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Abel Lionel Moderns On Tragedy PDF

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Major essays by playwrights, critics, and philosophers about the nature of tragedy from the time of the Greeks

through the twentieth century

Irving Howe, General Editor

LITERATURE AND IDEAS SERIES

Irving Howe, General Editor

MODERNS ON TRAGEDY
An Anthology of Modern and Relevant Opinions on the Substance and Meaning of Tragedy

Edited with Introductory Remarks by LIONEL ABEL

A FAWCETT PREMIER BOOK

Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn. Member of American Book Publishers Council, Inc.

3 9091 00247314 2

I want to thank Sherry Abel, who helped me in many ways in preparing this anthology.

Acknowledgments and Sources

LA.
"Bellac and the Theatre of Tragedy" From Litterature by Jean Giraudoux, 1941. Reprinted by permission of Editions Bernard Grasset, Paris, and of Georges Borchardt. "The Christian Tragic Hero" From The New York Times Book Review, December 16, 1945, pp. 1, 21. 1945 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. "Andromaque" From The Hidden God by Lucien Goldmann, trans, by Philip Thody. Reprinted by permission of Humanities Press Inc. and of Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. "Character Change and the Drama" From Tradition of the New by Harold Rosenberg, Copyright 1959, 1960. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Horizon Press. "Critique of Corneille's Horace" From The Structure of Literature by Paul Goodman. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Copyright 1954. "Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil" From The Wheel of Fire by G. Wilson Knight. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Methuen & Co. Ltd. "The Cid, or Corneille's Cult of the Hero" From Corneille et la dialectique du heros by Serge Doubrovsky, Editions Gallimard 1964. Reprinted by permission of Editions Gallimard and the author. (I have retained the original French of Corneille in this selection because I do not feel there is a good English translation.L.A.) "Berenice" From The Idea of a Theatre by Francis Fergusson. Reprinted by permission of the Princeton University Press and the author.

Copyright 1967 by Fawcett Publications, Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-16880 First Fawcett Premier printing, January 1967 Published by Fawcett World Library 67 West 44th Street, New York, N.Y. 10036
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"The Euripidean Tragedy" Sections I and II of "The Euripidean Tragedy" from Greek Tragedy by H. D. F. Kitto. By permission of the publishers, Methuen & Co. Ltd. Greek Tragedy is available in the United States in an Anchor edition. "Tragedy and Religion" From The Masks of Tragedy: Essays on Six Greek Dramas by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Copyright 1963 by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Reprinted by permission of the author and of the University of Texas Press. "Is There a Tragic Sense of Life?" This article was originally published in Theatre: Volume Two, Annual of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. Reprinted by permission of Hill & Wang, Inc. "Oedipus Tyrannos" The original German is from Sophokles by Karl J. Reinhardt. Seite 105-195. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1947. "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life" From the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, October, 1960, pp. 5-26. By permission of the author and the American Philosophical Association. "On the Tragic" From Cross Currents, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1954, pp. 178-191. Translation by Cross Currents Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Cross Currents and A. Francke Verlag, Bern. This essay is taken from Vom Umsturz der Werte, vol. 1 (Der Neue Geist-Verlag, Dr. Peter Reinhold, Leipzig, 1923) * "On Tragedy" From New Statesman, 29 July 1966, pp, 169-170. Reprinted by permission of the New Statesman and the author. "The Tragic Vision: The World" From The Hidden God by Lucien Goldmann, trans, by Philip Thody. Reprinted by permission of Humanities Press Inc. and of Routiedge and Kegan Paul Ltd. "Notes on Hegel's Theory of Tragedy" In another English translation, this selection will appear in the forthcoming book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojeve, to be published by Basic Books, Inc.

"The Limitation of Being" From "The Limitation of Being" in Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger, trans. Ralph Manheim. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Yale University Press. "The Birth of Tragedy" Sections 5-14 and 17 from The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann. T h e Concrete Development of Dramatic Poetry and Its Types" from The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920), pp. 312-348. (Translator's footnotes have been omitted here.) "Tragedy and the Attacks on Socrates" from Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: 1892), Vol I, pp. 425-448.

Contents

Introductory Remarks

13

RECENT LITERARY OPINION

29

JEAN QRAUDOUX Bellac and the Theater of Tragedy 31 * v . H. AUDEN The Christian Tragic Hero" 40 t u a E N GOLDMANN HMtOLD ROSENBERG Andromaque 45 56 60 76 95 114 137 152\' 175 187 Character Change and the Drama AUL GOODMAN Critique of Corneille's Horace C WILSON KNIGHT Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil SHtGE DOUBROVSKY The Cid, or Corneille's Cult of the Hero HtANClS FERGUSSON Berenice: The Action and Theater of Reason R. D. F. KiTTO The Euripidean Tragedy THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER Tragedy and Religion UOKEL ABEL Is There a Tragic Sense of Life? ?KA*LEINHARDT Oedipus Tyrannos

THE OPINIONS OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS 225 SMBT HOOK M A X SCHELER Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life On the Tragic 227/ 249 ^

STUART HAMPSHIRE

LUCIEN GOLDMANN
QALEXANDRE KOJEVE
V

On Tragedy 257 The Tragic Vision: The World 271 ( Notes on Hegel's Theory t of Tragedy 295 ' f The Limitation of Being 299 j 313

O MARTIN

MODERNS ON TRAGEDY

HEIDEGGER

N I E T Z S C H E ' S "BIRTH OF TRAGEDY"

HEGEL ON TRAGEDY
HEGEL HEGEL The Concrete Development of Dramatic Poetry and Its Types Tragedy and the Attacks on Socrates

365
367 398

Introductory Remarks
RECENT LITERARY OPINION

We feel that our age has a special relation to tragedy and should be represented by some work in the tragic form; we also feel that this form is inaccessible to us, our age has denied us access to it. We are interested in tragedy, value it, and are not sure what tragedy is. Tragedy, for us, is a problem. In what the philosophers call "ordinary language" we say of such or such an event that it is "tragic," by which we mean that it is painful to think of or to comtemplate. But by "tragic" in the esthetic sense, we mean an event so presented that, for all its content of pain or horror, we can respond to it with joy. To be sure, the words "tragic" and "tragedy" are not our own creations, though they now form part of our language; these terms we have taken from the Greeks, who used them to describe the esthetic form which they alone invented. One of our difficulties may be that the term "tragedy" remains a Greek word in no matter what language we speak, just as the word "philosophy" remains a Greek word in all tongues. A modern philosopher has even asserted that philosopay talks Greek; I am inclined to believe that tragedy talks Greek; this of course would mean that Macbeth and Berenice are, in some fundamental sense, Greek works. It will be seen that this judgment is quite contrary to that of W. H. Auden, who argues, in the essay included in this anthology that there! are two kinds of tragedy, one Greek and one Christian, the first being the tragedy of "necessity" and the second the tragedy of "possibility." Now in the first place we are not very clear about what possibility is. And Professor Quine, I am told, has it is a word no philosopher should use. In any case, in 15

Auden's so-called "tragedy of possibility," the catastrophe, as he sees it, would necessarily not be inevitable, and so would have to result from a moral lapse on the part of someone. But such a play would then have to be a moral play, and Aristotle has told us that the moral play ought to end happily. Moreover Hegel is quite in agreement with Aristotle on this point, and even contends that the dramatist interested in the tragic must make every intellectual exertion he can to save his protagonist: the dramatist's failure to prevent a catastrophe is precisely what convinces us that the catastrophe is fated. But I do agree with Auden on one point: there is something in our cultural heritage that stands between us and tragedy as conceived by the Greeks. The question comes to mind: what has prevented much of modern philosophy from talking Greek? Has it not been the effort of our philosophers to talk, not philosophy, but science. Modern though, I believe, broke with the kind of questioning the Greeks initiated when philosophers began to treat problems in the light of discoveries, that is to say, in terms of the deliverances of science. But recent philosophy, in at least two important schools, has returned to the older, the Greek mode of questioning: the phenomenological school, putting all received ideas in parentheses; and linguistic analysis, limiting philosophy to those questions about which one can be one's own informant. What has prevented us moderns from thinking in terms qualitatively continuous with Greek dramatic thought? It has been our interest in and knowledge of psychology. I Now, we know very little about the psychology of any figure in any real tragedy. I once asked some students to describe |the psychological traits of figures of comedy such as Falstaff or Tartuffe: there seemed to be no difficulty was found in analyzing these characters. One is reminded, of course, of Morgann, speculating not only about the Falstaff of the plays, but about his parents, acquaintances, and the acts of his not yet invented life before he appeared on Shakespeare's stage. But when I asked the same students for an opinion on the personal traits of figures of tragedy, Oedipus or Macbeth, they were hard put to point out anything in these figures that would show them as distinctive. They could not say whether Macbeth was either good or bad, courageous or the contrary, candid or treacherous, weaker or stronger than his wife. All they could say was that he had imagination, and rather more than most men. But this is hardly a way to describe a character, and tells 16

us finally that we know very little about MacBeth Oedipus the students found altogether unanalyzable. I must add that I had to agree. So, do we have less psychological knowledge of figures of tragedy then of figures of comedy? Or of our personal acquaintances? Yet we are, or become, I think, personally acquainted with Oedipus and with Macbeth. We do know something about them. What? Ortega y Gasset pointed out a similar problem with regard to the lover's knowledge of the beloved. Plato thought the lover knew the beloved, and better than anyone else could, Stendhal thought the contrary: that the lover was mistaken about the beloved, knowing less than others could know. Ortega in his essay sides with Plato. It seems to me, however, that Plato and Stendhal are both right, The lover may not know the characteristics of his belovedthis is Stendhal's claim. But the lover does know, and more surely than anyone, the beloved exists: so he does have knowledge of the beioved, even if not the kind of knowledge Plato had in mind, Oar knowledge, I suggest, of the tragic protagonist is something more than psychological, a knowledge of his reality, whatever his psychology be. We know in the fullest sense that \ The tragic protagonist exists, and we feel this all the more strongly as we see him driven, and necessarily, into nonexistence. Tolstoy, it will be remembered, thought Macbeth had no motive for murdering Duncan, and attacked Shakespeare's tragedy on this psychological ground. Is it true that Macbeth Had no motive for murder? I said we know him to be real, so he must have had some real motivation; do we know what this motive was? I should say that his motive, which we can know, does not however set him apart from others, i in no sense gives us any insight into what may be called bis character. His motive lies very simply in the excitement produced in him by the prophecy of the witches he would be first Cawdor, and then King. It is often said that Macbeth reacts differently to the witches' prophecy that Banquo does to their promise that his descendants will be kings. The interest of G. Wilson Knight's essay on Macbeth, which I chose for this anthology as against other treatments of the play, is that it convincingly answers this contention: Knight shows that Banquo inwardly is as excited and involved in expectation as Macbeth himself. The matter might be put this way: the contrasting actions of Banquo and Macbeth spring less from a difference (fancied, I think) in 17

their characters, than from the different motivations supplied them by the witches. We have an interesting anti-psychological approach to the problems of tragedy in Harold Rosenberg's "Character Change and the Drama." However, I think Rosenberg goes too far in dismissing the intention of a character as relevant to a judgment of his acts. Rosenberg ingeniously compares legal and religious with dramatic thinking, but it is excessive to say, as he does, that only the act of a felon or criminal is important to the law and not his motive: what if the felon or criminal is a minor? or is mad? What of the specific legal distinction between taking life after deliberate thought as against killing in passion? I believe that in tragedy motives should be immediately apparentwe should not have to look for them: Oedipus has no hidden motive for killing Laius. On the other hand, when a motive is not evident we are unlikely to find out what it is. Think of the quantity of speculation about Iago's motive for destroying Othello! I for one do not find a satisfactory solution in Coleridge's notion that Iago was hunting for a motive; the English critic has simply transferred to the character of Iago the difficulties he, and we too, have with the play. If we have little to say psychologically about the protagonist of a tragedy, we at least know this, that he is one person though pulled in different directions. In the Spanish play The Star of Seville, once ascribed to Lope de Vega and now thought to have been written by some other playwright, the King tries to break into the home of Estrellathe Star of Sevilleand is driven out by the young lady's brother, who, sword in hand, defends her. The King, wanting revenge, asks one of his favorites, the nobleman Busto (in love with and affianced to Estrella) if he is ready to accept any task the royal will wants done. Busto assents to any order; the King orders him to challenge and kill the brother of Estrella. This Busto does. And Estrella has to endure the double horror of hearing of her brother's violent death, and of how death was inflicted by her lover. But the point to be noted is that the very quality of spirit that makes Busto kill, once he has given his word, is precisely the quality we expect from one whose word of love is not given in vain. For the author of The Star of Seville, whoever he was, hardly wanted us to think that Busto cared more for honor than for love. He wanted to confront us with something we almost never experience ourselves and can never encounter in any play not a tragedy: the tearing apart of a person who 18

can be so torn because so unified. There is here no problem of psychology at all, and our sense of the unity of Busto's character is given with the same simplicity as our sense that fee exists. Of course, the world of The Star of Seville is a very special one, and to comprehend it more fully we probably have to have some knowledge of the romantic and chivalrous values of Spain's Golden Age. Similarly, we have to know something about what reason meant to the French of Racine's time to understand his Berenice, and Francis Fergusson in his fine essay on the play has rightly stressed the rational meaning of the word gloire to Racine and his audience. For in the early part of the seventeenth century, the leaders of France had made the most extraordinary effort to give a rational foundation to all spheres of life: politics, thought, manners, grammar, and poetry. This effort may be said to have finally shaped the French character; it was by trying to be right that the people of France became French. True, by the time Racine set to writing his Berenice, it was clear that the French effort at a thorough-going reasonhad failed. The play's audience was in fact a most court, dismayed by what had come of its projects. As Ramon Fernandez in his book on Moliere notes: "The palace Versailles, a comedy by Moliere, and a tragedy by Racine, are precisely equivalent expressions of the wholesale retreat from reason, a force that no more presides over mankind than the honorary chairman presides over an assemblage. Reason had ceased to be a working model and become a mold...." That reason had become a mere mold may account for the element of artificialitypointed up by Francis Fergusson in Berenice. But reason had very recently been a working modelhence the genuineness of the play and its great sadness. What Fergusson has failed to note in essay is that out of the uniquely French experience of the defeat of reason Racine made a tragedy that is not just classical but Greek. One could not create Greek tragedy in Greece, however, once the order of the Greek world, sustained by cosmic piety, had been destroyed: it was in ruins when the Sophists appeared, even for Euripides. He was the first of the Greek playwrights, I should say, who tried to write tragedy without being able to situate in a cosmic frame the catastrophes with which he wanted to move the public to pity and fear. Curiously enough, in the one play of Euripides in which he does make us feel that there is a cosmos underlying the 19

normally experiences world, this cosmos is envisaged not as an order in which catastrophe might occur, but as itself catastrophicI am of course referring to the Bacchae. So I cannot agree with the important view of H. D. F. Kitto (expressed in the section I have chosen from his book on Greek Tragedy) that Euripides wrote tragedy, though of a different kind from Sophocles, as Sophocles, according to Kitto, wrote a different kind of tragedy from Aeschylus. To carry Kitto's reasoning further, we would have to say that Shakespeare wrote a fourth kind of tragedy (Kitto does try to assimilate Shakespeare's kind to that of Sophocles) and Racine a fifth. And after all these qualifications of tragedy, we would be even less clear as to what tragedy is. For my part, I do not think Euripides' plays are tragedies; and I think it important to show they are not. Especially the Bacchae, defended as tragedy by Kitto. Also by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, in his essay "Tragedy and Religion" appearing here. Kitto asserts that Euripidean tragedy is peculiarly abstract and that is why it is often taken, wrongly, for melodrama. And he has argued for this view with great ingenuity, most cogently in reference to the Medea. I think, with all respect, that he is quite wrong about that play, and also about the Bacchae; both plays are faulty in the same way, and their fault is not abstractness. In a true tragedy, I hold, there is something like an execution; moreover, both the executioner and the victim piust be noble. In the Medea, neither Medea nor her victim Jason is noble; nor is either the emissary of Dionysus or King Pentheus in the Bacchae: we cannot sympathize either with the rigidly rationalistic king, or with his cruel, divinely aided destroyer. And we cannot sympathize with Pentheus' mother Agave when, her ecstasy lifted, she realizes that it is her son she has killed. There is a great freshness in the work, and a most seductive poetry. But human feeling, which, in any true tragedy, is never diminished but on the contrary aggrandized, and is sometimes even lifted to equality with the divine, is in the Bacchae brutally set aside. Rosenmeyer, in his defense of the play, has tried to justify King Pentheus and present him as something more than a rationalist at grips with a god. Here is Rosenmeyer on King Pentheus' transformation under the spell of Dionysus: "His vision is broadened; but his role as Pentheus is finished. The disintegration of the king is made particularly painful by the emphasis on feminine clothing. . . . The energies which
20

had once been directed toward the mustering of armies and the implementation of public decisions are now bestowed on the arrangement of his Bacchic vestments. . . . The Bacchianized Pentheus is a visionary and poet. But it is a poetry which lacks the saving grace of choice. He contemplates the prospect of his mother carrying him home from the mountains, and the prospect pleases him. . . . Having rid himself of the social restrictions and classifications, he savors infancy, a sentient creature for whom the mother's cradled arms offer escape and bliss. He is woman and child and beast, an amorphous organism susceptible to all influences and realizing itself in the life of instinct and unthinking sense." The description, accurate enough, is hardly that of a tragic protagonist on equal terms with a divine destroyer; and the god in the play is reduced to animal proportions: at one point King Pentheus takes the god's emissary for a bull. But this is not the place to argue at length for my own notions about tragedy; I only want to indicate what they are insofar as they have influenced me in selecting the essays I am presenting. For instance, I chose to reprint Lucien Goldmann's analysis of Andromaque because it calls attention to the cosmic setting of Racine's drama. Goldmann is the first, to my knowledge, to have noted that Andromaque's power to resist Pyrrhus, who does appeal to her, conies entirely from Hector, dead and buried. To be sure, I have not excluded views contrary to mine. I have tried, though, and this I do not deny, to present as many pieces as I could which have some bearing on my own notions, supporting or contradicting them. I could not include of course everything I admire. And I have used some pieces which I myself do not find clarifying. However, I think that on this topic anyone who has expressed himself forcefully is entitled to be heard; nor did I rely on just one norm in choosing pieces. For example, I chose to reprint Paul Goodman's passage on Corneille's Horace because the writer, though committed to a psychological viewpointone I do not acceptshows so much finesse in his moral judgment of the characters in Corneille's play. Serge Doubrovsky's essay on the Cid I included because of its quality, and not because, in agreement with the author, I tend to see the characters of tragedy as situated beyond the purely psychological. In fact, I disagree with Doubrovsky's analysis of the Cid, and I think his conclusions directly contradict his premises: he daims the play to be a tragedyhe claims too (in the book on Corneille from which I took his piece, abridged for 21

publication here) that Corneille is the greatest French writer of tragedy, more tragic than Racine. But in his essay on the Cid, which he treats as one of Corneille's masterworks, Doubrovsky declares finally that the dramatic situation which "threatened to be tragic" ends in "tragi-comedy." Surely tragi-comedy is something different from tragedy. I think Doubrovsky, interpreting Corneille's hero as a representative Master, did not look carefully enough at Kojeve's analysis of the class of Masters, an analysis Doubrovsky has used and cited in his essay. Kojeve says: "The idea of the Master is not viable; one can only die as a Master. The Master who pretends to live as a Master is an impostor." Now, as Doubrovsky indicates in his book, all Corneille's heroes, including the Cid, try to live as Masters, and this is no doubt the reason why Corneille's plays seem not genuinely tragic and, finally, for all their strenuousness, strike us as comedy or tragi-comedy. But if Doubrovsky has not seen this very real difficulty, yet his essay nevertheless will interest for its intellectual vigor and also because it treats of Corneille in terms new to the discussion of tragedy. Which brings me to the very first essay in this anthology, Jean Giraudoux's "Bellac and the Theatre of Tragedy." In this delightful piece the French writer says many things with which I am forced to disagree. When, for instance, he insists that French audiences prefer tragedy to any other entertainment, and that their taste for tragedy is inseparable from their love of bourgeois comfort, bourgeois well-being, I think he is being witty at some expense of truth. And it is not at all the case that whenever a tragedy is presented in France the house is sold out. Even if it were true that the French people have a special feeling for tragedy, something surely contestable, should we not make a distinction between the creator of tragedy and its consumers? The creator of tragedy in France was Racine, who was far from being the kind of humanistic bourgeois Giraudoux's essay celebrates. What drew me, though, to Giraudoux's essay was his desire to relate the taste for tragedy in Greece to the taste for it in France, evident in the discretion with which French audiences have pursued this taste.
THE OPINIONS OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS

' |

What philosophers have had to say about tragedy is by no means more interesting and certainly not more important 22

man what literary men have said. On the other hand, what the philosophers have had to say is much more general, and often more sharply put. Scheler's essay is valuable, I think, for only one of the ideas presented in it, but this idea is most essential. When Scheler speaks of tragedy as a collision between equal and contrary values, he is, of course, repeating Hegel's view, and "with less acuteness than Sidney Hook, who formulates the issue in tragedy as a struggle between the right and the right, or even between the right and the good. Also, it seems to me that Scheler's notion of "objective sadness" is both questionable and unclear. Do we respond to tragedy with "objective sadness"? What does it mean to say of any felt sadness that k is "objective"? I do not know, nor does Scheler say. But what is extremely valuable in his essay is the notion that at the heart of any true tragedy we will find the operation of a kind of causality which Scheler calls "eidetic." Necessity in tragedy according to him, is given, a priori: even an overwhelming probability of catastrophe is insufficient to define a truly tragic situation. Sidney Hook's essay, which I have praised for its formulation of Hegel's view, is to be objected to, however, insofar as it tries to characterize a particular school of philosophical thinking, the pragmatic school, as "tragic." There is no philosophy, let alone school of philosophy, which can properly be called "tragic." I make this point in my own essay, "Is There a Tragic Sense of Life?" in criticism of Lucien Goldmann's view that Pascal's thought was tragic. Hook thinks Dewey's was. Both Goldmann and Hook have, I believe, fallen into the same error: they think the tragic is separable from particular tragedies. Valery once noted that philosophers try to separate beauty from the things that are beautiful: the ifei^gs themselves become irrelevant. - art Hampshire's brief comment, written as a review for Ibe New Statesman and Nation, contains more valid ideas dun many long treatises. The critical asides about Lukacs' aunner of thinking are not only right, in my view, but applicable to Goldmann (Lukacs is his master). And I am completely in accord with Hampshire's incisive point that ID a tragedy the causes of a catastrophe are remote from the victim. I should go even further, and say that they are abo remote from the dramatist, or at least not clearly discernible by him. I have taken some pages from Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, pages in which he tries to relate the thought of
23

Parmenides to what he calls the "thinking poetry of the Greeks," specifically to one of the choruses in Sophocles' Antigone. I think these few pages contain a highly original and genuinely philosophical notion of tragedy. Is it a romantic notion? This may well be. But in any case, the idea that the strangeness characteristic of man is most completely expressed in those collisions with reality that end in disaster seems to me one implied by all past theorizing about tragedy, be it by Aristotle, Hegel, or Nietzsche; and Heidegger has expressed his view with great power and a kind of poetry.
NIETZSCHE'S "BIRTH OF TRAGEDY"

For reasons of space, I have not been able to present Nietzsche's essay in its entirety. But in fact not everything in it is pertinent to our topic. Certainly the essay has historical importance, marking a decisive moment in our reflection. Also, it is filled with insights. Yet its enthusiasm for the tragic wonderfully felt, has helped to propagate conclusions I, for one, find questionable. About Euripides, Nietzsche was probably right His judgment that Euripides was a rationalist was taken up and differently expressed at the turn of the century by the English scholar Verrall in his brilliant book on the dramatist. To be sure, Verrall rejoiced in the rationalism of Euripides, which Nietzsche deplored. And Verrall interpreted the Bacchae as an expression of rationalism, while Nietzsche took the play here I think Nietzsche was right, Verrall wrongas a recantation of rationalism. _ What are we to think finally about The Birth of Tragedy? Its positive influence has been exhausted, whereas what I would call its negative influence is probably still with us. Certainly we must today regard Nietzsche's attack on Socrates, whom he calls the destroyer of tragedy, as totally unjust. And we cannot but regard Nietzsche's pitting what he calls "Dionysian" man against Socratic or "theoretical" man as so much rhetoric, the tantrum, perhaps, of a philosopher. After all, it was Socrates who upheld absolute values against the moral relativism of the Sophistsby argument, of course: what other means was possible against Protagoras, for instance, who excelled in argument? It was in fact the moral relativism of the Sophists, combatted by Socrates, that created an atmosphere in which tragedy became impossible. Moreover, Neitzsche thought tragedy an anti-progressive ideology, or dependent on some such ideology. In my judgment, tragedy, is neither progressive nor anti-progressive, nor ideo24

logical at all: there is no such thing as a tragic attitude, or a will to tragedy. I have still another objection to Nietzsche's view. It will be remembered that Scheler, in his essay, maintains that at the heart of tragedy there is a type of causality that is essential, a priori. Where else is this type of causality to be found? Not in nature, of course, where we no doubt have to deal entirely with probabilities, however overwhelming. The type of causality Scheler has in mind is to be found, I suggest, in the presuppositions of a culture, presuppositions that may never have been confronted directly by the creator of tragedy. But Nietzsche writes as if the creator of tragedy were able to make an intellectual decision in favor of values consonant with tragedy, and contrary to those destructive of it. The decision in favor of tragedy would, for Nietzsche, have to be musically motivated, but it would nonetheless remain the decision of an intellectual. But Aeschylus and Sophocles were not ideologists of culture, like the Euripides whom S'ietzsche criticizedlike Nietzsche himself. What makes the tragedies of Euripides weak, or, as Kitto says, "abstract," is that they were founded not on the norms that were fateful for Greek society, but on the ideas the talented dramatist entertained at the moment, if you will, on his vues d'espritpacifist as in the Trojan Women, or barbarous as in the Bacchae. Nietzsche's consideration of tragedy amounts finally to logical support for the Euripides of the Bacchae against ice Euripides of the Trojan Women, whereas the Greek poet in both of these works was equally remote from those presuppositions of the Greek culture which in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles operate both within and behind oents causing catastrophe. Nietzsche did give us one damental notion: that the form of tragedy expresses a certain moment or condition of culture; but this true idea, in hts treatment of it, is coarsened, becomes misleading. He argues at if the condition of culture he desired, and in which he thought tragedy would be possible, could be produced by the exertion of a certain cultural will; and tragedy is seen by him Mt as something we might have to submit to, but as something we ought to strive for ideologically, as something we ought to will. Now the desire for tragedy is anything but tragic.
HEGEL ON TRAGEDY

Hegel's views on tragedy are, it seems to me, much more profound than Nietzsche's; and what is essential in them has 25

been reformulated with admirable lucidity by Alexandra Kojeve in the passages from his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel presented in this volume. But of course I have let Hegel speak in his own words. However, I must call attention to a curious misunderstanding by Hegel of his own idea of tragedy. He seems to have\ thought that his explanation of tragedy could also serve as al description of it. But were his view of tragedy meant to ' describe, it would be both limited and misleading. It could be \ said (it was said) that Hegel had adequately described only J one tragedy, the Antigone of Sophocles; and Hegel himself: * says as much, when he proposes a second theory of tragedy, to account for Sophocles' Oedipus. I do not think Hegel needed a second theory to supplement his original and striking conception of tragedy. Obvi-1 ously it is a weakness in a philosopher to present two entirely different theories to account for the same phenomenon. Hegel's first notion was an explanatory one, and not a description of the Greek works. And as an explanatory notion, that is to say, a notion as to why the form of tragedy appeared in Greece, it has a valid reference to every Greek tragedy, holding as well for the Oedipus as for the Antigone. It is true that Hegel's notion does seem to describe the Antigone perfectly, and the Oedipus only in part; but the intent of the theory, as I noted, was surely not descriptive. In my own formulation of Hegel's view (as stated in "Is There a Tragic Sense of Life?") I assert that in the Greek world the superior individual had to violate the law of the family or of the state; on this point I am in agreement with Kojeve. One might argue, though, against this view, that in Greece there was an alternative, permitting escape from fate. Could not the philosopher, at least, sidestep the conflict of state and family? Here the story of Socrates in instructive No doubt, Hegel had this in mind when he insisted that Socrates' fate was tragic; but his explanation as to why it was tragic is most unsatisfactory, requiring him to justify the Athenians in sentencing Socrates, something no philosopher before Hegel dreamed of doing. However, if Hegel had held to his original insight he could have shown a tragic content in the drama of Socrates' death, and this without justifying Socrates' accusers or judges. One thing held against Socrates was that he had voted for the acquittal of an admiral who, after an engagement, had failed to collect the Athenian dead. As Hegel himself pointed out, care for the dead was the special province of the Greek family. Failing to collect the 26

dead, the admiral charged by the Athenian court had obviously sinned, but not against the state; nor did Socrates sin against the state in voting for the admiral's acquittal. But what about die sin against the Athenian families, a sin in which Socrates was also involved? I take this whole matter as an illustration that the antinomy of family and state in the Greek world was inescapable, even by a philosopher once, that is, under the obligation to act. Readers of Karl Reinhardt's essay on Sophocles' Oedipus (an essay praised by Heidegger) may think, though, that the critic's analysis of the play is more in line with Hegel's special theory about the Oedipusthe one I called wrong and said he did not needand contrary to the theory of Hegel which I called original, and support. The argument no doubt would be that Reinhardt showed the Oedipus centered on an issue of Being as against Appearance, Appearance as against Being a metaphysical question, and not on a less general issue, such as the conflict between state and family in the antique world. My answer is that though Reinhardt has been wonderfully sensitive to the theoretical meanings Sophocles wove into his play, he has left out of his account the elemental struggle which gives these meanings their drastic character. Not knowing he has killed his father, Oedipus strives to find his father's murderer. He succeeds, trapping himself, and becomes his own judge and sentencer. But in the name of what? Of Being, as against Appearance? Noin the name of the state. The many conflicting postures of the characters in relation to Being as *r nst Appearance, brought out by Reinhardt's clarifying esay, should not hide from readers the bitter conflict at the heart of the action in the Oedipus. And Hegel's theory has a certain descriptive value, as I aoled, even for the Oedipus. Suppose we ask: In what sense Oedipus free? in what sense determined?questions Reinhardt raises but does not succeed in answering. Now rertainly Oedipus seems free to investigate the crime he "tmelf committedon the other hand he does not know, ben he begins his investigation, that it was he who was guilty of the crime. It has been said, rightly I thinkeach of us can confirm this from his own experiencethat we fed most free when we are in fact most determined, so that our feeling that Oedipus, with whom we identify, is free m no sense proves that he is. But what kind of determinism is he subject to? Vnt to any kind of natural determinism. But in the Greek 1. as Hegel has shown, still another determinism was at 27

work: an individual who acted drastically could not but sin, against either the family or the state. Guilt followed ineluctably on action, and from the very presuppositions of Greek culture. But does not culture have the meaning of freedom from necessity? In Greece, it did have that meaning for the many, not for the few. There are few who act; and action, in Greece, meant exposure to a determinism set in motion by society itself. To be sure, such cultural determinism did not exclude freedom; sin was not inevitable for those who could avoid drastic action, and they are represented in the Greek tragedies by a chorus that does not act. Oedipus, because of his nature and station, had no choice but to act. It is from Hegel's perspective that Macbeth and Bereniceas I suggested beforecan be seen as Greek works; here I should like to make this judgment, which some may find odd, more pointed and precise. Let us take Berenice first. In Racine's play, Titus, Emperor of Rome, is subject to a Roman law applying only to emperors; any other Roman but the emperor is free to marry a queen. Titus does not have to submit to this law. He is free to yield up power, to become an ordinary citizen, or to go into exile with Berenice. As emperor, he remains subject to a law applying only to him. And Macbeth, in Shakespeare's tragedy, is subject to an atmosphere which could not but envelop anyone who had the ambition to be king. This murky and controlling atmosphere, like the mist in which the Weird Sisters appeared, materializes the belief held at the time that kings rule not by moral, but by metaphysical, right. Duncan's character is unimpeachable; but the Weird Sisters, representing the metaphysical, in their prophecy offer the crown to Macbeth. Moreover the descendants of Duncan are rejected by them: only the descendants of Banquo will have metaphysical support. Now it was under a descendant of Banquo, James I, that Shakespeare staged his tragedy. We may assume that for the playwright and his audience, with James on the throne, the metaphysical was no longer felt to be at odds with the moral. In any case, it was the atmosphere of moral ambiguity ("Fair is foul and foul is fair") operating with the power of a causal law which excited Macbeth and his wife to their tragic action. Here too, as in Berenice, and in the Greek plays, we have a type of determinism to which only the hero is exposed. But does the writer of tragedy have to be aware that he is 28

dealing with the presuppositions of his culture? By no means. Shakespeare in writing Macbeth need not have reflected directly on the moral significance of the divine right of kings. And Racine in writing Berenice may never even have noticed how perfectly the defeat of reasonfor the seventeenth century reason was the regal facultycould be expressed in the story of an emperor's impotence; Racine may have been led to his subject merely by sympathy for Louis XTV in love with La Valliere. As for the Greeks, may it not be precisely because they did not understand the cultural determinism they were subject to that they were able to represent it as fate in their tragedies? A fatality understood calls for action, for change. Hegel was even of the opinion that the writing of tragedy becomes impossible once the presuppositions of a culture are directly known. We may pause over this thought, which can lead to a fuller comprehension by us of the power of the presupposed. We have some notion of what that power is from metaphysical analysis, in which the ideas controlling most of our thinking are located somewhere behind, and even hidden by, our thoughts. In social life and action, what we presuppose has power over us by being immediately intimate and yet at the aune time remote; and it is the source of whatever piety we are able to bring to the achievement of our goals. So it is not from his clearly thought out views about life or about action, but from what he along with others of his culture and period presupposes, that the writer of tragedy draws his special and incomparable power. I am referring once again to what I take to be not a notion but a truth (we owe its clarification to Scheler, its revelation to Hegel), that the causality at work in a proper tragedy is one not found in aature. And I wish to stress once again that this type of causality is derived by the writer of tragedy through his felt onion with his society. When at one with what controls the action of his fellows, the writer can feel such pathos as is Solicit in their aims; he gains, in addition, a specialI ~iost said a technicalpower, the power to be independent at the empirical, and to discern behind some shocking instance of human adversity a subtly spun givenness as its cause. Thus it is that he is able to formalize and lighten analytically a domain which at first sight seems incapable of order and lightness, the domain of human defeat and suffering, of those things which, as Pascal puts it, "take us by the throat." It should be possible to answer more fully now the 29

question with which I began: Why is tragedy a problem for us, why do we feel cut off from it? True, we tend to understand our own acts and those of others in the light of psychology, and we lack any independence of the empirical; but what separates us most decisively from tragic thinking which is something quite different from thinking about tragedyis that we are lost in a welter of suppositions and countersuppositions, and incapable of ever getting back to the presuppositions governing all these. So divided is society now, that we may well wonder whether there are any presuppositions at all behind the multitude of things, often catastrophic, now being done. Our fate seems to be that we cannot find fate anywhere, in any action, no matter how lofty its motive or grim its consequences. We are, however, able to think about tragedy, and here our very separation from it may work to our advantage. After all, it was in a Greece in which there was no longer a single writer capable of tragedy that Aristotle formulated the conception which has not since been set aside, calling tragedy the imitation of an action so designed as to relieve, by stimulating, the feelings of pity and
terror. Lionel Abel

Recent Literary Opinion

September, 1966

30

to the greater conception underlying her; and in the last resort it is this, not the imagined character of Medea in these imagined circumstances, that moulds the play. As Euripides develops his method, in particular as the war forced his thoughts more on the social aspects of tragedy, we shall find this gap between the stage-drama and the tragic conception, non-existent in Sophocles but perceptible in the Medea, growing much wider. Already the strict logic of plot, the Aristotelian doctrines of the tragic hero, the Sophoclean tradition of characterization and the use of the chorus are receding, and they will recede much farther. Unity of interest, that is of tragic conception, remains; but how far that conception is to be presented through one hero and one action, how far through a diversity of heroes and a multiplicity of actions, is a matter to be decided privately between Euripides the tragic poet and Euripides the playwright.

