Ryan M. Davis

The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy, by Martin Puchner, 2010.

The history of philosophy, to paraphrase the famous quip by logician Alfred North Whitehead, can be summed up as a series of footnotes to Plato. Ditto the history of western drama, according to Martin Puchner. As the subtitle of his ambitious and intelligent new book The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy suggests, Puchner sees in Plato’s notorious antagonism toward theater a generative force, one in which the complementary pursuits of theater and philosophy jostle, like rival siblings who goad each other on to greater acts.

Customary accounts have pitted philosophy and theater against each other in mutual suspicion since antiquity. While philosophy concerns itself unconditional truth, theater busies itself with make-believe—or so the conventional wisdom goes. It was Plato who first declared their “ancient quarrel.” In the Republic, his putative mouthpiece Socrates damned the theater for serving up dramatic imitations twice removed from the perfection of ideas, and for inflaming emotions rather than making way for the serene conclusions of reasoned argument. (Puchner’s study begins with an ironic depiction of this with an episode from in Plato’s life: while en route to submit his own freshly penned tragedy to the City Dionysia, Plato encounters his future intellectual mentor and burns his script dramatically on the steps of the great Athenian theater as a sign of his conversion to philosophy.)

The theater fought back with Aristophanes’s derisive portrayal of a graceless Socrates with his head in the clouds. Aristotle’s efforts to ameliorate the schism couldn’t help reducing tragedy to an object of empirical scrutiny and subordinating it to the practice of philosophy. Centuries later, Nietzsche upheld this narrative of division in his first work The Birth of Tragedy, in which he imagined Attic theater, originating in the Dionysiac abandon of the undifferentiated chorus, slaughtered at the hands of the individual philosopher and his discerning Apollonian rationale. Today, the storied disconnect between theater and philosophy plays out in much writing about contemporary performance, which, although practically encrusted with Theory with a capital T, cannot shake its relativism and a focus on bodies that eschews metaphysics.

Between the immanent realities of theater and the transcendental insights of philosophy, there is an imagined battleground, which in recent years has been a handy point of departure for much scholarship set on revising assumptions about this contentious pair. It is across this millennia-old fault line that Puchner straddles his expansive, but highly readable, study of Plato’s enduring influence on theater and drama. He follows a string of critics—David Krasner, Samuel Weber, Alice Lagaay, and others—who, in the last decade, have investigated fraught points of intersection while looking for unexpected concord. Freddie Rokem, in his 2010 book Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance, actually envisages a “border landscape” where the rival discourses encounter each other, engaging in not just “expressions of envy and jealousy but for mutual inspiration and productive cross-fertilization.” (This analysis promises a rich complement to Puchner’s.) Several, including Elinor Fuchs—and Puchner himself in his previous work—have found Platonic seeds blossoming in the modernism’s antitheatrical energies and intricate arrangements of metatheatricality.

But Puchner’s study is particularly indebted to the work of American philosopher and playwright Aldo Tassi for opening up this rich avenue of inquiry. Tassi’s “Philosophy and Theatre: An Essay on Catharsis and Contemplation” articulates the structural parallels and common purposes between philosophy and theater with sharp sensitivity for classical nuances. In describing Plato’s distinction between the tragic poet and the philosopher—the difference between channeling a message through the madness of divine inspiration, and recovering truth from the everyday world’s obscurity through the use of reason—Tassi points out: “Plato’s criticism, then, at least concedes that both playwright and philosopher are attempting to do the same thing, but it is the philosopher who succeeds.” Heeding a translation of katharsis more literal than the narrow medical usage, which has handed down to us the notion of a “purge,” Tassi determines tragedy’s endgame to be something more like a “clarification.” He further asserts, as Puchner also does blithely, that “theater” and “theory” derive from the same Greek word theatron, both a place and occasion “seeing.” In this light, the function of theatrical activity is not so different from philosophy’s “unconcealment” of the ideal world, one that allows clear sight.

If Tassi argues that the philosopher and the playwright have the same essential end in mind, Puchner takes this affinity a step further and rehabilitates Plato, whom Western tradition has cast as truth’s pugnacious champion against the illusions and degradations of the theater. Puchner converts him into a dramatist. Readers of Puchner’s previous works will recognize this sort of reversal (some force traditionally regarded as destructive or repressive is reappraised for its positive effects) as a hallmark of his critical approach. Such an elegant turn, coupled with his keenly applied classical erudition, distinguishes Puchner among a generation of critics who have incorporated the maneuvers of late twentieth century theory into their vocabularies with the dexterity and ease of a native tongue. His recasting of Plato is a consummation of his previous work in Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, in which he flirts suggestively with unraveling the apparent contradiction between the traditional view of Plato as the quintessential antitheatricalist and his chosen literary form, the dialogue, which is often deliberately mimetic.

