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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ 0:09
Hello and welcome to chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ weary, and I'm here today with Dr Calliope Nicolo Pulu, associate professor in the Department of comparative literature at the University of Buffalo, and we're here today talk about her book, hunting for justice, the cosmology of decay in Aeschylus's orestea, Dr Nicola Pulu Calliope, wonderful to have you on today.
Speaker 1 0:36
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here, and you can call me Calliope from now. So I'm very happy to answer your questions
PJ 0:46
and just start us off. Then, why this book? And I love anyways, I'm excited about this. I think it's really important to be able to draw not just the strengths of our traditions from our from our kind of foundations as Western society, but also critiques, and so I'm really excited about today, but let me not get ahead of you here Calliope. What? Why this book?
Speaker 1 1:14
Well, the easiest and kind of pragmatic or disciplinary way to talk about it is that it continues previous work and research that I have done on Greek tragedy and its relation to philosophy, both in ancient and modern context. So I have written before on Sophocles, particularly in relation to German idealism, holderlin, a little bit on Euripides. And I always felt that I have to somehow devote exclusive time to Aeschylus. I mean, one of the reasons is that his language always drew me. There's something that something very powerful about the quality of his language and his thought. And even he as a figure, he's a kind of a monumental figure. All of the anecdotes about his life, his service at the Persian Wars, even his death is he's a sort of a very enormous figure in Greek literature. And I came to him, in a sense, at the end, right? I came late. I started from the two previous figures, and I went to the beginning at the end. But I did, and the other reason, I would say, perhaps more interesting, is that I felt those, those last five years, or four or five years that I was toiling with it, that it was very timely and very urgent in terms of its its themes. So this, this the relation nature slash cosmology on the one hand, and justice on the other. I thought that it's a very important theme at a very important juncture in time to think about it primarily because one way to think about it is to see how modernity drove a wedge or a distance between those two things, nature and just for understandable reasons. I mean, there are legitimate reasons for why this was done or needed to be done. On the other hand, I have come to think that this type of of distance has also impoverished the way that we think about justice also that we needed to, or I needed to, bring back the question of nature and cosmology into the equation, so that that's I would, you know,
PJ 3:53
yes, oh, we. I mean, it's so many threads, so many different ways that we can go here. But I think, and forgive me, I it's way it's sitting on my shelf, which is an embarrassment. I haven't read it yet. But when you talk about Aeschylus is or astea, this trilogy, Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, the eumenides, can you give us just kind of the arc and even, like, kind of, maybe the underlying ethics. And I understand too, that there's like a traditional interpretation, and then you're critiquing and providing maybe an alternative to that interpretation. And so if you can just give us, just situate our audience with with your work.
Speaker 1 4:38
So the one interesting thing is that the Oresteia is one the only extant, surviving full trilogy that is customarily the tragedians. The early tragedians, when they were presenting their work to the great Dionysia, they would write three tragedies and a satyr play. So it was really a tetralogy. But. With three tragedies. And in Aeschylus time, the trilogy was based on one thing. So when, when we say the Oresteia, and we start from Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, humanities, it's treating the story of Orestes later, some of the innovations that were done by Sophocles Euripides and the later playwrights was they were still presenting three plays, but they weren't, strictly speaking, tree logic. They were maybe thematically connected. Let's say you can have, I don't know if Eugenia in Tauris and Helen being presented at the same time. They're not exactly related, but they're both escape place, how they both live, from where, from their predicament. So they were more thematically put together, rather than staying within the same myth. So the Oreste is kind of unique in terms of that. It's the only extant strict trilogy that we have, and so it tells the story of of the house of Atreus, in many ways, in its late stages. So we have Agamemnon, who was the king of Argos, of Mycena, and who is the commander of all of the army that goes to Troy to retrieve Helen, and we are dealing now the trilogy actually, actually starts with his return. So all of the other material is the Iliad, let's say, is dealt in the Iliad. And now the return of Agamemnon is in the the homonymous tragedy Agamemnon. So he's