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does not goad us to become better. Oedipus’ world is hyper-political. Jocasta’s treats the
inner life as the world, and would lead to the withdrawal from political life. In political
life, standards are set over which we have no control. Jocasta cannot tolerate this. She is
the flip-side of Oedipus’ longing for autonomy. He finds his in the world. She finds hers
within the confines of her own consciousness. To get control of this, she needs to do
something about guilt, and to do something about guilt, she needs a worldview which
says we cannot know why anything happens. Pity for her and Oedipus that she finds one.
In Oedipus Tyrannus, both Oedipus and Jocasta suffer horrible fates. That
Sophocles makes this palpably clear suggests that both Jocasta and Oedipus are negative
examples. They are extremes to be avoided. So, although we have left too much of
Oedipus lying on the ground for us to assert in good conscience that we absolutely
understand him, in noticing that the play contrasts Oedipus with Jocasta, and that they lie
at opposite extremes, a sort of Charybdis and Scylla, we have made the play more
intelligible. And we have avoided their mistakes. For unlike Oedipus, we have not
collapsed all things into one. And, unlike Jocasta, we have not retreated from the world
into our own idiosyncratic value system. Instead, by means of considering the details of
Sophocles’ play, we have dared to attempt to find and address his questions, not merely
our own. Sophocles’ play discloses that human life is riddled by oppositions, which
cannot be overcome, and that intelligibility lies only at the extremes, knowledge of which
is no benefit to the knower only if the knower fails to see that the extremes are meant to
inspire wonder, not a program of action.
Convention