The Concept of Fate in Oedipus Rex
To the first-time reader of Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, it seems that the gods are in complete domination of mankind. This essay will seek to show that this is not the case because the presence of a tragic flaw within the protagonist is shown to be the cause of his downfall.
In the opening scene of the tragedy the priest of Zeus itemizes for the king what the gods have done to the inhabitants of Thebes:
A blight is on our harvest in the ear,
A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds,
A blight on wives in travail; and withal
Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague
Hath swooped upon our city emptying
The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm
Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.
The power of the gods seems quite awesome in their ability to inflict great injuries such as these on the population. King Oedipus, seeing Creon returning from the oracle at Delphi, addresses a brief prayer to King Apollo as the ultimate source of assistance in time of trial: “O King Apollo! may his joyous looks /Be presage of the joyous news he brings!” Creon brings to Thebes the message of the gods from the oracle: “Let me report then all the god declared. /King Phoebus bids us straitly extirpate /A fell pollution that infests the land, /And no more harbor an inveterate sore.”
The gods know that Oedipus is a “pollution,” a “sore,” which must be gotten rid of, expelled from Thebes. Charles Segal in Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge supports this view:
In his growing strength Oedipus begins to act as the ritual scapegoat, the pharmakos, the figure who is ritually laden with all...
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...s Rex, edited by Michael J. O’Brien. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.
Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
“Sophocles” In Literature of the Western World, edited by Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. NewYork: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Transl. by F. Storr. no pag.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed new?tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&part=0&id=SopOedi
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- Spengler, Oswald. “Tragedy: Classical vs. Western.” In Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Woodard. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
Van Nortwick, Thomas. Oedipus: The Meaning of a Masculine Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Instead of adopting the ways of popular culture, the Church should show the world a more excellent way. Instead of retooling Sunday to render it in synch with Monday through Saturday, the Church, in its proclamation and in its making of disciples, should offer a counter-cultural model of living obedience, seeking to transform what believers and unbelievers experience during the week by what happens to them and around them on Sunday.
The great Sophoclean play, Oedipus Rex is an amazing play, and one of the first of its time to accurately portray the common tragic hero. Written in the time of ancient Greece, Sophocles perfected the use of character flaws in Greek drama with Oedipus Rex. Using Oedipus as his tragic hero, Sophocles’ plays forced the audience to experience a catharsis of emotions. Sophocles showed the play-watchers Oedipus’s life in the beginning as a “privileged, exalted [person] who [earned his] high repute and status by…intelligence.” Then, the great playwright reached in and violently pulled out the audience’s most sorrowful emotions, pity and fear, in showing Oedipus’s “crushing fall” from greatness.
The mind and body do interact with the body in some ways. Descartes says that the mind imagines things, you see things in your mind. These things do not just come from anywhere. You get these images from your senses. Say if one sees something with their eyes. Then turns away and closes their eyes. The image is still there.
Premise 1. (a) “If I am a thinking thing and I have a distinct idea of a body, then I am distinct from my body and can exist without it.” (b) I believe this premise is true. (c) Everything we clearly and distinctly understand can be made by God how we understand it. Thus, clearly and distinctly understanding things separately is sufficient for them to be independent.
Woodard, Thomas. Introduction. In Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Woodard. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
Descartes noted that the body is like a machine and is divisible, but the mind is separate of this body and is not divisible. He
Rene Descartes once said, “There is a great difference between mind and body”. This statement comes from the idea that Descartes believed there were two substances that made up reality. One of the substances in reality Descartes called extension, or material being, meaning it takes up space. The other has to do with the mind, or thought, immaterial. This is called dualistic metaphysic’s. Descartes began his exploration on the material and immaterial by way of epistemological detour. This is simply finding out metaphysical truth by ways of epistemological analysis. The question at stake is one that has continued on for centuries, how are the mind and body independent of each other?
Woodard, Thomas. Introduction. In Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Woodard. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
This argument supports the claim that the body and mind are two in the same. Premise 1 explains the reason we feel pain from stubbing our toe is that the mind and body work together. In a Dualist view minds are non-physical and non-spatial. Based on the assumption that our mind can be spatially divided there is no way to prove this because the only way the mind can be divided is in space and we can’t verify this to be true.
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher who used his understanding of his consciousness to develop Cartesian dualism, or the theology that ‘the mind and body are considered different substances’ (Solomon 332). Descartes believed that humans are composed of two different type substances or beings. The first are material substances or a material beings, which are physical substances or matter that take up space. The second being is a thinking substances or a thinking beings that are sometimes equated with the soul. These thinking substances, such as the soul, are nonphysical substances of the mind that engage in various actions such as thought, doubt, and imagining. The mind is a thinking substance that does not take up space and therefore cannot be perceived with someone's senses. Although these two substances interact, it is unclear how they do so because they are separate from each other; mind-body dualism is a direct example of this dilemma. The body is a material substance, while mind appears to be a thinking substance. The body and the mind not only interact, but also appear to have an
The mind being the main control of the body. Many individuals have problems connecting the two due to consciousness of the mind and how it makes us who we are and that having no connection with our body. We do have strategies and ways to see how our mind and body works but not necessary our consciousness in reasons as why we choose to do certain things, who we are, personality, or even free will. Others can only see our body and how we look but not who we are. If we did have a connection between our mind and body we can assume that it allows us to choose and control our body. If that is the case we would be able to control our bodies and their properties. Feeling pain, hunger, laughter, or is it that the mind can only control portion of the body as sending signals from the brain to our bodies. We don’t connect both because either we create them in our mind we can control them, since its not the case either someone else creates them or something does. I think that the mind is not physical at all but as far as being connected to the body maybe just a portion of it. Because of science we know that we need our bodies to exist or continue to exist. I guess we will never know since we don’t have proof of anyone surviving without their bodies and are here to tell their
René Descartes was the 17th century, French philosopher responsible for many well-known philosophical arguments, such as Cartesian dualism. Briefly discussed previously, according to dualism, brains and the bodies are physical things; the mind, which is a nonphysical object, is distinct from both the brain and from all other body parts (Sober 204). Sober makes a point to note Descartes never denied that there are causal interactions between mental and physical aspects (such as medication healing ailments), and this recognition di...
His pain is not his future; it is the plague of the country. Oedipus was told by Teiresias that in his later years he would be the killer of his own father, and would marry his own mother. In his attempt to avoid this situation, he left both of his parents and traveled to a far away city called Thebes. Once there he was married to a woman, that he, himself, was positive was not his mother, for his mother was the woman that he had left back in Corinth. Also, being so far from his known home, there was no chance that he could kill his father whom he had also left behind. Oedipus thought he was safe, but he was not.
The ineffaceable impression which Sophocles makes on us today and his imperishable position in the literature of the world are both due to his character-drawing. If we ask which of the men and women ofGreek tragedy have an independent life in the imagination apart from the stage and from the actual plot in which they appear, we must answer, ‘those created by Sophocles, above all others’ (36).
Physicalist often bring up the argument that dualism does not make sense because how can a mental object be hanging out in a physical object. I believe dualism because I do not think the physicalist perspective is accurate when you talk about how there is only physical things that make up the world. For me it does not answer the question how we think and make decisions, there has to be some kind of mental object that process and manages all of that information in our brains. To be honest I don’t think that any of these arguments are true or false, we still need to do more work before we could figure such questions out. I think we can argue that something is happening both in the brain physically like neurotransmitters and something mental as well, no argument is right or wrong in this case because we just don’t know. Dualist can argue that love is not something physical, something mentally happens that attracts you to someone and there is a feeling and emotion associated with love that just is not