Tragedy

Week 2: Tragedy
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (c. 450 BCE +/- 30 years)
Nietzsche: The Birth Of Tragedy (1872)

Prometheus Bound
“No good deed goes unpunished”

Aeschylus and Nietzsche are paired this week to explore the nature of Tragedy. Our last topic, Hubris, had a complicated definition in Ancient Greece compared to the meaning we ascribe to that word today. The same can be said of “Tragedy”. As far as Prometheus, tragedy lies in his being wrongly punished for a series of good acts he commits towards humans. His personal will was in conflict with his duty as a god and this is his tragic flaw. In his suffering, he arouses pity in the spectators of the play who feel a sense of kinship toward him. As spectators, we also know that his bad fortune will change (as prescribed by Fate) and we learn that even the gods must endure long ordeals but must remain hopeful of a happy ending. In adopting such an attitude, we humans approach a more divine status. Some of these features are (may be) prerequisites of tragedy... like I said, it's rather complicated.

Again, one theme that dominates this week is that of balance, of moderation. Avoid pride and excess in all things. Know your natural place and experience that sphere fully without stepping beyond its boundaries (to do that would be unnatural). These dualities and their limits must be understood to keep one on the central path and to keep one confined to what is “natural”. Middle ground between God (divinity, enlightenment) and Titan (brute, animalistic strength); balance between nature and humanity. I wonder if all tragedies play on this idea, and whether in one way or another they are the result of deviating too far to one extreme.

But let’s focus here on tyranny and friendship for a moment. These themes were most engrossing to me as I read Prometheus Bound because I was giving it an “anthropological” reading. My interest was piqued at the idea that the changing of the godly guard (from the Titanomachy to the Olympian) in Prometheus Bound is a mythical echo of the shift from nomadic life to that of civilized, walled-city life - not dissimilar to the Enuma Elish and other ancient myths. During this shift (which spanned millennia) the relationship between the people and their rulers must have changed as well as that between the people themselves. So do the notions of tyranny and friendship change in this play and if they do, why? Must “tragedy” necessarily occur at major transition points in our evolution, at least when enacted and revealed in our mythology?

Zeus punishes Prometheus for being kind to the very humans he planned on destroying. Prometheus gave humans not only fire (stolen from Zeus) but knowledge and other intangible principles like justice, cunning and the love of freedom. He had faith in Man’s development while Zeus was set on destroying humanity and all of its imperfections. Zeus imposes a severe penalty on Prometheus even though they were friends and even though Prometheus played a significant role in putting Zeus in the seat of power (Prometheus helped the Olympians defeat the brutish Titans). Zeus is thus behaving like the tyrannical Titans he just deposed. (He is new to power, wields it frivolously, and believes that he will hold on to it for all eternity). It’s not surprising, then, to note that none of Zeus’s minions sympathize with him, except perhaps Strength and Violence. They all fear him for the tyrant he is. Certainly none speak of him as a friend. He is a supreme ruler, oppressive from every angle and possesses none of the sensitivity possessed by Prometheus. He has neither love for those who do his dirty work nor any for those who placed him in the seat of power. Excessive! This is the tragic situation Prometheus is faced with for having faith in humans.

The role of the chorus in a Greek tragedy is to uphold the moral standard and this they do, but the chorus in Prometheus Bound wavers on some moral issues and its inconsistency is significant. For example, at one point they claim that one should be prudent and not help others who cannot help in return. However, at the end of the play, through loyalty and friendship, and to their own harm, they stand by Prometheus as Zeus’s lightening strike. In so doing, they mirror Prometheus’ own behaviour towards humans. He had nothing to gain from helping them, he just believed in them. Somehow, there is a moral shift in the chorus, in the moral standard. What does this shift represent in the story of humanity?

Historically, when did altruism make an appearance? I suspect it has been with us for quite some time given that evolutionary theory supports the idea (i.e. by being altruistic one’s fitness in nature (and the chance of one’s genes being passed on) increases. Altruism has also been linked to consciousness because one can imagine oneself as the other and can therefore empathize.

Hephaestus makes a point of commenting on his relationship to Prometheus, (p.21) “The ties of birth and comradeship are strangely strong.” In saying this, he justifies sympathizing with Prometheus - something that Zeus might condemn. In contrast to this attitude and relationship, he rubs salt into Prometheus’ wounds by reminding him, “Your kindness to the human race earned you this.” Is this a comment on giving for the sake of giving, without expecting anything in return (as Prometheus does to humans?) It seems to me that Prometheus represents the “new man” who is able to do act truly altruistically while the old school (characterized by Strength, Hephaestus and Oceanus) cannot act this way. Oceanus, p.29: “Being related to you, I suppose, makes me sympathetic with you.” There is reluctance in his saying this. He is speaking out of fear and does not want to anger Zeus. “Being related to you I suppose makes me sympathetic…” as if he’d otherwise be unwilling to show empathy.

