The Wisdom of Oidipous and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos

Abstract

The Wisdom of Oidipous and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos RAYMOND GEUSS In the spring of 1989, the distinguished philosopher Bernard Williams gave the Sather Lectures to the Department of Classics at the University of California at Berkeley, and these lectures were in due course published under the title Shame and Necessity. Many people, including me, consider this to be Williams’ finest book, and it is a striking fact about it that it both begins and ends with quotations from the poet Pindar. The exergue, the very first part of the printed book a reader will encounter, is three very famous lines from a poem which Pindar seems to have written very late in his life, the Eighth Pythian. In fact, there is some reason to believe that this poem is not just late, but the very last poem by Pindar which is extant. ejpamevroi tiv dev ti~; tiv d jou[ ti~; skià~ o[vnar a[nqrwpo~. ajll j o}tan ai[gla diovsdoto~ e[lqh/ lampro;n fevggo~ e[pestin ajndrw`n kai; meivlico~ aijwn. (95–97) Williams leaves these three lines in Greek without translating them. They aren’t actually cryptic in the way in which some parts of poems by Pindar are. That is, it is not the case that one does not know at all what they mean; the general sense is clear, but the mode of expression is exceedingly condensed , polysemous in detail, and pleasingly harsh. Pindar has been drawing the listeners’ attention to the instability of good fortune, prosperity, and the pleasures of life (to; terpnovn , 93), then comes the cited passage. A prose paraphrase might run: arion 20.3 winter 2013 We humans have a very brief time of life; we live for only one day. What then can any human being ever finally amount to? And what is forever beyond our grasp? Man is the shadow of a dream. But when a god gives him glory, a bright light plays over him and the span of his life is easy to bear. It is easy to romanticize “last words”; for instance, to assume that one can find distilled in them the wisdom of a lifetime . We are not, however, absolutely sure whether this is a “late” poem by Pindar, and a fortiori we can’t be sure it is the last even of his extant works. Why, in any case, assume that final thoughts are better than earlier ones? However this might be, the sentiments expressed here do not seem to be in any special sense the specific products of the reflections at the end of a long and active life, but rather to formulate an attitude toward life and the world which we can trace everywhere in Pindar’s work from the earliest to the latest poems (whichever these are): Human life is essentially both insubstantial and grim; if this seems not to be the case in some particular instance, that is because something outside our control—a god—has for a brief moment given some individual the gift of shining a ray of light on him; we know that that light won’t last. In contrast to the exergue, which might, but more likely do not, contain some of special “last words” of Pindar, it is natural to think that the very last words of a book are intended to be particularly important, perhaps, in a book of philosophy, to be something like a conclusion. Williams ends Shame and Necessity with a passage from Pindar’s Fourth Pythian, which is cited in his own translation: Take to heart what may be learned from Oedipus: If someone with a sharp axe hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree, and spoils its handsome shape; although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself if it comes later to a winter fire, or if it rests on the pillars of some palace the wisdom of oidipous 60 and does a sad task among foreign walls, when there is nothing left in the place it came from. This is a peculiar way for Williams to end his book, for several reasons. First, it is strange that a...