On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (review)

Tragedy and philosophy have long been locked in a life and death struggle. By banishing the tragic poets from his ideal, philosophically cultivated community, Plato established philosophy's authority atop the corpse of tragedy. But more than two millennia later, the recognition of the limits of metaphysical thinking led some to call for a rebirth of the question of tragedy. Certain German philosophers, all united in a concern for the ethical and political significance of the exhaustion of Western philosophical thought, have thus come to reverse Socrates' banishment and have begged the poets back into thought's domain. Dennis Schmidt has written a thought-provoking study of the development of this peculiar interweaving of tragedy, philosophy, death, and (re)birth, focusing on the rehabilitation of ancient Greek tragedy by Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After two preliminary chapters on the assessment of tragedy's political and ethical significance in Plato and Aristotle, Schmidt proceeds to examine what each of the German philosophers contributes to the rehabilitation of the question of tragedy. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life purports to test the hypothesis that an examination of how all six of these thinkers evaluate and appropriate tragic art "provides unique insights into the possibilities for the ethical and political assumptions working in those philosophers" (3). As Schmidt shows, despite the varying assessments of tragedy by the Greek and German philosophers examined, the topic of tragedy asserts itself always as an urgent, ethical question of our shared existence in time.

Schmidt's book contains eight chapters: a leading chapter, "Questions," which very effectively lays out the motivations and themes of the study; six chapters devoted to each of the six Greek and German thinkers mentioned above; an "Interlude" on Kant and Schelling that prepares the chapters on the four German thinkers for whom tragedy was such a vital question; a final chapter titled "Suspicions and Convictions"; and nine appendices. Rather than impart the contents of each of these chapters, I wish to draw attention to the three important themes that run through the main part of Schmidt's study, animating and motivating the concerns of the book.

The dominant theme of Schmidt's study revolves around the question "How is the experience of tragedy to be spoken and written?" (10). Is the knowledge contained in tragic poetry adequately preserved and conveyed by the conceptual possibilities of metaphysical language? For Aristotle and Hegel, philosophy will always be able without remainder to take up the insights of tragedy, which ultimately concerns knowledge suffered and not grasped. However, for Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, the question of how to preserve tragedy's insights is highly problematic. Nietzsche famously gave expression to this issue when he said of his own study on the birth of tragedy that it was unfortunate he didn't venture to say what he had to say as a poet, or better yet, to have sung this. Heidegger's insights into thinking and poesis—Denken und Dichten—are of course well known, if not always well understood. And for Hölderlin, who as Schmidt observes "performs the question of the tragic" (163), the problem of how to preserve the insights of tragedy became all consuming. The question of how to think tragedy ultimately becomes the question of how to philosophize tragically. That is, at issue is the question of how we can sufficiently think those aspects of our experience that lie beyond the limits of conceptual thought: the body, desire, affective life, in short, knowledge suffered and not grasped. Some of the most interesting insights and consequences of Schmidt's study emerge through his discussion of how art and language relate to truth, an issue ever more relevant in the current atmosphere of philosophical concerns.

The...