Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Sophokoles, Ödipus, Jocasta, Identität, paradeigma, Zeitlosigkeit

Kurzinhalt: Oedipus (9 Stadien), Orakel (Mensch), Protagoras, Akzeptanz d. Existenz im Horizont d. Mysteriums, Stärke in d. Schwäche, Identität durch Leid, Maß: Mensch - Gott, Transfiguration

Textausschnitt: 1) Oedipus' attainment of a successful identity (Überschriften)
2) His successful identity becomes questionable
3) Oedipus initiates a search for a truer identity
4) The answer which shatters his former identity
5) Oedipus begins to accept his new identity
6) Oedipus lives out his new identity
7) Oedipus' identity is accepted by Theseus as the identity of all Athenians8) Oedipus re-affirms his innocence
8) Oedipus re-affirms his innocence
9) The final transformation: Oedipus' identity as participation in divinity

() Oedipus ... he remains a classic example of a gradual achievement of personal identity or integration in response to the test of existence.
()
In the same century, Protagoras the sophist had given a similar answer, 'Man is the measure of all things,' and Oedipus himself symbolized this type of self-made man who seizes control of his environment and works out his own destiny, becoming in fact equated to the gods.
()
Oedipus remembers his own killing in anger of an old man who had haughtly blocked his way at a place where three roads meet: () The chorus makes explicit the inherent instability of Oedipus' first identity, an identity now in question
()
Jocasta again intervenes, this time to prevent the inquiry from reaching the awful truth. She characterizes exactly the desire to retain a safe, familiar identity, rather than face the agonizing task of breaking out into a truth which would utterly shatter that identity:
()
Finding that she has already committed suicide, he blinds himself. His true identity, in which now he and not the Sphinx is 'reduced to nought,'(cf. 1199) is of such extreme personal nothingness that he wishes to extend it to the extreme physical nothingness of blindness:
()
Oedipus had already shown that he accepted a measure of his existence greater than himself. His years of beggary have brought him to an unshakable integration of soul-not the brittle strength of the self-made man, but the enduring acceptance of an existence now lived at the horizon of mystery, where limitedness and limitlessness meet. Oedipus has learned that his strength is in his weakness ...
()
His gift of his own beaten self is being offered as the mysterious key to each man's identity. That key is that beyond the nothingness of success, capability, power and strength, there is the everything of becoming identified with the reality of an existence no longer essentially affected by the vicissitudes of failure, incapacity, deposition and weakness. Oedipus is already dead to the nothing of time and alive to the everything of the timeless. ... But the point of Sophocles' tragic paradeigma is that Oedipus' later life lived in the death of all his earlier values can teach us to integrate the death of all that is merely timebound into our own life, so that in focusing on the timeless, we too can already begin to live beyond time and death.
()
The secret of Oedipus' way, which transformed his experience of limitedness and failure, is love. This one word, which 'makes all those difficulties disappear' expresses a wisdom dearly bought by Oedipus, in which he slowly learned that man's fulfilment is in participating in the unlimitedness of God. For man, particularly for the self-made man he was, this means an agonizing transcendence of the bounds of the self. 'As Oedipus finds out in the end, man is not the measure of all things; rather, as Plato was to say much later, 'the measure of all things is-the god
()
The delay for which he is chided perhaps indicates that he had always been called, through accepting an awesome fate, to a more than human measure of existence. Only now, having answered that call at varying levels of clarity, from the opaqueness of his earlier identity to the transparence of his virtual identification with the god, does he finally transcend the measure of the self in accepting the measure of divine reality.