returning home, and Clytemnestra, that is his wife, is angry, and at his sacrifice of their daughter, there are other elements there. She is already in a she has a lover, his cousin, Augustus. And so in the first play, after his return, she is this. She plays up her seduction. She's called the Spider Woman, right? The first Spider Woman, she makes this famous scene where she receives him, but she's actually tempting him with a red carpet, right? And I've read around that this is the first scene of the red carpet for the VVIPs, right? The first she, she She tempts him, or taunts him, rather, to come in as a as a victor, and to to require that this red carpet is put down, be put down for him. Of course, he says, I wouldn't do that. This is only barbarians who do that. I'm a Greek and I have I am not going to be hubristic, but he falls for it at the end, and that accounts, in a sense, symbolically, for for his punishment. So then she kills him, and the second play, the Libation Bearers are, of course, the the revenge. So she revenged her dead daughter, the sacrifice daughter and so on. The second play, we have the revenge, the cycle of revenge continuing so now her living daughter, Electra, who is treated as a slave under her mother's regime, and in fact, hates her mother, conspires with her brother Orestes, who was exiled in the meanwhile, but again, using deception, is able to come back, reveal himself to his sister, surviving sister, Electra, and they conspired together to kill the mother for the patricide, right? But a lot of the business, a very haunted place, has been compared actually, to Macbeth. Both is full of incantations, maledictions, magic in a sense that there's something of sorcery there, because they are all calling to the dead, Electra and Orestes go visit the the father's grave. And there is also a chorus along, of course. And the chorus here, interestingly, is enslaved women from the palace, and they and they are on the side of what you may call in contemporary patriarchal they are upset at the killing of the Father and legitimate king of Agamemnon, right? So they are assisting, in a sense, the siblings, in bringing up the spirits from the underworld, the Spirit of the Father and of the dead of the house of Atrius, so that they can actually complete an act of revenge against the killer. So towards the end of the play, indeed, Orestes kills his mother, even though he's he does. It's not an easy act. He. He he has his hesitancy about it, but he knows that, as he says, he's been commanded to do so by Apollo, right? Because it is for the justice of his father's legacy and memory that he has to revenge him. And so this is how the Libation Bearers basically closes. And then we have many this, which is now a real kind of court scene, court drama, because now we have the goddesses who are the goddesses of revenge, or you could say the early, primitive, if you like, goddesses of justice humanity. This is the euphemism for the Furies or Erin is in Greek. And so what they do now is their job is to hound Orestes, and they're literally bloodhounds. And we have to think here quite literally, that for the ancient Greeks, murder brought about pollution, material, physical pollution. So your hands are literally immersed in blood. And so you need to be cleansed. And you need to be cleansed, not as we think now, juridically or spiritually, but also physically. So there are rites, rituals of purification. So he is purified by Apollo, but he also needs Orestes. That is a juridical kind of guarantee. So this is, this is almost propping onto the religious purification, a kind of a legal confirmation of his, if not innocence, certainly mitigation of the crime, right that his exoneration in some way. So, but the humanities, the Furies, don't think of the world in that way of mitigation or not yet, so their job is to follow in a relentless manner, the killer. So in the first part of the play, we have a scene in Delphi where the humanities have a confrontation with Apollo and Apollo, who just exonerate, who just purified, rather, Orestes is horrified to see them there. They just don't belong. I mean, He's the god of the sun, and they are, as the tragedy says in so many times, Daughters of night, grotesque. There is no fate for them under the sun. That's what's interesting. That's why, I think at the end, they have to go back down under the earth, right? They are, they are the grotesqueness and disfiguration, right? So they start an argument, the Delphic, the so called delphic argument, and he is trying to put some reason into them Apollo and to tell them that, why is it that you call yourselves agents of justice, and yet you never considered to go after Clytemnestra because she killed her husband? So why aren't you revenging him? But you are bent on revenging only the matricide of Orestes. And even though they try to argue that they are agents of justice, they basically say we are only here for the mother because we are only agents of justice for consanguinity. And since the husband is not of the same blood as the mother, we don't care. So. So this is one kind of interesting place from which to think also how we moved into our contemporary, or not even contemporary, very modern sense of justice, which is that we don't just take into account only when people are terrible to to
