Tragedy and the Discrete Freedom Sequence

The Greek period is so rich in material we can’t even list it all. Let us pass and point to the emergentism of freedom and the tragic genre in concert. We see that the Greek transition was the era of the birth (relative transforms again) of the idea of Freedom (no doubt not its absolute birth), the Greek ‘eleutheria’, in clear correlation with the second of our turning points. We have already connected this to the recursion seen in the last transition. The great clue to the rise of the modern lies not in the economic statistics of medieval towns, or the chase for the essence of the Renaissance, but here in antiquity. Armed with a discrete-continuous model the point becomes clear (none of which denies the importance of the great Medieval gestation period). One way to see it is by tracing the idea of ‘freedom’ as it submerges in the era after the Greeks, to resurface in the modern world. The emergence of democracy in the city-state of Athens is one of the great moments of this period, in the first incarnation of ‘proto-liberalism’, against a backdrop of many republican experiments from Rome to China.

Eutheria/Isonomia This period is that of the birth of so many of our current cultural preoccupations. “It was not in the streets of Paris that the spirit of man was first stirred by the cry ‘liberty and equality’, but in Athens of Pericles long before. The idea that freedom is man’s birthright was first proclaimed on Greek soil.” [i]

Herbert Muller in Freedom in the Ancient World observes the relation of freedom, but perhaps confuses the long period of cyclical stagnation in the world before the First Millennium with the lack of freedom:

All the great achievements of the early civilizations came in the early centuries of their history, long before the end of the third millennium BC [ Emphasis the author’s]…Finally, however, there did occur among some newer peoples in the first millennium BC the revolutionary change that Karl Jaspers has called the “Axial period”. The change was marked immediately by the appearance of great names—no longer the names of kings and conquerors, and of their gods, but of great individuals of a very different kind: Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-Tse; Amos Jeremiah, and Isaiah; Homer, Thales, Solon, Aeschylus, Socrates, and a hundred other Greeks. Together they represent the most extraordinary creative era since the rise of civilization, distinguished in particular by the emergence of the higher religions and of philosophy and science….It seems more extraordinary because of the mysterious coincidence that the most influential of these pioneers all appeared in or about the sixth century B.C., independently, in widely separated lands, without any apparent influence on one another…I assume that we do not know [the causation], that we can point to some relevant conditions but cannot wholly explain it, and that a student of freedom should not be distressed thereby, since we could explain it only if history were completely governed by determinate laws[??!]…I would suggest that it was perhaps the plainest demonstration of the power of genius, the difference that great men make in history.[ii]

Muller spots the critical piece of the mechanics, the reaction period after a still earlier transitional action, and the reason why turning points stand out. Why has nothing much been happening since the end of the Third Millennium? In fact, a great deal has been happening, but in terms of relative contrast there is a distinct boundary after –900. Muller’s explanation won’t work. Genius should be randomly distributed throughout history. The eonic effect claims a great deal of this curious property of the human mind whose character is taken as genetic exceptionalism in evolutionary psychologies that can’t even define ‘consciousness’.

The Roman sidewinder Finally, let us note that Rome and its history is an ambiguous cousin to this case, a sidewinder resembling the later American case. Note that Greece is a network of city-states, stretching into Italy. We can feel confident that the diffusing influences of this system are a major factor in the very similar development of Rome from monarchy to a republic.

