5. A moment turning from "know what it is" to "know thyself" (The Greek Tragedians on Man's Fate)

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5. A moment turning from "know what it is" to "know thyself" (The Greek Tragedians on Man's Fate)

In the drama of the ancient Greek world - in the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the tension between fate and striving can never be relaxed. Medea is illustrative. Here is a woman whose magic is used to rescue Jason, only to have their subsequent marriage set aside by him as he pursues another woman. In blind vengeance, she kills their two sons. Was Medea's crime mitigated by Jason's treason against their love? Was she a murderer or a victim of uncontrollable impulses? Nomos or physis - better still, perhaps, nomos as physis.

Consider, on the other hand, Antigone, as presented by Sophocles. Against the express orders of King Creon, she buries her brother, and appears before the king to defend herself. But her defence is not that of Medea, not that she was overcome by grief or that passion got the better of her. No, Antigone's defense is that her allegiance to her brother is a veritable law of nature - something as casual as the laws of nature themselves. Indeed, if there would be kings at all, there must be a capacity for unrepentant faithfulness.

Is human nature within or beyond the natural realm? What is it in our nature that inclines us toward good and evil? Is everything but the result of whim and chance and fate, or is there something in the person that might rise above both custom and brute nature itself? It is in the major dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides that the problem of self-knowledge is underscored - a problem made ever more difficult by the variety of factors, both seen and unseen, that operate on us in the course of a lifetime. How can we limit the destructive force of those "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"? What form of life, what mode of conduct, might yield sanctuary?

I think the problems of how we truly know and the hard solving cause of our life led the pre-Socratics to the scrutiny in human itself.