Speaker 1 14:08
people of the same blood, that would not right. So justice has to extend to the rest of the community. So then what happens is that Orestes comes to Athens and asks from Athena in the area, asks to go to the Areopagus, which is the the first capital court, right, the Supreme Court, let's say, of ancient Greece. And finally, it's the same name now for the Supreme Court in modern Greece, we call it. It's the Areopagus. So in there you have the humanities come to accuse him, and then you have Apollo and Athena on the other side as kind of like the defense team for him and the institution of. A court literally, because you have jurors now, and they are supposed to decide on what happened. Is he really a criminal? Is he should he get the death penalty, or should he be exonerated? Maybe because he suffered already a lot out of this pursuit of the Furies, maybe because there is a mitigating clause, because it was Apollo that asked him to do it, after all, and so on and so forth. And so there are some arguments that are being presented. We can go through the details, if you want later. And finally, the court, and that is what is very important for me, also for the times that we live now. The court is 5050, it is what we would call the jury. Is, is a hung jury. So it's interesting. I mean, he could, he could have made one person to be extra, to to but he didn't. He. He left us with a hung jury. So that necessitated the divine intervention of Athena. Scholars are not decided if she makes or breaks the jury in that sense, but she kind of votes, she kind of enters the process. And so the institution of the human court, the court of Athenian Jewry, has in the tragedy the imprint of this divine intervention, and she votes on the side of Orestes, which, of course, has its own arguments of why she does that, that there is an irrationality behind the way that she does that. She basically says, I am the father's daughter. I am the Virgin of the Father, and so I stand for the sons, right? And so there has been, of course, a lot of you know, feminist critique of this, etc, etc, which, again, there are details that I try to address in the book. And so then the she convinces the humanities, who are in the beginning, not easily convinced, but she uses, she uses, she brings persuasion. She appeals to the goddess of persuasion. She doesn't come on stage, but she appeals to that to tell them, Look, you are not going to be completely forgotten or Dishonored in any way. The Furies just go back under the earth where you were before, and you will be the basis, in a sense, the foundation of the police, the very foundation you go under the Acropolis, and citizens are still going to do sacrifices to you, so they're going to be honoring you, but just stay under there, because that's the world, in a sense, to which you belong, and You will be transformed from being spirits of blight and and sterility and civil war. You're going to be goddesses of prosperity. So they take on the mineral world, the seeds, everything that comes from under the earth. And in a sense, they return to what I think many sources say they were in the very, very, very beginning in the fog of time, which is fertility goddesses that then became goddesses of blood, of natural justice, of blood feud, and then they become, again, in a sense, goddesses of prosperity and the public order. And that's the part, and that's how the humanity is finished. I'm sorry if I took too long. Edge.
PJ 18:20
No, that was that was incredible. I thank you so much. That was such a big ask, and you really delivered. So thank you again. So many threads that we can pull on here just as an aside question. And feel free if you don't want to discuss this, but when you talk about juridical purity and material purity, is there anything that you can draw out from that, that you think is helpful for us to that maybe is something we're missing today in our society?
Speaker 1 18:59
Yeah, I haven't exactly thought about it in those terms. But certainly, if by material, in a sense, if by the blood, the actual blood, we open up. And I think, I think maybe this is, this is where you're gesturing to, to that natural or cosmological, because the blood is about a life cycle. It's a cosmological figure for them. Then, yes, I do. I do think that's I think that's what I meant in the beginning, in your first question, when I said that the distance, the chasm almost that we opened between the cosmological and the juridical, because of certain political, sociopolitical and historical necessities, which, again, I don't want to underplay, but nonetheless, there's the other side, which I think this gap between cosmology and justice has also, as I said, impoverished the way that we think about justice, so that. Mean so that when Justice becomes simply a social construct, we think that we can respond to what is called systemic injustice with a systemic form of redress. These are, these are problems for me. They're not. They are themselves, problems that need to be thought further. They're not just solutions to say to say that.