Greek Tragedy The emergence of democracy has become our signature example of an eonic double emergent. The eonic effect is beautifully reflected in the parallel, simultaneous, Greek Tragedy. There is a deep enigma here in the paradox spawned by our terminology, the ‘eonic determination of Freedom’. A variant of this is to look at Greek tragedy with a similar question about the ‘eonic determination of Greek Tragedy’ (i.e. the riddle of its periodization). Why does this mysterious genre arise like an island in an ocean in concert with the Axial period, and in parallel with the generation of the emergence of democracy, and then disappear within a few generations? [iii]

Note the timing of the philosophy of history and idea of freedom, in our discrete freedom sequence, and the echoes our method uncovers between two divides. The philosophy of history, since Kant, has produced a vast literature on the subject of freedom in history. The eonic model is crude but effective in showing the direct relevance of the one to the other using periodization, and to the arising, in the earlier period, of the characteristic themes of the ‘redemption of the will’ in later religions like Christianity. Historical evolutionary man is a kind of ‘tragical Frankenstein’ and his jerky ‘ethical changes of direction’ echo the Third Antinomy with its arcane yet significant distinctions of phenomenal and ‘transcendental freedom’. We see a sudden concordance of themes, and are ready to study this literature where by a curious non-coincidence we see the issue of the esthetic state arise near the modern divide. We also see that Kant discovers the connection between causal, ethical, and esthetic subjects, and what is more the deep relation of esthetic to teleological judgments. Does the irony suddenly stand out? Can we sense the deep unconscious gestation at work in the Greek transition and in its great tragedians. In some ways they are the first ‘philosophers of history’.[iv]

Perhaps too much mystification made of the riddle of tragedy. It is also, whatever its mysteries, a simple issue of action and failure, and a descant on the redemptive themes arising in other transitions. There could be an intimation of the ‘tragic’ in our ‘freedom’ question. The issue is that simple, in crude terms. A ‘tragedy’ is an ‘action script’ left unrealized as a virtual exploration of ‘history and the elusive factor of will, in the dilemma of phenomenal and transcendental freedom. What is the ‘fate’ of the individual (pun intended with that overused cliché of discourse on tragedy), i.e. the future of his ‘free action’ inside and outside the eonic effect. The genre of tragedy was unable to continue past the great transition here.

We should be wary of trying to define what a tragedy is, and this has a classic literature, e.g. the views of Hegel. But at a higher level of abstraction, Greek Tragedy is interesting in relation to our model because it shows creative action in the eonic mainline in a form that sequential eras cannot duplicate, and therefore can be taken as showing eonic determination. This unique instance is thus a prime candidate for the ‘evolution of art’ in our sense, or any other sense.

We must be wary of including the modern examples in such a statement, for they show a different character. But the modern recurrence, even it we accept unique instances as evidence of historical dynamism, must constitute a still further compounding of the mystery. The genre attempts to make a comeback just at the high-octane surge of the rise of the modern, and cannot survive longer than a generation. Why Shakespeare and Racine were the only two men since Euripides able to excel in the genre is difficult to grasp. It is surely no accident the discrete freedom sequence is resurgent in the generation after Shakespeare.

We began with a challenge from the biologist to find an example in history at at close range of the evolution of art. We have a spectacular example in the ‘eonic determination’ of the tragic genre in the Greek transition.

[i] Eric Robinson (ed.), Ancient Greek Democracy, New York: Blackwell, 2004). Max Pohlenz, Freedom in Greek Life and Thought (New York: Humanities Press, 1966).

[ii] Cf. Herbert J. Muller in Freedom, Its History, Nature and Varieties (1970), Dewey, R. et. al. (ed.), “Freedom and Justice in History”, an earlier essay version of Freedom in the Ancient World (1961). Muller’s confusion over ‘laws’ and ‘freedom’ expresses the dilemma perfectly.

[iii] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. xi.

[iv] In The Life of the Mind, Vol II. Willing (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1978), Hannah Arendt notes, p. 3., “that the faculty of will was unknown to Greek antiquity and was “discovered as a result of experiences about which we hear next to nothing before the first century of the Christian era.” It would be more appropriate to say ‘created’ than discovered, for the implication that it exists tends to be simply another crypto-futurist notion in the Zoroastrian and Judaic line of descent. The creators of Greek Tragedy cannot be faulted for a lack of the knowledge of a phantom faculty. But the issues of the concept of the will are of great importance.