The good mixture of the platonic charioteer: The lability of contemporary man under the lens of Greek wisdom

Abstract

This article proposes an anthropological-philosophical interpretation to the human being based on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of intermediary-being. The first part focuses on the mythical figures of Apollo and Dionysus whose relationship would express, in a practical-sapiential way, the intermediary character of the human. From this perspective, it will be shown that the Nietzschean reading of the myth reveals a modern anthropological prejudice that has forgotten the possibility of experiencing the tragic character of human existence as the radical fragility of its mediations or, in Ricoeur's terms, as the “pathetics of misery". The second part focuses on the dualistic transformation that myth undergoes in Platonic philosophy and that is embodied in the image of the charioteer as mediating agent of the extremes of the soul, as well as in the figure of the politician, intermediary weaver between the warp and weft of the political sphere. It will be seen that Platonic philosophy, through the notion of the just measure (tò métrion), recovers the practical wisdom that a philosophical anthropology that defines man as a mixer-being demands.