PJ 20:27
So in some sense, when you talk about nature versus justice, or cosmology versus justice, there's also, like, I feel this tension between nature and the polis. Is that another kind of way to set that up and we talk about systemic I think, and I want to just make sure I'm on the same track with you that we've become so concerned with the harmony of the polis, you know, as kind of that as a synonym for justice there, that We have missed, that we have missed the importance of harmony in nature. Is that, like the necessity of harmony at a natural level, at a cosmological level, is that one way to think
Speaker 1 21:14
about this? Yes, and I would actually even Yes. I think that that is very good way to think about it, and I would actually even say that one way in which, let's say the Greek police. I am going to stay narrow on this. I don't know how. I don't want to claim rather, how other ancient cities work, but the Greek police was a police, or it was at its best, the police, when it actually was attuned to the cosmos. That's what made it a police. So I want to now make a difference between the word politics and the word police. And sometimes it's to the students, for instance, that we have lots of politics but we have no police because we don't, because the kind of cohesion, yeah, even in very, very polar moment, polarizing moments that you get, at least in the representation of the police, In the tragedies, if not in the real policy in Athens was because it was the police was, in a sense, I don't want to make it too simple, but it was in some way, a reflection of the cosmos in a micro scale. The police was also a kind of a cosmos. And you get this in the second coral load in, in Sophocles' Antigone, you know, how, how the human being, you know, sort of conquers nature, but at the same time is in a relation with it. And it is out of these relations that the policies also made and sustains itself. And so it is, to me, it is not just just the opposite. The police is actually in relation to the cosmos in order to be a police, but I don't think that we live in a police anymore.
PJ 23:12
And so your critique is of political not the polis, but political infiniteization, right? This idea of, like, just continually looking to the state for answers, instead of looking, would we be looking to nature? And what? When we say we're looking to nature, what are we looking for there? What would be an example?
Speaker 1 23:36
Again, I may there are so many, in a sense, from, from the orestia I give even, even in the in the book, another one that I think might might hit in a more immediate way, because maybe more people know the story of Antigone. But I always think of of her when she says, When Creon says to her, you cannot, you cannot bury your brother the traitor here, because the gods don't like traitors. And her response is, no the gods under the earth, that is maybe the Furies, but also chronic justice in general, right? But also limbian Justice, she says, they don't care the Earth. Doesn't care about who goes underneath it. There comes a certain point where I think that what she's saying to him, and this is a point that Seth bernardetti, I think, a very interesting classicist, made, that Thebes is on top of the earth, and that's a police but beneath right, the law is not the same. It doesn't hold the same, and that's why, when Tiresias comes to tell Creon, finally, you've made a huge mistake, he tells him something very, very interesting that has to do with the order of things. Is not is the morality is? Almost secondary. The first thing that he tells him is ontological. He says, You are in no position to decide whether the ones who are dead lie above ground and the ones who are living are going underground in the cave where you so he's telling him, you've reversed the order of things, which is, in a sense, another way to put it, is it's the order of nature, that's what he's so before he's telling him this is bad, this is morally reprehensible, which it is, but it's almost as if that morality is propped first and foremost of a natural order of things. You do not allow corpses to rot above ground, and you do not allow living people to die of starvation under the earth because they decided to do to their brother that which, as Hegel says, is in a sense, the inalienable right, the right to death and the right to burial that in death, says Hegel, the individual becomes a universal, and you cannot deny, deny that to it. So, so this, this is like one example in which we, we ought to pay attention, I think, to this, to these aspects of the of nature, of the order of things, or, as I use the Greek word, a pragmatist, the things, rather than than constantly talking about everything that comes from there, oh, you've naturalized such and such, we say you've naturalized. Well, is everything just naturalized? Or is there something that we can learn from that world? You know, from the orestia? The example is that I have is the guard who is on top of the palace watching for news from the from the war, but he has a beautiful introduction to the play by talking about the constellations and what he's learned looking at the constellations day in and day out, summer and winter, right? And I thought, Here is a lowly character that's not a noble man, right? But he gets this very, very elegant, very noble descriptions that have to do with how he relates to the natural world. There's Clytemnestra, all of this, you know, kind of examples that, yes, that nature and the police are must be in some kind of attunement. That when they are not in attunement, then disasters happen, the Furies come back, and civil war happens, etc, etc,
PJ 27:45