Bacchae and Ion: Tragedy and Religion


THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER THE Bacchae, like the Ion, is a tale about a god, but that is all they have in common. The Ion I called, perhaps for want of a better term, a theological romance. What, then, can we say about the Bacchae? Earlier I suggested that it is not intrinsically a religious drama. This flies in the face of certain critical assumptions which have recently gained currency. It has been suggested that Euripides' chief object in writing the drama was to give a clinical portrayal of what Dionysiac religion, hence Dionysus, does to men. According to this view, the Bacchae is a more or less realistic document, perhaps an anthropological account of an outburst of manic behavior, of a psychosis analogous to certain phenomena reported from the Middle Ages and not unknown in our own troubled times. The play has even been compared with a modern imaginative treatment of mass psychosis, Van Wyck Brooks' Oxbow Incident. I feel that this is mistaken, and for a very simple and obvious reason. Whatever one may say about the ancient tragedians, about the extravagant character of many of the plots, about the implausibility of much 152

that is said and done, the fact remains that the writers are interested in what is typical, in the generic, or, as Aristotle has it, in the universal. To attribute to Euripides a study in abnormality is to indulge in an anachronism. Euripides is not the kind of dramatist, like Sartre, whose poetic urge is stimulated by small grievances rather than catholic insight. Nor is Euripides a scientific observer of sickness; he does not record, he creates. His material is ritual and mythical, and some of it clinical; but the product is something entirely different. Pindar once uses the tale of Perseus cutting off the head of the Medusa as an image symbolizing the act of poetic creation: living ugliness is violently refashioned into sculptured beauty. The ferocity of the Bacchae is to be seen in the same light. By an act of literary exorcism the cruelty and the ugliness of a living experience are transmuted into the beauty of a large vision, a vision which is not without its own horror, but a horror entirely unlike that felt at the approach of the god. It is the kind of horror which Plato touches on in the Symposium and the Theaetetus, the sudden weakness and awe which get hold of the philosophic soul at the moment when she comes face to face with a like-minded soul and jointly ventures to explore the ultimate. Dionysus is only a means to an end; Euripides exploits the Dionysiac revels to produce a dramatic action which helps the spectators to consider the mystery and the precariousness of their own existence. Aeschylus, notably in his Agamemnon but also in some of his other extant plays, appeals to the audience with an interplay of sounds and sights. With Aeschylus, language is not an instrument but an entity, a vibrant self-sufficient thing, working in close harmony with the brilliant objects filling the stage of the Oresteia. The word textures pronounced by the chorus, like the sentence patterns of the actors' speeches, stir the audience as violently as the sight of a crimson tapestry or the vision of evil Furies on the roof. Behind this sumptuous drapery of color and sound, personality takes second place. The characters are largely the carriers of images and speech. Sophocles introduces the personal life, the bios, into drama. Now a man is no longer largely the pronouncer of words, the proposer of ideas and emotions, but an independent structure involving a past and a future, a point of intersection for ominous antecedents and awful prospects. This emergence of the organic character, of the heroic life as the nucleus of drama, was a fateful step in the history of literature. Aeschy153

lus also, in some of his later plays, adopted the new structuring for his own purposes. Euripides goes further. He rejects the autonomy of speech as he rejects the autonomy of the personal life; instead he attempts to combine the two in an organic mixture of his own. In the Ion he gives us a parody of the pure bios form; mythology is squeezed into a biographical mold, with unexpectedly humiliating consequences for the great hero. In the Bacchae, on the other hand, it is in the end not the persons who count, nor the words or sound patterns though the play may well be the most lyrical of all Euripidean works, but the ideas. The Bacchae, in spite of its contrived brutality and its lyricism, is a forerunner of the Platonic dialogues. The smiling god is another Socrates, bullying his listeners into a painful reconsideration of their thinking and their values. That is not to say that we have here an intellectual argument, an academic inquiry into logical relations. That would fit the Ion better than the Bacchae. Rather, the Bacchae constitutes a poet's attempt to give shape to a question, to a complex of uncertainties and puzzles which do not lend themselves to discursive treatment. There is no clear separation of thesis and antithesis, of initial delusion and liberating doubt, nor is there anything like a final statement or a solution. Nevertheless the poem is cast in the philosophical mode. Sophocles, in the Oedipus Rex or the Ajax, takes a heroic life and fashions its tragic nexus to the world around it or to itself. Euripides, in the Bacchae, takes an abstract issue and constructs a system of personal relations and responses to activate the issue. He builds his lives into the issue, instead of letting the life speak for itself as Sophocles does. The issue derives from a question which is simple and raw: What is man? As Dionysus remarks to Pentheus (506), Your life, your deeds, your Being are unknown to you. For Plato, the human soul is a compound of the divine and the perishable, a meeting place of the eternal beyond and the passionate here. In the Phaedrus he puts the question more concretely. Socrates suggests that it is idle to criticize or allegorize mythology if one has not yet, as he himself has not, come to a satisfactory conclusion about bis own nature and being (230A): I try to analyze myself, wondering whether I am some kind 154

of beast more heterogeneous and protean and furious than Typhon, or whether I am a gentler and simpler sort of creature, blessed with a heavenly unfurious nature. The word that I have translated as "creature" is the same that appears in Aristotle's famous definition of man as a "political creature," or rather, as "a creature that lives in a polis." "Political animal," the usual translation, is unfortunate, for in his definition Aristotle clearly throws the weight of his authority behind the second alternative of Plato's question. Man is not a ravaging beast, but a gentler being. But perhaps Aristotle is not as fully sensitive as Plato to the difficulty posed by the alternative. Is man closer to the gods or to the beasts? Another question which is linked to the uncertainty about the status of the human soul is: What is knowledge? Or, to put it differently: How much in this world is subject to man's insight and control? Greek philosophical realism, beginning with the Eleatics and reaching its greatest heights with Plato, taught that reality is unchanging, static, difficult of access, and that in general men come to experience it only through the veil of ever-changing patterns of sensory impulses. There is an inexorable friction between total Being and partial Appearance. Man is constrained to deal with the appearances, but at his best he comes to senseor, according to Plato, to knowthe reality behind the phenomena. The break-through to the reality is a painful process; it can be achieved only at the cost of injuring and mutilating the ordinary cognitive faculties. The perfectionists, including Plato in the Phaedo, submit that the break-through becomes complete only with the complete surrender of the senses whose activity stands in the way of the vision of reality. That is to say, the perceptual blindness and the phenomenal friction cannot be resolved except by disembodiment and death. Now if this, or something like it, is the philosophical issue which Euripides is trying to dramatize, he is at once faced with a grave artistic difficulty. How is he, as a dramatist, to convey the universal scope of reality and the beguiling contradictoriness of Appearance, without rendering the formulation banal or bloodless or both? The statement "Dionysus is ill" would be worse than meaningless. It should be emphasized again that Euripides is not trying to say poetically what could also, and better, be said discursively. What does a poetmetaphysician do to clothe the range of abstract issues in the living and self-authenticating flesh of poetry? Is it possible for 155

a dramatist to convey ideas without having his characters preach them ex cathedra, which is by and large the situation we find in the Prometheus Bound? Can a philosophical idea which is refracted by a process of poetic mutation continue to score as a factor in a metaphysical argument? To begin with, the Greek writer has an advantage over his modern colleagues. The ancient conventions of tragedy stipulate that the dramatic nucleus be essayed from a spectrum of approaches. From Prologue to chorus to characters to Epilogue, each constitutive part of the drama contributes its specific orientation. In the end the various perspectives coalesce into one and invite a unified though never simple audience response. This is the desired effect; sometimes the merging of the lines of coordination is not complete, and the spectators are left without a certain key to gauge their participation. Goethe's Faust is, perhaps, once again a fair example of such a case on the modern stage. The author is saying something profound about man and reality, but for various reasons the play leaves us with the impression of partial statements instead of a total imaging, because of the vast scope of the action, because Goethe has inserted certain curious elements of diffusion and fragmentation, and because he tries to play off one culture against another in an attempt to universalize the compass of the theme. Any Greek play is likely to be more successful on this score. The traditional spectrum of perspectives is offset by an extreme succinctness of speech and thought, by a narrow conformity to Greek ways, by an economy of character, and, last but not least, by the condensatory effect of hereditary myth. Myth is itself a condensation of many experiences of different degrees of concreteness. Greek drama simply carries forward the business begun by myth. Dionysus, who is Euripides' embodiment of universal vitality, is described variously by chorus, herdsman, commoners, and princes. The descriptions do not tally, for the god cannot be defined. He can perhaps be totaled but the sum is never definitive; further inspection adds new features to the old. If a definition is at all possible it is a definition by negation or cancellation. For one thing, Dionysus appears to be neither woman nor man; or better, he presents himself as woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality (235): With perfumes wafted from his flaxen locks and Aphrodite's wine-flushed graces in his eyes . . . 156

No wonder Penfheus calls him (353) "the woman-shaped stranger," and scoffs at the unmanly whiteness of his complexion (457). In the person of the god strength mingles with softness, majestic terror with coquettish glances. To follow him or to comprehend hinr we must ourselves give up our precariously controlled, socially desirable sexual limitations. The being of the god transcends the protective fixtures of decency and sexual pride. Again, Dionysus is both a citizen, born of Semele, and a Greek from another state, for he was raised in Crete, like the Zeus of the mysteriessurely this is the implication of lines 120 ff.and a barbarian from Phrygia or Lydia or Syria or India, at any rate from beyond the pale of Greek society. It is not as if the conflicting pieces of information had to be gathered laboriously from various widely separated passages in the play. All of them are to be found in the entrance song of the chorus. After the introductory epiphany of the god himself, the women of the chorus begin to assemble their picture of Dionysus, and it is indicative of what Euripides means him to be that even these first few pointers should cancel out one another. It happens to be true historically that Dionysus is both Greek and non-Greek; recently discovered Mycenean texts have shown that the god's name was known to the Greeks of the Mycenean period. It now appears that the foreign extraction of Dionysus may have been a pious fiction of Apollinian partisans. Dionysus the popular god, the god of mysteries, the emblem of surging life in its crudest form, of regeneration and animal passion and sex, was endangering the vested interests of Apollo, grown refined and squeamish in the hands of the gentry and the intellectual elite. One of the defense measures, and there were many, was to declare Dionysus a foreigner, a divinity whose ways, so the propaganda went, offended the true instincts of the Greek. There was some apparent justification for this. The genuinely foreign deities who were being imported into Greece often were kindred in spirit to Dionysus. At any rate the propaganda took hold. At the end of the fifth century all Greeks tended to believe that Dionysus came from abroad; and yet they considered him one of their own, a powerful member of the Olympian pantheon. Euripides exploits the discrepancy to the advantage of his purpose; he uses it to emphasize the unbounded, the unfragmented nature of the ultimate substance. But the arrival from foreign lands signifies a special truth; it highlights the violently intrusive character of the Dionysiac life, of the unlimited thrusting itself 157

into the limited and exploding its stale equilibrium, which is a favorite theme of Pythagorean and Greek popular thought. But all this would be bloodless metaphysics, dry-as-dust allegory, were it not for Euripides' grasp of the essential irony enunciated in the passage of the Phaedrus and skirted in Aristotle's aphorism. Man is both beast and god, both savage and civilized, and ultimate knowledge may come to him on either plane, depending on the manner in which the totality communicates itself. It is as an animal, as a beast close to the soil and free of the restrictions of culture and city life, that man must know Dionysus. But that means that in embracing Dionysus man surrenders that other half of himself, the spark of the gentle and celestial nature which, the philosophers hope, constitutes the salvageable part of man's equipment. The incongruity of the two planes, the political and the animal, becomes the engrossing puzzle and the energizing thesis of the play. The double nature of man is what the play is really about; the ambivalence of Dionysus is pressed into service largely in order to illumine the ambivalence of human cognition reaching out for its object, for the elusive pageant of truth. How does Euripides use the animal in his art? In the Ion the relation between men and animals is simple and candid, though not devoid of some humor. At the beginning Ion wages a mock battle against the birds because they interfere with his daily cleaning operations. The kindly gruffness with which he rebukes them deceives no one. Once he threatens death to a swan that approaches too closely to the altar (161 ft), but he does not take the threat seriously himself (179): To think I would murder you, messengers of the words of gods to men! Ion is not so cynical as to remember that the swan is said to sing his truest song when he is about to die. Later Ion's life is saved when a dove consumes the poison meant for him (1202 ff.); he accepts the sacrifice gratefully but without comment. Near the beginning of the exodus Ion calls Creusa (1261) a "serpent... or a dragon" with murderous fire blazing from his eyes, but this is a metaphor induced by rage, and in any case Ion 158

is mistaken about her, as he acknowledges in the next scene. The history of Athens may have been crowded with serpents and half-serpents; the decoration of the tent features many beings half-man half-beast, including Cecrops himself with his serpent's coils. But the somber tent, as suggested earlier, is the exception. Through most of the action, and certainly at the end of the play when the causes of ignorance have been removed, men know their distance from the animals. Their humaneness entails this; the gentleness which characterizes the true inclinations of Io and Creusa and Xuthus takes us far away from the murky borderland where human nature and animal nature merge and where satyrs and centaurs ply their brutal trade. In the Bacchae this borderland is always present. Men are identified with animals, not as in Aesop where the beasts aspire to be men and become moral agents, but as in a Gothic tale where intelligence and social grace and responsibility are renounced and the irrational, the instinct of blood and steaming compulsion, take their place. Characteristically this way of looking at life paralyzes value judgment. The gulf between men and animals is erased, but whether this is a good thing or not is by no means clear. When the women of the chorus, for example, call Pentheus a beast they do not mean to flatter him. He is the son of Echion, who was sprung from dragon's teeth, and there is dragon blood in his veins (1155). He is said to be a fierce monster (542) whose acts make one suspect that he was born of a lioness or a Libyan Gorgon. His mother also in her moment of visionary bliss sees him as a lion rather than as a man. For her, however, this is not a matter of disparagement; if anything, embracing a lion seems to her to offer a glimpse of perfection. Not so the chorus; in the passages cited they show an incongruous pride in human shape and human achievement. But in the fourth choral ode, as they reach their highest pitch of passion and frenzied insight, they issue the call which is quoted at the beginning of our chapter (1017) : Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many-headed serpent, or a lion breathing fire! In their first ode also they refer to Dionysus as the bullhorned god wreathed in snakes (100 f.). The god Dionysus, the stranger-citizen, the hermaphrodite, at once superman and subman, is a beast, for which the chorus praise him. 159

This is the sacred dogma. Even Pentheus, once he has fallen under the spell of the god, acknowledges him as a bull (920): And now, leading me on, I see you as a bull, with horns impacted in your head. Were you a beast before? I should not wonder. And Dionysus answers: Yes, now you see what is for you to see. But what of Pentheus' own beast-likeness? Are the women suggesting that human beastliness is a mere parody of divine beastliness, and therefore to be condemned? Or have the ladies of the chorus not yet travelled the full length of the Dionysiac conversion, and retain a vestige of civilized values? Their abuse of Pentheus is couched in terms which expose them as imperfect Maenads. Contrast that other chorus, the band of Bacchantes hidden from our sight, whose mysterious acts of strength are reported to us in the messenger speeches. From them rather than from their more civilized sisters on the stage we expect the pure lesson of the new faith. And in fact they preserve no trace of false pride in human separateness. They carry the tokens of animal life on their backs and entertain the beasts as equal partners (695): And first they shook their hair free to their shoulders and tucked up their fawnskins . . . . . . their spotted pelts they girt with serpents licking at their cheeks. And some clasped in their arms a doe or wild wolf cubs and gave them milk . . . Under the aegis of Dionysus, men and animals are as one, with no questions asked. The philosophical message is tolerably clear. But the vestigial bias of the pseudo-Maenads on stage is more than a temporary deviation from the orthodox Bacchic faith. In the interest of the message it would have been wiser to abuse Pentheus as a man, incapable of going beyond the limitations of his anthropomorphism. The beast imagery in the choral condemnation of Pentheus is cumulative and emphatic. The praise of Dionysus does not blot it from our memory. It is, in fact, intended to serve as a counterpoint. The animal shape rules supreme; but when all parties have been heard it is not at all clear whether one ought to approve or not. The judgment is suspended, and values are held in abeyance. 160

It is a mistake to consider the Dionysiac ecstasy a perversion of social life, an impasse, a negative situation. The Bacchae does not tell a story of maladjustment or aberration. It is a portrayal of life exploding beyond its narrow everyday confines, of reality bursting into the artificiality of social conventions and genteel restrictions. Waking and sleeping are deprived of their ordinary cognitive connotations; who is to say that sleeping, the drunken stupor which succeeds the rite, does not expand one's vision beyond its commonplace scope? In the Ion the premium is on wakefulness; in the Bacchae we are invited to rest in a gray no man's land which is halfway between waking and sleep, where man shelves the tools of reason and social compact and abandons himself to instinct and natural law (862 ff., tr. Phillip Vellacott) : O for long nights of worship, gay With the pale gleam of dancing feet, With head tossed high to the dewy air Pleasure mysterious and sweet! O for the joy of a fawn at play In the fragrant meadow's green delight, Who has leapt out free from the woven snare, Away from the terror of chase and flight, And the huntsman's shout, and the straining pack, And skims the sand by the river's brim With the speed of wind in each aching limb, To the blessed lonely forest where The soil's unmarked by a human track, And leaves hang thick and the shades are dim. This is the strophe of a choral ode; in the antistrophe the chorus invoke the divine order of thingsphysis, nature which will assert itself eventually in spite of men (884) who honor ignorance and refuse to enthrone divinity . .. The verses cited picture the pleasure and the awe of identification with nonhuman nature, with the life of the fawn bounding free of the snare but never quite eluding the hunter, a life of liberty which is yet not free. The animal senses the sway of natural law even more strongly than the man. Strophe and antistrophe, the vision of animal escape and the address to natural compulsion, are part of the same complex. But in the text they do not follow one upon the other; they are separated by that rare thing in Greek poetry, a refrain which is repeated once more identically, at the end of the anti161

strophe. Refrains in Greek tragedy always have a solemn ring; they are felt to be echoes of ritual hymns. The fixed severity of the repetition is something foreign within the headlong flow of the dramatic current. The mind accustomed to pressing on after the determined advance of ideas and plot is abruptly stopped in its tracks; time ceases for a while and the cold chill of monotony reveals a glimpse of Being beyond the Becoming of the human scene. Here is an attempt to translate the refrain as literally as the sense allows (877, 897): What is wisdom? Or what is more beautiful, a finer gift from the gods among men, than to extend a hand victorious over the enemy's crown? But beauty is every man's personal claim. Wisdom equals tyranny, beauty equals vengeance. The hunted and the hunter have their own jealous notions of wisdom and beauty, but their pretensions are drowned in the vast offering of the gods, the dispensation of natural law and the survival of the strongest. This is what the refrain seems to say; the message agrees well with the propositions of strophe and antistrophe. But note the didactic quality of the speech, the question and answer, and particularly the academic formulation of the last line which in the Greek consists of only four words: "Whatever beautiful, always personal." It is a line which might have come straight from the pages of Aristotle; better yet, it reminds us of a similarly scholastic passage in a poem by Sappho in which she contemplates various standards of beauty and preference and concludes: "I [think that the most beautiful thing is] that with which a person is in love." The poetess speaks of a "thing," using the neuter gender, and of "a person," any person, desiring the thing. Like a good teacher she starts her discussion with a universal premise. Then, as the poem draws to its conclusion, she discards the generality and focuses on the living girl and on the I, the specific poles of her love whose reality constitutes the authority for the writing of the poem. But the philosophic mode of the earlier formulation remains important; it reminds us that the specific poles of her present love are at the same time representatives of a universal rhythm. In Euripides' ode, also, it is this universal rhythm which comes into view through the hieratic stillness of the refrain and particularly through its last line. The words are almost the same as those 162

of Sappho; the difference is that between a vision intent upon the small joys and sufferings of love, and a vision which comprehends man in the sum total of his powers and feebleness. The refrain may well be the closest approach to poetry shedding its disguise and showing itself as metaphysics pure and simple. But the glimpse is short-lived, and the clarity immediately obscured. Again it is the chorus itself which is the chief agent of confounding the analysis. It does so by combining in the Dionysiac prospects of its songs the two sides, the real and the ideal, which are inevitably connected in the experience. Both ritual and hope, slaughter and bliss, dance and dream, the cruelty of the present and the calm of the release, are joined together as one. The paradise of milk and honey and the orgy of bloody dismemberment merge in a poetic synthesis which defies rational classification. Of this creative insight into the contradictoriness of things I have already spoken. To complicate the picture even further, Bacchic sentiments are superimposed on traditional choric maxims. In an earlier ode which begins with a condemnation of Pentheus' words and an appeal to the goddess Piety, the women sing (386, 397): Of unbridled mouths and of lawless extravagance the end is disaster . .. Life is brief; if a man, not heeding this, pursues vast things his gain slips from his hands. These are the ways, I believe, of madmen, or of injudicious fools. We recognize the familiar adage of "nothing in excess," the motto of bourgeois timidity and sane moderation, at opposite poles from the Dionysiac moral of vengeance and expansiveness and the bestialization of man. The injunctions of moderation and knowing one's limits run counter to the hopes of those who worship Dionysus. The two people who live up to the injunctions, Tiresias and Cadmus, come very close to being comic characters, as we shall see directly. Why, then, does Euripides put the pious precept into the mouth of a chorus whose primary artistic function is to communicate precisely what it is condemning, the spirit of unbridled mouths and lawless extravagance? It may be noted that such injunc163

tions in Greek tragedy are often illusory. Setting off as they do a heroic imbalance or a cosmic disturbance, they underscore the poignancy of the action. But in this particular instance the use of the Delphic motto is even more startling than usual. The direction of the metaphysical impact is rudely deflected and the opacity of the poem enhanced by this conventional reminder of irrelevant quietist values. While the Theban women are away celebrating, the foreign votaries are in Thebes. This is a mechanical displacement necessitated by what Greek tragedy permits; for the Dionysiac revels must be reported rather than seen, and so the true Maenads are off stage. But that puts the chorus in an anomalous position. They are worshippers of Dionysus, but they must not behave like worshippers. Few Euripidean choruses are less intimately engaged in the action and in fact less necessary to the action. It is the chorus off stage that counts. Hence the curious mixture of halfhearted participation and distant moralizing, as if the poet were not entirely comfortable with the choral requirements. This may account for the perplexing admixture of Apollonian preaching which I have just mentioned. It may account also for the remarkable poetic color of many of the choral utterances. The poet, making a virtue of the necessity, calls attention to the detachment of the chorus from the heart of the plotthough not from the heart of the philosophical issueby giving it some of the finest lyrics ever sounded in the Attic theater. This is not the place for a close appreciation of the poetry; that can be done only in the original. The analysis of ancient poetry is a difficult thing; there are few men who combine the necessary scholarly equipment with an understanding of what poetry is about. Further, some of the clues to such an understanding which in modern poetry are furnished by the experience of living speech are missing for the Greek. Nevertheless few readers can expose themselves to the choral odes of the Bacchae without realizing that this is poetry of the highest order. Imagery has little to do with it; in this as in most Euripidean plays the choral poetry is even less dependent on metaphor and simile than the dialogue. There is some pondering of myth, to be sure. But perhaps the most important thing about the odes is the wonderful mixture of simplicity and excitement. The women do not beat around the bush; their interest in life is single-minded, and they declare themselves with all the fervor of a unitary vision. This does not, of course, say anything about the poetry as poetry, 164

but it may explain why the lyrics of the Bacchae touch us so powerfully. There is one image, however, or rather a class of images, which ought to be mentioned: the container filled to the bursting point. In their first ode the chorus use the trope three times. They sing of Dionysus stuffed into the thigh of Zeus, golden clasps blocking the exit until such time as the young man may be born (94 ff.). They call on Thebes, nurse of Semele, to (107) teem, teem with verdant bryony, bright-berried; the city is to be filled to the rooftops with vegetation, as a sign of the presence of the god. For illustration we should compare the famous vase painting of Exekias in which Dionysus reveals himself in his ship to the accompaniment of a burst of vegetation. Finally the women caution each other to be careful in their handling of the thyrsus, the staff of the god (113): Handle the staffs respectfully; there is hubris in them. In all three instances it is the fullness of the container which is stressed, not the spilling over. But as the play advances, containment proves inadequate. At the precise moment when the stranger is apprehended by Pentheus' men, the Maenads who had been imprisoned earlier are set free (447): All by themselves the bonds dropped off their feet; keys unlocked doors, without a man's hand to turn them. Their liberation is as real as the binding of the stranger is false. The most striking mise en seine of the inadequacy of the container is the so-called palace miracle. Like that of the other passages, its function is symbolic rather than dramaturgical; after it has happened it is never mentioned again. It is not necessary to the progress of the plot, only to the effect and the meaning of the poem. We need not worry much whether the stage director engineered the collapse of a column or a pediment, or whether the spectators were challenged to use their own creative imagination, though I am inclined to assume the latter. At any rate, the vision of the palace shaking and tumbling is the most explicit and the most extended of a 165

series of images pointing to the explosion of a force idly and wrongfully compressed. Eventually this concept converges on what I have called the friction between total Being and fragmentary Appearance, the friction which is worked out also through a series of antinomies: the brute wildness of the thyrsus versus the spindles abandoned in the hall, the fawnskins versus the royal armor, the civic proclamation versus the bleating shout, the beating of tambourines versus the steady clicking of the loom. Dionysus disrupts the settled life, he cracks the shell of civic contentment and isolation. Probably the most important word in the play, as a recent critic has well pointed out, is "hubris." It occurs throughout, and always in a key position. But it is not the hubris of which the tragic poets usually speak, the hubris which figures also in the legal documents, the thoughtless insolence which comes from too much social or political power. In the Bacchae, hubris is quite literally the "going beyond," the explosion of the unlimited across the barricades which a blind civilization has erected in the vain hope of keeping shut out what it does not wish to understand. That is not to say that the word is not used also in its more conventional sense, especially with reference to the campaign of Pentheus. As a result, the efforts of Pentheus take on the aspect of a parody of Dionysiac impulsiveness. Similarly the hunt is a principal symbol because it catches the futility of organized, circumscribed life. From the vantage point of the larger reality, all wordly activity appears both hunt and escape. Hunting and being hunted are the physical and psychological manifestations of Appearance, the monotonous jolts of the process of generation and decay. Agave cries when approached by the herdsman (731): Run to it, my hounds! Behold the men who hunt us! Follow me, brandish your thyrsus and pursue theml The Maenads are resting; they are communing with the god and sloughing off the sense of separateness when they are violently pulled back into the world of Appearance and resume their game of hunting and being hunted. In this case it is Appearance which causes the disruption; Being and Appearance are so related that one as well as the other may be the cause of disturbance and dislocation. There is a perpetual pull between them which never allows either to win a lasting victory. Without the constant friction there would be 166

no tragedy; without the violent disruption of one by the other there would be no dismemberment. Sparagmos, the sacred dismemberment of the Dionysiac rites, is both a means to an end and an autonomous fact. As a means to an end it supplies the frenzied exercise which terminates in the drugged sleep. The explosion of energy, the tearing and mutilation of a once living body, leaves the worshipper exhausted and readies the soul, through a numb tranquility, for the mystic union with the god. But the dismemberment operates also as a self-validating event. Through it, symbolically, the world of Appearance with its contradictions and insufficiencies is made to show itself as it really is. The destruction of Pentheus, then, is not simply a sardonic twist of an unspeakable bloody rite, but a fitting summation of the lesson of the play. The limited vessel is made to burst asunder, refuting the pretensions of those who oppose Dionysus, of the partisans of unreality. Who is Pentheus, and why is it he who dies rather than one of the other Thebans? When the stranger raises the question whether the King knows who he really is, he answers (507): Pentheus, the son of Agave and of Echion. Thus Pentheus identifies himself as a member of the ruling house, as an officer of the State. He bears a name which establishes his position within the hereditary political structure of his city. Even at the moment of death he throws off the leveling disguise of the ministrant and cries (1118): Mother, it is I, your son Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion's house. In the judgment of Dionysus this pride in the house, the emphasis on the limited life, is ignorance. But is it commensurate with the punishment which Pentheus receives? Is there not something about him as a person which is more likely to justify the violence of his undoing? To ask the obvious question: Does Pentheus not exhibit an arrogance which cries out for retribution? Here we must step gingerly. It is to be remembered that the action of the Bacchae is not primarily borne or promoted by the characters. Euripides does not in this play operate with idiosyncrasies but with lives. Suffering is constructed as the measurable content of a life, not as the unique 167

unquantifiable experience of a specific irrational soul. And the lives, also, are largely catalysts for the release of social complications. These complications have nothing to do with the arbitrary contours of individual dispositions, but answer directly to the needs of the author's metaphysical purpose. The personal relations brought into play are devised chiefly as one of the means for the author to invoke his philosophical riddle. In the Alcestis, as we shall see in the essay on that play, character is all; in the Bacchae it counts for very little. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of Pentheus is not that he tried to do what was wrong but that he was the wrong man to do itthat he was, in fact, not a political strongman but precisely the unbalanced, excitable type of person who most easily falls a victim to the allurements of the Dionsysiac indulgence. In other words, the character of Pentheus is too Dionysiac to allow him to oppose Dionysus successfully. But this argument will not stand up. Pentheus is no more and no less excitable or unstable than most of the heroes of Greek tragedy. An Odysseus, or a Socrates, is no more fit to stand at the center of a high tragedy than a Pecksniff or a Tanner. Odysseus is not a whole man, as Helen is not a whole woman; they are exponents of a partial aspect of the human range: intelligence in the case of Odysseus, love in the case of Helen. But Pentheus is a whole man, precisely as Oedipus is, or as Antigone is a whole woman. And because he is whole he is vulnerable, more vulnerable than the men and women who are weighted in one direction or another. Of course he is not a moderate. His order to smash the workshop of Tiresias (346 ff.) is not well considered. He happens to be right; Tiresias appears to have turned disloyal to Apollo, and so will no longer need his oracle seat. Under the democratic spell of Dionysus, everybody will do his own prophesying. But even if Pentheus were unjustified in his harshness toward Tiresias, his lack of moderation, or, to put it more fairly, his capacity for anger, does not necessarily discredit him. Stability, self-control, discretion smack too much of asceticism and puritan artifice to provide a solid basis for tragic action. Pentheus is a whole man, with none of his vitality curtailed or held in check. But he is also a king, a perfect representative of the humanistic Greek ideal of the ordered life, a political being rather than a lawless beast. Being Aristotle's "creature living in a polis," he is destined to ask the wrong sort of question, a political question, when faced with the reality of religion. His query (473), 168

