Tragedy and comedy

According to Aristotle (Poetics, ch. 4), tragedy originated from the improvisations of the exarchontes (song leaders) of the dithyramb, while comedy originated with the leaders of the "phallic songs."

A dithyramb was a religious hymn in honor of Dionysus, and the Dionysiac origin of tragedy was in antiquity taken for granted, Dionysus being the god of theater as much as the god of wine, vegetation, and fertility.
However, tragedy lost its Dionysiac associations very early, and only one of the preserved plays, indeed the very last tragedy of Euripides, Bacchae, has a Dionysiac content, namely the myth of resistance to the introduction of Dionysus's cult to Thebes, and the god's devastating revenge upon the city. Dithyramb, too, gradually lost its religious connection to Dionysus and developed into choral poetry that drew its subjects from mythology (like tragedy).

Dithyrambs were also regularly performed in the Dionysiac festivals.


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Freedom and tragedy

We can see tragedy as a specific disruption in the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The disruption takes place at the site of art’s "militarization," the point at which the medium and the mechanics of expression divide, not in indifference, but in strife. This conflict marks the emergence of a language that demonstrates its aesthetic and political authority only by undermining its very status as language.

In fact, Schelling's subsequent discussion of Greek tragedy has been viewed as the most important contribution of the Philosophical Letters, often to the point that the passage is read as a complete doctrine in its own right, in isolation from the rest of the work.
With the Greeks, explains Schelling, the hero is punished for succumbing to the power of fate. This fate is an inherently superior power, a power against which the hero fights, but in the face of which he could never hope to be successful .
For Schelling, it is this defeat and this defeat alone that constitutes the recognition of freedom. Only when the hero is lost before the fact, only when he enters into a conflict in which he is, as it were, always-already defeated, does he demonstrate that he is free.

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Conflict of rights

More than two thousand years after Aristotle's Poetics, Hegel proposed his own original and highly influential theory of tragedy.

Unlike Aristotle, who defines tragedy in terms of specific requirements of plot and character, Hegel defines it as, at bottom, a dynamic contest between two opposing forces--in effect, a collision or conflict of rights.

According to this scheme, the most tragic events are those in which two esteemed values or goals are in opposition and one of them must give way. For instance, suppose in a particular case we find ourselves torn between our private conscientious opinions or religious beliefs and our legitimate duties and obligations to the state. Such would be the circumstance, for example, of a conscientious objector facing military service. And such indeed is the situation of Sophocles's play Antigone, whose title heroine finds herself caught between her religious and family obligations and her duties as a public citizen.

In essence, then, a properly constructed Hegelian tragedy involves a situation in which two rights or values are in fatal conflict. Thus it is not (strictly speaking) tragic when good defeats bad or when bad defeats good. From Hegel's point of view, the only tragic confrontation is one in which good is up against good and the contest is to the death.

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Conflict within the Good in itself

What is the metaphysics of tragedy to Hegel?

Tragedy is rooted in spirit. Its source is a division in the ethical substance, that is, in the spiritual forces that rule and propel the realm of men's deeds and desires. It is a violent collision -- not of the good with the bad -- but of the good with the good, of spiritual powers, of an ideal or an institution, such as the state, with -- for example -- the family. It is a conflict between two rights.

Hegel says:

"The sphere of this content, although capable of great variety of detail, is not in its essential features very extensive. The principal source of opposition, which Sophocles in particular (in this respect following the lead of Aeschylus) has accepted and worked out in the finest way, is that of the body politic, the opposition, that is, between ethical life in its social uni­versality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations. These are the purest forces of tragic representa­tion" ( IV, p. 318).


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Unresolved contradiction

The original essence of tragedy consists in the fact that within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification ...

In this way, an unresolved contradiction is set up. However justified the tragic character and his aim, however necessary the tragic collision, the third thing required is the tragic resolution of this conflict. By this means eternal justice is exercised on individuals and their aims in the sense that it restores the substance and unity of ethical life with the downfall of the character who has disturbed the peace.

Although the characters have a purpose which is valid in itself, they can carry it out in tragedy only by pursuing it one-sidedly and so contradicting and infringing someone else's purpose.

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Tragedy and philosophy

Hegel and Nietzsche present two of the most important discussions of tragedy and philosophy since Aristotle.

Nietzsche claims to be the first tragic philosopher, and Hegel boasted that he had read all the Greek tragedies. Tragedy presents a challenge to rational thought because it implies a conflict in reason itself, i.e., that reason contradicts itself.
Tragic conflict is not a conflict of right and wrong, but of right with right.

Hegel’s concept of dialectical reason is a reason that sustains and endures contradiction. At issue is the question whether tragedy excludes reconciliation, or whether there is tragic reconciliation.

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That which does not want to be comprehended

Kierkegaard states: "Is it such great merit or is it not rather insolence or thoughtlessness to want to comprehend that which does not want to be comprehended?"

(The Sickness Unto Death)

And then: "to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God". All of this is not to say that Kierkegaard is an anti-intellectual or nihilist. Kierkegaard, who once admitted that he "gropes for the tragic in every direction" in a perverse and convoluted desire to "see" God, is just as guilty as anyone of this "imposition" upon God. His intention is simply bringing to light the dynamics of our strange tendencies to unearth the tragic and the role of death and fear in propelling our desire to understand God.

Kierkegaard is not judgemental or admonishing in his treatment of these natural human drives towards knowledge; he just wants to enlighten us on why we act the way we do, and what are the inner springs of our creativity and curiosity.

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Metabole and tragedy

The word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet. 1452a 22-23), which Anton F. Harald Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie.1991) regards as somehow connected with Dionysus.

He is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets, or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already sprung up by the time of HF (143 n. 88, 225). This word, Bierl thinks, signals metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just before he kills his children). According to Bierl, Heracles unites the two sides of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he becomes their murderer.
In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might
(a) serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a subsequent turn of events. It might
(b) induce the audience to experience vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might
(c) call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal, which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF 735], eleos and phrike [Phoen. 1284-87], phroimion [HF 753]) can suggest the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical communication).

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