Platonic Noise.

By J. Peter Euben. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 210p. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

As J. Peter Euben explains in his introduction, Platonic Noise is a collection of essays held together more by a common approach than by a theme or a sustained argument. In every chapter but one, he juxtaposes a “Greek text, author or epoch … with a contemporary text or thinker to explore a substantive issue” (p. 9). His opening analysis of Philip Roth's The Human Stain as a re-working of the story of Oedipus provides an initial example of the benefits of exploring the startling similarities between very different historical periods and genres. What seemed to be merely a story about an African-American's attempt to escape the prejudices against his race becomes a complex analysis of an individual's attempt to escape his fate. In the one chapter (2) in which Euben does not introduce such a contrast between the Greeks and his contemporaries, he defends this approach on the basis of an examination of Friedrich Nietzsche's essay on “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”

Like Nietzsche, Euben wishes to surprise and provoke his readers by using Greek materials to highlight the problems of his own times. In Chapter 4 he thus suggests that, despite their tendency to isolate their viewers and make them passive, television sitcoms might be used to educate present-day Americans politically the way Aristophanes had educated his fellow Athenians. Using foul language and fantastic premises, these sitcoms could also lead spectators “to laugh at those who confidently assumed that they knew what morality was, at those political leaders who were sure of their wisdom and power, and at those social conventions and cultural practices that were assumed or claimed to be ‘natural’” (p. 65). The only example of a truly intelligent use of the medium Euben could find, however, was The Simpsons, as analyzed by Paul Cantor. Apparently it takes a genius—and not merely comic genius—to formulate and deliver a political education of the kind Aristophanes provided.

In order to provoke his readers, Euben also sees that he needs to heed Nietzsche's warning “against glib assimilations that encourage co-optation of the Greeks rather than engagement in a (Greek-like) struggle with them” (p. 15). The Greek texts will not provide contemporary readers with enough distance from their own times to see their own times—and hence themselves—better, Euben recognizes, if the ancient authors are read simply in terms of current crises. Recognizing a problem is not enough to solve it, however. Euben's use of Oedipus at Colonus to explicate Hannah Arendt's Hellenism in Chapter 3 could be faulted, as he tells his readers Arendt herself was, for confounding the acts and speeches of individual heroes like Theseus and Oedipus with democratic political action and debate. Euben defends his own practice, as he does Arendt's use of an admittedly inaccurate and incomplete account of ancient Greek politics, “as a provocation … [to open] up the present for real thinking, if not real political struggle” (p. 63). According to Euben, “Politics is the struggle against a wisdom that cannot be defeated because it ‘reminds’ us of our mutability and the enigmatic quality of situations or lives …. For Nietzsche, Arendt, and perhaps Sophocles, the continued contest against this ‘fate’ spurs us to action and gives life its energizing passion” (p. 62; emphasis added). In using Sophocles to explicate Arendt, Euben admits that he may have attributed an understanding of human life to the ancient tragedian that he did not actually hold. In effect, Euben thus denies Sophocles his own voice and destroys the distance between ancient Greece and modernity he wished to preserve.

Euben's view of politics would be frightening, moreover, if he did not present it primarily in terms of the “acts” of individual authors, usually theorists. As all readers of Hamlet know, too much thought can be debilitating. But struggle undertaken on the basis of passion, by continually changing beings in ineluctable circumstances, looks an awful lot like sheer irrationality. Euben tries to bring out the positive possibilities of change and uncertainty, especially in the face of our inescapable mortality. Emphasizing not only the mutability but also the circumstantial character of human life, in Chapter 5 he suggests, in partial disagreement with Sheldon Wolin, that Plato and Machiavelli did not turn to theorizing simply because their practical political ambitions and aims were frustrated. These political theorists were trying to come to terms with a great sense of loss. Rather than merely look back nostalgically to “the good old days” of Socrates or the Roman republic, however, they formulated a vision of a new and different future.

Fully aware of the pitfalls of utopian political thinking, in Chapter 6 Euben then presents an impressive case for the Stoic reaction to the fall of the Greek city states only in order to point out the pitfalls of Martha Nussbaum's attempt to revive their universalistic, rationalistic morality as a basis for world politics now. This reader wishes he had continued to bring out the tensions between the universalizing character of reason and particularistic political attachments in the last and title chapter. By emphasizing the polyphony in both the Platonic dialogue and Don DeLillo's White Noise without coming to any resolution or project, Euben leads his reader to wonder in the end if, in the face of death, the personal is not and cannot be political. Do we all die alone, as Ernest Hemingway maintained, and thus see, in the end, that all social institutions and ties are merely transitory illusions? Or is it the prospect of our own death that leads us, like Odysseus, to appreciate the ties that bind us to friends and family?