What profit do the celebrants draw from it? shows the political or educational frame of his thinking. The twentieth century, unlike the eighteenth, is once more inclined to the view that the question of usefulness when applied to religion misses the point, that religion cannot be adjusted to a system of utilitarian relations. But where did Euripides and his contemporaries stand on this issue? In all probability Pentheus' question did not strike the audience as irrelevant; it may, in fact, have impressed them as noble and responsible. At the end of the fifth century, as we can see in the History of Thucydides, the preservation of social and political institutions and traditions had become the overriding topic of discussion to which all other values tended to be subordinated. The Bacchae demonstrates that this sort of nobility, the exaltation of the political and educational thesis, is as nothing before the primary currents of life. But a nobility which goes under is not the less noble for its defeat. Pentheus dies, and the nature of his death, particularly of the preparations which lead to his death, is deplorable. But the fact remains that his stand, and only his, can be measured in positive moral terms. Clearly the force which kills him eludes ethical analysis. Because Pentheus is a king he offers a larger area to be affected by the deity. His responses differ from those of other men less in their specific quality than in their intensity. As a king he suffers for the group; his name, as Dionysus reminds him (508), means "man of sorrow." But there is nothing Christ-like about him. He proposes to live as a rational man, to leave everything nonrational, everything that might remind us of man's original condition, behind him. Love and faith, the Christian antidotes of the dispassionate intellect, have not yet been formulated. In Plato, characteristically, it is love and reason together, or love-in-reason, which refines man and weakens the animal in him. Nonreason, in the fifth century B.C., is neither love nor hatred but religious ecstasy. This Pentheus means to fight, for he knows it is wrong. Pentheus is not a romantic hero, he does not search for a hidden truth. The same thing is true of the others; both the characters and the chorus are, each of them, convinced that they know best and that their way of life is best. For Pentheus the best is Form, the tested and stable limits of responsibility, law, and control. Against the chorus, which espouses the cause of excitement, of formlessness and instability, Pentheus is the champion of permanence and 169

stability. Neither his anger nor his defeat are valid arguments against the merits of this championship. Like Ajax, as we shall see in the following essay, Pentheus is identified with armor (781, 809); like Ajax, the armed Pentheus, confined in the panoply of embattled civic life, turns against the forces which are wrecking his fragile cause. As a functionary he represents order and limit; as a man he is whole and robust and fully alive. This cannot be said about Cadmus and Tiresias. For one thing, they are old men, their life force is diminished and stunted. This means that they cannot suffer as Pentheus can. It also means that they have come to terms with the world; there are no issues left for them to battle out, no difficulties over which to fret. Cadmus is a fine specimen of the arriviste, proud of the achievements of his grandson, but even prouder of the inclusion of a genuine god in the family. The god must at all costs be kept in the family, even if it becomes necessary to mince the truth a little. Here is Cadmus' humble plea to Pentheus (333): And if, as you say, the god does not exist, keep this to yourself, and share in the fine fiction that he does; so we may say that Semele bore a god, for the greater glory of our clan. The distinction between truth and falsity, between order and disorder, is of no importance to him. At this time of life, a good reputation is a finer prize than a noble life, no matter whether the reputation is deserved or not. Tiresias likewise is not concerned with essentials. This Tiresias is not the Sophoclean man of truth, the terrible mouthpiece of mystery and damnation, but, of all things, a clever sophist, a pseudophilosopher who strips away the mystery and the strangeness of the superhuman world and is content to worship a denatured, an ungodded god. A squeamish deist, he does not hold with the miracles and the barbarisms of popular faith. In his lecture to Pentheus he pares down the stature of Dionysus to render him manageable and unoffending (272 ff.). Point one: he is the god of wine (280) which liberates suffering mortals from their pain. This is to say, he is wine (284), precisely as Demeter is grain. By allegorizing the old stories and identifying the gods with palpable substances, we can dispense with whatever is 170

not concrete and intelligible in the traditions about Dionysus. Point two: he is a perfectly natural god. The distasteful tale about Zeus sewing him up in his thigh produces a quite satisfactory meaning once it is understood that the grating feature is due to a pun. Like Max Mueller in a subsequent era of facile enlightenment, Tiresias believes that the mystery of myth is caused by a linguistic aberration; with the discovery of the cause, the mystery disappears. Finally, in the third part of his lecture, Tiresias does pay some attention to the irrational virtues of the god, to his mantic powers and his ability to inspire panic in strong men. But this part of the assessment is underplayed; it is briefer than the other two, and one feels that Tiresias adds it only in order to have a weapon with which to frighten Pentheus. The reference to soldiers strangely routed and to Dionysiac torches at home in the sanctuary of Delphi is not a confession but a threat, calculated to appeal to Pentheus in the only language he understands: the language of military and political authority. Tiresias' heart is not in the threat; what interests him is the theological and philological sterilization of the god. Neither he nor Cadmus really understands or even wants to understand what the god has to offer. But they know that his triumph is inevitable, and so they try to accept him within their lights. They are fellow travellers, with a good nose for changes of fashion and faith. To take them seriously would be absurd; a Tartuffe has no claim on our sympathy. They do not understand; hence nothing happens to them.1 Pentheus, on the other hand, is fully engaged, and he is a big enough man to perceive the truth beyond his own selfinterest. He is capable of appreciating the real meaning of Dionysus; though he does not approve, he understands. But understanding, in a man of his power of commitment, is tantamount to weakening, and in the end, to destruction. This is what Euripides dramatizes with the sudden break-up of Pentheus' royal substance. Abruptly the officer of the State turns into a Peeping Tom. One shout of the god (810) and the manly general becomes a slavish, prurient, reptilian thing, intent on watching from a safe distance what he hopes will be a spectacle to titillate his voyeur's itch. The civilized
l T h e metamorphosis which Dionysus inflicts upon Cadmus in the Epilogue is a datum from mythology. Because of the bad state of preservation of the final portion of the play we do not know how Euripides motivated the metamorphosis, and what the punishmentfor such it is said to be (1340 ff.)is for.

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man of reason is gone, and in his place we find an animal, living only for the satisfaction of his instinctual drives. Is the rapid change psychologically plausible? Once more, the question is not pertinent. There is no character in the first place, only a comprehensive life-image to symbolize one side of a conflict which transcends the terms of a uniquely experienced situation. Whether it is possible for such a man as Pentheus is shown to be in the first half of the play, to turn into the creature he becomes after his conversion by Dionysus, is a question on which psychoanalysts may have an opinion but which does not arise in considering Euripides' purpose. The truth is that the change is not a transition from one phase of life to another, much less a lapse into sickness or perversion, but quite simply death. When a tragic hero in the great tradition is made to reverse his former confident choice, especially if this happens at the instigation of the archenemy, the role of the hero has come to an end. We remember Agamemnon stepping on the crimson carpet, after Clytemnestra has broken down his reluctance. The bloodcolored tapestry is a visual anticipation of the murder. Instead of the corporeal death which will be set off stage, the audience watch the death of the soul. With Agamemnon slowly moving through the sea of red the contours are blurred and the king of all the Greeks is annihilated before our eyes. Aeschylus uses a splash; Euripides, less concretely but no less effectively, uses a change of personality. \ That the hero has died in his scene with Dionysus becomes even clearer when the god, with a Thucydidean terseness, announces the physical death (857): Now I shall go and dress him in the robes he'll wear to Hades once his mother's hands have slaughtered him . . . His death, then, is an agreed fact both while the chorus sing their ode to Natural Necessity and also during the terrible scene which follows in which Pentheus arranges his woman's clothes about him. The King joins the Maenads, but he goes further than they, for he adopts the bisexuality of the god. All this is meaningful as a picture of the complete and devastating victory of reality over unreality, of the natural over the institutional life. But it is not without its psychological aspect; and here, curiously, we may see an ironic parallel to one of Plato's most troublesome concerns. In his discussions of dramatic poetry, Plato takes it for granted that the 172

spectacle affects the soul of the spectator, even to the extent of transforming it in its own likeness. This is what drama demands; the audience must allow what they see to shape their souls, without struggling against the impact. Plato recognizes the legitimacy of the demand, and decides that therefore drama is too dangerous to have around in a healthy body politic, except the kind of drama whose effect is beneficial. Pentheus also is about to see a spectacle, a Dionysiac drama of the type which as a responsible man of the city he had condemned. Euripides knows that Plato's act of censorship is in a hopeless cause. A life which does not reach out to embrace the sight of a greater reality which tragedy affords is incomplete. Watching a play may mean a partial sacrifice of the soul, a surrender to the unlimited and the irrational, but we cannot do without it. Pentheus holds out against it for some time, but in the end he throws down his arms, with such finality that his soul comes to be transformed and enriched even before he goes off to spy on the mysteries. Pentheus is drunk, without the physical satisfaction of strong drink (918):
Ho, what is this? I think I see two suns, two cities of Thebes each with its seven gates!

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This is one way of formulating his conquest at the hand of Dionysus. Drunk he sees more keenly, or at any rate more completely: And now, leading me on, I see you as a bull... And Dionysus replies: Yes, now you see what is for you to see. For the first time Pentheus' eyes are sufficiently opened to see the god in his animal shape. His vision is broadened; but his role as Pentheus is finished. The disintegration of the king is made particularly painful by the emphasis on the feminine clothing. With Dionysus assisting as his valet (928) the onetime upholder of the vita activa becomes fussy and vain about the details of his toilette. Does the cloak hang properly? Is he to carry the thyrsus in his right or in his left hand? The energies which had once been directed toward the mustering of armies and the implementation of public decisions are now 173 ' * '

bestowed on the arrangement of his Bacchic vestments. Along with this attention to the correct fashionbehold, another Tiresiasto the external signs of his new-found anonymity, there goes an internal change which is equally preposterous. The blocked doer turns into an uninhibited dreamer (945): I wonder if my shoulders would support Cithaeron and its glens, complete with Maenads? His speech, formerly royal and violent and ringing, has become pretty and lyrical; he pictures the women (957) like birds in the thickets, contained in the fond coils of love's embrace. Compare this with his earlier comment (222) that the women slink off by devious ways into the wild and cater to the lusts of males. His imagination has been fired, his surly prejudices are gone. The vision which neither Cadmus nor Tiresias was able to entertain has come to Pentheus and is inspiring him. The Bacchianized Pentheus is a visionary and poet. But it is a poetry which lacks the saving grace of choice. He contemplates the prospect of his mother carrying him home from the mountains, and the prospect pleases him. The political man has become woman and child. Having rid himself of the social restrictions and classifications, he savors infancy, a sentient creature for whom the mother's cradled arms offer escape and bliss. He is woman and child and beast, an amorphous organism susceptible to all influences and realizing itself in a life of instinct and unthinking sense. The victory of Dionysus is complete; the king is dead, and the man has been found out, in the god's image.

7s There a Tragic Sense of Life?


LIONEL ABEL For Merry Abel, 1940-1964, In Memoriam Our Estimate of Writers with the "Tragic Sense" WE SET a particular value on those writers of playssometimes of novelswho give expression to what has been called the "tragic sense of life." Do we overvalue them? The truth is, I think, that we value them in a very special way, for we see demonstrated in their works the possibility of viewing life other than with optimism or pessimism. And for ourselves, when we reflect, the only possible choice lies with one or the other of these extremes, so that it is not only the art of the writer of tragedy we admire, but some special insight, which we feel that we can achieve only through his intervention, and which hefor that is our assumptionenjoys by some peculiar privilege of rare wisdom, or intelligence, or some yet more mysterious endowment. He seems more philosophic than other writers of equal art or scope, so that by a kind of tacit consent philosophers have honored authors of tragedy as the most philosophical of writers. In this estimate of the writer of tragedy I think there is a misunderstanding of his very special achievement, hence also a misunderstanding of what he achieves, namely, tragedy. If we can correctly think out what we are right to admire the author of tragedy for, we may correct some wrong notions of what tragedy is. Our Dissatisfaction with Optimism and Pessimism Now it should be clear why optimism as an attitude toward life cannot satisfy us. It should be clear, too, that our dissatisfaction with it is mainly intellectual. For we are quite naturally optimistic insofar as we are active beings, living in time and planning the future which our very life structure requires us to think of as being capable of yielding to our purposes. But when we reflect, when we remember "things said and done long years ago," and also the things we did 175

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not say or do, as well as those said and done by others, we realizewe have tothat there are a great many negative facts. Only a few of these, and there are a great many of them, would be enough to invalidate any optimistic hypothesis that the world as it is can be truthfully described as good. Instances of such negative facts may be remote or local: the unjust sentence passed on Socrates, or the fact raised by Andre Malraux' at a congress of Soviet writers during the thirties of a man run over by a trolley car.1 Such negative facts are able to render void all optimistic generalizations about the world, just as a few tiny facts which remain obdurate to explanation are sufficient to refute a whole scientific theory accounting for a multitude of others. So those who live by optimistic beliefs are like bad scientists, clinging, despite the evidence, to refuted theories. But what about the negative facts? Do they at least justify pessimism? Not as a hypothesis, not as a generalized view. For the negative facts comprise merely one set of facts, and the world is such that no one set of facts is able to speak for it. We know that having heard one set out, we must listen to very different facts. Alas for the heartbreak of the defeated and the dead: if we do not straightway share their fate, we are forced to think of something else. The Russian thinker ChestovI will not call him a philosopherrepeated again and again in his writings that the injustice done to Socrates was a fact he could not endure. He thought, too, that a fact of this sort should make us suspicious of any facts we ordinarily think of as positive. But even if the positive facts were far fewer than the negative, they could still not justify our electing for pessimism. (For Schopenhauer a preponderance of negative facts did justify pessimism; his argument lacks subtlety.) The positive facts remain, and they prevent us from resolving without artificiality in favor of a pessimistic view. A very few positive facts can make pessimism unacceptable. This is illustrated, I think, in the biblical story of Abraham's debate with God when the Lord was intent on destroying the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham argued that if there were even ten good men in those cities, the Lord's proposed action would be unjust. And God finally conceded Abraham to be
IThe reply made to Malraux was that the Soviet authorities would see to it that accidents of that sort decreased annually. The argument of the Soviet writers was for optimism, to them obligatory; the greater relative safety of future generations would more than make up for the absolute harm which had befallen one individual.

the better philosopher, admitting that if there were even fewer than ten good men in Sodom and Gomorrah, His pessimism about the two cities would be unjustified, notwithstanding all the wicked in them. That the positive facts stand in the way of a resolve for pessimism is not in any sense an argument for being optimistic. Far from it! It is a sad fact indeed that sadness will bring us no closer than lightness of spirit to the heart of things. What argues for optimism is that it is required by our life structure. If we plan to be optimistic, then at least we are not contradicting ourselves; but if we plan to be pessimistic and since we live in time, to be pessimistic means to plan to be pessimisticthen we are contradicting ourselves; we are placing our trust in the view that things will be untrustworthy; we are reasoning that Failure cannot fail, and so, in a sense, can be depended on. Then too, except in cases of present or permanent distress, optimism is natural and spontaneous, while pessimism is inevitably theatrical. Life requires optimism; but optimism leaves out of account and quite disregards pain, frustration and death; such disregard is, of course, intellectually shallow. So we are back with our dilemma: we can be optimists or pessimists; but can we want to be either? The Tragic Sense The remedy is a fantastic one: it is a vision of the irremediable. We go to the theatre to see a tragedy. We see human action in the clearest light the mind can cast on it, and behold, we see the human person at his best. We do not disregard pain or frustration or death; in fact we give them our whole attention, and they do not make us pessimistic, they give us joy. As Aristotle said, we are relieved of pity and terror, the very emotions pessimism would yield to and optimism would avoid. We see life tragically; we have for the duration of the play at least and perhaps for some time afterward the tragic sense. Would that it were more lasting! Can we make it so? Can we not make permanent the view of life we enjoyed in the theatre and in recollection afterward for however short a time? Can we not acquire or develop a sense of life such as the playwright himself must have had? Of course, we cannot be Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Racine. The question then is: can the tragic sense be 177

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acquired without the special genius of the writer of tragedy, and if so, how? Why We Cannot Acquire the Tragic Sense Suppose, though, for I think this true, that what we call the tragic sense does not form part of the playwright's genius and does not involve superior capacities of mind; then it must be the result of experience. Of what experience? The answer to this question is obvious; we should have thought of it immediately: the experience which leads to the tragic sense of life is the experience of tragedy; it is by undergoing tragedy that one arrives at the tragic sense. Or rather, the word "arrives" is misleading here, for one does not acquire or develop the tragic sense; it is not realized but imposed; one never possesses it, one has to be possessed by it. We cannot add the tragic sense to our present sense of life, be that present sense optimistic or pessimistic. And without our present sense we have neither terms nor criteria with which to decide whether the tragic sense is worth what it will cost us. And from this it follows that no reason can ever be given for recommending the tragic sense, however good or great a thing the tragic sense may be. Herbert J. Muller, in a recent book, The Spirit of Tragedy, has had the temerity to urge on us the acquisition of the tragic sense for reasons which he himself does not deny are frankly utilitarian. He writes: "We might not continue to get along as a free, open society without more of the tragic sense of life." I think the error he has fallen into is expressed in his use of the word "more." If we had some of the tragic sense of life then perhaps we could get still more of it, but it would not be the drastic thing it is if that were the way it could be come by. The prospect we would face, if we had not just "more" of the tragic sense but enough of it to have it, would be one of all or nothing. So we cannot urge the tragic sense on ourselves or on others. To try to attain it or to recommend it is comical and self-refuting, tragedy being real only when unavoidable. There would be no such things as tragedy if a tragic fate could be rationally chosen. The Writer of Tragedy and the Philosopher But what about the writer of tragedy? Must he not possess the tragic sense of life since he is able to make it available 178

to us at least for the time we spend under his spell? Is there not reason for thinking that the writer of tragedy must have a more permanent relation to the tragic view than those who receive it from him? Does he have a special philosophy, a tragic philosophy if you please, permanently his, and which through his art he is able to share with us in some small measure? Now I do not think the writer of tragedy has to have any view of life drastically different from our own. Supposing he were a philosopher, what difference would that make? He could not by means of philosophy resolve the question of optimism or pessimism, which we who are not philosophers face. For philosophers are also either optimistic or pessimistic. (Some philosophies are neutral, but this last attitude is finally comprised under pessimism. Neutrality to life really means pessimism about it.) When the vision of a writer of tragedy is stated philosophically, it is always converted (I submit, necessarily) into a form of optimism or of pessimism. I shall give two examples. The first is taken from Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach. Arnold, looking out at the sea from Dover Beach and hearing in the cadence of the waves the "eternal note of sadness," thinks of Sophocles: Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; And the image of Sophocles hearing the note of "human misery" leads Arnold to this pessimistic declaration: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; The view of life expressed here is not one that I, or any one else, could derive from seeing a performance of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, or Antigone. Perhaps Sophocles had such thoughts when he looked at the Aegean, but these are not the thoughts we think when witnessing his tragedies. And from 179

the reports about Sophocles by his contemporaries, we are scarcely justified in calling to mind an individual contemplating human misery. The tragic poet was said to have been charming, gracious, genial, and with no better opinions about politics or life than other cultivated Athenians. The wonderful Spanish writer and thinker Miguel de Unamuno, who is actually responsible for the phrase "the tragic sense of life," trying to state this "tragic sense" as a philosophical attitude, converts it, I think, into a refined and pleasing, though somber, form of optimism. Unamuno's tragic sense is even a misnomer; there is little tragic about it, for he is not urging us to set something above life; rather what he does urge us to set above life is nothing other than life, immortal life, the immortality of the soul, on which immortality he asks us to gamble the existence we are certain of. That this violently optimistic Christianity should attract us with its death-splashed Spanish cloak is due, of course, to our obscure recognition, even if we have not thought the matter through, that optimism presented simply as optimism would offer us only what we are well acquainted and dissatisfied with. A novel and, I think, quite wrong view that thought, even philosophic thought, can have and has had a tragic cast is presented by Lucien Goldmann in his much-praised book on Pascal and Racine, Le Dieu Cadre. According to Goldmann there are certain philosophers whose thought can be characterized as tragic. He cites as instances Pascal and Kant. Why is their thought tragic? Because, says Goldmann, it expresses the conflict in them between alternatives and exclusive world views, the world view of mathematical science and the world view of revealed religion. But surely no character on the stage would be convincing in the tragic hero's part if his torment were due to nothing more drastic than his inability to choose between or mediate conflicting views. In fact, Kant and Pascal did both. What I mean is this: Kant opted for religion in his metaphysics and for science in his epistemology. And I think Pascal did the same in his distinction between I'esprit geometrique and I'esprit de finesse. I submit that it is not through any particular philosophy that the tragic writer is able to give expression to his tragic sense of life, although this tragic sense does have for us, the audience, a virtue which has been called philosophic. Then is it by art alone that the writer of tragedy affects as he does? 180

The Writer of Tragedy Without the Philosopher The very great probability is, I suggest, that the writer of tragedy is no more endowed with a tragic sense of life than are we to whom he makes it available. By which I mean that he, too, in his regular experience of life, is condemned to the same unsatisfactory choice between optimism and pessimism that we are, and that only in the act of writing a tragedy, only by making the tragic view available to us, is he himself enabled to envisage life in such terms. His creation then is a communion with us, in the experiencing of a view of things which we could not have without him, but which he in turn can only have insofar as he is capable of extending it to us. Why could we not have the tragic sense without the written tragedy? Let us consider this point from a somewhat different angle. There is something we could have without the help of art, and which many people may confuse with the tragic sense, namely the feeling of a pessimism that is justified. This is all we can get from the lesser masters of the art of tragedy, from Euripides, Webster, and Tourneur at their best, and from Shakespeare in his unsuccessful tragedies such as Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and King Lear. Moreover, this justified pessimism appears at times even in the greatest works but it is not this which makes them tragic. When Richard in Shakespeare's Richard 11 complains of the vulnerability of kings, . . . for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits . . . Allowing him a breath, a little scene . . . . . . and humour'd thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! he gives expression to a pessimism which in view of his situation he is certainly justified in feeling. And the greatness of the verse penetrates Richard's feeling completely; what he says seems all the more inevitable because said in lines of such power. Who can be secure if the best protected of men, the ting, is not? It is to be noted that a negative fact, in this instance death, armed with so mean and trivial an instrument as a pin, is seen as rendering meaningless the highest state a man can aspire to, that of a kingliness. Later in the play Richard will say: 181

.. . nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd With being nothing. The feeling expressed here of life's meaninglessness we may all have felt, indeed must have felt, at some time or other and with some measure of poetry, too, for such feelings provide a verbal talent all by themselves. We would not need the art of tragedy to acquaint us with such a judgment of life nor even with the necessity to pronounce it consummately. A judgment of life similar in its pessimism to Richard's and equally justified is uttered by Macbeth: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. This judgment, too, we could form for ourselves without either the experience of tragedy or Shakespeare's art. But what we could not get without actual or invented tragedy is the experience of resolution when nothing can follow from resolve, a resolution beyond optimism or pessimism, hope or despair. This we get from Macbeth's great words: Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane, And thou opposed, being of no woman born, Yet will I try the last. Richard's speech about the death of kings is a protest against the weakness and impotence of the most highly placed. Macbeth's lines of resolution express a much more complicated feeling, one in which are allied, to use Heidegger's phrase, "utter impotence and super power." Richard's lines about the death of kings, justifying pessimism, point to the negative fact of death which renders optimistic notions of life invalid even for a king. Macbeth's lines of resolution refer to no negative facts at all, not to anything common in human experience, not even to the common experience of kings, but exclusively to the withdrawal of their aid from him by those metaphysical beings, the witches, who had for a time supported him. Macbeth's lines are thrilling; Richard's are merely sad. What has to be explained is why Macbeth's lines thrill us, and why he had to pass through the experience of tragedy in order to 182

be able to utter them. The weakness of Richard is evident, so is Macbeth's. But whence comes Macbeth's power? What Is Tragedy? In tragedy it is not the negative facts, rendering optimism invalid, which finally cause misfortune. Such negative facts as commonly threaten all of us are even converted by the mechanism of tragedy into positive goods. Blindness is an evil; yet Oedipus deliberately blinds himself; death we would think is to be avoided at all costs; yet Antigone elects to die and denies her sister, Ismene, the same privilege. Ajax, when told that if he spends the day in his tent he will be allowed to live, deliberately leaves his tent and falls on his sword. In the tragic universe the negative facts of experience are finally unimportant. What might lead us in ordinary life to be pessimistic is never the cause of tragedy. What is the cause then of tragedy? It is the opposition, as Hegel affirmed, of two conflicting goods. Tragedy is never caused by what is unambiguously evil. It is the sheerly positive in conflict with the sheerly positive that destroys the tragic protagonist. In the Greek world it was the collision of the values of the family with those of the state. Those contrary values, as Aeschylus and Sophocles understood them, could not be held to with equal fidelity in any superior experience of life. The superior man would inevitably violate the one or the other.2 Perhaps it may be said that while this may have been true of the ancient Greek world, it was not true of the Shakespearean world. For in what sense can the witches who incite Macbeth to kill Duncan be called sheerly positive? In what sense can they be called representatives of the good? Are they not the expression of unmitigated evil? If they were, Macbeth would not be a tragedy. It would be a melodrama, and Macbeth's story would merely be that of a villain defeated. But once again, in what sense can the
2 It may be asked: why is a collision of values different from a collision of world views? But a collision of views, even if we call them world views, takes place within consciousness and not within the world. Values such as the family and the state are not merely values; they are valued realities. I should like to point out here that one of the most interesting insights of Martin Heideggermuch more interesting than his remarks about anguish and guilt, which have become part of current twaddleis his judgment that world views imply the absence of a world rather than a world's enduring presence. Tragedy takes place in i world, not in a consciousness which is uncertain as to what the world

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witches be said to represent the good? In this sense: the witches in Macbeth are the only dramatic expression of the metaphysical. Duncan, the reigning king, is presented as kingly, just, morally right. But Macbeth and Banquo are the characters in the play who have direct contact with the representatives of the metaphysical, that is to say, the witches. Now in Macbeth the metaphysical does not coincide with the moral, but is at odds with it; yet both are to be valued. Since the justification for kingship was finally metaphysicalthe Elizabethans believed in the divine right of kings as opposed to any merely moral right to kingshiphow could an immoral deed of murder to attain kingship, when metaphysical forces, in this case, the witches, seemed to support that deed, be thought of as evil? And, in fact, we never feel Macbeth is evil. We think of him as suffering, suffering because he has violated moral values he cannot deny, in support of values neither he nor Shakespeare's age thought criticizable in moral terms. As in the Greek tragedies, we have in Macbeth good pitted against good, and the protagonist is the victim of their collision. What is dreadful then is never the mere negative facts ordinary experience fears. It is the good which is dreaded and has to be dreaded. Soren Kierkegaard, peculiarly sensitive to these matters, summed up what, I think, can be called the experience of tragedy when he said in his acute analysis of dread that it is fundamentally dread of the good. What Has the Writer of Tragedy Seen? So the tragic writer has to have seen some collision of good with good in order to have been able to arrange the events he describes into a tragedy. Was he predisposed to see some such collision of good with good? Not, I should say, if it were not there to be seen, even if only he saw it. For can we want to see what it is undesirable to see? Some of us may out of ambition or perversity, but not the writer of a proper tragedy. He sees what it is undesirable to see without desiring to see it. This is one of the things we admire him for. To be sure, there are others. But in any case, what must be understood here is that the object of his vision was given by his age or epoch and not created by him alone. The collision of good with good which he witnessed had then to be given him along with others to see; his part was to take what he saw, and what others may have seen, and fashion it into art. Thus the tragic view, properly understood, means to have seen the necessity for tragedy, to have recognized it rather 184

than to have created it. That the tragic vision results from a direct act of seeing, and not from the holding of any particular view, or from any predilection for interpreting reality tragically, is something we must understand in order to evaluate that vision and judge it for its true worth. Just as in the tragedy he is going to write, the dramatist will set forth a sequence of events whose connections are necessary, so he himself can only be stirred to set forth such a sequence of events by the sight of a fatality that was thrust upon' his view and which was necessarily, not accidentally, there before him. Once again: what did he see? A collision of good with good. Is it desirable that such a collision come within our view? Not in life. No. Nobody can genuinely say that he wants to see a tragedy enacted anywhere but on the stage. For it is a misfortune to a society or to a culture if its main values contradict one another. On the other hand, tragedy, that art which expresses the collision and not the harmony of such values, is in itself a positive aesthetic good. But this good, this aesthetic good, is achieved through an appropriate description of the ultimate in human misfortune: that man's values should contradict rather than support one another. Once Again "The Tragic Thinker" Perhaps it is right to say of the writer of tragedy that his thought, since it had to be equal to what he sawwhat he saw was tragedyis a kind of "tragic thinking." But this can only mean that the writer of tragedy has not permitted any philosophy or ideology to impede or obstruct his vision. But what about those thinkers who have been called "tragic," as for instance Pascal? As I indicated before, I think the term "tragic" when used to designate the thought of anyone not the writer of a tragedy is always wrongly used. Nonetheless, there are in Pascal's Pensees many dramatic characterizations of experience which give us a kind of thrill comparable to the kind we get from tragedy. My contention is that in the case of such Pensees, Pascal has merely created an abstract replica of the kind of collision of values we find embodied with ever so much more concreteness in tragic poetry. Here is one of the most famous of Pascal's thoughts: Man is but a reed, the feeblest of Nature's growths, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him; a breath, a drop of water, may prove fatal. But were the universe to kill him, he would still 185

be more noble than his slayers; for man knows that he is crushed, but the universe does not know that it crushes him. I think what we have here is an imitation in conceptual terms of the kind of event set forth in a real tragedy. It is to be noted that Pascal begins by saying men can be destroyed by a drop of water or a breath; but he chooses not to continue the thought that men can b'e destroyed by such small means. The drop of water, the breath, are tiny facts: acting negatively, they would be of no interest in tragedy. So in Pascal's thought they are expandedin possibility, of course into the universe. From the breath, the drop of water, Pascal goes to the whole universe, which he imagines in the act of overwhelming a man. Even then, says Pascal, the man would be nobler than his slayer. But, in any case, the slayer would be noble, being the universe. Insofar as Pascal's thought here may strike one as tragic, I should say that the event he has described was modeled on that structure of events always present in a true tragedy. For he who is destroyed in a true tragedy is always destroyed by something of worth. The drop of water, the breath, may be thought of, as I said before, as tiny facts behaving negatively but which Pascal had finally to forget about and obscure from his view in order to make a true judgment of man's nobility in misfortune. What We Should Admire the Writer of Tragedy For Let us turn from the "tragic thinker" to the writer of tragedy. Why do we admire him? Not for his philosophy, for he has none. If he does hold to one in his personal life, this is not pertinent to his achievement or to our judgment of it. Nor are we required to think of him as a master of experience, as wiser or more deeply human than ourselves. Let us admire him for his art; we should recognize, though, that what he gives us goes far beyond what art generally or regularly gives. And let us admire him for his luck, too, at having been given by his age the opportunity to see in his mind's eye certain paradigm instances of human adversity. Does not Pushkin say that the day after the flooding of Petrograd, "Khostov, poet, favorite of the heavens, already sang in verses never to die the griefs of Neva's shores"?3 Moreover, the effort the writer of tragedy makes has to be 3 From Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman in Edmund Wilson's translation. 186

immense. He has seen the collision of the main values of his age or culture; he has seen the nonmeaning of meanings. Now the mind naturally seeks for meanings; the writer of tragedy has to deny and reverse this process in the very movement with which he yields to it. His interest is, of course, an aesthetic one. May I speak for just one moment from a professional point of view? When you have written a play you are faced with this problem: what does this play mean? If it is meaningless, it is uninteresting. Suppose it does have a meaning, though. This is scarcely better. Have you not then reduced the action in your play to the illustration of an idea? Now illustrative art is scarcely better for many of us today than is meaningless art. Here the idea of tragedy exerts its fascination. For it is the kind of idea that attains to its truth only when represented in the work itself: the play, the tragedy. We are much more clear about what tragedy is when we see a tragedy enacted than when we try to reason about tragedy. And let us not forget that what the writer of tragedy gives, he himself gets in the very act of giving: communion with us in a privileged view of human adversity. We admire him then for what he makes us see, a world where the highest values collide and in which we know we could not live. We recognize this when the curtain comes down and we do not know where to go. We have to become optimists or pessimists again in order to think of going home.