and so in a lot of ways, and I, I may have skipped us ahead, so I apologize, but you're complicating the question of justice at the foundations of kind of Western society. I mean, a lot of like, lot of this, the the Greek shadow is long. And so one way to think about you complicating the question of justice, to look at what the common interpretation, especially for people who don't dive deep into this, is that the Oresteia is just, I think, I think, I think I'm saying it wrong, but that's right, the that it's, it's really just about moving from kinship and vengeance to the the universal order of politics and so and that's just the story is that, and it's really just the sanitization of familial relationships and blood feuds into something that's more ordered. And you're trying to complicate that kind of simplistic interpretation, which is in some ways predominant, especially at a at the at the level that it's taught for, even, you know, college freshmen, they read it, and they're like, oh yeah. So then now, now late, you have jurors, and you, you know, they go back down in the earth, and so now they're the, you know, the goddesses of grace. Is that one way to look at it, that you're complicating that, to kind of re enrich this story and to help us to re examine where we're at, yes, and I
Speaker 1 29:18
mean, to be gracious to all of this is that this interpretation, which you call the sort of traditional interpretation, which is one of the ones that are traditional, there are other interpretation more having to do more with for instance, you know, gender, the gender divide, and things like that that have also become kind of A main theoretical mainstay, but the one that you've mentioned, which is, of course, you know, it's a huge interpretation, and it is, in many ways, one that comes to us, at least the closest to us that I can say it came from, is Hegel. I mean, as you say. Said that's, that's, that's a very simple way of summarizing what he did in a very convincing I mean, in many ways, that's not wrong. It is. It is a passage. It is. It is not wrong to say that it is a passage from the justice of the blood feud, the justice of family and very, very narrowly conceived justice that that always appealed to the natural category of blood, blood shed, and therefore blood in revenge that has to be shed. We are now moving into a more the jurisprudential kind of structure, the Court of jury, etc, etc. And therefore there is this sense of demythologies, that demystification of the of the process that now we are indeed, as you said, sanitized clean there are doesn't mean that justice is perfect, but there are some guarantees in the process and and we can think of ourselves as quote, unquote, unquote enlightened, right? And as I said, there is a lot to be said here.
Unknown Speaker 31:11
It's just that, as you mentioned, I wanted to emphasize that, particularly as far as Aeschylus is concerned,
Speaker 1 31:23
Nature doesn't doesn't disappear, necessarily once this happens. And there are ways to talk about that, that, as I said, the humanities go down under the earth. They become goddesses of fertility, etc, etc, the way that you know, the way that Apollo and Athena are intervening, we can say that they are political gods. But again, that doesn't exactly work. The doesn't resolve the problem, and that's why several people criticized Hegelians. Criticized Hegel by saying, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't become historical enough. Because there is nothing reasonable about Athena. There's nothing reasonable about saying I am going to exonerate this murderer, the erinny. Say I'm not going to exonerate him, because I only go after people who kill their mother because they're consanguineous, and Athena's Counter Logic is, well, I am going to exonerate him, because I am daddy's daughter, and I like sons, and so in a sense, someone who I mentioned in the book who criticizes James Gordon Finlay, some very interesting critique of of Hegel is that there's nothing reasonable about her. So it's not Athena, he says that that actually facilitates the process juridically. But it is, in fact, something else. It is her contestation. But that contestation is almost it's not irrational, but it is. It is it is not. She uses Persuasion by way of coercion in a sense, right? So again, what we're having here is the recourse not to something so enlightened and reasonable, but the recourse to force in some way. So, so what I'm trying to say is that the traces of nature, whether and particularly, it's the biggest trace, which I think is the one we don't like as enlightened political beings, which is arbitrariness. Another word is necessity. It's the trace of arbitrariness in nature, or natural justice that we try to withdraw from, to spare ourselves from right. And my point is to say, but that is there, and it continues in the civic that civic justice in many ways, wittingly or unwittingly, still relies or partakes or whatever verb you like to have there in this arbitrariness as well. And in my humble critical opinion, it may even be worse when this arbitrariness inheres civic justice precisely because civic justice comes in with the conceit of reason. It comes in with the idea that everything about this type of justice is deliberative, rational, objective, already mediated, whereas nature, on the other hand, does not have that conceit. And yet my argument that somehow it's randomness, I mean, to use, like my own wording, gathers itself into a pattern. And so it works almost statistically, that if someone is hubristic, 123, Three four times. The fifth time, the world will somehow also respond accordingly, right? And even though it appears arbitrary, it comes belatedly. It may hit not exactly the right person, and that's terrible. I'm not condoning that, but it's done almost more, I would say, isonomically, isonomia, being the equality in front of the law, which is what the the Greek, Greek thought did in the wake of the sixth, you know, fifth century, to provide equal treatment to all by the law, right? But we now can see that in civic justice, in precisely moments of systemic redress, etc, etc, there are tons of arbitrariness, is there, right? Which are done with good intention, right? And so that's, that's my point. My point is to to be to be aware that these things, again, are more problems rather than solutions, and and, and maybe nature, which we kind of vilify or demonize for this arbitrariness at least, at least it can say, if we could speak, I didn't mean to. I didn't mean and in that sense, it is. It has its own strange kind of it's, it's indifference ends up actually having sometimes an effect which is more egalitarian than actually our own will to egalitarianism, right, which many, many times may end up betraying the very project that it sets itself to complete, accomplish.
