The uncanny is many-sided; nothing, however, / looms larger than the human in strangeness. / He travels on the effervescent tides / driven by the southern winds of winter, / crossing peaks of ravaging waves. / The gods, even the most sublime ones, / he wears down, and / the earth – indestructible and tireless – too / overturning her from year to year, / plowing back and forth with stallions.
– Sophocles, Choral Ode from Antigone
What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.
‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.
Schmidt provides three indications as to why this fate leads Kant’s successors to retrieve the question of tragedy. There is, first of all, the antimony of reason itself (with special reference to the third antimony between freedom and nature). Secondly, there is the dignity accorded to aesthetics in reflection on ethical life. Thirdly, there is the renewal of the notion of the sublime. True, for various reasons, Kant did not take up the question of the tragic himself; it was left to Schelling to indicate in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) how tragedy, as a literature of crisis, of agony and incommensurability, might be retrieved to mark the experience of the limit in post-Kantian philosophy.
Szondi: ‘After Aristotle, there is a poetics of tragedy, only after Schelling is there a philosophy of the tragic’. For Schelling, tragedy indicates the way in which the contradiction between freedom and necessity might be thought; the lesson for post-Kantian philosophy lies in the way aesthetic experience, specifically the artwork (no longer, like Kant, does Schelling place emphasis on nature) can think, endure, the contradiction in question.
To deinon is the word Heidegger isolates from Sophocles’s Antigone. How might it be translated? Gewaltige, powerful, that was Hölderlin’s first translation of this word in 1801; in 1804, he translates it as ungeheuer, monstrous. Heidegger will translate it Nicht-geheuren, the non-familiar. What does it designate? The power of the human being to transform the world confronts the overwhelming power of death; freedom shatters itself against necessity.
Freedom, necessity: for Hölderlin, writing to the philhellene Böhlendorff in 1801, the Germans have fallen too far from the experience of fate, from the ‘highest’; they must be brought into confrontation with the Greeks. This is the task of art, perhaps a renewed tragic art, but it is, he writes, dangerous for German art to imitate the art of the Greeks.
Why then labour so hard over his translations of Greek tragedy? The task: to attune the German language to what he calls Greek sorrow and thereby to bring it into the conflicted space which exceeds the power of philosophical cognition. ‘We learn nothing with greater difficult than to freely use the national’, he writes to Böhlendorff. If it is ‘the clarity of presentation’ which is natural for the Germans, it is the ‘fire from heaven’ that is natural to the Greeks. Yet for Hölderlin, to use the national is not play to the strengths of one’s nature. It is, rather, to test oneself against the foreign – and what is more foreign for Germany than Greece?
The Greeks are less masters of sacred pathos, because it is innate to them, whereas they excel in the gift of presentation from Homer onward, because this extraordinary man was sufficiently soulful to conquer the Western Junoian sobriety for his Apollinian empire, and thereby to truly appropriate the foreign.
Hölderlin’s task? To surprass the Greeks in ‘beautiful suffering’, in ‘sacred grief’. But it this possible? Greece names for Hölderlin a fated experience of overwhelming power and strangeness; the German confronts in fate and destiny what exceeds its power. It is the task of the poet to reawaken that torsion, to affirm the shining forth of the disclosure to which the human being belongs. The poet thus watches over both freedom (‘the free use of the national’) and necessity (the fateful encounter with the Greeks). This was the mission which emerges for Hölderlin.
Heidegger, too, is drawn to this strange reciprocity between Greece and Germany; once again, for him, it is a question of poetry, Dichtung, of the inaugurating poetic act this time to be accomplished by Hölderlin the poet, in dialogue with the thinker (Heidegger) and perhaps, at least in the early 1930s, the statesman (Hitler).
What is the fate of tragedy in those years and after? Perhaps it collapses in the sorrow beyond sorrow of those same years such that the tragic life of the ones the Germans called the Greeks no longer rises to exemplarity with respect to the experience of the limit. It was the Greeks’ relationship to pain which was his central concern in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote. But what happens when the pain is closer, more immediate – when it can no longer be a question of attending to what Heidegger calls the katastrophe, the turning around of the human being which is still understood in terms of the heliotropism to Greece, but to what might be called the disaster?
On 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up by the French police; he would die at Auschwitz. His daughter writes:
When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.
Kofman’s father was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. Sarah Kofman writes:
My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.
Infinite violence: but what does this mean? A reinvention of tragedy – its transformation, just as it was transformed after Kant? The quest for a new dispensation of freedom and necessity? ‘Auschwitz belongs to a sphere beyond tragedy’ – Lacoue-Labarthe.
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