Oedipus Tyrannus
KARL J. RBINHARDT As OPPOSED to the static scenes of Sophocles' earlier dramas, almost every scene of the Antigone, by a development of the situation into its opposite, entails a reversal. Oedipus Rex is from beginning to end a reversal of this kind, one writ large, a reversal running through a whole drama. The fall of kings from their power and glory was, to be sure, nothing unusual for the Athenian stage. But how differently the kings fell in the Agamemnon and in The Persians of Aeschylus! In these plays the future is prepared from the beginning: dread amidst 187

hope, presentiments, entreaties by the chorus, forebodings in the dialogue; from the very outset, the fall lurks behind every word. Even in Sophocles' earlier Women of Trachis, downfall was prefigured and prophesied by a certain mood, introduced with the first word, and furthered by the tone of gloom. How different is the Oedipus Rex, what a contrast between its beginning and end, both of equal power and scope! The end reverses the beginning. What the beginning reveals is countered by the revelation at the end. In_the beginning Oedipus Li&Jhejrefuge and the shield of all; at the end, he is expelled by all and from all, evgnjxom hisjjgKTto ^^"Between Beginning and end, this play of shifting demonic centers does not develop as did the Antigone, through discrete, clearly separated, independent parts, but rather through a single whirling j movement beginning slowly and growing ever more torrential. We know very little about Aeschylus' Oedipus, but we may still conclude that it did not rely on this type of reversal. For in the trilogy of Aeschylus performed in 467 B.C., the Oedipus stood between the Laius and the Seven Against Thebes, which last has been preserved. Now the tone and thrust of Aeschylus' Oedipus must have been different from that of the Seven Against Thebes since doom in his Oedipus could not possibly have come to the grandson from a curse on his grandfather and father. It is also to be noted that in the Seven there is not a trace of that peculiarly dramatic development which makes Sophocles' Oedipus what it is. In order to heighten the contrast between end and beginning, and show the roots and soil from which the royal house is finally uprootedroots so deep their tearing out is like the removal of all human securityOedipus in the beginning is not presented as he appears in the legend, which shows him a child of fortune, Tyche, served by chance, he who comes - from afar and wins a kingdom. Sophocles' Oedipus js the blessed man, the leader, helper, savior; the royaljnan_upheld by the favor of the gods, the man who representing himself represents all men, and whose words are a benefit to aU. To 'enlarge his scope and raise his stature, he is surroundedlike a godby a procession of pious supplicants, aged priests, and a group of boys; thus the speech he directs to them begins like that of a father:
Oedipus Children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus, why do you sit here with your suppliant crowns? 188

What do you fear or want, that you sit here suppliant? Indeed I'm willing to give all that you may need; I would be very hard should I not pity suppliants like these. The solemn speech of supplication by the priest of Zeus, like an echoing wave, takes up and carries further the tone and tactic of this introduction: Priest: you see our company around the altar; you see our ages; some of us, like these, who cannot yet fly far, and some of us heavy with age;
* *

We have not come as suppliants to this altar because we thought of you as of a God, but rather judging you the first of men in all the chances of this life and when we mortals have to do with more than man. You came and by your coming saved our city, freed us from tribute which we paid of old to the Sphinx, cruel singer. This you did in virtue of no knowledge we could give you, in virtue of no teaching; it was God that aided you, men say, and you are held with God's assistance to have saved our lives. The regal note sounded here is equalled only by Aeschylus in his Agamemnonthere in the tone of the royal speech of sublime knowledge about the powers of fate; in Sophocles' play, through the words of a man destined to serve, and by birthright bound and obligated: I know you are all sick, yet there is not one of you, sick though you are, that is as sick as I myself. Your several sorrows each have single scope and touch but one of you. My spirit groans for city and myself and you at once. The first shock to Oedipus' sense of power does not, as the legend might lead one to expect, spring from a memory of what was said by the Delphic oracle to the departing fugitive, namely, that he would murder his father and bring shame to his mother. In sharp contrast to the Women of Trachis, where an ancient prophecy is referred to in the very first scene, the 189

words of the oracle in the Oedipus Rex are not mentioned until secure power has been shaken and real trust_b_roken, that is, jjpt until after the quarrels of Oedipus with Teiresias and Creon. It is a new pronouncement from the Delphic god indicating how the land polluted by the unpunished murder of Laius would have to be purified which first startles Oedipus. His concern is thus stimulated not by what the oracle had said to him in person (as in the legend) but by one of those orders which the Delphic god was wont to give at critical moments of history, in this case imposing on Oedipus the task of discovering himself. The order finds its way immediately to the heart of the protagonist, it soon begins to transform him; it enchants him like a magic potion, and becomes for him a test of his very being. He is seized by a mighty urge to pledge himself and to uncover alleven before the emissary from the oracle, Creon, arrives: But when he comes, then, may I prove a villain, if I shall not do all the God commands.
Oedipus what is the word you bring us from the God? Creon A good word,for things hard to bear themselves if in the final issue all is well I count complete good fortune. Oedipus What do you mean? What you have said so far leaves me uncertain whether to trust or fear. Creon If you will hear my news before these others I am ready to speak, or else to go within. Oedipus Speak it to all; the grief I bear, I bear it more for these than for my own heart.

But what makes for the suspense, frequently noted, of this drama is not at all the breathlessness with which we wait the unfolding of a fated discovery; this is not just a cat-and-mouse game between a settled fate and an unsuspecting victim; nor is suspense due to false leads like those that turn up regularly in the investigation of crime. In short, the suspense here is not what dramas have since made of suspense. When Schiller in a passage that has been quoted much too oftencharacterized the Oedipus as a "tragic analysis. . . . Everything is already present and is merely developed. . . . Added to this is the fact that an event, when it is unalterable, is by nature much more terrible. . . ." (Letter to Goethe, October 2, 1797), was he not too attentive to what he himself had done in writing his Wallenstein, thinking about the economy of the play, and very little about its real meaning? For Sophocles, as for the Greeks of more ancient times, fate, even when foretold, even when recurring with the strictness of law, never had the meaning of determinism, and was seen as a spontaneous unfolding of the demonic. There is no fatal determinism before the time of the Stoics and the triumph of astrology. The meaning of the Oedipus is not to be seen in the unalterability of the hero's past once uncovered, but rather in the hero's active struggle to defend against great threat to it the apparent or "seeming" order of his life. Such a struggle is imposed by the hero's very humanity, calling on him, in the name of truth, to reverse the values of seeming and being. Less than any other Greek tragedy is the Oedipus a tragedy of fate, for which it has for so long been taken to be the model. As German classicism well understood, to posit fate is to posit "freedom," and the noblest kind of freedom at that. Distinct from all other tragedies, the Oedipus is uniquely the tragedy of appearances, that tragedy of seeming which results from the human need to think of seeming as being, even as Parmenides thought of belief as discovery. It is to be noted that none of the choruses of the Oedipus invokes fate, as is common in other plays; what has not been noted is that one of the choruses makes a dramatic point of the idea of "seeming": What man, what man on earth wins more
of happiness than a seeming and after that turning away?

Thus already in the beginning he is forecast as the mighty unveiler; by his every gesture, by his every word, he prefigures the man who at the end calls for the portals to be opened so that all can see him. 190

The play's attack on and defense of seeming, not noticeable at first, has in fact begun with the command of the god that 191

an inquiry be undertaken. The question about seeming is expressed early in the play by a strange twist, rightly noted by Voltaire the logician, but wrongly judged by Voltaire the critic. After an inquiry into the case seems in order, after the question has been raised: "Is there a witness?" and after a witness has been discovered, "robbers" are mentioned in such a way as to make any investigation suspect. For how could robbers there have dared do what they did, had they not been bribed "from here"? "From here" refers to Thebes. This question, raised by a king, is unavoidable since it concerns the murder of a king. The question is directed to Creon. Creon seems to evade it: the suspicion that was bound to arise could not be pursued, after the deed. Why? The sphinx was the reason. After her coming, doubt seems to have been laid to rest. It was no longer a question of where the deed took place, or of its circumstances and instruments, but of its originators, who may have been bandits. The suspicion comes back in Sophocles' play after Oedipus' quarrel with the refractory and clearly malicious seer; and then suspicion is further strengthened, the alliance between Creon and Teiresias is established, and a whole web of hostility is spun. Luckily there has been preserved from Aeschylus' Oedipus a single fragment, in which a witness, the only survivor besides the protagonist, tells us of the place where "three roads cross." The discovery of the true facts, or something leading to their discovery, must have followed his testimony. In Sophocles, no such account is given. But the value of the Aeschylean fragment is that it enables us to see what Sophocles was ready to set aside for the sake of another effect. In ignoring the Aeschylean witness, Sophocles added to the original, inescapable, and objective seeming a new kind of seeming, subjective seeming, that is to say, illusion. And in the manner in which this new seeming entersas suspicion of bribery, of a secret conspiracy in the court, and one that must be counteredthe Oedipus goes beyond the dramatic formal structure of the Antigone, where "seeming" overpowers Creon. Just as in the Antigone the suspicion of bribery is first only hinted at by a single word, kerdos, and then, after being dropped for a while, is again brought forth and developed in the scene with the seer, so it is in the Oedipus. But in the Antigone, even the external situation inherited by the ruler Creon suggested something suspicious. The two heirs to the throne were dead after the defeat of the invading army. So suspicion was already present in Creon's first decree, in 192

the prohibition against burying that heir to the throne who had been the country's foe. In the Oedipus, since the ruler steps before the community at a moment when he is honored by all, ardently importuned by all, and not proclaiming, like Creon, his seizure of power, there seems to be no basis for any suspiciousness. And yet here too a rather similar doubt seems to haunt the scene, first vaguely; then the doubt, suggested by Teiresias, is strongly taken up by Creon. For in the Oedipus, the threat of illusion or "seeming" comes much more from the human subject and emanates much more from the soul itself; "seeming" here is not deducible from outward circumstances but arises from the demonic incomprehensibility of some task which the soul cannot altogether comprehend. Error springs here from the necessity to have a foe at which one can strike, in order not to lose one's own certainty. For Creon in the Antigone, the violation of his decree against burying Polynices did not as such signify a threat to his own existence; for Oedipus, everything is at stake even before he suspects what the stakes are. "Seeming," in his case, is threatened at the start not by the truth, its real opposite, but rather by other appearances, other seemings: Oedipus: For when I drive pollution from the land I will not serve a distant friend's advantage, but act in my own interest. Whoever he was that killed the king may readily wish to dispatch me with the murderous hand: The irruption of truthhere one should not speak of reality, since at first Oedipus does not live in illusion but in an objective untruth and order of seeming or semblancethe irruption of truth within the structure of appearance follows successively from two breaches, the first a breach at the periphery and the second at the center. First, there is the question: What is hidden before me which it is my duty to bring to light? Then there is the question: What am I, and what is my true being? The second question conceals itself behind the first; then they operate in secret complicity; finally they become as one. The power of appearance persists, fights back, and shores up whatever of its positions are threatened. The first defense against the as yet unknown murderer is banishment, and, along with it, a curse. Oedipus knows how lo curse: in his curse, he is authentic. Cursing, he pronounces 193

the sentence that will require fulfillment, the sentence both public and personal; he curses with priestly dedication, and at the same time with marked feeling. Consider the curses in the plays of Euripidesa typical one is that of Theseus in the Hippolytus; how different is the curse of Sophocles' Oedipus. And just compare the Oedipus with the fragmentpreserved by chanceof the old epic the Thebaid, where cursing is not given poetic expression, but simply told: "He cursed." Oedipus' powerful curse is of course directed unwittingly against himself cursing. In the Antigone, Creon's oaths rebound against him; but the retroactive force of Oedipus' curse is perhaps even more fateful. A dynamic intensification follows his curse, as after Creon's speeches in the Antigone; in both cases, a low-keyed beginning is followed by a frenetic rhythm, which may be characterized as the rhythm of illusion. Here we have another reversal, one not expressed in the dialogue, but in the shifting movement of the curse-containing speech itself. The restraint with which the speaker had begun, with which he promised that there would be no punishment for the guilty partythis restraint vanishes once solemn banishment has been proclaimed. The force of the curse and the condemnation possess the speaker as the riddle he wishes to solve draws him ever closer to his own deed: So I stand forth a champion of the God and of the man who died. Upon the murderer I invoke this curse whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of manymay he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearth I pray that I myself may feel my curse. Out of the first unfamiliarity with which the new king has faced the unknown and almost forgotten events, there develops a peculiar intimacy with things unfamiliar to him, as if they were his own. Without suspecting the true state of affairs, he makes himself into the real son of his real father; in the demonic sphere of seeming, he is already gripped magically by his own true being. At the beginning he speaks without real knowledge: Hark to me; what I say to you, I say as one that is a stranger to the story as stranger to the deed. For I would not 194

be far upon the track if I alone were tracing it without a clue. But now, since after all was finished, I became a citizen among you, citizens now I proclaim to all the men of Thebes: It is as yet the same lack of knowledge as before: Creon: My lord, before you piloted the state we had a King called Laius. Oedipus: I know of him by hearsay. I have not seen him. But unfamiliarity changes into ever stronger connectedness: Since I am now the holder of his office, and have his bed and wife that once was his, and had his line not been unfortunate we would have common children(fortune leaped upon his head)because of all these things, I fight in his defence as for my father, and I shall try all means to take the murderer of Laius the son of Labdacus the son of Polydorus and before him of Cadmus and before him of Agenor. Here at the end, Oedipus mentions all his ancestors; he is the representative of the whole line. It was customary for kings to name all of their ancestors when taking an oath, as does Xerxes in Herodotus: For let me not be thought the child of Darius, the son of Hystaspas, the son of Arsames, the son of Ariaramnes, the son of Teispas, nor of Cyrus . . . if I take not vengeance on the Athenians.1 There is, to be sure, a tragic-ironic element in both the seeming unfamiliarity and the seeming participation (Oedipus' true participation appears only with his fall). But it is only in the act of appropriating the pastpresent already in the pretense of appropriating it with a turbulence more excessive than warrantedthat being and seeming are ineluctably entwined. It is only from their fusionno longer external or l Rawlinson translation. Modern Library, p. 502. 195

partial, but comprehending the whole of being, the soul itself, speech itselfthat there can arise the tragedy of one who, lost to being, is also hurled from seeming. This is why Oedipus' fate is of such concern to us; and this is how the particular circumstances of his life can be seen as forming, in Sophocles' play; a symbolic whole. The demonic, continuous, and uncalculated transposition from the realm of seeming into the realm of truth is the human element which was not present in the myth and which only Sophocles connected with the figure of Oedipus. And just here lies the ironic element which our academic aesthetics has generalized and inexactly designated as "tragic irony." For here the spectator does not have any knowledge beyond that of the man groping in darkness, and cannot see a meaning in the latter's speeches beyond what is said. Rather, protagonist and spectator are equally perplexed by the puzzle of seeming and being; seeming and being are not distributed any differently to those in the audience than to those on the stage, nor is an exchange of being for seeming between the protagonist and the spectators even conceivable. Here being and seeming encounter each other in every word and gesture of the man who has gone astray. It is not the poet here who uses his own or the theater's power of illusion to play a game with human seeming; it is the invisible gods, working from an invisible background, who do this. After a secret, unconscious, and preliminary struggle, the open fight between truth and seeming begins in Oedipus' scene with Teiresias. It is not now a battle between truth and error. To speak of error is not to recognize that it is, after all, impossible not to err, and that here there is a failure not of understanding, but rather of the whole human capacity, taken subjectively and objectively. Dianeira in the Women of Trachis finds herself in a state of tragic error; she acts in a way which she immediately regrets; in the same play, Hercules' rage is tragic and based also on a misunderstanding. Tragic error is something into which men can indeed fall. But the state of tragic seeming, in which Oedipus finds himself, is undoubtedly something still more profound; it is something that from the start encompasses the character; all that he is and all that he desires, as king, as husband, as leader, as savior; tragic seeming is what conditions him, and also gives him his power and his sureness; he is sustained by nothing else. In the Antigone, Creon is driven on and on into semblance, into seeming; Oedipus stands before us, resolute within seeming, and then is hurled out of it. 196

What the human bearer of truth, the seer Teiresias, has to say is indeed hard to grasp, and it is not only Oedipus who misunderstands. For Teiresias participates both in the superhuman and in the all-too-human; on the one hand, he is the master of secret and infallible knowledge, while on the other he is irresolute and forgetful. He comes, yet he desires to be gone; he conceals, and yet he reveals. An old man, capricious and irritable, his angry disposition is not exactly what it seems: he is a walking riddle, nourishing the riddling nature of truth. One aspect of the puzzling contradiction in the mantic stance, of "neither speaking nor holding back," seems to be personified in him. His contradictoriness clearly goes beyond that exhibited by him in the earlier Antigone: the idea of prophecy has been pushed further. There was no longer any need in the Oedipus to point up the blindness of Teiresias, by introducing a boy to lead the blind leader of the blind; in place of such a dramatic prop, there is now the pure contradiction of the mantic appearance as such. Taking only character into consideration, such a contradiction presents an incomprehensible fusion of a stubborn, limited existence with a demonic element that, entering from the beyond and aiming at sovereignty, does not thereby endow the man it possesses with an air of ecstasy, or the dignity of a prophet. A similar contradictoriness can be seen in the Oedipus of Sophocles' last play, the work of his old age. Something from beyond overpowers the old Oedipus, commands all his acts, and in the firmness and breadth of its scope raises him into the realm of the mysterious. The magic of this contradictoriness is not yet present in the Antigone, from which we may conclude that Sophocles did not feel its force when he wrote that play. Toward the end of Creon's scene with Teiresias in the Antigone, and from out of the timidity and reverence that had been present in the beginning of the scene, invective and accusation break forth; the same thing happens in the Oedipus. But here the reversal is more violent, the mood more irrational. Oedipus' very first speech, expressive of royal reverence, recognizes the seer as a person and also the mystery of his office; and both solicitous and trusting, it goes far beyond Creon's acknowledgment of Teiresias in the Antigone:
Teiresias, you are versed in everything, things teachable and things not to be spoken, things of the heaven and earth-creeping things. 197

The quarrel in the Antigone results from Creon's disdain of the wise warning; then accusations are made which result in the exposure of the accuser; nevertheless, the struggle between Creon and Teiresias takes the form of a debate over right and wrong, hybris against sophrosyne. In the Oedipus however, the protagonist finds himself at grips with a puzzling resistance in the seer himself who darkly refuses to obey, and sets himself up as a barrier against any effort at salvation, against Oedipus' will to confront the very question on which his whole being depends. Here it is not right and wrong, it is nothing less than "dark" and "light" which struggle with each other and engage in mutual recriminations; Oedipus moves from a preliminary darkness to an ever greater, an ever more malicious clarity; Teiresias moves from alertness and receptivity to an ever more passionate deafness; each is carried away by the other as they goad each other on. The quarrel soon reaches its first peak: Oedipus: You would provoke a stone! Tell us, you villain, tell us, and do not stand there quietly unmoved and balking at the issue. The seer, resisting the attack of Oedipus, is of course allied secretly with those forces whose riddling action, ever since the message came from Apollo, have been endangering and threatening the "seeming" in which Oedipus lives. Teiresias is accused by Oedipus of being an accomplice in the crime. And thus a quarrel between two orders ensues, even as in the verbal fencing of the Antigone; in that play, in the Teiresias scene, the quarrel was over the word "gain," kerdos, which has a double meaning, referring both to salvation and to acquisition, as of worldly goods. In the Oedipus, as we saw, there is a similar quarrelbut a much more violent one this time, and also about a word with a double meaning: "truth" or "clarity" to Oedipus is found in what he knows himself to have done, in what he comprehends, in what he has governed by will and knowledge; to Tiresias "truth" and "clarity" are found in what lies beyond, human comprehension. To one, the truth is that which lies within human reach; to the other, it is what limits the reach of humans. If one merely considers the situation objectively, one might say that. Teiresias. like the spectators, has knowledge which Oedipus cannot have; so understood, one thinks of the

quarrel as tragic-ironic in the conventional sense. But if we look at the quarrel from another perspective, that which has as its object the very being of man, then we see that it is not knowledge and ignorance which are confronting each other, but two different modes of man's Being: what is "light" in one of these modes is "darkness" in the other:
Teiresias I say you are the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek.

Oedipus Do you imagine you can always talk like this, and live to laugh at it hereafter? Teiresias Yes, if the truth has anything of strength. Oedipus It has, but not for you; it has no strength for you because you are blind in mind and ears as well as in your eyes. Teiresias You are a poor wretch to taunt me with the very insults which every one soon will heap upon yourself. Oedipus Your life is one long night so that you cannot hurt me or any other who sees the light. Oedipus lives in a clarity which "nourishes" him, inwardly and_outwardly, clarity which is the same for him as for all, those who "see the light." Without the brightness of this clarity, his quarref with Teiresias would be a Euripidean argunates. This same clarity must desig-

nate as "darkness" all that threatens to obscure it. Darkness threatens ever more powerfully until the name of Apollo is mentioned:
Teiresias It is not fate that I should be your ruin, Apollo is enough; it is his care to work this out. 199

Oedipus

or Creon's?

Was this your own design

But Apollo's name is quickly replaced by that of a man, Creon, and it is thus that the structure of appearance is still maintained. There has been, to be sure, an attempt to explain the connection of Apollo with Creon on rational, objective, and humanly understandable grounds. It had already been mentioned that it was Creon who advised that Teiresias be questioned. But the fact that Creon's practical aims could, for Oedipus, throw suspicion on Teiresias, while telling us something of the protagonist's character, does not enlighten us about his situation: suspicion serves him as an excuse, but once he has become suspicious, he drops all reference to what occasioned it. Apollo is mentioned at just that critical juncture where seeming must turn into illusion and madness in order not to surrender itself to being. On the ground of seeming, an illusion world order is at once set up: Creon, Teiresias, and the crime are indissolubly bound together. Indignation now has a target. Passion can now be discharged in an enigmatic invocation of all that makes the world worldly and understandable by its very worldliness: Oedipus Wealth, sovereignty and skill outmatching skill for the contrivance of an envied life! Great store of jealousy fill your treasury chests, if my friend Creon, friend from the first and loyal, thus secretly attacks me, secretly desires to drive me out and secretly suborns this juggling, trick devising quack, this wily beggar who has only eyes for his own gains, but blindness in his skill. A whole new world system emergesthe past, too, is now snatched up to confirm the truth of seeming: what good was the wisdom of Teiresias when he faced the Sphinx. . . . And is the new view of the world of Oedipus entirely wrong; is it not right? Who could ever be convinced by "seeming," if "seeming" did not "seem" true? In the Antigone, Creon, too, appealed to something that was not as such false; but here there was something brutal and repellent in the true value by which Creon justifies his ruthless decree. In the Oedipus the disjunction between seeming and being, understood as neces200

sary for self-determination and self-interpretation, belongs to the essence of man. Teiresias's answer here has again something in common with his prophetic speech in the Antigone: both are at once prophecies of the future and interpretations of the present: Teiresias: Since you have taunted me with being blind, here is my word for you. You have your eyes but see not where you are in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing you are an enemy to kith and kin in death, beneath the earth, and in this life. A deadly footed, double striking curse, from father and mother both, shall drive you forth out of this land, with darkness on your eyes, that now have such straight vision. The phrase "nor where you live," like the words "where you are," serves to designate a place within the general order, wherein a man's deeds have meaning. So these words of Teiresias are not to be understood as a kind of mystifying and artificial paraphrase of what could be said more plainly and more briefly; what Teiresias says does not mean: "Thebes is your home, Jocasta your mother," though if Teiresias had expressed himself thus, he would have said no more than the truth. But origin, place, and associationsthe "from where," the "where," and the "with whom"express the whole content of human existence. Insofar as human existence is tragic in Sophocles, this is always due in some way to its drastic isolation from all natural ties. So it is because of the way human existence is envisaged in this play that the prophetically indefinite is much more suitable than the definite. "You do not know with whom you live. . . ." is an interpretation of the facts. "You do not know that Jocasta is your mother," would be a mere statement of a fact. But the real meaning of Teiresias' remarks is this: You think you have ties, but you are hostile toward everything to which man is tied. "Beneath the earth" and "in this life" stand for the two regions in which one is tied by blood, just as in the prophecies of the Antigone "above" and "below," "the living" and "the dead," represent all possible orders. The horror in which Oedipus will find himself at the end of the play, foretold by Teiresias, will do no more than make visible what Oedipus already is. For only from the perspective of the 201

demonic, which enters the situation through the prophet's enigmatic words, can one truly determine the situation in which the hero finds himself. With the enigmatic and indeterminate elements in the prophet's speech, that which in the original fable was only a consequence of the hero's past and a delimitation of his future is, by Sophocles, boldly thrust into the present; as truth it is thrust into that seeming or darkness from which no man can free himself. The ensuing quarrel between Oedipus and Creon relates to the Teiresias scene even as does the quarrel between Creon and Haimon to the Teiresias scene of the Antigone. The causes of Oedipus' quarrel with Teiresias are' still hidden, irrational, and dark with prophecy; now there appears a rational man who sees the attack of Oedipus on the seer as a threat to his own person. It is interesting to note that in Sophocles' earlier play, the Ajax, the successive quarrel scenes are hardly in contrast with one another: But in the Oedipus, the two quarrel scenes are intimately related, the second quarrel being a development of the first. Thus the second scene leads the hero even further away from the aim of his own action and from his task of self-knowledge; we shall see finally that what is wrong humanly, can, supported by the demonic, lead to the required goal. The oracles like to arrive at their goals in just this way; they seem to prefer delays, and are inclined to fulfill their pronouncements at the very moment when it seems these may be proved false. Now in the Oedipus, Sophocles is no longer bent on transferring a few archaic and formal elements of the working of the oracular on human lives into a drama, as he still did in the Women of Trachis; in the Oedipus he directly grasped the experience to which the oracles' pronouncements refer, and made drama out of this. In the Oedipus the pronouncements of the oracle do more than provide an incentive to act or an impetus to self-knowledge as in the Women of Trachis. Rather, the primal ground of the oracularas fertile as the soul itselfis the ground from which the drama grows. However, the continuous crescendo which characterizes the quarrel scenes of the Antigone is not repeated in the Oedipus. In this play the battle is from the beginning fought in the greatest passion and does not develop out of an initial, though seeming, concord. One man appears on the stage full of indignation, then another even more enraged collides with him. The objective and static element in the play is expressed in the parallelism of equally vehement reproaches 202

by both parties. Nevertheless this kind of duel is quite different from the one we saw in the Ajax; between the Ajax and the Oedipus, there was, after all, the Antigone. In the Oedipus the conflict at once begins to twist and turnit is a fight in which one man exhausts himself by hurling himself against his opponent without having a shield to protect him, while the other, well-shielded, parries his blows. Thus it is that Creon is the first to face Oedipus on the stage and it is with him that Oedipus collides: Oedipus You, sir, how is it you come here? Have you so much brazen-faced daring that you venture in my house although you are proved manifestly the murderer of that man, and though you tried, openly, highway robbery of my crown7 Oedipus continues his attack. What had been no more than a fleeting suspicion'the unanswered question, Why, after the deed, had the seer kept silent, and why was the inquiry broken off?is now turned against his enemy in an apparently victorious interrogation. But soon after his first thrust, the questioner yields the initiative to the one he is questioning, and the latter answers with a counterattack by way of a counter question. In so doing, his weapon is his rational clarity, his awareness of his own blameless self. It is easy for him to fight, for he is rooted in no depths, strives toward no heights, has not touched on the frontiers of the human. He has no drive that cannot be mastered by consciousness or find some reasonable fulfillment, he has entered into no purposeless relationships, and is not aware of qualities in himself which are not calculable and for which he would be unable to "render an account." Thus his "rendering an account" has reminded some of the way in which Hippolytus accounts for his actions in Euripides' drama. But in Euripides' play, reason, abstracted by the dramatist from the totality of the human, is posited as belonging to the essence of the human; man is divided into reason and passion. In the Oedipus, reason serves only as an impediment, as an obstacle; thus the human as truly understood can collide with and break against it. Facing the man enveloped by an atmosphere of tragedy stands Creon, the rational, enlightened man, the self-conscious representative of the spirit of the times. He is not capable of self-knowledge through suffering, nor does he feel the need of it; he can judge for himself: I am this, I
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am not that; I am capable of doing this, never that. In these calculations he does not even make mistakesthere are such men. Now in Sophocles, the greatly tragic can only unfold against the untragicthe army and Odysseus against Ajax; Ismene against Antigone; the god who wants to preserve his life against the girl who sacrifices her own. So, too, Creon stands against Oedipus. Against the leader, the ruler, the man of higher strength and first in all things, stands the man of spotless reputation, who draws back from every chance of risk or self-exposure, constantly protecting himself, and content with advantages rather than power, an average man by our standards, born to be second in all things. The victor is clear: it is Creon who has the last word before Jocasta steps between the contestants. Oedipus is already inwardly wounded and bleeding, and rather because of his blind and futile charge against an opposing and resisting world than because he has been touched by anything that was said. Toward the end, cornered, he fights on, scarcely noticing what, when he strikes out, he has hit: Oedipus When he that plots against me secretly moves quickly, I must quickly counterplot. If I wait taking no decisive measure his business will be done, and mine be spoiled. How his defense tells against him! What a contrast there is between it and Creon's account, to which it is a response. Moreover, his threat to punish Creon with death is much more like a paroxysm of anger than a true resolve. It is as though the seeming amid which he stands holds him fast and no longer permits him any effect in the real world. From a forceful king and ruler able to defend himself, he becomes a man left with this one cry: "O city, o city!" In the Antigone, the quarrelers separated at the height of their quarrel. In the Oedipus the quarrel is rarefied, almost idealized, in a series of short choral verses and by the influence of rhythm on the surge of feeling. With a strikingly calming effect, Jocasta steps between her brother and her husband. The settling of the final quarrel in the Ajax was also achieved by the intervention of a third character. But in the Oedipus, the scene is greatly changed. It has been noticed of course that it is with the Oedipus that Sophocles first shows the technical mastery needed to order a real dia204

logue among three characters. In the Ajax, in the Women of Trachis, and even in the Antigone, one can find nothing comparable to the three-way dialogue of Jocasta, Oedipus, and Creon. But the achievement of this "three-way dialogue" signifies a change of style even more than an advance in technique. If we look at comedy, we find the earliest drama of the very young Aristophanes, in the Acharnians of 425 B.C., just such a juxtaposition and intermingling of a number of conversations and transactions; one could not wish for anything more varied even on the modern stage. Something of this kind was bound to be done, even without the Oedipus. But three-way dialogue, in Sophoclean tragedy, does not have the aim of adding variety. Even in works after the Oedipus, Sophocles is not interested in talk for the sake of talk, or for realism, or to indicate the milieuas in the nineteenth-century drama. Indeed there is no social milieu, no court, which in the plays of the young Shakespeare serves to justify a dialogue among more than two characters. The three-way dialogue in the Oedipus is the sign of a distinctive style of scene-construction newly achieved by Sophocles. In the Ajax, Odysseus stepped between the quarreling heroes, just as Jocasta does between Oedipus and Creon. But only a two-way dialogue emerged in the Ajax, a third character superseding one of the other two. The static antithesis through which the pathos of the archaic form unfolds would have been weakened rather than enhanced by a dialogue among three characters. Only in a play of fluid motions and changes, where pathos is no longer static but dynamic and demonic, could a three-way dialogue serve to express the content of tragedy; the three-way dialogue, with its changing relationships, is after all best suited to a play about transformation. Here, as everywhere, the outer technical form takes its lead from the form of the soul. The intervention of a third character and the ensuing calm is not an end to the struggle but rather a shift of the conflict toward its reversal. It is not a formal pause but inaugurates a further ascent to the culminating point of the whole episode with its many changes and contrasting levels, its sudden transitions, vagaries, glimmers from obscurity. The accused, to be sure, goes free; wrath quits its object, but instead of bringing relief, leaves everyone all the more oppressed. The man arraigned and now able to reply freely can say to his persecutor: 205

Creon I see you sulk in yielding and you're dangerous when you are out of temper; natures like yours are justly heaviest for themselves to bear. The aggression of Oedipuswho has lost sight of Ms goalbecomes a violent consciousness of being the one aggressed against, the victim of a monstrous injustice. Unity of outer and inner, of acting and feeling, is lost to him. Seeming, on which certainty rests, persists and perseveres; however, it has already been undermined from within, even before the external action, beginning at a point we have hardly noticed, exerts its destroying power. Anyone who holds Creon to be without guilt heaps guilt on Oedipus: Oedipus I would have you know that this request of yours really requests my death or banishment. This is how it appears to Oedipus: one of the accused must be the criminal. So deeply has the feeling of persecution damaged his sense of his worth and his station. Nevertheless, in letting Creon go free, Oedipus is prepared to shoulder a guilt he thinks is not his own, and which when he swore to punish the crime, he could not even conceive as his. An innocent sufferer, a victim of persecution, he is ready to pay the price for another's acts as a violent reproach to those standing by: Oedipus Well, let him go thenif I must die ten times for it, or be sent out dishonoured into exile. What has happened? Nothing reasonable. But in his shifts between action and patience, in the shock to his seeming, this man of wounded soul has grasped the truth without knowing it. What was first a possibility in the soul now comes to pass. The demonic does not break into the soul from without until it has created within, from the soul's own anticipations and possibilities, the readiness for fate. Thus the turning point is prepared; thus the truth strikes home. It no longer appears as an external danger threatening from afar; it is now at the very center of the protagonist's inward life. Once again, we have a suspenseful pause. Creon 206

is gone. Isn't Oedipus going off, too? Isn't the queen about to lead her king, so tormented and perplexed, offstage? But she still has one question: What really happened? Since the chorus refuses to answer, the question is finally directed to the mute Oedipusnow dependent on her, now indeed her son. Here there is a change of mood. The theme of the blood-tie is not explicitly stated but vibrates in the tone of the dialoguefor instance, in Oedipus' speech to Jocasta: Oedipus It shall not be kept from you, since my mind has gone so far with its forebodings. Whom should I confide in rather than you, who is there of more importance to me who have passed through such a fortune? She is the refuge, he the one who has lost his way. But the more confidently she consoles him, the more violent become his doubts. The very idea that she can console him is in itself a kind of hybris, not unlike Creon's in the Antigone. Like Creon, Jocasta prides herself on a universal maxim; it is based on an enlightened belief in the divinity. But in this tragedy, catastrophe will not recoil on a too great human arrogance; the danger to the protagonist lies in the hybris of his seeming, which is innate in the human essence. Thus what is wrong with Jocasta's consoling words is not their arrogant obstinacy, but that they further veil what is in fact the case. A. W. Schlegel, to be sure, was convinced and able to convince others that Jocasta was "thoughtless" and "irreverent." But how could piety have helped her? Could piety at this point have made her believe that the predictions of the oracle had come to pass? Had she not devoutly sacrificed her son to prevent this consummation? Was she to believe her sacrifice useless? And how could such belief help Laius now, struck down by robbers? If what the seer said was clearly impossible, then why are her doubts "thoughtless"? Is she "godless" when her doubt is not directed against the god but only against his priest? After all that has happened, is not she involved along with with Oedipus, in the objective deceptions of seeming? She is sparing of words, but her tone is firm; she thinks what she says can dissolve suspicions not believed by her but threatening Oedipus:
Jocasta

