In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of the famous claim at the end of the Symposium that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, according to which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.

In this chapter, I show how Plato’s conception of and norms for comedy provide a framework for understanding the Euthydemus as an ideal comedy, and I argue that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light, but it also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

Watching a tragedy can make us weep against our will, whereas a good comedy can send us into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Causing these intense emotional experiences seems to be what is distinctive about the two genres. From its earliest incarnation, tragedy has also been seen as communicating deep and important truths about human nature, and many figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Hegel and Kierkegaard, have constructed theories of tragedy that attempt to articulate the nature of this tragic wisdom. In common parlance, a ‘tragedy’ is a sad or heartbreaking event, like the accidental death of a youth or a natural disaster, but the genre of tragedy – which often depicts sad or heartbreaking events – is thought to communicate something to its audience about human life – its fragility, for example, or its meaninglessness. Comedy, by contrast, is often seen as mere amusement, and we are not inclined to think that we are learning anything significant while laughing at the foolishness of a stage figure, at the pretensions of a politician or at the punch line of a joke.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the Gorgias about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. Since Socrates is portrayed as both defending the life of philosophy in argument, and actively living it, then the Gorgias itself counts as an ideal tragedy. This reading of the dialogue sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates in the Phaedo is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense, but it also repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might portray it. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy, in addition to an important disagreement about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation from the body, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. This means that, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments for Socrates’ optimistic picture of divine redemption really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

In this chapter, I interpret Plato’s Cratylus as an ideal comedy and argue that Plato employs the comedic technique of parody in order to expose rival methodologies as sources of ridiculous self-ignorance. Socrates’ extended parody of etymology shows that words cannot be a guide to the nature of being, since we have no reason to think that their analysis can teach us anything about reality. Etymology is, in short, a source of laughable self-ignorance because it provides its practitioners with the illusion of wisdom. Parody generally involves the use of an imitation that exaggerates or distorts some feature of the original, often in order to undermine its claim to authority. In the case of etymology, Plato’s parody not only exposes etymology as a false path to wisdom, but it also articulates specific criticisms of etymology regarding its methodology, its scope and its alleged systematicity. The function and purpose of the very long etymological section has proved highly puzzling to interpreters who are generally unsure what to make of it, and my account reveals the etymologies to be playing a central, and previously unnoticed, role in the overall argument of the dialogue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Philebus, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands comedy to be, in essence, an imitation of laughable people, where the notion of the laughable, or to geloion, is a normative one that picks out what genuinely merits laughter, and not necessarily what people actually laugh at. According to Plato, the only thing that merits laughter is moral vice, in particular the vice of self-ignorance. I formulate four constraints on ideal comedy on Plato’s behalf: the veridical constraint, which holds that only what is genuinely laughable, that is, moral vice, should be imitated as laughable; the educative constraint, which holds that comedic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to reject vice in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the comedic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that only moral and political enemies should be portrayed as laughable.