By the end, the Chorus goes against such thinking and stands firm by Prometheus even though they have little to gain by doing so (p.52) “Would you have me practice cowardice? I will stay with Prometheus, come what must. I was taught to hate those who desert their friends; And there is no infamy I more despise.”

If nothing else, this last statement is a criticism of Zeus who basically backstabbed Prometheus, an old friend. Zeus now sees everyone, even his peons as beneath him. P.27 “To look on all friends with suspicion - this disease would seem to be inherent in a tyrant’s soul.”

There are hints, though, that such oppressive regimes are only temporary:
p.27 “My mother, Earth, had many times foretold to me, that not brute strength, not violence, but cunning must give victory to the rulers of the future.”
Prometheus to Hermes: “You and all your crew are young; so is our power; and you imagine that you hold an unassailable citadel.”

Not only does this play mythologically depict a shift in how our ancestors were governed, (or does it?) it also portrays a change in their development as supernatural beings, beings that possess gifts beyond what the rest of the natural world possesses.
p.28, “I caused men no longer to foresee their death.” “What cure did you discover for their misery?” “I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.” “Your gift brought them great blessing.” “I did more than that; I gave them fire.” “What? Men, whose life is but a day, possess already the hot radiance of fire?”
In so doing, did Prometheus bring us Hell as well? Prometheus has sinned in making humans more god-like, more immortal for causing us to no longer foresee our deaths.

Even though we broke free from the shackles of nature when we were ruled by the law of Necessity and had no choice but to live and behave as natural beasts, we are now burdened by the ramifications of veering too far from what is “natural”. Prometheus seems to believe that beings have a place. To Oceanus he cries: (p.32) “Be what you are!” The chorus seems to agree: p.36 “Did you not note the helpless infirmity, feeble as a dream, which fetters the blind tribes of men? For human purposes shall never trespass outside the harmony of Zeus’s government.” Humans have a place from which they should never leave. (p.47) “When marriage is with an equal for me it holds no fear or danger. But may the love of the greater gods never cast on me its irresistible glance.” (p.46) “That the best rule by far is to marry in your own rank; That a man who works with his hands should never crave to marry either a woman pampered by wealth or one who prides herself on her noble family…”

Friendship, loyalty, power struggles… to this day, in our relatively stable world, relationships unfold amidst the give and take of power dynamics, to put it coldly. It makes me wonder what people thought of friends, strangers and mere acquaintances in Ancient Athens and in the centuries and millennia before. Are feelings more heartfelt now that we live securely in established and peaceful communities?

And finally, did a tortoise dropped from the claws of an eagle really result in Aeschylus’ death? (The bird somehow knew that Aeschylus gave its species a bad name for how it plagued Prometheus). He never did reach his 30th year; Tragedy.




(<-- Nietzsche as a young man)


Nietzsche: The Birth Of Tragedy (1872)

People! Dear multitude of readers... I cannot keep this up. Nietzsche has done me in. Until now I’ve always tried to write down whatever attention-grabbing thoughts came to mind while reading, but Nietzsche has left me both rather lost and with a whole host of thoughts and ideas that I could not possibly articulate in one blog (and it wouldn’t be worthwhile reading anyway). Something has to change. Future blogs will be (will have to be) more focused. (Alas, for all I know, everything I say about Nietzsche is way, way off).

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche critiques modernity by elucidating the death of Tragedy the result of an overpowering of the Dionysian (God of wine and revelry) by the Apollonian (God of civilization and intellectual pursuits, among other things). Those guilty of removing Dionysius from the Tragic stage (thereby killing Tragedy) are Euripides, with his rearrangement of traditional tragic drama, and Socrates, who put the nail in the coffin with his morality and rationality.

The worm at the core of Nietzsche’s world is Science. For him, science is problematic: (p.18) “…for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science” in the same way that to criticize Reason, one has to apply methods at odds with Reason, and therefore must argue from outside of the paradigm within which everyone thinks (that being the paradigm of Reason).
Basically, Nietzsche’s main argument seeks to answer the question he poses early on: (p.21) “Could it be possible that, in spite of all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of a democratic taste, the triumph of optimism, the gradual prevalence of rationality, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, no less than democracy itself which developed at the same time, might all have been symptoms of a decline of strength, of impending old age and of physiological weariness? These and not pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist - precisely because he was afflicted? “Disease was the most basic ground/of my creative urge and stress;/creating, I could convalesce,/creating, I again grew sound.”” Nietzsche is prescribing his own remedy for the woes of the world and that very remedy is in the art experienced by humankind and the creation of art by humanity.

Nietzsche looked up to Schopenhauer in his early days even though they had very different reactions to tragedy - (p.24) Schopenhauer on tragedy: “That which bestows on everything tragic its peculiar elevating force is the discovery that the world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit - it leads to resignation.” In contrast, tragedy uplifted Nietzsche; it strengthened and reaffirmed his humanness.