PJ 36:47
Does that go back? Does that go back to your discussion, or your what you were saying about how death makes every human universal right, like, it's like, if there's one thing that kind of is egalitarian, it is death. Is that? Is that connect there?
Speaker 1 37:03
Absolutely, absolutely that is yes. And in previous in work on Antigoni, mostly, I make this point, but you're absolutely right. It's death is called the Great, the great host in Oedipus, at Colonus, in one of the chorus, the chorus speaks about it as the one who hosts everybody. And I think that's Antigone point to Korean. It doesn't matter if you're a traitor, if you're a patriot, if you are poor, if you're rich, right? And you find it, you know, I always tell my students, you find it in Hamlet, I think, where he looks at the skull and he says that even Alexander, I don't remember now the Shakespearean lines, but he becomes a worm for the you know, he becomes food for the worm, food For the worm. So, yeah, from from, from Yorick the servant, to Alexander the Great, they are the same substance now.
PJ 38:09
And you mentioned that you've seen some of my other episodes. My episodes, really, I've had other guests on. And you, you mentioned that your suspicion of technology is something that comes out in your work. And I was kind of looking through this idea of instrumental rationality and how you are, you're critiquing that. Can you expound a little bit on how this ties in with a suspicion of technology?
Speaker 1 38:37
Yes, I mean, I'm not. You had the wonderful, I think, colleague Professor from Germany, speaking on Heidegger. And I am not a Heidegger specialist, of course, I know some Heidegger because of his connection to the Greeks and and I know that in his late work, he spoke a lot about meditative thinking, contemplative thinking, versus technological, instrumental thinking. And I know that there's a lot of a lot of efforts and various people trying to read him as to complicate him as not being just the critic of technology, because technology is for him and our ontology. And it's a, it's a mode of disclosure and of being, etc, etc. And again, as I said, I don't, I don't profess to be a Heideggerian, and so I don't want to enter that domain too in too much of a detail, but I take him to be a little bit more critical than than some other people do, and to be to be suspicious of of the way in which technology is taking us, and the type of thinking that it does. And. And and I think that, I think that the tragedians knew that very well. And I think that any place from here that I can activate to talk about that is a quote I have twice in the book, which I love very much. And it comes from Aeschylus. Is Prometheus Bound, who? There he is, the god of technology, the god of threats, the god of of crafts. He was worshiped with Athena as and Hephaestus in festivals about craftsmanship. Craftsmanship. He gives tools. He gives language to the human beings actually all of these good things to build civilization. And he's on the rock of Caucasus, chained there, tortured for for eternity before he gets freed. And what does he say? This is the god of craft, who says that craft is much weaker than necessity. And so if we are to think of necessity, and Aeschylus, I think, is the poet par excellence of necessity, of an anchor, as he writes it, that is, in a sense, another synonym for me, at least for this work, is that that's, that's nature, that's the cosmos, that's, that's the world outside human will, outside human control, outside all of these things that We think that we can use as Ways and Means and control everything around us, right? And there is the god of craft, the God who can use these machines and these gadgets, gadgets. And he says, No, craft is much weaker than necessity. So I think the tragedies have spoken this very, very strongly. I think another, you know, again, I think I seem to be speaking about Antigone more than I am about the arrestia. But she calls herself resourceless, and the word resource, resourceless is a mijano, a mecca non, the one who has no machines. And of course, the chorus talks about the police and humanity in the second choral load, the choral load that Heidegger is very interested in in that work, by the way. And he says the chorus, the chorus says, Oh man, the most wonderful dainon, the most marvelous of all creatures who can conquer the till the earth and make agriculture, who can make ships and travel, or who can do all of these things and yet one and even can heal from illness, but one thing does not have the way, the means to confront, and that is death. So man has all the machines, all the techne, all the craft to confront everything, but he is incapable. He does not have any resources to confront death. And what does she say? I am the resourceless in a sense, or her. I don't remember exactly what you you have no resources. But of course, she has no resources, but she is the only one from the play, and in a sort of as an exemplary, you know, instance in humanity, who confronts death, who not confronts, in fact, accepts it as her own, as always having been her destiny. Why? Because she has no other machines, yeah, yeah. And she does not build, she does not build a mound. She never builds anything, right? Humans build to be remembered that way. We make skyscrapers and missiles and all sorts of things. She doesn't, she doesn't build a thing. She just cries. Does the libations leaves no trace, except to accept her words, right, and to say that I have no resource. I have no resources. So for her already death is, you know, accepted as her destiny, right?
