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Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400852505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Genealogy of the Tragic
Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy
By Joshua Billings
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5250-5
CHAPTER 1
Quarreling over Tragedy
Antiquity or modernity? Today, the question seems incoherent. Even if "antiquity" and "modernity" were clearly defined, the notion of comparing the merits of one age to another seems both pointless and perilous. Antiquity was one thing; modernity is another. There is no general method of evaluating ages or cultures. If we speak of ancients and moderns in the same breath, it may be with an eye to understanding their differences and similarities, but never to declaring the absolute superiority of one over the other. Evaluating entire epochs is not the work of serious thinkers, any more than debating the relative merits of coffee and tea.
Yet this way of thinking is a recent development. From the Renaissance until around 1800, evaluative comparison of antiquity and modernity was an important mode of thought throughout Western Europe. These inquiries are often grouped under the name of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. The term refers specifically to a virulent dispute that arose in France at the end of the seventeenth century, but quarrels over the value of antiquity were widespread for centuries before, and tenacious even for some time after the Querelle proper. Indeed, comparisons of antiquity and modernity were one of the major forms of literary-critical thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the positions of the Anciens and Modernes (the proper nouns referring to partisans of the two camps) are discernible well beyond the temporal bounds of the Querelle. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, though, these comparisons began to disappear. They were replaced by an understanding of cultural difference and relativism that is recognizably modern.
We know this change as historicization, the assumption that past societies have their own unique modes of existence, which are not necessarily comparable to one another or immediately comprehensible in contemporary terms. Antiquity can no longer be measured against modernity; there are no firm grounds for evaluation. Though this attitude to the products of the past is by no means new around 1800 (historicization is at least as old as history), it takes on a new prevalence and explanatory prestige. Origins, contexts, and idiosyncrasies become the defining features of thought about the past, and historicized understanding the sine qua non of sound inquiry. As Reinhart Koselleck influentially argues, the final third of the eighteenth century sees "the temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history": temporality is no longer a neutral container for events, but exerts its own force on agents and actions. The temporalization of history grounds the familiar concept of the "spirit of the time" (Zeitgeist, a word that first enters the German language in this period), which describes the particularity of a given culture as a result of its unique historical character. With each age defined by a characteristic rhythm and shape, it becomes impossible to judge the products of different historical moments against one another.
This chapter and the next will trace the rise of historicization and its consequences for thinking about Greek tragedy. These chapters argue that tragedy was a crucial ground for thinking about history in the eighteenth century, and, reciprocally, that historical thinking fundamentally shifted the terms in which tragedy was understood, with consequences that persist to the present. The notion of history that informs most contemporary approaches to antiquity was largely formed in this period, as modernity came to define itself as categorically different from previous ages—effectively ending the Querelle. From the other side of this conceptual shift, it is easy to read the texts of the Querelle with condescension, as the silly answer to a silly question, or (the prevalent scholarly approach until recently) as the platform for a largely ulterior struggle to define authority under the absolute monarchy. Historians seems to be moving away from ideological readings, towards seeing the Querelle as a formative moment in the self-consciousness of modernity, and as a rich and dynamic debate in its own right. For the partisans of the Querelle, the question of antiquity's role in modern culture was a live one in a way it has rarely been since. Answering it entailed defining a way of living within history, of understanding the present in relation to a series of pasts.
Ancients and Moderns on Tragedy
The exemplary discursive form of the Querelle is the "parallel" (the French term parallèle is often used to designate this subgenre of criticism). The parallel could draw on classical roots, most importantly Plutarch's Lives, which examined Greek and Roman lives in synkrisis, the rhetorical mode of comparison. More explicitly evaluative were the ancient contests of poets: the Certamen of Homer and Hesiod and the competition of Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes' Frogs. Such works drew on the agonistic contexts in which epic and tragedy were performed in ancient Greece in order to stage competitions between the great poets. Antithesis and evaluation were major features of ancient literary culture, and this tendency seems to have authorized or inspired the parallels and comparisons that pervaded discussions of ancient literature from the Renaissance. Tragedy, as a genre that had flourished in antiquity and modernity, was one of the most popular grounds for thinking the ages in parallel. But it could also be problematic, as critics found profound differences beneath the apparent similarities of ancient and modern works. From the Querelle onward, understandings of Greek tragedy were formed by divergent ways of thinking about the play of similarity and difference in history.
In parallels of the Querelle, the achievements of ancients and moderns in practically any area could be compared. Most important was Charles Perrault's Parallel of ancients and moderns, in regard to the arts and sciences (Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, en ce qui régarde les arts et les sciences, 1688–97), which attempts a systematic evaluation of the ages. His aim throughout is to prove that "the ancients were extremely inferior to the moderns for this general reason, that there is nothing that time does not perfect." The doctrine of progress—applied equally to the arts and sciences—became a rallying cry of the Modernes. The Anciens, though accepting elements of the narrative of progress (especially those concerned with science), denied its universal applicability, pointing out that societies develop in different domains and at different paces, undermining the possibility of a comprehensive, binary parallel. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this latter strand would acquire a firmer theoretical basis as thinkers explicitly questioned the possibility of comparing ancients and moderns. An important part of this thinking took place around tragedy, which came to be understood as the genre that represented the height of both Greek and modern literary achievement, and so became a testing ground for the question of progress in the arts.
