Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence by Hatab Lawrence

Author:Hatab, Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Nietzsche on Mimetic Psychology and Greek Drama

Nietzsche occasionally discusses what I am calling mimetic psychology, especially in his reflections on Greek art. An early essay, “Greek Music Drama,” mentions the audience’s sympathetic identification with the sufferings of tragic heroes (KSA 1, 528). And The Birth of Tragedy contains several relevant treatments. Apollonian and Dionysian forces are exhibited in nature herself, before the mediation of artistic works (BT 2). Forming and deforming powers are intrinsic to nature’s very course, and dreams and intoxicated states (both of which exceed conscious control) are preconditions for the more cultivated manifestation of Apollonian and Dionysian powers, particularly those of language and music. Artists are said to “imitate” such primal natural energies, which could not mean representational simulation, but rather the more performative sense of “impersonating” these energies in artistic practices (impersonation being one of the meanings of mimesis in Greek). Singing and dancing, for example, exhibit an enchanted, ecstatic elevation, a quasi-divine transformation where one is not really an artist because one “has become a work of art” (BT 1).15

In many respects Nietzsche associates the Dionysian with music (BT 6, 17), especially its immediate emotional force, which “overwhelms” conscious individuation. The Apollonian is associated with poetic language and theatrical technologies that shape a more individuated world. But since music and language are coordinated in tragic drama (BT 21), immediate disclosive force still operates in its performances. Poetic metaphors are not “symbolic,” they possess a living power to disclose (BT 8). For Greek audiences, dramatic fiction was not a departure from reality, it produced on stage powerful scenes of “a world with the same reality and irreducibility that Olympus with its inhabitants possessed for the believing Hellene” (BT 7). Tragic drama produced a Dionysian effect of mimetic identification, originally embodied in choral impersonation, where one acts “as if one had actually entered into another body, another character” (BT 8). If we consider the connotations of capacity and power in the word “virtue” (the “virtue” of a tool, the phrase “by virtue of”) and the notion of “virtual” indicating an actual effect without formal recognition (a virtual king), we can say that the power of poetry on the Greek stage produced a virtual reality.16

The problem with Euripidean drama, as Nietzsche saw it, was that it brought the critical “spectator” on stage (BT 11). Particularly problematic was the effect of the prologues in Euripides’ plays, where the context and course of the drama was laid out in advance for the audience. The effect was to preclude or diminish mimetic identification, so that the audience would no longer “become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear” (BT 12). The modern “aesthetic” audience has been thoroughly schooled in the mode of critical reflection, where art is meant to be understood by way of interpretive tools beyond the immediate presentation of the work, beyond the “powerful artistic magic” that should “enrapture the genuine listener” (BT 22).

In later texts, Nietzsche reiterates this sense of poetic immediacy.

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