PJ 44:41
And and I want to, I think I'm, I think I'm tracking with you. And I think an additional example from the orestea, Orestes, as you, as you even mentioned some of this earlier, is that human justice. It is true that we have moved from a kind of kid. Ship blood feud type to a human justice. But what you're saying, To complicate things, to help us, to enrich this is that human justice has to be honest about its limits, and we see that exactly in as you were talking about earlier, the hung jury that requires divine literally, you know, you could talk about Deuce Machina, right? Like talking about necessity, right? Athena has to step in because the it there is a limit to the human justice. Even though it is applied, it is still has its limits. Is that one another way of thinking about this
Speaker 1 45:39
brilliant, I think, yes, it's a very, very good observation. Yes, this is a, this is exactly that the court in its if you want to talk about the long shadow of the Greeks, right, and the this story being foundational in classes on long literature. I last time I read someone, Paul gave its, you know, constitutional law theorist who says, you know, at Yale, they still do this. This story right to train lawyers. And it is a reminder that the court, the court, is a Court of Justice and also clemency. Its roots in this religious scene, also right this kind of intervention. Christian Meyer, the historian, talks about Aeschylus, theological politics, not a Political Theology I want to make a logical politics so absolutely. And another point that I would like to add, which here that yes, what I said before about the police and why the police ought to be in harmony, that a police is a police when it is a kind of a microcosm, kind of reflecting back the macrocosm, which is the cosmos? Right? To come back to this idea that there is a 5050, and I mentioned to you in the beginning that That, to me, is such a key, real ethical key. Or that turns, turns us to this question of the police. And again, I don't need to mention any specific examples. We can just see our world in the last 10 years right, where nobody can speak to anybody, where if you're this, then you are totally right, and if you're this, then you're totally wrong and and right, and we are trying to live right and communicate globally. And we think that we live in an age of communication and the word community. How many times I hear this word I you know? I'm not sure. But what I wanted to say is that, look, look at the scene that Aeschylus leaves us with, right? That, let's say for the for easy math, they're five and five, right? Well, can you imagine what this thing could do? They could come into a complete Civil War, right there. That's, that's what the hearing is, is about. Is about bringing civil war. And they say that destroying the city, destroying the seed of the city, right? Because the young men, that's the language of Aeschylus, they will go there, and all of the seed will stiffen to ruin, as he says. But you could have that, because can you imagine the people who think that this guy is a murderer? He murdered his mother in cold blood. And you, Madam, are you coming here to tell us? No, he's fine. And you other five people who live next to us in the neighborhood, you think that's okay, that's despicable. So you are completely wrong. You are a horrible person, you're terrible and we must just completely come to an irresolvable war, or an irresolvable conflict in which we're never going to speak to each other. But what happens? Well, she comes in, she intervenes, and maybe those five were not really convinced, I don't know, but they were convinced enough to say what, we are all living under the same police, which is to say what, it's not the police, it's the cosmos. We are all partaking in the same cosmos that Athens that Athena, I don't want to say the Athenian cosmology, meaning the city's cosmology. Is the Athenian being Athena's cosmology. And when you decide that, no matter what your city is a reflection of that cosmos, the Apollonian, the Athenian, you know of. A of that double of that axis that it has, the Olympian justice, that's light, that's right, that is sunny, solar. And then the Sonic, which requires that the blood. When you decide that you have to account for these things in their interaction, then you don't look at the people who voted the opposite from you as this horrendous people who need to be forever vilified, with the potential result of dissolving the police completely. So why? For me, I think that he's leaving us a great enigma. What does it mean to hold on to a police when the trauma of the disagreement is so deep and so harsh. And why? I think Christian Meyer, the historian of Athens, he wrote a wonderful book on Athens. I am very indebted to a colleague of mine who gave me the book and told me about it, and he talks about how wonderful the how what, what a mind, and what a needed, necessary mind. Aeschylus was at a time in Athens he did, he did the work of a theologian, a politician and a mass psychologist, you know, to fight Athens with a story that can actually sustain its its political existence. And for me, what I wanted to bring forth is how it's his cosmology that allows that it's not his politics, it's his cosmology that can provide that framework that can make politics bearable, because otherwise it becomes unbearable.
