The central argument of this groundbreaking book is that Plato developed ideals of comedy and tragedy that also function as critiques of actual comedies and tragedies as composed and performed during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and that his own dialogues instantiate these ideals. Briefly, the ideal of comedy is to portray only what is genuinely ridiculous as ridiculous, i.e., “the bad and stupid” (22); the ideal of tragedy is to imitate only what is truly finest and noblest as being such: i.e., wisdom and virtue (130). This is what Trivigno calls in both cases “the veridical constraint.” There is also an “educative” constraint, which in the case of tragedy is that it ought to make us as good as possible by giving us good models (135), and in the case of comedy that it should enable us to avoid what is truly ridiculous (28). There are in addition “emotional constraints”: comedy should generate “appropriate emotions of hostility” towards the bad and stupid, as well as moderate laughter (31); tragedy should shape the emotional reactions of the audience (136), specifically, by preventing emotions of pity and fear towards things (like loss of wealth or even death) that are not truly pitiable or fearful. There is, finally, a political constraint: tragedy should never portray living citizens as living the best and noblest life (137); comedy should portray enemies and never friends as being ridiculous (32).
Once these constraints for ideal tragedy and comedy are established, the book seeks to show that Plato’s dialogues abide by them. Specifically, the Euthydemus and the Cratylus are shown to fulfill the requirements of ideal comedy, while the Gorgias and the Phaedo are shown to fulfill the requirements of ideal tragedy.
Trivigno’s case could not be more clearly presented and cogently argued. Furthermore, his reading of the mentioned dialogues through the lens of comedy and tragedy has significant payoffs that will enhance all future readings. The mentioned ‘constraints’ nevertheless prove in my view to be something of a strait jacket.
There is first an evident problem with deriving these constraints from Plato’s dialogues. As Trivigno notes, Plato nowhere offers a theory of ideal comedy or tragedy. The constraints must therefore be inferred from what is said in isolated passages in different dialogues. This of course is already problematic. A good example is Trivigno’s political constraint on comedy. It is inferred from only one passage in the Philebus where Socrates suggests that the pleasure taken in the evils of your enemies is neither unjust nor phthoneros (492d3-4) and its application gives Trivigno himself some difficulty since some of those ridiculed in the dialogues are not ‘enemies’ in the sense of foreigners (see 123 & 181). But Trivigno’s suggestion that ‘enemies’ could also be fellow citizens “who are vicious or ethically bad” (33) has the opposite problem of making the restraint possibly not restrictive at all. Since arguably none of Socrates’ Athenian interlocutors have reached Socrates’s ideal of wisdom and virtue (has Socrates himself?), they would all be legitimate targets of ridicule.
Another problem is that practically all the passages cited for constructing a theory of ideal comedy and tragedy come from the Republic and the Laws. That is obviously no accident since both dialogues are concerned with defining an ideal city. But if Plato is obviously not writing his dialogues in an ideal city, as Trivigno himself occasionally acknowledges (52, 87, 154), can we impose on them the constraints imposed on works produced in such a city? Even if there is for Plato a distinction between comedy/tragedy as practiced in fifth/fourth-century Athens and ideal comedy/tragedy, as I agree there is, it does not follow that Plato’s own comedic/tragic techniques can be simply identified with the latter.
The major limitation of Trivigno’s approach becomes most evident in the concluding chapter on “The Unity of Comedy and Tragedy in the Symposium.” If we consider Trivigno’s constraints on ideal comedy and tragedy, it should be evident that there can be no real unity between them: one either depicts wise and virtuous characters as models of emulation or one depicts bad and ignorant characters as objects of ridicule. It is therefore no surprise that Trivigno will allow only an external, “fairly weak sort of unity” between the two (230). Specifically, he allows (221): 1) a teleological unity: both ideal comedy and tragedy aim at moral improvement (though in opposite ways); 2) an ethical unity: they both endorse the same theory of value; 3) an epistemic unity in that, while they depict opposites, you cannot know one opposite without the other.
A Platonic dialogue, therefore, can be called both a comedy and a tragedy, or a tragicomedy, only in the sense that it in part depicts and ridicules bad characters, in part depicts and praises good characters; and because it will generally do one more than the other, it is still classifiable as a comedy or a tragedy (see 239-40). As for the talk in the Philebus of “the whole tragedy and comedy of life” (50b1-4), this can only mean for Trivigno that life is potentially either tragic or comic; it can actually be only one or the other: comic if you are bad and tragic if you are good (244-5).
This is where the constraints become truly constraining. Trivigno is completely right to claim that the speeches of Aristophanes and Agathon offer comic and tragic perspectives, respectively (see 225): clearly Agathon idealizes love as something noble, wise and virtuous, while Aristophanes ridicules it as something needy, incomplete, ignorant and unvirtuous (love on his account is the result of a punishment for human hubris). But if this is the case, the place to look for the unity of comedy and tragedy is where Trivigno does not look for it: in Socrates’ own speech.[1] Why? Because Socrates’s account of eros not only critiques the limitations of the perspectives of Agathon and Aristophanes but also appropriates and unifies the comic and the tragic elements of their speeches. From Aristophanes Socrates takes the characterization of love as needy and incomplete; from Agathon he takes the relation between love and what is beautiful, wise and virtuous. The result is a depiction of love as a ‘spirit’ between good and bad, wisdom and ignorance, child of both poverty and plenty; in brief, ugly and poor, but full of resources for pursuing the beautiful and the good. Now, is this ‘spirit’ comic or tragic? It should be clear that it is both, not just potentially both, or both at different times, but actually and always both. And the person who best embodies eros as thus understood is clearly Socrates. It is therefore in this way that Socrates is a tragicomic figure and that Plato in writing Socratic dialogues is writing tragicomedies.
