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Self-knowledge and Convention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Kekes
John Kekes
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Albany
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Extract

This paper is a defence of the combination of three theses. First, selfknowledge is a requirement of good lives, but it must include knowledge of our limitations. Second, these limitations are set by certain unavoidable conventions whose observance is another requirement of good lives. Third, Sophocles's Oedipus the King is a moral text of the highest significance, for it contains a profound account of why self-knowledge must include knowledge of unavoidable conventions limiting human aspirations.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 61 , Issue 237 , July 1986 , pp. 313 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1986

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References

1 Numbers in parentheses refer to the lines of the translation by S. Berg and D. Clay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

2 Knox, B. M. W., Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven: Yale, 1957), 138; referred to as Knox.Google Scholar

3 Knox, 50–51.

4 Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays (New York: Viking, 1982), 135, trans. Fagles, R.; intro. and notes by Knox, B.; the passage quoted is Knox's.Google Scholar

5 Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a30–34, trans. I. Bywater.

6 Dodds, E. R., ‘On Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex’, Greece and Rome 13 (1966), 37–49; the passage quoted is on 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Knox, 5–6.

8 Knox, B. M. W., The Heroic Temper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 8.Google Scholar

9 Versenyi, L., Man's Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 227.Google Scholar

10 For my discussion of conventions, I am indebted to Hampshire's, S. ‘Morality and Convention’, in Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).Google Scholar

11 Knox, 14.

12 Knox, 52.

13 By Versenyi, L. in ‘Oedipus: Tragedy of Self-knowledge’ Arion, 1 (1962), 20–30.Google Scholar

14 For a more extended discussion of these psychological mechanisms, see my ‘Moral Sensitivity’, Philosophy 59 (1984), 3–1.

15 I am indebted to Berel Lang for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.