Do not concern yourself about this matter;


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listen to me and learn that human beings have no part in the craft of prophecy. * * * So clear in this case were the oracles. so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say; what God discovers need of, easily he shows to us himself. The prospect of truth which in the Oedipus of Aeschylus results from the intervention of a witness not involved in the story, is envisaged here as two persons confide to each other their real fears, their real faiths. In the Women of Trachis, after the oracle is fulfilled, Sophocles permits his protagonist to vaunt his knowledge in a pathetic monologue, even as Aeschylus, in his Seven Against Thebes, permits Eteocles a monologue in which he recognizes and affirms his fate. Now in Sophocles' Oedipus, no monologue could convey the changing effect on one another of two driven souls. The story is not a pathetic report, but rushes forward in terse phrases; it wants to get to the heart of the matter and has no time for metaphors. (Consider the very different rhetoric of the Women of Trachis, as in the circuitousness of "he is not alive, but dead," as in the long list of epithets to describe the holy place, and in the many epithets, pathetic in their effect, to describe Deianeira's gift; there is nothing of the sort in the Oedipus.) To be sure, it is once more an unintended word that leads to knowledge, just as is the case in the Women of Trachis. There the word is the name "Nessus"; here the word is "crossroads." Thus, too, in Aeschylus' Oedipus "crossroads" was mentioned: the scholars have attributed it to Sophocles. But in Aeschylus the word was voiced with much tragic pomp, requiring three verses: . . . and thus we moved on a wheel-furrowed street to a cleft crossing of paths, where three-fold was the road's division, by Potniai. .. The abundance and even repetition of ornament here has pathos. It is clear that after this moment there will be no further questions, doubts, or confirmations. Nothing remains but for the protagonist to receive the full blow of knowing. (Anyone who gives the extant three lines to Oedipus instead of to a witness has surely not considered their rhetoric.) Something similar occurs in the Women of Trachis when 208

Heracles recognizes his condition after the fateful word has been spoken in response to his own challenge, and in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes when Eteocles realizes that his father's curses are about to be fulfilled. In the Oedipus of Sophocles, the protagonist makes no outcry, he does not indulge in words; there is no longer anything like the tragic outburst belonging to the older form with its interest in the pathetic. Instead, there is an opposition between unsuspiciousness and tearfulness, between ignorance of self and discovery of self, between hesitancy and sureness. For the first time in Greek tragedy, the alternate lines of the dialogue express now security and now the threat to it (how different from the monologue of the Women of Trachis); the insecurity here is so uncomprehended and so crippling, that speech is barely possible, rhetoric excluded. Pathos restrained is now stronger than pathos expressed. The hesitant "perhaps," "it seems," the word as yet unspoken, the thing as yet unnamed: these precede the clear revelation of the terrible; and instead of the images and sounds used previously there is now nothing but a naked movement of dialogue:
Oedipus I thought I heard you say that Laius was killed at a crossroads. Jocasta Yes, that was how the story went and still that word goes round. * Oedipus What have you designed, O Zeus, to do with me? Jocasta What is the thought that troubles your heart? Oedipus Don't ask me yettell me of Laius How did he look? How old or young was he? Jocasta He was a tall man and his hair was grizzled alreadynearly whiteand in his form not unlike you. Oedipus Oh God. I think I have called curses on myself in ignorance. 209 X j j

Jocasta

What do you mean? I am terrified when I look at you. Oedipus I have a deadly fear that the old seer had eyes . . . Here at last husband and wife appear as visibly tied to each other and attacked by the same fate. But more intimate than their visible tie is the bond between them still in darkness. Both are fighting for the same "semblance" which unites and separates them; and when one wavers, the other, responding to the very same revelation, deludes himself into thinking he is standing firm. The positions of the two in this scene are reversed in the scene which follows. Thus at first Jocasta believes that she and Oedipus have nothing to fear, even as he is plunging into the truth as into an abyss; in the following scene he self-confidently lifts himself up to the very height of "seeming" even as she plunges fatally into her own truth. What has begun to be unveiled is not yet the whole truth, but only part of it, so that the structure of belief is now even more vulnerable than when there had been complete illusion. Seeming is now like some edifice a part of which has collapsed. Oedipus, frightened by the collapse, tries to support the part still standing: by prayers, by will, by that same resoluteness of spirit he showed when he fled from Corinth. There still remains one hope, though a feeble one, of perhaps saving seeming in general, that is to say, human seeming. Everything seems likely to lead the protagonist into knowledge of his deed and of himself, except for one thing: there is still an unresolved question of number. According to the witness, more than one person was involved in the murder of Laius. This testimony has led certain scholars to conclude that the Oedipus is finally based on a trick. As if it were not by numbers too that we are tied fast to "seeming." As if the structure of appearance, in collapse, could not always find something with which to shore itself up. Isn't it perfectly human for a man in distress to cling tenaciously to the feeblest hope, sustaining it with his ingenuity even to the point of quibbling? Here instinct guides thinking. And surely it is not against human nature in such cases for the feminine instinct to take over and guide the reason of the man: 210

Jocasta

Be sure, at least, that this was how he told the story. He cannot unsay it now, for every one in the city heard it not I alone. But, Oedipus, even if he diverges from what he said then, he shall never prove that the murder of Laius squares rightly with the prophecyfor Loxias declared that the king should be killed by his own son. And that poor creature did not kill him surely,for he died himself first. So as far as prophecy goes, henceforward I shall not look to the right hand or the left. Not that she has grown more "thoughtless" as some critics have been inclined to assertwhy expect her now to be clear about the relation between the prophecy and the prophet? Her earlier words in the same scene express security still unassailed; now she talks the language of the most vehement defensiveness. Emerging from the show of quibbling reason is the distress of existence as such, here embodied in the feminine will to survive and to prevail for the sake of the man; this characterizes Jocasta's action, rather than personal inadequacy. To be sure, she is thus led on to hybris against the gods. Nevertheless, her error arises much more from the human essence itself than from her personal nature. Here doubt and reason are merely means of defense for an existence which has been threatened; doubt and reason do not here spring from any such attitude as that of free spirits in the age of the Sophiststhis is shown, if further proof were needed, by the beginning of the third episode. With prayer and sacrificial offerings, Jocasta approaches the same Apollo whose oracle she doubted. For now she is in a state of dread, a dread all the stronger because it is not dread for herself but for Oedipusshe fears because of his fear: For Oedipus excites himself too much at every sort of trouble, not conjecturing, like a man of sense, what will be from what was, but he is always at the speaker's mercy, when he speaks terrors. But instead of discharging her feelings in lamentations and supplicationsas do Tecmessa and Deianeira in Sophocles' earlier styleJocasta begins to perform her silent rite of prayer, and then a messenger enters unannounced and reports the death of Polybus. According to the conventions of Greek 211

drama, to which Sophocles in his Ajax and in his Women of Trachis still adhered, the messenger's entrance should have been signalled beforehand. But in the Oedipus something totally new intrudes, bearing with it the irony of a demonic intervention that most nearly resembles the irony in the Antigone when the guard intrudes on Creon's speech of state. Hardly has Jocasta turned to pray when, independently of her wishes, and wonderfully for them, someone appears as by divine command and resolves the distress in her soul:
Jocasta

O oracles of the Gods, where are you now? It was from this man Oedipus fled, lest he should be his murderer! And now he is dead, in the course of nature, and not killed by Oedipus. And now begins a series of developments like the moves in a game of chess. Yet this external confluence of circumstances, not altogether uncontrived, finds a place within the whole, adding a special brightness to the universal gloom, appearing amidst psychic convulsions and against a background of inner confusion. Two-thirds of the drama, almost the whole play in fact, is over before the determining external facts enter the circle of internal dissension. For up to this point Oedipus had received from Creon, Teiresias, Jocasta only solace or mortification for his seeking, erring, seeming: did they not step forward merely because of his own desire to be assuaged by seeming? Now unfamiliar messengers appear, and events, some recent and some long superseded, are brought out; from outside his soul, a circle is cast about Oedipus from which he cannot free himself. The old and kindly messenger goes from amazement to amazement. The news that rule over Corinth has passed to him is not what concerns Oedipus, but only that Polybus is dead: this is the fact he wants proved beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Once proved, he responds with jubilation; it is as though the death of his father is bringing him salvation. And the messenger is puzzled. He hesitates; should he or should he not reveal more? But he is led to imagine that Oedipus would be glad to hear that he is not the dead king's son. Thus his good will impels him to speak and he can speak with pride, for did he not save Oedipus as a foundling?and thus in his joy, not noticing it, he allows himself to speak familiarly:
Messenger Son, it's very plain you don't know what you're doing. 212

Such an unelevated expression as "Son, it's very plain" would not have been possible in a play like the Women of Trachis, where there are also messengers; the play's style would have precluded it. Since the pathos of the Women of Trachis is not based on the ironic contrast between outer events and inner suffering, a loss of elevation in that play would have meant a loss of dramatic tension. Here too it differs from both the Oedipus and the Antigone, even in the presentation of secondary characters. Two old men have appeared who saved Oedipus as a child. There is a contrast between their attitudes, the joyous advance of the one and the sudden alarm and restraint of the other. In this, there is a repetition, in a popular key, of the very contrast between Oedipus and Jocasta in their tragic recognition scene:
Herdsman No not such that I can quickly call to mind. Messenger That is no wonder, master. But Til make him remember what he does not know. For I know, that he well knows the country of Cithaeron, how he with two flocks, I with one kept company for three yearseach year half a yearfrom spring till autumn time and then when winter came I drove my flocks to our fold home again and he to Laius' steadings. Wellam I right or not in what I said we did? Herdsman You're rightalthough it's a long time ago. Messenger Do you remember giving me a child to bring up as my foster child? Herdsman What's this? Why do you ask this question? Messenger Look old man, here he ishere's the man who was that child! Herdsman Death take you! Won't you hold your tongue? 213

Oedipus No, no, do not find fault with him, old man. Your words are more at fault than his. Herdsman O best of masters, how do I give offense? When you refuse to speak about the child of whom he asks you. Herdsman He speaks out of his ignorance, without meaning. Of the two witnesses, one is full of dread, the other is assured; one disavows and the other insists. The contrast between them is very different from that between the two messengers in the Women of Trachis, though in that play too one messenger reveals what the other hides: this is the kind of intrigue common in human relations; deception based on good intentions had no place in the Women of Trachis. Now in the Oedipus, the two messengers show themselves to be good and kindly servants, if not without some interests of their own; but in relation to the whole they are merely the unconscious and lowly instruments of divine destiny. The irony that causes them to confront each other is of the same playful sort by which the divine interweaves the low and the high, so as to disclose itself finally in the impermanence of human greatness. The third episode falls into two parts which have the same rhythm. First there is an ascent from fear to hope, which lasts until the triumph of seeming certaintyin this part Jocasta leadsand then a new wave of dread begins which again rises apparently to certainty or safety. But now Oedipus leads even as Jocasta retreats, begs him to desist, and finally withdraws. Moreover, an inner reversal takes place between the beginning and the end. At first it was Oedipus who was afraid, and it was Jocasta who advocated trust in "fortune," in what comes by chance, whatever its guise: her words do not urge "frivolity"; they tell Oedipus not to listen to what is sinister and dark, not to slit the fabric of life's questionableness, for it is because of the gods that man is questionable. Soon after, Oedipus, escaping into his final bout with seeming, re214

Oedipus

fers to himself as the "son of fortune" at the very moment that Jocasta, in despair, loses her desire to live. Jocasta, to be sure, is prefigured in this by Deianeira in the Women of Trachis when, suddenly silent, and leaving the others ignorant of her purpose, she retires. The chorus, suspecting something, is not informed. The report comes finally, and is told with solemn pathos. In the Oedipus, Jocasta is alternately caught in and freed from the grip of her own demon. And just as her retirement signifies her fall from a deceiving security, so too is the misunderstanding she leaves behind her incomparably more drastic and ironic than the misunderstanding after Deianeira's exit. For while in the Women of Trachis misunderstanding is due to an unexplained action on the part of a noble person, in the Oedipus, we see the ironic eruption of the demonic in man himself; misunderstanding arises from man's inherent tendency to be possessed by seeming, which finds a way to be convincing even after it has failed to convince. It fabricates out of its own substance a new and deceptive motive for hope:
Chorus Why has the queen gone, Oedipus, in wild grief rushing from us? I am afraid that trouble will break out of this silence. Oedipus Break out what will! I at least shall be willing to see my ancestry, though humble. Perhaps she is ashamed of my low birth, for she has all a woman's high-flown pride. But I account myself a child of Fortune, beneficent Fortune, and I shall not be dishonoured. She's the mother from whom I spring; the months, my brother, marked me, now as small, and now again as mighty. Such is my breeding, and I shall never prove so false to it, as not to find the secret of my birth. In the Ajax the deception, a god-sent madness, something foreign to man, something against nature, destroys the hero without his having unravelled it. In the Women of Trachis, Deianeira's lamentable error springs from her own loss of hope and from the gloom cast by her frightened, despairing, and passionate nature. In the Oedipus deception is viewed as something lurking about, a mood, an atmosphere, as the demonic destiny of man's own nature and world. Is there 215

such a thing as progress in viewing knowledge as futility? Perhaps not; but it would not be easy to think of these plays in reverse order, or to consider the much more limited tragedy of knowledge in the Women of Trachis as expressing a more mature view than the tragedy of Oedipus. The two last brief episodes of the Oedipus are richer in movement and action man anything else in Sophocles. The final opposition in the final reversal had to be expressed in the contrast between two human beings finally aware of their doom; feminine conduct in the face of fate here stands in the most profound contrast to masculine conduct. For it is not truth that causes Jocasta to hope against what she thinks might be the facts; she hopes in behalf of the man on whom she depends, her hope counters his mood. In security as in dread, her relation to the truth is indirect; she is direct only in relation to the instinctiveeven her reason is instinct. While Oedipus, in terms of the old tragedy, conducts himself "pathetically," she conducts herself sym-pathetically. She is lighter in spirit than he and more hopeful, even to the point of hybris; and in defeat, she is less able to endure, and finally takes her life. It is already a victory for her when he merely begins to hope again, though his hope is vain, and her downfall comes not from seeing her own reality, but from the fact that he cannot now avoid his:
Jocasta

but in the shifting modes by which two different persons receive the truth that crashes in on them. It is true that the revelation of the Women of Trachis has a similarly external character. But in self-knowledge Heracles can remain calm; actually he has learned little more than that he is to die; and though Heracles ascends from this knowledge to his last overcoming, in his ultimately limited heroic existence, he still does not see himself as he really is. Thus, his self-knowledge can only lead him to commiserate with himself, in selfpity and pained subjectivity:
Heracles

Woe, woe is me! This is my miserable end. Lost! I am lost! I see the light no longer.*

What is called forth from Oedipus, however, is not a subjective yielding to pain. His suffering has a universal meaning which in no way diminishes its force. Herdsman . .. But he saved it for the most terrible troubles. If you are the man he says you are, you're bred to misery.

I beg youdo not hunt this outI beg you, if you have any care for your own life. What I am suffering is enough.

Oedipus O, O, O, they will all come, all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me look upon you no more after today! I who first saw the light bred of a match accursed, and accursed in my living with them I lived with, cursed in my killing. Here there is no intensification of suffering by powerful images or outcries, and no self-indulgence in naming the causes of suffering. Instead, we have a meaningful figure of speech, not a play on words but an image of right reason; for a pathetic gesture or unreserved emphasis the poet turns to a kind of understatement. Let us note the likenesses and differences in the endings of the Oedipus and of the Women of Trachis. In the Oedipus the pathos of the ending has a proper fullness, but the expression of suffering is no longer felt to be meaningful as such; suffering here takes on a uni* Translated by Michael Jameson, The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, University of Chicago Press.

O Oedipus, God help you! God keep you from lie knowledge of who you are! Should she be called frivolous? Hardly. The two principals are of course very different, but not in the sense that either is frivolous. They are related to life in opposite ways and it is this that makes possible the intricacy of the tragic net woven about them in the last part of the Oedipus. In distress, her dereliction makes her ready to accept seeming, and nothing but seeming, for the sake of life, his life; his dereliction makes him ready to accept such a life, the life of a blinded and accursed man, all for the sake of truth. The real action does not lie in the chess moves of external fates, 216

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versal significance, the true quality of the tragic. I am not thinking of the kind of maxim, at the beginning or end of the various speeches, but rather of a universal significance inherent in all that happens. To be sure, the content of the Women of Trachis is much more limited, as well as more intimate. But the force of universality in the last part of the Oedipus does not indicate in that play any lack of those subjective elements we find in the Women of Trachis; at the end of the Oedipus, we transcend the special case of the protagonist to a general wonder at our own condition. So that this is not really a story with a particular beginning or end, joining various vicissitudes, told in a tone of high emotionas is the Women of Trachis. The Oedipus in its second half is not a drama narrated, and thus revealing what has already happened off-stage, as is the Antigone. In the Oedipus we come to the limits of the visible: these limits have penetrated into the gestures and accusations of the blinded man who finally can see: Messenger (of Jocasta, 1. 1242ff.) When she came raging into the house she went straight to her marriage bed, tearing her hair with both her hands, and crying upon Laius long deadDo you remember, Laius, that night long past which bred a child for us to send you to your death and leave a mother making children with her son? And then she groaned and cursed the bed in which she brought forth husband by her husband, children by her own child, an infamous double bond. (of Oedipus, 1. 1268 ff.) When he saw her, he cried out fearfully and cut the dangling noose. Then, as she lay, poor woman, on the ground, what happened after, was terrible to see. He tore the brooches the gold chased brooches fastening her robe away from her and lifting them up high dashed them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out such things as: they will never see the crime I have committed or had done upon me! The event is itself an extended metaphor, even as the language is metaphorical. Every difference between the natural and spiritual is destroyed: surely it is not the physical eye 218

which looks upon the past. "Acting and suffering" are terms that apply to all existence and cannot throw light on either the marriage or the murder lived through in ignorance; rather it is the marriage and murder that throw light on acting and suffering. In the darkness to come there will be "seeing" and "not seeing" as there was when Oedipus had sight: a seeing of those whom he should never have seen with his eyes, and a not-seeing, not-knowing, of those whom he had wished to see when his will drove him to seek his origins. The darkness will be both physical and spiritual, and only thereby will his true seeing begin: that knowledge out of the night of blindness which is self-knowledge. The death of Jocasta had been understood in terms of an enigmatic and paradoxical formula; once again, the paradoxical interweaving of terms points to the complex weaving of the fate of Oedipus, in which blindness and seeing are tangled. This, too, is expressed finally in lyrical terms, in his last lament. Again the individual instance is shown to contain a universal meaning; the fate of the body is at the same time the fate of the spirit: woe is twofold. In the lament of Ajax in the play of that name, "night" and "light" stand for the opposite spheres of "life" and "death," which are confused by the suffering hero; in appealing to both, he tells all his grievances unrestrainedly. The lament of Oedipus, however, points to a meaning beyond itself, so that "darkness" is not only that of the physical eye but also all which f atefully and demonically envelops him.
Ajax O Darkness that is my light, Murk of the underworld, my only brightness, Oh, take me to yourself to be your dweller, Receive and keep me . . . .* In the Oedipus Rex, however: Darkness! Horror of darkness enfolding, resistless, unspeakable visitant sped by an ill wind in haste! madness and stabbing pain and memory of evil deeds I have done! Translated by John Moore, The Complete Greek Tragedies. 219

In the Ajax and in the Women of Trachis, there is no atmosphere of or contact with the uncanny, as in the Oedipus. In the Ajax, Athena, who punishes the protagonist, is a familiar figure, known to all the audience. Thus she serves to dissimulate that element of the enigmatic and the uncanny, that "cloudiness" or obscurity we feel in the Oedipus; that threat, stemming from no person and hardly even attributable to Apollo, which hangs over the glory of man. That quality in Attic tragedy which generally appears in the texture of a whole drama, that revelling in the fearful, mingling horror and voluptousness, has in the Oedipus, as in no other play, entered into the conduct of the tragic hero himself. In the other plays the strophes and anti-strophes of the chorus do more to make pain bearable than the speeches of the powerless victims in the grip of pleasure-in-pain. In the Oedipus, the same person is victim and dithyrambist, the one who writhes and the one who discerns himself, the one who finds himself under torture, the one whose speech is impassioned and the one who sings. Biers, mechanical instruments, are no longer in evidence: from within the house the blinded man calls for the doors to open so that he can be led into the light. But instead of being brought in by others and thus exposed to view, the victim, after his search for himself, rushes into view to exhibit his great find: the blinded man he always was. The traditional act of exhibiting, like the uncovering of the wounded Heracles who thereby can show what has been done to him {Women of Trachis) or the uncovering of the bloody dummy that represents Ajax with a sword in his chestwhat covered the hero at the start was there to be taken off at the endthis act of exhibiting was never performed in Greek tragedy by the hero himself before the Oedipus. While the unveiling of the dead Ajax and the unveiling of the dying Heracles are intended to show what was done to the protagonist, the self-exhibition of Oedipus with his blinded eyes is an act of self-revealing that springs from his situation. All that surrounded and sustained him, his ancestors and contemporaries, his parents and children, his city and its people, his station, his royal decree, indeed the cosmos itself, all now reject him. How can he look at his children, at his city with its towers and statues of the gods, or think of this people among whom he had gained such glory? Now he will be cast out from the realm of the living as well as from the realm of the dead: even death, as reunion with his kin, 220

would be a kind of coming home to some community. But this possibility he violently rejects with tragic absoluteness: Chorus I cannot say your remedy was good; you would be better dead than blind and living. Oedipus What I have done here was best donedon't tell me otherwise, do not give me further counsel. He is, as it were, the opposite of Ajax; he cannot call upon death to help him. Ajax could look upon and apostrophize the world that had destroyed him: Zeus and the Erinyes, Salamis and Troy, the fields and streams, Hades below and the light abovecalling on all of them to hear his last words. The desire of Oedipus, at the end, is to cut himself off from all communication and involvement: now that he cannot see he would also like not to hear. In other plays after the denouement, the apostrophes were addressed to whatever had been felt as friendly, trustworthy, closethe hero's own arms, bodily strength as in the Women of Trachis, the fields of heroism as in the Ajax, the dead of the royal line as in the Antigone. But Oedipus addresses himself at the end to what at the very beginning was alien, hostile, false: Oedipus Cithaeron, why did you receive me? . . . O Polybus and Corinth and the house the old house that I used to call my father's . . . crossroads, and hidden glade . .. O marriage, marriage! you bred me and again when you had bred bred children of your child . .. At this point the verses become tragic even in their ornaments; the words of Oedipus are directed against himself, expressing the pathos of a life that has turned against itself. And the self-disclosure of Oedipus is so deeply tragic because at this moment he is both for and against himself, affirming himself in self-negation, self-destruction. Cursing, he calls on the others to hide him or kill him by throwing him into the sea, to cast him out, to perform on him as they will so 221

long as they prevent him from being seen: but why then had he asked to be led into the light where he could be seen? The contradiction here has the purest kind of tragic pathos, for tragedy delights in affirming the very person whom, by causing his suffering, it negates. Approaching the man who curses himself is the very apotheosis of the untragic man, Creon. This is the very same Creon who had been unjustly accused by Oedipus in their quarrel, who had proved his integrity, and can now dispose over the defiled and defiling Oedipus. He does so in a matter-of-fact way, with an aptness that is neither inhuman nor calculating; for instance, he makes no decision before consulting the gods. He is a man without a destiny, and even hostile to destiny, and he is the one against whose life the vicissitudes of Oedipus are measured. A short while ago he was the object of Oedipus' profound contempt; now to Oedipus, fallen, and in the mire of self-debasement, he is the best of men where he was once the worst; Creon is the one whose greatest act of mercy would be to allow the now monstrous and blind Oedipus to touch his own daughter. Creon, nonetheless, whatever pity he feels, is rather cold to Oedipus, who in torment reaches out toward those he loves. As the secure and untragic man, his relation to Oedipus whose companion, opponent, and friend he has beenis much like that of Odysseus to Ajax in the Ajax of Sophocles. But once again the moving force of the Oedipus is very different from that of the Ajax. For there is no development in the Ajax, no reversal in the relationship of the characters contrasted: the relationship of Odysseus to Ajax is the same at the end as it was at the beginning of the play. Yet there was nothing in the character of Odysseus as Sophocles took him from the epic which precluded a change in his relationship with his enemy unto death. Thus in every way the Ajax is a play of static and the Oedipus one of dynamic situations. At the same time, however, the contrast of the characters in the Oedipus is deepened to the very limit of the understandable. At the end of the play we perceive the difference between Oedipus and Creon in terms of the protagonists' greatness, sublimity, and humanity; and the difference is of a sort not to be found in any other drama. Nevertheless, this difference cannot be expressed in the language of ethics or of psychology. In his great if rigid heroism, Ajax was opposed by the flexibility, humanity, and intelligence of Odysseus; in the persons of Menelaus and Agamemnon he was opposed by vin222

dictiveness, arrogance, envy, and pettiness. In the Antigone, self-sacrifice and youth are opposed by the age and hardened obstinacy of a tyrant. Oedipus is opposed finally only by Creon, who is totally untragic. One question, however, is not raised in the Oedipus, which will be raised by the characters of Euripides: Who is the guilty party? Oedipus indeed refers to himself as a criminal, guilty of another's death. But herein the question of who is really guilty (alria) is not raised. To be sure, the god is named as the moving force, but this is not done so that Oedipus can fight against the god, or attack himself in the god's presence; he will not wrestle with the god or destroy himself before the god: he does not think of punishing his punisher. The important thing here is that Oedipus and the god are in a strict relationship. The naming of the god is part of the revelation; divine revelation parallels human revelation: Oedipus It was Apollo, friends, Apollo, that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion. But the hand that struck me was none but my own. Pointing to Apollo, as Oedipus does, cannot alter the issue. Apollo is referred to simply to indicate that the justice and injustice expressed in the action touch on the foundations of all life. So here there is no question of assigning guilt. If we could imagine a tribunal of gods and men acquitting Oedipus as Orestes is acquitted in the Oresteia, this could hardly help Oedipus in any way. How could such an acquittal resolve the contradiction between what he thought himself to be and what he found himself to be? On the other hand, a judgment of guilty against him would not help him either. Orestes can be found not guilty, but Oedipus cannot be extricated from what he has learned of himself. As was said before, there is no question of assigning responsibility for what has happened; whether the responsibility is to be borne by gods or men or by the order of the world would change nothing. This question of guilt, without which some of the greatest tragedies of Euripides and Aeschylus are hardly thinkable, does not even arise in the Oedipus. Nothing is decided in this play about justice or atonement. It would be absurd to think of Oedipus as blinding himself in order to atone for his deeds; nor does the play decide whether we are free or determined. But something is decided in the Oedipus about 223

seeming and truth, those contrary realities in which man is entangled. Caught between seeming and truth, and reaching for what is highest, man consumes and destroys himself. Translated by Werner Dannhauser

The Opinions of Contemporary Philosophers

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Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life


SIDNEY HOOK

"WHAT, if anything, has philosophy to tell us about the human condition, about the fate of man and his works?" This question in all its changes I have heard repeatedly on three major continents. It is asked mostly by philosophical laymenby students and teachers and men of letters in search of a center, or at least a shelter, in a world become dark and insecure because of the shadows of totalitarianism and war. It is asked at interdisciplinary conferences; and by academic administrators in search of projects to recommend to foundations, projects which, to use an expression in wide use, "are not merely of technical philosophical concern." The question: What saving message do philosophers bring their fellowmen? I have heard asked even by professional philosophers agonizing over the fact that they have a subject but no apparent subject-matter. It was heard at the Xllth International Congress of Philosophy at Veniceand there the Soviet philosophers undertook to answer it. It is raised periodically by voices in this country and in our own association as a protest against analytic philosophy. It was the central theme of the Third East-West Philosophers' Conference where for six weeks forty older and almost as many young philosophers tried to discover what bearing philosophy had on social practice. At one point we were told to imagine that we had the ear of the statesmen of the world, and were challenged to give them counsel on how to put the world's affair in order. No one recalled Plato's experience at Syracuse or reflected upon the fact that as far as we can judge the only request Aristotle made of Alexander, when he had his ear, was that he send back fresh biological specimens from Asia. Indeed, it is not likely that with his views about the essential superiority of the Greeks to the rest of mankind that Aristotle would have given his blessings to Alexander's enlightened, if premature, attempt to establish a world culture

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or that he would even have been sympathetic to the purpose of the East-West Philosophers' Conference. This question, with which I begin, is certainly a large one and may be deemed an appropriate theme for discussion in conjunction with John Dewey's centenary year. II For some time now philosophers have been disputing with each other about what philosophy should or should not be. They would be better occupied, it seems to me, doing each what he thinks philosophically worth while instead of objecting either to linguistic analysis or metaphysical speculation, as the case may be. The issue is not one of proper definition or even whether philosophy is a science or a body of knowledge of comparable objectivity, but rather whether it is worth doing, whether there is sufficient illumination and fun in pursuing certain themes, ignored by others, to justify continuing to do so. After all no one really believes that only science is a self-justifying enterprise. But since the subject has become moot and since there has developed a wide concern about what, if anything, philosophy has to say of general human concern, some remarks about it are in order. As some of you are aware, I have for many years concerned myself with problems of social and political and legal philosophy, with "problems of men" as authentic as any of those recognized by thinkers who would reform modern philosophy. But I find myself increasingly out of sympathy with those who have impugned the whole philosophical enterprise because of its failure to serve as a beacon to mankind in distress. When I ask myself why I feel uncomfortable and at odds with those who attack philosophers because they have nothing of immediate, practical moment to say, I find that my conception of philosophy although stated sometimes in words similar to theirs, differs in important ways. Put most succinctly, although I believe that philosophy is a quest for wisdom, many of those who cite this phrase, too, speak and act as if they already had it. The difference may be only of nuance and emphasis but it has a profound bearing on one's conception of the appropriate role of the philosopher in the culture of his time. It is the difference between being a moralist and being a moralizer. The moralizer may be called "the shouting moralist," of whom Santayana somewhere says that he "no doubt has his place but not in philosophy." It is a difference, on the one hand, between analyzing specific and 228

basic social problems and conflicts, and clarifying the issues in dispute with all the tools at one's commandand, on the other, proclaiming solutions and programs on the basis of antecedent commitments which one shares with some faction of his fellowmen. It is the difference between approaching problems of human experience in terms of one's vocation as a philosopher, which is to do intellectual justice to the varied and conflicting interests present or discovered, and one's vocation as a citizen limited by specific duties he must fulfill. It is the difference between intellectual concern which may or may not lead to programs of action and commitment to programs of action which by their very nature estop selfcritical thought. In the course of its history philosophy has been many things. But its distinctive concern at all times has been the quest for wisdom. Otherwise there would be no point in including thinkers like Descartes or Leibnitz in the history of philosophy in addition to the history of science or mathematics. What distinguishes the philosopher as a moralist from the philosopher as a mathematician, logician or natural scientist, and from the ordinary man as a philosopher, is his sustained reflective pursuit of wisdom. This means two things. The systematic study of the knowledge which is relevant to wisdom: and the analysis of the commitments we assume and rule out when knowledge is related to policy. All of us know that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing but we sometimes mistakenly speak as if they are opposed. A man may have knowledge of many things and not be wise but a wise man cannot be ignorant of the things he is wise about. He must have knowledge of the nature and career of values in human experience; knowledge of the nature and history of the situations in which they develop and conflict; knowledge of the minds and emotions of the carriers of value; knowledge of the consequences of actions taken or proposed. The wise man is not one who merely recites moral principles and applies a ready-made schedule of moral obligations to the problems and perplexities of value conflict. He is one who on the basis of what he already knows, or believes he knows, makes fresh inquiry into the situations which define alternatives and exact their costs. "Only the conventional and the fanatical," observes Dewey, "are always immediately sure of right and wrong in conduct." This means that a philosopher must earn his title to be wise not by right of philosophical tradition or philology but by the hard work of acquiring relevant knowledge and by hard thinking about it. 229