Puchner’s move to reconceive Plato as a dramatist, like most genuine insights, appears glaringly obvious in its simplicity, but turns out to be devastating to conventional wisdom. Puchner’s most dazzling and original moments come early in the book, when, in his first chapter, he reads Plato’s dialogues—the Phaedo and the Symposium—as much for their dramatic construction as for the content of their arguments. Attending to details of plot, character, and circumstance, Puchner discovers tremendous consequences for traditional conceptions of Platonism.

In the Phaedo, his depiction of his mentor’s incarceration and death by hemlock, Plato stages not just ideas but character and pathos—we’re as moved by Socrates’ resignation in the face of death as we are by his rationale for dying. There is an onstage audience whom Socrates engages in a series of abstract arguments and whose attention he thereby directs away from the fearful and pitiful scene, with its brute reality of shackles and impending physical suffering. Instead, he entreats them to consider again the theory of forms and the immortality of his soul, which, in death, will escape his corporeal prison. Puchner’s understanding of this scenario—in which Socrates has a vested personal interest in the validity of his own arguments, and in which his admirers fluctuate in their resolve (now some are soothed by reasoned conclusions, now some are despairing again)—reveals that a total appeal to abstract forms is impossible. Plato’s pure arguments turn out not to be absolute and ends in themselves, but to be a practically oriented tool for conducting oneself in this world. As Puchner says, “the Plato I am after is not an idealist but rather a dramatist, and this means someone acutely engaged with conditions of materiality.”

The upshot of Puchner’s dramatic reading of Plato is that philosophy does not take place in a vacuum of abstraction, but rather arises from the specifics of situation. The two form a productive symbiosis. This relationship appears, likewise, in Puchner’s analysis of the Symposium, in which the love of wisdom, Platonic love, is juxtaposed with the erotic love of particular bodies. The one counters the other and is, as Socrates would say, “born of its opposite.” In both the Phaedo and the Symposium, Puchner sees Plato tempering the attitudes that the genres of tragedy and comedy induce in Athenian audiences, and training those audiences in an alternative philosophical stance. Plato’s drama is never quite tragedy and never quite comedy because it is crafted rationally, yes, but from same matter as the other ancient forms. In it there is “a counterforce that does not leave bodies, scenes, and drama behind; it profoundly changes them and their function, rearranging them in a way that is then called philosophical.”

Such hybrid compositions of idealist aspiration and material practice – instances of “dramatic Platonism,” as Puchner terms them – serves as forceful corrective to the received wisdom of the fundamental incompatibility between theater and philosophy. “This philosophical drama contains both a critique of the theater and an engagement with it, integrating it into the project of philosophy, but not without a critical edge.” As such, this dramatic Platonism Puchner that identifies is one of the most influential forces shaping modern drama, and it is the principle threading together his eclectic survey of playwrights. In illuminating this Platonic strain in modern drama, Puchner hits upon some expected notes with several of its frequently anthologized representatives: Strindberg, with his phantasmagoric metaphysical streak; Brecht, with his Platonic preference for diegesis and his rationalistic exposures of theater’s mystifying tricks, can perhaps be seen as a latter-day version of Nietzsche’s philosopher—the killer of tragedy; and Pirandello, whose Six Characters yearn to have the inexhaustible dimensions of their story told onstage, but chafe against the material limitations of theatrical performance.

In addition to this lot, Puchner ravenously pores over works by Georg Kaiser, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Tom Stoppard—a motley assemblage of dramatists and thinkers (to whom he devotes a few brief pages each), but the pattern is quite evident. Puchner offers a myriad of illuminations about an otherwise conventional group, excavating under-recognized world-historical dramas by Kaiser and Strindberg, featuring Socrates as a paradigm of the modern condition; revealing the diligent Oxford-trained Platonic aesthetician that was Wilde; and cutting to the metatheatrical core of Shaw’s Man and Superman to demonstrate a characteristically modernist dramatic structure derived from the cave allegory. Puchner examines each writer cogently for his philosophical bent, and demonstrates the their collective debt to a Platonic dramaturgy of tragicomic coaxing toward thoughtful irony. Reflecting the merits of his dramatic Platonism’s concreteness, Puchner’s vibrant and limpid prose wrests philosophical insights from their potentially abstruse formulations, rendering them active and tangible, without reducing their dimensions.

