of what we can be responsible for. The questions "What does it mean to be human?" and "What is justice?" are deeply connected.

Plato wrote after Sophocles, but the theory of forms demonstrates just how much is at stake with classical philosophy. The theory is simple enough: you use a word like "couch" or "chair" or "garden." How do you know how to use the word? How do you apply it to different couches and chairs and gardens? Well, maybe your mind knows the ideal forms–what various objects are truly like–and you can apply that knowledge to lesser forms in order to identify them.

OK, you say, this is silly. I mean, if I'm using a giant rock as a chair, does that mean I have an ideal form of "chair" in my head which the rock corresponds to? Or am I just sitting on a rock and calling it a chair? Also--and here you look at me directly like I don't know what I'm talking about–is this really about being human? This looks more like a problem for philosophy of language (How do words work?) or epistemology (a fancy term for theory of knowledge: we know because the ideal forms underlie reality).

So let's talk a little bit more about what Plato was really about. We're talking about a world where there are philosophers, but they're regarded as silly people who think "everything is water" or "everything is wind." They are not typically regarded as people who could advance science, seriously challenge tradition, or imagine new ways of living and governing. Plato gives us the figure of Socrates, both his mentor and a fictional character in Plato's works, to change that.

OK fine. What does Socrates have to do with the theory of forms? Well, everything, as it turns out. The theory of forms features prominently in the Republic, where Socrates works through the question "What is justice?" with a group of young men, some of whom are Plato's brothers. Plato's brothers are eager for power and one of them in particular will say anything to get it. The forms are introduced with that of a couch, but the larger question is if there is a form of justice. If there is, one must be as conscious of it as possible in order to rule. Socrates, you can say, is anchoring justice to knowledge when a number of those around him think it is fine to say anything to get what they want.

However, the rhetorical/philosophical task is bigger than that. Plenty of people think they know what justice is and should rule over everyone! Socrates is aware of this too. Why did he pick a couch as an example of the forms? In the Republic, justice is illustrated by describing ideal cities. One of those cities is mocked, called the city of pigs. People in that city have no especially strong ambition or desire for conquest, but they do live well, each working for the other and living within their means. People in that city might not mind lying on couches and talking like a philosopher.

So the forms slyly ask "Is there a form of man?" And maybe human being at its best resembles someone like Socrates, someone willing to push the bounds of curiosity but striving to do no harm. You might say at this point that I've done a great job talking about a book, but what about the forms as a philosophical theory? Truth is, it's very powerful. Platonists exist with regard to philosophy of mathematics. Forms are very useful when it comes to concepts like numbers. And all of us embrace Platonism in a way via monotheism. Nietzsche famously called Christianity Platonism for the masses. If there is an ideal form of justice, it is only a small step to calling that God. The more or less intuitive feeling we have that something isn't right and we can assert this on a cosmic scale is the forms at work. Our moral instincts, no pun intended, have been formed.

Aristotle has a phrase describing humankind: "rational animal," where "rational" is the species and "animal" is the genus. It is a phrase which does not feature prominently in the Aristotlean corpus, though you could say it sums up his thought. In the Middle Ages, when religious thinkers held Aristotle was the philosopher, the master of all who know, "rational animal" was key. It was built into Thomas Aquinas holding that there was a natural law, knowable by reason, binding all people morally whether they knew Christ or not. It fed into the idea that a hierarchy, rational and divine, ultimately governed us.

Even though "rational animal" isn't strictly speaking Aristotle, it can be used to define humankind in a less strict way. Aristotle describes humans as political animals who can rule and be ruled in turn; he works through ethics philosophically, thinking how virtues like courage and generosity can be transformed by and into friendship and set to work for the greatest good. Humans pursue happiness, he holds, and you can say that the rational animal is willing to use reason in order to have happiness by means of virtue.

You might say "So what? Don't we do that already?" The counter: No. We do not. Plenty of people punch down. They see someone who did something they can criticize and they do not hesitate to hurt them. That's not reason, that's not happiness, that's not virtuous. That's moral shaming for the sake of exerting power. Society is not more rational or virtuous because people scream "get a job" at homeless people or refuse to help those in need. Note that to assert you have virtues, you cannot hide behind the notion that charity is optional. If you believe generosity or temperance are things the next generation should practice, you yourself practice them. This is an extremely radical teaching for our age. Aristotle's philosophy puts you in a position where you are bound by your word.

It makes sense, really. The term meaning "rational" is related to logos. In the Gospel of John in the New Testament, Christ is repeatedly referred to as logos, the "Word." The Greek means speech or reason. For Aristotle, the rational animal is merely the talking animal.

Even though virtues strongly imply living for something higher, I want to draw our attention to the word "animal." "Rational" describes, merely modifies, "animal." It does not dictate the entire substance of the noun. Ultimately, the phrase points to the fact that we have to come to full terms with being an animal, that the mystery is ourselves. We have to figure out what pain and death mean for us. What dignity we will assert, what shames must be accepted. There's something deeply existential about the pairing of two terms which we normally hold to be in tension.

Your translation begins around line 390, and I have to strongly disagree with how it is rendered:

There are many strange and wonderful things,
but nothing more strangely wonderful than man.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger is more correct when commenting on this passage. Not "strange and wonderful," but terrible. Deinos is the Greek: clever and terrible. You can think about it like so. Remember that Greek myth where a king asked an inventor to build him the cruelest torture machine possible? And the guy came up with a bull where you could place someone, they would be tortured to death, and their screams would be like the noises a bull made? So the king put the inventor into his own torture machine? That's what is going on in these first two lines, that's deinos. We can outsmart ourselves into situations worse than death. You are not going to convince Sophocles that we cannot possibly destroy the planet.

As you go through the ode, you see how humankind conquers through a combination of cleverness and cruelty. They hunt birds, trap fish, herd wild beasts. This is, for Heidegger, a Presocratic rendering of the world. Humans respond to the violence of chaos with a violence of their own. Out of this comes what we call "reason." This is not the Platonic forms or the "rational animal." This is chaos, strife, too much at once being thrown in our face. Like, say, having your brother not be buried and then wondering if your family even exists at all. Or, as the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides put it, "everything is one," there is no change, because to be is to be part of being. It makes sense when you think about how static grief is, how much violence and loss we have to pretend doesn't weigh us down. Or another Presocratic, Heraclitus, saying you can't step into the same river twice–everything is in flux. We're just responding blindly to events much bigger than us and not really knowing what we're doing.

This isn't just me waxing philosophically to better paint the play's emotional depth. There is a definition of human being here pertinent to the way we run things nowadays. Heidegger will kill me for saying so–he believes the play opens the door to a more original confrontation with Being–but I think you can fairly say that a more modern definition of humankind is at least somewhat visible here. Things like American Constitutionalism do talk about deliberation, sure. But they also try to create incentives so the blindly selfish are not too destructive and our orders don't assume any specific virtue or mode of moral reasoning. We've got plenty of people who believe that the way the world works is to take when you can and never give back. We work with the idea that humans are violent and are tamed through orders which dictate their confrontations with each other. Think "due process," "checks and balances," capitalism's embrace of competition.

Hegel, another German philosopher, held that the tension between Antigone and Creon generated modern politics. Natural and religious forces met the law, and the result was a public sphere which had to recognize the irreducibility of the private. This is a lot to think about, but hopefully you're getting started, and you can see that our thoughts about who we are in the largest sense need to be revealed and challenged.