The Birth of Tragedy Chap. 12
Before we designate this other spectator by name, let’s linger here a moment to call to mind for ourselves that impression of the duality and incommensurability at the heart of Aeschylean tragedy, something we described earlier. Let us think about our own surprise at and unease with the chorus and the tragic hero of those tragedies, both of which we did not know how to reconcile with what we are used to any more than with the tradition — until we again recognized that duality itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two artistic drives woven together, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To cut that primordial and all-powerful Dionysian element out of tragedy and to rebuild tragedy as a pure, new, and un-Dionysian art, morality, and world view — that has now revealed itself to us very clearly as the tendency of Euripides.

Near the end of his life, Euripides himself proposed as emphatically as possible for his contemporaries the question about the value and meaning of this tendency in a myth. Should the Dionysian exist at all? Should we not eradicate it forcefully from Greek soil? Of course we should, the poet says to us, if only it were possible, but the god Dionysus is too powerful. The most sensible opponent — like Pentheus in the Bacchae — is unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and later runs in this enchanted state to his own destruction. The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems also to be the judgment of the aged poet: the thinking of the cleverest individual does not throw away that old folk tradition, that eternally propagating reverence for Dionysus; indeed, where such amazing powers are concerned, it is appropriate at least to demonstrate a diplomatically prudent show of joining in. But even with that, it is still possible that the god might take offense at such lukewarm participation and transform the diplomat finally into a dragon — as happens here with Cadmus.1

The poet tells us this, a poet who fought throughout his long life against Dionysus with heroic force — only to conclude his life with a glorification of his opponent and a suicide, like a man suffering from vertigo who, in order to escape the dreadful dizziness, which he can no longer endure, throws himself off a tower. That tragedy [The Bacchae] is a protest against the practicality of his artistic program [Tendenz] , alas, and it had already succeeded!2 A miracle had taken place: just when the poet recanted, his program had already triumphed. Dionysus had already been chased off the tragic stage, and by a daemonic power speaking out from Euripides. But Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the divinity which spoke out of him was not Dionysus, and not Apollo, but an entirely new-born daemon called Socrates.

This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and from this contrast, Greek tragedy perished as a work of art. No matter how much Euripides might now seek to console us with his retraction, he was unsuccessful: the most magnificent temple lay in ruins. What use to us are the laments of the destroyer and his awareness that it had been the most beautiful of all temples? And even if Euripides himself, as a punishment, has been turned into a dragon by the artistic critics of all ages — who can be satisfied with this paltry compensation?

Let us get closer now to this Socratic trend, with which Euripides fought against and conquered Aeschylean tragedy.

What purpose — that’s the question we need to ask ourselves at this point — could Euripides’ intention to ground drama solely on the un-Dionysian have generally had, if we assume its implementation had the very highest ideals? What form of drama still remained, if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious half-light of the Dionysian? All it could be was dramatic epic, an Apollonian art form, in which the tragic effect is naturally unattainable.

This is not a matter of the content of the represented events. Indeed, I could assert that in Goethe’s proposed Nausikaa it would have been impossible to make the suicide of that idyllic being — which was to be carried out in the fifth act — grippingly tragic, for the power of the Apollonian epic is so extraordinary that right before our very eyes it magically transforms the most horrific things through that joy in and redemption through appearances. The poet of the dramatic epic cannot completely fuse with his pictures, any more than the epic rhapsodist can: it is still a matter of calm, tranquil contemplation, looking with open eyes, a state which sees the images in front of it. The actor in this dramatized epic still remains, in the most profound sense, a rhapsodist; the consecration of the inner dream lies upon all his actions, so that he is never completely an actor.

Now, how is Euripides’ work related to this ideal of Apollonian drama? It is just like the relationship of the solemn rhapsodist of the olden times to that younger attitude, whose nature is described in Plato’s Ion as follows: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears. But if what I say is horrifying and terrible, then the hairs on my head stand on end from fright, and my heart beats loudly.” Here we no longer see the epic dissolution of being in appearances, the disinterested coolness of the real actor, who remains, particularly in his most intense activity, totally appearance and delight in appearances. Euripides is the actor with the beating heart, with his hair standing on end. He designs his work as a Socratic thinker, and he carries it out as a passionate actor.

Euripides is a pure artist neither in planning his work nor in carrying it out. Thus, the Euripidean drama is simultaneously a cool and fiery thing, equally capable of freezing or burning. It is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of the epic, while, on the other hand, it has divorced itself as much as possible from the Dionysian elements, and now, in order to work at all, it needs new ways to arouse people, methods which can no longer lie within either of the two individual artistic drives of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These methods of arousing people are detached paradoxical ideas — substituted for Apollonian objects of contemplation — and fiery emotions — substituted for Dionysian enchantment. The fiery effects are, to be sure, imitated with the highest degree of realism, but the ideas and emotional effects are not in the slightest imbued with the spirit of art.