Greek tragedy was decidedly less important to the Querelle (and to early modern culture generally) than Greek epic. Yet drama was by no means absent from the Querelle; indeed, it was in a parallel of tragedies that Charles Perrault first articulated some crucial historical and aesthetic priorities. More than ten years before delivering his opening salvo to the Académie française, Perrault published an anonymous defense of Lully and Quinault's controversial opera Alcestis, kindling some of the passions and debates that would flare up in the Querelle proper. The short piece stages a dialogue between a partisan of Quinault's libretto and a skeptical friend. Though it is ostensibly the opera that is at issue, the discussion takes the form of a parallel of Euripides' and Quinault's treatments of the story of Alcestis. Considering the major changes to the Greek original, Perrault finds in favor of the modern author on every count. In Euripides' play, Perrault is particularly scandalized by the scene in which Admetus reproaches his father for refusing to die in his stead, which renders Admetus "so contemptible and worthy of hatred that one has no pleasure in seeing him escape death."
The heroes of tragedy, for Perrault, should be exemplary, providing models of conduct that will guide the audience—as he finds in Quinault's portrayal of the noble, self-sacrificing Hercules (a stark contrast to Euripides' riotous drunk). Perrault's critic opines, "If these kinds of works do not contain some kind of morality, they are vain amusements not worthy of claiming the attention of a rational spirit." The attacks made on Greek literature in the late seventeenth century often followed such a moralizing line. They could invoke Plato as their forebear in rebuking epic and tragedy for the morals of the characters portrayed. In contrast, the defenders of Greek tragedy, such as René Rapin and Racine, sought to argue that the improving power of tragedy did not lie in its presentation of exemplary characters, but in allegorical situations from which the audience could draw instructive morals. This way of reading goes back to Greek antiquity, when epic allegoresis was well-known by the classical period, and likewise responded to those, like Xenophanes, who sought to evaluate heroes' conduct by rational and moral standards. In reading archaic literature, the difference from contemporary conduct and values was unmistakable (even in antiquity). The Anciens sought to explain these differences as constructive, while the Modernes viewed them as reprehensible and even dangerous. Both sides of the debate, though, essentially agreed on the moral aim of the arts. They differed only on the mechanism for improvement, and on whether ancient or modern works better achieved a salutary effect.
When André Dacier published his translations of Aristotle and Sophocles in 1692, he was joining the Querelle with a defense of the neoclassical aesthetic. These volumes were the first translations into French of Aristotle's Poetics and of any Greek tragedy since the Renaissance. It is significant that the Poetics was translated first, followed by OT and Electra (as Dacier mentions in his introduction to the Sophocles). There could be no doubt as to the relative importance of the two: the "rules" found in Aristotle are of the essence, with the examples of Sophocles serving as illustrations of their validity. Dacier writes that his aim in translating Aristotle is "to establish not merely that poetry is an art, but that this art is solved [cet art est trouvé], and that the rules are certainly those which Aristotle gives us, and that it is impossible to succeed by another way." Dacier's understanding of poetry is rhetorical and universalizing: it is a means of producing an effect in its readers and audiences, which does not change through time. Echoing Racine's famous preface to Iphigenia, he writes that "the same subjects that have caused so many tears to fall in the theater of Athens and in that of Rome, again make them fall today in our own." In 1692, in the middle of the Querelle, these words assumed a combative stance in favor of ancient literature and against the Modernes' notion of progress. Dacier does not deny that modern authors can reach the same heights as the Greeks, but he insists that ancient poetry and—even more—ancient poetics is the standard against which modern works should be evaluated.
Aristotle's treatise is at the very least ambiguous as to the moral effect of tragedy. The key term catharsis can be interpreted in many ways, with the main division between those who see it as a morally improving effect and those who see it as a purely emotional discharge. Dacier's interpretation of catharsis as an educative, moderating influence on the spectator is paradigmatic of the period's defenses of Greek tragedy: "Tragedy is therefore a true medicine [une véritable médecine], which purges the passions in that it teaches the ambitious one to moderate his ambition, the impious one to fear the gods, the impulsive one to hold back his anger, etc." Dacier adapts the allegorizing strategy to the defense of tragedy: the poet intends for the reader to discover a deeper, moral meaning in the conduct of the characters. Oddly (though not uniquely), Dacier understands the passions purged by catharsis not only as those relating to the audience's experience in viewing the drama, but also as the passions that cause the protagonists to meet unhappiness. Likewise, in his preface to Sophocles, Dacier writes that the character of Oedipus shows "that curiosity, arrogance, violence, and impulsivity precipitate men who otherwise have quite good qualities into inevitable misfortunes, and these are the passions that he [Aristotle] wishes the example of Oedipus to purge in us."
