The paper argues that the act of looking, as defined between the story of Gyges, Candaules, and the offended queen and the story of Solon's visit to Lydia, functions in the first book of Herodotus, and perhaps also elsewhere throughout the Inquiry, as a metaphor for the relation of the histôr to the object of his investigation. Further, by a careful comparison of the Gyges story in Herodotus with the queen's own narration in the enigmatic "Gyges Tragedy" , we can (...) define a Herodotean psychology of spectation that bears a striking resemblance to the specifically tragic psychology manifest in the fragment. Herodotus positions his readers, the paper argues, in the place of Gyges, forcing them to look-in their imaginations-on what does not belong to them, just as the theatai in the Theater of Dionysus must look in imagination on the scene described by the queen. While the tragic audience is protected from the fate of Candaules and of Gyges' descendant Croesus by the constitutive blindness of tragedy that prevents the spectators from seeing what happens in the mukhos, Herodotus' audience must seek some other reassurance that they will not face the voyeur's penalty. This paper finally argues that Solon's theôria, with its crucial purpose of establishing the nomoi of Athens and its crucial ethic of looking not at the object of desire but at the end, installs in Herodotus' historiê the psychology of tragedy: to look desiringly is to lose, but to look inquiringly is to learn. (shrink)

Everyone misses the point of Plato's cave. What a coincidence, because everyone also misses the point of BioShock. The moment one's interactivity with the game is revealed as a fake isn't the moment when one kills Andrew Ryan in a cutscene. It's what happens after that. Atlas tells to abort the self‐destruct sequence. One has the choice of whether to abort self‐destruct sequence or not, but, positioned as it is, that choice has been exposed as meaningless within the basic fabric (...) of game's mechanics. The non‐choice of disarming self‐destruct sequence ends up in the same place as the other, more famous ethical dilemma of BioShock; the choice of whether to harvest the Little Sisters or to save them. That's the part that everyone gets wrong where BioShock is concerned, and so it's the part where comparing the game to Plato's cave can really help get both of them right. (shrink)