Hence, if we have recognized this much, that Euripides did not, in general, succeed in basing his drama solely on Apollonian principles, that, by contrast, his un-Dionysian tendencies led him astray into an inartistic naturalism, we will now able to move closer to the essential quality of Socratic aesthetics, whose most important law runs something like this: “Everything must be understandable in order to be beautiful,” a corollary to the Socratic saying, “Only the knowledgeable person is virtuous.” With this canon in hand, Euripides measured all the individual features and justified them according to this principle: the language, the characters, the dramatic construction, the choral music.
What we habitually assess so frequently in Euripides as a poetical deficiency and a backward step, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the most part the product of that emphatic critical process, that daring intelligence. Let the Euripidean prologue serve for us as an example of what that rationalistic method produces. Nothing can be more offensive to our stage techniques than the prologue in a Euripidean play. That a single person should step forward at the beginning of a work and explain who he is, what has gone on before the action starts, what has happened up to this point, and, indeed, what will occur in the unfolding of the work, that would strike a modern poetical dramatist as a wanton, inexcusable abandonment of the effect of suspense. If we, in fact, know everything which is going to happen, who will want to sit around waiting to see that it really does happen? — For here there is nothing like the stimulating relationship between a prophetic dream and a real event which occurs later.

Euripides thought quite differently about the matter. The effect of tragedy, he believed, never depended on epic suspense, on the tempting uncertainty about what would happen now and later. It depended far more on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the main hero swelled up into a wide and powerful torrent. Everything was preparing for pathos, not for action, and what did not prepare the way for pathos was considered disposable. But the most serious barrier to the delighted devotion to such scenes is any part the spectator found missing, a gap in the network of the previous events. As long as the listener still has to figure out what this or that person means, what gives rise to this or that conflict in motives or purposes, then his full immersion in the suffering and action of the main characters, his breathless sympathy with and fear for them are not yet possible. The Aeschylean- Sophoclean tragedies made use of the most elegant artistic methods to provide the spectators in the opening scenes, as if by chance, all those necessary clues to understanding everything, a technique in which their noble artistry proves its worth by allowing the necessary features to appear, so to speak, as something masked and accidental.

But for all that, Euripides believed he noticed that during those first scenes the spectator was oddly disturbed having to figure out the simple arithmetic of the previous events, so that the poetical beauties and the pathos of the exposition were lost on him. Therefore Euripides set up the prologue even before the exposition and put it in the mouth of a person whom people could trust — often a divinity had to more or less guarantee the outcome of the tragedy for the public and take away all doubts about the reality of the myth, in a manner similar to the way in which Descartes was able to establish the reality of the empirical world only through an appeal to the truthfulness of God and his inability to lie. At the end of his drama, Euripides once again made use of this same divine truthfulness in order to confirm his hero’s future for the public. This is the function of the notorious deus ex machina.1 Between the epic preview and final preview lay the lyrical, dramatic present, the essential “drama.”

So Euripides as a poet is, above all, the echo of his conscious knowledge, and it is precisely this which confers upon him such a memorable place in the history of Greek art.

In view of his critically productive creativity it must have often struck him that he had to bring alive in drama the opening of Anaxagoras’ text, the first lines of which go as follows: “In the beginning everything was confused, but then came reason and created order.” And if, among philosophers, Anaxagoras, with his concept of nous [mind] , seems like the first sober man among nothing but drunkards, so Euripides might have conceptualized his relationship to the other tragic poets with a similar image.2 So long as the single creator of order and ruler of all, nous [mind] , was still excluded from artistic creativity, everything was still mixed up in a chaotic primordial stew. That’s how Euripides must have judged the matter; that’s how he, as the first “sober” poet, must have passed sentence on the “drunken” poets.

What Sophocles said about Aeschylus — that he does what’s right, without being aware of it — was certainly not said in any Euripidean sense. Euripides would have conceded only that Aeschylus created improperly because he created without any conscious awareness. Even the god-like Plato speaks of how the creative capability of poets is not a conscious insight, but for the most part only ironically, and he draws a comparison with the talent of prophets and dream interpreters, since the poet is not able to write until he has lost his conscious mind and reason no longer resides in him. Euripides undertook the task, as did Plato as well, to show the world the opposite of the “irrational” poet. His basic aesthetic principle, “Everything must be conscious in order to be beautiful,” is, as I have said, the corollary of the Socratic saying, “Everything must be conscious in order to be good.”

With this in mind, we are entitled to assess Euripides as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that second spectator, who did not understand the older tragedy and therefore did not value it. With Socrates as his ally, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new artistic creativity. If the older tragedy perished from this development, then aesthetic Socratism is the murdering principle. But insofar as the fight was directed against the Dionysian of the older art, we recognize in Socrates the enemy of Dionysus, the new Orpheus, who roused himself against Dionysus, and who, although destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian Court of Justice, nevertheless compelled the overpowering god himself to run away.1 Dionysus, as before, when he fled from Lycurgus, king of the Edoni, saved himself in the depths of the sea, that is, in the mysterious floods of a secret cult which would gradually overrun the entire world.

Footnotes:

1Cadmus and Tiresias : Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and Tiresias, the blind prophet, are two old men in Euripides’ Bacchae. They are mocked in the play for their desire to observe the Dionysian rites. At the end of the play, Cadmus is transformed into a dragon.

2Euripides wrote the Bacchae at the very end of his life when he had left Athens for Macedonia. The work was discovered and performed after his death.

1deus ex machina (lit. “god out of a machine), a term describing the resolution of a complex action by an extremely implausible event (e.g., by having a god come down from on high to sort out all the problems on the spot and to indicate what will happen in future to the main characters).

2Anaxagoras : (c. 500 BC to 428 BC), an Ionian materialistic philosopher.

1Orpheus in Greek mythology was the preeminent poet and musician, who perfected the lyre. He was said to have the power to charm nature with his music. Socrates was charged by the Athenians with impiety, put on trial, and sentenced to death. He died by drinking hemlock, the official method of execution.