In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of the famous claim at the end of the Symposium that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, according to which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.

In this chapter, I show how Plato’s conception of and norms for comedy provide a framework for understanding the Euthydemus as an ideal comedy, and I argue that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light, but it also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

Watching a tragedy can make us weep against our will, whereas a good comedy can send us into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Causing these intense emotional experiences seems to be what is distinctive about the two genres. From its earliest incarnation, tragedy has also been seen as communicating deep and important truths about human nature, and many figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Hegel and Kierkegaard, have constructed theories of tragedy that attempt to articulate the nature of this tragic wisdom. In common parlance, a ‘tragedy’ is a sad or heartbreaking event, like the accidental death of a youth or a natural disaster, but the genre of tragedy – which often depicts sad or heartbreaking events – is thought to communicate something to its audience about human life – its fragility, for example, or its meaninglessness. Comedy, by contrast, is often seen as mere amusement, and we are not inclined to think that we are learning anything significant while laughing at the foolishness of a stage figure, at the pretensions of a politician or at the punch line of a joke.