PJ 51:49
And I think that's a great lead in I want to be respectful of your time to what is very often my final question, which is, so someone has just listened to us for last 50 minutes or so talking about this, what would you recommend, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which I always want to make sure to I say that you know, so make sure you buy everyone that you buy and read, hunting for justice. But besides buying and reading your excellent book. What is something you would recommend to someone who has just listened for the last 50 minutes to either meditate on or do over the next week in response?
Speaker 1 52:32
Ah, what's does this have to do a with a secondary source on Aeschylus, or that you're talking that you want me to suggest or other things.
PJ 52:43
Well, what so? How should someone live in the light of cosmology? How does someone what is do they do they go and read the Oresteia and and meditate on it? Is there another like, should they dive into the Greeks? Or is there maybe something you should do in their own community to think more cosmologically rather than politically?
Speaker 1 53:09
I would actually yes. I would say that diving in the Greek, into the Greeks, and specific, to be more specific, I would say the natural philosophers, I mean, I start with under because they give a sense of this, of the structure of things, as being, as Nietzsche says, both just and unjust and justified, right, the notion that the world is a world of finite entities, some things come and then they have to disappear, and some other things come and they have to disappear, and it doesn't. It's not always fair, right? So the unfairness sometimes is in the structure of things, in the finite structure of things, as they come in and then they return. So I would say the natural philosophers, but I would say any Plato. We think of Plato mostly as a philosopher of the will and a moral philosophy, but, but there are gems there to see the cosmological thinking behind that. Many, many of the dialogs, but most of all, I would say the tragedies. I mean that that's that's because, of course, I am very partial about that and Homer. I mean, particularly for me, the Iliad person, not to say that, I don't, but I know this is another gem, but yes, and, I mean, I was just, I was just thinking of this very just another book. I mean, I don't mention it here, but I was, I was thinking of Laura, Laura slatkins book on on cities, the power of cities in the Iliad. It comes completely laterally. But what she's trying to say there is that Thetis Achilles, as a mother, whom we think is a secondary figure, is someone who is holding the cosmic order. It's because her son. Is a mortal son that Zeus can go on with his hegemony, and she has this beautiful line that it is Achilles death that guarantees Zeus hegemony. So this is very unfair, right, but it's right, someone's death guarantees this person's hegemony. And yet it's interesting, because these characters are part of what is Zeus he's holding, and for Aeschylus, he's holding the cosmic order, right? And so I keep thinking of Homer and the tragedies as the places where we really see, in many ways, this amazing structure, that kind of justice and injustice that inheres the things themselves. So read the
PJ 55:47
yes, what a great way, and I love it. Dr Nicolo, Polo kalaupi, wonderful to have you on today. It's been a joy talking to you.
Speaker 1 55:59
The same, the same for me. Thank you for the opportunity, and good luck with the rest of your endeavors on this. And I'll be looking forward to seeing more of your work. Bye.
Unknown Speaker 56:11
Bye, yep. Well, let me hear real quick before we we can cut this out. Don't worry. Um.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai