Playing your hero when he is ridiculed: the case of Aristophanic Socartes

How is it for an actor to play his own hero? Well, given the usual circumstances, the hero will usually be another actor, a politician, a leader or some other sort of social figure. When Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon” he completely transformed, so they say, being Andy or Tony during all the breaks and all rehearsals. The director Milos Forman says he only met Jim twice during the making of the film. I guess for real actors, there’s an excitement in playing the role of a famous hero-actor that makes them want to push themselves to their own limits. Kaufman was a very talented mutli-faceted actor and Carrey was probably anxious to meet such high standards.
As a first year student in my undergraduate degree I had to take a course called “History of Political Philosophy I”. Right at the first class the professor introduced us to the first man in the western world that has been documented to think about our social and political life, our first critic and observer, the father of all philosophy – Socrates. With great awe and admiration we read the apology and other dialogues. The professor, a true guardian of the scholastic tradition, questioned every student for the suppositions behind his comments and did not hesitate when emphasizing the foundational importance of the Socratic “I do not think that I know what I do not know”. Just a few years later with the presumption of a political theory graduate student and despite being an amateur actor at best - I tremble with the kind of apprehension perhaps met by Carrey, an urge to meet more stringent demands when I portray a figure that has been a role model for my aspired profession.
But there is another layer of difficulty in playing the role of Socrates in the Aristophanes’s Clouds. For despite the figurative role Socrates plays in our modern philosophy, as the illustrious dedicated pursuer of the truth, exposer of sophists for their vacuous rhetoric and steadfast guardian of scientific integrity with the public acknowledgment of his own limits – Aristophanes’s Socrates is himself a sellout, a rhetorical artist of little substance, a perverse parody of his own social criticism. In order to even begin thinking about the role, I have to placate the cognitive dissonance I experience when I hear the name Socrates abused that way.
These two radical ends meet for me in The Clouds – the amazingly intelligent Socrates, the inspiration and role model for all western philosophy and the laughable idiot, detached from real life in his ivory tower, looking for opportunities to show off his useless wittiness and obnoxious eloquence and even to sell his poignant tongue to the highest bidder. I try to meet the challenge by offering a self-conscious academic, dedicated to his spiritual world and his critique of material world but also aware of his own flaws and weaknesses. Aristophanes’s bottom line is extremely unfavourable; but in my inner struggle I try to give Socrates a charitable interpretation, ascribing sincerity to his passionate but wacky pursuit of elegance, eloquence and ultimately – knowledge. I take this contradiction happily, pondering the social criticism of the role of academia in political life and particularly the use of analytic theoretical frameworks that ‘simplify’ reality into a model which loses contact with ordinary life on its way. I have always said, and explicitly elsewhere, that folly should be taken very seriously. I take Socartes’s ridicule very seriously and I hope I can do justice, as the saying goes, to his odd and bipolar Aristophanic character.