Nietzsche predicted my skepticism: (p.31) “But perhaps such readers will find it offensive that an aesthetic problem should be taken so seriously… I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.” At first, (knowing that I had understood a mere fraction of what he is trying to get at in The Birth of Tragedy), I wondered at the usefulness of this essay. Who cares if the Dionysian and the Apollonian are not in equilibrium on the dramatic stage? I’m happy and lead a satisfying life. However, he later argues that cultures without myths, without a set of beliefs that lift them from the monotonous existence of their lives, are sad and uninteresting cultures indeed. He also extrapolates this imbalance to all aspects of human life. (p.59) “Art saves him, and through art - life.” In this light I think I would agree with him. Everything we do beyond eating, sleeping, procreating and other activities that animals do, is within the realm of our ability to create, create everything from art to the atomic bomb.

Nietzsche starts his dissertation with an explanation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian duality (p.33) and the fact that they are as intertwined “as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations.” Put simply, science has removed the Dionysian not only from the Tragic stage but also from the artistic and human stages as a whole. The result: we can only see one side of ourselves. (p.34) “Philosophical men even have a presentiment that the reality in which we live and have our being is also more appearance, and that another, quite different reality lies beneath it.” We live mostly through Apollo, the god of appearances and illusions; this is Nietzsche’s definition of naivety.
By ignoring the Dionysian, we are ignoring our primal selves and denying the full expression of ourselves. Within this sublime state is also a feeling of terror, not dissimilar from the sublime: (p.36) … “the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason … seems to suffer an exception.” One might liken this loss of self to that that Wollstonecraft and Frankenstein experienced through nature, their means of tapping into the Dionysian. “These Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness”.

Nature has this effect on us - through the Dionysian - because first and foremost we are natural beings. We’ve become caught up in our scientific, rational thinking and are on Pentheus’ trajectory. Living within the realm of rationality and science, we cannot see beyond appearances.
Nietzsche speaks of “healthy-mindedness” in a way that reminds one of Pentheus and our own blindness as modern men: (p.37) “but of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them. … Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated hostile or subjugated celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man.”
(p.40) “…In the Dionysian, man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically” (through art).

“Nature, as yet unchanged by knowledge, with the bolts of culture still unbroken – that is what the Greek saw in his satyr who nevertheless was not a mere ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions.” (p. 61) The special, sacred holiness of nature is something contemplated at length last semester. Nature is where we come from – no matter how detached we might feel from it as a result of our (overly-) rational thinking. Such thinking lead to Pentheus’ whole family’s downfall in The Bacchae and such thinking can also instill anomie and nihilism. A “complete” man must somehow commune with Nature through his archetypal self, the satyr. The Greeks did this in the form of tragic drama and Nietzsche presents a way for Germany to follow this tradition.

To Nietzsche, the essence of nature, to be expressed symbolically, is done in the form of music. Nietzsche was very critical of music in his day, especially Romantic music: (p.25) “a first-rate poison for the nerves, doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and who honour lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicate and spreads a fog.” I can’t help but wonder what kind of music Nietzsche himself listened to. Did he enjoy Beethoven's genius at all? Did he actually think his own compositions were superior? Most of Nietzsche’s music is only listened to out of curiosity (and probably only once, at most) by those who have an interest in his philosophy, not his music.

From what I gather, Nietzsche might have visualized music in the ether that fills the void between universal Forms and what actually is. (Man, at least that’s what I think he’s saying!) Music accesses "symbolic intuition", something that Socrates ignored. Socrates, in contrast, acted on reason, not intuition, and hence went against the Dionysian.

When it comes to opera Nietzsche has novel ideas and I - (frustrated as I was reading some of these complex and convoluted thoughts!) - I couldn't help but think that he is trying hard to make a name for himself in the academic world. In reading his criticism of opera, I was tempted to conclude that he’s simply imposing his own agenda on this form of art. Maybe another ingenious and clever thinker could argue that opera, in fact, represents the rebirth of the proper Greek Tragic Form! This is not to say that Nietzsche doesn’t support his argument very well: everything he says in the preceding 18 chapters supports his thinking. However, I suspect that if he were alive today he might change his tune upon experiencing some hip-hopera , and recognize the deep tragedy therein.

p.60 “Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action …” In complete contrast to the modern man, who is lacking in the Dionysian, I read this as Hamlet being conquered by the Dionysian without the Apollonian filter required to shelter him from the terror that can result from being exposed to the “pure Dionysianness”.

Now what about the Apollonian takeover that Nietzsche’s so pissed off about? This “Greek cheerfulness” brought on by Euripides (and then Socrates) “…it is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to be responsible for, nothing great to strive for, and who does not value anything in the past or future higher than the present.” (p.78). This made me think of the modern-day precept, “live in the present and contentment will come.” But Nietzsche is thinking beyond the single moment, beyond the present, and beyond any specific point of an individual’s path in life. He is saying, here, that the archetypal man must fully encompass and embody the past, along with his (and all of humanity’s) whole evolutionary journey – past, present and future – and recognize and represent his boundless greatness despite all the chaos that surrounds him. Confront that Reality and understand it. Embrace it like a polar bear swimmer on New Year’s Day.