Philosophers and Thespians by Rokem Freddie;

Author:Rokem, Freddie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Birth of the Philosopher from the Ruins of Tragedy

Like a blank sheet, Socrates invites us to write; like a vast stillness, he provokes us into shouting. But he remains untouched, staring back with an ironic gaze.

—Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (9)

Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), originally published in 1872, is an enigmatic and multifaceted text that has received many different and even contradictory interpretations.50 At the same time as it presents Nietzsche’s own version of the birth of tragedy through a union constituted by “the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, which are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation,”51 it is, I argue, also a text about the birth of philosophy, and in particular about the autochthonous birth of Nietzsche himself as a philosopher.

This second birth takes place after the Dionysian and the Apollonian energies—whose union had previously resulted in the birth of tragedy—have crumbled, leaving the brilliance of early Greek culture in a chaotic demise. But at the same time as this collapse—on the overt level characterized by Nietzsche as catastrophic for Western civilization—had taken place, a new stage in the development toward self-reflection and critique had in fact been born. In spite of some very critical pronouncements of protest and even aversion against this development, Nietzsche, I argue, closely identified himself with it in his ongoing attempt to create a discursive space wherein the remnants of tragedy become transformed into philosophy. Whereas Socrates had initially constructed his philosophical discourse through a unification of the dramatic genres of tragedy and comedy, Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking was born out of the collapse of tragedy.

This ambivalent position enabled Nietzsche to take on the role of mediator between the discourses of tragedy and philosophy as an expression of the human spirit and its recurring stages of development. It is only, Nietzsche seems to be saying, when philosophy “remembers” its origins stemming from the performative energies of tragedy that it can achieve the aim of “revaluing values,” in the sense he aspired to achieve through his more comprehensive philosophical project. This was certainly not what Plato’s Socrates had advocated when he appropriated both tragedy and comedy for the sake of philosophy. Nietzsche’s project was instead to create a mechanism of “generational” bridges between the philosophical and the thespian discursive practices. But still, Socrates constantly reappears as a powerful ghost for the demise of tragedy in Nietzsche’s text. At the same time as he rejects Socrates’ rationality, Nietzsche admires his presence, in particular during the moments before Socrates’ death. Actually, to put this situation in pictorial terms, when Nietzsche looks at himself in the philosophical mirror set up in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, he sees the image of Socrates, who—in the words of Nehamas, quoted in the opening to this section—even if he “provokes us into shouting ... he remains untouched, staring back with an ironic gaze.

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