Here lie important tasks for the philosopher. To be wise he must immerse himself in the actual subject matters (not necessarily experiences) out of which life's problems arise. To be wise about economic affairs he must study economics, to be wise about problems of law he must study law, to be wise about politics he must study history, sociology and other disciplines. To be wise about war and peace he must study military technology and the theory and practice of communism including its strategic exploitation of peace movements to disarm the free world. Indeed, these subjects are so interrelated that to be wise about any one of them he must study them all. And I might add, in view of some current writing, to be wise about education it is not enough merely to rebaptize the ends of the good life as ends of a good education, too, as if without operational application to concrete historical situations, they had any but a peripheral bearing on the great, current problems of education. One must study social history, the psychology of learning, the methods and techniques of pedagogy to achieve educational wisdom. To enumerate the ends of the good life is not enough. Nor is a primer on logical analysis which can serve as an introduction to the study of any subject, a primer to a philosophy of education. All of these problems are of tremendous complexity because of the number of independent variables they contain, because they rarely permit of controlled experiment, and because the community must sometimes act upon them in desperate urgency before the analysis is complete. This should make for humility among philosophers even as they bring to the study of these problems the methodological sophistication, the arts and skills of analysis which are the hallmarks of their profession. This is what / mean by "the problems of men." It is philosophy not as a quest for salvation but as a pursuit of understanding of great cultural issues and their possible upshot. It does not start from a complete stock of philosophical wisdom which it dispenses to others with hortatory fervor but with an initial sense of concern to meet the challenge of the great unresolved problems of our time, offering analysis of these problems which will win the respect of the specialist and yet command the attention of everyman, e.g. how to preserve peace and freedom, achieve adequate production and meaningful vocations for all, design patterns of creative leisure, effect desegregation if possible without coercion, establish a welfare state and a spirit of enterprise, preserve national security and the right to dissent. It is philosophy as normative social inquiry. And it is not social reform. How could 230

philosophy be identified with social reform in view of the existence of many esteemed philosophers from Aristotle to Santayana whose judgments of wisdom were conservative, hostile to social reform? Such identification would be comparable to denning a physicist as one who was committed to a specific hypothesis in physics. At this point my inner ear senses unspoken murmurs of surprise. "Surely," some of you must be saying, "this constitutes a repudiation of John Dewey's conception of philosophy, for, after all, does not Dewey call upon philosophers as philosophers to do precisely what is being urged they should not do? Does not Dewey call upon philosophers to play the role of social reformers?" My answer is: "Not as I understand him and not as he is to be understood in the light of all he has written." Here is not the place to provide the documentation. I content myself merely with saying that Dewey has a very complex conception of philosophy. Philosophy is indeed concerned primarily with what I call normative problems of social inquiry. But its function is also to provide leading, speculative ideas in sciencenatural and social. And a third function is to weave together certain families of ideas into a philosophical synthesis. "There is a kind of music of ideas," he says, "which appeals, apart from any question of verification, to the mind of thinkers!" Nor is this all. The philosopher must bring some perspective or vision to bear upon the world which is related to issues of value and hence makes the analysis of normative problems of social inquiry more sensitive. "Philosophies," declares Dewey, "are different ways of construing life.. . ." There is more, then, than problems of normative social inquiry which falls within the province of the philosopher's concern. There is the illuminating perspective in which they are seen which is metaphysics. "If philosophy be criticism," Dewey asks in Experience and Nature, "what is to be said of the relation of philosophy to metaphysics?" His answer briefly is that metaphysics is a description of those gross features of the world which constitute the backdrop of the theatre of human activity against which men play out their lives. The conduct of life and the analysis of its problems, however indirectly, will reflect what we believe to be the generic features of human experience in the world. In this sense, as ultimately related to the human scene and the adventure of human life, but not to ontology, metaphysics is 231

"a ground map of the province of criticism establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations." This brings me finally to my theme of the tragic sense of life as a feature of human experience which provides an illuminating perspective upon the analysis of man's problems. The juxtaposition of the expressions "pragmatism" and "the tragic sense of life" may appear bewildering to those who understand pragmatism as a narrow theory of meaning and "the tragic sense of life" as the hysterical lament that man is not immortalthe theme song of Unamuno's book of that title. To speak of pragmatism and the tragic sense of life is somewhat like speaking of "The Buddhism of John Dewey" or "The Dewey Nobody Knows." I am not aware that Dewey ever used the phrase "the tragic sense of life" but I know that growing up in the shadow of the Civil War, he felt what I shall describe by it and that it is implied in his account of moral experience. At any rate nothing of moment depends upon whether the view is actually Dewey's or Hegel's or William James' or Nicolai Hartmann's in all of whom it can be found. I take the responsibility of the interpretation and its application. It is a perspective which seems to me to illumine the pragmatic view that problems of normative social inquirymorals in the broad senseare the primarynot exclusivesubject matter of philosophy, and that reason or scientific intelligence can and should be used to resolve them. By the tragic sense of life I do not understand merely sensitivity to the presence of evil or suffering in the world although all tragic situations to some degree involve one or the other. And since I have mentioned Buddha I should like to say that the presence of the evils in the world which led Buddha to surrender his Kingdom in order to seek salvation for himself and mankind are not to me the realities fundamental to the tragic sense of life. There were three things in Buddha's experience, reflection upon which led him to a renunciation of his princely lot and a quest for liberation from desire and incarnate existencesickness, old age and death. One can very well understand why in the world in which he lived and for many centuries thereafter until our own, these phenomena loomed so large in the overpopulated and povertystricken areas of Asia. Nonetheless if we are to distinguish between the sense of the pitiful and the sense of the tragic sickness, old age and even many forms of death, despite their numbing effect upon human sensibility, are not necessarily to be classified as tragic.
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First, given the rapidly expanding horizons of knowledge in our age, there is nothing in the nature of things which requires that the sick, any more than the poor, must always be with us. If scientific medicine develops at the same pace in the next few hundred years as it has in the last century, it is not shallow optimism to anticipate that the most serious forms of sickness will disappear and not be replaced by others. Even where sickness is present it may be the occasion of tragedy but by itself is not an illustration of it. In relation to the forces of nature man's lot may appear pitiful. The tragic is a moral phenomenon. What is true of sickness is true of old age. The aged arouse our compassion because of their feebleness and fragility and the multiplicity of their aches and pains. When these are absentand this, too, is a concern of scientific medicine there is a chance for serenity, wisdom and beauty of spirit to manifest themselves. There is sometimes a grandeur and stateliness about an old tree which aged persons do not possess because the processes of physical degeneration, and _ the consequent weakening of the vital powers, make man v pitiful. There is no tragedy in growing old biologically but only sorrow; the element of the tragic enters in the defeat of plans or hopes, in the realization that in much grief there is ' not much wisdom, and that we cannot count merely upon the I passage of time alone to diminish our stupidities and cruel- j ties. But what of deathBuddha's third appalling discovery preoccupation with which has become so fashionable today among some European existentialist philosophers that their philosophy seems to be more a meditation upon death than upon life? Is not death the ultimate source of whatever is tragic in life? I cannot bring myself to think so. Nor can I convince myself that its nature and significance in life waited to be discovered by Kierkegaard and Heidegger and their modern disciples. It is the reflective attitude towards death not the popular attitude or the one displayed by those in its last agonies, which throws light on its nature and place in life. The attitude exhibited by Socrates in facing it seems wiser than that expressed by the contemnors of the rational life who not content with talking about what they find when they look into themselves inflate it into a universal trait of the human psyche. So Tolstoy who is quoted by existentialist writers, writes: "If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All
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philosophers are like that. And what truth can there be, if there is death?" Logically, of course, this makes no more sense than the even more extreme statement of Sartre that "if we must die then our life has no meaning," which to those who solve some problems in life and therefore find some meaning, might be taken as a premise in a new short proof of human immortality. All this it seems to me expresses little more than a fear of death and a craving for immortality. It is a commonplace observation, however, that most human beings who desire immortality desire not unending life but unending youth or other desirable qualities which life makes possible. The fable of Juno and her lover in which Juno petitions the gods to take back the gift of eternal life they had conferred upon a mortal indicates that the Greeks knew that a life without end could be a dubious blessing. In this respect the Hellenes were wiser than the Hebrews whose God drives Adam from Paradise after he had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge to prevent him from eating of the fruit of the tree of eternal life. Agony over death strikes me as one of the unloveliest features of the intellectual life of our philosophic timesand certainly unworthy of any philosophy which conceives itself as a quest for wisdom. It has never been clear to me why those who are nauseated by life, not by this or that kind of life but any kind of life, should be so fearful of death. " Wisdom is knowledge of the uses of life and death. The uses of life are to be found in the consummatory experiences of vision and delight, of love, understanding, art, friendship and creative activity. That is why in a contingent world of finite men, vulnerable to powers they cannot control, which sometimes robs them of the possibility of any justifying consummations, death has its uses, too. For it gives us some assurance that no evil or suffering lasts forever. To anyone aware of the multitude of infamies and injustices which men have endured, of the broken bodies and tortured minds of the victims of these cruelties, of the multiple dimensions of pain in which millions live on mattress graves or with minds shrouded in darkness, death must sometimes appear as a beneficent release, not an inconsolable affliction. It washes the earth clean of what cannot be cleansed in any other way. Not all the bright promises of a future free of these stains of horror can redeem by one iota the lot of those who will not live to see the dawn of the new day. It is nobler to exist and struggle in a world in which there is always a vital option to live or die. The fear of death, the
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desire to survive at any cost or price in human degradation, has been the greatest ally of tyranny, past and present. "There are times," says Woodbridge, "when a man ought to be more afraid of living than dying." And we may add, there are situations in which because of the conditions of survival, the worst thing we can know of anyone is that he has survived. We have known such times and situations. They may come again. Even in a world in which all injustices, cruelties and physical anguish have disappeared, the possibility of withdrawing from it makes the world insofar forth a better and a freer world. So long as we retain possession of our faculties, our decision to remain in the world indicates a participating responsibility on our part for those events within it which our continuance affects. If human beings were unable to die they would to that extent be unfree. Man shares a conatus sui esse perseverare with everything else in the world or at least with all other sentient beings. But just because he can on rational grounds give up his being, choose not to be, he differentiates himself most strikingly from his fellow creatures in nature. I conclude therefore that death as such is not a tragic phenomenon and that its presence does not make the world and our experience within it tragic. It would be truer to call tragic a world in which men wanted to die but couldn't. What, then, do I mean by the tragic sense of life and what is its relevance to pragmatism? I mean by the tragic sense a very simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of the moral experience and the phenomenon of moral choice. Every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity in which we ask: "What should I do?" takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good. If we already know what is evil the moral inquiry is over, or it never really begins. "The worst of evil," says Dewey, "is the rejected good" but until we reject it, the situation is one in which apparent good opposes apparent good. "All the serious perplexities of life come back to the genuine difficulty of forming a judgment as to the values of a situation: they come back to a conflict of goods." No matter how we resolve the opposition some good will be sacrificed, some interest, whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be modified, frustrated or even suppressed. Where the goods involved are of a relatively low order, like decisions about what to eat, where to live, where to go, the choice is unimportant except to the mind of a child. There are small tragedies as there are small deaths. At any level the conflict of values must become momentous 235

to oneself or others to convey adequately the tragic quality. Where the choice is between goods that are complex in structure and consequential for the future, the tragic quality of the moral dilemma emerges more clearly. And when it involves basic choices of love, friendship, vocations, the quality becomes poignant. The very nature of the self as expressed in habits, dispositions and character is to some extent altered by these decisions. If, as Hobbes observes, "Hell is truth seen too late," all of us must live in it. No matter how justified in smug retrospect our moral decisions seem to have been, only the unimaginative will fail to see the possible selves we have sacrificed to become what we are. Grant that all regrets are vain, that any other choice would have been equally or more regretted, the selves we might have been are eloquent witnesses of values we failed to enjoy. If we have played it safe and made our existence apparently secure, the fascinating experience of a life of adventure and experience can never be ours, and every thought of a good fight missed will be accompanied by a pang. It is a poor spirit William James reminds us who does not sense the chagrin of the tardy Crillon, who arriving when the battle is over is greeted by Henry IV with the words: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there!" On the other hand, if we have scorned to put down our roots, hugged our liberty tightly to ourselves by refusing to give hostages to fortune, become crusaders or martyrs for lost causes, we have thrust from ourselves the warmth of sustained affection, and the comforting regularities which can best heal the bruised spirit. There is a conflict not only between the good and the good but between the good and the right where the good is a generic term for all the values in a situation and the right for all the obligations. The concepts of good and right are irreducible to each other in ordinary use. We are often convinced we must fulfill a certain duty even when we are far from convinced to the same degree that the action or the rule it exemplifies will achieve the greatest good. The "good" is related to the reflective satisfaction of an interest: "the right" to the fulfillment of a binding demand or rule of the community. There is no moral problem when in doing the right thing we can see that it also leads to the greatest good or when striving for the greatest good conforms to our sense of what is right. But the acute ethical problems arise when in the pursuit of the good we do things which appear not to be right, as e.g., when in order to avoid the dangers of war a nation repudiates its treaty obligations or when in order to 236

win a war non-combatants are punished who are in no way responsible for the actions of others. They also arise when in doing what is right our actions result in evil consequences, as e.g., when a dangerous criminal, set free on a legal technicality, kills again or when the refusal to surrender to the unjust claims of an aggressor results in wholesale slaughter. Many have been the attempts made to escape the antinomies between the right and the good by defining the good as the object of right or the right merely as the means to the good. All have failed. To act upon the right no matter what its consequences for human weal or woe seems inhuman, at times insane. The thirst for righteousness has too often been an angry thirst satisfied if at all by long draughts of blood. On the other hand, the attempt to do good by any means no matter how unjust, is subhuman and usually irrational. As compared to traditional ethical doctrines, ideal utilitarianism reaches farthest in our quest for an adequate ethics but in the end it, too, must be rejected. And it was the pragmatist and pluralist, William James, long before Pritchard and Ross, who indicated why in the famous question he asked: "If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris' Utopia should all be outdone, and millions be kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel . . . how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?" The situation is unaltered if we recognize that there are other goods besides happiness and that justice is itself a good, because in that case the conflict breaks out again between good and good. In this connection I would venture the statement that it is the failure to see the radical pluralism in the nature of the goods which are reckoned in the consequences of an action which accounts both for Moore's view that it is self-evident that it can never be right knowingly to approve an action that would make the world as a whole worse than some alternative action and for Kant's view that there are some duties that it would always be right to perform, even if the consequences of the action resulted in a worse world or in no world at all. No specific rule can be laid down as absolutely binding in advance either way. Nothing can take the place of intelligence; the better or the lesser evil in each situation can be best defined as the object of reflective choice. Even the decision in the stock
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illustration of the text-books whether to execute an innocent man or turn him over to be tortured in order to save the community from destructionwould depend upon a complex of circumstances. It is perfectly conceivable that an unjust act will sometimes produce the greater good or the lesser evil. It is sometimes necessary to burn down a house to save a village. Although when applied to human beings the logic seems damnable, few are prepared to take the position of Kant in those agonizing moral predicaments that are not uncommon in history, especially the history of oppressed minority peoples, in which the survival of the group can be purchased only at the price of the pain, degradation and death of the innocent. No matter how we choose, we must either betray the ideal of the greater good or the ideal of right or justice. In this lies the agony of the choice. Many have been the attempts to escape the guilt of that choice. I cite one from the past. During the Middle Ages, Maimonides writing on the Laws of the Torah to guide his people discusses what a community is to do when it is beset by enemies who demand the life of one man with the threat to kill all if he be not turned over to them. Maimonides teaches that they are to refuse to turn over any man even if all must die in consequence, except if their enemies call out the name of a specific person. I had heard this teaching defended on the ground that if the community itself had to make the decision who was to die, it would be taking the guilt of an innocent man's death upon itself, which is impermissible. But if the enemy names the man, then he can be turned over because the guilt and sin fall now on their heads. By this miserable evasion it was thought that the tragic choice could be avoided. But it turns out that Maimonides has been misread. What Maimonides really taught is that only if the name of the person who has been called out is of one already under the death sentence for his crimes should he be surrendered. But never an innocent man. "Never," however, is a long time. It is problematic whether the Jews would have survived if they had always abided by Maimonides' injunction. If anything, human beings are more readily inclined to sacrifice the right to the good than the good to the right especially in revolutionary situations which have developed because of grievances too long unmet. It can easily be shown that it was Lenin's conception of Communist ethics which implicitly defined the right action as consisting in doing anythingliterally anything that would bring victory in the class strugglewhich explains the transformation of a whole gen238

eration of idealists into hangmen. In fact the health of the revolution whether in the times of Robespierre or Castro never really requires the holocaust of victims offered up to it. But no revolution including our own has ever been achieved without injustice to someone. However the conflict between the principles of right and the values of good be theoretically resolved, in every concrete situation it leads to some abridgement of principle or some diminution of value. The most dramatic of all moral conflicts is not between good and good, or between good and right, but between right and right. This in its starkest form is the theme of Sophoclean tragedy but the primary locus of the tragic situation is not in a play but in life, in law, and in history. Innocence in personal matters consists in overlooking the conflict of moral duties and obligations. Innocence in political matters, the characteristic of ritualistic liberalism, consists in failing to see the conflicts of rights in our Bill of Rights and the necessity of their intelligent adjustment. In our own country we have witnessed again and again the antinomy of rights revealed in divided loyalties, in the conflict between allegiance to the laws of the state and allegiance to what is called divine law or natural law or the dictates of conscience. On the international scene it is expressed in the conflict of incompatible national claims, each with some measure of justification, as in the Israeli-Arab impasse. One of the noteworthy features of moral intuitionism as illustrated in the doctrines of Ross is this recognition that prima facie duties conflict and that every important moral act exhibits at the same time characteristics which tend to make it both prima facie right and prima facie wrong so that although we may claim certainty about these prima facie duties, any particular moral judgment or action is at best only probable or contingent. As Ross says, "There is therefore much truth in the description of the right act as a fortunate act." From this the conclusion to be drawn, it seems to me, is that the most important prima facie duty of all in a situation requiring moral decision is that of conscientiousness, or reflective assessment of all the relevant factors involved, and the searching exploration of our own hearts to determine what we sincerely want, whether we really wish to do what is right in a situation or to get our own scheming way come what may. As much if not more evil results from confusion of our purposes and ignorance of our motives than from ruthless and clear-eyed resolve to ignore everyone's interests but one's own. This emphasis on the importance of reflective 239

inquiry into the features of the situation which bear on the Tightness of an action seems to me to be more important than Ross' conception or interpretation of the intuitive apprehension of our prima facie duties. It is easier to doubt that we have this faculty of infallible intuition than that our intelligence has the power to discover our conflicts and mediate between them. Irony is compounded with tragedy in the fact that many of the rights we presently enjoy we owe to our ancestors who in the process of winning them for us deprived others of their rights. In some regions of the world the very ground on which people stand was expropriated by force and fraud from others by their ancestors. Yet as a rule it would be a new injustice to seek to redress the original injustice by depriving those of their possessions who hold present title to them. Every just demand for reparations against an aggressor country is an unjust demand on the descendants of its citizens who as infants were not responsible for the deeds of aggression. That is why history is the arena of the profoundest moral conflicts in which some legitimate right has always been sacrificed, sometimes on the altars of the God of War. The Christian and especially the Buddhist ethics of purity which seeks to transcend this conflict and avoid guilt by refusal to violate anyone's right in such situations, can only do so by withdrawing from the plane of the ethical altogether. This may succeed in God's eyes but not in man's. The Buddhist saint or any other who out of respect for the right to life of man or beast refuses ever to use force, or to kill, even when this is the only method, as it sometimes is, that will save multitudes from suffering and death, makes himself responsible for the greater evil, all the more so because he claims to be acting out of compassion. He cannot avoid guilt whether we regard him as more than man or less than man. No more than we does he escape the tragic decision. There are three generic approaches to the tragic conflicts of life. The first approach is that of history. The second is that of love. The third is that of creative intelligence in quest for ways of mediation which I call here the pragmatic. The approach of history is best typified by Hegel precisely because he tries to put a gloss of reason over the terrible events which constitute so much of the historical process. Its upshot is woefully inept to its intent. It suggests not only that whatever cause wins and however it wins, is more just than the cause which is defeated, but that the loser is the
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more wicked and not merely the weaker. Further, it calls into question the very fact of tragic conflict from which it so perceptively starts. No one has seen more profoundly into the nature of the tragic situation than Hegel and its stark clash of equally legitimate rights. But his solution, expressed in Schiller's dictum Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, as Hegel develops it, makes the philosophy of history a theodicy. It thereby vulgarizes tragedy. For it attempts to console man with a dialectical proof that his agony and defeat are not really evils but necessary elements in the goodness of the whole. The position is essentially religious. No monotheistic religion which conceives of God as both omnipotent and benevolent, no metaphysics which asserts that the world is rational, necessary and good has any room for genuine tragedy. The approach of love is incomplete and ambiguous. It is incomplete because if love is more than a feeling of diffused sympathy but is expressed in action no man can love everyone or identify himself with every interest. Empirically love has produced as much disunity as unity in the worldnot only in Troy but in Jerusalem. Injustice is often born of love, not only of self-love but of love of some rather than others. Love is not only incomplete but ambiguous. There are various kinds of love and the actions to which they lead may be incompatible. An order of distinction is required. A man's love for his family must be discriminatory: his love of mankind not. He cannot love both in the same way without denying one or the other. The quality of love is altered with the range of its generalization. In one sense love always shows a bias which reinforces some conflicting interest; in another it gives all conflicting values its blessing without indicating any specific mode of action by which conflict can be mediated. Love may enable a person to live with the burden of guilt which he assumes when he sacrifices one right to another. But it is no guide to social conflict as the last two thousand years have shown. Because the Lord loves man equally nothing follows logically about the equality of man before the Law. "The Agape quality of love," says Tillich, "sees man as God sees him." But what man can tell us how God sees man? "Agape," continues Tillich, "loves in everybody and through everybody loves itself." Karl Barth speaks more simply and intelligibly, and with a basic brutality which is the clue to his crude neutralism, when he claims that such love has no bearing whatever for the organization of any human society.
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Finally there is the method of creative intelligence. It, too, tries to make it possible for men to live with the tragic conflict of goods and rights and duties, to mediate not by arbitrary fiat but through informed and responsible decision. Whoever uses this method must find his way among all the conflicting claims. He must therefore give each one of them and the interests it represents tongue or voice. Every claimant therefore has a right to be heard. The hope is that as much as possible of each claim may be incorporated in some inclusive or shared interest which is accepted because the alternatives are less satisfactory. To this end we investigate every relevant feature about it, the conditions under which it emerged, its proximate causes and consequences, the costs of gratifying it, the available alternatives and their costs. Every mediation entails some sacrifice. The quest for the unique good of the situation, for what is to be done here and now, may point to what is better than anything else available but what it points to is also a lesser evil. It is a lesser evil whether found in a compromise or in moderating the demand of a just claim or in learning to live peacefully with one's differences on the same general principle which tells us that divorce is better for all parties concerned than a murder. In every case the rules, the wisdom, the lessons of the past are to be applied but they have presumptive, not final, validity because they may be challenged by new presumptions. "The pragmatic import of the logic of individualized situations," says Dewey, "is to transfer the attention of theory from pre-occupation with general conceptions to the problem of developing effective methods of inquiry," and applying them. It is a logic which does not preach solutions but explores the suggestions which emerge from the analyses of problems. Its categorical imperative is to inquire, to reason together, to seek in every crisis the creative devices and inventions that will not only make life fuller and richer but tragedy bearable. William James makes essentially the same point as Dewey in the language of ideals. Since in the struggles between ideals "victory and defeat there must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the more inclusive sideof the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished interests lay...." But prayer is not enough. He goes on: "Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demandsthat and that only is the path of peace." To which we must add, provided there is a reciprocal will to peace in 242

the matter. And even then, your own or the alien demands or both must be curtailed. As you may have gathered by this time, I have been concerned to show that this pragmatic approach to the moral problem can not only be squared with the recognition of tragic conflicts, of troubles, minor and grave, which dog the life of man in a precarious world, but that it gets its chief justification from this recognition. Intelligence may be optimistic when it deals with the control of things but the moral life by its very nature forbids the levity and superficiality which has often been attributed to the pragmatic approach by its unimaginative critics. Indeed I make bold to claim that the pragmatic approach to tragedy is more serious, even more heroic, than any other approach because it doesn't resign itself to the bare fact of tragedy or take easy ways out at the price of truth. Where death does not result from the tragic situation, there are always consequences for continued living which it takes responsibly without yielding to despair. It does not conceive of tragedy as a pre-ordained doom, but as one in which the plot to some extent depends upon us, so that we become the creators of our own tragic history. We cannot then palm off altogether the tragic outcome upon the universe in the same way as we can with a natural disaster. Contrast this attitude towards tragedy with the Hegelian fetishism of history which in the end is but the rationalization of cruelty. Contrast it with the Judaic-Christian conception which offers at the price of truth, the hope that the felicities of salvation will both explain and recompense human suffering. Contrast it with the attitude of Unamuno whose hunger for immortality is so intense that he sees in intelligence or reason the chief enemy of life, both in time and eternity. For him the joy and delight of life is the conflict of value and value no matter what the cost. "The very essence of tragedy," he tells us, "is the combat of life with reason." And since the Inquisitor is concerned with the eternal life of his victim's soul, the potential victim must defend the Inquisitor's place in society and regard him as far superior to the merchant who merely ministers to his needs. "There is much more humanity in the Inquisitor," he says. Crazed by this thirst for the infinite, Unamuno glorifies war as the best means of spreading love and knowledge. He illustrates the dialectic of total absurdity and caprice in thought which often prepares the way for atrocity in life. Here is no quest 243

for the better, for the extension of reasonable controls in life and society, for peace in action. To be sure, Unamuno is so horrified by the flux of things in which all things are ultimately liquefied that he expresses pity for the very "star-strewn heavens" whose light will some day be quenched. But this cosmic sentimentality is disdainful of the vexations, unheroic daily tasks of mediating differences, even of mitigating the consequences of irreconcilable conflicts, of devising ways to limit human suffering whose ubiquitous presence is the alleged cause of spiritual agony. No two thinkers seem so far removed from each other as Miguel de Unamuno and Bertrand Russelland as philosophers they are indeed related as a foothill to a Himalayan peak. But this makes all the more significant the similarity of their attitude towards the arts of social control which require the extension of man's power over nature. For Russell, any philosophy, and particularly one like Dewey's, which interprets ideas as implicit guides to activity and behavior, and knowledge as dependent upon experimental reconstructive activity in the situation which provokes it, exhibits "the danger of what may be called cosmic impiety." It is an arrogant power-philosophy whose insolence towards the universe is hardly less objectionable when it stresses social power than individual power. It is fortunate that Russell's attitudein which he is not always consistenttowards scientific power and control of our natural environment has not prevailed, otherwise the whole of modern civilization including modern medicine would never have developed. The charge of megalomania against any view of knowledge just because it is not a pure spectator view is absurd. For the pragmatic view accepts the Spinozistic dictum that nature can be changed only by nature's means. The problem is to discover or devise these means. This cannot be intelligently done without experimental activity. According to Russell's own position, power itself is neither good nor bad but only the uses and ends of power. But since he also tells us that there is no such thing as a rational or irrational end, that intelligence or reason is helpless in determining what we should do with our power, one can argue with much better warrant that it is his view, if acted upon, that increases "the danger of vast social disaster" than the pragmatic view which believes that by changing nature and society, men can to some extent change themselves in the light of rationally determined ends. No humane person can read history without being moved more by man's 244

failures to use the knowledge he has had to remove the evils and sufferings which were remedial than by his attempt to achieve too great a control or power over nature. It was not science which was responsible for the use of the atomic bomb. It was politicsa failure of politics to understand the true situation. The pitiful disparity at any particular time between what we know and don't know is sufficient to inspire a sense of humility in the most intellectually ambitious. But it is only in the most vulgarized sense of the term "pragmatism," a sense which Russell helped to popularize by flagrant misunderstandings, that the adequacy of a theory of knowledge, which regards activity or experiment as integral to the achievement of knowledge of fact, can be judged by its alleged social consequences. I am more interested tonight in stating a position than establishing it. As I understand the pragmatic perspective on life, it is an attempt to make it possible for men to live in a world of inescapable tragedy,a tragedy which flows from the conflict of moral ideals,without lamentation, defiance or make-believe. According to this perspective even in the best of human worlds there will be tragedytragedy perhaps without bloodshed but certainly not without tears. It focuses its analysis on problems of normative social inquiry in order to reduce the costs of tragedy. Its view of man is therefore melioristic, not optimistic. Some philosophers belittle man by asking him to look at the immensities without: others belittle him by asking him to look at the perversities and selfishness within. Pragmatism denies nothing about the world or men which one truly finds in them but it sees in men something which is at once, to use the Sophoclean phrase, more wonderful and more terrible than anything else in the universe, viz., the power to make themselves and the world around them better or worse. In this way pragmatic meliorism avoids the romantic pessimism of Russell's free man, shaking his fist in defiance of a malignant universe, and the grandiose optimism of Niebuhr's redeemed man with his delusions of a cosmic purpose which he knows is there but knows in a way in which neither he nor anyone else can possibly understand. To the meliorist the recognition of the gamut of tragic possibilities is what feeds his desire to find some method of negotiating conflicts of value by intelligence rather than war, or brute force. But this is not as simple as it sounds. There is no substitute for intelligence. But intelligence may not be enough. It may not be enough because of limitations of our 245

knowledge, because of the limited reach of our powers of control. It may not be enough because of the recalcitrance of willnot merely the recalcitrance of will to act upon goods already known and not in dispute, but because of unwillingness to find out what the maximizing good in the situation is. And although we are seeking to settle conflicts of value by the use of intelligence rather than by force, is it not true that sometimes intelligence requires the use of force? Let us take this last question first. Faced by a momentous conflict of values in which some value must give way if the situation is to be resolved, the rational approach is to find some encompassing value on the basis of some shared interest. This, as we have seen, involves willingness to negotiateto negotiate honestly. The grim fact, however, is that there is sometimes no desire to reason, no wish to negotiate except as a holding action to accumulate strategic power, nothing but the reliance of one party or the other upon brute force even when other alternatives may exist. In such cases the moral onus rests clearly upon those who invoke force. Their victory no more establishes their claim to be right than a vandal's destruction of a scientist's instruments of inquiry has any bearing on the validity of his assertions, evidence for or against which could have been gathered by the instrument destroyed. The intelligent use of force to prevent or crush the use of force where a healthy democratic process, equitable laws and traditions and customs of freedom make it possible to vent differences in a rational and orderly way, is therefore justifiable even if on prudential grounds one may forego such action. This means that tolerance always has limitsit cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant. There is a tendency in modern philosophical thought which, in rejecting too sweeping claims for the role of intelligence in human affairs, settles for too little even when it does not embrace a wholesale skepticism. Of course, a man may know what is right and not do it just as he may know what is true and not publicly assert it. In neither case is this a ground for maintaining that we cannot know what action is more justified than another or what assertion is more warranted than another. The refusal to follow a rational method, to give good reasons is one thing: the claim that there are different rational methods, different kinds of good reasons each with its own built-in modes of validity, is something else againand to me unintelligible. To be sure, the acceptance of rational method is not enough. Men must have some non-rational element in common. Hume is on unquestionably solid ground 246

in asserting that reason must always serve a human need, interest or passion. But his mistake outweighed his insight when he contended that rational method could only be a servant or slave of what it served and that needs, interests and passions could not be changed or transformed by the use of intelligence. In our flights into space if we encounter other sentient creatures capable of communicating with us, it is more likely that their logical and mathematical judgment will be the same as ours than their ethical judgments, because we can more readily conceive creatures of different needs than of different minds. At any rate the world we live in is one in which men do not share all their needs and interests and yet it is one in which they have sufficient needs and interests in common to make possible their further extension, and to give intelligence a purchase, so to speak, in its inquiry. The most difficult of all situations is one in which even the common use of methods of inquiry seems to lead to conclusions which are incompatible with each other although each is objectively justified. There is always an open possibility of ultimate disagreement no matter how far and long we pursue rational inquiry. We can conceive it happening. In such situations we must resign ourselves to living with our differences. Otherwise we must fight or surrender. But it is simply a non-sequitur to maintain that because no guarantee can be given that there will not be ultimate disagreement, penultimate agreements cannot be validly reached and justified. In any case we cannot in advance determine the limits of reason or intelligence in human affairs. So long as we don't know where it lies, it is sensible to press on, at the same time devising the means to curb the effects of the refusal to reason when it manifests itself. Above all, we must avoid oversimplifying the choice of evils and encouraging the hope that to be unreasonable will pay dividends. We are moving into another period of history in which freedom once more is being readied for sacrifice on the altars of survival. The Munichmen of the spirit are at work again. The stakes are now for the entire world. Our task as philosophers is not to heed partisan and excited calls for action, but rather to think through the problems of freedom and survival afresh. In a famous pronouncement two years ago Bertrand Russell declared that if the Kremlin refused to accept reasonable proposals of disarmament, the West 247

should disarm unilaterally "even if it means the horrors of Communist domination." Although he no longer believes this, there are many others who do. I know that common sense is at a discount in philosophy but in ethics it should not be lightly disregarded. A position like this obviously can have only one effect, viz., to encourage the intransigence of those who wish to destroy the free world without which there cannot be a free philosophy. You cannot negotiate successfully by proclaiming in advance that you will capitulate if the other side persists in being unreasonable. Our alternatives are not limited to surrender and extinction of freedom, on the one hand, and war and the danger of human extermination on the other. There are other alternatives to be exploredall tragic in their costs but not equally extreme. The very willingness, if necessary, to go down fighting in defence of freedom may be the greatest force for peace when facing an opponent who makes a fetish of historical survival. On pragmatic grounds, the willingness to act on a position like Kant's fiat justitia, pereat mundus may sometimesI repeatsometimesbe the best way of preserving a just and free worldjust as the best way of saving one's life is sometimes to be prepared to lose it. The uneasy peace we currently enjoy as a result of "the balance of terror" is tragic. But it may turn out that it is less so than any feasible alternative today. If it endures long enough and it becomes clear to the enemies of freedom that they cannot themselves survive war, they may accept the moral equivalents of war in the making. The pragmatic program is always to find moral equivalents for the expression of natural impulses which threaten the structure of our values. I have perhaps overstressed the sense of the tragic in human life in an effort to compensate for the distortions to which pragmatism has been subject. There is more in life than the sense of the tragic. There is laughter and joy and the sustaining discipline of work. There are other dimensions of experience besides the moral. There is art and science and religion. There are other uses for intelligence besides the resolution of human difficulties. There is intellectual play and adventure. But until men become Godswhich will never bethey will live with the sense of the tragic in their hearts as they go in quest for wisdom. Pragmatism, as I interpret it, is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control. It may be a lost cause. I do not know 248

of a better one. And it may not be lost if we can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom and enjoy the blessings of a little luck.

