Destiny Domesticated: The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Technology

Notes

259 NOTES Prologue 1. Note that the word tragic is used with three different meanings here. First of all, it refers to the tragic events that occur in everyone’s life. Second, it refers to the awareness of this tragic dimension of life. And third, it refers to the art form in which this awareness is expressed. In what follows I will distinguish between these three meanings, by referring to them as “tragic events,” “tragic awareness,” and “tragedy,” respectively. The three connotations do not necessarily arise together, although they are connected to one another. The tragic events of one’s life, after all, need not always occur together with awareness, and yet they still do their workings. Human beings tend to (attempt to) live around the tragic events of their lives. Tragic characters (and cultures) generally only become aware of the tragic dimension of life when an inevitable catastrophe has taken place. Tragic awareness can remain implicit or it can be given an explicit expression in a religious and/or artistic representation. 2. This kind of guilt is central in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, in which the main character Sophie is forced by a sadistic physician in a German concentration camp to choose which one of her young children will live. While the choice is forced, Sophie is the one who 260 NOTES TO PROLOGUE makes it in the end, and because of that she is left with an almost unbearable guilt for the rest of her life (Styron 1979). 3. By politics I do not mean political governance in the strict sense, but the effort to live well (together), that which Anthony Giddens has called “life politics,” “politics of lifestyle,” or “politics of life decisions” (Giddens 1991, 214–17). I will discuss this practical dimension of tragedy in chapters 3 and 5 in more detail. On the moral meaning of tragedy, also see Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum 1986). 4. While political action revolves around human traffic, technical actions predominantly revolve around controlling nature as an object. When technical means are used in human interaction then it is difficult to separate political and technical actions. Especially in (post)modern societies political actions are increasingly controlled by technical management (De Mul 2010, 49–55). In chapters 6 and 8 we will see that this development is a rich source of modern forms of tragedy. 5. My description of this myth is based largely on the version in Hesiod’s Theogony (Hesiod 2006) and Plato’s Protagoras (Plato 1997, 746–90). 6. The idea that the suffering Prometheus symbolizes man is not so strange when we consider that, according to various sources, Prometheus originally was a mere mortal, who gained his immortality by ending the sufferings of the centaur Chevron, who was hit by a poisonous arrow from Hercules, and thus ‘taking upon himself’ the centaur’s immortality (Apollodorus 1997, 2.5.11 and 2.5.4). In the “Ode to Man” in the first stationary song of the Choir in Sophocles’s Antigone, in which the technical inventiveness of man is excessively praised, almost every reference to the gods is missing (in chapter 6 this passage will be discussed in detail). Prometheus has also been called a proto-Christ, by the way. Just like the figure of Jesus in the New Testament, he is positioned between human beings and the gods and he takes mankind’s suffering upon himself. 7. The fact that the level of predictability is not all that great in most cases, because most diseases, and especially the most common ones, are the result of the interplay between genes and epigenetic factors such as the living environment, nutrition, and lifestyle (smoking, etc.), does not undermine the example. The question here is, after all, whether we would want to have such knowledge. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 261 Chapter 1. Destiny Domesticated 1. Just like the Greek notion of moira, fatum is also often personified by the Three-formed Fates, also called the Parcae, whose decisions are inconvertible (fatum, “that which is said,” stems from fari: to speak, and therefore also has the connotations of god’s speak and oracle language). In English this word survives in both the concepts of fate and fatal. 2. We also encounter this concept earlier in history, in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, in which it has a...