But Puchner’s study is not without its defects. There is a distinct peculiarity in its reliance on an outlying genre of seventeenth and eighteenth century verse dramas, which he calls “Socrates plays,” as the vehicle of transmission for the Platonic heritage he traces in the history of theater. These works portray scenes in the philosopher’s life, lifted from, Xenophon, and Socrates’s ancient biography by Diogenes Laertius, or fabricated outright. These plays tend to fashion Socrates into an emblem of the times: some, such as Amyas Bushe’s Socrates, A Dramatic Poem (1758) and Henry Montague Grover’s 1828 play of the same title, make Plato into a precursor of Christianity; others, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s The Death of Socrates (1808) or Jean Marie Collot’s The Trial of Socrates, or, the Regime of Ancient Times (1790), co-opt Socrates as an allegorical figure for the French Revolution (despite his dismissals of democracy). This stodgy category of plays seems to have little more internal continuity than its recurring protagonist, whose sometimes comic but always valorous presentation becomes the end-all be-all. Despite the droves of example dramas depicting Socrates—catalogued extensively in the book’s appendices—Puchner never convinces the reader that Plato’s dramaturgical model endures through these works.

To be sure, Puchner doesn’t argue specifically that these Socrates plays are some unified aesthetic movement serving as a genetic missing link between Plato’s dialogues and modernist dramaturgies. He’s keenly aware that most of these plays have had little sway over subsequent dramatic trends, or each other for that matter. Instead, his valuation of these works is beholden to the character of Socrates himself as a dramatic vessel for philosophy. He even admits that these plays often “fail to recognize the particular use to which Plato had put drama,” and instead “their chief interest was in character, the assumption that philosophy is tied to a philosophical protagonist.” But, nonetheless, in calling attention to these neglected works, he excavates a rich vein of dramatic literature attempting to exploit Plato’s latent theatrical potential.

Despite its impressive panorama of playwrights, there is a sense of discontinuity within the survey Puchner constructs under the sign of his dramatic Platonism.  There are, of course, inevitably going to be gaps. Blinded by his infatuation with the charismatic Socrates’s dramatic embodiments after the Renaissance, Puchner misses major movements in a theater where the philosophical pursuit of ideas is negotiated through the material circumstances set forth by drama. Most significantly, Puchner bypasses a golden age of German idealism, which spent its seemingly inexhaustible energies erecting and revising daunting metaphysical systems and which inspired a rush of dramaturgical experimentation. While Puchner pays brief heed to Hegel’s dramatically-attuned dialectic, he neglects the Romantic drama that sprang up around such a worldview. Works by Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, and subsequent Romantics—all admittedly beholden to Plato as an alternative to neoclassical bastardizations of Aristotle’s poetics—have no perch in the branches of Puchner’s genealogy. This drama (an interpenetrating “poetry that philosophizes and philosophy that poeticizes,” as Friedrich Schlegel characterized it) perhaps epitomizes the nature of Puchner’s Platonic poetics. Indeed, the Romantic notion of the genius, who through his artistic medium can render truth and beauty sensuous, and offer a sublime glimpse of the Infinite, is the very picture of Puchner’s Plato and his dialogues. Symbolist drama—considered a vestige of Romanticism’s insatiable longing—likewise “seeks to clothe the Idea in a tangible form,” according to its earliest manifesto. (Although, if one considers this book in conjunction with Stage Fright’s thorough study of Mallarmé’s resistance to theatricality, the Platonic character of Symbolist drama is well elucidated by Puchner.) While the Socrates plays were isolated and ephemeral, these dramatic developments did have a traceable influence on the later modernist dramaturgies that Puchner addresses, and their omission is glaring. With the Socrates play irrelevant to picture of a direct lineage, and with these marked lapses, Puchner’s account of a modern drama of ideas might seem to sprout fully formed from Plato without an intervening gestation, like Athena from Zeus’s head.

If not for a myopic digression down the dead-end path paved by a disconnected set of closet dramas and if not for his neglect of a clearer candidate, Puchner’s book might be an unimpeachable exhibition of dramaturgical inheritance. But this by no means detracts from his picture of fruitful reconciliation between the Platonic tradition and theater in occurring in modern drama.

In a prefatory anecdote, Puchner styles himself an incarnation of a compromise between theater and philosophy. Having spent his undergraduate life shuffling up and down a stairwell leading from his rehearsals in a basement black box theater (reminiscent Plato’s fabled cave) to the bright lecture halls where he first encountered philosophy; Puchner recalls a longing to make sense of the magnetic pull of each space had on his imagination. These equal and opposing forces have propelled his scholarly endeavors throughout his career, and now his recent appointment as professor of theater at Harvard – a longtime stalwart against institutional endorsement of practical arts – represents the enshrinement of theater in the academy. Perhaps the two have buried the hatchet and are ready to work together?