On the Tragic
MAX SCHELER IN THE following we will speak of no particular art in which tragic is portrayed. It is impossible to arrive at the phenomenon of the tragic through the art product alone, although the results of examining its extant forms might be most fruitful in discovering what it really is. The tragic is rather an essential element of the universe itself. The material made use of by the art product and the tragedian must contain beforehand the dark strain of this element. To determine what makes a tragedy genuine we must first have as precise a notion as possible of the phenomenon. It is doubtful whether the tragic is essentially an esthetic phenomenon. We are speaking of life and history in general without placing ourselves in any particular esthetic circumstance, no matter how unusually full of tragic events and circumstances. The question of how the tragic works on our emotions or of how we come to "enjoy" the tragic in some art form we are purposely avoiding. These things can not tell us what the tragic is. The usual "psychological" method of observation, proceeding from the investigation of the experiences of one observing a tragic incident to its "objective understanding," tries to discover and describe the evocations of these experiences. Such a method avoids the issue rather than clarifies it.1 It tells us only what the tragic does, not what it is/The tragic is above all a property which we observe in events, fortunes, characters, and the like, and which actually exists in them. We might say that it is given off by them like a heavy breath, or seems like an obscure glimmering that surrounds them. In it a specific feature of the world's makeup appears before us, and not a condition 1 Even the famous definition of Aristotle: The tragic is that which arouses pity and fear. 249

of our own ego, nor its emotions, nor its experience of compassion and fear. What goes on in the observer of the tragic as he feels this heavy breath and sees this shimmering darkness that encircles the head of the "tragic hero" is not related to his ability to understand this phenomenon by using his own symbolical way of looking at this feature in the world's makeup. There are people who are blind, or halfblind, to the tragiclike Raphael, Goethe, and Maeterlinck.2 One must know what the tragic is to depict this experience. Moreover, the experience is historically far more variable than the tragic itself. A tragedy of Aeschylus arouses entirely different emotions today than in his time, although the tragic is just as perceptible to both ages. The mental processes of understanding the tragic, the inner perception of how it is brought to us, are to be distinguished from what one experiences in observing the tragic. This is not the same as the "experience" theory of the tragic. It has nothing to do with depicting the way it works on us psychologically. However, the former places the problem close to the essence of the tragic and its essential manifestations. Consequently, it should not be disregarded. How then should we proceed? Should we indiscriminately gather together examples of the tragic, selecting those events that impress men as being such, and then ask what they possess in common? This would be a method of induction that would lend itself well to experimental support. Yet this would bring us only to the observation of our own ego when the tragic works upon us. What right have we to trust men when they call something tragic? A plurality of opinion does not help here. Without knowledge of what the tragic is, must we be forced to decide between the opinions that have weight and those which do not? But even taking this for granted, we would still have to justify ourselves. We would have a confused mass that we would call tragic. What would the common element be that would justify this judgment of ours? Nothing more than the fact that they are all called tragic. All induction would presuppose that one knows beforehand what the essence of the tragic is, and not just what events are tragic. Our method of procedure will be different. The few examples and statements of others that may be given are not to serve as the basis for abstracting by induction a concept of the tragic. They will rather give us some rough 2 Cf. Maeterlinck's La Sagesse et la Destinie. 250

draft in which to see the basic use of the word and the phenomenon expressed therein, without taking into account who uses the word and to what intent. (They will provide the basis for seeing in what experience this phenomenon comes to its given state. We do not assume that the examples are facts in which the tragic adheres as a property. They are only something which will contain the basic manifestations of the tragic. They will provide us with the opportunity of searching out these manifestations and finally of arriving at the tragic itself. It is not a question here of proofs but of indications or signs. One should also guard against treating the tragic as a phenomenon with its own metaphysical, religious, and otherwise speculative interpretations. The tragic is not the result of an interpretation of the world and the important events of the world. It is a fixed and powerful impression that certain things make and one which can itself be subjected to many different interpretations. Theories like that which Maeterlinck proposes, basically the theory of every Rationalism and Pantheism, are totally wrong. According to these theories the tragic is the result of a false and unstable interpretation of the world. The tragic is attributed to the ways of thinking in uncivilized times with uncontrolled emotions. Or it is a sort of sudden bewilderment in the face of the defects of the world against which one knows of no help, orwhat is the simple consequence of this as stated by Maeterlinckno helper is at hand, no helper to put the matter in order? They obscure rather than clarify the essence of the tragic; their own outlook and times prevent them from seeing it.^We, however, reason that these interpretations of the world are wrong because they have no place for the undeniable fact of the tragic and that any age which does not perceive it is insignificant. Metaphysical interpretations of the tragic are most interesting. But the phenomenon itself is taken for granted by them. Certain metaphysicians like Eduard von Hartmann make God Himself the tragic hero. Others think the tragic lies only on the surface of things and that underneath all tragedies lies an imperceptible harmony, into which they are finally resolved. But to know where the tragic has its source, whether in the basic structure of existence or in human passions and unrest, is to know already what the tragic is. Every interpretation fails before the inflexibility of reality which reduces it to silence. 251

This question of the tragic is only one example of the importance of contrasting the changing whims of the times with the facts of reality.
THE TRAGIC AND VALUES

All that can be called tragic is contained within the realm of values and their relationships. In a universe free of values, such as that constructed by mechanical physics, there are no tragedies. Only where there is high and low, nobleman and peasant, is there anything like a tragic event. The tragic is not a value like beautiful, ugly, good, or bad. The tragic appears in objects only through the interplay of their inherent values. It is always founded on values or connected with values. To repeat, it is found only in that realm where there are objects of value and where these work in one way or another on each other. Serenity, sadness, grandeur, and earnestness can be classified among the more tranquil values. The tragic is absent here. It appears in the realm of changing values and circumstances. Something must happen for it to appear. There must be a period of time in which something is lost or destroyed. In empty spaceSchiller notwithstandingdwells much sublimity, but not the tragic. In a spaceless world the tragic might be possible, but never in a timeless world. In its basic connotations the tragic always implies a determined effectiveness in doing and in suffering. The tragic "character" remains such only as long as he has the necessary dispositions for tragic acting and suffering. Even a situation calling for opposition of forces or their reconciliation is only tragic as long as it contains this effectiveness. If the tragic is to appear, however, this effectiveness must take on a definite direction, a direction toward the annihilation of a positive value in a determined hierarchy. The strength which annihilates it must possess this value itself. To belong to the category of the tragic some value must be destroyed. With regard to man it does not have to be his existence or his life. But at least something of his must be destroyeda plan, a desire, a power, a possession, a faith. The destruction as such is not tragic. It is rather the course that an object of lower or equal positive values, never of 252

higher values, is able to force upon it. We can hardly call it tragic for a good man to defeat and bring about the downfall of an evil man, nor for a nobleman to do the same to a peasant. Moral approval precludes a tragic impression here. This much is certain/It is also certain that it must be an object of high positive value that destroys a value. (Values such as the honest with respect to the wicked, the good with regard to the bad, and the beautiful compared to the ugly, are here called positive. All values have this opposition and duality, even excluding their degree of "higher" and "lower.") The tragic is apparent only where the strength to destroy a higher positive value proceeds from an object possessing this positive value. The manifestation is, moreover, purest and clearest where objects of equally high value appear to undermine and ruin each other. Those tragedies most effectively portray the tragic phenomenon in which, not only is every one in the right, but where each person and power in the struggle presents an equally superior right, or appears to fulfill an equally superior duty. If an object of higher positive value, let us take for example a good, just man, is overpowered by some insignificant evil object, the tragic is at once senseless and irrational. In place of arousing tragic pity, it arouses painful indignation. Tragic pity can never fall completely into the depths of pain and disgust, but must maintain some semblance of coolness and calmness. The tragic is first of all a struggle that is occasioned in an object of high positive value, i.e., of a high moral nature, generally treating of the family, marriage, or the state. The tragic is a "conflict" which takes place between the positive value and the very object which possesses it. The great art of the tragedian is to set each value of the conflicting elements in its fullest light, to develop completely the intrinsic rights of each party.
ON THE TRAGIC AND GRIEF

It is true that in some way all tragic events are sad, but in a very definite sense. This is precisely what fate is, an event unrounded by this quality of sadness.3 On the other hand it arouses sorrow in the feelings of men. It makes the soul sad. Not all sad persons are tragic characters, however. Every
*That the quality of the sad is definitely not a "feeling," nor a socalled "empathic feeling," cf. the essay, "Hole der Selbsterkenntnis."

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death is sad and makes those left behind sad as well, but assuredly not every death is tragic. Let us disregard for a moment that type of grief that is produced in us independently of any perception of values, almost as if caused by a "neutral" feeling. We would rather consider the "grieved over something." The nature of a certain event arouses our sentiments and produces this feeling in us. It should not appear to be caused by our individual wishes or aims, but only by the worth of the object. The tragic grief has a double characteristic, one rooted in itself, the other in its subject. This kind of grief is free from all indignation, anger, reproach, and that accompanying the desire "if it had only been otherwise." It is a calm, quiet fullness; a special kind of peace and composure is characteristic of it. The atmosphere of tragic grief will be absent if we are aroused to do something about it. Once the event has been completed and brought to its climax, any indication of a compromise or of some chance to avert the catastrophe makes tragic grief impossible. Tragic grief contains a definite composure. It is thus distinguished from all specifically personal griefs, those which come from a personal experience of being "sad about something." It comes to us from the outside through the soul; it is occasioned by events that are "tragic." The tragedies of Aeschylus show especially well how to awaken this atmosphere of grief in its utmost purity. We will now point out the twofold characteristic feature of the tragic which causes this atmosphere. One is the very nature of the world's makeup; every individual sad event is thus determined. The other is based on the appearance of an uncompromising inevitability of the destruction of a value, a species of destruction which every tragedy must contain. In every genuine tragedy we see more than just the tragic event. We see over and above it the permanent factors, associations, and powers which are in the very makeup of the world. It is these which make such a thing possible.4 In every tragic event we are directly confronted with a definite condition of the world's makeup without deliberation or any sort of "interpretation." This confronts us in the event itself; it does not result from what it does to the things which brought it about. It is only momentarily connected with the event and is independent of the elements that make it up. It is present in the form of a slight presentiment. 4 We mean "such a thing" in the sense of "a so-constituted value." 254

Every objective grief like that of a tragic event has its own depth. (I take the word here in a transferred meaning like the "depth" of a room.) It has its own immensity, too, which distinguishes it from a very limited, determined event. The depth is brought about by the fact that its subject is twofold. One is the element of the event that has been seen by us. The other is that point in the world's makeup that is exemplified by the event of which the event is but an example. Grief seems to pour out from the event into unlimited space. It is not a universal, abstract world-makeup that would be the same in all tragic events. It is rather a definite, individual element of the world's construction. The remote subject of the tragic is always the world itself, the world taken as a whole which makes such a thing possible. This "world" itself seems to be the object immersed in sorrow. In the foreground of this darkness of sorrow we see the specific event and fate standing out all the more clearly. The element in the world's makeup which produces these situations seems to do so without any warning. In producing them it ignores the peculiarities of the causes of the event and even its normal effects. It is this which causes the second essential element of the tragic, its inevitability. We will clarify this later. Right now we are interested in the peculiar atmosphere which it lends to the tragedy. There is a whole category of feelings and affections that can be connected with the destroying of a value. Their essence is in being "preventable," even if in a particular cast they may or may not have been prevented. It doesn't matter what these feelings might bedread, fear, anger, horror, or the like; they all have in general the characteristic of "excitement." Thinking about the possibility of its turning out otherwise, or even better, causes this excitement. In men it is more frequently caused by the thought, "If so and so had only acted differently." This excitement is able to take hold of a man only because he is a practical being and, as it were, the potential actor in any event. It softens when the inevitability is seen as an impossibility. The grief does not cease to be what it is, but it assumes the character of the feelings of dissatisfaction, excitement, and pain. These are taken in the same narrow sense as the physical feelings of fear, horror, and the like. Tragic grief is pure, without physical arousement. In a certain sense even a feeling of "contentment" is joined with it. There is no desire to do away with the event which led 255

to the destruction of some value. This is abolished by seeing its inevitability. We see that the tragic seems to have its ultimate roots in the essential makeup of the world itself. It is this which clears away all sense of culpability or responsibility. When we see this in the nature of the event a certain reconciliation takes place. It is a species of reconciliation which fills us with peace and rest and with resignation. This resignation banishes the weakness and pain that would come from contemplating a better-made world. Thus the specific sadness of the tragic is really an objective character of the event itself. It is independent of the individual circumstances of the beholder. It is free from the feelings provoked by excitement, indignation, blame, and the like. It has a depth and immensity. It is not accompanied by physical feelings or by what can be called real pain. It has a definite resignation, contentment, and a species of reconciliation with the existence which it chances to have.
THE TRAGIC KNOT

We asserted previously that in the tragic a struggle takes place between two objects possessing high positive value and that one of them must be overcome. There is one case where this is fulfilled to the highest degree. It happens when the objects are not different events, persons, or things, but coincide in one event, person, or thing; even better, in one and the same quality, power, or ability. It would be most tragic if the same power which has brought either itself or another object to a very high positive value becomes its destroyerespecially if this takes place in the very act of its achievement. If we are observing a certain action which is realizing a high value, and then see in that same action that it is working towards the undermining of the very existence of the being it is helping, we receive the most complete and the clearest of tragic impressions. The same tragic impression occurs when a special courage or boldness which permits a man to accomplish an heroic deed undermines him because it exposes him to a danger that a moderately prudent man would avoid"If only I were prudent enough I would not be called Tell." Another example is the man with high ideals toward a spiritual goal who permits them to became shipwrecked on the little things 256

of life. Everyone according to Madame de Stael's dictum has the mistakes of his virtue: the same traits of character which permitted a man to do his best have brought him to catastrophe. We don't have to talk only of human beings here. An art gallery can be destroyed by the very fire that was kindled to preserve the picture. The event has a sharp tragic character. The flight of Icarus is tragic. The very wax which glued his wings to him melts in the same degree as he flies toward the sun. The use of the phrase, "the tragic knot," is a pertinent metaphor. It illustrates the inner entanglement between the creation of a value and the destruction of a value as they take place in the unity of the tragic action and the tragic event. Something else can be deduced from the aforesaid. It is not the relationship between values that constitutes the "stage" for the tragic event, nor is it the connection of causal events which it contains. It is rather a special reference of the value relationships to the causal relationships. It is an essential characteristic of our worldand thus of every worldthat the course of the causal events disregards completely the value of things. The exigencies of values as they develop toward a unity or as they unfold themselves toward their ideal fulfillment is not taken into account by the causal series. The simple fact that the sun shines on the good and bad alike makes tragedy possible. At times it may happen that the causal relationships simultaneously coincide with an increase of the values. This is accepted as only accidental. It is not occasioned by intrinsic determination. Nor is it occasioned by a consideration of what the values need to reach their fulfillment or that the causality is at hand to produce them. Without this basic condition there can be no tragedy. There would be no tragedy in a world which operated on an established system of laws whereby each thing had the powers and capabilities commensurate with its values, and whereby its activity was directed only towards the exigencies of developing or unifying these values. Tragedy would likewise be impossible in a world operating on a system of laws whereby the powers would be directed against the exigencies of these values, purposely opposing them. The tragic would thrive in a satanic world as well as in a divinea fact that Schopenhauer forgot in his discussion of the tragic. We see the tragic only when in one glance we embrace both the causality of things and the exigencies of their immanent values. In this unified glance the mind tries to syn257

thetize the conditions in which it finds these values so as to arrive at the unity it is trying to achieve. Then it follows the course of events in their causal sequence. The result is a clear insight into the independence of these two things. It is here that we may see the formal "background" of all tragedies. Obviously, it is not in the mere knowledge of this circumstance that the tragic exists. The tragic comes into sight only when this independence of the two elements becomes embodied in a concrete event. What has just been said casts new light on our definition. For never is our insight so clear and so concentrated as when we see that the same action may in some places produce a high value and in othersquite indifferentlydestroy this value. Here thenwhere we are able to see the unity of an action at a single glance and not by discursive connection, limb by limbhere is a circumstance known previously only by concept which has now come tangibly within our grasp. What do we mean when we say that in the tragic the destruction of value is "necessary"? Surely not the destruction of causality in general! Is the question then one of "causal" necessity or is it likely to be one of quite another kind of necessity? Here one might begin to discriminate and say that it is indeed causal necessity but of a particular kind, that is, "inner necessity," and consequently a necessity which depends not on influences breaking in from the outer world but rather on the eternal nature of things and men. Only as such can things and men undergo the tragic fate. Actually, this concept of the tragicwidely held though it may beis not borne out by the facts. When a man who seems destined for a certain fate, either by congenital disease or by any sort of natural predisposition, is brought low the first time that external circumstance has a chance to work upon himsuch an event does not seem tragic to us even if the highest values inhered in him, values independent of this natural predisposition. Thus Ibsen, with all his artistic genius, has not succeeded in making of Oswald, in Ghosts, a tragic figure, since the worm of destruction gnawing at Oswald is the result of a disease he has inherited from his father. We miss here something that belongs to the essence of the tragic hero: that the evil which drives the hero to his downfall pertain to those against whom 258

the struggle is being waged, and also that such a struggle be actually waged. Both these requirements are missing in Ghosts. Nor is the tragic hero to be found in him who immediately surrenders to the inimical, and who at the first dismissive word, immediately abnegates and resigns himself. The "necessity" of which we are now speaking must rather be of such a kind as to take its course even after the performance of all the "free" actions that may be tried in an attempt at flight. When we see the catastrophe opposed by all free efforts of will and means, and can still trace its irruption as "necessary"; when we can even trace, through the turmoil and anguish of this struggle to avert the catastrophe, a species of transcendent necessity: then and then only do we have an example before us of tragic "necessity." Tragic necessity is not the necessity of the course of nature, a necessity which lies beneath freedom and the power of the will and which may be conceived as the free essence which permits the best linking of events in nature. Rather is tragic necessity of such a kind that it lies above freedom: it is to be found only in the conclusion of free acts or of "free causes" in the total sphere of causality, in which may be found even "unfree causes," that is, those which are the results of prior causes. Wherever men are presented as "milieu-defined," as completely determined by "relationships," as in the naturalist "drama," we have a much less likely source of the tragic than in the drama which gives us the impression that consciously free choices are clearly and conclusively driving the events of the play to its catastrophe. Consequently neither naturalism and determinism on the one hand nor the rationalistic thesis of a "freedom of the human will" limited only by the chances of nature can provide a comprehension of the tragic, or anything more than the beginning of such comprehension. Both these views of the world have no place for the tragic since they make no provision for essential necessity reaching out above the qualities of nature and free choice. There is still another reason why it is inadequate to define as "inner" that species of necessity we are here discussing. Immanent cause is that which in a thing or in a person exists as latent predisposition, or capacity, or skill, which functions at the inception of true relationships to other things or situations or persons. Wherever we encounter a strictly defined predisposition to the decline of value we 259

must recognize an absence of the true development, of the veridical renewal, of the inner historicity which is needed for the tragic event: in such a situation the catastrophe itself would be predictable if we had a firm and exact picture of the character. The tragic however contains this paradox, that when we behold the destruction of value it seems completely "necessary" and at the same time completely "unpredictable." Though the catastrophe may come closer and closer, driven by all the contributory factors (whether free or not), and each new event is visibly pregnant with danger, yet there must still remain one moment when everythingeven by ideal calculationcould still turn out quite differently: whereupon from all this complexity is brought forth a deed which resolves these lurking factors into the unity of one species of reality by a means not rationally predictable. The seemingly "propitious turn of events" just before the catastrophe, which so many tragic poets have been fond of, is a special means to exclude from the audience even the slightest appearance of "predictability." Even the increase of tension, which every tragedy must arouse, would not be possible if the catastrophe did not seem to us to be well founded from the beginning in the latent inner qualities of the characters and their relationships. It is concrete causality, which has nothing to do with "natural law," which governs tragic events as it also governs the irreversible motions of the constellations in their consummation of causality that species of causality which is rightly called the truly "historical." For this we must return to the assertion of Schopenhauer that tragedy never exhibits true "character development" but only "character revelation," revelation of what was previously latent as disposition and character. Even the tragic transformation of a character, the alteration of disposition and mentality, the essential and latent diversion from the previous course of lifeeven this transformation is seldom either the catastrophe itself or even an important part of it. A specifically tragic phenomenon is to be seen in the interruptioneven in the midst of external victoriesof a course of life directed towards certain values as goals. Tragic necessity is to be seen above all in the ineluctable and inescapable, founded on the eidetic ulations of the universe. Even these negative definitions indicate that the species of "necessity" we have been talking about becomes apparent only when every conceivable kind of skill seems to be 260

brought into play to halt the destruction of value and to preserve the value in question. Consequently two species of valuedestruction are essentially untragic: first, those instances which are tinged with guilt because someone has failed in a duty definitely assigned to him; second, those instances which might have been avoided by the use of available techniques and means. In general, then, the quality of the tragic is lacking when the question "Who is guilty?" has a clear and definite answer. Only where no such answer can be given does the stuff of tragedy begin to appear. We may use the term "tragic" only when we feel that everyone concerned in the story has hearkened to the demands of his duty with the utmost of his capabilities, and yet the disaster has had to occur. The tragic consistsat least in human tragediesnot simply in the absence of "guilt" but rather in the fact that the guiltiness cannot be localized. Wherever we can substitute, in place of a man who plays a role in the unfolding of a catastrophe, another man who is like the first but morally better that is, one who has a finer sympathy for moral opportunities as well as a greater energy of the moral willto the extent that we can perform such substitution the growth of a feeling of tragedy is stunted by the amount of blame we can pin on the responsible person. In such an instance "necessity" is missing as a quality of the tragic phenomena. Consider, for example, the death of Christ; suppose we were able to have the idea that his death, instead of being an essential relationship between His divine purity and the profaneness and opposition of an obdurate -world," had been brought about by the particular moral laxity of Pontius Pilate, or by the wickedness of an individual named Judas, or by the inimical deeds of the Jews. If we were then able to imagine Jesus of Nazareth surrounded not by these men but by a group morally "better," or if we could place him in a different historical context where he would come to higher recognition and reputeif we could do these things the impression of the tragic would vanish. The death of Jesus is tragic only when it is presented everywhere and foreveras the consistent adherence to the r::2her duty of all the parties concerned. An execution, for t .mple, can never have a tragic culmination. The tragic appears when the idea itself of "justice" appears as leading to the destruction of higher value. An execution, if it is unavoidable, awakens deep sympathy; if it were avoidable it 261

might arouse deep anger or irritation, but never tragic sympathy.5 If it is true that a disaster becomes tragic only when everyone has done his duty and, in the usual sense of the word, no one has incurred "guilt," it becomes part of the essence of tragic conflict that this conflict be guiltless and unavoidable even before judges who approach the ideal in wisdom and virtue. The tragic misdeed is even definable as that which silences all possible moral and legal powers of judgment; and, on the other hand, every conflict is essentially untragic when by moral and legal lights it is seen to be obvious and simple. Every essential confusion of the bounds of right and wrong, of good and evil, in the unity of action; every maze of threads, of motives, of views, of duties, so presented as to seem to lead equally well to a judgment of "right" or "wrong"; every complication which is not based on necessary moral and legal wisdom but which instead produces from the circumstances alone an absolute confusion of our moral and legal powers of judgmentevery such complication pertains to the subjective side of tragic feeling and thereby transposes us completely from the realm of possible "right" and "wrong," from possible "accusation" and "indignation." "Tragic guilt" is of a kind for which no one can be blamed and for which no conceivable "judge" can be found. Out of this error of our moral judgments, out of this pardonable search for a subject upon whom to pin this "guilt," a guilt which appears to us as such with crystal clarityonly out of this appears that specific tragic grief and tragic sympathy of which we have been speaking, along with its unique peace and reconciliation of the emotions. Now too the shifting of that which is to be feared to the cosmos itself appears as the essence of the reconciliation of the individual men and wills with the culminating deeds and events in which they have been taking part. In this way, tragic guilt becomes something other than definable "right" and "wrong," or than "obeying obligation" or "defying obligation." But individual men have quite different microcosms of values, dependent on the extent of their actual moral awareness and even on the extent of their possible moral aware6 It is for this reason that Aeschylus, in his Eumenides, furnishes the judges of the Areopagus with both black and white marbles to indicate the guilt or innocence of Orestes.

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ness. Only on these bases can be measured their possible "duties" and areas of dutyquite independently of all the peculiarities of their empirical real situations. If every individual does his "duty," to the extent that he does this he behaves morally; not otherwise can he do something of equal value or be in any way of equal value. How deep his gaze thereby penetrates into the macrocosm of moral value, which contains the entire extent of the realm of possible good and evil, and how deep a hold he takes within this macrocosm, are in no way to be decided by the extent to which each individual dutifully produces the "best" of the realm of values with which he has been endowed. It is not duty and the performance of it that "ennoble"as the Kantian, short-sighted ethic puts itbut rather "noblesse oblige": this is the original nobility of man, which establishes for him quite varied arrays of possible dutiesduties which stand in varied relationships to the moral world and are variously "significant" for it. It makes a difference whether the man doing his duty is a grocer or a noble king; the first one in a vague way obeys a few moral value-distinctions, doing his "duty" with a couple of poor concepts of choice, while the other, living in the fullness of manifold human and other moral relationships, with a finely articulated and higher realm of moral valuedistinctions before his eyes, does his "duty" while he demonstrates the highest value given to him, and in will and deed realizes this value. The latter man in this action must conduct himself as occasionally opposed to duty, while the man bund to value blandly performs his "duty." If we were now to say that in a true tragic presentation everyone must do his "duty," or at least that it would be prudent so to do, and thateven if everyone has done his dutythe destruction of value and the consequent lessening of the total moral value of the world must nevertheless take place, we would thereby still not know how to exclude this quite different dimension of the moral value-distinction of the individual and of his being taking part in the tragedy. It is rather a quite different species of the tragic which, in this dimension of being, bruises "noble" individuals against the strongly articulated "duties" of the mob. And it appears to be a particular melancholy-ironic glory of this kind of tragedy that the noble individual should accept a moral guilt that his companions do not accept. To the extent that the noble person can more easily become "guilty" than the ignoblein accord with his richer and higher realm of dutieshe is susceptible to a moral "risk" which ever bears with it something potentially 263

tragic, as this risk simultaneously praises and blames his noble nature. The Prometheus of technic, who stole fire from Zeus, is a tragic figure; but even more tragic are the moral Prometheuses in whose eyes a moral world comes with the brilliance of lightning, a moral world that never previously existed . . . While they are realizing values and acquiring duties which the vulgar do not yet know how to see as value or to feel as duty, the vulgar are themselves only doing their "duty" while the noble see as "evil" what may still be "good" for the vulgar. Here is one instance of the tragic "fall" for the "noble," in that his every eventual moral disapproval of the vulgar must necessarily remain silentto the extent that only through "good consciences" can his sacred "duty" be accomplished. We can now penetrate more deeply into "tragic guilt" if we are careful to remain clear on the matter of what, in such a case, is the completion of the duty of the noble. Let it be a proposition herewith no attempt at proofthat moral "good" is the relation by which we realize or tend to realize in a given action that a preference indicates a more highly conceived value.8 To prefer the higher value is always equivalent to depreciating the lower value, that is, to discontinue the realization of this lower value. However, all "moral norms," i.e., all imperative rules of a general type, are only exercises in what to will and what to do, as suggested by the average levelling of values in any given epoch resulting from the "situations" which are typical of and regularly recurring in this epoch; still, even this levelling of values provides "higher" values which must be realized. Every material rule of morality contains the presuppositions of the particular positive world of good appropriate to its level of civilization. What happens then when the "noble" man perceives a value which is higher than the average, a value which is generally trodden under in the levelling of values, and accomplishes his advance in the moral cosmos of value, an advance that the vulgar are not yet ready to grasp? In such a case it must be obvious to him that what appears "good" and "dutiful" according to the ruling morality now becomes wicked and eviland by the same token becomes for him "opposed to duty." And this realization is not avoidable but ratherto use a term of Kant'sa "necessary perception" ("notwendiger Schein"). And since everything that can be generally a
6Cf. my book, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, vol. I, Niemeyer, Halle, 1914.

"moral law"even to the most complete codification and strongly logical presentation of these lawsinevitably exhibits the positive material world of values of the "time," the "time" itself being determined by the prevailing system of value-levellingsuch a man must violate the prevailing moral precepts and also violate everything in the moral world that comes into the orbit of such precepts. He must necessarily appear "guilty" even before the fairest judge, when he is in fact guiltless and is so seen by God alone. That this is so is not an irregularity but rather part of the essence of all moral development. * Here I mean to point out the root of that necessary and "guiltless guilt," which has hitherto been expressed in this paradoxical form only with a feeling for the justice of it. What is essential here is the necessity of the deception into which the most just moralist must blunder when confronted with the "tragic hero." Although the tragic hero with moral awareness7 is obviously essentially the opposite of a sinner, he cannot be distinguished from a sinner by the age in which he lives. Only to the extent that his newly experienced value becomes established and becomes the prevailing "morality" can he be seen and knownand then only in historical retrospectas a moral hero. And so there are no present tragediesthere are only tragedies of the past. The tragic man necessarily goes his way in his "present" quiet and speechless. He strides unrecognized through the mob; he may even be there considered a sinner. The error of an instance which separates genius from sinner is here not an accidental but a necessary error. Here, in this tragic fate of the moral genius we can perhaps grasp, in a single species and fashion, the nerve of fate, the complete unpredictability of moral development in man. And even in the absolutely inevitable "fate" and the related absolute loneliness of the moral genius we can see a moment of the type of the tragic, as it may have happened to Jesus in Gethsemane. Here likewise appears the total fate of the world as it appears compressed into the experience of one man, as though in this moment he were standing alone and yet in the "middle," in the center of all the forces that animate the universe. His experience is as though whole epochs of history occurred in him, yet with no one else being aware of his experienceas though everything lay unified in his hand. And perhaps through this something more may become clear: the tragic
f We are speaking here only of this kind and not of the tragic hero in general.

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hero of this kind is not guilty of his guilt, but rather it "happens" to him: this justifiable circumlocution repeats a very characteristic moment of "tragic guilt." That is: that the "guilt" comes to him and not he to the guilt! . . . "Ihr fuhrt ins Leben ihn hinein . . ." Nevertheless this "fall" into guilt does not mean that the tragic hero, either through immoderate passion or through stress and a drive in one direction, is so moved that this drive becomes the central point of his ego and his will consequently is impelled in this same direction. This is also the case in the usual moral guiltinessat least in great measure; and quantities cannot here serve as a basis for differentiation. Even in the midst of the most powerful stresses the will which "follows" such a direction remains a new action, an action not entirely determined by this stress! The tragic guilt into which the hero "falls" is much more accurately characterized by calling it a "guilty" doing or renunciation of doing which darkens the areas of his possible choices and so makes a certain kind of guilt unavoidable, since the choice of the "best" meaning is necessarily in error. Moral or "guilty guilt" is based on the act of choice; tragic or unguilty guilt is rather based on the sphere of choice! The act of choice is consequently for the tragic hero free of guilt just the reverse of what obtains in moral guilt, in which the sphere of choice also entails objectively guiltless possibilities, and only the guilt of the act is important. And so the tragic hero "becomes guilty" while doing a guiltless thing. The consequence of what has been said is the absurdity of the schoolmasters' theory that a moral guiltiness is to be sought in tragedies, and that the tragic poet instead of being a respectable performer of a tragic phenomenon is made into a moral judge over his heroes, whom he punishes for their deeds while at the same time he animates them to perform those deeds. Only total blindness for the phenomenon of tragedy could hatch out this silliest of all theories. But we should also fall into error if we should try to make the correct concept of tragic guilt serve as the complete definition of the tragic phenomenon. However, since from its earliest presentations the tragic has been a universal phenomenon, not specifically human or limited to static will, such a definition is self-destructive. However, note this: where a "tragic guilt" is actually portrayedand it is not the deed of the hero which brings the guilt upon him or is involved in the "catastrophe," nor is his downfall the bearer of the tragic phenomenon, but rather the "guilt of error" 266

itself, and consequently the fact that purity of will falls into guilthere is the very bearer and root of the tragic. In this way it is tragic that Othello falls into the guilt of having to kill his beloved, and that guiltless Desdemona should be killed by her beloved who loves her. In his own words, "For, in my sense, 'tis happiness to die," the death of Othello is not punishment for his deed, which as "punishment" must terminate a conscious evil; rather is it deliverance. Tragic guilt is therefore not a condition of the tragic phenomenon which would indeed be a circulus in demonstrando, if the guilt had to be not any sort of "guilt" but only "tragic" guilt but it is a species of the tragic itself, and to the extent that we are here dealing with moral value, it is therefore a species of absolute valueso to speak, the culminating point of the tragic. Neither death nor any other mischance but only his "fall into guilt" constitutes the tragic fate of the hero. Translated by Bernard Stambler

On Tragedy
STUART HAMPSHIRE intends this book1 to be "about the connections, in modern tragedy, between event and experience and idea, and its form is designed at once to explore and to emphasise these radical connections." The topic is obviously vague. Mr Williams has always used an imaginative sociology of his own. With its aid he sees in contemporary literature a true reflection of the dislocation of private lives, which, he believes, no longer keep a natural connection with a continuing social life in a community, accepted and enjoyed. His vision is of a possible lost Eden, of a wholeness falling away into fragments; the metaphor of a torn social fabric is essential to the vision. The trouble is one must suspect that this particular diagnosis of the disease of modernity is itself part of the condition diagnosed. This kind of imaginative sociology, in the tradition of Carlyle and Ruskin, may itself be an expression of a modern literary temperament, and a conMR WILLIAMS 1 Modern Tragedy by Raymond Williams.