This erotic and therefore somewhat ridiculous Socrates is not Trivigno’s Socrates. While he of course acknowledges Socrates’ avowal of ignorance, and though he rightly and very perceptively sees ‘epistemic uncertainty’ (see 13, 207) as a key theme of the Phaedo, he still gives a heroic depiction of Socrates as ideally wise and virtuous because this is what his definition of ideal tragedy requires. This requirement seems to prevent Trivigno from seeing the full implications of something he himself notes: that our sources for what took place at Agathon’s party, i.e., Apollodorus and Aristodemus, are both depicted as fanatic idolizers of Socrates, obsessed with Socrates in an unhealthy way; Trivigno speaks here of “hero-worship” (161). Yet when Trivigno writes of the Symposium that Socrates “is, on my reading, in his full glory as the dialogue’s true, tragic hero” (240), he forgets the hero-worship through which this portrayal is filtered; indeed, he seems to participate in this hero-worship himself.
Trivigno does not completely ignore the message of Socrates’s speech in the Symposium, but he takes it into account only briefly in the second to last page of the book: “Since Socrates is, as suggested in the Symposium, like eros, both needy and resourceful, in between ignorance and wisdom, then he too is tragicomic in the general, potential sense that Alcibiades and others are” (246). But note how he inserts the word “potential” here which is justified by nothing but his thesis. The claim of Socrates’s speech is that the philosopher is by definition, like eros, between ignorance and wisdom, bad and good, ugliness and beauty. He is not potentially but actually tragicomic. He does not have only the potential to “fall back” into ignorance but is always there, even if he has escaped that “foolish-self-ignorance” of thinking that he knows what he does not know. Furthermore, the “tragicomedy” of life itself is this human condition that Socrates’ speech describes.[2] While Trivigno acknowledges in his very last paragraph that “Socrates is noble and admirable but by no means perfect” (247), the latter qualification seems only a minor concession, a side-thought, when it should have been central to the account of the tragedy and comedy of the dialogues. Likewise, on the preceding page (246), and for the first and only time in the book, Trivigno acknowledges that in allowing Socrates to ridicule himself, Plato may wish “to remind us that Socrates has not achieved the wisdom that he aims at and that he is not as far away from being ridiculous as one might think.” [3] If only Trivigno had acknowledged this at the beginning of the book and had allowed it to influence his argument. Instead, throughout the book, only vicious and self-ignorant people have been allowed to be ridiculous.[4]
Tragedy for Plato must also be comedy because the wise and the virtuous are always far from being perfectly so; comedy must also be tragedy because it is precisely the bad, ignorant and foolish who, when recognizing their state, aspire to wisdom and virtue. In my view, then, Socrates in the final scene of the Symposium is trying to convince Aristophanes and Agathon of the unity of comedy and tragedy by reiterating the central points of his earlier speech, rather than by means of an argument having nothing to do with his speech, but reconstructed by Trivigno on the basis of passages taken mostly from the Republic and the Laws (229-33). Such a conception of the unity of tragedy and comedy would enable us to read Trivigno’s examples of ideal comedies, the Euthydemus and Cratylus, as also tragic, and his ideal tragedies, the Gorgias and Phaedo, as also comic. That, of course, would be another book. The important point here is that even this alternative account would remain indebted to Trivigno’s excellent and original discussion of the topic. No student of Plato can or should ignore his book.
Notes
[1] Trivigno tells us that Alcibiades’s depiction of Socrates as beautiful on the inside and completely ridiculous on the outside is reminiscent of something in the Republic (242), thereby ignoring how it is reminiscent of Socrates’ speech in its description of erôs (see 203c-d).
[2] Trivigno himself suggests seeing human life “as a unity of the human condition of neediness and the human good of wisdom” (244). But as such a condition, it is not simply potentially one or the other.
[3] For Trivigno elsewhere “the ridiculous fool and the noble philosopher” (241) are completely distinct and opposed characters; the most he will grant to the depiction of Socrates as a tragicomic character is “that Socrates appears ridiculous to the many” (242) who are, of course, simply wrong.
[4] While Trivigno acknowledges that tragedy ought to portray limitations and obstacles to what is the finest and noblest life (though, revealingly, he terms this only a ‘corollary’ rather than ‘constraint’, 141) and writes that “the good life as Plato conceived it, is in fact subject to epistemic limitations connected to dialectical conversation and human embodiment” (141), he tends to treat these limitations as external ones faced by a person who is inherently good and wise, like the dangers faced by an epic hero.