Theater and Philosophy, Information Technology and Democracy: A Skeptic's View
Timothy Richard Wutrich
Associate Professor of Comparative Arts, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio U.S.A. Email:
The history of western theater is a subset of the history of ideas. Indeed, if we consider the origins of European theater in sixth-century B.C. Athens we will observe that the development of theater and the development of philosophy coincide and that their histories overlap. For the ancient Athenians theater provided entertainment and a festival atmosphere, but also provided a public forum for citizens in the world's first democracy to examine ethical and metaphysical questions, issues, and ideas that philosophy was also investigating. The intersection of dramatic and philosophic literature has been noticed and studied by scholars in important works such as Eric Bentley's The Playwright as Thinker and Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy as well as in the volume edited by J. Peter Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. What these scholars and others like them have noticed is that in European intellectual history the progression towards democracy has often been accompanied by the parallel development of dramatic literature and theatrical performance. Thus the emerging democracy in Athens saw also the development of the theater festivals and the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Shakespeare wrote and performed his plays in Elizabethan and Jacobean England which, if not precisely democratic, still signals important advances in human freedom; and in the eighteenth-century German-speaking world, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller wrote dramas that celebrated human freedom and gave the disorganized Germanic states (which lacked newspapers, easy communication, and a central government) a public forum for discussing ideas. The information revolution of the late twentieth-century has changed the way thinkers conceive many human institutions. Indeed CITIDEP has as one of its goals the development of participatory democracy throughout the world with greater Internet access and a wider use of information technologies. While this objective is commendable, it is certainly not above discussion and debate. If we were to think for a while about the use of information technology to promote the fine arts we might make some interesting discoveries. If we start with the above premise that democracy and theater have often developed simultaneously and that theater and philosophy have also gone the same path together at the same time, and if we acknowledge democracy, theater, and philosophy as good and necessary human institutions, one might wonder whether these good and necessary institutions might be made better or at least might be helped in their labors with increased use of technology. Would it not be wonderful if a production of a play by Vaclav Havel about the evils of totalitarianism were performed in Prague and simultaneously were "watched" on-line by spectators from around the world from home computer screens?While these are commendable ideas in theory, I adopt a skeptical viewpoint and in this paper I will argue that the essence of participatory democracy, like the communal experience offered by live drama, cannot, indeed, must not be primarily "virtual," but if it is to be a significant expression of the living human spirit must be the product and the process of a localized and real human community.
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