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venient myth for intellectuals who are uneasy in an industrial environment. As one reads, one finds oneself wandering around in a circle, from the imagined social experience to the dramatic literature, and from the literature to the social experience; there is a pattern of interpretation, but no independent confirmation that anything is explained by the pattern. Lukacs's famous studies of Scott and Balzac have opened the way for this strangely intuitive, yet historical, criticism of literature. It amounts to a reversal of Marxism, for a supposed social consciousness replaces any hard, materialistic analysis of social facts as a basis for understanding the decay of literary forms. One may perhaps convince oneself, one may have a dim feeling, that this fragmentation of the social fabric, first suggested by Hegel, is a real feature of modern experience, separately identifiable, and not just a familiar theme, and a recurring fiction, of the imagination. But literary criticism in this style will still seem a prosaic substitute for the original writing which it interprets. Criticism becomes a programme for, or a preface to, a possible fiction, and approaches the condition of fiction itself. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that Mr Williams should end this book with a play of his own. The historical imaginative style of criticism has become so familiar, as a separate literary genre, that one overlooks the enormity of the assumptions that must be made if it is to be taken literally. Are we to suppose that men's dreams change with changing social relations? Is there not an imagery, and are there not associated themes of fantasy and fiction, which are independent of any adult consciousness of learnt social relations? It has been plausibly suggested that the sources of the interest we take in tragic action on the stage are not unrelated to the religious feelings that surround the doctrines of the Fall, of Judgment, of predestination and salvation. The doctrinal setting of these inchoate ideas may change from period to period; the social setting in which they present themselves will certainly change; the shape and sonority of sentences, the quality of the rhetoric, will change correspondingly. These are changes that touch the surface of the mind, and are a proper part of the history of drama as a history of styles; they may even help to explain its abrupt decays and rebirths. But surely the substance of an interest in tragedy cannot be found here: for the sources of the philosophical ideas that make an action, represented or real, a tragic action 268

are primarily the subject-matter of individual psychology, if not of philosophy. A tragic disappointment is one that admits of no remedy in social action, or in any alteration of the specific conditions of the action. The disappointment lies in the nature of action itself, as intrinsically liable to accident and mistake, and also in the double face of virtue as carrying its own defect with it, a returning echo that mocks the first intention. Enjoyment of tragedy marks a point of breakdown in the hold that moral ideas have upon us, a breakdown that is the more strongly felt in proportion as moral ideas are clearly defined. This is one place of entry for tragedy, familiar to everyone from their intimate experience. Morality presupposes a relation that is humanly intelligible between intention and achievement, and it therefore also presupposes a kind of inhuman, or real, justice upon which human justice can be built. But even in childhood, this relation is felt to be insecure. Filial and other loyalties are too often seen to be a form of murder and treason, and the clear-sighted repair of wrong in the house too often turns out to be its destruction. So the judgment of action is shifted towards its consequences, where one knows that, from the standpoint of morality, it should not be. It is not so much that a great ambition, the will to positive action and to repair the disjointed world, fails catastrophically in a tragic situation. Rather, the action fails in a particular way and for a particular reason: the forces used are not, as they seem to be, the forces that really control human fortunes. These are always invisible to the protagonist until it is too late, and are therefore unusable, and appear, to us and to him, as accidents. So the distinction between willed or voluntary evil and involuntary evil is made to seem tenuous and uncertain, a human pretence: and yet any justifiable moral attitude requires the distinction. One may come to think that what one has achieved, not intentionally but seemingly by accident, is more indicative of one's true nature than the original intentions were. One may be born to be blind, and at the centre of determining forces which remain unrecognised until it is too late, and precisely this may be the condition of resolute action and high intentions. Anna Karenina takes action to escape from a dead life, and finally kills herself, because of the accident, as it seems, of Vronsky's carelessness, restlessness and casual absence. The story becomes a tragedy, because of the uncharted necessities of natural law which are revealed in the lives surrounding hers. The justifiable action that should save her, and 269

repair a loss, becomes a waste and destruction of her life, just because it was too strongly willed, or willed with a single mind. For the tragic consciousness, a strong will to put things right will end in mistake and self-destruction, because the sources of wrong are always too remote, and beyond the reach of any solitary virtue. The sources of evil are in the house and in the family. Once disjointed, house and family are locked together in a natural misfortune, which no individual energy can suddenly break. Mr Williams has in Ibsen the obvious example of modern tragedy: modern, just because virtue takes the form in his plays of action against a social wrong, or at least against an offence to conscience or to bourgeois freedom. The pride of improvement and liberation ends in waste and destruction, leaving the survivors with their inherited stain, as if it were the shared wrong which had held them together. Within the play there has been single-minded action, and not pathos; but the liberal intentions have been shown to depend upon an ignorance, or an ignoring, of the genealogy of misfortunes, which pass across the generations as an inherited punishment. The family, as Ibsen classically represented it, is not a social unit: its links are more constant and less open to inspection, and, above all, less voluntary and less adjustable at will. Unhappy families are, as Tolstoy wrote, different from each other, fiercely coherent in their attachment to a distinguishing doom. Liberalism and the modern spirit, as Ibsen knew them, try to dismiss tragic inheritances, on the assumption that the quality of an individual life may always be rationally changed in a single generation. Ibsen was on both sides, seeing at once the modern necessity to believe and the old desperate implausibility of the reformers' assumption. It is at least possible that the criticism that sees literature, unquestioningly, as criticism of society is itself a symptom of the decline which the critics think that they notice. The philosophical idea of tragedy requires a kind of confident individualism which no historically minded critic will retain: the necessary isolation of the individual, alone with his intention and its consequences, will seem untruthful to the historian unless some trailing edges of social analysis are added, as by Sartre. But in the setting of tragedy the social pressures on the individual are uninteresting, because they explain too much, and by the wrong kind of causality. As sometimes in Brecht, the protagonists become pathetic, victims of their historical circumstances, figures in a pageant There is a striking consensus in writings about tragedy, which cuts across differences of time and place. It would
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indeed be strange if the nature of the interest in tragedy changed with changing social conditions, at least within societies which recognise a rational morality, whether secular or religious. The contrast between tragic consequences and the catastrophes that follow imputable errors cannot be ignored, as long as justice and rational reward and punishment are at issue. Mr Williams examines the work of Lawrence, Pirandello, Eliot, Sartre, Brecht, Genet and others in search of what it is that replaces tragic fiction and drama in these representative writers: he has a variety of interesting observations to make, particularly about Lawrence. He is certainly not obliged to write another kind of book, about the philosophical ideas and psychological needs that tragedies embody. The notion of tragedy, so heavily documented, is not strictly essential to his purpose. He is simply continuing that gentle, sincere, discursive meditationalmost a spiritual autobiographywhich he began in Culture and Society. I think he is trying to imagine the kinds of writing that would both reflect and strengthen an active community of free men, in contemporary conditions. One may respect the vision, even if one believes that an interest in tragedy is an interest in an altogether different kind of freedom.

The Tragic Vision: The World


LUCIEN GOLDMANN It is from our separation and absence from the world that is born the presence and feeling for God (Saint-Cyran: Maximes, 263). THERE are two distinct but complementary planes on which philosophical thought considers the relationship between man and the world: that of historical progress, and that of the ontological reality which both conditions this progress and makes it possible. Thus, men do not see the world as an unchanging unreality given once and for all, since we cannot know what the world is like "in itself," when not seen through the categories of the human mind. There is only one reality which we can gradually come to know through our historical researches, and only one possible starting-point for philosophical investigation: it is the succession of ways in which men have, in the course of history, seen, felt, understood and, 271

This State, like any state, was exclusively interested in and recognized only the Action of its citizens, which Action consisted essentially in Fighting. The pagan State thus recognized in the Citizen only the universal aspect of human existence. However, the particular aspect of human existence could not be absolutely excluded. In fact, the Master was not only a Master of slaves and the warrior-citizen of a state. He was necessarily the member of a Family, too. And to the Family belonged the particular aspect of the pagan Master's existence. Within the Family, Man is not in any sense a Master, a Citizen, a Warrior. He is father, husband, son and he is this particular father, this husband, this son. However, his particularity, recognized in and by the Family, is not truly human. In fact, for the pagan Master, who did not work, human and humanizing Action was reduced to Fighting. But there is no war or risk of life within the Family. Thus there can be no human Action recognized by and in the Family; the Family recognizes only the Sein, the static and given Being, the biological existence of the man, be he father, husband, brother, or son. But to attribute an absolute value to a being not by virtue of what he does, not because of his acts, but simply because of his Sein, of his Being, is to love him. One can therefore also say that it is Love which was realized by and in the Family of the antique world. And since Love does not depend on acts, on the activity of the loved one, it does not stop, it does not cease, even with the loved one's death. Loving a man in his inaction, one regards him as if he were already dead. Death thus cannot change Love, or affect the value attributed to it in and by the Family. And this is why Love and the cult of the dead were the exclusive affair of the pagan Family. The particular and particularist Family was therefore a necessary complement to the universal and universalizing State. But the pagan Master was as little "satisfied" {befreidigt) by his Family life as by his existence as a citizen. In and by the State his Human existence was realized and recognized. But this existence was not truly his; he was not the one recognized. As to the Family, it recognized his personal, particular existence. But this existence, essentially inactive, was not truly human. Where the human Actions of Warring and Working are not synthesized in a single human being, Man is never fully satisfied. The realization and recognition of uniquely universal 298

Action for the State satisfies Man as little as the realization and recognition of his particular being within the Family. For the Family the supreme value is the Sein, the natural Being, the biological life of its members. But what the State exacted of the Family member was precisely that he risk his life. The State required his death in the interest of all its citizens. To do one's duty as a citizen, it was therefore necessary to violate the law of the Family, and vice versa. In the pagan World this conflict was inevitable and irreconcilable: Man could not renounce the Family since he could not renounce the Particularity of his Being; and he could not renounce the State either, since he could not renounce the Universality of his Action. Thus he was necessarily always criminal, either toward the State or toward the Family. Now it was this which made for the tragic character of pagan life. Translated by Lionel Abel

The Limitation of Being


MARTIN HEIDEGGER WE READ the first chorus from the Antigone of Sophocles (lines 332-75). First we listen to the Greek words in order to get some of the sound into our ears. The translation runs: There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness. He sets sail on the frothing waters amid the south winds of winter tracking through the mountains and furious chasms of the waves. He wearies even the noblest of the gods, the Earth, indestructible and untiring, overturning her from year to year, driving the plows this way and that with horses. and man, pondering and plotting, snares the light-gliding birds and hunts the beasts of the wilderness and the native creatures of the sea. 299

With guile he overpowers the beast that roams the mountains by night as by day, he yokes the hirsute neck of the stallion and the undaunted bull. And he has found his way to the resonance of the word, and to wind-swift all-understanding, and to the courage of rule over cities. He has considered also how to flee from exposure to the arrows of unpropitious weather and frost Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue, he comes to nothingness. Through no flight can he resist the one assault of death, even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading painful sickness. Clever indeed, mastering the ways of skill beyond all hope, he sometimes accomplishes evil, sometimes achieves brave deeds. He wends his way between the laws of the earth and the adjured justice of the gods. Rising high above his place, he who for the sake of adventure takes the nonessent for essent loses his place in the end. May such a man never frequent my hearth; May my mind never share the presumption of him who does this.

In the third phase we attempt to take our stand in the center of the poem, with a view to judging who man is according to this poetic discourse. First phase. We seek that which sustains the whole and towers above it. Actually we have not far to seek. It is threefold; it bursts upon us like a triple assault, shattering at the very outset all everyday standards of questioning and definition. The first is the beginning: There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness. In these first two verses the poet anticipates. He will spend the rest of the poem in catching up with himself. Man, in one word, is deinotaton, the strangest. This one word encompasses the extreme limits and abrupt abysses of his being. This aspect of the ultimate and abysmal can never be discerned through the mere description that establishes data, even though thousands of eyes should examine man, searching for attributes and states. Such being is disclosed only to poetic insight. We find no portrayal of existing specimens of man; nor do we find any sort of blind and fatuous inflation of human essence from below, inspired by peevish yearning for some unattained glory; here there is no suggestion of a pre-eminent personality. Among the Greeks there were no personalities (and for this reason no supra-personality). Man is to deinotaton, the strangest of the strange. Here we must anticipate an explanation of the Greek word deinon and of our translation. This calls for a tacit glance over the whole poem, which alone can provide an appropriate interpretation of the first two verses. The Greek word deinon has the strange ambiguity with which Greek discourse cuts across the contending separations (Auseinander-setzungen) of being. On the one hand deinon means the terrible, but not in the sense of petty terrors, and above all not in the decadent, insipid, and useless sense that the word has taken on today, in such locutions as "terribly cute." The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which compels panic fear, true fear; and in equal measure it is the collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm. The mighty, the overpowering is the essential character of power itself. Where it irrupts, it can hold its overpowering power in check. Yet this does not make it more innocuous, but still more terrible and remote. 301

The following commentary is necessarily inadequate, if only because it cannot be built up from the poet's entire work or even from the whole tragedy. Here I shall not be able to go into the choice of readings or the changes that have been made in the text. Our interpretation falls into three phases, in each of which we shall consider the whole poem from a different point of view. In the first phase we shall set forth the intrinsic meaning of the poem, that which sustains the edifice of words and rises above it. In the second phase we pass through the whole sequence of stropes and antistrophes and delimit the area that is opened up by the poem. 300

But on the other hand deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes of power (Gewalt) but is violent (gewalt-tatig) insofar as the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being-there. Here we use the word violence in an essential sense extending beyond the common usage of the word, as mere arbitrary brutality. In this common usage violence is seen from the standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from conventional compromise and mutual aid, and which accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of the peace. The essent as a whole, seen as power, is the overpowering, deinon in the first sense. Man is deinon, first because he remains exposed within this overpowering power, because by his essence he belongs to being. But at the same time man is deinon because he is the violent one in the sense designated above. (He gathers the power and brings it to manifestness.) Man is the violent one, not aside from and along with other attributes but solely in the sense that in his fundamental violence (Gewalt-tatigkeit) he uses power (Gewalt) against the overpowering (Oberwaltigende). Because he is twice deinon in a sense that is originally one, he is to deinotaton, the most powerful: violent in the midst of the overpowering. But why do we translate deinon as "strange" (unheimlich)? Not in order to hide or attenuate the meaning of powerful, overpowering, violent; quite on the contrary. Because this deinon is meant as the supreme limit and link of man's being, the essence of the being thus defined should from the first be seen in its crucial aspect. But, in that case, is the designation of the powerful as the strange and uncanny (unheimlich) not a posterior notion derived from the impression that the powerful makes on us, whereas the essential here is to understand the deinon as what it intrinsically is? That is so, but we are not taking the strange in the sense of an impression on our states of feeling. We are taking the strange, the uncanny (das Unheimliche), as that which casts us out of the "homely," i.e. the customary, familiar, secure. The unhomely (Unheimische) prevents us from making ourselves at home and therein it is overpowering. But man is the strangest of all, not only because he passes his life amid the strange understood in this sense but because he departs from his customary, familiar limits, because he is the violent one, who, tending toward the strange in the sense of the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the familiar (das Heimische).
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To understand the full implication of these words of the chorus, we must bear this in mind: to say that man is to deinotaton, the strangest of all, is not to impute a particular attribute to man, as though he were also something else; no, the verse says that to be the strangest of all is the basic trait of the human essence, within which all other traits must find their place. In calling man "the strangest of all" it gives the authentic Greek definition of man. We shall fully appreciate this phenomenon of strangeness only if we experience the power of appearance and the struggle with it as an essential part of being-there. The second passage that sustains the poetic edifice and rises above it is to be found in line 360, in the middle of the second strophe: Pantoporos aporos ep'ouden erchetai. "Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue, he comes to nothingness." The essential words are pantoporos aporos. The word poros means: passage through . . . , transition to . . . , path. Everywhere man makes himself a path; he ventures into all realms of the essent, of the overpowering power, and in so doing he is flung out of all paths. Herein is disclosed the entire strangeness of this strangest of all creatures: not only that he tries the essent in the whole of its strangeness, not only that in so doing he is a violent one striving beyond his familiar sphere. No, beyond all this he becomes the strangest of all beings because, without issue on all paths, he is cast out of every relation to the familiar and befallen by ate, ruin, catastrophe. It is not hard to see that this pantoporos aporos contains an interpretation of deinotaton. The interpretation is completed in the third salient phrase, line 370: hypsipolis apolis. In construction it is similar to pantoporos aporos, and its situation in the middle of the antistrophe presents another parallel. But it moves in a different direction. It speaks not of poros but of polis; not of the paths to all the realms of the essent but of the foundation and scene of man's being-there, the point at which all these paths meet, the polis. Polis is usually translated as city or city-state. This does not capture the full meaning. Polis means, rather, the place, the there, wherein and as which historical being-there is. The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens. To this place and scene of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the rulers the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the army and the fleet. All this does not first belong to the polis, does not become
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political by entering into a relation with a statesman and a general and the business of the state. No, it is political, i.e. at the site of history, provided there be (for example) poets alone, but then really poets, priests atone, but then really priests, rulers alone, but then really rulers. Be, but this means: as violent men to use power, to become pre-eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this. The first phase shows us the inner design of the essence of the strangest of all beings, the realms and scope of his power and his destiny. Now we go back to the beginning and attempt the second phase of interpretation. The second phase. In the light of what has been said above we now follow the sequence of the strophes and hear how the being of man, the strangest of beings, unfolds. We shall try to determine when the deinon is meant in the first sense, how the deinon in the second sense emerges concurrently, and how, in the reciprocal relation between the two, the being of the strangest being is built up before us in its essential form. The first strophe names the sea and the earth, each of them overpowering (deinon) in its way. It does not speak of them in the manner of us moderns who experience them as mere geographical and geological phenomena and then, as though by an afterthought, brush them over with a few faint and fleeting emotions. Here "sea" is said as though for the first time; the poet speaks of the wintry waves that the sea creates as it unceasingly tears open its own depths and unceasingly flings itself into them. Immediately after the main, guiding statement of the first verses, the song begins, hard and powerful, with touto kai polion. Man embarks on the groundless deep, forsaking the solid land. He sets sail not upon bright, smooth waters but amid the storms of winter. The account of this departure concerts with the movement of the prosody; the word chorei in line 336 is situated at the point where the meter shifts: chorei, he abandons the place, he starts out and ventures into the preponderant power of the placeless waves. The word stands like a pillar in the edifice of these verses. But woven into one with this violent excursion (Aufbruch) upon the overpowering sea is the never-resting incursion (Ein304

bruch) into the indestructible power of the earth. Here the earth is the highest of the gods. Violently, with acts of power (gewalt-tatig) man disturbs the tranquillity of growth, the nurturing and maturing of the goddess who lives without effort. Here the overpowering reigns not in self-consuming wildness but without effort and fatigue; from out of the superior tranquillity of great riches, it produces and bestows the inexhaustible treasure that surpasses all zeal. Into this power bursts the violent one; year after year he breaks it open with his plows and drives the effortless earth into his restless endeavor. Sea and earth, departure and upheaval are joined by the kai in line 334, to which corresponds the te in line 338. And now to all this the antistrophe: it names the birds in the air, the denizens of the water, bull and stallion in the mountains. The living things, lightly dreaming, living in their own rhythm and their own precinct, perpetually overflowing into new forms yet remaining in their one channel, know the place where they wander and pass the night. As living things, they are embedded in the power of the sea and the earth. Into this life as it rolls along self-contained, extraordinary in its own sphere and structure and ground, man casts his snares and nets; he snatches the living creatures out of their order, shuts them up in his pens and enclosures, and forces them under his yokes. On the one hand eruption and upheaval. On the other capture and constraint. At this point, before we pass to the second strophe and its antistrophe, it is necessary to insert a note calculated to ward off a misinterpretation of the whole poema misinterpretation to which modern man readily inclines and which is indeed frequent. We have already pointed out that this is no description and exposition of the activities and fields of activity of man, an essent among other essents, but a poetic outline of his being, drawn from its extreme possibilities and limits. This in itself precludes the interpretation of this chorus as a narrative of man's development from the savage hunter and primitive sailor to the civilized builder of cities. Such a notion is the product of ethnology and psychological anthropology. It stems from the unwarranted application of a natural scienceand a false one at thatto man's being. The basic fallacy underlying such modes of thought consists in the belief that history begins with the primitive and backward, the weak and helpless. The opposite is true. The beginning is the strangest and mightiest. What comes afterward is not development but the flattening that results from mere spreading out; it is inability to retain the beginning; the beginning is 305

emasculated and exaggerated into a caricature of greatness taken as purely numerical and quantitative size and extension. That strangest of all beings is what he is because he harbors such a beginning in which everything all at once burst from superabundance into the overpowering and strove to master it. If this beginning is inexplicable, it is not because of any deficiency in our knowledge of history. On the contrary, the authenticity and greatness of historical knowledge reside in an understanding of the mysterious character of this beginning. The knowledge of primordial history is not a ferreting out of primitive lore or a collecting of bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science but, if it is anything at all, mythology. The first strophe and antistrophe speak of the sea, the earth, the animal, as the overpowering power which bursts into manifestness through the acts of the violent one. Outwardly the second strophe passes from a description of the sea, the earth, animals to a characterization of man. But no more than the first strophe and antistrophe speak of nature in the restricted sense does the second strophe speak only of man. No, what is now namedlanguage, understanding, sentiment, passion, buildingare no less a part of the overpowering power than sea, earth, and animal. The difference is only that the latter, the power that is man's environment, sustains, drives, inflames him, while the former reigns within him as the power which he, as the essent that he himself is, must take upon himself. This pervading force becomes no less overpowering because man takes it into his power, which he uses as such. All this merely conceals the uncanniness of language, of the passions, the powers by which man is ordained (gefught) as a historical being, while it seems to him that it is he who disposes (verfiigt) of them. The strangeness, the uncanniness of these powers resides in their seeming familiarity. Directly they yield themselves to man only in their nonessence (Unwesen), so driving him and holding him out of his essence. In this way he comes to regard what is fundamentally more remote and overpowering than sea and earth as closest of all to him. How far man is from being at home in his own essence is revealed by his opinion of himself as he who invented and could have invented language and understanding, building and poetry. How could man ever have invented the power which per306

vades him, which alone enables him to be a man? We shall be wholly forgetting that this song speaks of the powerful (demon), the strange and uncanny, if we suppose that the poet makes man invent such things as building and language. The word edidaxato does not mean: man invented, but: he found his way to the overpowering and therein first found himself: the violent one, the wielder of power. In view of what has been said, the "himself means at once he who breaks out and breaks up (ausbricht und umbricht, departs and plows), he who captures and subjugates. It is this breaking out and breaking up, capturing and subjugating that opens up the essent as sea, as earth, as animal. It happens only insofar as the powers of language, of understanding, of temperament, and of building are themselves mastered (bewaltigt) in violence. The violence of poetic speech, of thinking projection, of building configuration, of the action that creates states is not a function of faculties that man has, but a taming and, ordering of powers by virtue of which the essent opens up as such when man moves into it. This disclosure of the essent is the power that man must master in order to become himself amid the essent, i.e. in order to be historical. What is meant by deinon here in the second strophe must not be misinterpreted as invention or as a mere faculty or attribute of man. Only if we understand that the use of power in language, in understanding, in forming and building helps to create (i.e. always, to bring forth) the violent act (Gewalttat) of laying out paths into the environing power of the essent, only then shall we understand the strangeness, the uncanniness of all violence. For man, as he journeys everywhere, is not without issue in the external sense that he comes up against outward barriers and cannot go on. In one way or another he can always go farther into the etcetera. He is without issue because he is always thrown back on the paths that he himself has laid out: he becomes mired in his paths, caught in the beaten track, and thus caught he compasses the circle of his world, entangles himself in appearance, and so excludes himself from being. He turns round and round in his own circle. He can ward off whatever threatens this limited sphere. He can employ every skill in its place. The violence that originally creates the paths engenders its own mischief of versatility, which is intrinsically issueless, so much so that it bars itself from reflection about the appearance in which it moves. All violence shatters against one thing. That is death. It
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is an end beyond all consummation (Vollendung), a limit beyond all limits. Here there is no breaking-out or breaking-up, no capture or subjugation. But this strange and alien (unheimlich) thing that banishes us once and for all from everything in which we are at home is no particular event that must be named among others because it, too, ultimately happens. It is not only when he comes to die, but always and essentially that man is without issue in the face of death. Insofar as man is, he stands in the issuelessness of death. Thus his being-there is the happening of strangeness. (For us this happening of a strangeness must be initially grounded in human being-there.) With the naming of this strange and powerful thing, the poetic project of being and human essence sets its own limit upon itself. For the second antistrophe does not go on to name still other powers but gathers those already named into their inner unity. The concluding strophe carries the whole back to its basic line. But as we have stressed in the first phase, the basic line of what is actually at the center of the song (the deinotaton) resides precisely in the unitary relation between the two meanings of deinon. Accordingly the final strophe, in summary, names three things. 1. The power, the powerful, in which the action of the violent one moves, is the entire scope of the machination (Machenschaft), machanoen, entrusted to him. We do not take the word "machination" in a disparaging sense. We have in mind something essential that is disclosed to us in the Greek word techne. Techne means neither art nor skill, to say nothing of technique in the modern sense. We translate techne by "knowledge." But this requires explanation. Knowledge means here not the result of mere observations concerning previously unknown data. Such information, though indispensable for knowledge, is never more than accessory. Knowledge in the authentic sense of techne is the initial and persistent looking out beyond what is given at any time. In different ways, by different channels, and in different realms, this transcendence (Hinaussein) effects (setzt ins Werk) what first gives the datum its relative justification, its potential determinateness, and hence its limit. Knowledge is the ability to put into work the being of any particular essent. The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art techne, because art is what most immediately brings being (i.e. the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizes it in something present (the work). The work of art is a work not 308

primarily because it is wrought (gewirkt), made, but because it brings about (er-wirkt) being in an essent; it brings about the phenomenon in which the emerging power, physis, comes to shine (scheinen). It is through the work of art as essent being that everything else that appears and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and understandable as being or not being. Because art in a pre-eminent sense stabilizes and manifests being in the work as an essent, it may be regarded as the ability, pure and simple, to accomplish, to put-into-the-work (ins-Werk-setzen), as techne. This accomplishment is a manifesting realization (Erwirken) of being in the essent. This superior, realizing opening and keeping open is knowledge. The passion of knowledge is inquiry. Art is knowledge and therefore techne. Art is not techne because it involves "technical" skill, tools, materials. Thus techne provides the basic trait of deinon, the violent; for violence (Gewalt-tatigkeit) is the use of power (Gewaltbrauchen) against the overpowering (Oberwaltigende): through knowledge it wrests being from concealment into the manifest as the essent. 2. Just as deinon as violence collects its essence in the fundamental Greek word techne, so deinon as the overpowering is manifested in the equally fundamental dikeo. We translate it as Fug.1 Here we understand Fug first in the sense of joint and framework (Fuge und Gefiige); then as decree, dispensation, a directive that the overpowering imposes on its reign; finally, as the governing structure (das fiigende Gefiige) which compels adaptation (Einfugung) and compliance (Sichfiigen). If dike is translated as "justice" taken in a juridical, moral sense, the word loses its fundamental metaphysical meaning. The same applies to the interpretation of dike as norm. In all its realms and dominions the overpowering, in respect to its domination, is Fug. Being, physis, as power, is basic and original togetherness: logos; it is governing order (fiigender Fug): dike. Thus the deinon as the overpowering (dike) and the deinon as the violent (techne) confront one another, though not as
1 Heidegger is particularly free to define the word "Fug" as he wishes because the word does not occur in modern literary German except in the combination "mit Fug und Recht""with F. and justice," where it conveys no precise meaning but suggests "proper order," "fitness." This is why I have preferred to introduce the word in German. R.M.

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two given things. In this confrontation techne bursts forth against dike, which in turn, as Fug, the commanding order, disposes (verfugt) of all techne. The reciprocal confrontation is. It is only insofar as the strangest thing of all, being-human, is actualized, insofar as man is present as history. 3. The basic trait of the deinotaton lies in the interrelation between the two meanings of deinon. The sapient man sails into the very middle of the dominant order (Fug); he tears it open and violently carries being into the essent; yet he can never master the overpowering. Hence he is tossed back and forth between structure and the structureless, order and mischief (Fug and Un-fug), between the evil and the noble. Every violent curbing of the powerful is either victory or defeat. Both, each in its different way, fling him out of home, and thus, each in its different way, unfold the dangerousness of achieved or lost being. Both, in different ways, are menaced by disaster. The violent one, the creative man, who sets forth into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, compels the unhappened to happen and makes the unseen appear this violent one stands at all times in venture (tolma, line 371). In venturing to master being, he must risk the assault of the nonessent, me kalon, he must risk dispersion, in-stability, disorder, mischief. The higher the summit of historical being-there, the deeper will be the abyss, the more abrupt the fall into the unhistorical, which merely thrashes around in issueless and placeless confusion. Arrived at the end of the second phase, we may wonder what purpose can be served by a third. The third phase. The central truth of the song was set forth in the first phase. The second phase has led us through all the essential realms of the powerful and violent. The final strophe pulls the whole together into the essence of him who is strangest of all. Certain details might be considered and elucidated more fully. But this would provide a mere appendage to what has already been said; it would not necessitate a new phase of interpretation. If we content ourselves with what the poem directly says, the interpretation is at an end. Actually it has just begun. The actual interpretation must show what does not stand in the words and is nevertheless said. To accomplish this the exegete must use violence. He must seek the essential where nothing more is to be found by the scientific interpretation that brands as unscientific everything that transcends its limits. But here, where we must restrict ourselves to a single poem, we can undertake this third phase only from a limited 310

point of view imposed by our main task, anci even here we must confine ourselves to a few steps. Bearing in mind what has been said in the first phase, we start from the results of our explanation of the final strophe in the second phase. The deinotaton of the deinon, the strangest of the strange, lies in the conflict between dike and techne. The strangest is not the extreme rectilinear intensification of the strange. It is specifically the uniquely strange. The conflict between the overwhelming presence of the essent as a whole and man's violent being-there creates the possibility of downfall into the issueless and placeless: disaster. But disaster and the possibility of disaster do not occur only at the end, when a single act of power fails, when the violent one makes a false move; no, this disaster is fundamental, it governs and waits in the conflict between violence and the overpowering. Violence against the preponderant power of being must shatter against being, if being rules in its essence, as physis, as emerging power. But this necessity of disaster can only subsist insofar as what must shatter is driven into such a being-there. Man is forced into such a being-there, hurled into the affliction (Not) 2 of such being, because the overpowering as such, in order to appear in its power, requires a place, a scene of disclosure. The essence of being-human opens up to us only when understood through this need compelled by being itself. The being-there of historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of being hurls man into this breaking-away, which drives him beyond shatter against being. The strangest (man) is what it is because, fundamentally, it cultivates and guards the familiar, only in order to break out of it and to let what overpowers it break in. Being itself hurls man into this break-away, which drives him beyond himself to venture forth toward being, to accomplish being, to stabilize it in the work, and so hold open the essent as a whole. Therefore the violent one knows no kindness and conciliation (Giite und Begiitigung) in the usual sense; he cannot be mollified or appeased by success or prestige. In all this the violent, creative man sees only the semblance of ful2 The dictionary meanings of the German word "Not" are need, want, anguish, distress, affliction, peril, necessity. Insofar as one meaning can be disengaged from the whole, Heidegger's primary meaning is "need," because he has used this word "Not" as a translation for chre in the sixth fragment of Parmenides. But the ord as used in German speech and poetry carries the primary implication of distress, trouble, affliction.

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fillment, and this he despises. In willing the unprecedented, he casts aside all help. To him disaster is the deepest and broadest affirmation of the overpowering. In the shattering of the wrought work, in the knowledge that it is mischief (Unfug) and sarma (a dunghill), he leaves the overpowering to its order (Fug). But all this not in the form of "psychic experiences" in which the soul of the creative man wallows, and still less in the form of petty feelings of inferiority, but wholly in terms of the accomplishment itself, the putting-into-the work. As history the overpowering, being, is confirmed in works. Thus the being-there of the historical man is the breach through which the being embodied in the essent can open. As such it is an in-cident (Zwischen-fall, a fall-between), the incident in which suddenly the unbound powers of being come forth and are accomplished as history. The Greeks had a profound sense of this suddenness and uniqueness of beingthere, forced on them by being itself, which disclosed itself to them as physis and logos and dike. It is inconceivable that the Greeks should have decided to turn out culture for the benefit of the next few millennia of Western history. In the unique need of their being-there they alone responded solely with violence, thus not doing away with the need but only augmenting it; and in this way they won for themselves the fundamental condition of true historical greatness. We shall fail to understand the mysteriousness of the essence of being-human, thus experienced and poetically carried back to its ground, if we snatch at value judgments of any kind. The evaluation of being-human as arrogance and presumption in the pejorative sense takes man out of his essential need as the in-cident. To judge in this way is to take man as something already-there, to put this something into an empty space, and appraise it according to some external table of values. But it is the same kind of misunderstanding to interpret the poet's words as a tacit rejection of being-human, a covert admonition to resign oneself without violence, to seek undisturbed comfort. This interpretation might even find some basis in the concluding lines of the poem. One who is thus (namely the strangest of all) should be excluded from hearth and council. But the final words of the chorus do not contradict what has previously been said about being-human. Insofar as the chorus turns against the strangest of all, it says that this manner of being is not that of every day. Such being-there is not to be found in the usual bustle 312

and activity. There is nothing surprising about these concluding words; indeed, we should have to be surprised if they were lacking. Their attitude of rejection is a direct and complete confirmation of the strangeness and uncanniness of human beings. With its concluding words the song swings back to its beginning.

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