Dacier sees the characters of tragedy as negative exemplars, whose weaknesses are a reminder of the destructive influence of certain passions. This understanding of the flawed heroes of tragedy is directed against Corneille, whose works and theory had advocated a drama of exemplary characters falling through no fault of their own. Dacier adduces Aristotle to refute Corneille's dramaturgy, arguing that such a plot, though it may be enjoyable and involving, is not properly tragic, giving the audience nothing from which to draw instruction. The means of improvement Dacier puts forward is not based on admiration and emulation, but on reflection and self-determination. Yet for all the divergence between Dacier and his opponents, they agree that tragedy should be morally improving and that it can be evaluated on the basis of universal criteria. Both of these consensuses will break down in the century following, as comparisons of ancient and modern tragedy find profound differences in what had been assumed to be a unified genre.
Comparisons of tragedy are essential to the most important publication on tragedy of the early eighteenth century, the Jesuit Pierre Brumoy's 1730 The Theater of the Greeks (Le Théatre des Grecs). Translating three works of Sophocles (OT, Electra, Philoctetes) and four of Euripides (Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Alcestis) into French prose, and summarizing the rest of the extant tragedies, comedies, and the Cyclops, The Theater of the Greeks quickly became the primary reference work on Greek drama for much of Western Europe. The work was reprinted immediately in Amsterdam, revised in 1749 and 1763, and completely reedited in 1785–89. Brumoy's Theater built on the popularity and influence of Dacier's translations, but sought to extend the acquaintance with Greek drama beyond a few canonical works and the purported rules for creation. In comparison with his predecessor, Brumoy is notable for his more nuanced historicism and less normative viewpoint. Both of these qualities appealed to readers weary of the partisan quarrels of previous decades and interested to discover for themselves the much-disputed qualities of Greek theater. Brumoy's ecumenical discussion and clear translation made his Theater an extremely durable work, which influenced many of the major thinkers and artists of the French Enlightenment.
Brumoy's understanding of Greek tragedy is laid out in three prefatory essays, "On the Theater of the Greeks," "On the Origin of Tragedy," and "On the Parallel of Theaters." The last essay is particularly important as the most substantial general comparison of ancient and modern drama to date. Throughout, Brumoy is quite sensitive to the differences between ancient Greek and modern French theater, and accordingly does not try to set down or abstract timeless rules for creation. His avowed aim is to educate his readers in this still-obscure area of literature, so that they may form more accurate judgments. Though comparisons of ancient and modern pervade the edition, polemic is almost entirely absent. Brumoy situates himself between Anciens and Modernes, noting repeatedly that his advocacy for Greek works does not preclude recognizing their flaws, or prevent him from praising the glories of French theater.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Genealogy of the Tragic by Joshua Billings. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface xiNote on Translations, Citations, and Abbreviations xv
INTRODUCTION: Tragedy and Philosophy around 1800 1
TRAGIC MODERNITIES
Chapter 1: Quarreling over Tragedy 19
Ancients and Moderns on Tragedy 21
Nach Athen: Literary Models in Germany 32
Chapter 2: The Antiquity of Tragedy 45
Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort: Tragedy and Cultural Difference 46
Johann Gottfried Herder: Tragedy for the Volk 53
Returns to the Greek: Translation, Philology, Performance 59
TRAGIC THEMES
Chapter 3: Revolutionary Freedom 75
The Tragic Sublime: Schiller and Schelling 80
Schiller’s System of Tragic Freedom 88
Criticism and Scholarship: A. W. Schlegel and Gottfried Hermann 97
Chapter 4: Greek and Modern Tragedy 105
Friedrich Schlegel: Nature, Art, Revolution 107
Schiller: "The Limits of Ancient and Modern Tragedy" 113
Schelling: Identity and History in the Philosophy of Art 123
Chapter 5: Tragic Theologies 133
A Poetic Religion 135
"Problems of Fate": "The Spirit of Christianity" and Empedocles 139
The Power of the Sacrifice: The Natural Law Essay 150
TRAGIC TEXTS
Chapter 6: Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Fate of Tragedy 161
The Ethical World of Tragedy 163
Error and Recognition 171
Tragic Knowing and Forgetting 177
The End of Tragedy 184
Chapter 7: Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Tragedy and Paradox 189
Tragedy and Vaterland 191
Sophocles, Ancient and Modern 196
"The Lawful Calculus" 200
"The Boldest Moment" 205
Vaterländische Umkehr 212
Exodos: Births of the Tragic 222
Bibliography 235
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
"There is no body of work as important for understanding the idea of the tragic as German Idealism, which fundamentally changed modernity's notions of tragedy. I can think of no better guide to these formidable writings than Joshua Billings, who takes the reader through them with clarity, deep knowledge, and revelatory exposition. A great achievement, this is a book that scholars and students of tragedy have needed for years."—Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge"This is a very fine book—meticulously researched and clearly written. Joshua Billings is in complete control of his material—and his combination of serious purpose and scholarly adroitness is hard to beat. Scholars and students alike will learn much from this study of the tragic as a philosophical ideal, a notion that continues to haunt us today."—James I. Porter, University of California, Irvine"Readers of Greek tragedy and readers of German Idealism, whether classicists or not, have much to learn from this important book."—Constanze Güthenke, Princeton University