The Tragic: A Question of Art, not Philosophy of History

The grandeur of Attic tragedy has never ceased to satisfy very different, indeed contradictory, interests. Our own interest is not in philosophy or history, but in art. There is an ongoing scholarly literature dealing with the concept of tragedy, especially by various philosophers, which I will not discuss in any detail.² What is significant for the perspective presented here is that neither of the two most important philosophers, both of whom lived and thought in especially enlightened periods, namely Aristotle and Hegel, touched on the true tragic core of Attic drama: its aesthetic-epiphanic impulse. And here they are echoed in one way or another by a philology that is interested not in the work of art, but in history. To be sure, Aristotle famously identified "terror" (Phobos) as a defining characteristic of the tragic, but he did not investigate it as a phenomenal event. Rather, terror is connected with the counternotion of "pity" (Eleos), jointly establishing a structure leading to the creation of that questionable category in which terror is banished once more: catharsis. It is the purifying effect of tragedy that constitutes its appeal for its audience.

In a very similar fashion, Hegel paid no attention to the aesthetics of tragedy, even while relying on different categories—namely, those of the philosophy of history. Instead of terror, which Aristotle had represented dialectically, Hegel speaks of a conflict of rights, which, thanks to the absolute claims of the opposed parties, leads to tragic catastrophe.³ Not least because of the absolutism of the hero's subjective sense of right, as the expression of a consciousness superseded by modernity, Hegel had to acknowledge tragedy as an exhausted world-historical art form. This judgment, grounded in Hegel's philosophy of history, can only cite a single tragedy, Sophocles' Antigone—and perhaps also Oedipus Rex—as evidence of its plausibility. None of the other tragedies by the same dramatist, let alone the drama of Aeschylus and Euripides, offer any support for the famous theory of the "collision" of two forms of right, and Hegel's theory was countered early on. It was Friedrich Nietzsche, above all, who argued that it is the actual acts of violence and suffering that constitute the tragic in tragedy: terror is the "tonic" of tragedy as a work of art.⁴ But Nietzsche did not offer any justification for this counter-argument. The reason for the minimal impact of Nietzsche's argument lies in the fact that Hegel remains useful to a tradition of tendentious scholarship that has no real interest in the work of art.⁵

Both philosophers ultimately dissolve poetry into concepts: Aristotle's reduction of metaphor to thought and Hegel's neglect of affect in favor of speculative propositions prevent them from examining the forms of pathos in tragedy as an autonomous discourse.⁶ Instead of such syllogistic arguments, which also characterize later philosophical studies of Greek tragedy, the following discussion takes the aesthetics of tragedy seriously.

Still, rejecting philosophical readings of Attic tragedy does not do away with the key dilemma of how to understand it adequately. This is because, from the first rediscovery of tragedy in the Renaissance until today, an abyss—mental, psychological, and social—separates us moderns from the ancients. The philosophical debate about the meaning of Aristotle's terminology has long made it seem as if the more thoroughly we clarified the matter of fear, pity, and purification (catharsis), the closer we would come to solving the mystery. It was only thanks to a historical scholarship oriented toward cultural anthropology and sociology that the immediate or mediated access to tragedy was called into question.⁷ In this line of thought, anyone who no longer understands the real mythological-institutional anchoring of the art form or the mantic culture of ancient Attica, but who draws on the concept of fate—as many interpreters and readers oriented toward intellectual history have done in one way or another—is surrendering to the illusion of an inadmissible modernization.⁸

A suspicion of philosophical and literary hermeneutics reveals...